August 5th, 2025. The SPARK w James Dalton and James Dalton.

Whoof. Last night was a lot, but it was good, but it was a lot. It seemed like more than it should’ve been, and perhaps even more than it actually WAS, but I didn’t get out till almost 11.30 so it’s a quantifiable amount of “a lot”.

First off, totally solved the buffer underrun issues from last week’s stream. Apparently the Gen 4 Scarlett 2i2 draws a little more power than the Gen 3 and the low grade USB-C cable we had in there wasn’t cutting it. Problem solved!

My other problems, of course, involve having too many people coming to the open mic (good problem to have, but, as above, quantifiable!) and them not sticking around and scrumming the list at the beginning of the night. I’m not sure how / if I’m going to solve the first one (though I could imagine a couple of changes – maybe starting a half hour earlier, putting MY name in the hat too because maybe my higher energy would be better served later in the evening? Cutting down to 1 song later in the evening… etc) but TONIGHT I tried going back to the ye olde Capital City Cheesecake method of randomizing the list with the Fickle Finger of Fate.

Pros:

Lots of people remarked positively that they liked it, so yay
kept people from scrumming the list at the beginning
people DID stick around and close to the show more than usual
people’s handwriting’s better on little slips of paper than on the whiteboard
no-one pulls out a random marker and uses a permanent marker on my damned white board

Cons:

I don’t have a big-ass list to photograph
More prep – I cut up 30 slips and somehow a lot of them went missing halfway through signup, but people Found A Way
Dealing with people that Neeed To Leeeave involves finding their slip
It’s MUCH harder to see how many total artists are here, and how many are left!
If someone signs up their friend, and then their friend shows up, it’s not immediately obvious and someone can end up signed up twice
I keep leaving my bag in different places
Definitely harder to find my new people

Solves:

Just needs to be smoover. Heh. Should I wear a sporran of fate? The fanny pack of fate? No, all of those are too small and too weird.
I don’t have a big ass list to photograph but I do have a stack of slips – which I can also save or throw out. I can take my skips and losses and put them in my stack for next week already.
Juels kept count. But his numbering systems are always weird.

Anywho, we do this every week, etc etc. The list is being changed but we’re working it out. The OTHER thing from last night that I’m not sure how to address yet is that we appear to have our first theft from the donation bowls (not to the artist, but to the food donations). There was $2 in the bowl at the end of the night causing one person to remark “hey, I put a $10 in there” causing ANOTHER person to remark “I did too!” sooooo that’s not good and undermines a lot. Who knows when it happened. I of course, didn’t keep track of who said that to me because it was during the end of the night and too much was happening, but I should’ve tried to determine who put their $10s in WHEN and used that for a metric for who was there at that point. The first hour plus of the evening we had a LOT of people there, including a LOT of high school (?) kids who aren’t regulars…

So, I don’t know.

Anywho.

This week we had