Posts Tagged JoCo Cruise
Captain Quark and Juratron Park, JoCo Cruise and other news
Posted by Angela Brett in News, Performances on April 2, 2025
Last year on JoCo Cruise, Aimee Mann sang a song called The Ballad of Captain Quark — the song title having been suggested by ChatGPT as a typical Jonathan Coulton song title:
This year, one of the theme days on the cruise was Captain Day, so obviously I had to dress as Captain Quark. I got a custom captain’s hat and some ‘Quark’s Bar‘ pyjama pants, and wore them with a ‘one quark, two quark, red quark, blue quark’ T-shirt I got in 2003 from online funny T-shirt pioneer Gary Freed, and a CMS hoodie I got from CERN last year.
Of course, this outfit on its own would make very little sense to most people, so I made some postcard-sized cards with the lyrics (as far as I can make them out) of the song on them. Here’s a pdf of that.
Of course, the song on its own would make very little sense to most people, so I wrote and illustrated an explanation of quarks, with particular reference to things mentioned in the song, for the other side of the cards. Here’s a pdf of that. This is my first real foray into science communication; how did I do?
I made it in OmniGraffle, because that seems to be my default these days. I didn’t have room to explain as much about colour confinement as I would have liked, and colour confinement is pretty neat (as is this animation of it.) Since Captain Day happened to be on the same day as the Open Mic, Joey Marianer sang part of The Ballad of Captain Quark, and then I followed up with what would be on the sequel postcard — my poem Juratron Park (which is available on my album!), and an explanation of that:
I recorded the rest of the open mic too… if you performed there, let me know if it’s okay to publish video of you, and what links or other information you want me to put in the video description.
On the subject of video, I uploaded my video from the Queen Mary 2 leaving Southampton, which I mentioned in my last post, and I’m now busy watching, writing descriptions for, and uploading my videos from the 2025 JoCo Cruise.
On the subject of JoCo Cruise, the 2026 cruise is already sold out, with a long waitlist, but there is currently a possibility to add a second cruise the week immediately after that one, from March 28 to April 4 2026, leaving from San Diego. If you would like to be on that, and you haven’t already booked for the existing JoCo Cruise 2026, you can make a fully-refundable deposit. Deposits may be placed until Monday, April 7th at 8 pm EDT, and my understanding is the number of deposits they get by then will determine whether this second cruise becomes a reality. If it does, people already booked on the original cruise will have the opportunity to switch to the second one or book both.
On the 2024 cruise, Joey and I met someone wearing an ‘🌈I’ve got anxiety✨’ T-shirt, and Joey pretty much immediately wrote a barbershop tag about it (which we then sang two parts of to the shirt-wearer.) Joey has since found a workable way to record all the parts and put them together, so here it is, along with the shirt design:
Please feel free to replace the anxious voices in your head with this. Just sing at them when they try to tell you bad things. Earworms vs. Brainweasels: Fight!
Now for some updates on things mentioned in my last post. Joey and I have now finished watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, watched this chat between Wil Wheaton and Cirroc Lofton, and started watching Star Trek: Voyager, interspersed with episode recaps from The Delta Flyers podcast.
I’m still looking for a job, and working on the app I mentioned in my last post. Currently I’m learning about CloudKit, concurrency in SwiftData, and strict concurrency checking in Swift 6. I’ll be attending Deep Dish Swift in less than a month to learn about all sorts of other things.
That’s all from me; please enjoy CERN’s April Fools joke for this year.
My year is only going to get weirder, so I’d better fill you in.
Posted by Angela Brett in News on August 2, 2024
A lot has happened so far this year, and a lot more is about to happen. I have pics, so it did happen. TL; DR: I saw K’s Choice again, went to CERN again, went on the JoCo Cruise again, and will be moving to the USA in August. Just read the blue ‘Visa news’ section and the August part if you want to know how the US visa process went.
January: K’s Choice in Gent
🇺🇸Visa news
In mid-January, I got an email that began ‘Thank you for being a valued U.S. Consular Electronic Application Center (CEAC) customer.’ indicating that I’d finally got past step 1 of the 12-step program for me to quit Austria and go move in with the lovely Joey Marianer in the USA. Thus began a new phase of filling in forms and collecting documents.
On January 26, I went to Gent to see K’s Choice, one of the bands I have seen a fair bit at various places in Europe. I hadn’t them them since they were last in Vienna in 2017, so I missed them. A friend I know from JoCo fandom had suggested we go together. Unfortunately, she was too sick to go, but I did reconnect with someone I met at my very first K’s Choice concert, in Hamont-Achel in 2009.
