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Archive for the ‘pirates’ Category

Alluring Swiper realised now that attacking an entire crew of pirates had been somewhat ambitious.
Sankmarray: Clouded Hearts (section two of about five). © 2009 Herm Baskerville, all rights reserved.

In other words: Part Two is complete, yay!

As of tonight, I've finished rewriting the short story I wrote last year, which is forming Part One of Sankmarray-the-Novel. Yep, the cheaty part is over. We're now in uncharted waters.

And to prevent myself from being show-stoppingly nervous about continuing to write in said uncharted waters, I made sure to write the first bit of Part Two before I stopped.

I'm now at 11,938 words. *writerly glow*

I'm aiming for roughly 2000 words a day, i.e. a 60k word book (because I hate messy numbers like 1667, and anyway Mews turned out at just over 60k, so there).

By that projected total and my current word count, I should be a fifth of the way through the story now. Since I've only just reached the end of Part One, and I don't know how long the other parts will turn out (or even how I'll end up dividing the rest of the plot outline into sections yet), I have no idea if this is accurate. It feels awfully odd that my 'short' story, with a lot of crap taken out and only a couple of thousand words added overall, is technically a fifth of a novel. But, well, to be honest, I suspect this is going to be a rather long book.

The first of two books, I remind myself…

I'll shortly be contacting the people who offered to alpha read and probably have no idea what they're letting themselves in for (er, well, Anke and Vespers probably do, so they really do have no excuse whatsoever). For the rest of you, there's a second excerpt up now at my NaNoWriMo profile. This one shows a little more of the worldbuilding, and a tiny bit of Roseeye, the piratical first mate, of whom I'm rather fond.

So, it's official: I'm doing NaNo this year (my profile), and it happens I have next week booked off from work (having had a lot of leave days to use up) to get a good head start.

My outline is shaping up but there are huge blank areas, and I'm no good at changing plots on the fly; in order to write easily, I have to have a rough outline nailed down. By tomorrow night. This is where you can help – and all you have to do is fill in the blank:

Well, Herm, knowing that you're going to write a very silly novel about pirates and ninjas (and dinosaurs and robots), I would be very disappointed if _____________ doesn't happen at some point!

When I finalise the outline, I'll make an honest attempt at working in all of your ideas that don't clash with what I've already decided. If they don't fit in the first book of the duology, they still might get into the second (particularly if they're ideas related to the dinosaur-men and the robots).

This is your chance to weasel your silly ideas into the Sankmarray Duology! You'll be doing us all a favour: me, by helping with the plot and giving me a challenge, and yourself and the rest of the world, by making it more fun to read.

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I spent me mornin' caressing an eager young thing's rump.

Finished by slippin' five pieces o' eight into her collection box, if ye knows what I mean.

Yarrrrrrrrr!

I'm dreading seeing today's Twitter digest. XD I got far too into the "competitive geek baiting" craze that was going round yesterday evening. Fantastic fun, and I even got a bite when I mentioned SEO and another when I dissed Dominic Armato. (No deed is too wretched for my evil evilness.)

However, I'm the only tweeter I saw who got onto Gilbert and Sullivan. This is sad. I thought G&S were as geek as Monty Python. Are we raising a new generation with no knowledge of their geek heritage?

This will not do. So, young ones, get your ears round this. Maths jokes in opera. With subtitles. I love subtitles.

Also, this. Geek hero ondashore! (Sadly, no subtitles. Frankly, it goes too fast for 'em.)

This is called a "patter song". Gilbert and Sullivan were famous for putting in particularly fast, intricate and witty songs for their comic baritone singers. They are often sung just after the character is introduced, so that the moment the patter baritone steps onstage he's met with raucous applause from fans who know what's coming up.

omg omg omg omg omg omg omgeekgasm.

squoo.

First sketch of Sankmarray ninja and pirate (crewpir, not king)

I'm not happy with the pirate — pe needs to be a bit more doggy as well as chimpy — and I still have no idea about head hair growth on either of 'em. Luckily you can't see the ninja's hair anyway, thanks to ner headscarf.

