収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

It’s been a problematic year, in a lot of ways; started out with the third round of eye surgery and recovery from all three initial rounds, and ended on a fourth round which will hopefully be the last. In between, despite everything, we managed to produce a new album (which I certainly hope you will preorder) and even tour a little.

But in terms of public exposure, it’s mostly been… about the blog. And that’s really not how to do things as a musician. I haven’t even started booking much for 2015 yet, because I’ve been waiting for this last go-round with the eye, afraid it’d explode again making me cancel anything I set up.

Hopefully we can move past that now.

Still, most of the visible action has been at the blog! So here’re the 2014 Top Ten Posts. Four of them are actually posts from 2013, so I’ll also add on the four that would’ve made it without those holdovers.

1. Gatekeeping and Recourse: something only men can do about sexism in geek culture. (A perennial favourite, from 2013)
2. Music in the Post-Scarcity Environment, part 8: The Intrinsic Fraud of the Prestigious Internship. See above. Also 2013.
3. An Embarrassing Stumble Towards Irrelevancy – comments on the SFWA petition flap and sexism.
4. Mozilla and Firefox Careen Into a Ditch – comments on The Open Standard’s endorsement of Gamergate. This got me mentioned in The Daily Dot, so that was pretty cool.
5. A Horrible Group of People – more on the SFWA petitioners, and specifically, on petition author Dave Truesdale’s “five furry pussies on the ballot” comment.
6. What is Being Lost – the SFWA petitioners and failure to envision the present, much less the future. I sense a theme here; lots on sexism.
7. Pushback and Misandry – sexism in geek culture and two case studies of sexist pushback against science. Another 2013 post in this year’s top 10.
8. A Friday of Followups – Sarah Kellington of Pinniped comes in for recording, and more on the SFWA flap. Yay, something about music!
9. Ribbon Mic Buildout – I built a ribbon microphone, and took pictures. The last of the 2013 posts in the top 10.
10. Way Too Much to Dislike: my highly critical review of Doctor Who: The Caretaker. This was before “Kill the Moon” and my breakup of Moffat’s Who.

It reflects the controversies of 2014 geek culture pretty solidly, I’m afraid. But that’s not the whole story.

The difficult thing about this blog is that it’s echoed a lot of places. Some places, in entirety. Some comments come back here, and others are linked, but I’m not making any attempt to include views on those other sites in my numbers. I still have three-digits worth of views per post on Livejournal, and this year, Tumblr started mattering. In some cases, mattering a lot.

And by “a lot,” well – the biggest post in this list got over 17,000 views at the home site this year. That is a lot for me, and it’s totally awesome. Most of them aren’t nearly that popular, at least, not here.

Let’s take a look 2014’s 7, 8, 9, and 10th most popular posts, because one of them is a Tumblr example:

7. Insects of the Writing World – on the contempt for the new shown by the SFWA old guard. Essentially tied are:

8. A Quiet Night at the Lair: Korrasami is Canon and Nothing Hurts, and,

8. GamerGate True Believes are the Anti-Vaxxers of the Online World, and finally:

10. If One of the Bottles Should Happen to Fall – more SFWA sexism, specifically, Sean Fodera’s arguably questionable apology to Mary Robinette Kowal

Number eight there? A Quiet Night at the Lair: Korrasami is Canon and Nothing Hurts? Here, it has a couple of hundred views. Plus another couple of hundred at Livejournal, and a few other places. All combined, over 400 views, which actually isn’t all that far above average.

On Tumblr, though? It rocketshot. I can only get an estimate of the views, but the data I have puts it at around 35,000-45,000, mostly for the addendum commentary at the end. It nearly triples the number one post’s total count actually on crimeandtheforcesofevil.com.

That’s not the only post I’ve had do that. Rock candy geode did that too. And a post I made of some of the Kitsune at War sheet music (a bass-clef transposition actually left labelled “flute”) is nearing six digits.

In the past, I’ve questioned my “echo everything everywhere” strategy, of letting people read whatever they want wherever they want. It didn’t seem to have been getting me much, and certainly, things like Facebook are a total bust. (And given how Facebook Destroys Everything, I’m kind of okay with that.)

But having had a year which has, by necessity, been mostly about being online… it may have started to catch. This strategy may vindicate itself after all. That would be nice.

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An addendum: None of these lists include compilation posts, which are nexus posts for specific topics, like, the sexism and racism in geek culture collection, the studio buildout series on how to build your own recording space, and Music in the Post-Scarcity Environment. Those would all be in the top ten, but obviously shouldn’t count.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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First off: THIS WILL NOT AFFECT THE ALBUM RELEASE OR RELEASE CONCERT EVENT IN JANUARY. It also won’t affect preordering of Bone Walker, which you should of course totally do. ^_^

But. I will be going in for what is hopefully my last round of eye surgery early – this Monday, to be specific. It got moved up some weeks, due to reasons. This is actually good; it moves recovery time to December, which means I can more and better rehearsal time in January for the big event.

