It was a very long weekend off at Midwest FurFest 2009, but very fulfilling - as the con has always proven to be.

Most of my con weekend was taken up volunteering, as per my usual modus operandi. Spent close to thirty hours hucking sodas behind the bar in the new and improved Consuite, and guarding the doors overnight. (When all attempts to find roomspace to crash fail, you've got a lot of nighttime hours to fill...)


Aside from that, I participated in the usual panels and shows, and picked up a couple pieces of art. Diana Harlan Stein provided a conbadge that she said she was tickled to draw - I suppose after endless wolves, foxes and cats, a little hamster was an amusing diversion. I may get around to scanning the badge tomorrow.

I also picked up a print from Ursula Vernon that was unanimously approved as quite appropriate for me.
The Battle Hamster Raid: VIKING HAMSTERS IN A LONGBOAT. I am pleased with this purchase.


I pulled off another quick act for the Furry Variety Show, which the audience seemed to like.
Unfortunately, the FVS ran late due to the previous show running long, so it interfered with my evening jam session. Still, once musicians started trickling in over the course of the hour, the groove started to click and we had an enjoyable time. As is tradition, we kept musicking long past our allotted time slot, so I had to clear the room. And again, as is tradition, I did it by getting everyone playing Denis Leary's Asshole.

One peeve of mine is people who think they're clever to know that song, but repeat the intro and the rant section verbatim from the recorded version. No, I say, if you're clever enough to sing "I'm an Asshole" in public, you ought to be creative enough to riff a rant from scratch. So three words into someone else starting to quote Denis Leary, I busted right into them and bitch 'em out for quoting the record, then proceeded to describe the various acts of sodomy and degradation that such an act would imply they had partaken in. Then I complimented a lady's cleavage, started ranting on furry in general, which was the cue for someone to cut me off and get the song back on track for the final choruses, yaaaaay. I'm just glad that somebody caught that performance on videocam, because it was an intense moment, the groove was just right, and I TOTALLY blew out my voice ranting at the entire circle of furries, lol. I'm still croaking, twenty-five hours and two naps later.


My calves are knotted, my larynx is scarred, I've spent a weekend consuming nothing but free food provided in the Consuite. But I also spent that weekend surrounded by MY PEOPLE, and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I count this a success.

brownkitty posted this morning a link to My Life Is Average, a site that allows passersby to submit small scenes from tiny oddball portions of their daily life to prove, once again, that the Mean and the Mode are two ENTIRELY different concepts to people who aren't even necessarily mathematicians.

Lots of high schoolers and college kids abounding, not unexpectedly. Still, it's good to appreciate the girl who understands that the way to really attract a proper man is not necessarily through batted eyelashes and a hint of cleavage. See Example:

"On Halloween, out of all the maids, Little Red Riding Hoods, lingerie models and hot nurses at the Halloween party, the most popular girl was the one dressed as a giant piece of bacon, passing out bacon, with a sign on her back that said, 'You know you want me'."

EDIT: Thanks to MLIA I now have a new task for whenever I go back to school or work for someone where I have to write essays. I shall place the word "Waldo" once in every page of every paper I write.

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I was cruising the free demos available on Steam, and up came Zombie Bowl-O-Rama! With a promise like that, how could I not grab it?

Yes. You are fighting the evil zombie swarm who are invading the bowling alley by holding a BOWLING COMPETITION. Knock down all ten Zombies, get a strike! The Zombie computer player even gets to roll a Zombie head as a bowling ball.

There are tricks and treats you pick up along the lane, and you can steer the ball, so it's less a game of amazing skill and more a game of "Screw your Neighbor." But who doesn't love that kind of game once in a while? ... Of course I eat my words as soon as the Zombies hand over the Zombi-nator triple stack of random threats, which in this case widens the gutters, makes all the Zombie pins go in formation of three single file lines, and turns my ball into a cabbage that barely knocks down the front pin.

Not bad for the ten-dollar game market.

While cruising for random Stephen Colbert trivia, I came across the Wikiality page for Stephen Colbert's Penis.

- It is my sad duty to report that Stephen Colbert's Penis is currently a stub. (But you can help make it longer!)