Sam Bettens, the lead singer of K’s Choice, recently published a book which described (among many other things) his experience of moving to the USA to be with a spouse, as I am about to do. Even though the marriage didn’t work out, living in the USA did, so that was comforting to read about, as I mentioned to him after the show. I had too many things I wanted to say in a short time, and was a little flustered, so I forgot to ask for permission to post videos of the show, but they’ve always given it in the past, so here you go:
February: CERN Third Collisions
🇺🇸Visa news
In early February, I was notified that my Immigrant Visa Case had become Documentarily Qualified, meaning I’d completed step 9 of the process and just had to wait for my interview to be scheduled.
From 9–11 February, CERN had an event called Third Collisions, where CERN alumni could socialise, see some talks, and visit the new Science Gateway exhibits and the LHC experiments underground. I visited ALICE, because it was the only one of the four main detectors that I wasn’t 100% sure I’d seen before.
I haven’t put too much from the CERN visit online yet, but here’s a playlist where I will add videos:
Among other things, the Science Gateway had this tactile model of a particle detector, with an audio description to guide the visitor in feeling around the different parts of it. The various parts of the detector were differentiated with high-contrast colours and textures. Before visiting the Science Gateway, I happened to talk to someone who was involved in developing this; they had many ideas and prototypes for ways to explain particle detectors to blind and low-vision folk, and a lot of feedback from such people, and this is the only finished product that ended up in the exhibit.
Ironically, since I’m editing this post on my iPad, I can’t figure how to add alt text to this picture, but I think the audio description does a better job than I would have.
When I arrived in Vienna ten years ago, I assumed that I would soon forget French to learn German, so I did the DALF C1 exam to have proof that I once knew French. When I arrived in Geneva and had a conversation with a stranger at a bus stop, I realised I neither forgot French nor learned German — it was still so much easier to communicate in French. I did not make the most of this opportunity to learn German. This is partially because of circumstances (having to stop in the middle of four different B1-level German courses for different reasons, spending most of a year in NZ, and another few years hardly going outside due to the pandemic) but mostly because I didn’t put as much effort in. Or at least I didn’t listen to as many podcasts or read as many books in the language. Oh well; my level of German might still impress people in America.
March: JoCo Cruise (and a little MarsCon)
I shouldn’t need to tell you what JoCo Cruise is again. It’s where I met Joey, and thus, ultimately the reason I’m moving to the States. Joey and I stayed in Minnesota for a bit before this year’s cruise, because the flights from there to the cruise were more convenient, and it also gave us a chance to hang out with people we know from the MarsCon Comedy Music Track. As is often the case, MarsCon was on the same weekend as the start of the cruise, so we didn’t get to go, but at least we got to see people who arrived early.
We also saw a Jonathan Coulton and Aimee Mann concert with some friends from MarsCon and the cruise. At the show they mentioned, but did not play, a song Aimee Mann wrote based on a ChatGPT-generated title of a typical Jonathan Coulton song, ‘The Ballad of Captain Quark’. As someone who’s quite interested in quarks, I mentioned to JoCo on the cruise that I’d like to see it, and Aimee sang it at the final concert. Simalot posted video from the red team show and b$ shot this video of it on my camera in the gold team show.
Here is a playlist of the 25 hours, 5 minutes, and 17 seconds of unique JoCo Cruise 2024 footage captured by my cameras (some filmed by Joey on my second camera while I was at other events, some filmed by b$ while I was isolating in the cabin.)
🇺🇸Visa news
On the second-to-last day of JoCo Cruise, while Joey and I were holed up in our cabin getting over whatever lurgy we had caught (Joey tested negative for COVID, but it was an antigen test that didn’t come with instructions, so who knows?) we heard that my immigrant visa interview had been scheduled, which is to say, we’d reached step 10 of the immigration process.
April: US Visa Issued
Okay, I don’t have a video of this, but unless you’re an immigration officer working at the Port of New York and New Jersey in August, you’re not the people I have to prove it to. I heard that my visa was granted almost exactly 24 hours after leaving the visa interview (where they’d already told me I met the requirements, so it was not an agonising wait.) I then picked up my passport with the visa in it during my lunch break the next day.
I have six months from the date of issue to enter the country, at which point they will validate the visa and it will be good for a year, during which time I will receive an actual green card in the mail which will be valid for longer.
I then gave notice at my job and my apartment and figured out a moving company. Joey flew to Vienna not long ago, to help me with moving and then take me home. I am not keeping any of my furniture, so if you’re in Vienna and want some tables, bookcases, or other kinds of shelving or storage, let me know. Most of it has been claimed by now, though.
August: Moving to the USA
Joey and I will take the Queen Mary 2 from Hamburg to New York City, because that seemed like a sufficiently ridiculous way for me to immigrate. In NYC we plan to at least visit Ellis Island (it seems appropriate to do that after immigrating by sea) MoMath, Central Park (mainly because I love the Apple TV+ show by that name), 826NYC, and maybe Club Cumming, if JoCo Cruise 2024 and 2025 guest Daphne Always will be performing there. If you have any other suggestions on what to see in NYC, let me know! We haven’t decided yet when or how we’ll get from there to Joey’s place in the Seattle area.
