new job duty

I now have a new title: Graphic Artist/Production Assistant. On Wednesday I'll be learning how to use a printing press so we can get the black & white components ready more quickly, since our head pressman has been spending more time with the 4-color jobs this year. Since our new music is mostly finished for this year, and with the switch to series covers rather than individual covers next year, there is/will be less graphics work than before, so rather than hire a new person (which they can't afford), they're going to give me a dual role.

This will make me much more marketable for future jobs in my field, because I'll better understand the whole printing process, from beginning to end. My job will also be less monotonous because I'll be doing graphics work some days, and press work other days. Coolness.

my salad brian

I'm not sure why I find this so amusing: "an e-mail I wrote in my sleep". I recommend listening to the first mp3, which is one of the Something Awful "goons" reading the e-mail, complete with misspellings. I made my own mp3 (184 K), although all I did was copy and paste the text into TextEdit and have good ol' Agnes High Quality read it.

Oh, and for those in-the-know, I'd just like to add: DIAERESIS!!!

ping pong matrix

The PingPong Matrix

Perhaps this paves the way for... The Matrix, The Musical? ;)

drama.bryanbird.com

A message board I frequent is actually comprised of several different boards: general discussion, religion, and politics. This allows us to discuss hot-button issues separately rather than cluttering up the main board with rants and ravings. To keep track of the various web addresses, I use subdomains of bryanbird.com as shortcuts. (For example, http://wdtss.bryanbird.com points to the Why Does The Sun Shine? animation on my site.) The other members of the message board use them too, and whenever we set up another auxiliary site (like say, a photo album), I make a new subdomain (like say, photoalbum.bryanbird.com).

So back in May, before the politics annex existed, we were having a political discussion and there wasn't much meeting of minds. There was, however, plenty of flaming, restlessness, digging up of past grievances, and of course, drama. One of the participants in the discussion, a long-time member, left the board and hasn't been back since. No one replied to this person's going-away message except me, whereupon I posted, "Perhaps we also need drama.bryanbird.com to act out all this latent thespianism."

I really didn't intend it to be mean or harsh, but I felt someone had to break the tension, and this pretty much summed up my feelings on the emotional state of the discussion at that point, the emotional state being needlessly dramatic.

Today, in light of the NEOhioPAL "discussion" I linked below, I decided to actually put something at drama.bryanbird.com -- although I won't be posting it to the list, as it goes to 3,000 performing arts people in the northeast Ohio area. Still, I'll have it there at the ready whenever necessary.

content of neohio list

If there's one thing I hate about community theatre, it's all the drama.

christmas in december

I know it's early, but I want time to plan and execute this by December. I want to record a CD of me playing Christmas piano music, using my own arrangements and uncopyrighted carols. I don't expect this will go nationwide and sell in big stores or anything, but still, if I'm going to sell this for even one penny apiece, I don't want a copyright hassle on my hands. So that means, no Leroy Anderson... no Sleigh Ride or A Christmas Festival. And good lord, no White Christmas.

I don't have professional audio equipment, but this will mainly be for friends and family anyway and be on sale at church dinners or wherever else I have gigs (and available for order from my website via PayPal). Also, they will just be CD-Rs, as I don't want to go to the cost of producing a minimum 1000 pressed copies.

Anyhoo, I've been compiling a list of Christmas carols that are old enough to be royalty-free, but I'm trying to decide what style these should be. Should I make it a mix? Would it be awkward for one to be in a Jim Brickman style while another is ragtime? If they're all the same style, would it get boring?

Here are examples of uncopyrighted Christmas carols:

Joy to the World
Deck the Halls
The Boar's Head Carol
Here We Come A-Wassailing
What Child Is This
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
Hark the Herald Angels Sing
Good King Wenceslas

I imagine I'll make some of them medleys, e.g. a fanfare of Boar's Head Carol leading into Here We Come A-Wassailing. And I have no idea what carol could possibly be turned into ragtime; it was just an idea. When I play gigs, people sometimes ask if I have a CD, and others have suggested I sell one, but the issue has always been copyrights, so I decided to start with old Christmas carols since they're free.

If nothing else, it'll make my dad ecstatic. :)

it's time for another *thud* useless fact

The animal with the most periods of REM sleep is the armadillo. [source: Wikipedia]

This has been another *thud* Useless Fact.