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Okay, rosencrantz23 reminded me of the date, so I found my Guy Fawkes mask, recited the classic quatrain to a pair of confused parents, and promptly went off to start a small fire in the back yard.

This is my act for the Furry Variety Show, I hope you will like it.

The MC announces "The Amazing Fantastic Dynamic Gymnastic Portly Porcina, the Pogo Pig!"
Out comes the hamster.

MC: "You're not Porcina."
Zel: "No, I'm her agent!"

"....What are you out here for?"
"I'm here to warm up the audience!"

"And fellas, what a show you are set to see! She comes hopping out, singing Lebanese Opera, all the while...
*riff for several minutes, milk the audience with multiple furry references, full carnival barker mode*

*finally winds down with offstage call*

"Porcina isn't coming!"
"Porcina isn't coming?"
"She couldn't make it."
"What do you mean she couldn't make it?"
"Swine Flu."

Vaudeville groaner for the audience, praying I'm the only one doing this stupid joke.

Once again, the lovely miss zerocreature manages to blow my mind with awesome.

Now, I know my audience. Some of you are gamers, some of you have toyed with Spore. Some of you are furries, some of you think that people wearing tinfoil hats are simply ahead of the curve.

Here's something to please everyone on that list: The Rocketship H.M.S. Infinity Squared!

Yes, not a creature but a ROCKETSHIP.

Shaped like a hamster strapped to a booster rocket! FWAZOOM!


It's really the giant belt buckle, and the mind-control device shaped like bunny-ears antennae, that really seal the deal for me.

Starting to get my head back in order again.
Yesterday I decided to have a grillout for whomever could make it on short notice. I pulled in a local dragon who's become a recent friend, and brownkitty and her tribe showed their faces. Chicken 'n porkchops were sandwich fodder, and we got to introduce people to the madness that is Fluxx. Ben Dragon had just picked up the latest edition, and it's gotten even madder and more awesome since I introduced it to the Gamers Paradise crew several years ago.

Everyone agreed that this was a good idea, made a timely exit before things got tiresome, and agreed we should do it again soon. Then I snuggled in with leftovers and watched Zorba the Greek, and smiled myself to sleep.

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Today, I've got a stew in the crockpot - beef shanks, full with marrow bones, browned and deglazed, thick-cut veggies and herbs from the garden. Now comes the hardest part of the cooking... Leave it the hell alone.
The folks are on vacation, so I'm taking the helm for my mother's handbell choir rehearsal tonight. I figure the stew should be ready for first tasting around the time I get home, roughly nine o'clock - seven hours in. Still, it won't be PROPER stew until at least the second or third day.

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The garden's ready to be tilled under for the season. As soon as I have two days of dry weather in a row, I'll get on that. For all my eccentricities, I've learned that I do enjoy the simple grounding of working the earth.

Whilst browsing my daily webcomic bookmarks, I saw a link that Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal gave the thumbs-up. For those of you who dig both jigsaw puzzles and unique art pieces, check out Chris Yates' Baffler!s. Quite nice for the coffee-table, I'd think.


Speaking of SMBC, their short films are dark and viciously funny, to a select audience. Here's one from the vaults. (NSFW, language)

Hmm. Something's up with either our router or my dad's network card, because wired access has degraded to the nil point. His computer was the only one attached to the router with a cable, so I thought perhaps the wire had gone bad - but after replacing the CAT5 and trying other ports on the router, still little to no throughput from the network, both internet and LAN. That computer acts as our printer spooler, so if you can't access that computer from the network, you can't print, making my mom quite frustrated since she does her work on her laptop upstairs.

But I finally thought to plug in a spare USB wireless adapter, and BAM speedy access.

I'm wondering if a surge caught the network card, though it seems odd that the router's input is doing just fine. Maybe later if I'm feeling curious I'll take the laptop down and see if that connects to the router via cable. If it will, then the hardware problem should be in my dad's box, most likely the network card. If it won't, then the router's output ports finally bit the dust. Free-after-rebate Belkin router has served well over the course of seven years, considering the cheapitude. It needs rebooting pretty much every night around 3-4AM, but otherwise works decently with reasonable workarounds.

