First Of May in ASL

Hurray, hurray! The first of May.
Outdoor sex begins today.

Once again to celebrate May Day, I will post a video interpretation of Jonathan Coulton's First Of May. This time, it's a video of the song being signed in ASL. WOW!!

Check it out below (lyrics NSFW)

The Presidents

The Presidents Live!

Shop Vac

Welcome May!

Sorry if the clapping is a bit loud; I recorded this from the crowd.

JoCo in Philadelphia

(Poster by Len)

Last Wednesday (April 2nd), Jonathan Coulton played a concert in Philadelphia for the very first time. Or perhaps I should say that he played a concert in Philadelphia proper for the very first time. He was joined once again by Paul and Storm for a show at the World Cafe Live. This a larger venue than the last few times I saw him. Jen hooked me up with a ticket (her ticket--she couldn't make it--thanks Jen!) at a table near the front and center with some friends Caroline, Arthur, Jeanne, Kathy that was absolutely fantastic. This may be the best show I've been to yet. Unlike past shows where I brought props related to JoCo songs, I decided to honor Paul and Storm at this show: I brought panties (you'll have to check out the video to see what I'm talking about.)

Speaking of Paul and Storm, they played (with full cathedral echo) their very fun song Nun Fight. I'm sorry that I wasn't recording at the time.




But I was able to get some footage of the concert. Below is the playlist of the songs I recorded. It's not the complete set they played, but it's a decent chunk of it.

1. Opening Band
Watch the panties fly.


2. Nugget Man
An homage to a great inventor indeed.


3. IDEAL jingle
If you're not a 30+er from the Philly area, you won't get this one.


4. The Future Soon
Hey popular girls! Remember to treat the nerds nicely or this is what they'll do to you.


5. I'm Your Moon
Love song to Pluto from its moon Charon.


6. Flickr
This is the first time I've heard this song with the proper accompanying video. It's AOK!


7. Code Monkey
Needs no introduction.


8. Soft Rocked By Me
Jonathan sings about what it's like to be a total pussy.


9. Creepy Doll
Paul and Storm really rock on the back up during this song.


10. I Feel Fantastic
The song is fantastic.


11. Mr. Fancy Pants
Watch a grown man have fun with a $1000+ toy.


12. Dance Soterios Johnson, Dance (partial)
Unfortunately, due to my camera running out of memory and an emergency refill, I was only able to get the last verse. Luckily (for JoCo), what was lost was mostly screw-ups since this song was a special request that he hadn't rehearsed or played in like forever. Still, I felt that the performance was important enough that it needed to be posted anyway.


13. Still Alive
I added some "TRON" FX to this song written for the video game Portal. JoCo couldn't help laughing during the song because most of the audience members were holding up their cell phones (lit up). I guess cell phones are the "lighters" of the twenty first century.


14. Skullcrusher Mountain
What's with all the screaming?


15. Re: Your Brains
Even someone like me who couldn't sing to save his life can be a zombie for this audience sing-along.


16. First Of May
The JoCo classic about the coming of Spring (adult themes).


17. Sweet Caroline
Since I recorded this from the audience, I must apologize for the loud, off-key singing from the crowd. Oh wait, that was me ...
(Note to self: sign up for singing lessons)

Here's the video (total playing time 58:52) Enjoy!


UPDATE: The Voice of Free Planet X has a podcast with some highlights from the show as well as interviews.

UPDATE #2: The three panties from our table have made it to The Gallery Of Thrown Panties.

Fractal fun

My favorite fractal is the Mandelbrot Set.



Another fun fractal that I like is the Julia Set. What I've recently discovered thanks to someone I was talking to (sorry, can't remember his name) is that there is a section of the Mandelbrot zoom that looks eerily similar to the Julia Set. Look at the Comparison below.

Here's a Julia Set that I generated using GIMP2.



And here's a Mandelbrot zoom generated (by the above mentioned anonymous person) using Fractal eXtreme. (Much nicer quality than my GIMP rendering)



Pretty neat! No?

