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We have taken all your comments and concerns to heart to bring you this update jam packed with new improvements. Rummy 500 now has a map view where you can see all the game aspects that you have unlocked, and how many more victories you need to unlock the next! We're sure you all will love to hear that the banner ads on the bottom of your screen have been completely removed-COMPLETELY!
If you are just joining the Rummy World Tour and this is your first time playing, do not fear you are behind the curve! We have added a guided tour of our Rummy world, voiced by Questie.
The new Championship Rummy 500 release offers over 1,000 changes, additions, and improvements. Here is just a taste of what's new and exciting!
NEW! Voice guided tour gives you a quick and entertaining overview of update
NEW! Distracting banner ads completely removed from game
NEW! Zoomable Tour map now features 45 unlockable game features as you progress
NEW! Simpler unlock of bonus game content via either coins or trophies
NEW! Coins/trophies/unlockables earned now transfer between devices (if you use FB login)
NEW! Daily loyalty reward gives more coins to players who return to play every day
NEW! In-game slot machine offers free daily pull and chance to win a million coins
NEW! Most unlockables now have a TRY FOR FREE option (one-time use each)
NEW! You can now disable ALL in-game ads using coins in the Store (or via purchase)
NEW! Collect 15 winnable achievement Crowns to attest to your skill and win coins for doing so
NEW! Login to Facebook to customize and add your name and likeness in-game
IMPROVED: Playing cards via dragging and flicking now much more consistent
IMPROVED: Cleaner layout of stock/discard pile and more space for melds to fit
IMPROVED: Higher contrast and higher-quality card graphics for easier readability
IMPROVED: Illegal Plays cheat now allows not using bottom card on multi-pickup
IMPROVED: Most clickable game objects are now orange to signify they are clickable
IMPROVED: Various icons and other game art assets improved
FIXED: Bug that allowed players to sometimes win without discarding
FIXED: Bug that allowed players to sometimes not meld on multi-card pickup
FIXED: Issues with some graphical issues on older Android phones
As usual, our cast of realistic and cheerful characters creates a friendly atmosphere that will bring back fond memories. Relax with Championship Rummy 500's soothing tones and easy pace as you decide when, where, and how many rounds to play. Share and challenge your friends on Facebook with our new high score list. Extensive customization options and adjustable settings will satisfy even the savviest Rummy 500 player. With features like Undo and Replay, you'll be a winner in no time. Players looking for even more invigorating play will want to unlock the numerous practice and cheat options as well as thrilling game variations such as 500 Rum, Ten Card, Dots, Kaluki, Spot, Cutthroat, Michigan, Continuity, and Block.
Categories: Uncategorized


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Kollage - Square Double Pointed Needles
Made in USA!
I purchased this product because it was supposed to be easier on the hands, as I knit for long periods of time. I prefer dpns over circular for smaller circumferences. The needles are not better compared to my other dpns. The knitting experience is about the same. My stitches are even no matter what needle I use. The tip is very pointy, but is not an issue with the way I knit. If pushing the needle tip is the way you knit, these needles are not for you. The yarn slides nicely over the needle. If I am in need of more double pointed needles, I will Kollage Square dpns as they are made in the USA.129 found this review helpful
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Plymouth Yarn - Jeannee

subset: commoncrawl


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Shown in Aluminium finish -
Saving in style This flush mount has a clean, contemporary look that breaks the mold of traditionally bulky and unattractive energy saving products. It''s slim, sleek, chic design is the perfect combination of form and function.
At Philips, design excellence is at the core of the commitment to both customers and belief. Philips believes that good design is about creating products and solutions that satisfy people's needs empower them and make them happier. All of this while respecting the environment in which we live. Giving more than just products, Philips creates experiences that are meaningful and improve people's lives. Philips focuses its designs on value creation. Designing lighting that can influence and affect the world in very significant ways – politically, socially and culturally. Lighting that is functional as well as aesthetically pleasing while using the latest in lighting technology. Philips' forward thinking and strength in lighting technology has enabled them to become the leader in LED lighting.


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A couple of my friends love their slow cooker. I have a pressure cooker. Do I still need it. I have a small apartment with. Is it worth to sacrifice some space to kitchen for that?
I have wrestled with this for years and still end up using my dutch oven on low heat on the burner, or slow and low in the oven(eg 225F). Mind you, you have to be home to keep an eye on it.
I'd say no, I think most things in a slow cooker turn out rather muddled. Chicken even dries out into rubber. You might better results...but a dutch oven and attention works better for me.
A pressure cooker is superior for stews, and quicker healthier cooking.
Also slow cookers leach out and destroy some vitamins. Especially B and A vitamins.
i know I've seen that other people on this site like them, but like bigpan and Sam1148, I have never wanted a slow cooker. I don't think they produce as good a dish as a very slow oven and and a ceramic or enameled cast iron pot. My only electronic "trick" for cooking while I'm not home has been a rice cooker, and I have liked having it..


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While the boys go, the girls stay and have a "princess party." There is an actual little party with our friends, the Browns, but the whole week is pretty much a princess party too. We play, shop, and treat ourselves. I could have sworn I took some pictures of our adventures, but I've got nothing =(
I do have a completed checklist of things I was going to do while the boys were gone. We:
- Went to Ikea
- Applied our Ikea purchases (i.e. made beds with new bedding, hung curtain rods & shelves, framed pictures)
- Went to Downeast Home
- Went to the Temple
- Cleaned out the car (which was the equivalent of cleaning a barn, although that's probably offensive to actual animals)
- Video chatted with the boys a lot
- Read my book for book club
- Prepared a YW lesson
- Went to Deseret Book
- Went to Sally Beauty for Nail polish, applied said nail polish on three sets of nails
- Grocery shopped
- Went to Stake Auxiliary Training
- Cleared to DVR queue of my "crap" shows Eric hates to watch
- Washed and folded 5 loads of laundry
- Dusted the blinds
- Cleaned! Cleaned! Cleaned!
- Hosted the Princess Party
Thankfully, this post does not have to be pictureless, Eric managed to take a few from their week with his phone:
A new development from this trip was that it was brought to my attention that Audrey and Maggie DO NOT LIKE EACH OTHER. I had no idea they have been just coexisting with Amos as a buffer. The girls fought like crazy without him around, and it was something else. Maggie just wanted to be left alone, and Audrey was SO lonely. They really missed their brother. Maggie kept looking at the calendar and saying, "why is [Amos' trip] taking too long????"
Now that Amos is back, all is right in the world again. Amos and Audrey are running wild in the yard (with the chickens) and Maggie is alone inside playing by herself. Who knew???
If you look closely, you can see the top of Audrey's head in the coop. She thinks she's a chick. Amos thought it was great.
I am so glad Amos and Eric get to make it back to PA so much, but I am even more glad that they're back with us.


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This week I received an e mail by an italian young student passionate of Vehicle Design asking me for support. You will want to invest in some expensive supplies and equipment, set up your cutter, and use computer software to style the operate. The initial set-up was painless and efficient, the design of the internet site was wonderful and modern and the help we are receiving on a everyday basis from the team is second to none. Overstock has a huge number of categories to browse and even gives cars, travel, and insurance via its website. I f you determine to create your own HHO fuel method, the charges are very low for material supplies as they can be bought at any hardware or automotive retailer.
With lots of space to promote your company, staff and lessons, this is a great template for any person wishing to create an official and established feeling website. We have access to a quite higher quality print and cut procedure for acrylic, and can create gorgeous final results with straightforward concepts. They have effectively produced an attractive design with out employing as well a lot color. TI Automotive utilizes a wide variety of components and manufacturing processes in order to enhance efficiency, maximize durability and optimize packaging and installation.
Use price comparison websites and feedback from other drivers to support you accomplish this. We've gone by means of a lot of adjustments with our web style for vehicle dealers organization, added a lot of new attributes/improvements, and introduced new offerings/businesses as well. Combining fuel storage and delivery as a company enables TI Automotive to develop and generate completely- integrated fuel systems.
Depending on how complicated your design is, cutting may take seconds or hours, but most simple decals are completed in a handful of minutes. I could sketch out the style on the wood floor with a marker pen and comply with the plans. Our websites continue to win awards in the automotive business and have been very influential to other vendors' technologies and designs. Selling nine brands at 17 various dealerships dotted all through New York's Extended Island region, the Atlantic Automotive Group generated $1.six billion in total revenue in 2010 making it one particular of the top 15 dealer groups in the nation.
Has been live because 1999 and has slowly grown to turn out to be a thriving web site for each standard and 1-off sellers. Starting with Jeff's Bronco Graveyard in the late 90's, we've built our platform and accomplishment formula about some of the most demanding automotive companies like Pit Stop USA, KT Efficiency, Moto Wheels and American Toppers.


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Drinkwater ban blow for Foxes
Leicester midfielder Danny Drinkwater has accepted an English Football Association charge of violent conduct and will serve an immediate three-match ban.
The England international will be suspended following an elbow on Watford's Valon Behrami in the Foxes' 2-1 defeat at Vicarage Road on Saturday.
Referee Neil Swarbrick took no action during the game but the English FA acted having been alerted to the footage after it ran on social media on Sunday.
Drinkwater will now miss tomorrow's visit of Middlesbrough, the trip to Sunderland and the home game with Manchester City on December 10. He has started every Leicester game this season and helped them into the last 16 of the Champions League on Tuesday when the Foxes beat Club Brugge 2-1.
Claudio Ranieri is light in midfield, with Nampalys Mendy struggling with an ankle injury. Andy King and Daniel Amartey are the club's only fit central midfielders.