We're heading up to go visit Old World Wisconsin this weekend! We're bringing along my nephew Jake (my cousin's son) to give him an educational experience that gives him a solid reason to skip a day of school to go road-tripping with bad influences like us.

Hmm, we'll be camping, I still have some roleplaying books, I'm sure there's a core set in there somewhere... Now, do I introduce him to World of Darkness or RIFTS first? Tee hee. I may introduce him to Mage: The Ascenscion, though, and blow his mind.

Heehee, now I'm remembering when my cousin Jason started introducing me to all his mad-maniac diceflinging ways. We were on a family camping trip, I was nine, and he had just purchased the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (And Other Strangeness) Palladium^TM-based book. And I, being a nine-year-old in 1989, was a TMNT fanatic. (Donatello's still my boy.) So yeah, big geek Jason shamelessly leveraged this with his excellent storytelling skills to get me hooked on this little thing called RPGs.

Well, it'll either stick or it won't, but the boy's as obsessive about his pastimes as any of us, and I'll see if this is to his liking.

My mom's been quilting again. She's working on a Sudoku quilt - 9x9 square blocks, nine colors, each row and column has one each of nine colors.

It's roughly like this pattern, just less pastel.

My mother is doing geeky arts and crafts... I'm so proud!

I love metahumor, and for those of you intellectual nitwits who are saving comedy today, good night and thank you sir.

I have decided that this song MUST be a standpoint of the MFF Music Jam. It's a four-chord song, it's catchy, it's loony, it's wonderful, I shall drag it out of the dustbin of nostalgia. I've already googled the chords.

(if you just want the song, skip to 2:20 and I won't tell your weird Uncle Frank.)



So, like, twenty old people will be laughing their asses off, and we introduce all the young furries to this wonderful weird stuff. I also plan to bring up Start Wearing Purple, from Gogol Bordello. And the requisite video game themes that everyone knows. It's gonna be awesome.


I should see if someone can bring a whiteboard or an overhead projector, so we can write down chord series.

I'm joining the march of those of use who are large, but still quite healthy. Healthy does not necessarily mean 'low fat, pure muscle.' That's a vision that builds people who seek perfection by a sculpted statue. Yes, statues are nice to look at, but they're not very feasible to live by if you're blessed by genetics to be different from the Greek Adonis.

I am Stout.

I am strong, hearty and healthy. I get out on my bicycle every day, I can lift quite a bit of weight wherever you may ask me to, and I can burp the alphabet.

I am not sculpted with every muscle bulging from my arms and shoulders. But I turn on the cable television, watch the World's Strongest Man competition, and by god there I see men that are shaped like ME. Barrel-chested, strong-bellied, round-faced men from all corners of the globe. Europe, Asia, America, EVERY SINGLE MAN there is not a beautiful bodybuilder, but a cannon-solid creature of power.

We are Stout men. And it's no problem to be proud and strong and Stout.

I've read postsecret for some time now. Every Sunday, with anonymous postcards telling little pieces of someone's life ranging from extreme gravity to extreme levity, and all the flavors in between. It's my tiny moment of voyeurism with other people's tiny moments of anonymous cathartic exhibitionism.

I've always liked hearing secrets from strangers. Mostly for the 'Knowledge is an end in itself' factor, I just like to know things. The mask of anonymity makes it easier to trust away a secret, oddly enough - to talk freely about something, knowing there's no link back to the meat persona, no risk of consequences just for talking it out. No worry about changing how someone might look at you the next day, because they didn't see you the day before.

Some people feel very uncomfortable in an environment of anonymity. Others thrive.



Completely unrelated but utterly geeksquee, this has been making the rounds. I blame drhoz. All we're missing is James Burke to make the trifecta complete.

The season has started for my musical groups again, and I can already tell the difference in how I'm feeling. Still in a deep funk, but I'm starting to have SOME sense of give-a-damn about life in general.