After that, we’ll likely go to FuMPFest at Con on the Cob in October and MathsJam Annual Gathering (back on this side of the pond) in November, but the future hasn’t been written yet!
The “The Captain’s Wife’s Lament” Lament, and Seven Bridges (of Königsberg) Road
Posted by Angela Brett in News, video on September 25, 2023
About a week ago, me hearty Joey Marianer recorded three songs (two of which I wrote) while I slept! I meant to post about them on Talk Like a Pirate Day, but ended up not being home all day. Nonetheless, I’ll start with the pirate shanty. This might not make much sense to you if you’re not familiar with Paul and Storm; it’s a parody of one of their songs, about the lengthy live performances of another of their songs, which would be less than three minutes if they had a few other singers keeping them in line.
Storm DiCostanzo, please sing, and sing faster!
You’re not going to get any younger, you know.
Hey, Paul Sabourin, we’re growing impatient,
And you’ve still got most of the song left to go,
so come on Storm, spit it out.
I curse the day that these guys ever wrote this —
a joke about seamen that’s not hard to get.
How could I know that their seed would get into
my hair and my craw and two thirds of the set
Now three lines in, and I arrr with the masses,
Dejected, excited, and counting to pi.
And I have to admit, if you’d ask to continue
my bladder says ‘no’ but my mouth says ‘aye-aye!’
Why does every new verse of your song
Keep taking you so goddamn long?
Storm DiCostanzo, please sing, and sing faster!
Enough with the jokes that we don’t understand.
I need to pee and it’s no longer funny.
Yes, that’s your R Kelly goddamn cover band.
So come on Paul, spit it out.
Eighty-six seconds for all Lehrer’s Elements,
One Week’s three minutes and Yesterday’s two.
Cohen wrote hundreds of draft Hallelujahs
but won’t subject crowds to much more than a few.
You’re not our bitches, you’re not the CD,
and we don’t mean to tell you you do your job wrong,
but please bear in mind, in the time that you’ve had
Mister Boggia churned out thirty-five Beatles songs. [actually 25]
And if you keep singing so slow,
you’ll hold up the closing band’s show!
[extract from Nobody Loves You Like Me, by Paul and Storm’s usual closing band, Jonathan Coulton]
Here at the bar who cares what I do
I’m all alone but I’m drinking for two
Drowning the man that I used to be
Nobody loves you like me
Hey, Paul Sabourin, please sing, and sing faster,
though we won’t stop arrring till long past the show.
Crap out the verses, and Storm, while he’s at it,
your G-string is tuned half a Boggia too low.
So come, yes come…
Hey Paul and Storm, please just sing, and sing faster
Don’t hold back your seamen, please spit it all out.
Mister Boggia is Jim Boggia, who is known not only for his original songs and Beatles covers, but also for having perfect pitch and being very good at tuning. The ‘Boggia’ mentioned at the end is a unit of measurement defined on JoCo Cruise 2015 as “the smallest unit of tuning perceptible only to Jim Boggia”.
The other song of mine that Joey sang is Seven Bridges (of Königsberg) Road, which I mentioned in my last post:
Joey sang it based on Steve Young’s original version, rather than the Jonathan Coulton, Paul and Storm, and Sara Watkins version that I’m familiar with. Joey is wearing a T-shirt printed with the cover of my poetry album Wake Up Gasping. The album cover is by CamannWordsmith, who makes several of the major art food groups.
The other song Joey recorded that night was a parody of ‘You’ll be back’ from the musical Hamilton, from the perspective of GlaDOS from the game Portal. It was written by Brian Young, whom I knew from the olden days of the JoCo forums (which I am surprised to see are still up), and we both know from the JoCo Cruise.
The wardrobe and impetus to learn the tune was provided by our friend Chella Quint (who is usually more into menarche than monarchy) for an unrelated project which will forever be a mystery to you, but you should check out her work on menstruation (which should not be a mystery) because it’s bloody good.
That’s all for now, but Joey is working on some incredible cover versions of songs which I look forward to sharing.
∎
We got married (to each other) and then did cute couple things on a boat!
Posted by Angela Brett in News, Performances on April 15, 2022
Remember that time that Joey Marianer and I got engaged (to each other)? Well, a while after that, we also got married, as is typical for engaged couples. It was just a small ceremony in a courthouse, followed by a small gathering with two large cheesecakes. Here’s a very short video synopsis of the wedding:
I just edited the closed captions, and noticed that YouTube’s autocaptions thought the judge said, ‘congratulations youtube and you guys get a blog it’s okay’ when in fact he said, ‘Congratulations, you two. And you guys can applaud; it’s okay!’ Anyway, that video has been gathering congratulations on YouTube for a while, so now you guys get a blog about it.
Then we ate cheesecake with a few friends, and Joey did this:
If you don’t understand what just happened, here’s a video that will explain it.
