The Revenge of The Nerd

A series of words and images about people with nerd pride.

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GAME OVER: The End of Mana Bar Melbourne

This week Skaidris and Bonnie discuss the final moments of Mana Bar Melbourne, read aloud some Mr Potato Head Erotic Fan Fiction, talk about the new bar, live streaming and discuss GTA V! Download the MP3 Here

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Live From The Basement

Our brave hosts Skaidris and Bonnie begin the search for a possible new location for a bar. Skai brags about his mad StreetPassing Skills we discuss our thoughts on Disney Infinity and Leeshi chimes in with her general disappointments.

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Mana Bar Infinity

On this weeks episode we talk about our vision of Mana Bar 2.0, Disney Infinity, Magic the Gathering and Payday 2! Download the MP3 Here

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Save Your Mana! The Return of The Revenge!

Well here we are! After taking a break from the Podcast game to kick up my game at Mana Bar for almost 2 years sadly Mana Bar Melbourne is closing down. What i'm looking to to here over the next month is try and restart the Podcast with the latest on what's happening with the Bar, Save Your Mana and the future of our community! Joined by the Trusty Bonnie Bradly we're going to have some fun, give away some free stuff and try and keep you all up to date on Geeky stuff happening in Melbourne! (Note the competition date mentioned in this episode has obviously been extended to the 22nd)

Download the MP3 here!

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Mana Bar Melbourne Facebook

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Oh you.

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MC Lars

I was lucky enough to get hold of Rapper MC Lars during his tour of the UK with Wheatus to talk about his upcoming Edgar Allen Poe EP, some of his inspirations, Nerdcore as a genre, religion and his tour in Australia later in the year.

Download the MP3 Here

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You can find MC Lars:

At his Website

On Twitter

and Facebook

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Zelda Universe

This week i talk with Cody Davies, the webmaster of Zelda Universe, one of the largest Legend of Zelda Fansites on the internet today.

We discuss the suspicious Zelda timeline, the fans, the Top Geek competition and the political history of the website.

You can vote for me in the Top Geek Competition here

You can find Cody on:

www.zeldauniverse.net

YouTube

Twitter

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Download the mp3 here

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Xena: Warrior Fandom

This episode i talk to professional Xena Cosplayer Kelly "Xena" Mitchell about what it's like to emotionally identify with fictional characters and also about what kinds of strong female/male/transgender and gay role models are on Television today.

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Find Kelly at www.ilovexena.com 

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Casey Jones The Movie

This week i chat with Polaris Banks the Director of Casey Jones, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles spin off film.

We discuss how to find Ninjas through Craigslist, the perils of making fan films, how cartoons in the 90's shaped us in our adulthood and what other comic book adaptations we would like to see brought to the silver screen.

Stay tuned for an intensely nerdy conversation about not only Ninja Turtles but Alternate Universe Batman, Spider-Man 2099, Ren & Stimpy, Gargoyles & the return of the Cyber Punk genre.

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Watch Casey Jones The Movie for free at:

www.caseyjonesthemovie.com

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Remove The Head and The Fun Wont Die

Humans VS Zombies is a week long epic Nerf powered Zombie Apocalypse game played throughout the world. Today i talked to Connor & Tim, 2 of the Melbourne organizers of the game to try and shed a bit of light on what the game actually is, how to best survive the Zombie Apocalypse and finding love in all the wrong places.

Download the Vanilla MP3 Podcast here or subscribe to it through iTunes here

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Alerting Nerds With Jeff Rubin

Jeff Rubin is a Comedian, Actor, Host & Writer known for his nerdy work with popular comedy website CollegeHumor.com & Jest.com

In the first official Revenge of The Nerd Podcast we discuss his career at College Humor, Doppleganger Economists and his own Podcast "The Jeff Rubin Jeff Rubin Show"

You can follow Jeff Rubin on: YouTube Twitter Tumblr College Humor 

Subscribe to The Revenge of The Nerd Podcast on iTunes to always keep up to date on the latest episodes.

You can also download the podcast here as MP3 

(Right Click Save As)

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The Nerd-Rock Blues With Blue Turtle Shell

Blue Turtle Shell are a 2-piece band based in Melbourne, I had a chat to band members Homan and Pip recently about the perils of being Nerdy Musicians in a town where being a musician alone is becoming increasingly difficult.

