Posts Tagged video
Valentine Day Massacre chapbook
Posted by Angela Brett in News, Publishing on February 10, 2011
Just in time to arrive late for Valentine’s Day, Červená Barva Press have released a chapbook of poems mentioning the word ‘heart’, which were posted on Fictionaut in response to a Valentine’s Day challenge. I’m going to assume they removed the customary apostrophe and ensuing S in order to avoid any unintentional SQL injection. Anyhow, this book includes my scientific love poem, Chemistry, which you can see me reading while wearing two fake moustaches here:
The words and explanations of the science behind it can be found on a few previous blog posts, so I’ll just link to one of them.
Feel free to buy a copy of the chapbook for yourself or your valentine. I don’t get any money from it, and neither does anyone else except for the publisher, because apparently we did it for love, but if you buy it, you’ll get to read quite a varied set of poems, which will make you happy. Alternatively, you could read the poems on Fictionaut by searching the site for ‘Valentine’s Day Massacre’.
On the subject of fake moustaches, I recently went on a cruise with Jonathan Coulton and many of his famous friends and fans. The cruise featured a moustache formal, so if you would like to see how my moustache has changed over time, here’s a picture of me at the formal. I’ll probably post more about the cruise later, if I can come up with a sufficiently creative way of describing it. In the mean time, you could enjoy the many videos I took of the cruise.
Video: Return of the Pants
Posted by Angela Brett in The Afterlife on February 6, 2011
You remember those red pants I wore in the ‘A Laptop Like You‘ and ‘Love Letters‘ videos? They weren’t mine. My sister gave them to me years and years ago, and after seeing how much they improved those videos, she wanted them back. So when I went back to New Zealand in May 2010, I took the pants with me. This is how it went down:
Since then, I’ve thrown the weird underwear I’m wearing in the beginning at Paul and Storm, because that’s what I do with weird underwear.
Here are the words to the ‘poem’ part, minus the oattakes:
YouTubers, I have a confession.
Two tubes in my possession,
once used to belong to my sister.
From before she was fat,
and she’s no longer that,
so in keeping them, I think I’ve pissed her.
While I wasn’t at fault just to wear them,
when their owner was not even near them,
to not give her credit was rude.
While they’ve not made me famous,
They’ve saved me from shame, as
They certainly made me less nude.
So it’s time to put things right.
I’ve suitcase and pants and a flight,
some chocolate to sweeten the deal and,
with a smile and a wave,
if the volcano behaves, (this was just after flights resumed after the Eyjafjallajökull eruption)
I’m off to see Liz in New Zealand.
Liz: I’m sure glad she’s coming;
the lack of pants is numbing.
I had to grow pubic hair to cope. (Note: this was originally ‘leg hair’ but she only had pubic hair handy)
After many a year
in just underwear
I’d just about given up hope!
Me: Here you go, sis, have your trousers;
their stardom is greater than ours is,
so go in the bathroom and strip.
Liz: I got my big bum in,
and my gruts hold my tum in
though I can’t quite do up the zip.
The rimshot-like thing and the word ‘pants’ which you hear after that come from Christian Davis’s recording of Jonathan Coulton playing ‘Mr. Fancy Pants’ at Park West on 28 February 2009.
You might have noticed I changed the theme of my blog. This was because there was at last a new variable-width theme with a customisable header, and I thought it might suit my ‘Creative Output‘ picture better. Unfortunately, the title of the blog covers most of the picture, so it didn’t really work.
Video hodge-podge: Open Mic Night, JoCo Day, and a few musical evenings
Posted by Angela Brett in News, video on December 2, 2010
On Friday I went to an open mic poetry night run by the Leman Poetry Workshop. I had forgotten about it until my calendar reminded me the day before, so I didn’t have time to prepare anything to read. In the end, I read two poems I’ve already read at other gatherings, and also recorded for YouTube. They seemed to go down well. I told a few people there about my blog, so I’m reposting videos of the two poems here in case they want to see them again.
Read the rest of this entry »
Video: Chemistry
Posted by Angela Brett in The Afterlife on July 4, 2010
Well, my last six months are over, without the rules really having been adhered to, and I’m still alive. On the subject of Still Alive, Steam is now available on the Mac so I finally played all the way through Portal on the very Mac that sang Still Alive for my last video (the older Mac only lip-synched, although it was perfectly capable of singing.) And on the subject of my last video, that wasn’t my last video after all, because here’s a new one. It’s a ‘performance‘ of the scientific love poem Chemistry, which I wrote during Writing Cards and Letters and revised for a challenge on Fictionaut.
It’s one of those things that was meant to be simple but resulted in my buying lipstick, cotton swabs, a T-shirt, nerd specs and two fake moustaches, and breaking a wine glass which I never used anyway. I bought the moustaches in New Zealand because I couldn’t find any here. While I was there I recorded another video, which is not quite finished yet, so watch this space.
