Story Telling Cafe Number 4 (by sarah)

Each month me and Jane Springer host Gloucester Story Telling Cafe - it has been a wild ride and we are only on number 4 (including Chloe the Midnight Story Tellers memorial edition), number 4 will be happening on Thursday doors from 7 for a 7:30 start. We are based at The Folk of Gloucester on Westgate Street just down from the Cathedral.

This month we have two guest story tellers who are just fab! Darren Hoskins who runs the regular story telling event Oh Crumbs over in the Forest of Dean and Deborah Gordon who wowed us all with a very ancient story at Chloe's Memorial Storytelling. We also have music from Cathal Lynch which I am very much looking forward too!

Thursday 7th July 2023 from 7 pay what you want

The Folk of Gloucester, Westgate Street, Gloucester

An update on my electronics projects (by alaric)

One of the challenges of being a massive nerd - who loves learning complicated technical skills - is that it can sometimes be hard to find new skills to learn. Thankfully, analogue electronics has provided me with a rich vein to mine; it's full of things that take some work to master, yet offer the opportunity to create interesting and useful things.

So, after the success of the Polyp Mixer (in which I learn how to use op-amps and to manage impedances within a circuit) and the trickle charger (in which I gained experience with basic power electronics), I am currently working on a... thing. I don't quite know what to call it, but I'm going with the working title of "microphone pre-amp". And my goal with this (other than to end up with a working microphone pre-amp) is to master the class A bipolar transistor amplifier.

The Goal of the Microphone Pre-Amp

So, the Polyp Mixer sits on my desk, mixing the audio output from my two PCs, and with two spare channels - one of which I intend to connect to a radio transceiver in future, the other being spare for random laptops or listening into audio circuits I'm working on (such as the microphone pre-amp, as it happens). This means I can listen to all of these devices through my nice amplifier and speakers. I can even plug headphones into the amplifier if I want to.

But, when I talk to people in video calls, I am using the nasty little microphone built into my USB webcam - and I can't feed that audio to the other computer, nor to a transceiver or anything. Rather than have a plethora of microphones for everything, I'd much rather have a single microphone that just feeds microphone-level signals to all of my devices.

So, the first goal of the pre-amp is to have a box that has a microphone in socket on the front, so I can plug in a microphone, and a bunch (let's say 4: two computers, a transceiver, and a spare, matching the mixer) of microphone-level outputs on the back to feed into my devices' microphone inputs.

However, this is complicated by the fact that different microphones produce different signal levels (of the pile I've tested, I've seen signals from 5mV to 100mV peak-to-peak). Normally I'd deal with that by adjusting "mic gain" controls on the inputs to everything, but it would be simpler if I had a "mic gain" knob on the pre-amp to adjust for different microphones, and then all the downstream devices can have their mic gains set to a constant level.

But not every device has a mic gain knob, because some things are meant to be plugged into custom-made headsets rather than arbitrary microphones. So, as well as the front-facing "mic gain" knob to adjust to different microphones, I could also do with "mic level" output knobs next to each output on the back, so each can be tweaked to read the same volume.

Also, if I switch microphones, I'd like to be able to get the level right before talking into my devices - so it would be nice to have a mute control and a level meter. I can mute the outputs, talk to see the level meter deflect, and adjust the mic gain knob until it's just hitting the maximum and not going over it. (This is why vu meters always have a green bit and a red bit; you're supposed to adjust levels until they're using the green area nicely but not going into the red area). So, I need a mute switch and a level meter.

Some microphones have a really tinny frequency response, picking up high frequencies much better than low frequencies. It would be nice (and fun!) to be able to compensate somewhat for this. I can't quite stomach building full spectrum analyser, but a classic James-Baxandall tone control circuit would be a fun addition.

Some of my microphones have a push-to-talk button; it might be nice to be able to feed that into the pre-amplifier, and have it drive the mute control. So, the mute switch really needs three settings - audio on, audio muted, and do-whatever-the-input-push-to-talk-socket-asks-for. And an LED showing the current output status, so I can tell if it's working when in external-push-to-talk mode.

A radio transceiver needs to know when I push-to-talk so it can transmit, so there also needs to be a push-to-talk output socket on the back.

Oh, and finally - I have a few headsets, with a microphone and earphones, so it would be nice if the thing also contained a headphone amplifier with a line-level input and output, so it can be connected between the mixer and my amplifier, and save me from running a long cable down from the headphone socket on the amplifier. So stick a headphone output and a headphone volume knob on the front for that, too.