A few days and two negative COVID tests later, we boarded the JoCo Cruise. On cosplay day we cosplayed each other:
This was mainly to facilitate changing into our pants for the Fancy Pants Parade. I haven’t found a video that shows us in the parade itself, but here’s one of us practising last year, when we thought the cruise might be virtual again so we’d need a video:
Then two days later, all decked out for formal night, we did a show, which was also quite geared towards things we could only do while physically together. I structured the setlist to tell the story of how our relationship developed through collaborating on songs.
If you prefer, there’s also a playlist of individual pieces. I even made a playlist of the videos mentioned in the show, complete with the comments in which I might have been flirting with Joey. Some of the poems and songs are on my album, one is on our album of SpinTunes entries, some are on the playlist of Hallelujahs, but three of them have never been published anywhere before.
I’ve wanted to do a poetry show on the cruise for a while, but was always afraid of having to miss out on other events that were scheduled at the same time as it. I did a show on the 2021 virtual cruise where that wasn’t so much of a concern, and people seemed to like it, so an in-person sequel seemed like a good idea. Only, with Joey’s help, it was not merely a poetry show, but also a musical show!
My fears were somewhat realised; this show was scheduled opposite the reception for frequent cruisers, which most of the people who know me well enough to attend my show were eligible to go to. But the other thing those people know is that I film every event I’m at (so far I’ve uploaded 12 hours, 48 minutes of video from the 2022 cruise, and I’m only up to Wednesday afternoon), so they could safely miss the show and watch it now! We got through the setlist with a little time to spare, so we even got to attend the reception briefly.
How I got to work at CERN (video) and some rambling about video (text)
Posted by Angela Brett in Story Time on April 2, 2022
Right before JoCo Cruise 2020, I bought a 256GB SD card, just as a treat, so I wouldn’t have to worry about switching between 64GB cards and offloading videos to my Mac when recording as many events as possible. I discovered too late that my camera (a Nikon P7700) was too old to support 256GB cards, and when I got home from the cruise we were in lockdown, so I couldn’t return the card. This ultimately led to my buying a new camera (a Sony ZV-1) in late 2021 which would support the card, and I am very happy with this application of the sunk cost fallacy.
I planned to test out the camera at a Burning Hell show in Vienna (which would have been my first in-person concert since the cruise), but Austria went back into lockdown, so instead, I recorded myself talking about how I got to work at CERN, as a sequel to That time Steve Wozniak bought me a laptop and That time Steve Wozniak taught me to Segway and then played Tetris and pranks through a concert. I recorded 36 minutes continuously, in 4K, and I ran out of things to say before the camera had to stop for any reason. My old camera would have to stop after less than 30 minutes recording in 1080p, due to the 4GB file size limit, so I’ll call that a success.
Whether my 36 minutes of talking about my route to CERN is worth watching is up to you to decide:
The video is fully closed-captioned by me, a human, so if you prefer skimming text to watching videos, click the … symbol (at the end of the line below the title) and choose Open Transcript.
The Burning Hell are making another attempt at a Vienna show in September, so here’s hoping I can run that original experimental design.
I’ve since been on JoCo Cruise 2022, and found the camera much less stress than my old one for recording concerts. I not only don’t need to change the card as often, I’m also not limited to 4GB files, or by the battery capacity, since it can use an external battery pack. So I’ve recorded most events continuously. The new camera also shows me what it’s focussing on, and I can change that using the touch screen, so from what I’ve seen so far, I haven’t had any incidents of an entire video being out of focus.
The only issue I had with the new camera is that if I start recording video immediately after turning it on, it doesn’t show it’s recording for another second or so, so I’d often press the button again and inadvertently stop recording in my attempt to start recording. In most cases I realised what had happened immediately and start recording again, but in one case I didn’t notice for a while and missed the introduction of a performer.
I used to do most of my lightweight cruise video editing in QuickTime Player, but for whatever reason its ‘Split Clip’ option is disabled for the videos from my new camera, so I’m trying out LosslessCut. It has a few issues, but I’ve found workarounds for them. One great thing about it is when I cut a show into individual parts, it can not only export those parts as individual videos, but also give me a list of times for those parts. I can paste them into the YouTube description of the full video so that they show up as chapters.
With the help of to that feature, I’m uploading most of them as full shows with chapter markers, and putting them into a playlist of the whole cruise as I do so. I’m also splitting shows into individual songs/stories/questions when relevant, and uploading those as separate videos, so I can add the individual pieces to other relevant playlists. Look in the description of any of the full-show videos to find a link to a playlist of the individual parts of the show. It will take a while to get everything processed and uploaded, so subscribe or check back later to see more.
Another thing I did (and recorded some video of) during that trip was marry Joey Marianer, but that can have its own blog post later. If you’re impatient, you can check out the Joey-Angela Merger playlist.
