Posts Tagged: ‘Jonathan Coulton’
5 Questions for Stephen Torrence, ASL Singer & Jonathan Coulton Fan
by Tracy V. Wilson | September 1, 2009
This summer, a broken knee prompted me to spend a whole lot of time on the couch with my laptop. That’s how, one weekend morning while trying to alleviate my boredom with some Jonathan Coulton-inspired machinima, I stumbled across something delightful on YouTube. It was a sign language video of “First of May,” the NS-est of all potentially NSFW Jonathan Coulton songs.
But that wasn’t the most delightful part — the most delightful part was that there were more.
I caught up with Stephen Torrence, who created these videos, last week for a FanStuff interview. He reminds me of Charlie Ross of One Man Star Wars fame — both of them are smart, creative and funny, and they have more interesting things to say than I have room to print. So, I’m splitting my interview with Stephen up into two posts. Today’s post is the “why” part of my talk with Stephen, and tomorrow’s is the “how.”
TechStuff’s Jonathan Strickland pointed me to a feature in Wired today — Cybraphon, the robot band that gets gloomy when it’s not the center of attention. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and an antique galvanometer are all part of Cybraphon’s ability to figure out whether it’s popular at the moment and change its tune accordingly.
It’s an idea as delightful to me as music played on Tesla coils, so it seemed like a good time to follow up on last week’s post on geeky ways to make music — this time with robots. (No, Data doesn’t count, since he is both fictional and an android.) We’ll start with a look at Cybraphon’s demo song — there’s also a whole Cybraphon channel at YouTube.
I’m a huge introvert, but I still think there’s something tremendously cool about being part of an audience of fans … the more devoted, the better. This weekend’s trek to see Paul and Storm and Jonathan Coulton was definitely no exception. My overall analysis is that these are some of the best fans ever, although since I’m basing that on exactly one concert, my results are in no way statistically significant. (I’m also muddying things up by lumping all the fans into one bucket, but since there’s a lot of overlap in the Venn diagram of JoCo and Paul and Storm fans, it’s probably not that big a deal, right?)
One of the things on my to-do list this weekend is seeing Jonathan Coulton and Paul and Storm at Atlanta’s Variety Playhouse on Saturday. My introduction to JoCo was that “Code Monkey”/”World of Warcraft” machinima that made the rounds a few years back. I was hooked … but it’s not just the music. Here are my top 5 awesome things about JoCo.
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