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A lash curler, eye liner, mascara and eye shadow are all used to help make the eyes pop. Each of these make up items draw attention to the eyes by outlining them and making them appear larger and brighter.
Make up is a good tool to make eyes appear larger, or to help brighten up the eyes to make them the focus of attention. There are several tools and make up tricks used for this purpose. Women may use one or a few of these techniques to enhance their naturally beautiful eyes.
A quick way to make the eyes pop is to use a lash curler on those lashes. This tool gently crimps and curves the lashes up and outward. It can make the eyes look a lot bigger and enhance lashes within a minute.
From here, the addition of a light-colored eyeliner on the insides of the eye lids and a darker liner just below the lash line creates the illusion of larger brighter eyes. A few strokes of a volumizing mascara add a bold frame around the eyes too. Consider adding a thicker layer of mascara to the outside corners of the eyelids. Finish the look with a smoky eye shadow in one of the rich jewel tones, such as a ruby red, emerald green or sapphire blue.


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The striking orangey-red colour of
the oval Carnelian gemstone generates a richness that cannot fail to impress
with this 9 carat Yellow Gold Signet Ring. A powerful gemstone said to
boost motivation and inspiration when worn regularly, you only have to look at
this commanding gold Carnelian Ring to believe what they say - maybe try it
yourself ?
* Carnelian is
a stone from the Chalcedony Quartz family and is said to be one of the oldest
gemstones known to mankind – it was once considered strictly the property of
the noble classes, and is said to be an energy booster.
|Product Details
|Metal Purity:9 carat Yellow Gold


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Closed on Monday andfrom 16th January to 17th March /25th/26th/31st December and 1st January 2018
Christianity and the other religions: exhibition of objects, photos, testimonies
60 years of revolutionary graphics
Laurina Paperina | Rolando Tessadri | Luca Coser | Christian Fogarolli
The glacier is the most complete picture of our lives.
It represents what we are, eternal and ephemeral, permanent and mutable.(Juremir Machado da...
Guided visit to the dairy in Pera di Fassa, organized by the Ladin Museum
Uniforms, armours, helms and gas masks from the First World War to the 21st Century
A new glimpse on the war by photographer Alessio Romenzi
Permanent exhibition by the sculptor Andrea Soraperra in Penìa di Canazei
Exhibition-event about the Great War in Val di Fassa, by the Cinema Theatre Navalge in Moena
Picture, sculture exhibition
11th Contemporary Art in Nature Event
Painting exhibition
Picture xhibition


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I walked all the length of the pier, shooting photos of the seagulls, the waves and the clouds. Then I turned back, as it was almost time for my rendezvous with my friends Mats and Teresa.
In the distance I saw two men walking towards me. One was a short, pot-bellied, almost bald guy. The other one was tall and slim. He had bleached blond hair, was clad in a white T-shirt and jeans. They both carried walking sticks and were obviously having a good time.
When they came closer, I couldn't believe my eyes. The tall, blond man was Rod Stewart! Well, at least from that distance, I would have sworn it was him. I discretely tried to make a photo of them, but the pot-bellied man saw me pointing my camera at them. He tapped his companion on the shoulder and I heard him say: "Hey, the lady is taking our photo." Rod Stewart turned towards me and ... then I saw that it wasn't him, but just one of the locals who really was doing his best to look like the rock star. I'm sure he was well aware of the striking resemblance and had deliberately added to it by dying his hair and cutting it in the same porcupine style.
with on the right, the local Rod Stewart.


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Burberry Flagship Store
Thursday, November 8th, 2012
By John Dugan
Mag Mile strolling Chicagoans have been watching with anticipation as the iconic Brit luxury brand Burberry erected its eye-catching Chicago flagship store. As of today, the newest example of a global store design concept developed by Burberry Chief Creative Officer Christopher Bailey is now open.
The concept blurs the physical and digital realms with a Burberry Retail Theatre feature that enable the broadcast of live events and content on the store walls. The Chicago store will be the first in the Americas to offer Burberry Bespoke, which allows one to customize a Burberry trench coat with a choice of 12 million designs. The store also features an in-store Burberry Beauty consultation counter (New York doesn't have one, yet) and limited edition outerwear, accessories and more.
The five-floor structure has a custom LED-illuminated black chrome and glass exterior façade, referencing the iconic Burberry check.
Christopher Bailey himself will be in town late November for some invite-only events to celebrate the opening. In the meantime, we've got some (window) shopping to do.
Tagged with: Burberry • Chicago • retail design


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Monday, July 09, 2012
With The Early Harvest of 2012, How Will That Impact USDA's Estimate Of The 2011 Crop?Tweet
In the wake of increased demand for corn, 2012 was shaping up to be a year in which supplies would be extremely tight, and possibly the pipeline would run dry before the end of the marketing year when the 2012 crop would be harvested. However, the early spring allowed early planting and many producers booked corn for early delivery to end users with the help of early delivery premium prices. But if a lot of early maturing corn is being funneled into processing plants offering high premiums, what is the impact on calculating feed and residual use from the 2011 crop and how is that going to be estimated to adequately inform the marketplace?
Spring planting jumped to a record start this year due to a mild winter and warm soil temperatures in March that allowed many acres to be planted well ahead of normal. USDA economists say the early harvest has implications for many facets of estimating supply and demand by USDA. Their report indicates the origin of all supply and demand data used to assemble the World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE), except for feed use of corn, which has no direct measure. The number "is derived to equal supply minus all other uses minus ending stocks. Implicitly, this derived component of the balance sheet includes actual feed use, measurement and estimation errors in other compo¬nents of the balance sheet, and postharvest crop loss factors such as waste and shrinkage that occur throughout the corn marketing channel."
The economists say the early harvest will allow some of the new crop to be used by August 31, but not displacing old crop use. Another potential effect is for some replacement of old crop use, making old crop carryover more than would have been, had there not been an early harvest. But they report there is also the chance that total supplies of corn in the new marketing year may be less than the sum of the beginning stocks, new crop production because of the early deliveries. That would increase the derived feed and residual use for the new crop year, they say.
To solve the issue, the economists developed an econometric model designed to measure actual feed use as well as estimate the residual component. Because more grain that just corn is feed to livestock, the economists converted all feeds to tonnage, then measured a price that used the marketing year corn price received by farmers, but compared it to consumer prices to be able to adjust it against changes in consumer demand for meat. Next they calculated the size of the livestock herd, based on USDA's tally of grain consuming animal units. Because many of those animals also consume distiller's dried grains, the economists had to compensate for the amount of DDG's consumed by livestock, and their pricing relationship with whole grains. Another factor that needed integration into the formula was the size of the corn crop.
One of the keys to estimating the potential amount of corn harvested before the start of the new marketing year is to use the estimate by the National Agricultural Statistical service of how much corn was harvested by August 31. That data is not available from all states every year, but NASS does have an estimate of how much corn is mature by August 31.
With all of that data the economists tested it on the 20 crops prior to 2010, to check the performance of their model. Except for several small burps in the 1996 to 2000 crops, the model worked well in estimating feed and residual use for both all feed grains and solely for corn.
With their economic model in hand, which passed their tests, the Economics Research Service staff has estimated 4.717 billion bushels of corn for feed and residual use for the marketing year that is coming to a conclusion at the end of August, which pointed to 12.5% of the corn crop to be mature by the end of August and potentially harvested. That also points to a reduction of 119.4 million bushels of the old crop not being used for feed and residual by the end of the marketing year. However, the economist also calculated that if 25% of the crop is mature this year by August 31, then 4.568 billion bushels of corn will be used for feed and residual use during the marketing year, replacing 149 million bushels of the old crop.
Currently, USDA is using a 4.550 billion bushel feed and residual number in the June WASDE report. It will be interesting to see if the WASDE and NASS statisticians adopt the model developed by the Economic Research Service and integrate the number into the WASDE estimates beginning in July. That report is scheduled for July 11.
The early planting opportunity this year, and the chance for early delivery premiums to farmers harvesting corn early has the potential for significantly changing the estimates of the size of the old and new corn crops. With 2012 crop corn being added to the 2011 crop, it is hard to estimate the size of the corn being fed and for residual allocation. USDA economists developed and tested a model which points to the potential for 4.717 billion bushels going to feed and residual use from the old crop, if 12.5% of the new crop is mature by the end of August.
Posted by Stu Ellis on 07/09 at 12:36 AM | Permalink


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Cloud computing is the use of hardware and software resources that are delivered as a service typically over the Internet. It entrusts remote services with user's data, software and computation.
Although there are numerous business advantages and opportunities offered by cloud computing in terms of improved availability, scalability, flexibility etc. it is important to tap its business potential carefully. Securing the client data in the "cloud" must be the prime concern for the cloud service provider. Legal concerns over jurisdiction of client data in "cloud" needs to be addressed properly. This is because the stored data may not reside with service provider in its own data center or at a single location.
In this course, we shall first discuss the characteristics of cloud computing and later on focus specifically on cloud security's best practices taking reference from industry standards like NIST, OWASP, Cloud Security Alliance etc. We then look into the broad set of policies, technologies, and controls deployed to protect client data, applications and infrastructure associated with cloud computing.
Who should attend?
- Business Owners
- Entrepreneurs
- Senior Managers
- Cloud solution providers
- Business Analysts
- Developers
- Compliance managers
- Security Enthusiasts
Course Contents
Session One: Cloud Knowledge Foundation
- Introduction to cloud
- History of Cloud Computing
- Architectural Overview
- Security Architecture
- Terms & Terminologies
- Cloud Deployment Types
- Public Cloud
- Private Cloud
- Hybrid Cloud
- Community Cloud
- Service Model Types
- Software As Service
- Platform As Service
- Infrastructure As Service
- Some Real-world Cloud scenarios – Case Studies


