Posts Tagged JoCo Cruise
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!
Who We Are (a.k.a. Wear Your Nametag) – a song
Posted by Angela Brett in Holiday Highlights, Performances, Things To Listen To on April 26, 2020
A few weeks before JoCo Cruise 2020, I wrote a song to perform at the open mic. It’s a singalong which I figured everyone could relate to, so I figured people would enjoy it. I came up with the tune myself, and Joey Marianer worked out some ukulele accompaniment. Then we found out there would be no open mic on the cruise, so we performed it at Beth Kinderman’s song circle at MarsCon, though there was a lot of background noise and not much singing along there.
I was signed up to perform in a shadow event called ‘A Bunch of Monkeys Read Some Stuff‘ on the cruise, so I also performed it there, along with some short poems I’d written during NanoRhymo 1 and 2, and Global Poetry Writing Month. Words and tweet links of the specific tiny poems are in the video description.
Later in the cruise, Joey hastily organised an especially unofficial open mic, so we performed it there as well. By that time I was slightly more confident about remembering the words:
Here are the lyrics. They contain much haplology, and work best in an accent without the trap-bath split; I had to change the way I pronounce ‘demand’ to sing it, and I didn’t always keep that change consistent through the rest of the song.
We’re close, and I’m finally here with you.
You don’t look like your avatar.
Until I demand all
your names and your handles,
I probably won’t know who you are.
You’ve changed name and gender
your hair, or your shirt
You took off your glasses
your beard or your skirt
You left for three seconds,
your mouth’s now ajar.
I probably don’t know who you are
I probably don’t know who you are.
I probably don’t know who you are!
Your name and your face too,
I just cannot place you.
I probably don’t know who you are.
You’ve just really killed it at open mic.
Your singalong chorus went. far,
but nobody says so
when you’re off the stage, so
they probably don’t know who you are.
They snubbed you at dinner
they brought the wrong beer
Regaled you with stories
you told them last year.
They won’t share their stateroom
or give back your car
They probably don’t know who you are
They probably don’t know who you are.
They probably don’t know who you are!
Even if someone knows ya,
there’s prosopagnosia —
they probably don’t know who you are.
You once seemed at least somewhat normative
but each year things get more bizarre.
There’s joy and there’s strife while
you’re changing your lifestyle.
You probably don’t know who you are.
I couldn’t write this part;
It wouldn’t be true.
Just think about things
That are changing for you.
It takes time and patience
To tune a guitar
You probably don’t know who you are
You probably don’t know who you are.
You probably don’t know who you are!
You’re constantly growing
new parts for not knowing.
You probably don’t know who you are.
We probably don’t know who we are.
We probably don’t know who we are!
And we don’t know whether
we’ll find out together.
We probably don’t know who we are.
It’s all based on truth. Every JoCo Cruise I spend an action-packed and sleep-deprived week with people who are, to varying degrees, my friends. It’s a cruise where people’s clothes and makeup are often far more memorable than their faces, so I may or may not recognise my new or old friends each time I see them during that week. The subtle difference between formal night and pyjama day attire in the videos above can’t compare to the costume changes some people go through. I spend the rest of the year connected to many of these friends via the internet, where I learn their full names and/or other handles, but (despite the name of one of the websites) not necessarily the faces which go with those names. Then we meet in person again, a year of growth different.
Sometimes they grow a full beard between cruises, and then once I’ve figured out who they are, shave it off during the cruise (you know who you are. I didn’t.) Sometimes they transition, tell me their new name, and I don’t connect that ‘new’ person with the name and face they had previously until weeks after I get home. Sometimes I accidentally tell people their own origin stories.
I perform at many open mics, and often love the performances as they’re happening, but don’t remember exactly what the performers looked like or who did what. When people come up to me afterwards and praise my performance, I want to do the same for them, but am not sure whether or what they performed.
I wrote the ‘I’ and ‘they’ parts with no particular plan to turn it into something serious at the end, but then a ‘you’ section seemed like the obvious continuation. That part is true for me, too — the most predictable thing about my life is that it will keep getting ever more ridiculous. May you all find a Jim Boggia to help tune your metaphorical guitars, and if not, time and patience.
