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On a Podcast

Well, it was a rainy, cold, shitty weather weekend, but on Sunday I had a really good time talking to David Thornton for his Luchaskate podcast. I’ll post up a link when it comes out on New Years Day. It was fun being on the “other side” of the process, and just talk and have fun with a good conversation. David is a smart guy – a writer – so he’d done some research and was prepared to talk about freestyle.

Toward the end of the recording session, we talked about bearing spacers. I hope that isn’t too boring. If he cuts it out, I totally understand. I used to think bearing spacers was the most nerdy pet-peeve to be obsessed with. Then I met slalom skaters. I felt better about myself.

2015-12-22 20.27.12Oh, so last week I went to practice freestyle in a parking garage. I skated for less than five minutes and broke my rear kingpin. I had just replaced it back in September. My trucks were really tight. I fixed it yesterday, and changed to a softer bottom bushing and soft risers.

Wish the weather was better. Winter kind of sucks. On the other hand, I enjoy sitting in my warm house and being warm, reading, and getting fat.

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Common Criminals

Over the last year I’ve been communicating with two guys who write about skateboarding. It’s been very enjoyable, since I do the same thing.

First dude is Kyle Duval, of the Parking Block Diaries. Kyle writes for the Ride Channel. He is, arguably, the only person who produces quality content there. Five months ago he interviewed me for an article about Skate Zines, since I am co-publisher of Broken Fingers freestyle skateboarding zine. The article was finally released yesterday — here it is. Kyle did a really good job of assembling a number of interviews into a coherent, readable article of significant length. I’m glad to have been a part of it. Thanks, Kyle!

The other guy is David Thornton, of Luchaskate.com. David writes, and also produces a Luchaskate podcast. We’ve been corresponding a bit, and it’s been fun. I while back he published a book called “Common Criminals” – an anthology of skate stories mostly by common skaters. It’s a quick read and enjoyable. I read it on my Kindle, but will get a hard copy for my collection.

 

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Bleep Drum

I finally built my Bleep Drum.

It took a while. The original audio jack was defective. So to change it out, I had to wire it (as I lack the tools or knowledge for removing solder from the board).

So it looks like crap. But it works. I may see if I can clean it up and make it look better. It didn’t help that months ago when I started working on it, not only did the audio jack suck, but I managed to lose two tiny capacitors in my garage. So it sat for a long time unfinished. I even lost the little bolts to fasten the top into the support legs.

IMG_0794What I’m saying it this: this has been the worst of the Bleep Labs projects I’ve built — and the fault really is mostly mine. On the bright side, the work I did today improved my soldering skills quite a bit. The Pico Paso and the Nebulophone turned out really well. I think I might have gotten in a bit of a rush on this months ago.

I have no idea if the MIDI jack works or not. Those are the two capacitors I lost, and I got the replacements about 3 months ago. So I don’t even know if I got the right ones in the right place. They are so damned small they really have no markings.

EDIT: been looking at methods of removing solder from the little holes in the board, so I can put the new audio jack on properly. Gonna give it a try. If I messed up the MIDI interface I’ll just order a new one – it isn’t expensive.

Here’s my first experiment.

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Super Simple

Last weekend I got together with my old college friends, all good musicians, to jam as the improvisational super group Sleezure. My friends are nice to let me hang around and make noise. They are all great musicians, and I am a hack, but they don’t seem to mind.  It is much appreciated! So fun!

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EZ-7

If the weather on Saturday, November 28 is good (or at least not wet) in Houston, I will be going to the EZ-7 Turkey Jam ditch skating contest and jam.

It has been many years since I’ve been. Probably 11 or 12. Seems like the last couple of times I went it got rained out, which is always a bummer. But I’m going to give it a shot this year.

EZ-7 is one of the oldest and most classic of Texas skate spots. It’s a drainage ditch in a public park that empties into one of those massive flood control ditches that runs through Houston. It is surrounded by grassy berms, on which skaters and families hang out and have a good time. It’s about as grass-roots as you get, and reminds me a lot of the atmosphere of the Paderborn, Germany freestyle contest. The City of Houston, or the County, or some entity of authority has actually decreed EZ-7 an official skatepark, which is bloody amazing. Yep – it’s all legal and good.

I really need this. I need to bath in the reviving waters of Texas skateboarding. I need to skate with friends, take my runs, not care who “wins” because it is all such a blast that no one cares and everybody leaves fully stoked and powered up for more skating!

I’m planning a trip to Belton to skate Chuck’s ditch and other spots with my friend Mike, the week before the Turkey Jam.

ez7_fulldesktop

 

For me, ditches and banks are really the best form of skating other than freestyle. I love freestyle – it is really what I prefer to skate – but let’s face it, sometimes one needs to carve, and grind, and ride walls. Flat-walled ditches and banks offer the best variety of moves. You can adapt vert, street, or freestyle tricks to them, and there are some tricks that are really best done on banks. I have more fun at places like EZ-7, the little bitty Glenville ditch where I usually skate, or even a simple banked wall or driveway, than I ever have at a modern skatepark.