My Poetry Show on JoCo Cruise 2021
Posted by Angela Brett in Performances on April 26, 2021
I’ve been going on the JoCo Cruise since the ‘shadow cruise‘ was just an iPhone handbell choir. As it developed into something people could book spaces and times for, and have on a schedule that packed 26 days of events into a week, I participated in a few friends‘ shadow events, but hesitated to run my own in case it conflicted with something else I really wanted to do, or had me nervous or practising instead of enjoying other events.
This year, the cruise went virtual, and my excuses went out the window. I registered to do a poetry show, promising that I would ‘recite some poems that rhyme, some that don’t, and maybe even sing a few things. Topics may include science, love, poop, and life.’ I came to realise I could not only read my poems from my screen to avoid any nervousness about remembering them, but I could also share my screen. There are projectors on the cruise, but they are in short supply, so I wouldn’t request one for just one or two poems in a shadow event. On the virtual cruise, I could share whatever I wanted, including things from the internet, which wouldn’t be reliably available on a ship. And I could use props that I wouldn’t bother to bring on a cruise. So I did! I made slides for poems that worked best with visual aids, I showed off my rhyming dictionary, and I closed with a cover song that requires a video. And of course, I recorded everything. Here’s my show!
I also performed a few poems at the open mic — hastily-adapted versions of a poem I wrote for the Vienna open mic Open Phil, and the one I opened my show with about the differences between the real cruise and the virtual one. Joey Marianer and Phil Conrad (who also hosts Open Phil) hosted the open mic, so the open mic videos are on Joey’s channel.
It sure was weird watching Joey upload videos, when usually I’m spending most of my free time from March to May processing videos from the cruise. On the subject of cruise videos, the videos of the official events will allegedly only be up until May 1, so watch them while you can!
My Fancy Pants on JoCo Cruise 2021
Posted by Angela Brett in News on April 16, 2021
I had some plans for my entry into the JoCo Cruise 2021 Fancy Pants Parade, but they involved being on an actual cruise ship. When it went virtual, I assumed there would be no parade. When the call for video submissions came on 16 March, with the deadline on 31 March, I was unprepared. I’m not shopping in-person, and I didn’t think I’d be able to order materials and make anything in time.
But as much as the virtual cruise makes it impossible to do some things we would do on the real cruise, it also makes it possible to do things we couldn’t do on the real cruise. In one in-person Fancy Pants Parade, there was a person in a motion capture suit holding a sign saying ‘we’ll fix it in post’, and also a person in a green screen suit (who was controlling the tentacles of their partner’s pants.) In a virtual Fancy Pants Parade, we really can fix it in post. So I decided to try using my pants as a green screen — for what, I wasn’t sure.
At first I thought I’d try with some black jeans and hope I could tune the green screen effect for them, but then I realised I actually had blue-green jeans (purchased purely because I was excited to find jeans that were the right length for me.) I paraded ridiculously across the room in them, and Final Cut Pro immediately recognised them as the colour to apply the green screen effect to.
I settled on showing footage from previous Fancy Pants Parades on my pants. At first I thought I’d use my own pants, to not steal anyone else’s glory, but I didn’t have footage of all my own pants. I went with the winning pants from each parade, making this sort of a restrospective — a celebration of the whole tradition of Fancy Pants Parades. As the live version of Mr. Fancy Pants often says, chances are you’re best in everybody’s pants.
After submitting my entry, I duplicated the footage, enabling different settings in each copy, to make this short step-by-step. I’ve never used a green screen effect before, so this was me learning as I went along.
I submitted my video on 21 March. On 30 March, the JoCo Cruise Home Office sent out an email saying they’d only received one submission so far, and Jonathan was “nigh-inconsolable” about it. So I encouraged some friends to submit some — as I mentioned in my last post, winning by default is not as much fun as winning by crushing the hopes and dreams of your friends. So here’s how the Fancy Pants Parade went. Watch it before reading the rest of the post if you don’t want the result spoiled:
There was a lively exploration of the problem space of pants. What is fancy? Does it modify ‘pants’, or ‘parade’? What are the most important components of being ‘best in terms of pants’: physical pants-crafting, presentation, or spirit? And is that fancy pants spirit, or we’ve-been-home-for-a-year spirit? Still, it seemed that at least the chat comments were mostly in my favour, until, in a shocking twist, they found Gina’s video, which had been accidentally left out of the parade. And hers, too, used some movie magic! More debate: Culture and history? Conception, or construction? All pants, no dance? If you are silent, the pants will speak. I put my pants on one leg at a time, but in four dimensions, somehow.
It came down to a vote, and… I won! But all the particiPANTS were winners.
This is my second win… as you might guess from this year’s video, I also won in 2014. I am not the first person to win twice — the 2016 winner had also won previously, I think in 2013.
Wake Up Gasping — an album!