However, it also means my next couple of weeks have been tipped over. Things may be a little random. If all goes well, it won’t be a big deal and nobody will notice anything, but I wanted to get it out there now anyway.

Fingers crossed, eh?

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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I put a few photos from yesterday’s 700,000-person Seahawks superbowl victory parade up on Flickr. That’s more people at the parade than live within city limits.

Here’s one photo as a preview:

More at the link.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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Follow-up today with the eye surgeon at 2pm; since I’m pretty familiar with the progression of recovery on this kind of eye surgery now, and know where I am, I should come back with good news.

My vision will still be a mess for weeks, though. Aside from the three-month recovery time for focus, the remaining eye bubble is intensely distracting, even with an opaque eye patch.

Still, it’ll be nice to have the motion-restrictions at least eased. And it’s not that bad looking, is it?

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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I’d just drilled some probably-entirely-unnecessary vent holes in the two tighter-sealing mic cases, and finally got around to packing up the spare ribbon material for the ribbon microphone I’d built after the second eye surgery, and as I was walking upstairs to do some more comping…

…something darted down the centre of my vision.

But only in one eye. And it was repeatable.

Kill. Everything.

So I poked at it a bit, and yep, I have newly asymmetrical peripheral vision. I schedule an emergency doctor’s appointment, who confirms what I already know, and I’m scheduled for emergency surgery on Saturday morning, kill everything.

Anyway. I don’t know how much you’ll see me for the next few days. I’ll be “positioned” for another week, then limited in motion again after that. I won’t be at Conflikt, the songwriting workshop is cancelled, I’ve delayed a bunch of recording sessions indefinitely until we can reschedule, everything’s delayed another two weeks, fuck everything.

See, when this first happened, last October, there were three areas: one where the retina had torn, and two others which showed extremely old physical trauma damage. Dr. Saperstein fixed the tear in surgery, and tried to do some pre-emptive work on the other two areas, as they would fail sooner or later.

This completely failed. A few weeks later, I was back in for round two. I thought I was safe at this point from a round three, and that the pre-emptive work had done some good on the third area, but FUCK ME NO, it tore today, so I’m back in again.

So that’s what happened, and that’s where I am, and where I’m not. I’ll try to set something up so I can blog some and chat while I’m recovering – again – from this. But it resets the clock on vision recovery, I won’t be able to drive for two months – my vision had just got back to 20/20 with correction in the pinhole test, and 20/30 in open field – and… yeah.

I am so pissed off about all this, I don’t even have words. We’ll be shooting through our out-of-pocket for insurance again. What a way to start a year.

I won’t even be able to make a cake for Anna’s birthday on the 23rd. At least there will be presents.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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I did a little voice acting work from my studio this weekend, the first creative work I’ve done since all this emergency eye surgery started up. It’s a new field for me; I’ve done a little stage acting, but no voice acting ever before. It’s very exciting! I did two character voices, all for elements of five short scenes, and gave two readings – a primary and and alternate interpretation – for each scene in each voice.

I got back mail about it today:

This is BEAUTIFUL work. I’m elated with these takes! Thank you!

I don’t know how much of it they’ll use, but they like it! I’m so excited. :D The production in question will be coming out next year sometime; I don’t know when. Of course, I’ll point at it when it comes out if they use my work.

Similarly, I’ll eventually point at Leannan Sidhe’s Mine to Love, when that comes out. I talked to Shanti about it recently about why it’s not out yet – I mean, it’s finished, why not? But basically, she really wants to do a proper release show, which is kind of difficult now that her fiddler lives in Wisconsin. So she’s trying to figure out if she has any way of making that happen.

Oh, about that eye thing, an update: still recovering, and more quickly than after the last surgery, even if it feels longer – that’s just because I never finished recovery the last time. Less pain now, but not zero; sleeping badly, but not all the time; listening to Night Vale, a little too often. Anna’s also recovering on schedule; she’s going to try to work part of the day this week, from home. Good night, dear readers. Good night!

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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One thing that happens in eye surgery is something called “positioning,” where there is literally a bubble in your eyeball that you keep in a correct spot by controlled angling of your head.

Which is why I’ve been staring at the ground since Friday, and why I’ve been movement-restricted since the first, unsuccessful go at this.

I knew this would be boring. I did not realise how painful it becomes over time. I have vicodin to take the edge off, but fuck, this hurts. Crying-from-the-whole-body-pain hurts, without the vicodin. Not so bad, with.

The good news is that tomorrow should be the last day, for the most part. There’s still phase-out and no lying on my back for another week and I won’t have full vision for a few more weeks, but…

yeah. Painful. Hell, Anna is in way less pain than I’ve been, and she had an organ out! At least so far. She’s still surfing the percoset wave at the moment.