To save you a click, here are the words and study guide, mostly cut and pasted from other posts but with some irrelevant bits taken out and other bits added:
Video: Mac singing Still Alive
Posted by Angela Brett in The Last Six Months, video on March 29, 2010
The weirdest thing happened yesterday. I was using Ayu, my as-yet-unnamed MacBook Pro, and suddenly Axis, my old PowerBook G4 booted and started singing Still Alive, the theme to the game Portal. I really should stop naming my Macs; I hear it makes them sentient.
Okay, that’s not really what happened. Actually, a couple of weekends ago, all three of the parties I had been invited to (yeah, I don’t understand how I got this social life either; just believe me) were cancelled or too difficult to get to, so I used my unexpected free time to do something I’d wanted to do for ages: get my Mac to sing Still Alive. You might remember that one weekend way back when I had an excuse to avoid being social, I wrote a parody of Still Alive, and a program to get my Mac to sing it using the TUNE input to the built-in speech synthesiser. Back then, I had to enter the notes and durations to sing one by one, and it was too tedious to do the whole song.
V Day’s over, because it has to be.
Posted by Angela Brett in The Last Six Months on February 15, 2010
Isn’t it though? The title of this post is an homage to Jonathan Coulton’s song ‘Summer’s Over‘, about things (or in his case, Things) ending because they have to. As Valentine’s Day was ending in my time zone, I recorded a video of my poem about love ending because it has to. It’s Love Letters, from my own Thing a Week. This poem also serves as a mnemonic, should you ever forget the alphabet.
I also added a stanza to Chemistry, a funnier love poem, so that I could participate in the Valentine’s Day challenge over at Fictionaut. Here’s the revised version. I would have liked to record a video of that one, but I didn’t have all the props I needed. Perhaps another time.
Little Things That Don’t Necessarily Count, But Still Involve Numbers.
Posted by Angela Brett in Adventures of Mr. Super-Elephant and Friends, The Last Six Months on January 24, 2010
The problem with relaxing rules is that they keep on relaxing all by themselves. In an attempt to make up for missing a few weeks, here are some small things I’ve done. Firstly, a big thing which I played a small part in: the video for Gödz Pöödlz‘ song ‘345-5316008’, also known as ‘She Boogies’. The song was written in response to a Masters of Song Fu challenge to write a song about a number, which is why every word of it can be displayed on an old upside-down calculator. For the video, they asked for photos of calculators showing the words, and girls dancing with calculators. I submitted an ‘eligible’ calculator picture, and some dancing with the closest things I could find to calculators. I don’t usually dance, if I can help it, but I thought it’d be a good excuse to wear my Klein Four T-shirt, and I wouldn’t have to show the video to anyone I knew. But they edited it to make my boogying less embarrassing, and the rest of the video is great, so here it is:
Another small video thing I’ve made is episode two of Adventures of Mr. Super-Elephant and Friends, in which Arch-Enemy continues his conversation with Mr. Super-Elephant by inviting her out. I started this series on December 14 with a silly improvised three-line scene to try out xtranormal, and decided I may as well continue in this fashion, since it only takes a few minutes. Don’t expect it to make sense, or be good.
And one final small thing which I’m only adding to make these add up to something less small, is some kind of weird poem-like thing I wrote in a few minutes one day. The first line was something I actually thought would be cool to do, but then it unexpectedly turned grim. But compared with the Adventures of Mr. Super-Elephant and Friends, it makes sense:
Poem: Urgent Journey
Posted by Angela Brett in Adventures of Mr. Super-Elephant and Friends, The Last Six Months on December 14, 2009
Her heartbeat brings you rhythm, love, and nourishment and life
Till muscles push you out and out, and out and out and out and out
and out to meet the world.
Cold, kaleidoscopic cacophony,
warmed with awed caresses,
melts into your new cocoon
of boundless metamorphosis.
Everything to touch
to play
to know
to be
Freedom jostles safety,
your everything expands.
You brace it with your own faint beat
and feel a lifetime in your hands.
You start to think you’ve found your groove,
and life is full of fun,
and then you see the finish line
and know you have to run.
Reach potential, reach new heights,
reach for all of Earth’s delights,
leave the nest and leave an heir,
leave your traces here and there,
make a fortune, love, relax,
spend ahead of death and tax,
Smell the roses, make your mark,
lighten up and light the dark,
take it easy, take a breath.
Take it all before your death,
know and teach and hear and see,
know the stars of cult TV,
take it easy, make the time,
make the hay while in your prime
make your day, and make it count,
count your days, a small amount,
amount to something, race the clock,
earn a tick for every tock…
Give it all you can… or not.
you’ll reach the end no matter what.
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Creative Output 