Petpet Park load test = slashdotted. There's a surprise…

…Oh my stars and tri-corner hat. This is possibly the greatest thing I've heard this week.

I found the CD on the stairs today after I got home. I assume Slen dropped it round for me. ♥

Wolves of the Sea with Caribbean Monkey Island stylings. If I could get horny, that would be making me very much so.

Tomorrow is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. I woke up to Rock Radio on my alarm clock as I usually do and noted that they were doing a pirate-themed breakfast show tomorrow.

Slen's band Pyroclasm (consisting of Slen and his mate John—name contributed by the illustrious Charlie Monterey!) has done a song about a pirate. I woke Slen up in great excitement and told him to call them up and try to get it played.

He has. They will.

So… tomorrow morning the breakfast show (06:00–09:00 UK time) is playing his song and interviewing him! Eeee! My baby brother on a good regional radio station! Talking about pirates! Everyone tune in (you can listen live on the Rock Radio site) and record it if you can!

OMFGSQUEE.

Somehow it's 21:55 now. I seem to have been all day editing and sorting photos, and I'd already started the job last week. Wow.

Slen and I booked last week off work to celebrate our unbrother Paul coming back from Ireland, go on loads of day trips and generally have ourselves a time. Well, the whole part where Paul was supposed to be with us didn't go according to plan, but Slen and I managed to do most of the activities I'd planned without his company—or his car.

Alton Towers, 2 June

Pirates are this year's thing at Alton Towers (site), the theme park in Stoke-on-Trent. They've opened a new themed area with battle galleons (which we considered, but it looked as though we'd get rather wet) and piratey shows and shops. These two swabs were found at the gift shop, where Slen also bought a swashbuckling t-shirt to wear at gigs. Yarr!

Also wonderful to hear was Slen bantering with one of the actors from the pirate show. I shall quote from memory.

Pirate (obviously noting Slen's long, unkempt hair and general dress sense): "Ye look like ye've just escaped someone's crew."
Slen: "Arr, I'm a mutineer and proud!"
Pirate: "Good, good. We need more like you around here."

Slen was wearing one of his T-shirts, which is black (of course it's black) and bears on the front, in pink Impact font, the message "Nobody knows I'm a lesbian". Slen is a man.

Pirate (seeing shirt): "Does nobody know that, then?"
Slen: "Aye, well, they do now."

We arrived early and got on Air, a newish rollercoaster, and also Nemesis, with minimal queueing. Queues and crowds were very slight all day, it being a school day.

On the Runaway Mine Train was what seemed to be a wedding party. Two of the girls, sitting ahead of us, were flirting with the operator… who proceeded to send us round four times. We found this awesome, but the young girl waiting at the head of the queue wasn't impressed. "We want to ride too, you meanies!" she shouted.

I got a picture of the pagoda from the Skyride cable cars. Here's Ripsaw, which we eschewed.

We went into the petting zoo for a while. They have a singing barn full of animatronic animals. Horsie and dog and horsie alone, taken with Altivo in mind. And the legendary singing hen—I'll let the captions on Flickr tell the story.

Since I last came, several years ago, they've turned the haunted house into a laser gun game. It's nowhere near as good. But check out the zombie and friend outside.

There were lots of ducks. (If you like mallards, here be more.)

Here are all the day's photos if you prefer to browse on your own or want to see what I've missed out.

Chester Zoo, 3 June

Best if you just look at the photos for this one. Our Chester Zoo trip

Our mother came with us on this trip and a good time was had by all. Tigers were fed in our view, as were lions, condors &c. A panda was distantly sighted. A plushie panda was bought, as was a black t-shirt with tigies on it (for gigs at which he doesn't play his pirate song, presumably). I got mad sunburn on my forearms, which is gently peeling even now.

In the evening we saw Sweeney Todd, the Sondheim musical. It was great. Loved the epic song at the end of Act 1, and also the opening of Act 2.

We didn't do anything on the 4th because of aforementioned difficulties acquiring transport and accomplice. (For the record, I'd planned Flamingo World in Yorkshire, with a production of The Sorcerer in the evening.)

