DJ Wüdi

My Norwescon 47 Schedule

March 2, 2025 by Michael Hanscom

Promo image with art by Wayne Barlowe of an orange-tinted alien landscape, and the text, Norwescon 47: Through the Cosmic Telescope, April 17–20, 2025, DoubleTree by Hilton Seattle Airport, SeaTac, WA.

Norwescon 47 is coming up quick, and this year, in addition to my usual behind-the-scenes duties (website admin, social media admin, Philip K. Dick Award ceremony coordinator, assistant historian) and visible duties (Thursday night DJ, Philip K. Dick Award ceremony emcee), I’ll also be paneling!

Here’s my (tentative, but should be pretty solid) schedule for the con; any time not listed here when I’m not sleeping, I’ll likely be found wandering the convention, hanging out with people, getting into ridiculously geeky conversations, enjoying the costuming, and generally seeing what’s going on:

Thursday, 4/17

Thursday night dance setup (7–8 p.m.): Making sure the noise goes boom as it should.
Introduction to Fandom Dancing (8–9 p.m., Grand 3): Teaching people how to do things like the Time Warp, the Rasputin, the Thriller dance, and so on.
Thursday Night Dance: Star Trek vs. Star Wars (9 p.m.–1 a.m., Grand 3): I DJ. Noise goes boom! People boogie.

Friday, 4/18

A few Philip K. Dick award related things during the day.
Lifetime Dinner (5–7 p.m.): Munchies and chatting with other lifetime members, the guests of honor, and the Philip K. Dick award nominees.
Philip K. Dick Award Ceremony doors open (6:30 p.m., Grand 3): Welcoming all to the award ceremony.
Philip K. Dick Award Ceremony (7–8:30 p.m., Grand 3): Featuring readings of selections from the nominated works (read by their authors if attending) and the presentation of the the award.

Saturday, 4/19

Basics of Accessible Documents and Websites (7–8 p.m., Cascade 10): Aimed primarily at authors, especially if self-publishing, small publishers, but also for anyone distributing writing online. An overview of digital accessibility and tips on how to make sure that what is being published can be read by everyone, including readers with disabilities.

Weekly Notes: Feb 17-23, 2025

February 23, 2025February 23, 2025 by Michael Hanscom

🇺🇸 On Monday we took advantage of having the day off to hop the light rail into downtown Seattle and go to the Save the Civil Service / 50501 protest in front of the Federal building. Lots of people showed up, which was great (though I do wish we didn’t need to do this). I uploaded a Flickr album with photos of signs and the crowds.
🤖 I’ve added a short AI disclaimer for this blog to the sidebar. In short: No generative AI, traditional/iterative AI for video captions (first pass only, then manually reviewed and corrected before finalizing).

📸 Photos

Even at protests, I can get a little arty with my photos sometimes.

📝 Writing

I thought I found a bug with Feedbin’s RSS feeds…but nope!
I answered some questions about music in a blog meme.

📚 Reading

Finished three books (well…a graphic novel, a government pamphlet, and a magazine) this week:

Indiginerds, a graphic novel anthology.
The infamous Simple Sabotage Field Manual.
Clarkesworld Issue 221.

And I’ve started reading Lucy Worsley’s A Very British Murder. It’s good to get at least one non-fiction book in each year.

📺 Watching

Our current reality show is season 19 of Project Runway, and then we’re continuing to get caught up on Law & Order, Law & Order: SVU, and NCIS. All three of these shows are great for watching people having worse days than us. Scrubs continues to keep things a little light.
After a long pause, I picked back up with my ongoing project to watch all of Star Trek in chronological order (current progress 30.57% complete), and started season two of TNG. Two episodes in (“The Child” and “Where Silence Has Lease”), many, many to go.

🎧 Listening

I’m finally getting started practicing for DJing at Norwescon this year, and as always, I’m recording and posting my sessions. Here’s Difficult Listening Hour 2025.02.22. These are always random, seat-of-the-pants, unplanned sessions, so the song selections are a bit all over the place.
I also decided to sunset my DJ Wüdi blog (one gig and a few practice sessions a year doesn’t really need its own separate blog), and moved all of the posts that were there over onto this blog. All my mashups and mixes are now part of everything else here on Eclecticism.

🔗 Linking

The Nerd Capital of America: “Washington tops yet another list — this time for something that actually matters: full-throttle, no-holds-barred nerdery.” And this article doesn’t even mention Norwescon or Seattle Worldcon 2025!
Why Democrats Won’t Throw a Real Punch: “‘The Democrats have brought a lectern to a social media war.’ Masses of enraged, terrified people are looking at the analog, slow-motion leadership of Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer and the zero-calorie rhetoric of House leader Hakeem Jeffries and want them replaced by people who know how to fight.”
Airlines Challenge Biden-Era Wheelchair Accessibility Rule: “Some of the biggest US airlines are seeking to overturn a sweeping Biden administration rule that would impose higher standards for accommodating passengers with disabilities, particularly wheelchair users.”
It’s disappointing to learn that the horrible video of deportees in chains that the official White House X account posted was filmed here in Seattle at Boeing Field. I mean, I knew the flights had to go out from somewhere, but I guess I just assumed it would be someplace a little less blue. How depressingly naïve of me.
The ‘3.5% rule’: How a small minority can change the world: “Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.”
Here’s a site that tracks how much of Project 2025 has been implemented. Currently at 34%.

