...someone wrote this interesting article about why sparkly vampires would actually make at least vague, heavily-suspension-of-disbelief-flavoured, evolutionary sense.

I hate to admit it, but this actually makes me kind of curious to know more about how vampires are thought to work in Twilight. 

You see, the thing is, I also wrote a story with vampires who are insectine-based. 

Naturally, mine are way scarier and more awesome, if I do say so myself:  

They have the gross insect mouth-parts happening, for instance.  They also appear as demonic insect beings on the astral plane: see here and here.  Light makes them hiss like cockroaches.

I doubt Twilight "tries" in the same way as this to "make" the vampires insectine, but still, the whole notion has caught my interest.

Of course, having brought that up, now I'm just picturing Grand Inquisitor Treacheris slaughtering various Twilight characters ("Sissy Mormons!  I'll show you real religion!"), but there you go.

While I'm on this, shameless plug: if you haven't read my novel, links to all the entries that make it up can be found here.  If you do want to read it (not that I expect that, as I know it's long and entails a lot of myspace-journal-reading in its current, first-draft-satisfactory-but-not-final-version state) maybe do it in the order that pages lists, or there might be spoilers in the vampire-related links above.  Similarly, because of how journaling normally works, if you try to read the story by going to characters' myspace pages, you'll just end up reading it in reverse chronological order, which is why I have the one page in the link I just gave that puts all the excerpts in the correct order.

I found this article about evolutionary psychology insights into the behaviour of underprivileged classes to be rather interesting. 

This article, about supposedly-human traits that have been found in animals, is also rather interesting.

These articles, along with an excellent book I read recently entitled "The Biological Roots of Human Nature" by Timothy Goldsmith, convince me that there really needs to be a clearer distinction between evolutionary psychology and evolutionary pop psychology.

Something kind of funny about the Hydra posters:

Mortal Kombat + Gears of War + Marvel villain organization = pure awesome

Go geekery!

This message will likely be posted to Facebook within the next while, but I thought I'd post it here as well just for the sake of further spreading information:

* * *

Good news and bad news: an official announcement from DJ Jinx

Hi everyone.  I have some good news and bad news for you.  As is usual with such things, I'll give you the two pieces of bad news first:

1. As of the July Chimera this coming week, we will be raising cover for all events that were previously $4 to $5. 
   
   While we have enjoyed over 4 successful years with Chimera, thanks to your patronage, a consequence of that success has been that as the event has grown, we have needed more helpers.  Furthermore, the workload of our volunteers has steadily increased. 
   
   I have therefore decided to convert all my regular volunteers into paid employees.  This is the only reason for raising the cover charge.  We thank you in advance for your understanding.
   


2. Due to low attendance, the Pandaemonium industrial/metal event on the 2nd Wednesday of each month has been cancelled.

Now the good news:

We will be replacing Pandaemonium with a new event called Hydra.  It will take place on what was formerly Pandaemonium's date, i.e. the second Wednesday of every month.  The first one will be on August 11.

Hydra is intended to be a sort of "industrial variety show," where every month we will have at least 3 different DJs and, occasionally, bands.  The schedule of who is playing when will be posted at http://www.angelsofdisruption.com/hydra/ as well as on Facebook, so you will be able to know ahead of time exactly when your favorite band or DJ is likely to be around and what genres they will be playing.

Cover for this event will be $5 when DJs are playing, and in most cases around $8 when bands are playing.

There will be two bands at the August Hydra, namely Promonium Jesters and Nanochrist, so the cover will be $8.  All other details are the same as our other events, i.e. it is at Soda, the show starts at 9 pm, etc.

Promonium Jesters have come to Calgary multiple times in the past, and have said that our city is one of their favorite places to tour, so if you like industrial-rock please come out and support them!  You can check out their music and Nanochrist's here:

http://promoniumjesters.bandcamp.com/
http://www.nanochrist.com/music.html

If you or someone you know is interested in playing at Hydra, either as a DJ or as a band, please contact DJ Jinx at dj_jinx@angelsofdisruption.com. 

That's all for now.  We hope to see you at Chimera on Thursday, July 29 and/or at Hydra on Wednesday, August 11. 

Thank you as always for your support,

- DJ Jinx

Conspiracy and Discordia both had great turn-outs, much better for a first event than either Chimera (whose first event was way back in 2006) or Pandaemonium.  All-told we had about 100 people in total.