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Traveller

Back when I was in junior high and highschool, when we weren’t playing D&D we were usually playing Traveller.

travellerTraveller was (is) a space role playing game. Characters are generated by random dice rolls, and gain their initial skill by having been in some kind of military service or the “merchant marines”. During character creation, you can keep your character in the service for many tours of duty to gain more skills, but there is a chance you may DIE during character creation! hahahaha.

The original rules for Traveller were pretty sparse. The game came in a little box, with 3 books – Characters, Starships, and Worlds. There were a LOT of supplements. It was cool. There was a Naval supplement called High Guard. Think of Han Solo having a pilot skill of 3 or 4. We’d roll up High Guard characters with Pilot-8. Hell yeah.

But of course, we were 15 or 16. Most of our games involved:

  1. Arrive on new planet in our ultra fast starship (think Millenium Falcon, just faster).
  2. Find gun shop (never hard to do).
  3. Force gun shop owner to reveal the hidden room where all that really good stuff was.
  4. Buy the most powerful weapons they had (clearly, our games foretold the future of our country).
  5. Get in a fight in a cantina (this was the Star Wars era).
  6. Use previously acquired weapons (needler guns, plasma rifles, etc) to commit a mass murder in “self defense” (we never really thought it would seem odd to bring a plasma rifle into a bar – open carry bro!).
  7. Run back to the ship, killing more peope on the way (yaaaaaay!)
  8. Make our escape (wheeeeeeee!)
  9. Maybe blow up some ships that might be chasing us (yaaaaaaay! again!)
  10. Start looking for another planet on which to repeat this process. (Isn’t the imagination great!)

All of this was of course enabled by a very generous Game Master, who loved guns even more than we did.  I was never sure he actually knew the rules, minimal as they were. “Roll three dice” he would say, and then quickly consider the roll to determine our success or failure based on who-knows-what criteria. Things usually went our way.

Once I tried running a Traveller session. My idea was a hunting expedition on an alien world. The PCs would be hired to hunt down a very large beast that was causing problems. I envisioned a great jungle adventure to kill the giganitic elephant-like beast. Instead, the PCs hired a helicopter, and shot the monster to death from high above its head.

Job done. Bounty collected. On to the next mass murder.

Good times.

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Coming up – Post 600

I’m almost to post 600 on this blog. This one is post 597.

Post 600 will have to be a real work of art.

So I guess this post needs to be about something.

Last night we went to a small art show and panel discussion downtown about the notion of “chirality” and its use in art. Chirality is a term you see in some scientific fields, like chemistry. Anyway, it was smart people talking about smart people stuff, brainstorming weird art/aesthetic stuff, some of which was perhaps somewhat “out there” but nevertheless interesting. I was the troglodyte sitting there nodding like I understood. You can’t come up with new ideas without throwing a lot of stuff around. One of the “pieces” (GAAAAHHHH – I’m using “quotation marks” a lot today) was a very cool interactive video installation. Dude wrote code to switch a projector between front and rear webcams at about 30 frames per second. The result was that you saw yourself on screen from front and back at the same time, due to your brain’s integration of the rapidly changing image. It had an odd flutter, and some color manipulation as well. It was cool.

One of the artists was one of those guys who is either going to be a famous genius or the crazy guy you see walking down the street with a piece of string hanging out his mouth.

One piece of social commentary here (actually, it’s mild sarcastic negativity thinly disguised as social commentary): is the messy mountain man/crazy person beard played-out yet? I’m not sure, but let me know right before it is, because razor sales are gonna explode and I want to buy some stock.

Anyway, it was a really fun evening.

5 seconds. #graymattersgallery

A video posted by Toni (@indigocrush) on

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Skating

Went skating last night. Fun. My friend Dale moved back here, so we’ll be skating together a lot now, which is great! Early sundowns now forced us to the skatepark in McKinney. It has a little “ditch” style run, which is fun to carve around in, though for some reason I find the walls mostly too low to really do any tricks. I guess I need to start riding the lower end a bit more, where the walls are of a reasonable height. Nice thing — at least he walls are mostly flat.

Rode a board I bought last year for the first time. A Cockfight Skateboards Dave “Shaggy” Palmer model. 8.75″ wide, but with the nice curved sides you can run some 149 trucks on it and they fit perfectly. I like to use 149s when I can, as they are more responsive than wider trucks.

Of course, half the fun of the evening was just talking with Dale as we drove and skated. Always fun. Lots of plans for skating and projects.

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the Weekend Report

It rained all weekend. So no skating.

Other than that, not a bad weekend.

Aikido on Saturday, and taught kids class as usual. Adult class was strenuous, which is good. Friend’s birthday party Saturday night.

Sunday – took my mom to church. Then later she and I went to a person’s house who had contacted me earlier in the week. A retired military guy, he had been an officer at Camp Leonard Wood when my dad was in basic training for the National Guard. It seems that as a former minor league baseball player, my dad and his brother spent most of their time playing on the camp baseball team. This guy had a baseball that both of them had signed, which he wished me to have. So that was very cool. I appreciate his thought and kindness, and the baseball will stay in our family.

Then last night we went to Master Pancake Theater, a live version of Mystery Science Theater 3000, done periodically at the Alamo Drafthouse by 3 or 4 very funny people. They spoofed The Exorcist. For a movie that scared the hell out of everyone when it came out, I have to say it isn’t very scarey now. But it was fun.