Embedded - BONUS: Your Cat's Not Part of the Band

Episode Date: June 18, 2021

On this quick bonus episode, Elecia and Christopher chat about their various recent projects, some of which have just been released into the wild. Christopher’s band 12AX7 just launched their album Kickstarter, which was selected as one of Kickstarter’s "Projects We Love”. Check it out here if you are interested in finding out more or backing it. It’ll run through July 16th at 10am Pacific Time. Elecia’s Embedded Online Conference talk on map files will be posted publicly on June 22nd, so be on the lookout for that. In the meantime, the slides and examples are available here at embedded.fm/blog/MapFiles (and on Github) If you’d like other Embedded merchandise such as a mug (many different options), Memory Map Land mousepad (or different poster), we have a Zazzle store. Her lightning talk about origami, Snails, Paper, and Programming: A Computational Approach to Mollusc Morphology in Origami, is already on Youtube and you can watch it now! Elecia’s origami github can be found here. Finally if you are interested in having your cat or cats appear in 12AX7’s upcoming music video, send Dropbox/Google Drive/iCloud/whatever links to your clips, along with how you’d like to be credited, to [e-mail]. Use the subject line “Cats for 12AX7”.

Welcome to Embedded. I am Alicia White, here with Christopher White. This is a bonus episode where we get to talk about a few of our projects finally hitting that release date. Yes, so if you don't want to hear about more music, or more origami, or more presentations, or merchandise merchandise or anything like that then we'll see you next week well I mean I hope they enjoyed Aaron's

well yeah yeah right alright go ahead so you have been a little anxious today that's I don't see how you can tell the difference honestly okay honestly I have been super anxious today

on your behalf because... Well, today was two days ago. Okay, cut that part. No, we're leaving it. So I hear you have a Kickstarter. Yes. Is it for something electronic? No.

Well, why would you do a Kickstarter? Because I don't do electronics projects. Okay. Christopher clearly has not figured this out. He has a Kickstarter for his album with 12AX7. It's my band with my brother. And it's surf and blues and progressive rock. It's a mix

of guitar rock. It's instrumental. And we've been working on it for a couple of years. And I've been talking about it on this year's podcast off and on. And I never really thought we'd actually release it. But this Kickstarter is for the release. And we're doing it. And it makes me very nervous

to put things out there that I've done and try to promote them and get people to listen or buy them. So that's why I'm nervous. And that makes sense. I mean, it's a line in the sand. It's a, I am done with this. I think this is good enough to share. And that's scary.

Yeah. And then there's the whole Kickstarterstarter aspect of give me money which chris and i are not that great at asking for money yeah yeah well and you know it's expensive to make a record there's not going to be this isn't like my ticket to buying a lot more instruments or anything it's not if you're only raising 2800 dollars which is it's to cover the production costs and the printing of the vinyl so you know it's it's we wanted to we've done records before with previous bands my brother and i uh but those were live bands and you know we got most of our gratification from doing music and having people respond to it from audiences dancing and then

coming up and saying you know thanks or whatever after a show uh it's harder with studio stuff because you can't really break through the the spotify the itunes thousands and millions of people out there um to get to get in front of people's ears um so it's been an experience trying to build this band up from nothing without a live component, which is difficult for a couple of reasons because it's a complicated band and there's only two of us, so we'd have to hire people. And for the last 18 months, of course, there's been no live music,

so there wasn't even a chance of that. So yeah, trying to get it out there. Making something physical seem like a good way to do it, something cool and physical that people could hold on to and say, I have this from this band that I like and this is their first thing. I don't know. Does that make any sense? Yes. So I hope people like it.

We're doing a couple different kinds of vinyl and some other fun stuff for add-ons. And if you go there and you think it's cool, then I appreciate your support. If you go there and you don't think it's cool, then want to encourage you to go to the Kickstarter page because Chris did all of the art and he did all of the video production. And the first real video production he had done was my talk for the Embedded Online Conference. And so this, I mean, the switch from I don't really know video to I can produce a video that looks really good. And the intro is just so awesome. So go look at the video. Because even if you don't want the music, it's just neat to see what you can learn with a dedicated decision that you want to learn something. I guess.

Yeah. So, you know, and the hard part is, and this is applicable widely, so this isn't just a pitch, but learning to promote stuff is hard. It's really hard. And, you know, there's all the social media aspect of it, which seems to be the way to do things these days.

