MuseBlog

Beforehand: What are your plans for the day? What sort of foolery do you have in the works? How will you avoid becoming an April Fool yourself?

Afterward: Well? How did it go?

(By special request of our New Zealand friends at Muse Academy South, for whom days start earlier than they do in blog time.)

For communicating in other languages and in variants of this one.

Long-term MBer Lizzie sent us three sound files of her playing the violin. It took us several days to convert them to blog-friendly format (sorry, Lizzie), but here they are at last: Part 1, Part 2, and Cadenza.

Here’s Lizzie’s description:

A few months ago, I asked the blog if anyone would be interested in
hearing a recording of my playing. Several people responded
positively, so I went off and recorded me playing the concerto I was
working on at the time, which was the first movement of Paganini
Concerto no. 1. Since the piece is about 20 minutes long and really
hard to play through well at one sitting, I split it into three parts
(the first part, the part that comes after that and approx. 50
measures of rest, and the cadenza that comes after the second part).
Hopefully, I included them all in attachments in a format that you can
open / post. The first part is probably the best, the second part
contains some really cool parts that may, alas, be slightly out of
tune (or more than slightly, but hey, I’m still a student, and I’m
getting better), and the third part the hardest and most showy (Sauret
cadenza. I swear, that man must have had a horrible childhood or
something, and had this unresolved grudge against the world of
violin-playing, and decided to get it out by writing the hardest, most
evil cadenza he could think of).

During last week’s Muserly get-together, Alice, Cat’s Meow, and IBCF — all loyal members of Muse Academy’s Spector House — recorded themselves singing the house song (with lyrics by POSOC). You can hear an MP3 file of the performance by clicking right here.

WARNING! Will definitely contain spoilers!

To spare MBers reading the “Recent Comments” columns, please paste the following message in at the beginning of your posts:

SPOILER SPOILER APRIL MUSE SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER.

(Remember to include the period, for the benefit of the sidebar.)

Let us know when your issue arrives. NO SPOILERS, please. There’s another thread for discussing the issue.

Good news: The online store Amazon.com has just announced that Muse is its top-ranked magazine as judged by readers’ reviews. You can read the reviews yourself by clicking here and can even post your own, if you haven’t already.

By special request of KaiYves, during our sojourn on the “Muse Academy” blog.

MuseBlog’s host company, DreamHost, seems to have solved its server problems, so it looks safe to post here again.

Meanwhile, those of you who missed the overnight-and-morning excitement should know that we’ve instituted a “lifeboat blog” that MBers can move to whenever MuseBlog goes offline. Called “Muse Academy,” it’s at http://museacademy.wordpress.com. We just threw it together and made it up as we went, but it kept us all occupied and communicating when the chips were down. We’ll leave the threads open for a little while just in case.

Whew! Now let’s hope we just have ordinary MuseBlog weirdness for a while.

The March random thread, continued from Part 2.

(Users’ Manual: Obey The Rules. Consult The Guide. Have fun!)

Things are getting very exciting here.

Continued from Muse Fanfiction, v. 2008.1.

These are not RRRs but solo projects which share the same thread. Start your own, or just stop by and visit.

The vernal equinox occurs at 12:38 a.m. (blog time, i.e., U.S. Central Daylight time) on Thursday, March 20. By the time most of you read this, it will be spring in the northern hemisphere. Oh, and happy autumn to MBers in New Zealand and other points south of the equator.

Muse‘s editors need to talk with you about your Q&A question. Please e-mail them at muse@caruspub.com .

Ever since we installed the new blog software, some of you have been afflicted with comment boxes that get smaller and smaller until you can’t see what you’re trying to post.

Good news: a WordPress programmer is on the job and says he expects to solve the problem this week.

Of course, that will require another upgrade… *shudders*

Born 14 March 1879; died 18 April 1955.

Almost belated best wishes to the memory of someone who saw the world in a new, unexpected way that turned out, as far as we can tell so far, to be right.

It’s 3/14 in the United States — any excuse for a party, we say. (We’ll celebrate again on July 22.)

At least, we think so. The blog is back online, mostly, apart from the page tabs (“Who’s Here,” “What’s Here,” etc.), which we’re working on.

Meanwhile, please note the new “Who’s Talking” feature over on the right. We’re hoping that it won’t cause the same sorts of problems that “Recent Comments” did, but it’s too early to say. So keep your fingers crossed, and start blogging!

We’ll be taking the blog offline on Thursday morning (March 13) to try some more tinkering. Anyone visiting the site will see long periods of nothing interspersed with weirdness. In the unlikely event that you are able to post, your comments will be lost. So you’ll be better off doing something else — studying, getting some fresh air and exercise, that sort of thing.

See you before and after.

Even Lady Bunniful isn’t sure what’s hatching here — just as nobody knows what will happen on the March random thread during its second ten-day stretch.

(Users’ Manual: Obey The Rules. Consult The Guide. Have fun!)

These exciting, inexplicable adventures in the Musiverse are continued from Ships’ Logs: Beyond Museica, Part 10.

The good news is that dear old MB is back online. Post away, and let’s hear how you spent your Saturdays!

Now here’s the bad news:

We didn’t manage to upgrade the software. Robert spent his Saturday trying to install three different versions of new WordPress software, each of which proved fatally flawed. As a result,

1. we haven’t been able to revive the “Recent Comments” sidebar; and

2. we’re going to have to go through the upgrade ordeal again in the near future.

The partially offsetting compensatory news is that we’ve stumbled across some new things that we think you like and plan to try them soon.

But not yet! It’s too nice a day here (and here, and here, and here).

Continued at long last from version 2007.2.

At the moment, as you’ve undoubtedly noticed, MuseBlog is even weirder than usual.

We’re not sure exactly what’s going on. Apparently the blog’s software started sending too many queries to our Web host’s server, so the host company took us offline. We’re back, but the blog appears to have amnesia — either because we can’t tap into the database, or because the database has been erased.

We’re trying to restore things to what passes for normal around here. Meanwhile, we’ll open some temporary threads so that you all can keep communicating. It will be a little bare around here for a while, but MUCH better than a MB-less universe. [Not as bad as we feared. A little mopping up has solved most of the problem. –Robert]

Keep on Musing — and posting!

–The Administrators

Unlike the random thread, this discussion thread stays on topic until the topic changes.

Newcomers should read The Rules and The Guide before plunging in.

Current topic: Princesses (real, not fictional, and emphatically not Disney; requested by Kokonilly)
Fairy tales and Disney and such
Spelling mistakes (including one in Harry Potter)
Plans for Easter/spring break and Favorite colors

‘Tis the season to be hare-y, rabbitish, and bunniful — and the March random thread is a place where you can be as capricious as March weather.

(Users’ Manual: Obey The Rules. Consult The Guide. Have fun!)