O.W.

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For those who follow me on Facebook probably saw the regular status updates for the past two days so you would know I was in Pensacola, FL to see Nerd Invasion. After going to Nerdapalooza back in July as that was such an eye-opening experience, I wanted to get more of these kinds of events.

The problem is that unlike standard fandom conventions, I have to go on the road to other states to get my fix. It has been 5 years since I found something I've latched onto and want to go to as many events as possible. You don't need to worry about seeing me dropping San Japan to start up my own nerdcore show. Unlike with anime cons, these events don't bring in a lot of money. It is truly an extremely niche genre of music with very devoted fans. Unless you're one of the few big-name artists, people who perform are typically doing it for free or get a pittance to try to hock merch. A majority of the music is given away for free on websites and music artists who try to sell their music fully realize that their music is mostly pirated to be passed around amongst fans.

Now even thought I've already seen all the performing artists live at Nerdapalooza, I basically wanted a second helping. For this show, I cashed in a lot of my credit card & hotel points I earned from SJ to fly/stay for free. Tickets were only $10 so the only thing I needed to rent was a car and I was golden. I flew out of S.A. early Saturday morning and made it into Pensacola around 10am. I spent a few hours at the beach then checked into my hotel then made my way over to the venue. When I setup for this trip, I interrupted from the website that this was a 2-day event like Nerdapalooza. I would discover when being there it is actually a 1-day event from dusk to dawn. No big deal, I mainly came to just see the music so I knew was going to be a long fun evening. It would turn into a very long evening.

The venue was at Silver Screen Entertainment Complex. The best I can compare it to is a very ghetto version of the The Alamo Drafthouse. The good side was that if you didn't mind the gaudy aesthetics then you can eat cheap with all food being around $3-$6. The seats were small cushion seats that weren't bolted down so they just moved everything aside. However, due to scheduling and equipment issues, everything ran late. Very late. The event was supposed to start at 7pm. We didn't get inside until 7:45pm. The music events were supposed to start at 8:15pm. The first act didn't start until 10:15pm and all night they had to battle massive problems of screeching feedback from the wired mics and perform without monitors. It would be a test of patience for the fans.

While there were around 125-150 people who showed up for this event, it seems a vast majority came just to play Magic The Gathering, Tabletop or play video games. The music room next to it was fairly light except for the Scrub Club Records VS Battle and Schaffer The Darklord.

It started with the VS Battle with three musicians who were finalists in the battle to join Scrub Club Records. The winner was Southside who deserved it with great beats. The other performers in order were the following: Benjamin Bear, ZealouS1 (who I brought out to SJ2.x and recognized me there), Schaffer The Darklord, Dual Core, Scrub Club Records, Krondor Kew, Shael Riley and Marc with A C.

Instead of giving an individual breakdown of each artist, I'll just give the highlight reel version:

B.Bear busted out a guitar during his set. This was unexpected.

During the song "Headshot", Z1 rounded up most of the artists in the audience to help perform the chorus.

By the time Schaffer was going to be performing at the speed things were running, he wouldn't have performed until 5am so he got Dr. Awk to do a swap.

Schaffer briefly mention about having a rough summer as he kept pushing his new album 'Manslaughter' and during the last song of his set "Nerd Lust", he made an interesting change to the last stanza which in past would refer to his wife but not this time.

Kabuto The Python made a change to his Guy Fawkes mask so that you can actually hear him this time unlike at Nerdapalooza.

With the schedule change, Dr. Awkward was suppose to perform after Shael but since that would have been at an ungodly late, Dr. Awk just performed a few tracks from his new album during Scrub Club's slot then called it a night.

The major technical probs greatly affected Scrub Club's performance and you could see it on MadHatter's face. Two mics out of four kept messing up badly and during the set everyone started to sound like they were singing through megaphones.

By the time it got around for Krondor Krew to perform, it was already past 3am and the crowds started to thin out at that point. Only about 20-25 people stuck around to see everyone else perform.

When Shael Riley was setting up, someone noted that it looked like an MTV Unplugged set with a couple of condenser microphones with two laptops on the side.

The people who stuck around for Shael's performance were in for treat. At Nerdapalooza, Shael was robbed from performing his A-Game due to major tech issues so he wouldn't allow it this time. One laptop was dedicated to chiptune music and another laptop handled the mics, one for singing while the mic next to it would create a digital echo and distortion effect without being overpowering.