For me, it was definitely a fun day but also a very long one.  Once 9 o'clock hit and the kids were kicked out of the club, I could not get my jagerbomb fast enough.

That helped me stay awake, but even more helpful on that front was the number of amusing moments that Discordia had.  For example, the bit where I went on the megaphone to say "this is a request, so I don't want to hear any bitching about how I played rap," only to have the dance floor get completely packed for... House of Pain (?!). 

See, I wasn't sure going into this whether my idea of "retro that I want to hear" (as opposed to "retro that I never want to hear again") matched that of the audience, so it was nice to see that there's apparently a fair bit more alignment there than I'd anticipated.  It's reassuring to know that the years of the Warehouse that I remember most fondly are not the "lame" years in the minds of those coming to Discordia.  I was all ready to adapt if so, and there is definitely still experimentation to be done on this front in the future.  But it's always nice to get a positive reaction right from the get-go.

Thanks to:

• arden_drake, cadredlight, darkenstein, diss_tress and mauler for helping out on the door, i.e. sharing this super-long day with me
• DJ Chameleon for guest DJing at Conspiracy
• Heroes and Villains for providing the piercing-and-tattoo-info-table at Conspiracy
• The awesome staff at Soda
• Everyone who made it out to show their support for the night

Here are the playlists for both events:

Before this month's Pandaemonium I had no idea that there was a Cannibal Corpse song I could tolerate, nor a Mayhem song that I actually like... let alone that the title of the song by Mayhem is "Chimera." I like how Pandaemonium has expanded my metal horizons.

That said, the turnout last night... left something to be desired.  I am increasingly thinking that this event is not passing the test of the market.  I haven't decided what to do about it yet, but something is going to need to be done, whether it is more promotion or a totally different event concept.  I'll make announcements once I decide exactly what to do next, but I doubt I'll have any news on this front until after Conspiracy / Discordia.  So if you hear any rumors before then, please disregard them.

Thanks to:

• cadredlight, darkenstein, diss_tress and mauler for helping out on the door
• Each of the several people who was at one point so enthusiastically rocking out on the dance floor
• The awesome staff at Soda
• Everyone who made it out to show their support for the night

Here is the playlist:

I opened a store on Zazzle for all the Angels of Disruption events.  You can check it out here.

And now that I've designed 9 different products tonight, and also created fliers to advertise the whole thing at Discordia and Conspiracy, I'm probably way too overstimulated to sleep, so Pandaemonium should be interesting tomorrow / later today.

That link I gave to the "periodic table of swearing" was broken - possibly due to Boing Boing overload - so here's the same thing on my own server.

Like I said: #97 (Icc) is awesome.  "International c*** circus" for the win!

Since this came up at tea the other day, here's the "BP Oilspill = DOOOOOMM!!" article. 

To quote the person I got this from: "I don't at all believe this is what is happening, but man would it ever make for a great plot for a disaster movie."

In unrelated news, the other day Boing Boing posted this periodic table of swearing.  It doesn't reflect actual elements, which puts it somewhat behind my appreciation for some other periodic-table-like-images I've seen (I saw posters awhile back of fruit and vegetable ones where the abbreviations were actually right, and I kinda wanted them for my kitchen) but it's organized on its own somewhat amusing principles, so that makes up for it.

In any case, I think #97 (Icc) is LOL-hilarious and needs to be used far more often.

While shopping around online for goth/industrial stores that might want to advertise with Chimera or other events of mine, I noticed that Art of Adornment posted a discount code - ADORNMENT15 - for ChicStar Retro Clothing. 

The latter store I think is going to cause some problems for me inasmuch as I want a good half of the jackets, skirts, dresses, etc. that they are selling.  Particularly since pretty much everything there is under $100, and a lot of it is even under $50.  Shipping looks reasonable too.

So perhaps some of the local dark-inclined ladies in the audience could help me narrow it down by taking a look and telling me if you get anything, so that we don't all show up wearing the same thing at some future point? I'm already curious to see whether the one choker I bought from Art of Adornment turns out to be something that diss_tress already has...

I also noticed that ChicStar has some sort of seemingly-ongoing thing, where they are wanting people to send them fashion designs with the possibility that these may be produced and sold to the public (with the designer name displayed on their website) at some time in the future.  I could think of a few of you who might be interested in that.