×   16-Jul-2004 (fri)

As our auxiliary Halloween has come and gone, the kids decided we needed to have a secondary staff Christmas party, too. Also, it was our three year anniversary! Yay us. We had all the usual Christmas trappings at this party: a bouncy-castle, piñatas, and karaoke. (Well, the bouncy-castle was actually a car, but you get the idea.) Unfortunately, I forgot to schedule a webcast for that night, so we don't have an archive of the red hot karaoke action.

Photos of that, and of tonight's Glis / Regenerator / Ayria / Title show are now available for your convenience.

Well, last night was just all about the equipment failures... Our sound board crapped out just before the W.A.S.P. / Sparrow's Point / Push show last night, so we had to bring in a loaner. We were late getting doors open, and in the ensuing chaos, we didn't get the new board hooked up to the webcast until halfway through the second band's set. It was webcasting the between-bands music fine, but we lost all of Push and half of Sparrow's Point.

I took photos, but it was really difficult. It was pretty crowded up front, and W.A.S.P. had us rent barricades for in front of the stage. This made it pretty hard to get decent shots: those barricades make it hard to move around near them, and when I went on the stage side of the barricades to shoot, I was too close and was getting these great shots right up peoples' noses.

The barricades were totally unnecessary, of course. The crowd was enthusiastic, but there wasn't even a pit. We've had rougher goth shows here.

Then, when I got home, I found that 2/3rds of my pictures were toast: most of Sparrow's Point and all of W.A.S.P. were zero-length when I got them off the card. I don't know if the card got corrupted, or if this was the "your computer is our learning experience" Linux USB drivers screwing me again, but either way, zap.

Funny anecdotes:

• Apparently W.A.S.P. gave Sparrow's Point a lot of shit after they played together in LA last night for "upstaging" them. Which I guess means "putting on a more energetic and entertaining show."

• We printed up some W.A.S.P. posters to sell (same image as the flyer), and the band agreed to have their merch guy sell them for us. He put them on display by hiding them under a stack of t-shirts. He was actively trying not to sell them, so the only way any got sold was if someone spotted someone else walking around with one and asked where they got it. Sweet.

So, we've got a big stack of those posters left. If you want to buy one, ask the next time you're at the club. We've got a bunch of the Sister Machine Gun posters left, too. (This selling posters thing, it's not working out so well.)