  So how would you guys describe what Blue Turtle Shell is?

Homan: Well I suppose I’d describe us as a kind of "somewhat whitty-pop-culture-acoustic-comedyish-geek/nerd rock band" meaning that basically we write quirky songs about pop culture, particularly videogames, TV shows and movies. There's a fair bit of incorporation of the music from our beloved geekdoms too, so when you put it together its kind of music written by geeks, for geeks.

Particularly the two geeks up on stage with the instruments

  Pip: I agree. Although a lot of inspiration comes from frustrating moments that can only be found in true geekdom, such as impossible Mario Kart tracks.

  So what kind songs do you guys play? What makes a song a "Nerd Rock" song?

Homan: Essentially “Nerd rock” is just that, songs revolve around nerdy things as opposed to the traditional way rock/pop songs are written. Instead of writing about fast cars and women we’ll write about Mario kart and David Tennant. We do it in a kind of tongue-in-cheek way, with a little tweak we could turn it into more of a straight up comedy act, I wouldn’t take it too seriously or anything. We can have a lot of fun with it, parodying pop and conventional songs with a healthy dose of geekery.

But that’s not to say that it doesn’t come from a bigger place, the thing I love most about writing geeky songs is that geeks are probably the most awesome type of people (in this geeks totally unbiased opinion ...totally ). They’re people who aren’t afraid to immerse themselves in what they are passionate about without being turned off by some oddly placed predetermined value of “cool”. Being "uncool" and not caring about what anyone else may think about it is probably one of the healthiest messages anyone could take to life. So if I can promote all that while writing as many love songs about David Tennant and Mario as I want, well... I couldn’t see myself doing anything else!

Do you guys find it difficult to find your audience? Or do you think your songs are accessible enough for anybody to get into?

 Homan: Immensely. I mean, don’t get me wrong, we try to make our shows fun and enjoyable for everyone and we are well received, even to a not so nerdy crowd, but at the end of the day our stuff is more tailored to a certain type of person and not in the way traditional bands might be tailored. Like if you’re a punk band you’d play punk bars, blues bands play blues festivals ect. But there are not a lot of geeky hangouts where geeky music would be appropriate, if you exclude the likes of conventions, which we are going to look in to, but it’s kind of a big jump for an unfamous band, so its unlikely that a con would invest in us without much of a following, so we're just going to have to try harder where we are for the moment!

  Well the live music scene in general is in really bad shape at the moment with live venues getting closed down left and right it's getting harder and harder to even find live music these days so the internet seems like the a logical platform for you.

 Homan: Some people have said that our kind of stuff is a lot more suited to YouTube and the like. I can definitely see their point; you would find a lot more of the pop culture audience online than in random pubs around Melbourne, but then comes the problem of getting noticed. Although there are some who have, you have to be really lucky to “make it big” on the internet since there is just so much content out there and a lot of it goes unseen. Along with that, being an ‘Internet Band’ also drops the live aspect, which as a musician would be terrible for me. I love performing far too much!

  So what’s the answer?

Homan: Ideally we should spread out stuff throughout the Internet while still playing shows to cover all bases, which is where we're sort of at now. We'll find our audience; it might just take a while! If we can't, well, I certainly don’t mind wasting my time on something I find so amazingly fun!

  Pip: I’m sure there are people out there who would make the effort to come and see bands like "Blue Turtle Shell" live, but it is hard to find the resources and advertising space for such an awesome group of people as nerd rock is still in its early days. Before now, being a nerd or geek was uncool. However, society is slowly growing to accept Nerd Rock and nerds can come out of hiding as pop culture and geek culture is finally being seen as a market that businesses can target. This may be the breakthrough needed for nerd rock.  

Homan: Blue Turtle Shell: Spearheading the nerd rock revolution!

At the very least, being something different to the countless other "normal" bands out there does sets us apart I spose, which is hard enough for bands. But that’s a bit of a double-edged sword. We just need people to give us a chance to geek-rock their worlds!

You can follow Blue Turtle Shell on: Facebook 

YouTube

Twitter

Sound Cloud

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Chiptunes 101 With Musician cTrix

Recently I caught up with Chip Musician cTrix at the Wah Wah Lounge in Melbourne to discuss what exactly Chiptunes is, how making music with old hardware can actually help with the creative process and his latest creation the gAtari.