At first I wanted to put a number of different sockets on the front, so I can just plug headsets directly in - an Android TRRS socket has lines for a mono microphone and stereo headphones, and the Kenwood/Baofeng headset socket has mono microphone, mono headphone, and push-to-talk. But in the end I decided it would be simpler to just have separate headphone and microphone sockets like on a PC, and a 3.5mm mono push-to-talk socket, and buy or make adapters from other standards to those three jacks. I managed to find a TRRS->dual TRS splitter on eBay, and made my own Baofeng->headset, microphone, and PTT lead (using two five-ohm resisters as a passive mixer to mix the stereo headset signal into a mono one). Having these adapters also gives me the flexibility to connect Android or radio headsets to computers, or connect a radio headset to a smartphone.

In other words, this thing has accumulated some feature creep, through a bunch of weakly interconnected features! The most questionable of these is including the headphone amplifier - but it does feel convenient to be able to plug a headset into a single box, and as the mixer is conveniently situated on my desk while the amplifier proper is a bit more of a reach away, it would be messy to be running a headphone cable extension back; headset splitter adapters only have ten centimetres or so of lead, so the microphone and headphone sockets do need to be close.

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One, Two, Three… Blast Off (by sarah)

Before covid we were running a story telling night called The Moving Story Telling Cafe but it was derailed and not just by covid - we sadly lost one of our trio to cancer. So last month we relaunched but this time without the Moving - The Folk of Gloucester have kindly offered us a permanent home and also house one of the other Legacy projects of Chloe The Midnight Story Teller... The Story Telling Library.

Last month was a special launch and opening of the library with lots of guest story tellers who all knew Chloe personally - that means the this month is going to be the first actual Gloucester Story Telling Cafe and it happens to fall on May the Forth. One of the reasons the three of us... Chloe, Jane and myself worked so well was that we are unashamedly geeks but perhaps not so obviously geeks to those with narrower ideas of what a geek is. We love our sci-fi and fantasy and I had a request from the Gloucestershire Poetry Society to have an event that geeky poetry would be welcome... well how could we resist such a set up.

So we are blasting off with a Starwars joke and a sci-fi author whizz reading a poem from their sci-fi novel!

Chris Hemingway is a poet, prose writer and musician from Gloucestershire. His book “The Future” was published in 2016 and was described by Cheltenham Poetry Festival as ‘darkly witty, like “The Man Who Fell to Earth “ meets “The Office”’. He has also had published two poetry pamphlets ‘party in the Diaryhouse’ and ‘paperfolders’. That’s a lot of ‘p’s’…

I have used a picture of my dad dressed up an explorer of space when he was a little boy - my Granddad took arty pictures and with my Nanny loved to make outfits for my dad and I am so lucky that copies of this one still existed in Australia and that a cousin kindly sent a copy to me.

Doors open at 7 on May the 4th 2013 at The Folk of Gloucester 99-103 Westgate Street Gloucester, Gloucestershire, GL1 2PG

There is a cafe and bar. Entry is free but we will have a pay what you want pot out!

We are open to all story telling types from traditional to memoirs, to flash fictions, to novel extracts, to oral and of course narrative poetry!

Our Moto is "story telling for all/everyone" and as such not only do we have some fab guests lined up as well as music but we have an open mic were we would love people to come and share. Open mic slots are a max of 10 minutes.

This is the years itinerary - first Thursday of every month except January as lets face it - it is nearly always going to be too close to New Years Eve for most people and I can't be dealing with that!

Here is the Facebook event for tomorrows: One Two Three... Blast Off! and May the Forth be with you!

event

I am very excited about where this is all going - Story Telling and Gloucester have a long history and I hope a longer future!

WoPo – And the Poetry Reboot (by sarah)

Many years ago I set up a poetry writing group for a group of student writers who I met at NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and so of course this manifested as a month of writing poetry and the first year there was a pledge sign up and a private forum and the website with prompts and all the social media and so on. I had guest poets and so on and it was great but a lot of work. I tried to pay others to do some of the work whilst I was pregnant with Mary but it just didn't really happen and so I scaled the event back. Then the physical group all finished university or drifted away and others couldn't do feb so I started doing it as a more year round thing and dropped the specific URL and tried to go with just World Poetry rather than a month writing drive.

But...