Posted by Angela Brett in News, Performances, Publishing, Things To Listen To on April 8, 2021
Last year my friend Phil from SkyStudio Wien called me up out of the blue to ask if I wanted to record some poetry, so I did! I went in for another session later in the year, and that time I was more prepared — I gathered up everything I could find that I thought was good and made some kind of sense without too much explanation. We ended up with 39 poems recorded, so in order to bring the total up to 42, I added Why I Perform At Open Mics (previously released on Bandcamp as a single) and a few songs recorded in studios with Joey Marianer. It comes in at just under an hour — some of the tracks are very short #NanoRhymo poems. It’s called Wake Up Gasping.
A lot of these poems have been previously published on this blog in some form, but some haven’t. I included some poems I wrote before I started this blog (the oldest, Shooting Star, being from around 1996) and some I’d written more recently but which I’d only performed with sound effects (Negative Return, sometimes followed by Down while the noise was still trailing off) or just always thought would work better spoken than read (A Couple of Problems.)
The title comes from a line in A Skirmish [With My Least-Favourite Body Part] which I always thought would be a great name for a hard-hitting collection of powerful, emotional poetry. I do not think that’s what this is, but at least with 42 tracks, it looks like I was holding my breath for a while and finally let everything out.
The cover art is by Joseph Camann of The Camannwordsmith Patreon. I started out without much idea of what I wanted on the cover, which was great because his art is mostly abstract, but after looking through some of his existing art for ideas I thought of having the lost astronaut from Down floating through a colourful space-y background. Joseph has a lot going on: music, stories, paintings, poems (sometimes read to puppies), reaction videos, even wearable art, in case you’d like something like this album cover but on a dress.
Some of my tracks have unusual characters in the titles, and I’m happy to report that Bandcamp did not have problems with any of them.
In other news, about 48 hours from now, I’m doing a 50-minute poetry show over Zoom as part of the ‘Shadow Cruise’ of the virtual JoCo Cruise 2021. It will include some poems from the album, but also (thanks to screensharing) some which require or are enhanced by visual aids or additional explanations. I will also be singing a few songs, and reading one poem especially written for the event. Feel free to join — there’s no signup, ticket, or even pants required! As with most JoCo Cruise events I’ve been to over the years, I will post a recording of it on my YouTube channel later if you can’t make it.
Check out the rest of the cruise schedule, and the cruise Discord, too… this year’s cruise is obviously quite different from the usual one in many ways, but still hopefully similar in enough ways that you’ll get a feel for how much it influences my life. One important way it’s different is that it’s completely free and you don’t even have to get out of bed for it, let alone go to an airport and cruise port.
You should also see me participating for the eleventh year in a row in the Fancy Pants Parade. For a while, I was the only person to have submitted a video, but I encouraged some friends to (including some clients of Chromatic Verse Wearable Art, by the same person who designed my album cover) so that I wouldn’t just win by default. Now I can win by crushing the hopes and dreams of my friends! Later, I will post a short making-of video about the pants I appear in.
Unintentional Haiku in my YouTube Video Descriptions
Posted by Angela Brett in Haiku Detector on May 10, 2020
Since I wrote a little app to download much of my YouTube metadata, it was obvious that I needed to feed it through another little app I wrote: Haiku Detector. So I did. In all of my public YouTube descriptions put together, with URLs removed, there are 26 172 sentences, and 436 detected haiku.
As is usually the case, a few of these ‘haiku’ were not really haiku because the Mac speech synthesis pronounces them wrong, and thus Haiku Detector counts their syllables incorrectly. A few more involved sentences which no longer made sense because their URLs had been removed, or which were partial sentences from song lyrics which looked like full sentences because they were on lines of their own. Most of the rest just weren’t very interesting.
There were quite a lot of song lyrics which fit into haiku, which suggest tunes to which other haiku can be sung, if the stress patterns match up. I’m not going to put those here though; there are too many, and I could make a separate post about haiku in Jonathan Coulton lyrics, having already compiled a JoCorpus for rhyme.science to find rhymes in. So here are some other categories of haiku I liked. For lack of a better idea, I’ll link the first word of each one to the video it’s from.
Apologies about my camerawork
Also, there’s a lot
of background noise so the sound
isn’t very good.
There was a little
too much light and sound for my
poor little camera. 🙂
But hey, if I’d brought
my external microphone,
it would have got wet.
I’m so sad that I
had to change batteries or
something part-way through. 😦
Who do I look like,
Joe Covenant in Glasgow
in 2008?
Now the guitar is
out of tune and my camera
is out of focus.
Performers being their typical selves
John Roderick:
Eventually
they get around to singing
the song Cinnamon.
Aimee Mann asks John
Roderick to play one of
his songs (which he wrote.)
Jim Boggia:
But first, he gives us
a taste of what he’s really
famous for: tuning.
And now he’s lost his
voice, so it’s going to be
great for everything.
Cody Wymore:
Cody Wymore can’t
do a set without Stephen
Sondheim in it.