How would you describe what Chip Music is?

Chip Music usually refers to taking an old gaming system from the 80’s or early 90’s and writing music for that platform.  Back in “the day” making music for a games console was a luxury that only game companies could partake in.  This was mainly due to the dev kits being exclusive and costing a fortune.  Now we’ve got whole online communities centred around reverse engineering the old hardware and opening them up for musicians to compose with.   We also have 20-30 more years of user interface experience so the programs being created now are much easier to use than back in the 80’s!  We are also able to push far beyond what the old software companies could do with their “background” music.  We’re making music that stands in the foreground and uses all the CPU and memory.  This is a huge shift forward for music on these platforms because “games music” generally meant being very careful with memory and always putting the game play and graphics as the primary focus.  So now we are focussing on just the music and taking things to a whole new level.   The chipmusic and demoscene community are constantly creating sounds you won’t have heard in a first generation game.  And that’s why we love it.  Chipmusic (in a nut shell) is geeks + old computers + online communities = good times!

What drew you to working in this medium? Were you interested in making music previous to this?

When I was 3 we got a first gen Commodore 64.  You had to type in commands to load programs so I started wondering what else I could do.  When I was maybe 5 or 6 I started making very simple music and sound routines by using BASIC.   You would “poke” parts of memory and it would make crazy sounds – then you could make loops and side number combinations around and have different oscillators doing different things.  Most of it was pretty simple and out of control, but I used to love it.  Later on I discovered the Amiga and it’s MOD format, also started visiting the local computer swap meet and discovered a family friend’s son ran a BBS.  Win!  I instantly began making music for the Amiga because at the time it was the best sounding computer and had a fully featured digital sampler at a time when the studio equivalent cost $4,000 - $5,000!!  The Amiga was THE machine that changed the sampling game because anyone at home could create remixes and original tunes.  Freeware was everywhere and you could reverse engineer peoples tunes to “leach” samples.  Then people started converting entire sample libraries from “studio” samplers so the quality of samples went though the roof.  It all sounded a little scratchy but no one cared. 

From here I got obsessed with the live music workstations of the late 90’s and started playing techno.  But the age of unstable software and plug-ins arrived in the early 2000’s and I got very jaded with the way music production was headed.  I was clinging onto to my aging techno gear but was being left behind.  So I guess Chip Music was a wonderful return to simplicity where nothing needed updating.  Ever.  I could access every part of the sound hardware and really perfect a tune.  Plus it hardly ever crashed and after a few years I discovered a wonderful bunch of people living locally who were doing the same thing.

Yeah; often having restricted tools for working on art with often helps give you direction.

Totally.  It becomes more of a craft rather than a bottomless pit of settings that you never quite get right.   3 or 4 channels of sounds and bugger all memory is the best way to keep it productive for me!

It seems with Chip Music it’s not so much a Genre as it is an instrument.  There are so many different types of music that people can play, for instance Anamanaguchi is more like Rock band, what would you consider the music you make to be if you had to class it as a genre?

I’ve always written heaps of styles of music.  What I didn’t mention before is that I also played in a Jazz band, the school orchestra, several metal bands so I’m all over the shop!  I play House, Drum ‘n’ Bass, Breaks, Prog Rock, Synth Rock and psytrance usually in the same show - so it’s more about the challenge of using the simplistic tools to write in those styles.   Luckily people let me get away with it!  But I think that’s a credit to the people who come to a chip show – they are generally very open minded.

So you’ve been around the world doing this during the past couple years.  What is the scene like in Australia compared to other countries that Chip Music is popular in like America and Japan? 

It’s a surprisingly similar vibe of smiling faces and excited crowds everywhere you go.  But here in Australia we are still evolving at a rapid pace and at every gig people are saying it’s their “first chiptune gig” . We are maybe where the Euro or American scene was 3-4 years ago.  So it’s very exciting times.  Australia is a little different in that we have a lot more coders, sound engineers and trained musicians involved.  Australia has a very diverse range of talent and we don’t have a single artist that sounds the same or is doing it just for the street cred.  It is actually quite easy to program up a tune on the Gameboy which has an underdeveloped theme and minimal substance.  But people here generally want to get to a solid level of skill down before jumping on stage.  This means showing each other drafts of songs and sitting down to help each other pull sets together.   So there is a lot of love behind the tracks you’ll hear here.  Plus everyone helps each other out with hardware mods and programmable carts, etc, as the equipment tends to be a little pricey and hard to get in Australia.