If you look closely, you'll see that they are different. If you can't see it, look at the center. Here's the Wikipedia explanation.

At first sight, these islands seem to consist of infinitely many parts like Cantor sets, as is actually the case for the corresponding Julia set Jc. Here they are connected by tiny structures so that the whole represents a simply connected set. These tiny structures meet each other at a satellite in the center that is too small to be recognized at this magnification. The value of c for the corresponding Jc is not that of the image center but, relative to the main body of the Mandelbrot set, has the same position as the center of this image relative to the satellite shown in zoom step 7.

While we're on the subject of Mandelbrot vs. Julia, I'll leave you with a Jonathan Coulton fan video of my favorite JoCo song--pay extra special attention to the sound clip at the very end ;-)

New Spiff video: The Big Boom

New Spiff video

Jonathan Coulton Got Back (Here)

Last night I saw Jonathan Coulton (with Paul and Storm) for the third time. Once again, the show was a blast. But before I continue, let me dispense with the negatives of the show. First, due to previous sell-outs, the Milkboy Coffeehouse had two shows: a 7:30 and a 10:30 show. The early show (since I rely on public transportation, my hand was forced; I wouldn't have had a good way to get home from the late show) wasn't as packed as the previous shows I'd attended (a good thing--for me). But they were recording a live album that night, and it seems that the air conditioning system would have been too loud and interfered with the recording. So this was the first concert I attended in a sauna. Yeah, the performers tried to make light of the situation by making "heat jokes" between songs, but I was sweating as much as they were.

Seriously, the heat didn't bother me that much. I look forward to buying the live album so that I can relive the experience.

Anyhoo, I got to hear a new song by Paul and Storm (I believe it was called Your Town). Unfortunately they didn't play Epithets. Ah, well.

JoCo was great as usual. He opened up with that song about that Swedish furniture store.



Unfortunately, since I'm still getting used to my new camera, I guess I don't know all the settings yet. It seems that I had my video set for the highest resolution (I'll have to figure out how to fix that) and so even with 1 Gig memory, it was full after two and a half songs :-(

Luckily, the other full song I was able to record is a song that I haven't praised enough in my previous Jo Co blog posts. The song is the trump card I pull out when someone says to me "Jonathan Coulton is a talented singer/songwriter, but to call him genius is an exaggeration." The beauty is that it's a cover song. Here's the original. Remember it?



And here's JoCo.



If you you don't agree that he's a genius after hearing that, then there's obviously something wrong with you.

How the internet is changing the popular music scene

This week's New York Times Magazine has an article by Clive Thompson titled Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog. The article is about how the internet is changing the way musical artists sell and promote themselves.

In the past — way back in the mid-’90s, say — artists had only occasional contact with their fans. If a musician was feeling friendly, he might greet a few audience members at the bar after a show. Then the Internet swept in. Now fans think nothing of sending an e-mail message to their favorite singer — and they actually expect a personal reply. This is not merely an illusion of intimacy. Performing artists these days, particularly new or struggling musicians, are increasingly eager, even desperate, to master the new social rules of Internet fame. They know many young fans aren’t hearing about bands from MTV or magazines anymore; fame can come instead through viral word-of-mouth, when a friend forwards a Web-site address, swaps an MP3, e-mails a link to a fan blog or posts a cellphone concert video on YouTube.

So musicians dive into the fray — posting confessional notes on their blogs, reading their fans’ comments and carefully replying. They check their personal pages on MySpace, that virtual metropolis where unknown bands and comedians and writers can achieve global renown in a matter of days, if not hours, carried along by rolling cascades of popularity. Band members often post a daily MySpace “bulletin” — a memo to their audience explaining what they’re doing right at that moment — and then spend hours more approving “friend requests” from teenagers who want to be put on the artist’s sprawling list of online colleagues. (Indeed, the arms race for “friends” is so intense that some artists illicitly employ software robots that generate hundreds of fake online comrades, artificially boosting their numbers.)

