Practiced some today for getting ready for the Remora show on Saturday. Played bass instead of guitar for all the songs to try to beat up my fingers a little more & get them back up to snuff for the show (or at least as good as I get). Only a 30 minute set, which is good to know & I should be able to pull it off easily enough without embarrassing myself despite not having only done one intentional solo show in 2011.
I got out the promo emails to places about the Remora video. It’s interesting that I started my database for video promotion only 18 months ago & already 10% of the sites are gone & I imagine at least another 10% mostly defunct & 50% not actually useful. I guess I’ll just wait & see if anything happens. The video has gotten 40 more views (according to YouTube, but I don’t know if I trust there numbers as I here they may not count embedded views like when I post something in the blog or on Facebook which probably counts for half the views I might get for a video) listed since I sent out the email newsletter.
I added these little Facebook & Twitter follow things on the right column in the blog. Thanks to Christopher Maples for his help on that. So if you are on Facebook or Twitter & not following already, just click it. In other Facebook news, Facebook stopped pulling in my blog posts for some reason a couple of weeks ago & I wasn’t aware of it.
I’ve been talking to Jason Young about doing a new comic tentatively titled “Redwoods” that’s a derivative work from a single line in an issue of Cerebus. It’s about when trees ruled the earth & more or less destroyed it with nuclear bombs. Been doing some research for it actually to make it as close to canonical to Cerebus as I can. The back story is that intelligent redwoods detonated a bomb that causes a flood to wipe out civilization (starting with their own) every 12,000 years. So my idea is that the first issue will be about designing the weapon & it being seen as a weapon of peace & protection & salvation rather than destruction (because weapons are almost always created with the idea in mind of protecting either an individual or a country). I don’t even have in mind yet whether or not it is a one-shot or maybe an ongoing thing.
I got an email from a fan today thanking me for all the free content followed by a donation that covers almost an entire year of my webhosting. It feels pretty great when something like that happens. I think the thank you note is actually more powerful than the donation in the end. That said I’m always willing to take in some money to help keep Silber rolling. We’re actually running a little into the red this year (I haven’t kept my paperwork up to date enough to give an exact number, but we’ll probably be down by $1000 from the start of the year in part due to me catching the Small Life Form amp on fire ($200) & in part due to me going ahead & doing a physical release of the Remora even though I know physicals are on the way out & that the Remora albums have never sold well (which makes sense since in a certain way they get half the promotion of any other release as they only get what I do for every release & not the bonus of what band members do for a release)) & usually things are slightly in the black. So if anyone has any ideas for me doing special discounted sales to try to generate an end of year sales spike, let me know. My ideas are up at the sale page & the only thing I can think to add is a special where you get 50 mini-comics for $25 (presuming I can get one more mini done fairly soon as I only have 49).
Last Night’s Dreams (clearly about loneliness & alienation):
I’m at church in a line that you’d think would be for communion, but is actually for anointing with oil before death. Which I assume mean the end of the world is about to happen. When I get up to the priest, he fakes putting the oil cross on my forehead, not actually blessing me. & instead of saying the little prayer he says, “Go, just go.” & I leave the church starting to sweat & not understanding what is going on.
A friend of mine asks me to go out with her & a group of her friends to a bar. I tell her I don’t really want to go & she asks me why not & I tell her I just can’t deal with social situations where my roll is not clearly defined. She asks if my favorite Muppet was Doctor Honeydew. (For the record my favorite Muppet is Fozzie Bear.)
you should get a bassVI.
I probably should. But I’m lately not playing often enough to justify it & I don’t have any particular song ideas or recordings in mind that require it. Meanwhile I am thinking about a metal dobro because I do have some recording ideas that might require that. (I hear when you get a metal one that they are designed for single note playing & chords don’t blend together the way they do with a wooden body so the way I play with a heavy right hand hitting all six strings might sound interesting, but I’ve never even seen one except on the internet so I haven’t checked it out.)
you’d play everything you’d play on guitar on the VI except it will be thicker and more bowelvacating inducing.