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Article: Practice by Chuck Clark
View Single Post
Chuck Clark
Dojo: Jiyushinkan
Location: Monroe, Washington
Join Date: Jun 2000
Posts: 1,134
Brad Medling
...so, if I seem to speak with authority, it comes from a particular experience of mine; my character exudes confidence because what I speak of, is a true experience. Now lets delve into my history. From a young age of around about 10, I studied some ninjitsu but to no real measure, from there I studied Shotokan Karate which is full contact. I then studied American Karate, and then a little of some other karate, a little judo, and finally I arrived at aikido.
Mr. Medling,
Thanks for the info. When, in the earlier post you said, " If anyone has ever trained in Japan, you will notice a distinct difference in methodology of that between American and Nihongo sensei... In Japan the sensei will demonstrate a technique fairly quickly a time or two and then you will have to do it... I find a little more instruction here in the states.", it sounded like you had enough first hand experience practicing in Japan to make the comparison. Was this in your "ninjitsu" experience at age ten or the Shotokan full contact experience?
I ask because I have some small direct experience with M. Nakayama Sensei and H. Kanazawa Sensei at the Shotokan JKA headquarters in 1966 and 67 at the old Kodokan building on Suidobashi. I thought we may have acquaintances in common. I remember strong waza with kime short of contact. I especially enjoyed playing table tennis in the basement opposite the weight lifters gym and meeting Yukio Mishima there after training upstairs.
It's too bad you came under the influence of "self proclaimed" sensei and that you earned rank you feel is bogus. Since you are contemplating opening your own dojo, though, you must have picked up some legitimate transmission from ongoing training with someone for long enough that has the real goods. What are you going to teach at your dojo? Having "made all the mistakes at one time or another" it sounds as though you have something to offer. I certainly have made a bunch of mistakes but still seem to find more in the most unexpected places.
Congratulations and best of luck.
Chuck Clark
Jiyushinkai Aikibudo
Chuck Clark
View Public Profile
Visit Chuck Clark's homepage
Find More Posts by Chuck Clark


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USDA report shows more grain than earlier estimated
U.S. stocks of all grains and oilseeds are greater than the federal government and industry analysts had thought, according to several U.S. Department of Agriculture reports released Friday.
Predictably, that worked against crop prices Friday, though analysts say other factors, including the size of South America's crop, will influence prices, too.
According to USDA:
USDA projects the nation's 2017-18 year-ending stocks of corn at 2.477 billion bushels, compared with the average industry estimate of 2.431 billion bushels and the month-ago USDA estimate of 2.437 billion bushels.
The United States produced 14.6 billion bushels of corn in 2017, down 4 percent from the 2016 estimate, reflecting a decline in corn acres in 2017. But the reduced acreage was partially offset by record yield nationwide of 176.6 bushels per acre, 2 bushels higher than the previous year, USDA says.
The new 176.6-bushel-per-acre estimate is higher than the 175.4-bushel-per-acre estimate from USDA a month ago.
USDA projects the nation's 2017-18 year ending stocks of soybeans at 470 million bushels. That's less than the average industry estimate of 479 million bushels but more than the month-ago USDA estimate of 445 million bushels.
The 2017 soybean crop is pegged 43.9 billion bushels, 2 percent more in 2016. That increase reflects more acres, which more than offsets a drop in average yield per acre.
U.S. farmers raised an average of 49.1 bushels per acre of soybeans in 2017, USDA now says. That's less than the 49.5 bushels per acre average estimated by industry analysts and the 49.5 bushels per acre projected a month ago by USDA.
The 49.1 bushels per acre is 2.9 bushels less than the record set in 2016.
Wheat, other crops
USDA projects the nation's 2017-18 year ending stocks of wheat at 989 million bushels, more than the average industry estimate of 959 million bushels and the month-ago USDA estimate of 960 million bushels.
Even so, U.S. production of wheat and barley dropped sharply in 2017 from the previous year, according to USDA.
That partially reflects steep drops in per-acre yields in North Dakota, Montana and South Dakota, which were hurt with drought in 2017 and which are major producers of wheat and barley.
The drought also hurt per-acre yields and overall production of sunflowers and flax. North Dakota dominates the nation's flax production, and the Dakotas are the leading sunflower producers.


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I've been picking up the Good Neighbor by the Drawn Thread again and made quite a bit progress on it. The outer flower border is almost ready.
This is one of my Crazy January pieces. Some of the other participants are stitching their 15 (31) projects in rotation and I tried that myself, but it just doesn't work for me. I figured that making only one design priority suit me much better. And for now it is this one.
By the number of stitches this is considered to be one of the big projects, but stitching everything over one on 26ct makes it look so small.
This design is stitched partly in cross stitch and tent stitch and both with 2 threads over 1. I had quite some difficulties in the beginning to make the crosses look nice, so I bought this 12" hoop to fit the whole design in it. I thought stretching the fabric might help making the stitches more even and it really works. I have started using hoops also for my other projects and I am much more happy with the stitching results.