A-list stars are made by multimillion dollar marketing campaigns; the B-listers need to build their network from the ground up. This has kind of always been the case. What the internet has done is change the nature of the network. This new breed of stars is able to, at once, get more personal with their fans while expanding the size and geographical distribution of that fan base.

Of course, the featured artist in the article was none other than Jonathan Coulton.

Click on the above picture to see Jonathan Coulton explain Code Monkey (drawing by Len)

I've blogged about Jonathan before (being a fan) so here it goes again (that reference will become clear soon enough). JoCo has managed to build up such a grassroots network, and much of its success is not due to anything he did or planned himself.

Coulton’s fans are also his promotion department, an army of thousands who proselytize for his work worldwide. More than 50 fans have created music videos using his music and posted them on YouTube; at a recent gig, half of the audience members I spoke to had originally come across his music via one of these fan-made videos. When he performs, he upends the traditional logic of touring. Normally, a new Brooklyn-based artist like him would trek around the Northeast in grim circles, visiting and revisiting cities like Boston and New York and Chicago in order to slowly build an audience — playing for 3 people the first time, then 10, then (if he got lucky) 50. But Coulton realized he could simply poll his existing online audience members, find out where they lived and stage a tactical strike on any town with more than 100 fans, the point at which he’d be likely to make $1,000 for a concert. It is a flash-mob approach to touring: he parachutes into out-of-the-way towns like Ardmore, Pa., where he recently played to a sold-out club of 140.

Let me just say that I'm one of those fans that Clive spoke to at the Ardmore concert, and indeed my first exposure to JoCo was through a Spiff video. (Although when I went to JoCo's website for the first time and started listening to all the music, I realized that I had heard Mandelbrot Set before but didn't know who sang it.) I really like the idea that many of these fan created videos have sort of become the "default official videos" for those songs--cool!

Speaking of cool homemade videos, the article also talks about the band Ok Go which is actually signed to a major record label (along with all the marketing machinery that comes with it) but became in instant internet sensation by employing some of these same tactics.

This confluence of forces has produced a curious inflection point: for rock musicians, being a bit of a nerd now helps you become successful. When I spoke with Damian Kulash, the lead singer for the band OK Go, he discoursed like a professor on the six-degrees-of-separation theory, talking at one point about “rhizomatic networks.” (You can Google it.) Kulash has put his networking expertise to good use: last year, OK Go displayed a canny understanding of online dynamics when it posted on YouTube a low-budget homemade video that showed the band members dancing on treadmills to their song “Here It Goes Again.” The video quickly became one of the site’s all-time biggest hits. It led to the band’s live treadmill performance at the MTV Video Music Awards, which in turn led to a Grammy Award for best video.

Just in case you haven't seen the video yet (perhaps you've been living in a cave but somehow managed to find this insignificant blog), I've embedded it below. Quick note: Damian Kulash is the tall skinny guy with the red pants. The one you see lip-syncing the lead vocals is the band's bass player (and childhood friend of Kulash) Tim. Not only do these guys rock, they have a sense of humor. Awesome!

First of May

Happy First of May! WARNING: ADULT CONTENT!

Creepy Doll

Ths is just like when I saw them live ... except without the uke player. Damn! Why do New Yorkers have all the fun?

I heart Sasquatch!

On Friday I went to see Jonathan Coulton with Paul and Storm at the Milkboy Cafe for the second time. I think his star is on the cusp of exploding and it may not be long before you can't see him up close in a small venue like this. If you'll recall from the last time I went to one his shows, I brought along a poster of the Mandelbrot Set. For some reason I thought I had to do something similar for this show. So I made a doll depicting the story in the song Under The Pines. (That's right, I'm one of those weirdos; give me funny looks and tell your daughters to stay away from me.)

My choice couldn't have been better. If you look at the picture below from Friday's concert, you'll see that Paul (from Paul and Storm) is wearing a tee-shirt with Bigfoot on it.



It turns out he wasn't the only one wearing a Bigfoot tee that night. To explain what inspired my doll, here's Jonathan's description of Under The Pines.