Since it was already 4am and just a few dozen people left in the room, we all brought up the chairs that were on the side up front to front of the stage. It was a slice of real nerd music. It was amazing to watch chiptunes mixed in with some great lyrics to give a memorable performance. Shael performed a mix of original and cover songs including a chiptune cover of "Margaritaville". It truly was the best way to end this show.

Marc With A C was performing in a separate section of the theater so when Shael ended his set I stuck around to see the second half of his performance. While the event was still going until noon, I went back to the hotel around 6am to crash hard. Next weekend, I do it all over again as I cashed in the rest of my points to head out to NerdPOW in Cincinnati.

It was a blast. I just hope that by the time Nerdapalooza 2010 rolls around which has been announced to be on Memorial Weekend (Edit: New date is now June 26th-27th. Ugh, 2 weeks before San Japan :3. I'll still try to make it out but puts me in a bind) at they have ample amount of wireless mics on-hand.

Tags: event, florida, music, nerd invasion, nerdcore, review

Current Location: Pensacola, Florida

Current Music: Nerdapalooza 2009 Live Sampler CD - Dual Core - Hostage Down

Many of you have participated in NaNoWriMo in the past. Not me. But now that ol' esmeralda_m has posted a few solid chapters of her planned novel I feel obligated to post something, if only as an excuse to point out esmeralda_m 's hard work (which in turn is an attempt to excuse not having read her posted chapters yet).

Anyway, I call my novel The Shakespeare Initiative. Why? Hell if I know. It's what I typed in as I was fiddling around with PyRoom (a program I'll get back to later). That sounds like a haphazard way to start a novel, but, well, it's a pretty haphazard novel, as you can see.

So it's not much of a start.

Anyway, back to PyRoom, the program you see in that screencap. It's a Linux text editor "without buttons, widgets, formatting options, menus and with only the minimum of required dialog windows, it doesn't have any distractions and lets you focus on writing and only writing." Problem is, focusing on writing evidently leads me to put down a stream of banal statements that are better left inside my noggin.

Anyhow, PyRoom is a great example of one of the best things about Linux: programs tend to do one thing and do them really well. There are programs out there with ugly and wonky interfaces, but there's also more than a few that are incredibly elegant and simple to use (Tasque and Tomboy Notes come to mind. The latter is available for Windows and highly recommended).

If you haven't guessed, I've been dabbling in Linux a bit. There's some great software available, the interface and features (at least in the GNOME desktop environment) are aesthetically pleasing and well designed, and most distributions come with a ton of great software on the disc. Compared to XP, it's a huuuuge step forward. It's like I'm finally stepping out of the dark ages of computing and trying a modern operating system for the first time.

On the other hand, I'm running into some problems with the newest release of Ubuntu. Firefox doesn't work well with Google Reader for some reason. That would be fine since I prefer Opera, but Opera hasn't been working well with Flash (or itself). But since Firefox is gimped, it's not like I can just give up on Opera or vice-versa. The default PDF reader made PDFs look grainy and washed out, which meant that if I had been more ambitious I would have rescanned the articles that I thought I had scanned improperly. The browser problems are the real show stoppers. I'm thinking about going back to XP until I can build a new rig. Once I have a new rig, this one can be turned into a box for testing various Linux distributions. Once I find one I like I'll switch over on my main rig.

Mind you, none of this means that I can do away with Windows forever. Right now I'm stuck emulating XP in Virtual Box just to use the awful Silverlight software that's necessary for watching streaming videos on Netflix. And needless to say, I'll be keeping a Windows partition for gaming -- which, relieved of the burden of being my main OS, will be sleek and powerful and ideal for gaming.

P.S. I don't actually hate Shakespeare. I don't know why I wrote that there. That said, my feelings about England throughout most of its history can best be described as ambivalent. My feelings about the England of today are easily summarized: contempt. Contempt for the chavs. The god damn chavs. Every young Britisher is a chav, as far as I'm concerned. And I don't like their accents. And if anyone thinks their English is better or purer, I object! I object strongly! According to Wikipedia, we NORTH AMERICANS speak the truest, most archaic English (just like Canadian Frenchmen speak the truest form of French, I reckon).

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Does anyone have an extra google wave invite they'd like to throw my way? pretty please? :))))

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