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The Rambler :: blog
Friday, February 27, 2004
We like this.
Wednesday, February 25, 2004
I should have linked to NewFrontEars long before now. Remiss of me.
And a quick 'hats off' to Paul Abbott. Shameless, which finished last night, was the best thing on TV since, well, State of Play, actually. Loved it: a 'dead' Frank being slapped about in his coffin by a debt collector was hilarious; the last act scenes between Steve and Fiona were heart-rending. Well done sir. (And please keep casting James McAvoy, ta.)
Michaelangelo picks up on this, which reminds of something I came across yesterday: this.
You poor man, you poor man
Here's a poem by Attila József to keep you going. Something for everyone, I think.
That's not me shouting
That's not me shouting, it's the earth that roars,
beware, beware, for Satan is raving,
better lie low deep in a clear stream,
flatten yourself into a pane of glass,
hide behind the light of diamonds,
among insects under stones,
go hide yourself inside the fresh-baked bread,
you poor man, you poor man.
With the fresh rain seep into the ground,
it's useless to plunge into yourself
when only in others' eyes can you bathe your face.
Be the edge of a small blade of grass,
you'll be greater than the world's axis.
O machines, birds, leaves and stars!
Our barren mother is praying for a child.
My friend, my dear, beloved friend,
it may be horrible or splendid, but
that's not me shouting, it's the earth that roars.
[Taken from Winter Night: Selected Poems of Attila József, trans. from the Hungarian by John Bátki (Budapest: Corvina, 1997), poem originally written 1924]
Hide behind the light of diamonds
Spot on. Following up on his previous post, Kyle Gann puts up responses from two composers. The second particularly hits the nail on the head: "Every generation believes civilization will die with it. It's a mystery to me exactly what the classical music establishment gets from its members-only doomsday scenario." You can do a quick scan around and find plenty of people bemoaning the parlous state of concert music these days: what baffles me, as too Gann's correspondent, is that all the bemoaning is done by people who claim to love and support the music. The standards of composition and performance have clearly not lessened, nor has access to the music. I've said it before, but I've been at concerts where Ligeti's Chamber Concerto has received a standing ovation (from an audience 500-strong) between movements. Is that evidence of a problem? To me, there only seems to be a 'problem' if your terms of reference don't include non-orchestral music or living composers, say. Or if you would rather judge musical success in terms of units shifted than the pleasure it gives to people (yes, I have heard this from people who are professional advocates of music!). Or if you want to spend your life searching for some (non-existent) key to what the Great Composer was thinking when he applied pen to paper (because, y'know, this small coterie of dead old white guys were constantly thinking of something profound, and specific, to be passed from generation to generation like sacred knowledge). Or if you think that this search, this propogation of tired old clichés substitutes for the visceral joy of just hearing something. What it sadly looks like is precisely what people from the 'outside', as it were, expect to see: classical music is run by fogies who care more about the desperate preservation of values and ideologies that are long out of date and irrelevant/meaningless, at the expense of all else. That whole attitude of 'you have to understand it before you can appreciate it'; or even just 'appreciation' above 'enjoyment'. It's not difficult to find people who say that they don't like concert music because they feel inadequate in some way, and this response has come from somewhere - most likely the concert music community themselves who insist upon the sort of exclusive language and mythologies that Gann and his correspondents have rightly highlighted. It's hugely frustrating, when actually all you have to do is sit and listen. The rest is up to you, honest. I promise, it's as simple as that.
But you all know this, readers, because you're all smart people who love music, so excuse the soapbox posturing. ;-)
The Grey Album reaches The New York Times. [You might need to register, sorry]
Tuesday, February 24, 2004
Grey Tuesday
Oh yeah, and don't forget that today is Grey Tuesday. So if you haven't downloaded the album yet, now's your best chance, what with about 100 or so servers hosting it for the day.
Although, that said, the copy I've got clips the end of some tracks, so I've tried finding another one - the first five or six sites I tried all have "account suspended"/404/something similar messages on them, already. So I might have to stick with my clipped versions.
And FWIW, I think track 10, 'Justify my Thug' is easily the best.
Resonance have just played a track off the album of recordings of this guy Deon Mac Gregor talking in his sleep. It's amazing - I've got another track recorded from an old Mixing It show. He talks completely clearly, and relatively lucidly, in his sleep, and his flatmate, I think, started recording the things he said. In the track just on Resonance he's going on about mythical creatures ... "Try putting a price on a Phoenix. You can't. It's inestimable ... no, you may not ... no, he doesn't want to rise in flames ..." Remarkable stuff.
The most interesting thing I've read all day.
On seeing Air in Southampton
I received the following summary from a friend:
"Woeful. Vapid as opposed to bracing."
You have been warned.
And re. Charlize Theron ('The best actress award proved more predictable. It went to Charlize Theron, who put on 13.5kg (30lb) to play the serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster.'), I'm reminded of what John Gielgud said to Robert de Niro when told that de Niro had been putting on weight especially for his role in Raging Bull:
"But my dear boy, why don't you just act?"
Monday, February 23, 2004
Matthew Guilford claims to be the first blogging bass trombone on the planet, and I ain't gonna argue with him.
Thursday, February 19, 2004
Disappointingly limp article on Steve Reich in the Independent yesterday. Glass Pärt and Reich the three composers who changed the face of classical music in the 20th century? Hmm, not sure about that - what about Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, Debussy, Bartók, Messiaen Stockhausen and Cage, for starters? And the most influential on electronic music? Stockhausen again, maybe? Or Pierre Henry, perhaps? Oh well, it's just a puff piece, but a shame because the Indy have plenty of music writers who could have done a better job.
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
This is splendid.
These people make an operating system built around Linux, with the name 'Lindows'. However, because of a court order brought by Microsoft, who allege trademark infringements, they aren't allowed to use the name in the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Sweden. Here's their brilliant solution.
[Thanx to milady for the tip]
What a lark! What a plunge!
Skipped off at lunchtime and found myself in Avid Records, Oxford. Unfotunately, since I don't have a turntable (I know; anyone know a secondhand one going cheap?), in places like this I have to grit my teeth and walk past the racks and racks of lovely LPs which I would dearly love to thumb and own and make do with the altogether colder business of the CD section. Still, the following 6 quality items set me back a mere £20, so you can't complain too much:
Goldie: Timeless (about time I got a CD copy, even if it doesn't have the extra tracks on)
Mercury Rev: Boces
Spiritualized: Let it Come Down
Missy Elliott: Under Construction
Soul II Soul: Vol. II: 1990 A New Decade (another one I've had on tape for years)
Lou Reed and John Cale: Songs for Drella
Quality. Pay Avid a visit if you're ever in Oxford. Great shop.
The Brits in onomatopeia
Politics, eh? What a charming business.
< soapbox title="Generalising whinge">
Rundown of the Grey Album hoo-ha at Downhill Battle. Not the first farce perpetrated by Big Record Co. (see the joke that is 99p-per-track downloading), and surely not the last, but this one's building some critical momentum at least. Milady knows more about the legal ins and outs of this than I can possibly imagine, but whatever the status of the law (which in cases such as this is desperately reacting to shore up long-outdated legislation in defense against new technology, rather than developing new legal parameters in line with what is actually happening) something needs fixing, because it seems that the right people (the artists and the listeners) are the ones who get the rough end.
< /soapbox>
Tuesday, February 17, 2004
Yes yes yes. Alex Ross makes all the right points at the New Yorker.
Monday, February 16, 2004
Hmmm. That looks a bit better - at least from the Win2000/IE6 perspective.
W3C, anyone?
Apparently not everything works: tried the new design on my Win2000 machine, with IE6, and it's all gone hoopla.
Which means that the below-mentioned feed thingy is down there on the left, now. And not in a green box.
My boy's growin' up
Three columns. The holy grail, apparently. With a lot of help from glish.com, that's what we have here. I feel like an HTML Jedi.
I also feel like a bit of a lie-down. Phew!
Horrible. I'm going up that line at the weekend. Hard not to feel like a rubber-necker.
I've put up a new feed thingy, down there on the right, in a green box. That's it. It's drawn from the deli.cio.us directory on music, so there'll be all kinds of random links to websites on 'Hey Ya' and networked music search engines appearing there from now on. Kind of like news, but not.
And shame on you BAFTA for ignoring Johnny Depp. Most enjoyable performance since McKellan's Gandalf, perhaps. [Both of which come with the benefit of drawing attention away from that Bloom buffoon.]
By the way, in spite of the apparent bile, I actually had a pretty splendid weekend, so you can't read too much into what people write down.
Monday things
Bear in mind ...
David Jennings posts a (belated) John Cage weekend review.
rgable on terminology and influence.
The Architectural Dance Society unpicks Outkast tokenism.
Kyle Gann on how music is useful.
Most miserable, miserly words I read over the weekend? "A book is a list, a list of words placed in an order favoured by the writer to tell a story. A film is a list of images. A piece of music is a list of sounds and rhythms. A song is a list of words and notes. A human being is a list of cells and mysteries." (Paul Morley: Words and Music, p.351)
Friday, February 13, 2004
Just noticed that Dizzee's been added to the line up for this. Oh my. See you there!
Esoteric. (Spotted at the splendid The Eyes Have It)
Now there's interesting. A wishy-washy memorial this is not.
Yer too kind. I should add, for the sake of clarity, that I'm only Cumbrian by default - family moved there a while back; I'm really a Watford lad by birth, but I know where I'd prefer to end up.
Music of Today: Royal Festival Hall, London, 12th February 2004
It's a remarkable bit of music history that tells how the dry composerly academicism of Boulez in the 1950s morphed into the perception-oriented exuberance of the spectral school in little more than two decades. This is part of the legacy of IRCAM. The precision and pseudo-scientism of integral serialism (pieces such as Boulez's Structures for two pianos) contributed to the formation of IRCAM, which subsequently turned its compositional research towards the properties and modulation of sound itself. This is heavy theory, and important acoustical research is done at IRCAM, but when deployed by composers as a compositional resource, it became tremendously liberating. At least, that is certainly the effect of the music.
All three of the composers played this evening (Tristan Murail, Hugues Dufourt and Gérard Grisey) worked at IRCAM, but sought a way foward and out of the strictures of total serialist composition; the irony is that they found it through following a path opened up by Boulez himself.
Murail's C'est un jardin secret ... is a short piece for solo viola, written to celebrate the wedding of two of his friends. It's a gorgeous little work. It begins from a near-silent breath of the bow brushing the strings. A lilting 1-2 rhythm is set up, and harmonics and other pitches are gradully added to the breath, until at one point there are three separate layers of sound from a single bow stroke. The centre of the piece is like a gently melodic cadenza, and then we return to the waltzing breaths, in, out. In, out.
Dufourt's piece Hommage à Charles Nègre was second. Dufourt was present, and, with Julian Anderson, had given a short introduction to the concert. It was he who coined the term 'Spectral Music' in an article written back in 1979. Hommage is a later piece, written in 1986, the 'mature' period of spectral music. It was conceived as music for a film about the 19th-century photographer Charles Nègre, so it's very restrained, and written to remain in the background, as Dufourt himself puts it. It is a nice enough sequence of sounds, played almost without rhythmic definition - there are no extended rhythmic patterns at all, really; just a sequence of slowly-paced sounds - so the entire life of the piece is within the shifting and evolving timbres. Think Selected Ambient Works vol.II and you're sort of there. It really came into life, for me, in about the last third, when bassoon and E flat clarinet swapped their instruments for contrabassoon and contra bass clarinet respectively. Suddenly, the sound became much thicker and richer, and more interesting.
Grisey's Talea was the real show-stopper. Also written in 1986, Grisey at this time was starting to address the question of movement (and rhythm in fact) in spectral composition. What makes spectral music so interesting is that for all the theorising that there may have been about sound, harmonic series, partials and so forth, relatively little time seems to have been spent theorising about form and structure, the traditional concerns of the composer, and the obsessions of the late modernist varieties. Grisey's music is some of the most vital and invigorating composition I know, probably for this very reason. Just to take one small moment, the opening of Talea is breathtaking. The beginning of late-twentieth century works has become clichéd, but this ... Fierce eddies of notes are shot through with almost-nothing. Just piano strings reverberating, the touch of bow against catgut. A sort of sudden tinnitus. It's as unpredictable as it is effective, and the rest of the piece continues this high level of inventiveness. As if designed to reiterate a point I made yesterday, in Grisey's music the shift of focus from the intellectualised concerns of form etc. to the perceptual, timbral concerns, the play of noise on the ears of the audience has liberated this music, given it life, just as I suggested was the case with pop. To think about your audience is not necessarily to enslave yourself: it can spark real creativity.
Some things I saw yesterday:
Docklands Light Railway - a man with an iPod and a Rubik's Cube
Outside Waterloo station - three teenage girls hanging out of a limousine waving at people
The London Eye is lit red at the moment. Bloodshot.
Went to Greenwich in the afternoon, picked up the following records in Music and Video Exchange:
Matmos: The Civil War, which is laugh-out-loud funny. What I love about Matmos is they strike that precarious balance between po-faced, arthouse electronica, and sheer daftness. Lots of pictures on the inside where they look like they're playing Blackadder, as milady observed.
Aphex Twin: drukqs, which I hadn't bothered to get yet, but for £7 I wasn't going to say no.
Missy Elliot: 'Pass that Dutch', promo
