New stuff in the store

So we’ve got these CD’s of our old bands, and the IdeaVan just broke.  We put 2 and 2 together and arrived at something like 4.1592.  So, for sale while we still have some – Mise En Scéne from Tim’s old band Duct Tape Mustache, and Esque from Mark’s old band Gwen Mitchell Experiment!  Cheep like only $5!  Plus the shipping…  still waiting on the plugin update.

Duct Tape Mustache - Mise En SceneGwen Mitchell - Esque

We’ll be adding downloadable stuff like Progress and some stuff from soulvasq (Mark, Dave and Phil G’s old band) – it’s waiting on us to figure out how to sell it in the store.  Dave was all “That’s easy” and then found out that the stores limit for downloads is 7MB, and Progress is 210MB.  Oops.  We really don’t want to reduce an album to poopy mp3’s, so we’re going to find a workaround.  To the workarounding…  board!

The IdeaHorse broke a leg

We may have to put her down.  The IdeaVan lost the trailer the other day.  The hitch assembly tore away from van frame, taking a bit of the frame with it.  Not sure how we’re going to handle this development…  but look for some new store items soon.  We might need to sell some digital downloads and and other stuff so we can fix it, or buy a new vehicle.  Man I thought we’d break 200,000 miles on that thing.

Back of the broken IdeaVan

Broken IdeaVan Left

Broken IdeaVan Right

All of the lyrics are up

So I opened this can of worms, ya know?  I turned on The Dinosaur today.  The Dinosaur is my first PC, it served soulvasq and The Fake Thing and Ideamen in it’s infancy.  It has soooo many goodies on it, much of which has yet to be transferred to another drive.  So every now and again, I need to dig into it to find some obscure old thing that we need, and I tend to stumble upon many distractions while I’m in there.  Today was no exception.  Only this time, because I can, I decided to share some of it with you.

The goal was of course to scrape the lyrics out of it.  That didn’t take very long.  All of the lyrics are up now, and here they are!

The rest of the process took a lot longer.  Whoa!  Look in there!  Dood, it’s the source and translation to the Latin bit in Quares!  No way!  I’ve been meaning to post that for years but never knew where it was…  What is that?  Whoa!  We were intelligent and eloquent back then, what happened to us?  We’re so stupid now!  Is that seriously the letter we wrote to Rotten Ron before we signed on to Rotten?  Keep looking, this is interesting.  We lost a whole chunk of history when myspace basically shut down, we had ALL of our shows posted there.  No waaaaay!  I made a copy!  Of all of our shows from 2007 to 2010!  Nice!  I might have to share that with Mark.  Reviews?  There’s a folder called ‘reviews’.  Heh, one file in there.  Neet, it’s reviews of Progress.

Oh god no…  not the flyers.  See, back in the day when we had apparently a lot of time on our hands, we used to make a unique flyer for EVERY show.  There are a LOT of flyers.  And failed working files.  And things that I still want to reignite and make stuff with.  Like POV-Ray.  POV-Ray is a 3D rendering program (note I didn’t say ‘modelling’) that is just fantastically awesome and powerful.  But old.  Really old.  But it was so robust that people just kept developing it, and it is still used to this day to render (not model) high end productions.  I used it to model.  And render.  It has a purely code-based interface (no fancy GUI for actually seeing what you’re building, all you see is code), and that made it…  erm…  fun.  For me.  I like a challenge.  So I coded for hours and then clicked “Run” only to encounter syntax errors and placement issues and…  Oh it was fun.  Here’s a couple flyers we made when I was cutting my teeth:

 PRTY BUS

Character Animation

Fun.  All of the Interesting Times art was created in POV-Ray.  I developed it intentionally to animate it and use it later to…  umm…  use.  We got this far.

I’m happy with how that came out.  I’m also going a wee long on this post.  Just to keep babbling, an interesting factoid…  the frame at roughly 1:31 in that video took 6 days to render.  One frame.  6 Days.  Hope you dig this little stroll down memory lane with us.  We’ll probably do this again.

Schemata Lyrics are up

You asked for it, you got it.  The Schemata lyrics are up!  It’s part of a larger project involving putting up our discography, some art, the lyrics for all the albums – and annotations.  But why wait until we do all that complicated nonsense?  It is in fact somewhat complicated…  the lyrics for all the albums were actually finalized and polished on the art itself, meaning all the text files we have named ‘lyrics’ are actually full of errors and typos.  Meaning we’d have to drag the lyrics line by line out of the art files which…  sucks.  Now you know why we never posted our lyrics.  But we’re doing it.  Now.  For you.  Did we mention that we like you?

Schemata Lyrics Page

Some shows a’brewing

Hello all and first off – thank you for the successful release.  We did really well so far, and it hasn’t slowed down a lot – you’ve been spreading the word and your friends are buying CD’s now.  We’ve had a glut of international orders recently, we dig it when that happens.  It’s cool sending stuff to Italy and Spain and England and Ireland and Australia.  Thanks!

The weeks surrounding our CD release were crazy, busy, strained, delayed, sold out, ordered, printed, shipped and whew!  After the bulk of the orders went out we took a little breather, but now we’re back at the wheel and making cool things happen in IdeaLand.  We booked a few shows recently, and from what I hear, there’s some cool shows brewing.  You can keep tabs on shows at the Shows Page.

We’ve got some projects in the works, one of them is working on the NEXT album – we’ll be quicker this time, we promise.  The rest…  well, we don’t want to spoil anything (read: we don’t want to say we’re going to do something that we totally bail on).  We’ll keep you posted.

