Posted onApril 8, 2021|Comments Off on “YES, WE’VE GOT A TWITCH CHANNEL!”
Welp, with help from Loyd Cryer of Texas Frightmare Weekend and his video assistants, we’re going to try again with the Thursday night videos on Twitch, tonight focusing on Sarracenia flava pitchers and flowers. (Just be glad that Smell-o-Vision isn’t practical for video feeds, because much like how wintergreen and birch bark smell the same, so do flava blooms and the long-defunct Dallas Fantasy Fairs. It ain’t pretty.) Video starts at 8:00 pm Central Time, and smartaleck comments are encouraged. And so it goes.
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Posted onOctober 30, 2020|Comments Off on Time for Video Nasties
Slight interlude: as promised, the YouTube channel has been updated with work that really needed to be posted a while back. In the interim, I hope you enjoy Pitcher Plants In Moonlight and Texas Triffid Ranch at NARBC Arlington. With a bit of practice, I might actually get good at this.
Posted onSeptember 13, 2020|Comments Off on Video Hyped the Carnivorous Plant Gallery
In the middle of a pandemic, and right in the middle of a much-needed gallery renovation, there’s still more than enough time to hang out with Loyd and Charles of Texas Frightmare Weekend and talk up carnivorous plants. Sadly, the planned Twitch Prime showing of Annihilation didn’t happen because Amazon removed it from Prime streaming just that day, but we still had a lot of fun with Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things. (Right now, we’re talking about doing this again in the future, and I’m going to recommend the best documentary on maintaining and cultivating heirloom roses ever made.)
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Posted onSeptember 3, 2020|Comments Off on New Developments and Upcoming Events
The COVID-19 shutdown of Dallas art events continues, and with it, a lot of events throughout the rest of Texas. The complete dissolution of shows for 2020 has been rough, but it could be worse (I really feel for the art galleries stiffed by the Dallas Art Fair, even considering that the combination of “Dallas real estate developer” and “wannabe world-class art fair” always promises a world of madcap fun), and the only thing we can do is be proactive about it. Hence, while things are quiet outside, it’s time to tear things up indoors.
Firstly, while the cliche “one door closes while another opens” is especially overused in Dallas (where it’s usually applied in reference to “the real estate developer who just ripped you off has friends who’d like to take advantage of your naive faith in human nature”), sometimes it applies. The collapse of the Pier 1 retail empire hit home hard, as a very dear friend was at ground zero at its Fort Worth headquarters when the announcement went out, but it also gave an opportunity for a serious gallery renovation. Combine heavy-duty Lundia shelving (with additional support in the center of each shelf) with a massive fixture sale at a nearby Pier 1 location, and this means that a long-planned Triffid Ranch renovation happens right when traffic is slow. Everybody wins. Keep an eye open for further updates, because by the time the upgrade is done, you won’t recognize the place.
In other news, everybody who already had plans to attend the rescheduled Texas Frightmare Weekend horror convention at DFW Airport already knows: the planned September 11-13 show was bumped to next May. The news was depressing on multiple levels, mostly because of the number of us who actively look forward to Frightmare every year, as attendees and as vendors. The only good news out of that justified and justifiable cancellation is that the Frightmare crew continue to keep their virtual schedule extremely busy with the regular Frightmare HQ video streams. I bring this up because on Saturday, September 12, the Triffid Ranch goes live with what everyone would have seen had we been able to come out for the weekend. To quote a mutual inspiration and Dallas icon, you’ll boogie ’til you puke. Just pick your favorite streaming video flavor, and we and the plants will see you on September 12.
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Posted onMay 22, 2020|Comments Off on Video Augmented the Blogging Star
The crew at Texas Frightmare Weekend created a monster. The move to Twitch for live video didn’t work out quite as expected (on phone and tablet, the app has a propensity to seize up either when ending a video feed or when other apps intrude), but it’s time to get back into the swing of things. In the meantime, we’re only about five years late, but the Triffid Ranch now has its own YouTube channel, so expect a lot of videos on plant care, odd species, and virtual events. It’s all very primitive and stop-and-go, but in lieu of live events for the foreseeable future, it has to improve. And so it goes.