and a CD of works by Kenneth Gaburo, whose name rang a bell for me, but I still haven't figured out why.
Thursday, February 12, 2004
Bloody good point.
The problem someone like Copland would have had with music as sound rather melody, rhythm and structure, though, is that in the end he says "I do not mean to suggest that sounds in themselves, taken out of context, are of any use to a composer. Interesting sonorities as such are scarcely more than icing on the musical cake." Every producer from at least Phil Spector to Timbaland has recognised the central place of sounds to Popular music. The classical world still considers 'sonorism' (a term associated particularly with Polish composition in the 1960s) a term of derision. For classical composers, as for Jack White it seems, the quality of the sound you make is secondary to its place within a structural framework. (Although, the problem with White's kind of rockist position is that your structure is usually not that interesting either, since you're usually tied to the same chord patterns and verse-chorus form as Pop is. Pop's liberated itself from sameyness by elevating the sonic dimension to a higher status.). As a result of several factors, not least of which was the invention of music recording and the studio, it could be argued that the most important musical development of the second half of the century has been this re-evaluation of the qualities nuances of sound as a key compositional factor. So much music, from Motown to free jazz, to Górecki, to ambient, to hip hop, of the last forty years or so has been created with sonority at the forefront that it seems ridiculous to me to continue to marginalise it and pretend that it's not important.
On a slightly related note, there's been surprise noted elsewhere over Sasha's observation in his NYT piece that Timbaland never learned a musical instrument. No cuss to Sasha, because his was a relatively small point in a great piece of writing, but for people to be surprised by his observation, I find a pretty classicist thing to say, too. Just because Timbaland never had violin lessons as a kid means nothing: the simple fact is that decks, ProTools and mixing desks are instruments. Pretty difficult to get lessons, so you're self-taught. And Tim plays his studio better than most other musicians can play the piano. The difference is that when you're playing your studio, you're working with sounds first, melodies and rhythms second. When you learn the piano, it's the other way around: in fact getting a good tone out of your instrument only comes after four or five years of learning. Two totally different ways of thinking about music, and for all that Aaron Copland said, he and Jack White are on one side, Timbaland, Górecki and Brian Eno are on the other.
Wednesday, February 11, 2004
New blog. I like the name .... ;-)
[P.S. - that is you Rob, isn't it? Welcome to the fray!]
Wynton Marsalis twice in two days? I predict a lot of disappointed Googlers heading my way.
Genre busting
The thing is, the more you try to put music - or any creative endeavour - into boxes, the more it resists. What I did below was just sketch out how things fall apart when you try to do this (and thanks to Mwanji [who has more on genre-type stuff here which is worth a peek] and Eppy for the comments). Any such definition will always be unsatisfactory because, in part, you're trying to impose your categories without consideration for the musical material itself. It's one thing to say that something that sounds 'poppy' is (probably) Pop - this is relatively quantifiable, and is at least definable (to an extent) in terms of the music [ie Pop is heavily reliant on verse-chorus structures, lyrics are written with a strong rhyme and rhythm scheme and tend to be about a small collection of themes (love, loss, etc.), verses are usually sung by one singer at a time, the music is rarely discordant - and if so, for local effect only ('A Day in the Life', say), the same can be said for the rhythms - which are almost exclusively in 4/4 or triple time (5/4 is not a Pop time signature), the harmonic vocabulary is limited to three or four principle chords, there is a strong emphasis on riffs, ostinati and groove structures, rather than conterpoint or declamatory homophony, etc. etc.], but it's quite another to say talk about 'Classical', or 'Jazz' in the same terms, since it is almost impossible to draw up a comparable list of qualities (musicologists have been trying to define Jazz for decades, then Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Evan Parker and Sun Ra all came along. Then came Jamie Cullum which confused everyone. No definition fits in all cases.) Trying to define Jazz in terms of musical aspects turns you into Wynton Marsalis - you end up with a pretty narrow definition of what it is about, and you reach the limits of creativity and innovation very quickly indeed.
And, I should add, there is this danger with any definition of Pop, too, even though it is - perhaps - easier to draw up some kind of list of necessary elements. Once you've defined your checklist, what do you do if Britney suddenly releases a record in 7/8 time, setting verses from e.e. cummings? Her usual producers gave worked on it, and she still sounds like Britney, so it's familiar, and it charts well. But suddenly my definition starts to break up again.
The alternatives, as I see them, are:
(1) We could all stop worrying about such things. But we're human, and we can't.
(2) We could come up with some different ways of categorising things; categories that are sensitive to the actual musical content, rather imposed from without (as it happens, I think this is, to some extent, what has happened with the micro-genres of dance: each different category is defined in purely musical terms, depending on beats, types of samples, vocals or not, etc.). [I've actually touched on this before, apropos of the Pop vs Classical worldview.]
(3) We could follow Wittgenstein's lead and talk about family resemblances rather than nessary conditions, as he does when trying to define what a 'game' is.
I think (3) is the one I'm happiest with, as a theory, since it has something to do with how people create anyway. On the whole, you don't sit down and say 'I'm going to write a Pop record that conforms to a certain genre template'. Most conscientious artists write what they feel inside, and this is usually part reaction against, part borrowing, part development of things that are already there. In this way you don't get stagnant genres, because check boxes are being ticked, unticked, ignored, invented, turned into circles all the time.
There's a lot of fun to be had making and filling containers - and it makes our lives easier in a lot of ways - but be careful not to screw the lids on too tight.
Tuesday, February 10, 2004
Yeah, 'Art' music's a horrible word. For me it's shorthand for 'music that has been written for the sake of writing a good piece of music', so yeah, there's a whole bunch of Pop that fits this criterion. And you're left with the question of whether people wilfully put out inferior bits of music simply to make a buck, or complete a task. Undoubtedly some people do, but I wouldn't want to say how many.
What I will say is that when I say 'Art' music, it's not a quality judgement - you can get bad art as much as good. It's just a (probably bad) way of delineating things.
This hole's getting bigger. Anyone got a ladder?
My two penn 'orth
Eppy opens up the can of worms that has been sitting on several people's desks for some time now. First of all, he's absolutely right that Popular Music ('Pop-I', music that is popular) is not the same as Pop ('Pop-II', music that sounds like pop). One is a definition based on socio-economic terms, the other is a genre description, and therefore related to musical form and content. They're both interesting phenomena, and overlap considerably, but they are not the same thing.
However, I've been drawing Venn diagrams all morning, and I can't seem to say any more than that with any clarity. I started with two circles, that don't touch, for Popular and Art music. Everything else, I figured would be a subset of one or the other of these. But of course, since they don't touch, you have this undefined space in the middle.
So I made them into two rectangles, and put almost everything else as an overlapping subset:
Pop, I figured, is almost by definition not Art music, so you can safely say it doesn't overlap, and can be safely included within just the Popular music set.
But, as Eppy points out, a Guns 'n' Roses tribute band, and acts like MPath are not strictly 'Popular', so they go somewhere else - but (without meaning to diss MPath, who I haven't heard) they're not really 'Art' either. So our 'Pop' subset overlaps outside the boxes, which is a bit awkward.
To accommodate this, how about two new main sets: 'Music written primarily for its own sake' (ie art music) vs 'Music written primarily to serve a particular function' (ie muzak, cynical money-making, theatrical music, tribute bands, jingles etc.). Then you get something like this:
But then this is an even bigger can of much nastier worms. Sure, a jingle for PC World is not music written for the love, but I'm not going to be the one to say where Britney, or John Adams, or Howard Goodall, or Wynton Marsalis, or the Chemical Brothers sit. Somewhere on a line between total (commercial) functionalism and pure aestheticism, but whereabouts anyone can guess - and on what side of the line between art and function no one wants to say. Perhaps I should just get rid of the set theory altogether, and just have a line with points on it.
But, this is all built around supposition (who am I to say that Beethoven wasn't just a cynical money-grabber who got lucky?), and neither reliable or useful, or interesting. And, I think, it has taken us far from where I came in, which was that the reason for confusion seems to me to be because of the two definitions of pop music; one, the statistical 'Popular' definition, and the other, the musically-defined 'Pop' genre definition.
So I've got nowhere. Someone else's turn.
P.S. - yeah, I know, I'm hardly Tony Hart am I?
Monday, February 09, 2004
Liking the look of Jim's new one.
I'm not normally in the business of plugging my friends' work (alright, maybe I am), but for this, I'm making an exception. When I heard that my mate Dom was working on a new internet browser, I have to be honest I did wonder about his judgement - haven't we got enough that work pretty well as it is? But then, last week, I saw his idea. It's called Quadrasite, and it's just been released on the net. It's early days, so it's only in a version for Windows at the moment, but if that's OK for you I urge to you try it out. Words don't really do justice to how great an idea this is, but download the program and you'll see what I mean. It's one of those ideas that when you see it, you go 'Oh my god, that's so brilliant, why has no one thought of that before?'.
The whole idea of Quadrasite is that it essentially opens four web pages at once. A bit like Opera, you say, but bear with me. Because the difference is that this is the first browser to think of everything four times over. So when you enter something in its inbuilt search box, you search four engines at once (and you get to set these). Or you can hit the 'I feel lucky'-type button, and get Google's top four results. So you don't have to be that lucky. And if that doesn't work, hit it again and you get the next four, and the next four and so on. ie very fast searching indeed.
Or, alternatively, you can have one page open in one pane, and drag and drop the links into the three other panes. None of this going back and forth to get anywhere, you can see where you've been and where you might be going at the same time. It doesn't sound much, but it means you can read a blog, if you do that sort of thing, and all its links out without losing track of what the person was saying in the first place. Imagine the possibilities for reading hypertext novels like 253 like this.
Or, you can set up your 'quadralink' favourites. Instead of one homepage, you can have four. Or, you can click your 'music' quadralink and get four record shops at once. Or, click 'news' and read all four British broadsheets together.
It really is very, very cool. But enough plugging, just click the link already.
Sunday, February 08, 2004
Favourite bit of that 'Raiding the 20th Century' thing (yeah, yeah, I'm hardly Colin Jackson off the blocks, y'know): Eminem spliced with Joplin's 'Black and White Rag'. Very funny, very clever.
Been reading a lot of Joyce in your absence, Scott?
P.S. Saw that Arni Arason save yesterday on telly. W-ow.
Friday, February 06, 2004
Now, I may be able to name some poets I like, but when comes to actually talking about poetry, I am way out of my depth. So I'm watching this one from the sidelines for now. (Just for now, mind...)
How his Soul came Ensnared
Favourite poets, then?
Always had a soft spot for Robert Herrick (1591-1674) myself. Partly, I'm sure, because he's one that I discovered for myself. There's a complete(?) collection of his works here, but personal favourites are The Argument of His Book and Delight in Disorder.
I came across Herrick completely by accident. I read his poem 'To Daffodils' in a random anthology that was lying around my parent's house, and it seemed familiar:
Fair daffodils, we weep to see
You haste away so soon;
As yet the early-rising sun
Has not attain'd his noon.
Stay, stay,
Until the hasting day
Has run
But to the evensong;
And, having prayed together, we
Will go with you along.
We have short time to stay, as you,
We have as short a spring;
As quick a growth to meet decay,
As you, or anything.
We die,
As your hours do, and dry
Like to the summer's rain;
Or as the pearls of morning's dew,
Ne'er to be found again.
And then I listened to 'Decay' from Ride's Nowhere, and there, out of the blue, were several lines from the second stanza. Uncredited, no apparent connection, but here were my favourite band of the time quoting this (fairly obscure) 17th-century poet. From then I was hooked, and even more pleased to discover that the Oxford-shoegaze connections aside, he was also a pretty fine writer to boot.
Thursday, February 05, 2004
Thought that might wake Scott up.
All that, and a Mcr FA cup derby to follow. Football eh, indeed. Bloody hell.
Wednesday, February 04, 2004
Thierry Henry, a John Coltrane tribute, and Animal from the Muppets. It's the new Renault Clio advert - what more could you ask for?
... and now they've all gone again. Definitely looks like something at my end though.
Answers, please!
Just noticed that my blog text is getting covered with links (to a so-called ntsearch engine) that I didn't put up there. This is obviously pretty alarming - is anyone else getting these? I haven't investigated further yet, since my computer is apparently swarming with QHost Trojans (getting blank looks from the IT department here), so I'm trying to stay away from the 'net for the moment. Funnily enough, this NTSearch thing (which proudly advertises some pretty nasty 'most popular searches') looks like the only search engine QHost will let me use, so caution is strongly advised. Any explanations gratefully received
I'll keep you posted.
P.S. If you get any weird error messages when trying to use Google, MSN etc. - I'd stay well clear.
Tuesday, February 03, 2004
So a friend of mine got me a ticket to a bash last night in aid of the London News Review. It was OK. Bit like being in a student bar, but full of 20-something meeja types like yours truly. DJ downstairs playing a bunch of flattened-out James Brown remixes (bland). Disappointed not to hear anything more adventurous (I thought London meeja circles were supposed to be hipper than that?).
Did, however, meet the owner of this blog. I don't tend to run into other blggers in the real world, so this was something of a first for me. I figured posting a link was the decent thing to do.