Not many people know this, but when Leonard Nimoy did the Bigfoot episode of "In Search Of..." he and the creature hooked up one night and had this crazy fling. These kinds of things never end well, but Bigfoot in particular is a bit of a cad anyway (being mostly wild animal). As you might imagine, Leonard Nimoy came out of the experience somewhat worse for wear.

And that is why my Leonard Nimoy doll is also wearing a Bigfoot tee-shirt. And it worked! Jonathan Coulton had never played the song live before (never even rehearsed it), but he was so impressed with my Spock doll (or maybe he was just really scared of me--I can't be sure which), that he played it on stage. You can hear it as well as other songs from the Jonathan Coulton/Paul and Storm show at Jen's podcast A Thousand Times No. Enjoy!




Live version: (low volume)

Skullcrusher Pirate Hotdish

A selected songset from Jonathan Coulton's and Paul and Storm's December 16's show at the Milkboy in Ardmore, PA is now up at 1000 Times No.

Friday Madness 12/22/06 : Skullcrusher Mountain

Last weekend I went to see Jonathan Coulton at the Milkboy café in Ardmore, PA.

Jonathan Coulton quit his job as a software engineer a little over a year ago in order to make music. When he didn't get a record contract right away, he started his "Thing a Week" project, where he came out with a new song every week for a year and podcast it for free under the Creative Commons license. Jen from A Thousand Times No interviewed him before the concert. You can listen to it here.

I watched some of his concert footage on YouTube, and in one show he said that he knew he was in the right place when a group held up their stuffed monkeys (a recurent theme in many of his songs). Right away I thought about how I could top that. Since I'm a fan of fractals, I decided to do something for his song Mandelbrot Set.



I generated a Mandelbrot Set image on my computer and had it printed poster size. I actually took a couple of pictures of Jonathan holding the poster I made, but alas, my P.O.S. camera screwed up and blurred the pictures by leaving the shutter open too long. Oh well, I guess I'll just have to wait until the next time he's in town. He did aknowledge me when he played Mandelbrot Set. He said "That gentleman holding the Mandelbrot Set poster has been following me around for a while. It's starting to get creepy!" He may have thought that he was just making a joke, but little does he know about my devious plan. It starts with stalking a singer/songwright, and finishes with world domination. BWA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!

Speaking of which--What does a Mad Scientist give his girlfriend for Christmas? The answer is: probably not what she wants. According to a new study, couples tend to give each other the wrong gift.

· Almost half of all lovers are worse at predicting their partner's heart's desire than a stranger who simply uses average gender-specific preferences.

· In addition, the more you know about your inamorata, the worse your success rate is likely to get.

These cheerful holiday tidings are brought to you by "Why It Is So Hard to Predict Our Partner's Product Preferences: The Effect of Target Familiarity on Prediction Accuracy," in the December issue of the scholarly Journal of Consumer Research, published by the University of Chicago Press

And there's more to it than the cliché of getting your partner the gift that YOU want. (although that's a big part of it) In the article they talked about one guy who got is partner a bathroom scale as a gift. I imagine that his thought process must have been something like "Well she's always talking about her weight. I bet she'd really like a fancy new scale.

But what does any of this have to do with mad scientists or Jonathan Coulton, you ask? It's the JoCo song Skullcrusher Mountain. The song is about an evil-genius/super-villian who falls in love with the girl he's holding captive. My kind of guy! In the song, the protaganist is surprised when his beloved doesn't like the gift he got her.

I made this half-pony half-monkey monster to please you
But I get the feeling that you don’t like it
What’s with all the screaming?
You like monkeys, you like ponies
Maybe you don’t like monsters so much
Maybe I used too many monkeys
Isn’t it enough to know that I ruined a pony making a gift for you?

You might think that he's crazy for thinking that she would like such a monstrous gift. But the truth is that he was acting no diferently than any "sane" person would. It's just that for him, a grotesque chimera is the ideal for a gift. Perhaps that makes him a tad crazy--just a tad.

With that I leave you with (from Xalen)