Dead-Stream

Mostly had a very awesome show last night. I say "mostly" because there were a couple serious hiccups (and now I greatly hate youtube) but otherwise it was pretty great. Ihcilon was first and did a killer set as always. Lots of bloops and whooshes and growls. He had the most elaborate visuals yet with a halloween lantern going. Signals under Tests was next and Ricky did a very nice, soothing set with ambient guitar through some granular computer stuff. Bruiser was next. Really good, intense set. He stayed off-camera where you mostly just saw his synths and pedals and curtains except when his hands and arms would occasionally come into the frame to do stuff. Kim (Belly Full of Stars) made the comment "a phantom hand appears) in the chat and it was very apropos. I took what is probably the coolest photo I've ever taken (of that "phantom hand"). Next was Tatras joining us from Knoxville. His set was awesome. He had a reel-to-reel machine going. It was very lowercase with occasional bursts of electronic squelches. Next was Tavishi and here is where we started having issues. They weren't able to successfully get their sound to route to the hangout within their laptop (we tried a bunch of different things but nothing was working, probably due to some copyright-type restrictions placed by the laptop manufacturer). So they were just going to stream directly to youtube. So I stopped my stream and then nothing happened. They were playing for like twenty minutes (while no one else could see anything) before seeing any of our messages that they weren't coming through. That setup had worked when we practiced it the other day, but it just didn't work last night for some reason (now I definitely feel validated in keeping simplicity as a one goal even if sometimes it might be at the expense of stream quality). Finally they saw and switched to the hangout to play through their speakers into mic instead of streaming the sound directly. Well, fine but then motherfucking youtube just algorithmically decides that this was somehow a "copyright" violation and they just kill the whole thing. I tried to create a new stream video (though the same thing ended up happening) but I couldn't even share the link to it because along with the video the whole chat was killed by the fucking bullshit. No record, nothing, everything gone. I filed a complaint later but that didn't do us any good. Quickly I jumped over to facebook to figure out how to live stream there and we got things back up and running and even had some people make it back over to watch with us. Tavishi played a shorter set though which was a little sad but what they played was damn great. Dinosauria finished things off with some lovely shoegazery guitar and a very dark screen to sooth us into the later night. Anyway, youtube pissed me off but everyone was great and I was pretty happy with the show in spite of being fucked with. Also, other than all that, I got better at managing the whole streaming thing and had a smoother experience of not having too much junk happen with my laptop to offer mild disruptions.

Other things? I had a third day in a row of a lunch break reading-time with Trudy sleeping on top of me with the piled-up slankets. It was likely the last 'cuz the weather feels like it's about to start getting warmer again. Mary Beth and I ordered some pizza last night so I chomped on some delicious Little Italy goodness during the show. Anyway, good times. Now time to enjoy the weekend.