text:
A Hotel Retreat with Historic Charm and Boutique Luxury on Nantucket Island A blend of charm and sophistication, The Wauwinet is a seaside refuge with breathtaking views, historic architecture, and luxury amenities for the perfect hotel stay on Nantucket Island. As Nantucket's only member of Relais & Châteaux hotels, our historic inn is known worldwide for its outstanding service, cuisine, and accommodations.
Relax in luxury rooms and quaint cottages surrounded by the natural beauty of Nantucket Island, and decorated with custom furnishings, Pratesi linens, and wildflowers. Lounge on pristine, private beaches on Nantucket Bay and the Atlantic. Savor regional cuisine and inspired wine pairings at the award-winning TOPPER'S, featuring an impressive wine list and even more impressive views of Nantucket Bay.
To view our hotel brochure, please click here.


text:
Helloween - Future World Chords & Tabs
Future World Chords & Tabs
#----------------------------------PLEASE NOTE---------------------------------# #This file is the author's own work and represents their interpretation of the # #song. You may only use this file for private study, scholarship, or research. # #------------------------------------------------------------------------------# From: Marek Horensky [email@example.com] Sent: Tuesday, January 13, 1998 8:46 AM Song: Future World Artist: Helloween Em If you're out there all alone Am Em And you don't know where to go to Am Em Cm Bm Em Come and take a trip with me to Fu--ture World And if you're running through your life And you don't know what the sense is Come and look how it could be, in Future World [ Tab from: https://www.guitartabs.cc/tabs/h/helloween/future_world_crd.html ] A E A E We all live in happiness our life is full of joy A E B We say the word "tomorrow" without fear A E A E The feeling of togetherness is always at our side A E F# We love our life and we know we will stay E C D E Cause we all live in Future World C A B A world that's full of love E C D E Our future live will be glorious C B E Come with me--Future World You say you'd like to stay, But this is not your time Go back, find your own way to Future World Life can be for living Just try and never give in Tell everyone the way of Future World One day you'll live in happiness With a heart that's full of joy You'll say the word "tomorrow" without fear The feeling of togetherness will be at your side You'll say you love your life and you'll know why Cause we all live ... Solo Scream it out Cause we all live ... Transcribed by Marek Horensky, Czech Republic E-mail firstname.lastname@example.com Marek Horensky


text:
Hi guys I am finally back designing, and boy did I miss it! I am so glad to be feeling better as I have been real sick, so bad I managed to hemmorage an atery my eye making the white turn black it was painful and hard to see right but on the up side it got me noticed especially by children..lol. I have a newbie in stores for you, I hope you like it! I have included all the numbers so it can also be used for birthdays or perhaps put something of your own in there :)
New Circus Horse script/template
Thanks for looking!


text:
It's the end of November and we are preparing to decorate for Christmas!! All summer I scooped up a ton of Christmas decorations at garage sales and packed them away. Now it feels like Christmas day for me to open up all the boxes of new decor. I am ready to fill up our house! I picked up this gorgeous, ivory, antique vase for $4. And I found these lovely, red flowers at Michaels!
This is our family wall in our dining room. It makes me happy every time I see it.


text:
a silver and gold dessert table for NOVA.
last week was my busy week. NOVA offered me to contribute craft projects for their 25th anniversary issue, so of course i jumped at the chance. at first, they just wanted me to make various cake toppers and decorate several lanterns. but since i was in the mood for a dessert table, i proposed my concept and they agreed! they only asked me to add some sparkles, hence the color silver and gold. the preparation was crazy but let me tell you, i think it was all worth it.
i love the result so much, am planning to keep the paper wheels for kutri's 1st birthday. i want to incorporate them with the theme we've (or was it just me?) chosen for her.