Things I forgot to blog about, part n+1: NanoRhymo #2
Posted by Angela Brett in NanoRhymo on January 21, 2020
In November 2018 I created NanoRhymo (inspired by NaNoWriMo), in which I wrote and tweeted a very short rhyming poem every day. I did the same thing in April 2019 for Global Poetry Writing Month. I started pretty late with NanoRhymo in 2019, and didn’t end up with a poem for each day of November, but I’ve started it again on January 1 and made up for the missing poems. In November, I mostly stuck to writing something based on a random rhyme from the rhyming dictionary I made, rhyme.science — either a new one I’d found each day, or one generated earlier for the @RhymeScience twitter feed. In January, I’ve often been inspired by other things.
I’ll continue writing a NanoRhymo a day for as long as I can. Here’s what I’ve written so far:
Day 1, inspired by the rhymes later, translator, and (in non-rhotic accents) convey to:
When you’ve got a thought to convey to
many mortals, sooner or later,
then you ought to get a translator.
Day 2, inspired by the rhyme chunked and bunked, and the folk etymology of ‘chunder’:
Sailors lying in their bunks
would shout “Ahoy there, mate… watch under!”
and then let loose digested chunks
on hapless seamen sleeping under.
That’s why even now, down under,
[I am lying; truth debunks!]
some refer to puke as chunder.
[This is half-digested junk
Please accept my weak apology
and not this doubtful etymology.]
Day 3, inspired by a friend’s experience learning flying trapeze:
My friend Robert Burke tried the flying trapeze.
It meant lots of work mulling hypotheses,
and then much amusement and catching catchees,
to end up all bruised on the backs of the knees.
Day 4, inspired by the rhyme spermicides and germicide’s:
Looking at small things up close and myopically,
one might prevent overgrowth with a germicide.
But looking at large things afar, macroscopically,
one must prevent unchecked growth with a spermicide.
Day 5, inspired by the rhyme explainable and containable:
As soon as the bug is explainable,
we can hope that it might be containable,
and our neural nets will be retrainable,
and our code is so very maintainable
that this progress is surely sustainable!
Day 6, inspired by the rhyme freaking and unspeaking:
Mouth agape, stunned, unspeaking
Eyes wide open, silent freaking,
What could this strange vision be?
a music video, on MTV?!
Day 7, inspired by the rhyme trekked and collect:
Over much terrain they trekked;
specimens they did collect,
to show just how diverse life was
before we killed it off, just ‘cause.
Day 8, inspired by the rhyme interleaved and peeved:
If rhyming couplets leave you peeved,
here, I tried ABAB.
Now the rhymes are interleaved!
This rhyme and rhythm’s reason-free.
Day 9, a rewrite of Day 8 that can be sung to a possibly recognisable tune:
If rhyming couplets leave you peeved,
Then try to make them interleaved
Or don’t, and then just let the hate flow through ya
Just AAB, then CCB
This rhyme and rhythm’s reason-free.
At least it can be sung to Hallelujah.
The most Hallelujest Joey Marianer sang that version:
Day 10, inspired by the rhyme platitudes and latitude’s, and my general dislike of casual hemispherism:
I’m just fine with the end-of-year platitudes —
“Happy Holidays”, nice and generic,
but please, be inclusive of latitudes:
“Happy Winter” is too hemispheric!
Day 11, another Hallelujah, inspired by Joey’s singing of the previous Hallelujah:
A kitchen scale, a petrol gauge,
a cylinder, a final page
will tell you up to what things have amounted.
An abacus, a quipu string,
some tally sticks, to always sing,
are all things on which Joey can be counted.
Day 12, inspired by the rhyme deprecations and lamentations, some deprecated code I was removing from the software I develop at work, and also complaints about macOS Catalina dropping support for 32-bit applications. I imagine it sung to the tune of Camp Bachelor Alma Mater:
Hear the coders’ lamentations
over apps that will not run,
due to years-old deprecations,
updates that they’ve never done.
Day 13, inspired by the rhyme whoop’s and sloop’s, and the tradition on JoCo Cruise of ending the final concert with the song Sloop John B:
Have some more whoops on me,
hearing the Sloop John B
as JoCo Cruise comes to an end.
You still have all night.
Hang loose, or sleep tight.
