I maintain the @filknews account on Bluesky, which is a manually maintained mirror of the one on Mastodon. It includes reports of upcoming conventions, online filksings, and other things of interest to filkers. This morning I got an email saying:
A Bluesky account you control has been assessed as a spammy, fake, or inauthentic account. Your account was reviewed by Bluesky content moderators and was found to be in violation of our Community Guidelines. As a result, your account has been taken down.
As a reminder, Bluesky requires that users not use Bluesky to do harm to others, including spamming, phishing or otherwise using technical means to disrupt the Bluesky experience for other users.
My latest album, Beacons in the Darkness, is now available on Bandcamp. It’s a living-room album, and I make no great claims for my vocal abilities, so payment is optional. It’s the songs themselves which I think have some interest. The title track, a secular solstice song, is one of my best songs, and it’s on the album in both English and German. 
You can find my other albums, likewise on a payment-optional basis, at garymcgath.bandcamp.com.
You wouldn’t think I’m important enough for the World Wide Web Consortium to worry about my reading its posts. Well, not really the W3C, but whoever runs its Mastodon account. Access from my Liberdon account is blocked, following my disagreeing with their statement that access to information is a “basic human right.” Prior to the block, they had responded to my comment by suggesting that I should not follow their account. Humans who question their views don’t have this right, apparently. It doesn’t cause me any trouble; as the link in this paragraph shows, it’s trivial to get around the block. The hypocrisy is just amusing.
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This week I added an ART USBMIX mixer to the audio gear I use to accompany silent movies on Twitch. The 1910 Frankenstein from Edison Studios was one of the movies I showed in January; I redid it with the mixer, hoping to improve the sound quality by eliminating the microphone and the keyboard and room noise along with it. I’m happy with the result and plan to use this setup in my February 14 movie. The proof of concept is now up on YouTube.
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The next silent movie which I’ll accompany on Twitch will be the 1926 Son of the Sheik on February 14, “Valentino’s Day,” at 8 PM Eastern US time. Following an old tradition, I’ll precede it with a short, Young Mr. Jazz, starring Harold Lloyd. If all goes well, I’ll have some new equipment to improve the sound.
Son of the Sheik was Rudolf Valentino’s last movie. He died shortly after its first, limited public showings. It was based on a novel that had no connection to his earlier movie, The Sheik, but was retrofitted to be a sequel. Valentino plays two title roles. He’s the Sheik as well as his son Ahmed. They sometimes appear in the same shot thanks to double photography.
Spoilers ahead.
Today I accompanied the 1925 Phantom of the Opera at the Plaistow Public Library. It got a good audience for a small-town library, and I got a lot of compliments. I really want to write down some of the musical tricks I used to improvise the music. It may lose everyone reading this; if you’re confused, just skip it and go on to the next post. I’m going to dive into technical musical language, because it’s the only way to explain some of the points.