text:
I took a couple of years off blogging because I felt I didn't have much left in the way of interesting things to say. So I've been just been programming, and studying, and learning this and that. I've been doing a bit of Cloud development, and I taught myself iOS development, and after years in the Google cocoon I poked my head out and learned how people do things in the real world with open source technologies.
And lo at long last, after some five years of tinkering, I finally have something kind of interesting to share. I wrote a game! Well, to be more precise, I took an old game that I wrote, which I've perhaps mentioned once or twice before, and I turned it into a mobile game, with a Cloud backend.
It has been waaaay more work than I expected. Starting with a more-or-less working game, and tweaking it to work on Cloud and mobile — I mean, come on, how hard can it be, really? Turns out, yeah, yep, very hard. Stupidly hard. Especially since out of brand loyalty I chose Google's cloud platform, which 3 or 4 years ago was pretty raw. And let's face it, iOS APIs have evolved a ton in that timeframe as well. So even as "recently" as 2013 I was working with some pretty immature technology stacks, all of which have come leaps and bounds since then.
And now I have all sorts of stuff to share. Definitely enough for a series of blog posts. But I also have less time than before, because it's all happening in my non-copious spare time, all late nights and weekends. And running an MMORPG is a fearsome task in its own right.
Incidentally, I've just opened the game up for
beta testing. So if you want to try it out while you read along, visit http://ghosttrack.com to request an invite. (Edit, 12/13/16 — BETA IS NOW CLOSED.) You'll need an iPhone, iPad, or iPod running iOS 10.2 (Edit: 9.2!) or later. I'd love to do Android and PC, but there's only one of me. For now.
So where do I start? I guess the logical thing to do would be to start at the beginning, but screw all that, I'm starting with the monkey.
The Monkey
I had the following conversation with my wife the other day. It went something like:
Wifey: Baby, I lost all my stuff!
(A lot of our conversations have started this way since April, give or take, when she started playing the game.)
Me: What stuff baby?
Wifey: (wailing) All the stuff I had in my house!! I dropped it all there and them boom, it disappeared, right in front of my eyes. I was watching it and then five seconds later it was gone. This happened before, and I didn't want to tell you because I wasn't sure, but I just saw it! It happened!
Me: OK baby I'll come look.
Wifey: See? It was right there! I had a lot of good stuff there and it's gone!
Me: (looking around) I believe you baby.
Me: (looking around some more) I think… I think the Monkey did it.
Wifey: What monkey? What!? That monkey took my stuff?
Me: (checking) Yep. It picked it all up and it's carrying it now.
Sure enough, her pet monkey had picked up all her precious loot and valuables. But while she stared in disbelief at this unexpected betrayal, I was worrying about how I was going to get her stuff back. Because there were two problems.
First, the monkey wasn't killable via combat, since I had marked pet creatures in your personal home as non-attackable. I don't know if that was the best decision ever, but it seemed reasonable at the time. And second, there was a chance that if I pulled out the big guns and killed it myself, for instance by invoking its kill() method directly at runtime, its inventory (her loot) would be replaced with the default monkey inventory of bananas and fur, or whatever I'd given them.
I'm pretty sure that in most states, accidentally replacing your wife's hard-earned treasure with bananas and bits of fur is legal grounds for divorce. So I was in a bit of a pickle.
Wifey: How are you going to get it back? I can't believe that monkey! Can you just make it drop it?
Me: Well I could, but the AI will just immediately pick everything up again.
Wifey: I worked hard for that stuff! I can't even remember what I had! An amulet, a sword, a girdle, all kinds of stuff!
Me: Don't worry, baby. Tap on the monkey, you can see it carrying everything. Just give me a second to figure it out.
The picture below shows the predicament. Wifey is the naga warrior, I'm the old guy in the blue pajamas, just like in real life, and the monkey is barely visible 2 squares below her, by the Japanese shoji screen.
Every creature in the game has an event queue and a command processor, and can respond to generally the same set of commands as players. Normally the AI decides what commands to give a monster, but you can inject your own commands under the right circumstances, or even take control for a while (e.g. with the Charm Monster spell). So I decided I'd try to command the monkey to give me the items, one at a time.
The game is written mostly in Java, but a good portion (maybe 25%) is written in Jython, which is an implementation of the Python language on the Java virtual machine. And, usefully, Jython has eval and exec functions for interactive code evaluation. So I opened up my command interpreter and went to work.
> exec monsters = me().map.monsterList
> eval monsters
> exec monkey = monsters.iterator().next()
> eval monkey
> eval monkey.inventory
The MonsterInventory contains:
– bit of fur (0.06 lb)
– bone (1.5 lb)
– Amulet of Acid Resistance (0.12 lb)
– bag (0.5 lb)
So far, so good. I had a reference to the monkey in my interpreter, and I was seeing Wifey's stolen valuables, plus the expected monkey inventory. Now for the coup de grace.
> eval monkey.commandNow("give amulet to rhialto")
> None
> Monkey gives you Amulet of Acid Resistance.
Woot! Success. I had to keep chasing the monkey around, since offhand I couldn't think of a way to make it stand still. In retrospect I could have paralyzed it, or set its AI to the stationary AI used for immobile monsters. But I couldn't be bothered to look up how right then, since I hadn't ever been in a situation quite like this before, and my wife was alternating between indignation, amused disbelief, and near panic over her stolen stuff.
I had a mechanism for getting the items back, so I just followed the monkey and issued those commandNow() instructions.
Unfortunately, and to my lasting surprise, the monkey started ignoring me after the fourth or fifth item. It continued about its business, but it would not give me any more items. I still don't know exactly why, since this was such an edge case scenario. I have a large toolchest of utilities and commands for manipulating player inventories and map contents. But it's rare that you need to command a monster to give you stuff. Normally you get a monster's inventory the old-fashioned way. You pay the iron price.
I was irked by the monkey's emergent nonchalance, so I pulled out the hammer:
> eval monkey.kill(me())
> Ok
> You killed monkey.
Where me() in this case is the attacker.
As I feared, the corpse's inventory was completely empty, because I clear out the inventory for pet monsters, to prevent abuses where you just create them in builder mode, take their stuff, and make infinite cash.
So I busted out the clone() command and manually recreated the rest of the missing items as best I could, and gave them all back to Wifey. I'm pleased to report that this story had a happy ending.
How to Make a Game
You look at a game like Wyvern, which is at its heart just a tiles game like the old roguelikes, and maybe a bit of a MUD, and you think, gosh, I could do that. And you can!
Off the top of my head, you will need:
* A cloud computing platform such as AWS, Azure or GCP.
* Xcode and a Mac, or else Android Studio and a whatever-you-want.
* A programming language and a compiler. These days, I would go with Kotlin.
* A service for browsing and licensing music and sound effects. They have those now.
* A service for hiring contractors for artwork and maybe level design. They have those too!
* A hosted datastore, because seriously it's 2016, don't administer your own.
* A source hosting and bug tracking service, such as Bitbucket.
* A good lawyer and a good accountant.
* About twenty years.
Ha! I kid. I've only put about ten years into it, spread over the past twenty years. I started in 1996; my character Rhialto will turn 20 on March 1st. But in terms of total person-years, it's in the hundreds, largely due to area design contributed by dozens of passionate volunteers.
It's amazing how much stuff we have access to since I started this project back in 1996. Back then, I had Java, and we're not talking about Java 8 with fancy lambdas and streams. We're talking Java 1.0.2, with that O'Reilly book with the referees on the the front. You had to roll everything yourself back then. Uphill both ways, in the snow. (Actually the game started in C++ in 1995, but I migrated to Java and never looked back.)
I went through something of a life crisis in 2004, after 8 years of working on the game, because my productivity had tanked as the code base grew, and I wanted it back. So I stopped working on the game, for the most part, and went on a Grail-like quest to find a good language — one that was ultimately unsuccessful, although I learned a lot and got some good rants out of it all.
Nowadays, though, sheesh. Between GitHub and its infinite supply of high-quality libraries, cloud providers and their hosted services, Stack Overflow and its infinite supply of answers to just about every question you'll ever encounter, and all the services available for payments and contractors and everything else you could want — I mean, it's a startup's dream come true. I am way more productive than I was in 2003. All I needed was a time machine.
Even so, a game like this — which, despite its simple appearance, is a true MMORPG with surprising depth — is basically an infinite amount of work. Lifetimes of work. So you have to practice triage, time management, and stress management.
But really, anyone can do it. You just gotta _want_ it bad enough.
Apple vs. Android
I have enough material for lots of blog posts now, and I'd love to spend some time exploring Google's Cloud Platform (GCP) in future articles. I've learned a thing or two about Android as well. And Kotlin is absolutely entrancing. I haven't used it yet for anything serious, but it's one of the best new languages to emerge in a long, long time. Would love to talk more about Kotlin at some point.
For today, though, I thought I'd offer a few musings on Apple, iOS, and their store ecosystem. I'm still no expert, and I don't do anything iOS-related at work. This is just some very personal impressions I've collected while making the game.
A lot of people have asked me why I did my first mobile client in iOS rather than Android. The answer is monetization. iOS is straight-up easier to monetize. Android has cultivated a frugal audience, through both marketing and hardware choices, and that cultivation has been a success. Android users tend to be frugal. That doesn't mean they don't spend money, but it does mean they are more cautious about it. I have friends who've done simultaneous iOS/Android releases for their apps, and invariably the iOS users outspend the Android users by anywhere from 4:1 to 10:1 — anecdotally, to be sure, but a little Googling is enough to support just about any confirmation bias you like. So I picked iOS.
When I started, I didn't know Objective-C, and I started just before Swift came out, just a couple of months. But by then I was far enough into development, and wary enough from prior experiences with new languages, that I opted to continue in Obj-C. Obviously today I'd do it in Swift, and if I weren't always so time-constrained, I could even start introducing Swift class-by-class. Swift is cool. It actually reminds me a lot of Kotlin. I think language designers must have some sort of clique these days, whether they know it or not.
What about iOS? Well, there's not much to it. And that's a good thing. It feels familiar, at least if you've done any sort of UI programming at all in your career. I've done some Java AWT and Swing, some Microsoft MFC and whatnot, some X-windows work, some web programming, whatever — rarely anything major, but I've tinkered with UI throughout my career. Frontend UI is a skill every engineer should have, even if it's just one framework that you know well.
Coming from all those frameworks, I had certain expectations, and they were 100% met by iOS. It has an MVC framework, and you add views and subviews, and you have all the hooks and lifecycle events you'd expect — after learning Objective-C, I'd say it was only about four days (thanks to the excellent Big Nerd Ranch book) before I was able to start cranking out reams of code by copying it all directly from Stack Overflow, as is tradition.
Why am I making such a big deal about iOS's almost boring familiarity? Because Android is the exact opposite of intuitive and familiar. I've gotta be a little careful here, since I recently joined the Android tools team at Google, and I don't want to throw anyone under the bus. They did the best they could with the environment and situation they had when they started back in the early 2000s, which featured phones that didn't even have memory — they just had "address/contact slots". It was awful. They did fine.
But now, thanks to Moore's Law, even your wearable Android or iOS watch has gigs of storage and a phat CPU, so all the decisions they made turned out in retrospect to be overly conservative. And as a result, the Android APIs and frameworks are far, far, FAR from what you would expect if you've come from literally any other UI framework on the planet. They feel alien. This reddit thread pretty well sums up my early experiences with Android development.
So as much as I'd love to make an Android client for my game, it's not going to happen for a while. Plus I'm still iterating heavily on the iOS UI, so I might as well wait until it stabilizes a bit.
That's enough about Android for today. I always gauge how edgy my blog posts are by how likely I am to get fired over them, and my little indicator is redlining, so let's move back to Apple and iOS.
Apple: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Objective C isn't so bad. They have continued iterating on it, so even though its string handling is comically verbose, and it has no namespacing, and there are tons of other modern features missing, the language is pretty capable overall. It has generics, literal syntax for sets/dictionaries/arrays, try/catch/finally macros, extremely well-implemented lambdas with proper closure capturing (unlike nearly every other non-functional language out there), properties, and many other modern conveniences. The syntax is awful, and it can get pretty weird when you're bridging to the C APIs, but on the whole you wind up writing less code than you'd think.
In fact, various bloggers have measured it, and if I recall correctly, the consensus is that Android Java is about 30% more verbose than Objective-C. Which is pretty counterintuitive, because the Java language itself, verbose as it may be, is clearly less verbose than Objective-C. What's happening here is that iOS has such good APIs, you wind up needing to write a lot less code to get your job done.
So Obj-C isn't bad, and Swift looks really good. The APIs are good, the documentation is solid, and Apple is aggressively deprecating crummy old APIs (like UIAlertView) in favor of better-designed ones. Everything is still there in the system, and you can see generations of whole layers of API access dating all the way back to the old NeXT computers from the late '80s (heck, everything in iOS starts with NS, for NeXTStep)
But you don't have to use most of that stuff, because Apple has been constantly layering on new APIs that modernize it all. Unlike, you know… some other, uh, people. >.>
Xcode is pretty good. It used to be bad, but now it's not bad at all. Yes, it crashes more than I'd like, and yes, its refactoring support is abysmal. It's no Visual Studio. But "pretty good" is good enough. Because all I'm doing is copying code from Stack Overflow, really I have no shame whatsoever, and Xcode works great for that. It even formats it for me. Who am I to complain? Besides, I use Emacs for any serious editing.
So for the Good, we have the languages, the APIs, and the tools. What about the Bad?
Well, Apple's review process is really, really, really long and convoluted. Sure, I can totally understand why. They have millions of developers trying to shoehorn crap into their store, and they are trying to make a strong quality stand. But it means you're in for a wild ride if you're making anything more complicated than a flashlight app.
First you have to go through their checklist of roughly seventeen thousand rules, and make sure you have addressed each of them, since all of them can result a veto. And wouldn't you know it, I checked exactly sixteen thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine of those rules very carefully, so my app was rejected. Because they don't mess about. You have to follow all of them.
The story of my app's rejection is epic enough for an opera, but in a nutshell, Apple requires that all apps support ipv6-only networks. But none of the major Cloud providers supported ipv6 at the time of my submission, in late September. You're pretty well covered if you're just doing HTTP(S), but if you use sockets you're hosed. My game uses direct TCP/TLS connections to my cloud instances, so it didn't work on an ipv6-only network, and my app was kicked to the curb like so much garbage. At least they did it quickly.
After some technical consideration, I did the only logical thing, and got on my knees and begged them for an exception, because what am I gonna do? Some cheesy hack with an ipv6 tunnel provider to a fixed IP address on a single instance? Well, yeah, that's exactly what I was going to do, if push came to shove, just to get through the review. Even though it's completely non-scalable. Desperate times.
Fortunately, after a mere six weeks, and me finally sending them an angry-ish (but still cravenly and begging) note asking WTH, they granted me the exception for 1 year, backdated so it was really only 11 months, but whatevs. I was approved!
The Ugly
Just kidding, haha joke's on me, I was NOT approved. Because when they gave me the exception, they also threw in a major feature request. Lordy. It's almost like they're a monopoly or something. They didn't like that my game required you to sign in via a social network — Facebook, Google, or Twitter for now, since those are the sign-in SDKs that I've managed to wire up so far. So they asked me to implement Wyvern Accounts.
Sigh. I was so relieved that I got the exception, I didn't fight it. I called back to ask if it was OK to require an email address, for account/password recovery functionality (but also because I use the email address to tie your characters together), and they said that was fine.
So I went to work, even though my game had already been in Alpha for six weeks too long, and I implemented Wyvern accounts. New database table, new web service, new API service, new UI screens for registration and account creation and password resetting, new plumbing for passing credentials to the server, blah blah blah. God dammit, the nerve of them to ask for such a big feature.
A week later when it was all finished, I realized FB/Google/Twitter all have minimum age requirements (all 13 years minimum because of COPPA), so I had been protected until Apple threw their curveball at me. Now I need underage reporting and god knows what else. Still working through it with the lawyers.
I'd go back to Plan B (in iOS-land, B is for Begging), except that I actually sort of agree with Apple that I need this feature. Not everyone is on a social network. For example, there is an uncontacted tribe deep in the South American rainforest who are not on Facebook yet, although I believe they are still eligible for Amazon Prime. And also some of my alpha testers were struggling with it. I guess there are a lot of people who not only don't have GMail, but they prefer not to sign up for a free account. I can only assume the NSA is responsible for this phenomenon. But it means I most likely need Wyvern accounts.
Another reason I sort of need Wyvern accounts is that Facebook, Google and Twitter all have very different philosophies about email-verification APIs.
Facebook's philosophy is, roughly: "What's a few API calls between friends?" They have quotas, but they're so high that I won't have to worry about them for years.
Google's philosophy is, roughly: "Our APIs should scale with your business." They have quotas, but they're so high that I won't have to worry about them for years.
Twitter's philosophy is, roughly: "Go fuck yourself." I exhaust their tiny quotas every day, even after adding credential caching so that players only re-validate once every 8 hours or so. Even though I only have a few dozen, maybe fifty regular players right now, only a handful of which use Twitter. Their quotas are comically, absurdly low.
So I'm probably going to have to yank Twitter out before launch, which would limit people to FB and Google sign-in. And that seems like… not enough options. I don't like having to maintain my own accounts, but I think I'm pretty well stuck with it.
The takeaway (well, other than "don't use Twitter APIs"), is that Apple can jerk you around pretty much all they want, and you'd better like it. You should basically prepare for a long review.
Back to The Good
Despite the bumps in the (long) road so far, some stuff has been great. TestFlight, which is Apple's beta testing system, is working nicely for me. It provides me with crash reports which have identified half a dozen real issues so far. The sign-up is a snap, and they'll let me have up to 2000 testers, which will help me make sure my stuff scales, if I can get that many.
And their review turnaround time has been pretty good. It generally takes about a day, in my experience. I'm not sure why they require a manual review for my Beta builds, after they've already approved me for the actual store launch. And every build requires another 1-3 day review. But I've got a pipeline going, and I'm pleased overall with how straightforward it has been.
I'm really worried about In-App Purchases. I offer them in my game (though it's definitely not pay-to-play), but Apple's testing for IAP leaves a lot to be desired. You have to sandbox it, and this requires setting up separate accounts. It's not possible to enable production IAP (with real money) before the actual launch. But their sandbox environment makes it really easy to screw up a transaction, after which your device will prompt you for a store login every 5 minutes for the rest of your miserable life, and likely into the hereafter. It's a mess.
You can sort of enable IAP in Beta/TestFlight, but it's *free*, which means players would be able to acquire millions of coins for free, and it would require me to perform a full reset of everyone back to level 1 before launch. I'm trying to avoid that.
So I have no idea if my IAP really works. I got it working in the sandbox at one point, and I'm hoping it works in prod, but until I'm confident that it's working, I'm going to have to charge for my app, to forestall the possibility of a massive meltdown from casual players (tourists, basically) eating up my server resources. I don't want to get a gigantic bill from Google. So I need to limit the growth as best I can for a while.
Going Forward
Building this game has been a lot of fun. I've learned more from doing this project than from anything I've ever done that was work-related, at any job I've had. Something about having to do a big project yourself forces you to pay attention to everything in a way that you rarely have to do at a corporation.
I don't know if it's going to be a hit. Statistically, probably not. But I have some pretty darn loyal players. The game was down for five years (2011-2016), and when I brought it back up, a hundred or so old timers appeared out of nowhere. Many of them had to purchase iOS devices just to play, but they splurged. And they started playing insane hours. The ratio of 7-day-active to concurrent players has been crazy. In the old days it was about 100:1, so on a server that could comfortably support 100 concurrent players, I'd typically have about 10k 7-day actives. It was self-limiting because I only had one server back then.
With these alpha testers, the ratio has been about 4:1. They're playing upwards of 8 hours a day, around the clock. And they're all over the world — I have testers in Japan, England, New Zealand, Spain, Nigeria, Toronto, east coast, west coast, I forget where they're all from. But we're talking about a group of only about 60-70 regulars, so the diversity is quite remarkable.
This letter they wrote me back in 2012, when the game went down so I could port it to Cloud, gives a pretty good sense of how much people like it.
I'll report back in a few months and let you know how the launch went. Meantime, if you want to play, visit http://ghosttrack.com. Hope to see you online!
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text:
Fashion expresses individuality. It creates a first impression.
About Me
- Stacie Charlton
- I am a textiles surface designer with a great understanding of its function and application. I specialise in hand embroidery, embellishment and in prints for fashion. I am a passionate, experimental, and am unafraid to take risks or to push boundaries with my work. Because of this, I am the kind of person suited to the fashion industry which has ever changing rules, challenges and expectations. All images and text are copyright to Stacie Charlton.
22 March 2012
Photos of work
Going to update blog next week with more/better photographs of close ups and details of my work, for those who wanted pictures at the show!
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text:
Actually, NOT! Early in the session, I was feeling the groove, getting my funky chicken style going just a bit. First time that's happened in a few. I counted a 22 contact guiltless run early on, too. But it seemed like my energy level was down a little. I spent more time going back to the radio, jumping to the next song (gawd I love being able to do that with internet radio!), pacing between rallies, stuff like that.
Then I kinda hit a lull in the middle. I was planning to do 1:30 tonight. In the last 15 minutes, I decided to try counting guiltless strings again. I swear almost every string was either 14, 17, or 19 contacts. Damn! I only broke 20 once! I was so pissed about it, I kept hammering away past quitting time. But persistence paid, and I finally busted out with a 34 contact guiltless run. Best counted rally of the year so far!
I also hit a pair of torques and a pair of paradox whirls in other 'clean' guiltless strings. Still getting the Drifter mojo too, and I hit a few decent blenders. I even got all cocky and tried a couple blurs; I'll be damned if they didn't end up being decent ripwalks instead. WTF – where did those come from? My right side whirl was back from vacation too. Furthermore, I made a small breakthrough in my juggling. I finally stopped looking at my feet and focused on the apex of the bag flight instead, just like in hand juggling. Much better! Of course I still stink; I think my best was a mere 5 contacts. But changing my focus sure made it seem easier, like there really is a chance I can get better.
Still jonesing for that first outdoor session. In my mind, it will be glorious! In reality, it will probably be windy and disappointing. Whatever. I promise to post my first outdoor rally of 2010. Even if it does suck. For now, another 1:45. I considered pushing it to and even 2:00 tonight; the janitor schedules have changed so I've got plenty of time. But I got what I wanted, and I do have to go to work tomorrow.
Next session won't be until Thursday next week. Until then, thanks for tuning in!