-- i'm not sure whether this is 'donner kebab party' or 'sweeney kebob.'

best song parody ever: http://pterodactyl.me/

Yesterday was the lullaby moon finale. I was somewhat late for it, but it ended as you might expect with the return of the egg and the dreamlanders sailing off into the sunset with the couple.

It's been an interesting several months of performances. I'm very grateful to Lucia Neare and her company of players for setting up this incredible play for us, and I also learned a lot from how the plotting engaged our civic places.

It's a wonderful thing, dreaming. It's great when someone gets to share a dream or a fairy tale with a city on such an epic scale. It's been a wonderful 12 months of storytelling and art.

I think the performance style really touched me, the way that the meaning was only slowly unveiled enabled us to interact with the characters in our own way and build meaning. I still remember the cat that winked at me in Seward park when she went by on her bicycle and the happy rabbit and Lucia smiling that stand out in the performances. It's memories like this that make spaces sacred and lose their everyday trappings and take on personal meaning.

Happy new moon.

One of our english contingent made this video about her time with the cube project. I've sort of cut down on the amount of cube-related things, but we're putting a part of the cube together for Seacompression on 11/7. If you're interested in seeing the mechanisms of the cube and you're not interested in Seacompression, let me know.

I've been reading a lot of free kindle ebooks over the last month or so as I have insomnia problems. here are the ones I've been reading in approximately reverse order, the links are mostly to the non-ebook versions because of amazon's link tool being hideously broken for kindle stuff. I tend to read lighter stuff when I can't sleep, more involved books make it unlikely I'll sleep at all:

Storm Front (The Dresden Files, Book 1). The Dresden Files are a great detective series, much better than the related television series. I recommend them over all the rest of the supernatural thrillers that have come out in the recent wave. (re-read)

Fool Moon (The Dresden Files, Book 2). Continuation of the Dresden Files series. Much better than the first book. Holds true to a few fairly predictable detective story tropes concerning information, though, which would render the story predictable if you've read Hammett etc.

Grave Peril (The Dresden Files, Book 3). This book is a great detective story. Lots of fun.

(several pratchett books i won't enumerate.)

The Demon Awakens (Demonwars). Someone said that RA Salvatore's books outside of the D&D realm are better. I gave two books of this 7 book series a try and I have to agree that they're better, still not 'good' though.

Queen of the Orcs: King's Property. This is allegedly a feminist take on fantasy tales, but mostly glorifies unthinking violence with a romance subplot. I don't recommend reading this book, as its heavy handed attempts to make points mostly fall flat.

Blood Engines (Marla Mason, Book 1). About a quarter of this book is really bad, a traipsing through the stereotypes of urban fantasy. The other three quarters are great. I really recommend this book over a lot of the rest of the similar books I've read this year. A quarter of the book's content read like an editor told the author 'you have to put this in for the book to sell,' the rest of it was great and impassioned prose.

The Briar King (The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone, Book 1). A great fantasy series. There are some slight problems with the kindle/iphone conversion that makes it slightly confusing to read at four points in the story -- I reported that to amazon, I don't know if it will get fixed.

Perdido Street Station. (reread.) I just don't get why this book is supposed to be great. Sorry. I gave it another chance, and it just leaves me cold.

Assassin's Apprentice (The Farseer Trilogy, Book 1) This is a decent political fantasy story. worth reading for free on the kindle. the later books in this series are allegedly better, I think this book suffered a bit from the world building.

The main result of going to the artstech meeting last night in Kirkland was allegedly to listen to several talks about various subjects, followed by a panel discussion, but in the end it became a return to the old subject: What is the Artistic Vision of the Eastside?

To some, this is an inherently laughable question. But the bel-red corridor is being redeveloped and there is a new chance for the rise of arts spaces like techshop and other similar spaces. Also, the rise in production values of interactive media is being driven in the region largely through the computer game companies. This gives it its own spin, although hearing elanlee talk again was great.

I don't know what the east side has for art. Clearly, in its mall/driving culture, meaningful public art is difficult. Some (ie: the panelists who cared about this sort of thing) would contend that as public transit and walkability spread in the bel-red corridor this will change. Others seem to think that art can only exist in the East side in the forms currently serving as economic export.

What do I think? I think the East Side needs mass transit and more walkable cultural centers like the largely abandoned crossroads mall. I think that they're right that their needs to be a walkable reality before more public art is a reality, at least in the way they want to push it.

When I worked in bellevue in 1996, there were constantly people walking from block to block. Today, those areas we walked through are now megamarts with no space in the frontage for other than window displays and branding. Even by the low standards of a suburb, it's a loss. You can't just destroy buildings randomly, but a lot of the creative installation art in the last while (B/IAS, free sheep foundation, etc) has been based upon the framework of dead buildings or spaces in transition from one purpose to the next.

So, who knows. Art-as-export is nice, but it would be nice to have some sort of walkable core in the corridor and if there's art stuff there so much the better. It was an interesting dialog to be present for, and I also ran into some old friends and colleagues.

So, I figured I'd do one of those screened questions things, where people can ask screened questions and get answers. Apparently, this is supposed to be a way to get to know people better or something.

So, ask away. I won't answer questions that are someone else's business, though.

Feel free to put this in your own journal.

The hoarders-inspired craiglist yardsale has already had a take of a couple of hundred dollars. Apparently, I have a lot of shit in the house. Two things I thought I might check if people here wanted:

Battlestar Galactica Toaster: It has the logo on it, it brands pictures of cylons onto toast. $50 OBO, apparently this is now a collector's item, but the opportunity cost of dealing with ebay is high and i'd just as soon have someone making toast with it.

1-pood (16kg / 36 lb) kettlebell. $50. from Apollo. generally these run about $15-20 higher than that once you factor in delivery (the local price is $1.75/pound at most vendors), and it's a good kettlebell. the grip is the wrong size for my hand so i use a different one now[1]. Comes with PDF of popular kettlebell book. Seriously, kettlebells are awesome, just ask Pirate.

Also, if anyone knows a good way to get rid of MechWarrior Hero Clixs, or just wants a bunch, that would be awesome.

Anyway, I might post a dump of links tomorrow, but these are two things that people might be interested in.

[1] i have big hands.

Picture of Grooviks Cube and the moon together by Aaron Seemer. This is my favorite distance shot of the cube.

This picture also makes me think of Joel Veitch's Moon Song.

This is a video that some guy with the attention span of a gnat took of other people using the Groovik's Cube on playa this year. Possibly some non-worksafe content in the background. It's a little hard to hear our art piece due to the art cars playing techno, but you can see people playing with the control surfaces and the cube moving and other good fun entertainments.

A bunch of people have asked me how the cube works in the last couple days, and this is actually a pretty good visual representation of people using it. The video on the youtube site is HD in case you like your dirty hippies in better resolution.