Well, we feel so broke up
but you’ll stay my friend.
Day 14, to the tune of Morning Has Broken:
Something is broken;
look at that warning!
Unbalanced token.
Unknown keyword.
Raise the exceptions.
Erase all the warnings.
Raze preconceptions wrongly inferred.
Day 15, inspired by Hilbert’s paradox of the Grand Hotel:
The rooms are all full for as far out as they can see;
such a big guest house to fill, but oh well.
What’s this? Nonetheless, there’s a sign saying vacancy!
There’s always more room at the Hilbert hotel.
Day 16, inspired by the rhyme feeling’s and ceilings, and the song Happy, by Pharrell Williams:
Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof. 👏
Please applaud if you think you’re a chamber with no ceiling. 👏
Clap along If you feel like happiness is the truth. 👏
Please applaud if you think there’s veracity in good feelings. 👏
For day 17, I let Pico, emacs, ed, vi count as the NanoRhymo, even though it does not mention the text editor nano.
November ended with no more rhymes, but I started it up again on January 1, simply because I was inspired to, and I continued to get ideas every day since. I’m not promising to keep this up daily all year (indeed, I promise not to keep it up during MarsCon and JoCo Cruise 2020) but I’ll post NanoRhymi whenever I feel inspired to.
Day 18 (on January 1, 2020) was inspired by the rhyme unworthy and incur the:
Don’t worry that you might incur the
sentence, “That person’s unworthy.”
Just try what you wish, and try plenty,
and have a great year twenty-twenty.
Day 19, inspired by the rhyme verb and kerb, but using the North American ‘curb’ spelling because it’s closer to the verb derived from the noun:
If you’d punch down, or kick to the curb
for verbing a noun, or nouning a verb,
researching the past will amount your disturb.
So many of the words we used today, including some in that poem, were once strictly parts of speech other than the ones they’re used as without a second thought today, and people objected to their shifts in usage just as they object to all manner of language change today.
Day 20, inspired by the rhymes occur to, Berta, and (in non-rhotic accents) subverter:
If it were to occur to Berta the subverter to hurt Alberta,
she’d prefer to assert a slur to refer to her to stir internal murder.
(Stones break bones but names make shame — heals more slowly, hurts the same.)
Day 21, inspired by the rhyme unconcealed and unpeeled:
While you’re growing in the field,
all your goodness is concealed,
till some lovely creature picks you,
doesn’t think they have to fix you,
lets you chill, let down your shield;
then, when you are fully peeled,
your sweetest inner self revealed,
that cunning rascal bites and licks you.
Day 22, inspired by the rhymes for fish, dwarfish, and (maybe in some non-rhotic accents with the cot-caught merger) standoffish, the ‘teach a man to fish‘ metaphor, and of course, my own poem, They Might Not Be Giants:
If a person’s always asking for fish,
don’t give them one, and go away, standoffish.
Teach techniques that they’ll expand on.
Be the shoulders they will stand on.
Not a giant — generous and dwarfish.
And then the same thing as a limerick:
There once was a man asking for fish,
who got one from someone standoffish.
Then shoulders to stand on
and tricks to expand on,
were given by someone quite dwarfish.
Day 23, inspired by… certain kinds of transphobic people, I guess:
Some folk seem to be offended
by the thought the queerly gendered
might themselves become offended
when they’re purposely misgendered,
so they’ve boorishly defended
all the hurt that they intended
towards the “easily offended”
who are “wimps” to try to end it.
Day 24, a double dactyl inspired by a conversation with someone who’s considering hormone therapy with one aim being a reduction of schlength, during which we noticed that ‘endocrinologist’ is a double dactyl, and also inspired by Paul and Storm’s habit of calling Jonathan Coulton ‘Dr. Smallpenis‘ (with the ‘e’ unstressed) which began on JoCo Cruise 2013:
Dr. Jon Smallpənis,
Endocrinologist,
helps you to shrink all the
parts that aren’t you.
Piss off, dysphoria!
Spironolactone could
soon make you tinkle the
whole darn day through.
Spironolactone is a medication that blocks the effect of testosterone, which as a side effect can increase urinary frequency.
Day 25, inspired by the rhyme eleven words and heavenwards:
Dear Father, a prayer I remember, amen.