Turned out some people like the month drive thing so its ended up as a bit of a miss match and half forgotten project which is a shame as when I went through the archive for its tenth anniversary I realised there was a lot of writing prompts and exercises and lots and lots of awesome poets stories and of course many of the poems written from the prompts have indeed gone on to be published.

Last year the prompts when up on Instagram mainly because I was dealing with hospitals and things and it just wasn't going to happen any other way. But this means I need to think about where this is all going? I feel February just is the main thing but other bits through out the year works fine - I might even manage to do some physical meet ups this year. This has already prodded me into sorting out a little poetry outing last week at The Folk Gloucester to be inspired by Cedric Titcombes work - it is amazing and I wish I had all the money to buy some of those images - each one is a liminal space in and of itself - but that is another story for another time!

Basically I can not run the sort of this I did in the first year by myself - it just isn't possible but covid did impact us as a family in drastic ways plus obviously the bereavements so the site is a mess, stuff is spread over multiple platforms and so on.

So there will be prompts and I will share them - they may not be exactly daily (I do not want a repeat of the year the scheduler did not work) but I will try and I am also trying to get myself back out to some poetry events. I want to take part in the zooms and things but the clipping and things is quiet exhausting so like with the physical events I am reserving my energy for the ones that have asked me to perform - it is purely an energy thing - I would love to attend so much stuff but I just can't.

And that brings me onto the fact that I am just having to take it all slowly and build myself and the projects back up slowly - I suck at this aspect as I want to do everything NOW!

In summary - if anyone does want to take part here are the links - there is loads of archive material so you don't have to wait and if you meed or want the prompts in another format please just say ie there are little booklets for the older prompts and so on.

insta

website

Facebook - there is also a group but it is reserved for people I know

Twitter it was under TheMonsterBlogs but twitter has broken many things including the tools that let me switch accounts easily so if anything goes up it will be just under my own account Saffy.

Lastly I feel I have failed slightly at the World part of the WoPo - I do have participants from all over the world but I had wanted lots of articles on poems from other languages and cultures etc and that just never really happened even when I had a budget to pay people to write articles - so I don't know weather I should be changing the name or not. Also on that note a lot of the prompts get used by writers for stories and things too which might be a stretch of the poetry bit but what do people think?

Luna and Their Wondering Stars (by sarah)

There is a lot of wonderful astronomy type stuff going on at the moment and sometimes I find myself able to capture just a glimpse of the worlds and burning suns in our sky. At the moment there is a visible comet - my eyesight is pretty bad these days but I am still hunting for it as I did with Neowise a few years ago - this time I do not have my mum to drag out in the car with the kids with thermoses of hot chocolate and lots of moaning and excitement when a shooting star is seen or a planet spotted. But I do have a Mary and Mary likes to point out "weird" extra glowey stars and wonder on what they might be and they have been many things - more things than I thought they would be. And so we have this picture taken on the dance run of a new moon growing from a slither so so thin and delicate with planet in tow - Venus and Saturn - at least I think that's Saturn much smaller and fainter there.

The moon always has held a fascination for me and of course it is for many cultures that this new moon - this moment is the New Year and with everything that has been going on and the illness over Christmas that feels right. Besides I like the idea of a rabbit in the moon - I know I've mentioned it before but I had a little outfit when I was a kid with embroidered bunnies on it and this idea kind of stuck in my head. Plus our bunny Angel is named after Mum and I am scrabbling for so much that was or should have been and I am becoming I think a re-Me or a new-Me or at least an adapted me at the moment.

This seem so cyclic as stuff from years past rears its head and says you need to use this skill or investigate this thing you knew or just look at the world in the wonder you once had. I found the MoonMania embroidery and have a wood to look at nature and rocks in and I found needle ice on my own drive way - a thing I've known about but never seen. I've been photographing mushrooms and taking part in Wassails and playing music. I have been finding the sky and the forest floor to be filled with things I know of but have been missing, I see landscapes and world and stories that want to flow but I am so very tired and broken - as Jean used to say "need glue" or maybe some gold to stick these fragments together again. I don't know. I don't even particularly care but I took some photos of the moon and of stars over the River Severn and found siderite and drew things for my kids.

Sometimes I dream of adventures in those skies and I wonder were exactly the wonderers are wondering off to but then I know I could just look it up or plot it out myself but is that any different to my walks were I find so many things to see and investigate.

Last year we failed to get the telescope out at all - this is an amazing fact to me but something I hope to counter this year.