Manchester, 5 June

In Manchester we saw the Lindow Man (wiki) at the Mancester Museum (site). Photography wouldn't have been welcomed, and besides, there wasn't much to see. You could spend some time listening to the audio interviews and reading the extra material. Honestly, though, it wasn't all that interesting (still, you can't beat the admission price).

Then we rushed off to Sportcity, which is a sporting arena and the Manchester City football club ground, to see the Chinese State Circus (site). They had a tent set up in the car park. It was a much smaller show, and less well attended, than I'd expected—but, again, it was a school day. We liked the Lion Dance, the diabolo handlers and the aerial silks.

The Monkey King ringmaster/announcer/clown was rather obviously miming along to pre-recorded dialogue, sometimes seeming to slip into miming the wrong language, which was cool because it made me wonder about all the other countries they must play in.

The wushu warriors were… good but brief. I recognised a lot of steps, but it was more of the showoff smashing of bricks and lying on spearpoints. I wanted to see more sparring and kicks! The beauty of the form was what made me fall in lub at first sight with this particular style of martial art. All in all it wasn't enough to make me want to take up classes again. (I quit because the instruction wasn't what I needed; not enough individual attention, and I just got nervous having to finish my kicks before the next guy could go. I wanted to learn, but in the end I don't find humiliation and stress fun in the slightest.)

We didn't have time to rush to the Lowry to see The 39 Steps stage adaptation, but that was ok because I had deliberately not booked tickets, not knowing when the circus would finish. Instead we went to the cinema and saw Doomsday (imdb), which is, well, completely freaking insane. Ha!

Birmingham, 6 June

On Friday we visited Cadbury World in Bournville. Cadbury World (site) is… chocolate themed. Very chocolate themed. It's part factory tour, part kiddy attraction.

Taking photos isn't allowed in the factory areas, but I got a few shots with bad flash in their 'history of chocolate' exhibition. Aztec calendar wheel, pirate ship (pirates are clearly the unofficial theme of this week) and fountain head thing.

These were in the shop. Just… what. :o (No, we didn't indulge.)

On the forecourt… was this thing. Rockin'.

In the evening we saw Return to the Forbidden Planet (wiki). It's a very, very awesome combination of Shakespeare, 1960s songs and campy sci-fi—honestly, I couldn't ask for anything more in a stage show.

A final note that all my photos on Flickr that are linked from this entry are licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial licence. (Or if they aren't, it's by mistake, so please let me know so I can change them.)

Connectivity issues at home seem to continue… please let me know if I've missed anything major in anyone's life or LiveJournal because I am unlikely to catch up anytime soon. If you've emailed me I'll try to get to it soon.

Theatrics

Other than that, this was a fun long weekend. On Saturday Slen and Paul hustled me out of the house in smug secrecy and we headed to the Lowry, where I discovered we were seeing… um. This, actually.

Yes, a Eurovision Song Contest parody musical. Absolutely [insane|hilarious]. I shall show you clips, although these are not from the performance and cast we saw. Here's the chavtastic UK entry, 'I Love to Love to Love (Love)'. And Hungary's 'Little Birds' ("Today I killed a chicken and ate its entrails. Mmm, entrails!").

Here also are the Russians with 'Ice Queen', which I'm sorry to say I recognised instantly as a rip on Northern Girl (er, what can I say, songs about ice really do it for me), and which also caused me to utter the line "In Soviet Russia, skirt rips you off", leaving the others in, um, stitches.

The source for Sweden's 'Same Old Song' is pretty obvious from the second you hear the opening piano line. Iceland… yes. Oh, and the 'German techno' is absolutely flipping adorable. Makes me want to hug the entirety of Germany. So that was that. Oh, and they have the mp3s on their site, downloadable under a Creative Commons licence, if you register.

Tonsorial

On Saturday morning I lost 45cm of hair from my head. Have had no difficulty adjusting to the short haircut. I keep forgetting I've had it cut, actually.

Don't ask for pics until I've trained it to lie back more successfully. At the moment the front keeps forming itself into curtains, despite wax, because my hair is very thick and soft and the last inch or so always curls.