Cody horns in on
it anyway by adding
a piano part.
He pauses time for
a bit so nobody knows
he was unprepared.
It’s about being
in a room full of people
and feeling alone.
Paul and Storm:
Why does every new
verse of their song keep taking
them so goddamn long?
Little did I know
that four other people would
throw panties at Paul.
Ted Leo:
We’re gonna bring the
mood down a little bit, but
maybe lift it up!
Nerf Herder:
Meanwhile, they have to
fix up the drums because I
guess they rocked too hard.
Zoe and Brian Gray:
It’s For the Glory
of Gleeble Glorp, which isn’t
a euphemism.
Zoe Gray has to
follow Brian Gray’s songs from
the Gleebleverse.
Clint McElroy:
He’s here to perform
for us an amazing act
of léger de main.
Travis McElroy:
Travis gets up on
stage and holds a small doll’s head
in a creepy way.
which brings us to Jonathan Coulton:
He loves us and is
very glad to be with us.
This is Creepy Doll.
Jonathan Coulton
remarks on the lax rhyming
in God Save The Queen.
Jonathan will use
Jim’s capo, and he will give
it back afterwards.
Jonathan did not
know this was going to be
a cardio set.
That guy Paul has been
seeing every goddamned day
for the last two months.
MC Frontalot:
MC Frontalot
talks about samples and tells
us what hiphop is.
Jean Grae:
It’s not because she’s
a lady, but because she’s
an alcoholic.
She feels like she should
get a guitar case, even
without a guitar.
Jon Spurney:
Jon Spurney rocks out
on the guitar solo, as
he is wont to do.
Me:
Eventually,
at about 6:38,
we get to the point.
The ship’s IT guy:
He has been very
glad to meet us, but he’s not
sad to see us leave.
Red Team Leader:
Red Leader has some
announcements to make before
the final concert.
The Red Team didn’t
mind, because we’re the team that
entertains ourselves.
All the JoCo Cruise performers in the second half of the last show:
Let’s bring Aimee Mann
back out to the stage to join
the Shitty Bar Band.
We now get into
the unrehearsed supergroup
section of the show.
JoCo Cruise hijinks
This is the last show,
unless we’re quarantined on
the ship for a while!
Half of those palettes
were 55-gallon drums
of caveat sauce.
This pun somehow leads
to a sad Happy Birthday
for Paul Sabourin.
Paul Sabourin points
out Kendra’s Glow Cloud dress in
the front row (all hail!)
They talk about why
they did note-for-note covers
instead of new takes.
Make It With You by
Bread, which has even better
string writing than Swift.
So by Friday night,
they’d written this musical
about JoCo Cruise.
A plan to take over the world:
Here’s how it’s going
to work: first we’re going to
have a nice dinner.
And once we have our
very own cruise ship, we shall
dominate the seas.
Some Truth:
An actual cake
which is not a lie. It was
delicious and moist.
It was delicious
and moist. This is Drew’s body
given up for us.
Questions and answers:
What do you do when
you reach the limits of your
own understanding?
When she reaches the
limits of her knowledge, she
says she doesn’t know.
the green people with
buttons who are aliens
wanting to probe you
Wash your hands! Do you
need to take your life jackets
to the safety drill?
What about water,
though? Where do you sign up for
the specialty lunch?
Calls to action
All this and more can
be real if you book yourself
a berth on that boat.
It was supported
by her Patreon patrons.
You could be one too!
If you want to hear
him sing more covers this way,
back this Kickstarter:
That will do for now. Next perhaps I’ll make word clouds of my YouTube descriptions from various time periods, to show what I was uploading at the time. Or perhaps I’ll feed the descriptions into the app I wrote to create the data for rhyme.science, see what the most common rhymes are, and write a poem about them, as I did with Last Chance to See.
Eventually, some of the content I create from my YouTube metadata will make it into a YouTube video of its own — perhaps finally a real channel trailer. But what will I write in the description and title, and will I have to calculate the steady state of a Markov chain to make sure it doesn’t affect the data it shows?
Some Statistics About My Ridiculous YouTube Channel
Posted by Angela Brett in News, video on May 3, 2020
I’ve developed a bit of a habit of recording entire concerts of musicians who don’t mind
their concerts being recorded, splitting them into individual songs, and uploading them to my YouTube channel with copious notes in the video descriptions. My first upload was, appropriately, the band featured in the first image on the web, Les Horribles Cernettes, singing Big Bang. I first got enough camera batteries and SD cards to record entire concerts for the K’s Choice comeback concert in Dranouter in 2009, though the playlist is short, so perhaps I didn’t actually record that entire show.
I’ve also developed a habit of going on a week-long cruise packed with about 25 days of entertainment every year, and recording 30 or so hours of that entertainment. So my YouTube channel is getting a bit ridiculous. I currently have 2723 publicly-visible videos on my channel, and 2906 total videos — the other 183 are private or unlisted, either because they’re open mic or karaoke performances from JoCo Cruise and I’m not sure I have the performer’s permission to post them, or they’re official performances that we were requested to only share with people that were there.