Difficult Listening Hour 2025.02.22

February 22, 2025February 22, 2025 by djwudi

Finally getting back to practicing before this year’s Norwescon! The usual randomness, slower for the first hour, faster for the final half hour.

Norwescon Thursday Dance Sneak Peek

February 3, 2025 by Michael Hanscom

Video still showing Star Trek's Enterprise behind graphics of audio being played.

My Thursday night dance at Norwescon is going to have a “Star Trek vs. Star Wars” theme, so I put together a video to play behind me of starship shots from the movies. I alternated clips between franchises, and most of them have been in the 10-20 second range; a few as short as 4, a few as long as 40.

In my alternating, when I made it up to the refit Enterprise reveal in The Motion Picture, you may be surprised to read that I restrained myself, and did not just drop the full eight-minute sequence in there.

Cutting out Kirk and Scotty’s reactions and some shots that are mostly spacedock scaffolding got it down to two minutes, fifty-one seconds.
I’m biased, and I’m not even sorry about it. 😆

Here’s a two-minute sneak peek (originally posted to Facebook, and so is silent so as not to run afoul of their automated audio copyright bots; feel free to listen to whatever audio you wish as you watch) of my background graphic setup for the Norwescon Thursday night dance. This will be playing on the big projection screen/video wall on the stage behind me.

The background video is 2 hours and 12 minutes of mixed Star Wars and Star Trek spaceship and battle shots (space and space ships only, no on-the-ground battles, so no Hoth or Endor). Two hours of that goes back and forth between Trek and Wars, but the last ten minutes is all Trek, because I was only pulling from the theatrical films, and there are two more Trek films than there are Wars films.

The “vinyl” platters at the top left and right automatically update with the cover art for whatever track is being played, and rotate as if they were actual turntables.

The waveform display at the top is live waveforms of the audio being played; the top waveform is the left turntable, the bottom is the right.

The title and artist of the currently playing track at the bottom automatically update.

The graphics on the t-shirt that the mini-cartoon-me is wearing randomly change every few seconds, with a selection of mostly (but not entirely) Trek or Wars themed images.

Some slightly more technical details for those who may be interested:

All the elements are assembled in OBS, and when I’m DJing, I’ll be pushing that video stream out to the the on-stage screen behind me.

The turntables and audio waveforms are pulled from djay Pro using OBS’s window capture feature, cropping down to the elements I need, playing with the color levels, and adding an alpha channel to turn dark/black pixels transparent. Cover art with dark/black pixels that become transparent is accounted for by placing the turntable graphics over PNGs of black circles to act as “platters” and black out the background video.

The “now playing” text also comes from djay Pro; in this case, djay Pro automatically creates a “now playing” text file, and I tell OBS to read and display that text file.

The Norwescon and DJ Wüdi logos are simple static PNG files.

The cartoon me is a static PNG file with a plain black shirt. I point OBS to a directory with small square white-on-black images that it randomly picks from on a five second rotation to create the “print” on the t-shirt.

Retro News: Gigs Music Theater Closes

June 9, 2024 by Michael Hanscom

A blast from the past — two news reports on the closing of Anchorage’s all-ages music venue Gigs Music Theater, in August of 1998. There’s even a quick shot of me (long-haired, shirtless, and muddy after the ¡TchKung! performance) DJing at the 1:56 mark.

A somewhat low-quality screengrab of a video clip of me DJing in 1998. The shot is from behind me over my right shoulder. I have long curly red hair dyed black at the ends. I'm not wearing a shirt, and I have red streaks of mud on my cheek and shoulder. I have one hand on the tempo control of a Numark CD DJ mixer. There is a rack of CDs to my left.

Thanks to Mark Romick and his daughter for recording these way back then, and then unearthing and uploading them (originally to the Facebook ’90s Anchorage Alternaculture group, then I copied the video to YouTube with Mark’s permission and added subtitles).

Norwescon 46 Thursday Dance: Fandom Mash with DJ Wüdi

February 22, 2025April 1, 2024 by djwudi

It’s the Thursday night dance! On our first evening venturing Into the Wylde, who knows what manner of fantastical beings we will encounter… or we will be? Mix-and-match from whatever outfits you brought for the weekend to create mashup costumes, or wear something to represent your fandom(s), and come down and dance to a mix of dance tracks across eras, convention favorites, and all manner of mashups and oddities, all brought to you by DJ Wüdi!