I also do not know why the hairdresser gave me teddy-boy sideburns. (*may be exaggeration caused by Mutt not being used to it yet)

Eurovizh

Eurovision itself, well, bah. We've no choice now; it has to be a return to the judges system. I don't see why we should continue to fund a "how many borders have you got?" contest (or, indeed, a "please don't re-invade us" contest, as the guys'n'I called it) and none of the happy little bloc voters can afford to keep it afloat without Western Europe's backing. In practice the phone votes will have to stay because they raise so much money, but they should only make up a small part of the overall score.

The UK's entry was out of place. It was a real song, and a boring song (I didn't like it much), so I don't care that it did badly. What really has me steaming is that Latvia didn't place highly. What is not awesome about a bunch of smelly pirates?

(Digression: it has the word "wolves" in the title, causing me to wonder idly if Finnish Telecom's records would show about 80 votes for Latvia from Tony Kakko's number. Tony luvs wolves like I love pirate pandas and pickpocket pangolins.)

Well, no point getting steamed about the votes, though, because in the end the ones we liked (Finland, Greece* etc) go on our mix tape and hang the rest.

* My private version of this Greek chorus begins "My secret combination, it's 1 2 3 4" and you may be able to guess the rest. Also, "I'm not a little girl"? YES YOU ARE.

Giggage

Ohohoho. Speaking of pirate music, I don't think I've blogged yet about Slen's gig last Monday. It was a college gig; Slen was there supporting co-songwriter/co-guitarist John, who is the music student. (They met when both were on the lower version of the same course; John's now doing the further syllabus.) They played their pirate metal song, which is now called Captain Solerno, and a couple of others. They even had a tin-whistle player there for the woodwind line, which was cool.

What was awesome was that their pirate track was played on the radio (yes, I have proof! *clutches mp3*) earlier that day, with a plug for the gig.

The gig overall overran drastically because of the number of students playing. Slen's group didn't have the chance for a sound check beforehand so there was some faffing around before they could play. I can't listen to live music so I can't really say how it went, but I did my best to stir up the crowd by example during the "YARR!"s and suchlike. I also spent some time before writing out slips of paper with their email address on them to add to their sample CDs, then tried to pass those CDs out. I'm hilariously bad at this, really, but oh well, did the supportive sibling thing…

Their set seemed to go down pretty well, especially considering they were on late and running late, so that some of the smallish audience had already started leaving. They played Drunken Sailor for an impromptu encore (making it extremely lucky I'd taught John a couple of verses of it a few days back, ahem). Missed the last tram by far and had to get a taxi. Got home at 01:00 with work the next day. I am so metal. Well, except for the long hair, now.

blah

I've been doing more playing Pokémon than writing, down to general and/or ambient depression I think, but I hope to begin bucking that trend.

Also been eating badly for the same reasons. Hopefully now I'm back at work and online this too should sort itself out. I baked cookies today, they're really bad. So out of practice.

Looking forward to next week, when I'm going with the brothers to Chester Zoo (which has GUESS WHAT?) and Alton Towers. Don't know yet what we'll do with the other days.

I have a discovery to share with you all. It is Pirate Gangsta Rap.

In recent weeks, I've been listening to a lot of Captain Dan and the Scurvy Crew. They arre "the only rap crew with buccaneer technique" and their influences arre "davey jones, scurvy, hip hop, tupac, eminem, blackbeard, sailling" [sic]. It is, as one review says, all the attitudes of gangsta rap, 300 yearrs earlier. It is the best, nay, the only gangsta rap to which I have listened willingly. It is hilarious.

Highlights of the first album, Authentic Pirate Hip Hop, arre Flintlock Glock (the title alone…), Blackbeard's Treasure and the unabashedly misogynistic Round the Corner Sallies.

Here is the epic quest for Blackbeard's treasure. Die, Corsair!

As for the second album, Rimes of the Hip Hop Mariners, the title track is goofy fun, as is the timber-shiveringly detailed description of a keelhaul. We'll ignore what appears to be a song about World of Warcraft. But the winner, oh yes, has to be the rap battle between a shipful of pirates and the British Navy.