I don't know how else you do it, right? Putting up a website today doesn't do anything. Nobody goes to websites. And radio is hard. If you put up a website on the internet with a bunch of cool stuff on it and then say nothing about it, no one will go to it. Not even robots. Yeah, and there's a lot of writing, you know, and for the promotional stuff, like saying, I've got something out here, what do you say about your own work? And how do you keep it fresh and not say the same thing over and over again? Because that's the other aspect of it, right? I feel like, okay, here it is, everybody. Here's something I did. Like it or hate it, but here's my announcement. I feel like I should be able to... Now you're done. I'm done. But no, you got to keep saying it because people miss the first one. It's, you know, Twitter scrolls by,

Instagram scrolls by, whatever. People think I'll look at it when I get home. Yeah. So you got to keep doing it and reminding people, which feels awkward and awful to me. Oh, so awkward. Because I feel like I'm browbeating people with myself. So finding new things to say

and not saying everything all at once, it's a challenge. And I don't like it really because I don't like saying things about my work. Well, and we're used to our work standing alone. You do it, people appreciate it. Your manager says, good job. And then you're like, okay, cool.

What's the next thing? As a contractor, they pay you and you know you've done a good job. Product comes out. Yeah. And your name's not on the product, but you can sit back and say, oh, well, I did. I was involved in that. This is more like, I don't know. There's no, you know, there's no buffer between me and the thing.

It's, this is, and it's a creative work too, which feels different. So, yeah, you know, so this is my electronics project, I said on, on Twitter. I don't do electronics projects. But a lot of electronics were used in the production. Yes. So I don't know what else to say about it, really. Well, we may come back to a couple of things. Okay.

But I wanted to say, you know, that Embedded Online Conference video, the Buried Treasure and Map Files, where I talk about how to use a memory map file, is going to be public as of Tuesday, July something. June something. 22nd. 22nd. June 22nd. It will be on embedded.fm slash blog slash map files. And I'll tweet it and have a link in this show. And the, I think it came out pretty well. Chris made me watch myself. It was so hard, but the talk I think was fun. People liked it.

And there's the map itself. That's like a Dungeons and Dragons style map. That's the takeaway part. So the talk goes over that. It goes over a few actual memory maps. And it goes over how to use the memory maps. So I hope you like that. The embedded online conference, seem to. And then I also put up another talk. This one, well, we talked about Bang Bang Con a couple of years ago, where it's 10 minute talks and they just go by really fast. And it's kind of fun. So

this year was an important year for our college reunion reunion which we didn't go to because you don't go anywhere right now and I suggested we do something similar to bang bang con where we we give 10 minute presentations and I really said this was in a long list of random suggestions because they didn't have any suggestions. And that was the one they took me up on. And then they said, well, can you do it? And I was like, no, all I had to do was do the suggestion. I'm the ideas person. Yeah.

I leave you to implement. Exactly. But then I was like, okay, fine. I was at this kind of position where I was like, I need to do more promotion, mostly of this show. And so I replied, sure. Okay, I will do a talk. Snails, Paper, and Programming. A Computational Approach to Mollusk Morphology in origami, which, I mean, come on, I made up the title because it's just, I mean.

It's pretty clearly deliberately overwrought. Yes, exactly. And then I had to write a talk to go with that title. And I went over mollusk morphology and how we talk about, how biologists talk about snails and shells. And I went over some of the math associated with making spirals. And then I showed pictures of paper snails. And it was 10 minutes of talk and about 25 minutes of information. And the slides probably should have been 35 minutes. But I didn't use all the slides. So there's bonus material on the slides, which are in GitHub. And there is a link to that on our website, embedded.fm slash blog slash snails.

Trying to make those cleverly named now. So, please check out snails if you want to know more. I did a collab with that. That's kind of like doing a Jupyter notebook where you can intersperse text and Python code. And so if you want to make your own snail patterns, you can. And I have gotten a request for making a video that shows how to fold them. The slides have sort of how to fold them, but it's after the end.

So I may make that video too. So that's what we've been up to. Oh, back to the map files talk. Cleo, Cleo A, if you are listening, please send me an email. Show it embedded.fm. You asked a really good question at the Embedded Conference, and I just wanted to say thank you, but didn't have a way to reach you. Let's see, what else do we have? Patreon.

We have one. If you are unaware that we have a Patreon, we do. For a buck or two a month, you can join our Slack, which is really fun. And people answer questions there that are really good. It's not always me. It's not even usually me. It's rarely us. But we're on there.

We do talk. It's a self-sustaining community. Yeah. It's a nice community. It's a fairly open and gentle community. And if it wasn't, we would put a stop to that. With violence? No.

The mallet of loving kindness. Ads. We'd like some. Yes, that would be nice if people paid us. But we might have some soon. You're on those emails, too. Yeah, but if... Look at me. You're in charge of advertising. I mean, you're on those emails, too. I have no additional information to share with you. All right, well, we may have ads soon. Yay.

And ad. And ad. But we would accept more. And merchandise. Merchandise. So after the maps talk, people wanted the file so they could make a poster. And the file is totally available.

But I asked a graphics designer friend where to get a poster made, and he suggested Society6. So I put it on Society6, and then somebody wanted it on a mouse pad. So I put it on Zazzle, on mouse pads, and on mugs, and on posters there too. And then I went ahead and made another mug with the last t-shirt design. So if you would like to show your embedded love, you can drink lots of coffee or... Gaze at the Flash Federation on your wall. That map was so fun to do.