I’ve ordered that ribbon microphone kit I’ve been wanting, as a bit of retail and DIY therapy. With some luck, next post can go back to talking about things like that instead.

But, of course, I’m mostly terrified of having to go back in for round three. Right now I don’t know how I’d do it.

OH: if you got any geekgirlcon pics of the show, send them in? Several people took photos and I handed out cards, but so far, no joy. I found one hall shot (sadly, angled and blurry, and really late, I look as exhausted as I was) on the Flickr stream, but that’s all. Thanks!

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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As a few of you may notice today: I am not at Orycon as planned. I am instead getting ready for another around of emergency eye surgery.

Basically, Dr. Saperstein said there was about 10% chance they’d have to go back in and do more work. Last weekend, I noticed an effect much like a meteor going across the sky, in the upper visual range of my right eye, the one they operated on two and a half weeks ago. I called in and got the on-call doctor, who said these things happen all the time from a million different reasons, and I shouldn’t worry about it.

I called in again on Monday, and was promised a return call by the surgeon’s assistant, but that didn’t happen; then I was too busy on Tuesday and Wednesday due to insurance company insanity (not medical; business and home, and they have also failed to call me back) and then some other day job things which also were kind of crazymaking.

So I finally called back on Thursday and said, “Look, this thing is happening, I don’t like my peripheral vision in my upper right eye, I’m about to go out of town for three days and then my partner has cancer-related surgery, I need it looked at.” And it took a couple of tries, but I got to see the on-call in Bellevue, all the external tests were really apparently quite good, but they dilated my eye and the on-call looked in said “Yep, this looks fine, this looks…” and started dictating numbers.

Pro tip: when the retinal surgeon stops saying fine and starts throwing numbers to the nurse assistant? That’s when something’s not right.

It’s not the previous retinal tear, either. It’s one of the two other areas of latticing (also from physical trauma) which Dr. Saperstien said would eventually fail, so he was going to go ahead and fix them now. Maybe he should’ve left well enough alone there. Or maybe it would’ve failed with the other work. No way for me to know.

Regardless, now another around of emergency surgery. Basically, the last three weeks get re-run. I really wish the on-call had taken me seriously last weekend and/or the office had called me back on Monday like they were supposed to; maybe we could’ve got this patched up on Tuesday, and I’d still have a shot of a reduced schedule at Orycon before Anna’s surgery, and at very least, maybe I wouldn’t be looking at not being able to be with Anna at the hospital during her surgery on Monday.

(This is a real possibility; it depends upon the post-surgical reaction. I just don’t know right now.)

So. This was kind of horrible the first time, but I made the best of it, I think. Honestly, that’s a little harder to do this time around. Hopefully I won’t have to be in a weird head position for weeks. I won’t know until Saturday. Wish me luck; at this point, we really appear to be needing it.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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Right about now last Tuesday is when they rolled me in for emergency eye surgery.

I can see over half my field of view in my right eye at this point. That’s actually pretty good, since it means we’re on an accelerating curve again – the maximum horizontal diameter of the bubble is shrinking now, rather than static. From top of eye down to focus centre, it’s pretty normal for me – nearsighted as all hell, but that’s normal. Then I have a band which moves around all the time because it’s the edge of the bubble, and then the bubble area.

If I look down I can see all the edges of the bubble in peripheral vision.

My eye still looks pretty damn scary tho’! It’s been one week…

…since I looked at you

…but if you compare it to two days after surgery, you can see it’s quite a bit less bloody overall.

Sadly, I have lost most of the macrovision. But I did use it a lot while I had it!

Follow-up appointment tomorrow; I don’t think that’ll change much. I am hoping they’ll let me stop sleeping only on my right side, tho’. I’m not sleeping well being immobile like that, and it’s catching up with me – I look kinda terrible. On the other hand, Anna and I got into a Scary Eye Fight on Tumblr last night. Everybody wins! Or loses. Depending. XD

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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So, I posted a brilliant bit of cosplay to Tumblr that I found originally over on Facebook (and, as here, I did link back and give source), on Tuesday. It got like six reblogs and a bunch of likes and I forgot about it.

And then on Wednesday morning my Tumblr dash was made entirely of reblog notes, and I looked at the post, and it said 3700 notes… and then jumped to 3800.. and 3900… and now it’s 81,463.

I’ve heard people talk about watching things go viral before, but I’ve never seen it from behind the dashboard? All I could think, really, was “… O.o …”

So, hi, some surprisingly large percentage of Tumblr! And hi, surprisingly large number of people who decided to follow my blog! Nice to meet you! I’m Solarbird, the Lightbringer; my band is Crime and the Forces of Evil; we’re supervillains turned musicians. Occasionally I cosplay, tho’ tbh my last big project was a few years ago; mostly I just fangirl right now. :D I run nwcMUSIC, the annual music festival at the Norwescon science fiction convention, and host The Geekmusic Podcast.

And that’s me. What about you?

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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