Well if the instruments have to be hand modified for somebody to get into it, that would limit Hipsters as they would need to learn the skills that nerds and programmers already have.

Actually, that’s part of the fun!  It’s not just nerds and coders.  It’s a whole community of people hanging out with differing interests.  Everyone in our community will help anyone write music with oldskool hardware and point people in the direction of good hardware and mods.  That’s the benefit coming to shows; it’s the best way to get into it and you get to meet artists over a few beers and inevitably end up hanging out.

It seems to me that in Australia there is a very tight community, everyone seems to know and support each other.

Yeah it’s funny that we all live in different states yet see each other quite a few times a year!  Most of us hang out in an IRC Channel together which helps everyone keep in touch.  Plus we have quite a few characters who are renound for their sense of humour on international forums.  Many of the Australian peeps have travelled the world together to events like Blip in New York and Japan and really care about chipmusic.  You can hear the heart and soul in their tracks.  This comes across in recordings and live shows plus inspires everyone involved to push their tracks as far as they can.

It’s very rare that a group of people are all banding together over an instrument and not a genre of music to the point where they will play gigs with each other despite the genre of music.

I guess?!  When someone decides they want to make chipmusic using the real hardware they have to find out how it works.  It’s not like you can call a helpline for something like LSDJ or Ninja Tracker – although there are some good intro videos online. (One of which I have made)  For some lesser used hardware you have to actively hunt down the people involved in that scene and there are only 1 or 2 places you can get info from.  So the community has grown naturally online through a shared passion and need to learn from each other.  People will often send their “RAM” dumps and source code to each other which is effectively sharing a complete break-down of a track.  There is so much to learn from seeing how other people work.  Even tonight I looked at Doy.AY’s Gameboy and didn’t know what was going on!  So I guess on the quest to learn how to make different sounds and push limits you end up digging each others tunes on a technical level and a composition level.

The fact that locally here people in Australia are making entirely different developments and sounds as compared to say other in Japan or America is really interesting.  To watch that sort of phenomenon happen up close is like a microcosm of world music. It’s similar as to how the way playing styles of the guitars developed in Ireland were entirely different to that of say South America. It’s fascinating to watch it happen live and in such recent history.

On top of that Australia has a very DIY approach.  Traditionally you would get on your Commodore 64 or your Gameboy and create your track with existing software but here you have people like little-scale who are pushing limits constantly.  In fact little-scale did a PHD that focused on building interfaces for chip music!  He’s developed cartridges for consoles like the Mega Drive, has built an interface for controlling the Commodore 64 from an iPhone App, built a push-rom sample cart for the Atari 2600 (to make it play digital audio), he built an entire Arduino based sampler and sequencer in a weekend just for fun then did a complete breakdown for people to see how it works!  Meanwhile Maddest Kings Alive is using custom made software when performing his tunes, and guys like 10k are doing hardcore thrash metal and pressing 5” records.  Then you have the demoscene guys coding complete voice synths on the C64 and new software for Atari Lynx.  We’re a country that has a tradition of doing lots with little 

On an international level it has all just happened at the right time I guess.  The availability of new hardware “workarounds” to get new code running on old consoles has meant anyone can get the building blocks to work on.  If you are interested in making Chip Music there are a plethora of cool hardware to get you started.   And now we have the internet to easily order and obtain parts.  Before this you’d get ASCii based schematics on a Diskmag (floppy in the mail!) or half baked instructions from a BBS that assumed you could solder and program chips.  I remember blowing up an LPT port back in the 90’s trying to make a C64 floppy transfer cable.  Now you just plug in an SD card adapter and turn the power on!  For additional modifications you now have Video streaming to take you though step by step and easily provide you with feedback if something isn’t working.   Chipmusic modding and dev has been going on since the 80’s but it’s only now that it’s broken free from a bunch of dedicated hardcore nerds who really need to be credited for the original ground work!

So tell us about the gAtari.  I’m assuming this classes as a mod?  What exactly is it?!

