I've mentioned that I run a band in Lord of the Rings Online? Here's my first performance!

Mon, 14 Dec 2020 06:43:02 GMT

Tonight concluded Winterfest 2020, three days of 29 bands and I don't know how many songs. I had one of the prime slots: Friday night at 8pm! I have to admit, I was kind of disappointed at the turnout, but as it happens, it wasn't just Friday night: the entire weekend was much lower turnout than last year. I'd say the crowd was under half the size as 2019!

One hour of nonsense!

If you can't see the embedded video (which requires Javascript), this link will work:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/834781041

With the exception of the lyrics of the first song, done by my wife, and the lyrics to Greensleeves, I wrote all the lyrics. The music is done through converting MIDIs to a format called ABC. I basically mix music channels and assign them to the performers and what instrument they'll be using. It's just me running the band, I have automation software for loading the instruments then loading the song. The lyrics display is yet another program and set of complications.

The difference in speed in playing songs in the first half of the show is because the instrument/song loader closes the panel that has the lyrics in it! So EVERY STINKING TIME I have to reopen that panel, then reopen the song, click on the first line, THEN hit the Playstart button to start the song! As you saw, it takes 15-20 seconds to do that! When I didn't have talking or singing going on, and particularly if I wasn't changing narrators, I can pop off song after song because I can have the next song almost completely queued and ready to go while the current song is playing.

I put a HUGE amount of work into developing that performance. It's fully scripted, the script went through many minor revisions while I was rehearsing. Oh yes, you'd better believe I was rehearsing! Probably seven or eight full rehearsals to make sure I could bring it in under an hour! I couldn't think of how to safely expand the story, so I ended up cutting a song and making it shorter and bringing in all the Christmas music. I thought it made for a much nicer performance.

And that music made for more work! I had to find it, convert it, and test it before making it part of the show! But now that I've converted it, it's mine forever! After the holidays are over, I'll move them off into a holiday folder since I won't be playing them again until next year, but I will be thinking about them and looking for more songs to expand my library: it's now at about 820 songs, IIRC. And that's in one year!

For me, the best thing about that video: NO MORE IMPOSTER SYNDROME! I've never really seen myself play. The playback that I'm getting on my side of the computer is different than what everyone else gets. I'm running ten instances of the LOTRO program - and that takes a lot of horsepower and memory on my laptop! Fortunately it's beefy: it's designed for high-power gaming and has 32 gig of RAM, so it can take it. But what I hear is a little choppy and perhaps slightly out of sync. To be blunt, it kinda sucks.

But to see my entire performance, pushed by the game's servers, perfectly synchronized: WOW. It makes me look actually competent and skilled! I appear to know what I'm doing! I feel like I might actually - MAYBE - have deserved that prime time slot!

My very sincere thanks go to Teedee, the operator of the TwitchTV channel that this video is hosted on. She recorded the ENTIRE weekend, then after the evening was over, carved out all the individual band's performances and posted them! I was expecting to have to download the entire day's video and cut out mine, which is easily enough to do, and *BOOM* there's my video!

Definitely going to send her some money when I get paid Wednesday!

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Did some photography at the observatory last night, made a video of it today

Sat, 01 Jul 2017 20:46:30 GMT

This is 972 photographs, taken in aperture-priority mode at f4.5, ISO 1600 with an interval timer firing every second. The first frame was at 1/90th of a second, the final frames were 6 second exposures. The green light is many quadrillion photons of laser light on the secondary mirror on its way to retroreflectors on the moon.

I am REALLY enjoying my interval timer! Best inexpensive accessory that I've ever bought! Best expensive accessory would be my 17-40 zoom.

https://www.youtube.com/user/WayneWestPhotography

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Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

I've mentioned that I run a band in Lord of the Rings Online? Here's my first performance!

Did some photography at the observatory last night, made a video of it today