It was ridiculously amusing. I think that's how to make a good talk, is to find something that just makes you laugh about it. And it made the whole talk, even the parts that I was like, I don't know, this seems dry. But since I was, yeah, the map file was funny. Oh, and you're wearing a cat shirt. Thank you for wearing a cat shirt.

That was the other thing I wanted to ask you about oh right so um i'm gonna announce this elsewhere but might as well announce it here well i can't because i haven't figured out how to get people to send me stuff yet well but by the time we put this up we'll have a link somewhere people okay will we anyway so here's here's the idea and we'll figure out how to get the clips to me. The idea is my band, 12AX7, who you might have heard of from earlier in the episode. Which recently has a Kickstarter. Which recently has a Kickstarter, which started on the 16th of June and is ending on the 16th of July at 10 a.m. Pacific time.

You can purchase a vast array of things from nothing to digital copies of the album to beautiful vinyl copies of the album to other junk. You can look at that at the Kickstarter link. Stickers, colored albums, if you want them to produce. You can force my brother and I into indentured servitude for a song. Yes. Or for educational purposes. Anyway, I also want to do a music video this month. And it's hard to do a produced music video in a month. But I had an idea for doing a kind of one that I could put together quickly. One of the songs on the record is called I Miss My Cats.

What is it like? It's kind of a straight ahead, not too up-tempo rock song with a nice melody. It's kind of a put your car top down and cruise in the afternoon along the coast song. Without feeling like you're blasting Metallica. But also not feeling like you're blasting Paul Simon. What kind of car are you driving? I'm driving like an early aughts Mustang. Okay, okay.

Anyway, the song is called I Miss My Cats. It's an instrumental. So, I mean, there's no song. There's nobody singing about their cats. But what am I talking about? Anyway, the music video. I would love it if listeners could send us fun little clips of their cats doing whatever, present cats or past cats. And I would piece those together around the music in a creative way,

and we'd have this whole kind of community music video for the song, and I'd thank everybody in the credits at the end, et cetera. So if you've got some clips of cats, you know, put them off to the side or send me a Dropbox link. If you've got Dropbox or a Google Drive link, and I'll collect them when they come in. Or I will set up some way for people to upload them before. It will be in the show notes.

Do you need them to be on green screen? No, but they could be whatever you want. I mean, green screen adds additional work for me. I have to figure out what to put in there, but whatever. No agenda. Just cats and music. No music. I have the music. The end of the agenda is cats and music. They're providing the cats, you're providing the music. No music. I have the music. Well, the end of the agenda is cats and music. They're providing the cats, you're providing the music. Correct.

And the video production. Yes. Okay. And no, you know, this isn't one of those, you know, it's just cat videos, so you're just going to get a credit. Your cat's not going to become famous? You're not part of the band, is what I'm saying. Your cat's not part of the band. what I'm saying. Your cat's not part of the band.

That's yes. So, so yeah. So if that sounds fun, you know, connect with us. Do you want them to be like the cats are doing something rhythmic? So you have a chance of,

or just, just funny. No, I don't care. I don't want to put restrictions on people. Cause you know, if something doesn't, if something's a five second clip,

I can use that in a place I can, I can arrange them in a collage. You know, I got to want to put restrictions on people. Because, you know, if something's a five-second clip, I can use that in a place. I can arrange them in a collage. You know, I'll come up with something. Okay. Just so, yeah. A little fun thing if you're interested in cats. No dogs. We don't have a song about dogs.

Yeah, what about? Dogs wearing cat costumes I probably would accept. All right. Well, that covers it. Cats wearing any costume, I would also accept because they're still cats. All right. What about dogs wearing cat costumes wearing other costumes? That's probably going to get you...

Bitten? Yeah, so I don't want to encourage people to do dangerous things. Yeah. Okay, well, I think that's it for our bonus episode. Thank you for listening to us blather about our projects. And the reason we're partially doing this is our schedule was such that we weren't going to have a Just Us episode for quite a while. Yeah, and I didn't want to take anything away from Aaron last week or Anitya next week. They have good stories on their own.

All right, thank you. We will talk to you soon. And please do check out Christopher's Kickstarter, because just the video, it makes me so happy. Please do check out the snail videos. Well, I mean, they were going to do that, of course. Oh. Much better at this whole self-image thing than I am.

Oh, it's just because the snail video was so funny. It's just so ridiculous. And it wasn't even the best one at the little conference because somebody, another mutter person cheated. So she's got sharks in her home aquarium was it like a twenty thousand dollar twenty thousand dollar gallon twenty thousand

gallon or forty eight thousand gallon 40 000 gallon tank with sharks in it yeah and so that's that's her background when she's on Zoom. She's got this giant aquarium. It's not even a fake background. It's actually behind her with sharks in it. Yes, it was really cool. I thought snails would be better. It's hard to beat that. Yeah, but sharks were better.

All right. All right. We've kept them. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye. you