Ah.  The gAtari is one half my sense of humour, and another half a quest to make music on a classic piece of hardware.  The Atari 2600 was THE FIRST hugely successful play-ay-home games console.  More people had these than any other console in the early 80’s.  In fact it retailed in stores for 15 years which is unbelievable considering the advancements that happened around it.  Can you imagine if we were all still buying Play Station 1’s?! 

I was expecting to find a whole load of software for making music and to my great surprise I found virtually nothing.  There was this cart made a few years ago called the “Synthcart” which allowed you to play some preset beats and add a few notes in by button mashing - but that was it.  So I tracked down the coder of the Synthcart, Paul Slocum, and obtained some of the assembly code it was based around.  Luckily he’d a fantastic guy and shares his code for people to learn from.  Unfortunately the code involved making tracks with 0’s and 1’s - you had to write the music in binary!  But that was a great way to learn how the console ticked.

So to combat the binary I built a preview engine that used a PC to make Atari 2600 music.  This allowed me to experiment (usually at high tempos) pushing the sound limits of the unit and using all the memory I had... in this case 4kb.   The Atari by nature has very simple sound.  The official documentation written in the 70’s specifies very clearly that the Atari 2600 was not designed for making music! 

For the geeks out there it has 5 bits to define the pitch and 4 bits to define the sound “waveform”.  The sound starts at a square(ish) waveform and runs all the way to a chaotic loop of semi-noise which is still questionably tonal.  Meanwhile the pitch is 30khz divided by 2, 3, 4, 5 all the way up to 32 using the 5 bit register which means the tuning is atonal (aka. completely out of tune!) and also presents different tunings depending on what waveform you have selected.  So you do not have a scale like a piano or guitar – you have random frequencies where the spacing get dramatically wider the higher you go.

But it turns out you can make tunes with the notes available and I soon had a few tracks pulled together in software.  But then I needed an output from the Atari which meant building a translator to generate the assembly code required to run it on real hardware and spit out an EPROM image to “burn” onto a 4kb chip.   This then replaces the chip on a gaming cart but luckily someone had prefabbed a board so I didn’t have to deconstruct any Atari games!

Then I hit the problem that the Atari was from an era when televisions had no AV sockets!  It only had RF for old analogue televisions.  So I had to build an audio output by soldering onto to the main custom chip (called the Stella) and of course everything was at the wrong voltage and also lacked in bass hence I added an EQ pedal designed for slap bass players to boost that up.  Then added a delay pedal to hold and warp snippets of sound, then finally a joystick to access the parts of tunes.  This added up to a lot of gear to set up so instead of mounting it to a board the idea popped into my head that I should wear it.   And the gAtari was born!

The whole project took a year to get working but totally worth it.  At the end of the day it is fun for everyone involved – for me, and for the crowd.  And no one notices that the music is out of tune or there are only 2 notes played at once.  And it always breaks down, but usually I get it up and working again within a few minutes.

And I think that sums up the chipscene.  Yes, there is a lot of nerdy stuff happening behind the scenes at the forefront is a bunch of smiling musicians from all backgrounds of life who are there together having a good time and rocking out in their own way.  And everyone is invited to the party.

Anything to add? Plugs?

Yes!  If you haven’t been to a show then come on down to one.  Soundbytes in Melbourne, Pocket Music in Brissy, DeathRave in Sydney and of course Blip Festival which is happening in Melbourne in February (in Melbourne).

Website: ctrix.syntaxparty.org

Facebook: cTrix

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Meeting The Cast Of Doctor Who

The day before my recent trip to Melbourne Armageddon, I stumbled across an impromptu opportunity, I was told i could talk to "somebody who had been on Doctor Who" but i had to make my way into the city within 10 minutes if i wanted the interview.

I frantically ran around the house looking for something to record the interview on and was relieved to find my iPod Touch was charged and had a Voice Recording App built in, i grabbed the iPod, jumped on my motorbike and sped into the city.  I arrived at the Hotel and walked into the lobby in a daze i was ushered into a sitting room just out of the publics view and was sat down next to not 1 but 4 of Science Fictions greatest Vetrans, Sylvester McCoy (the seventh Doctor Who), Louise Jameson (Leela from the fourth Doctor Who), Morgan Sheppard (Star Trek, Mad Men and Doctor Who) and Mark Sheppard, who is not only Morgan’s son but has had starring roles in Battlestar Gallactica, Firefly, Supernatural and of course, Doctor Who.  Everyone is very polite as i take a seat and Sylvester Asks me "So, what did you want to talk about?" Fidgeting, having no idea what i was going to say and being extremely unprofessional i reached into my pocket and pull out my iPod, unlock it, fire up the App, slam it onto the table infront of myself and the best i could come up with was... 