Another, sincere from a vendor, again.
As if by reciting just ten or eleven words
I’ll lift myself quite transcendentally heavenwards.
Day 26, inspired by what I was actually told at my first comprehensive annual checkup:
Sit up straight!
Lose some weight!
Take these pills!
Cure your ills!
Your heart is beating!
You’re good at breathing!
With those two habits kept up,
We’ll see you at the next year’s checkup.
They really did seem impressed by how well I could breathe. I wasn’t too good at it when I started, but I have been practising my whole life, and if I’m good then I may as well continue the habit.
Day 27, inspired by this Smarter Every Day video about activating smart speakers using laser light instead of sound:
Here’s a technique that is quite underhand
to beam gadgets speaking they might understand,
and give an unsound and light-fingered command.
This one works best in accents without the trap-bath split, so that ‘command’ rhymes with ‘understand’ and ‘underhand’.
Day 28, inspired by a container of those little dowel things to hold up shelves, which was labelled ‘Safety trans.’, and the song The Safety Dance, by Men Without Hats. This parody is presumedly to be sung by Women and Nonbinary People Without Hats:
You can trans[ition] iff you want to.
You can leave your assigned gender behind.
‘Cause your assigned gender ain’t trans and if you don’t trans[ition],
Well your assigned gender stays assigned.
Day 29, inspired by a video about Jason Padgett, who survived a vicious beating to end up with (among less attractive brain issues) savant skills and a kind of synaesthesia:
Acquired savants suffer pain,
to wake up with a better brain.
Get a bump, or have a seizure,
then end up with synaesthesia —
not the grapheme-colour kind,
rather, an amazing mind!
Day 30 is a version of day 29’s poem which can be sung to the tune of Hallelujah, with a second verse reminding people that synaesthesia is actually pretty common, affecting about 4.4% of people, (I have the grapheme-colour kind) and doesn’t necessarily confer superpowers:
Acquired savants suffer pain,
to wake up with a better brain
by healing from an injury or seizure.
They sometimes get amazing minds
associating different kinds
of input in a thing called synaesthesia.
Synaesthesia, synaesthesia, synaesthesia, synaesthesia.
But synaesthetes are everywhere,
not magical, or even rare.
It doesn’t make them smart or make things easier.
It just makes Thursday forest green,
or K maroon and 7 mean.
Your ‘the’-tastes-like-vanilla synaesthesia
Synaesthesia, synaesthesia, synaesthesia…
This refers to time-unit-color synaesthesia, grapheme-colour synaesthesia, ordinal linguistic personification (also known as sequence-personality synaesthesia), and lexical-gustatory synaesthesia, but there are many other kinds.
Day 31, a parody of ABBA’s Fernando for which I am deeply sorry:
Did you hear he goes commando?
I remember long ago another starry night like this.
In the firelight, commando,
he was wearing his new kilt and playing bagpipes by the fire.
I could hear his sudden screams
and sounds of mountain oysters sizzling in the fryer.
Day 32, inspired by two tweets I saw, each quoting the same tweet where someone had contrasted pictures of Prince Harry in the army with pictures of him with his wife, and claimed that getting out of the army and getting married was somehow emasculation caused by ‘toxic’ Hollywood feminism:
The two tweets happened to rhyme with each other and follow the same structure, from the ‘fellas, is it gay’ meme, so I put them together, and added a few lines:
Fellas, is is gay to have a wife?
Fellas, is it gay to be a human being with a life?
Fellas, is it gay to wear a suit?
Fellas, is it gay to dress to socialise instead of shoot?
(Fellas, is it toxic to be gay?
Fellas, why frame questions with a word she didn’t say?)
Day 33, another Hallelujah parody, inspired by Joey’s observation that NanoRhymo scans:
You want to practise writing verse.
The secret’s to be very terse.
You don’t have to try hard, just have to try mo’.
You write some dogg’rel every day
and some you’ll toss, but some will stay.
An atom at a time; it’s NanoRhymo.
NanoRhymo, NanoRhymo, NanoRhymo, NanoRhymo.
Day 34, inspired by a Twitter thread which began with my friend Rob Rix expressing frustration with type inference, and one of his followers suggesting the term ‘type deference’:
I love when it complies,
regards me with deference,
and bravely compiles
my unguarded dereference.