An Ideamen Group Picture

Your orders have shipped! (*)

* Most of your orders have shipped, see below for details

Finally, we mailed out all of the orders!  All that we could – we sold out of some stuff, which is a good problem, sort of.  Not for you.  Some of you have to wait a little while longer.  We sold out of Large Tesla Shirts, Medium Hats, and ran out of Trammels for the early birds.  All of the these are ordered and/or in the works and we expect to be getting/printing/stitching/assembling and mailing out the last of what’s waiting in a week or so.  Thank you all for giving us these kinds of problems.

Speaking of Trammels…  Some 70 or so of you have received/will receive a big chunk of oak with your order.  You had no idea – and neither did we.  When I made the decision to send these out as a gift, I had estimated around 40 might be reasonable.  Y’all did way better than that.  There were officially 58 orders that came in before the deadline, and a handful of slightly late-comers had requested or were chosen to get one.  What is that thing?

Archimedes Trammel

It is a thing.  A thingy.  A thing-a-ma-bob.  Doohickey.  Whatchamacallit.  And a whole lot of you got one.  So what do you do with it?  You just make circles.  Well…  ellipses.  It traces an oval, not a circle.  A couple times around and you’ll get the hang of it.  If it locks up on you in a couple years – just rub a bit of candle wax in the dovetail groove, it’ll slick right up.  Don’t use anything else, trust me.  A friend of mine put Vaseline in his, baaaaad.  Petroleum and wood don’t play nice.

A few folks posted pics of their IdeaMerch, we thought it would be nice to share:

Archimedes Trammel - Fan ImageIdeamen Merchandise Fan Image 1Ideamen Merchandise fan image 2You folks are awesome, we hope you enjoy the fruits of our labor and the results of your investment in Ideamen.  We hope we can multiply for you!

 

Schemata is officially released!

Finally!  Schemata is released for reals.  It’s been a long time coming and boy does it feel good.  Our CD release show was a fantastic success – thanks to all of ya’s that came out on a snowy night to support us. 

 So…  Here it is! (the art, that is)

We’re mailing out your orders – finally!  We got the second round of mailings packed up tonight, they’ll be going out first thing Wednesday.  I suppose it’s about time to tell you what the gift is for all of you whom ordered in the first 3 crazy weeks of our campaign.  It’s a…  thing.  That does…  erm…  nothing.  Or stuff.  It’s a Trammel Of Archimedes, otherwise known as a Do Nothing Machine…  or a BS Grinder.  It’s a simple but clever mechanical marvel with a little crank on it.  You turn it, and it makes you feel good.  I swear it does.  And they have an Ideamen logo burned into them, which is pretty cool all on it’s own.  Here’s a shot of the second batch:

25 Trammels

Ideamen has a chronic case of the hiccups

So it’s the Tuesday before our CD release show and we’re still sort of…  not ready to mail stuff today.  It was my personal goal to have everything packed up and ready to mail today so some of the local folks could get their stuff before the show.  Hiccup.  Excuse me.

A couple days before Christmas we ordered Zippos and a branding iron.  We were pretty sure they’d show up before we left for the tour.  Neither did.  We got back and still no Zippos or branding iron.  We called BlankDogTags dot com to ask why the Zippos hadn’t arrived and we got a song and dance about how they didn’t place their Zippo order yet and it might be a couple weeks yet and…  um…  no.  We got our money back after a few days of arm wrestling.  Ordered from a different company, they darn well better arrive this afternoon.  The branding iron on the other hand was ordered from Custom Branding Irons, a tiny business in Michigan that sort of dropped us through the cracks.  They were quite apologetic and rushed the order through in time.  Trust me, we need that branding iron.

To keep the sob story going, we were down to our last 2 print runs on the shirts when we discovered the screen for the backside image hadn’t been blown out properly and had to be redone.  Boooooo.  We’re done printing the shirts as of late Monday night.  Yay.  The stickers arrived as well, which is good because you all need to have them in your packages.  The promo pics will get picked up this afternoon.

The final thing you’re all waiting on now is the gift that goes out with the first 70 or so orders, the thank you for ordering so darn early in this whole mess and have been waiting the longest.  I hope it’s worth it, they’re nearly finished.  They may get branded tomorrow.

Ideamen Branding Iron

We ought to be able to mail out a good chunk of your stuff on Thursday – later than we wanted but there was a lot more preparation involved than we had accounted for.  We’ll be signing lots and lots of stuff on Wednesday.  We love last minute.  Thank you all for waiting, and keep an eye out for a big ol’ package in the mail.

 

Exciting things, numbers and you

Hey!  Since we released the “Running Home” video, it racked up nearly 1000 views in 5 days!  That’s not crazy fantastic viral or anything, but we’re really proud of how fast it clocked in.  Thanks to all of you for checking it out.  If you haven’t yet – check it out.

We got a notice from thesixtyone.com letting us know that we hit their homepage.  We don’t know how long this will last, but if you went to their home page yesterday, we were the 2nd or 3rd song in the lineup.  That’s pretty cool.  Here’s a link to our thesixtyone profile.

Last but not least, we got a message from Reverbnation notifying us that we broke into their top 10 in Chicago, we made it to #9.  Last we looked, we bumped up to rank #7.  We have no idea how their ranking system works, but that’s cool too.  You might help us bump up a little higher (wink wink, nudge nudge). [EDIT – we’re at rank 15 still! 02/21/2014]

Ideamen Reverbnation Rank 7