So are you all fans of the new generation of Doctor Who?

Mark: Well, I’m in it!

Well, yes of course! What did you think of the Neil Gaiman episode, ‘The Doctor’s Wife’?

Mark: Loved it. In fact, my kids reviewed it and sent it to him. They thought it was wonderful. My six year old and 12 year old also reviewed several of his books, they totally got it. It’s wonderful how they got it because we were talking about this yesterday weren’t we (gestures to Sylvester). The physical embodiment of the Tardis is just an extraordinary concept for Neil to put into [the episode]. Certainly making her feminine was a beautiful choice.

I noticed he was tweeting a lot about it leading up to the episode about how he felt almost unworthy to be the one to insert this lore into the Doctor Who universe and to be the person who got to decide what the Tardis had been actually thinking this entire time…

Mark: Well, that’s why we reviewed it for him. It’s such a sacred thing to him. He loved the show. He knows every lyric, quote, chapter and verse of every incarnation of Doctor Who. He’s just a real big fan. Gaiman didn’t write ‘Who’ not knowing ‘Who’. Gaiman took two years to write it. He didn’t spend 20 minutes writing it, he didn’t just bang it away. You can tell the difference between the people who love it.

Louise: The fans own it now. I mean, my very first autograph as Leela was to a guy called Gary Russell. He knocked on my dressing room door and was very nervous. Now the guy writes for Doctor Who for a living.

(The conversation moves into how each of them were introduced to the Doctor Who universe)

Mark: They picked me for a very different reason to what they would have picked anyone else. I mean, I always wanted to be ‘Doctor Who’ there’s no question I wanted to be on it…

(Sylvester interjects) You always wanted to be a ‘Whoer’?

Mark: A ‘Whovian’?

Sylvester: Who invented the word ‘Whovian’? I doesn’t mean anything. It sounds American. I don’t know where it came from. I think they should be called ‘Whoers’ (everybody laughs) or ‘Hoovers’ is another good one.

Mark: I think ‘Whoers’ is going to get you into trouble with the BBC, Sylvester.

Louise: I like ‘Whoers’.

Sylvester: I’m an old ‘Whoer’.

Morgan: We’re not, we’re classically trained.

Sylveter: Well, I haven’t been trained in it. Mark why were you not on it when I was the Doctor?

Mark: Well I wasn’t old enough was I? I would of if I could! Russell taking it in one direction and having the bravery to put Chris Eccleston in it was genius to kick it off, David being what David is which is just fabulous, actually not my favourite Era but I think was absolutely essential to changing Doctor Who into what it is and Matt Smith is just something extraordinary (everybody nods) We were just saying the other day it’s incredible that somebody so young is playing somebody so old.”

Sylvester, as someone who’s played the role of the Doctor before what did you think about the choice of Matt Smith for the part?

Sylvester: Well, when I heard they were going to give it to a 12 year old I thought “he’s too young!”, but he turned out amazing. He’s got this face. It’s an alien face. It comes from another planet and it’s so expressive.

Louise: That entrance he made as the Doctor when he’s looking at his hair, and you’re just thinking ohhhh yeah, you’ve done it!

All four of you have worked on the Doctor Who franchise before, it’s amazing to see how much you all still care for and support it, you can see how much it's apart of your lives now.

Mark: “the fun of it is, I think it’s the love and the passion of which it’s done by and the audience can always tell when it’s void of love or cynical, but it’s not, weather there’s money there, it’s a bad time for a show or whatever you can tell when it’s got heart in it and I think Doctor Who now is something so special because people are able to express how much they love it while their making it and it’s a fabulous thing.”

After about half an hour of discussing “The Who” our discussion was cut short as they were swept off  for another media event to which I, unfortunately, was not invited. 

I left the hotel feeling slightly frazzled, Mark Sheppard as lovely as he was really is as intimidating as the characters he plays and i couldn't help but feel that he had figured me out as soon as i had opened my mouth, i think it's the gravely voice.

i chose to flee...