If that sounds delightful, listen to Broadside.

And finally, if rap isn't your thing, here's a more traditional kind of sea shanty. Very educational if you didn't know what Round the Corner Sallies are.

US orchestra conducted by robot

Universe twice as bright as known

Birdsong CD helps rescue starling

Zoo's escaped orangutan attacks keeper

Here's the thing I've been waffling on about. It's the first in what is threatening to be a series. Still rough, but it may be as polished as it gets for now.

Sankmarray 1: Contact

You'll quickly see why I was shy about showing it. It is very silly.

Gentle feedback is welcomed, the more specific the better. If more of this appeared, would you want to read?

Yes, it's a fictitious song not a poem. Deal with it. :) No, I've no tune in mind.

The Jolly Pirate Ship

as recorded by Sylvette Lastude in "Selected Folk Songs of Central and Eastern Terrimoire"

Call-response requiring two singers (or teams of singers), A and B, with chorus.

A: I saw a jolly pirate ship
(Sing solid, liquid, gas and sand)
B: And what was on that handsome tub?
(Sing liquid, gas and sand-oh)

A: The holds were filled with figs and limes,
all brought aboard from warmer climes.
It was a quirky pirate tub.
(Sing liquid, gas and sand-oh)

B: I saw a jolly pirate band
(Sing fluid, granule, ground and air)
A: And who was on that dauntless crew?
(Sing granule, ground and air-oh)

B: The crew was golds and goblins all,
adroit and hardy in a squall.
It was a motley pirate crew.
(Sing granule, ground and air-oh)

A: I saw a windblown pirate jack
(Sing vapour, droplet, stuff and gloop)
B: And what was on that flutt'ring flag?
(Sing droplet, stuff and gloop-oh)

A: It showed a smirking vixen red
with striped bandana on her head.
It was a crafty pirate flag.
(Sing droplet, stuff and gloop-oh)

B: I saw a scowling pirate king
(Sing grainies, water, ice and steam)
A: And tell me of this fearsome chief
(Sing water, ice and steam-oh)

B: He had three lemons in his grasp
and velvet cloak with silver clasp.
He was a strange feraisai chief.
(Sing water, ice and steam-oh)

Sylvette Lastude was a gentlesapient scholar in the mould of the more famous and gender-ambiguous Gery Illumin. As with all Lastude's recordings, of all possible iterations of the song, the version as written is the most likely never to be heard in real life. This is put down in large part to the effect of a pretty, prim and proper feraisai face on the vocabulary of your average young man in a pub.

In practice, the order of the refrains ("Sing fluid, granule, ground and air") depended entirely on which words the singers in question could remember.

edit: and there are minimal changes to make an Earthling version in the Livejournal mirror comments section.

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Yo ho! It's that day of the yaarrr again when I be breakin' out the Tom Smith. (mp3|lyrics)

(All ye litarrrate dogs who be readin' them Harrry Pottarrr books… avast!)

I be glad I be wearin' patches ovarrr both eyes sometimes, 'cauz if I'd been seein' Tom-lad's custom shanties much earrrlier this yearrr, I'd be lightarrr to the tune of more pieces of eight than a dyscalculic pirate can be countin'¹. It warms the barrrnacles of an old sea-dog's hearrrt.²

A small thing arrrived in the post for Diibarrr, so I can finally be sendin' off her trayshur parcel. Silence, ye lubbers! A pirate larrrfs at yer lily-livered organisationin'! The sea is a fickle, unpunctual mistress! Or… arr, somethin'.

Oh, I almost forgot. *brandishes cutlass* I hope ye have a boat waitin' for a quick escape!

¹ I'm not dyscalculic, but my theoretical pirate captain self is. Where there's doubt, monetary transactions tend to end up erring in Shaky-Hand Herman's favour. Tremor in a trigger finger — words gets around.
² As an aside, the Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise wins for giving that mental image flesh. Or CGI, anyway.

edit: YouTube has the best instructional videos.