Day 35, inspired by… tea. I feel so rich when I make a pot of tea and top it up all day, having unlimited tea without feeling like maybe it’s wasteful to be using my eighth teabag of the day:
If hot tea’s an oddity,
the tea bag’s your commodity,
but if you drink a lot of tea,
you should make a pot of tea.
(To add some boiling water t’
whenever you want hotter tea.)
Day 36, inspired by my efforts to write an AppleScript to copy all my NanoRhymi and GloPoWriMo poems from Notes into a spreadsheet in Numbers, which initially failed because I had accidentally addressed the script to Pages instead, and Pages don’t know sheet:
👩🏻💻Hello there! Your finest Greek corpus, to go!
👩🍳The what now? Not understand corpus, no no!
👩🏻💻The active Greek corpus, the frontmost, the first, display all the corpora you have; am I cursed?
👩🍳I’m sorry? Your question is Greek to me… how?
👩🏻💻Okay then, just show me your bookcases, now!
👩🍳Bookcases? I have none; you’ve made a mistake.
👩🏻💻Ah, frack! You’re no linguist! You’re actually the baker!
The spreadsheet, by the way, shows I’ve written about a hundred of these small poems in total so far, in the course of my NanoRhymo and GloPoWriMo stints. I haven’t gone through it checking for notes that didn’t contain completed poems, so I don’t know the exact number yet. In the next roundup of these things, I’ll probably start numbering them based on that total, rather than the ‘days’ of any particular run of them.
Day 37 (today, as I write this), a parody of Taylor Swift’s ‘Shake it Off‘ inspired by another tweet by Rob Rix, in which he notices that a calculation done in Spotlight Search which should give the result zero does not, and remarks, ‘computers gonna compute’:
’Cause the bugs are are gonna ship, ship, ship, ship, ship
And an on bit is a blip, blip, blip, blip, blip
I’m just gonna flip, flip, flip, flip, flip
I flip it off ⌽, I flip it off 🖕🏻
That’s all of the NanoRhymi I have so far; I’ll post more here occasionally, but follow me on Twitter if you want to see them as they happen.
∎
In other news, please consider buying one or all of the MarsCon Dementia Track Fundraiser albums, which are albums of live comedy music performances from previous MarsCon Dementia Tracks, sold to raise funds for the performers’ hotel costs for the next one. The 2020 fundraiser album (with the concerts from MarsCon 2019) is nearly four hours of live comedy music for $20, and includes my performances of Chicken Monkey Duck and Why I Perform at Open Mics.
For yet more music, Joey and I will be participating in round #16 of SpinTunes, a songwriting competition following in the footsteps of Masters of Song Fu. I’ve been following it since the beginning, but never had the accompaniment to actually enter.
My Performances on JoCo Cruise 2019
Posted by Angela Brett in Holiday Highlights, video on April 14, 2019
I’ve been going to JoCo Cruise since it started in 2011, and this year I finally had the nerve and organisation (okay, so actually Phil organised it) to take part in running a shadow event. What with this and MarsCon, apparently 2019 is my year for getting on stage at events I’ve long frequented.
There are many official celebrity guests on JoCo Cruise, but anyone can request a space and time to host their own events, whether concerts, crafting workshops, jam sessions, locksports seminars, hydrating face mask parties, PGP signing parties, space dog slideshows, scotch or foreign snack tastings, meetups of people who are various flavours of non-heteronormative, religious, merfolk, impaired, purple-haired, or scientists, or just a session of yelling at the moon. All of these things are real events that happened this year. This ‘shadow’ cruise, as it’s called, took up 292 of the 605 hours of programming.
My little corner of that was Angela Brett & Phil Conrad with Friends, later referred to as the ‘Hastily Assembled Entertainment Taco’, after the official event ‘Hastily Assembled Entertainment Burrito‘. The friends involved included Randy Parcel on vocals, Ryan Nathan on drums, Joey Marianer on vocals and ukulele, and Jeff Kahan on oboe. You can see the full show in the YouTube playlist below, or read on as I self-indulgently embed the specific parts I had a hand in, along with a few others from the open mic night.
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 