I'm helping out with my mom's handbell choir at St. Dismas again. We had our first performance of the season this past Sunday, which went as well as could be expected when we lost two of our core players bowing out due to personal reasons. That had me worried for the group—we were down below two octaves and stuck playing arrangements specialized for short-handed bell choirs.
Fortune struck with a few phone calls, though. A few of the girls who've played with us before are now out of college, so they'll be joining up again. Good on several counts; not only will we have more hands to ring, they actually have a little bit of musical background, and it's always good to have someone younger than their fifties to help balance out the 'little old ladies' demographic.
Now, I just have to keep my patience with the newcomer who joined us last month with ZERO musical experience. I need to work with her in private sometime this week so we can mark her music with notes she plays, and counting out the beats of each measure. Still, every one of our players has had to begin at some point, and after four rehearsals I can already tell she'll pick it up by the end of the season.


More of a bonus to me, the Waukegan Concert Chorus is back in session. My favorite choral director, Maestro Sylvanus Alex Tyler, is at the helm, and somehow we've drawn in several new young men to flesh out the roster. I'm not the only young stud with a solid voice any more! I've had to tone down my ego already, but these guys are bringing a good attitude and a sense of levity. I can see the positive difference in the director bouncing back that attitude.
Our first concert is going to be a series of madrigals and Shakespeare-influenced work, more modern examples of madrigals. Some of the work skirts close to the avant garde, but falls on the side of tonality, if stretching its limits a tad. One of the pieces seems to take the key signature as more of a suggestion than any actual tonal framework. Folks familiar with names in jazz might be amused to hear how George Shearing put his smooth bop influence into madrigals, woo!

It's good to be playing and singing again in a more formal environment.

'Tis the day ye be talkin' like proper corsairs. Ther nineteenth o' September, an' it's right time we take the flag o' pirating back from th' Somali shipmen what're doin' her wrongful.

Yo ho, yo ho, we sail 'til dawn and beach the ship! Cap'n sez it's so, an' it's so!

I just read a little story at Everything2's node for 202-244-3121.

That phone number's the main congressional switchboard. The guy who wrote the anecdote chatted with the operator for a couple minutes, wondered how she handles the inevitable ranting crazies.
I like the operator's attitude. It's a good reminder of how to stay reasonably neutral when politics is going back and forth, heh.

And she basically answers, "Well, it's just the fact that people give a damn, even if they give a damn about different things, so I'd rather have all these people caring about keeping their country for the best rather than decaying into apathy."

I like that attitude, especially stumbling across that story after watching yesterday's bickering between the left, the right, and the apathetic about the day's provenance. It keeps me fresh-faced about the ongoing public debate.

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I haven't had much to post lately, and I haven't been in the mood to just toss up links to oddball media - not that there's any dearth of that online, as always.

This week I got a haircut! For most people that's no big deal, but I get a major clipping maybe once every two years. It's decent, my regular barber knows his stuff so long as you keep it simple. And any barber that can keep up his small-talk patter between both my father and me earns his tip, heh.

Also:

I was swapping Fun With TranslationParty with a couple friends, and lafinjack informed me that the revolution shall commence Thursday, due to translation difficulties and scheduling conflicts.
(Ahh, the glories of mechanical translation.)


Of course, he also sent me the following video:
( Cut for the overly squeamish, but it's actually pretty tame. (Transvestite bass solo, yay.) )



I'd thought I'd posted this at an earlier date, but I can't find in my LJ archives. So, I'll post it here, and apologize if I'm repeating myself.

While we're on the subject of the joys of translation, have some ancient Roman smuttily vituperative poetry.
I've long enjoyed this particular piece. It taught me bits of Latin vocabulary they'll never mention in that seventh-grade introductory class..

I don't have a lot going on in my life in this instant, so I'll just catch up on random interesting stuff.

For the reader interested in Art Masquerading As Enterprise, Or Vice Versa:
The $100,000 Panama Hat.
What amuses me is the simple artisanry of haberdashery raised to the status of high art.


For the reader in search of enlightenment:
A classic koan from the Principia Discordia.
I count this particular text among the most vital in my teaching tools, if the student is ready to understand its premise. Amongst balloon-poppers, its sharp needle is most refined.


And for those who simply seek a bit of guilty-pleasure musicking: