Heather Findlay has added an additional hometown Christmas show in York on the 21st December, in addition to the Dutch tour in November and the acoustic support for Touchstone in December.
They’re also playing the Forever Young festival in York (today!), and a CRS gig at the Wesley Centre in Maltby on October 29th.
She’s promising one or two suprises in the setlist.
Hard rockers Voodoo Vegas have announced the release of their second album “Freak Show Candy Floss” on November 4th.
To quote the band themselves
“It’s hard and at times, it’s completely crazy”, says guitarist Meryl Hamilton, “I mean, don’t get me wrong, to have the opportunity to do what we do is amazing and we’re extremely fortunate. But for anyone that knows what’s its like to be in band, working full on, whilst juggerling (see what we did there?) traditional work and personal lives, to people outside this bubble, they think we’re mad.” “Yep”, chimes in Case, “The name ‘Freak Show Candy Floss’ comes from the idea that people who don’t live in this music world can’t understand why we travel for hours and hours only to play music for a short amount of time. Some people think we are crazy, insane, maybe even FREAKS! The name Freak Show Candy Floss comes from that, we are crazy, we are insane, we are FREAKS who love writing and playing our music, and the candy floss is the music and gigs we play, it’s there, it tastes so sweet, but then it’s gone so quick just like candy floss.”
They’ve announced a handful of dates across southern England and South Wales over the next couple of months.
If their barnstorming set at the Cambridge Rock Festival in August is anything to go by, these dates should not be missed.
British four-piece Paradigm Shift describe themselves as combining elements of metal, jazz and electronica in their music. Mixed by Rob Aubrey and mastered by Tesseract’s Acle Kahney, their début album “Becoming Aware” represents the culmination of nine years work developing and honing their sound from their beginnings as a duo back in 2007.
It opens in archetypal progressive rock fashion; a Floydian synthscape and cacophony of spoken word samples from films and news media before a growling riff takes over and we’re into the sprawling kaleidoscopic “A Revolutionary Cure”, an epic that twists and turns over fourteen minutes. This and the following “An Easy Life” marry spiralling guitar riffs and soaring vocal melodies with intricate jazz-rock instrumental sections. Two short instrumentals follow, the dreamily atmospheric “The Void”, and the jazz-rock of “The Shift”. After “Masquerade” with its dense swirling instrumental passages, the closing number “Reunifications” comes over as a distillation of all the best elements of the album, driven by Puru Kaushik’s propulsive but melodic basslines and Ben Revens’ ever-present piano textures.
Taken as a whole, it’s a very solid piece of work. Where there only a few brief moments that could really be described as electronica, the album comes over more as a blend of progressive metal and jazz fusion, though the metal side never dominates; there are no blast beats or cookie monster vocals. In the hands of a lesser band such a thing might easily descend into self-indulgent noodling, but Paradigm Shift are both skilful enough and possess enough taste to avoid making that mistake. There’s still plenty of soloing, but the solos never outstay their welcome, and much of the time the instrumental virtuosity is folded into the structure of the songs.
“Becoming Aware” is a hugely melodic record that represents a modern and forward-looking approach to progressive rock rather than a homage to decades past.
Touchstone have announced that Liam Holmes will be guesting on keys for their three Christmas shows at St Helens, The Borderline in London, and Bilston Robin 2.
The Heather Findlay band playing as an acoustic trio with Martin Ledger and Sarah Dean will be the support for all three dates, which Ghost Community also appearing on the bill for the final show at Bilston Robin 2.
From the solo project by RPWL guitarist Kalle Wallner, from the forthcoming album “Liquid”.
X Factor is the musical equivalent of the burning of the library of Alexandria.
A small modelling prohect that can hopefully be completed in relatively short period of time, a so-called “photo plank”. Given that my main layout remains devoid of scenery, this diorama-like scene provides a background for photos of rolling stock.
While it’s primary purpose is as a photographic prop, I’m building it to the dimensions of T-Trak’s standards, so that it could be incorporated into a working layout.
I don’t trust my carpentry skills to build the thing entirely out of ply and get the whole thing square. So I’m using a 2″ Woodlands Scenics subterrain foam board as the base with a 3/4″ riser to bring the height up to the 2 3/4″ specified in the T-Trak standards. The track is Kato Unitrack double-track. The completed module will be faced in 4mm ply which will bring the length to the 618mm of a T-Trak double mddule. I’ve got the material to build two, the plan is for one to be British-outline, the other Swiss.
This close-up without the edges of the module visible ought to hint at the way it will be used. Now I need to decide whether to build the British or the Swiss one first.
The results of the Hugo Awards were entirely predictable.
As a fan of Alastair Reynolds it’s disappointing that his novella “Slow Bullets” didn’t win, but at least it didn’t get no-awarded for the crime of having been nominated by the wrong people, something I feared might happen. But much as I’m a huge fan of his writing, it’s difficult to imagine the sort of story he writes ever winning a Hugo; it’s like expecting The Guardian to name a prog-metal record as its critics’ album of the year.
It’s also disappointing that Noah Ward beat Chuck Tingle, his “clown car crashing a sombre chapel” is a good antidote too much po-faced seriousness. And it’s a real shame that they chose to vote for No Award over Larry Elmore as Best Professional Artist for what seemed like purely political reasons.
The reactions are exactly as expected too. The left-leaning media are hailing it as a victory in sending the puppies packing, while Sad Puppy organisers past and present complain that Worldcon are circling the wagons to shut out anyone not of their tribe, and predict the Hugos will now slowly decline into irrelevance, with the newer and more broadly-based Dragons taking their place.
The fact that there was a sharp decline in voting this year, down by almost half from last year and actually less than the number of votes in the nomination round is quite significant. After the mass no-awarding of last year many of the people who wanted wider participation seem to have concluded there was no point throwing good money after bad, and didn’t buy supporting memberships for this year.
I have concluded two things about the Sad Puppies this year. First, by running recommended reading lists rather than explicit slates, none of which had five and only five nominations, Amanda Green and Kate Paulk are not guilty of serious wrongdoing. Second, by combination of lack of numbers and not voting in lockstep they had relatively little influence. It was Vox Day and his Rabid Puppies whose blatantly political list swept entire categories. This was just as true last year, though it suited agendas on both sides to pretend otherwise. But this year anyone who still conflates the Sad and Rabid Puppies has an agenda, and isn’t to be trusted. Damien Walter, I’m looking at you…
The Worldcon business committee have rightly ratified EPH, but unfortunately have passed a second proposal for Three Stage Voting (3SV), which sends out all the wrong signals. EPH, while promoted as defence against slates, is a politically-neutral proportional voting system. 3SV is explicitly about preserving the purity of the awards by gatekeeping out Bad People. It institutionalises tyranny of the majority, and almost guaranteed to be misused in the next fandom war which will be about something completely different.
As I’ve said before, Worldcon needs to make up its mind what what the Hugos are supposed to represent. Vox Day’s campaigns have given them two choices; either they open up the nominations to a wider audience and dilute his influence, or they circle the wagons to shut out outsiders. They appear to have chosen the latter. Will the Hugos now become the SFF equivalent of the CRS awards?
A couple of photos from the Swanage Railway taken in mid-August. Here’s the venerable T9 class 4-4-0 No 30120, dating from 1899 entering Corfe Castle station.
These locomotives were once top-link express locomotives. Unlike many other locomotives from that era they managed to make themselves useful on less glamourous local work long after they were displaced by larger and more powerful types in 20th century. They lasted until the 1960s, where 30120 was the last one running, the only example to survive.
The M7 class 0-4-4T No 30053 is almost as venerable, dating from Edwardian times. Like the T9, 30053 wears the 1950s British Railways livery of the final years of steam, matching the BR Mk1 coaches of the train.
One nice feature of the Swanage Railway is that all the locomotives and rolling stock running carries liveries from the same period; in contrast to the ahistorical mish-mash you tend to get on many other preserved lines. Bar the fact that the locomotives are spotlessly clean, you could be stepping back in time to about 1960.
According to JestersCourt, Twitter can fix Twitter with just a few lines of code
I don’t have inside knowledge of Twitter’s architecture, and so can’t really comment on whether a “few lines of code” is accurate, but the essence is this: When someone blocks you for whatever reason, you can’t @mention them in a Tweet. Whether you get an error, or it’s just silently deleted, the Tweet will go nowhere and won’t be seen by your followers.
That fixes the biggest single aspect of Twitter’s harassment problem, when someone with a large bully pulpit sets their followers on someone who’s incurred their wrath.
Unless there’s a flaw in the solution I haven’t see, it’s hard to see why Twitter doesn’t just go ahead in implement something along these lines. You’re forced to suspect that Jack Dorsey is less interested in solving Twitter’s actual problems than he is currying favour with particular activist cliques. In other words, virtual signalling trumps positive action.
The problem with Jester’s Court’s solution is it’s politically neutral. The same mechanism that would stop racist and sexist trolls would also damp down the witch hunts popular in social-justice circles. And because that would cramp the style of the people Jack Dorsey wants to curry favour with, it’s a non-starter; they have a weird “punching up/punching down” dynamic where it’s only defined as harassment if it’s a member of their outgroup targetting a member of their ingroup.
So instead Twitter seem to be going down the route of top-down content politicng and filtering by keywords known to be popular with outgroups. What could possibly go wrong?