I’ve been wondering just how much I’ve written in my sometimes-overly-verbose video descriptions over the years, and the only way I found to download all that metadata was using the YouTube API. I tested it out by putting a URL with the right parameters in a web browser, but it’s only possible to get the data for up to 50 videos at a time, so it was clear I’d have to write some code to do it.
Late Friday evening, after uploading my last video from JoCo Cruise 2020, I set to writing a document-based CoreData SwiftUI app to download all that data. I know my way around CoreData and downloading and parsing JSON in Swift, but haven’t had many chances to try out SwiftUI, so this was a way I could quickly get the information I wanted while still learning something. I decided to only get the public videos, since that doesn’t need authentication (indeed, I had already tried it in a web browser), so it’s a bit simpler.
By about 3a.m, I had all the data, stored in a document and displayed rather simply in my app. Perhaps that was my cue to go to bed, but I was too curious. So I quickly added some code to export all the video descriptions in one text file and all the video titles in another. I had planned to count the words within the app (using enumerateSubstrings byWords or enumerateTags, of course… we’re not savages! As a linguist I know that counting words is more complicated than counting spaces.) but it was getting late and I knew I wanted the full text for other things, so I just exported the text and opened it in Pages. The verdict:
- 2723 public videos
- 33 465 words in video titles
- 303 839 words in video descriptions
The next day, I wanted to create some word clouds with the data, but all the URLs in the video descriptions got in the way. I quite often link to the playlists each video is in, related videos, and where to purchase the songs being played. I added some code to remove links (using stringByReplacingMatches with an NSDataDetector with the link type, because we’re not savages! As an internet person I know that links are more complicated than any regex I’d write.) I found that Pages counts URLs as having quite a few words, so the final count is:
- At least 4 633 links (this is just by searching for ‘http’ in the original video descriptions, like a savage, so might not match every link)
- 267 567 words in video descriptions, once links are removed. I could almost win NaNoWriMo with the links from my video descriptions alone.
I then had my app export the publish dates of all the videos, imported them into Numbers, and created the histogram shown above. I actually learnt quite a bit about Numbers in the process, so that’s a bonus. I’ll probably do a deeper dive into the upload frequency later, with word clouds broken down by time period to show what I was uploading at any given time, but for now, here are some facts:
- The single day when I uploaded the most publicly-visible videos was 25 December 2017, when I uploaded 34 videos — a K’s Choice concert and a Burning Hell concert in Vienna earlier that year. I’m guessing I didn’t have company for Christmas, so I just got to hang out at home watching concerts and eating inexpertly-roasted potatoes.
- The month when I uploaded the most publicly-visible videos was April 2019. This makes sense, as I was unemployed at the time, and got back from JoCo Cruise on March 26.
So, onto the word clouds I cleaned up that data to make. I created them on wordclouds.com, because wordle has rather stagnated. Most of my video titles mention the artist name and concert venue and date, so some words end up being extremely common. This huge variation in word frequency meant I had to reduce the size from 0 all the way to -79 in order for it to be able to fit common words such as ‘Jonathan’. Wordclouds lets you choose the shape of the final word cloud, but at that scale, it ends up as the intersection of a diamond with the chosen shape, so the shape doesn’t end up being recognisable. Here it is, then, as a diamond:
The video descriptions didn’t have as much variation between word frequencies, so I only had to reduce it to size -45 to fit both ‘Jonathan’ and ‘Coulton’ in it. I still don’t know whether there are other common words that didn’t fit, because the site doesn’t show that information until it’s finished, and there are so many different words that it’s still busy drawing the word cloud. Luckily I could download an image of it before that finished. Anyway, at size -45, the ‘camera’ shape I’d hoped to use isn’t quite recognisable, but I did manage a decent ‘YouTube play button’ word cloud:
One weird fact I noticed is that I mention Paul Sabourin of Paul and Storm in video descriptions about 40% more often than I mention Storm DiCostanzo, and I include his last name three times as much. To rectify this, I wrote a song mentioning Storm’s last name a lot, to be sung to the tune of ‘Hallelujah’, because that’s what we do:
We’d like to sing of Paul and Storm.
It’s Paul we love to see perform.
The other member’s name’s the one that scans though.
So here’s to he who plays guitar;
let’s all sing out a thankful ‘Arrr!’
for Paul and Storm’s own Greg “Storm” DiCostanzo!
DiCostanzo, DiCostanzo, DiCostanzo, DiCostanzo
I’m sure I’ll download more data from the API, do some more analysis, and mine the text for haiku (if Haiku Detector even still runs — it’s been a while since I touched it!) later, but that’s enough for now!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Please tell me if you do something cool with it.
Creative Output 
