Category: Strange Days

The remnants of my first, uncommentable blog, now transferred here.

Why Webbing?

Updating my website is addictive. I keep trying to tell myself, “That’s enough for now, focus on something else,” and then think, “Oh, just one more…”

This is because I spent three years wading through all the placeholder files I put up on March 7, 2005. File after file, tracking down where a story had first been published and saying something about it — and then suddenly, on December 7, 2014, they were done, and I was updating existing stuff and talking about all sorts of different things and there were never more than maybe four or five files in a day, and I could just tear through months at a time.

Exhilarating!

I’ve gone from nine years and nine months back to seven years and three months since then. It’s wonderful.

The Webbing Continues

So I had to figure out what to do with that bibliography page — which, upon checking, said it was last updated on December 12, 1995, and the 2007 update had only consisted of tagging it “Placeholder” and moving it to a new URL. Did I really want to update nineteen years of missing data?

My eventual answer: No. I decided that this mostly duplicates information I have elsewhere on the site, so I threw out most of the content and reduced the page to more or less, “The information you want is here, and here. Follow the links.”

One reason to do it that way is that if I kept it, it would need constant updating. I now know I’m not going to keep up with anything like that — back in ’95 I hadn’t yet figured that out.

I went ahead and worked through several more pages after that, many of which didn’t need much. Even the “personal” page turned out to need less work than I’d expected.

I did generate a couple of new placeholder files, though, where pages I was updating should obviously have links to pages that didn’t exist yet. I’ll fill those in eventually.

The next set of four files, from October 12, 2007, is the pages about the four volumes of “The Lords of Dus,” and I know the links to booksellers need updating, but otherwise they should be pretty much okay as they are.

So I’m down to just seven years and three months out of date.

The Music Will Never Stop 86

Okay, I didn’t get anything more off Side 2 of the Talon tape. There’s 48 minutes of music on that side, but it isn’t salvageable from this recording. I’ll need to try it again.

Meanwhile, I went ahead and did Side 1. Got an hour and eighteen minutes of music off it, but the quality ranges from almost okay to really bad. I may try that side again, too.

It’s progress, I think.

More Webbing

Still updating my website, oldest files first.

There were six files that shouldn’t have been on the server in the first place; they were blog archives from when I switched from Blogger to WordPress in 2006, and they should have been filed away on my hard drive, or simply deleted once I’d copied the posts here to the WordPress archives, instead of sitting there taking up space.

So I copied them to an archive folder and deleted them from the server. I did put in a redirect for the one that had been set up for public access, even though I doubt anyone ever saw it.

(If you’re curious about what was in them, it’s everything in the September 2006 archive, there in the right-hand column, except for the last two entries.)

Did a few other quick little updates which finished 2006 and got two files into 2007. Updated or removed some dead links, reformatted a couple of things.

The next file is from April 23, 2007 — International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, less than eight years ago. Definitely needs some clean-up, but a relatively minor job.

But after that there’s a bibliography page, and then http://www.watt-evans.com/personal.html, which is going to be a big job.

Webbing

I’m making progress on the ongoing webpage update; the oldest file on the site (not counting images) is dated September 16, 2006.

Of course, just because I’ve revised a file recently doesn’t mean it’s actually up to date; yesterday I tackled all nine installments of “So You Want to Be A Writer,” and mostly just made some esthetic tweaks and added notes saying how horribly out of date the articles are.

Still, at least I looked at them.

I’m eight and a half years back; I should probably decide just where I want to stop. Three years, maybe? The oldest file on ethshar.com is from 2009, the oldest on misenchantedpress.com is from 2014.

Moving On

So after I went and recorded all those tapes, I haven’t actually done much with the files yet. I’ll get to them eventually.

Of course, that’s what I always say. For example, I’ve been updating my website, and coming across pages where I promised to add or update some feature soon — and I made that promise in 2006, and am just getting to those files now, in 2015.

But on the other hand, I am getting to them now. I’ve replaced some placeholders with actual content, and brought a variety of things up to date.

I’ve been going through the website files in chronological order, updating the oldest first; I started doing this a few years ago, but not very seriously. For example, I didn’t do a single update between May 2013 and January 2014. Lately, though, I’ve been a little more ambitious.

One reason for the lack of enthusiasm was that on March 7, 2005 I had posted over a hundred placeholder files for stuff I knew I wanted to include eventually but didn’t have ready. It took a long time to wade through all those, adding content, but I finally finished the last of them on December 7, 2014. Now I’m going through all the other stuff, and have worked my way from March 7, 2005 to May 4, 2006 in just a month.

So that’s an ongoing long-term project. Finishing up the tapes is another. Writing novels is a third. I’m making progress on all three, but not very fast.

And another is switching where I hang out online. For twenty years my primary net-hang has been the newsgroups at SFF Net, but those have been in a long, slow decline for a long time. So I’ve been spending more time elsewhere — here, Twitter (where I’m @wattevans), Facebook, etc. The whole “The Music Will Never Stop” thing came here as reprints from SFF Net because no one there was responding.

No one here has been, either, of course. Still, it feels more real here, somehow, so I think I’ll start moving some other threads, as well.

The Music Will Never Stop 85

I decided on a change of approach. I’ve gone ahead and recorded all the remaining tapes onto my hard drive (well, except one, maybe — there’s one I didn’t do that was in the pile but that I think I recorded previously, then put back in the stack because I wasn’t satisfied with how it came out).

Now to go through them all and see what needs saving.

After that, I’ve stacked up all the tapes I think I might be able to coax better sound off, now that I’m a little more experienced at it. There are a total of twenty tapes where I’m not 100% certain I’m done with them.

(The other thirty-two — yes, I’m done with them. I’ve trashed one, given away a couple, three that were unused/blank are set aside, and the rest are in a box upstairs while I try to figure out what I should do with them. Suggestions are welcome.)

I’ve gone through fifteen of the twenty; five recordings (well, ten; each tape has two sides) are still pretty much untouched. I’m pretty sure at least one of those ten sides was blank.

Right now I’m working on Side 2 of Reel No. 4, “Coffeehouse – ‘Talon’ – Dance Aug. 25, 1973.” I’m assuming Talon was the name of the band. The first forty minutes were blank, but then I hit music — though after the first five minutes or so the volume drops off drastically, so the music is almost drowned out by tape hiss.

I salvaged an eight-minute jam, cut a minute and a half of silence, and then tried to clean up a four-minute piece. It didn’t go very well.

You know what? I decided it’s not worth it. That four-minute piece isn’t anything I’ll ever want to listen to. So I’ll just skip it. Now let’s see if there’s anything more worthwhile on the rest of the tape. There’s another stretch of silence, and maybe some faint tuning up going on…and then a rather nice song, but so faint it’s not worth exporting to MP3.

I think I should maybe try this tape again with freshly-cleaned heads.

The Music Will Never Stop 84

The situation with “Conceptionland,” “Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him, and “Dear Friends” was slightly more complicated than I thought; it was only Side 1 of “Waiting for the Electrician.” The title track, which is all of Side 2, was missing. And on “Dear Friends” Track 6 was complete, but Track 7 was indeed missing.

As mentioned, I bought a download of “Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him,” and am glad to have it. For the other two, though, I converted what I had on tape. Quality is only so-so, even after using Audacity’s filters, but since most of this material is frankly not all that great, and quality is less important with comedy than with music, I’m not about to buy those albums.

Converting the 49 (!) tracks from “Conceptionland” took quite awhile, and all those short little bits, heavily filtered, apparently destabilized Audacity — it crashed repeatedly during the last part of the job. I mean, repeatedly, sometimes three or four times in a single attempt to export a piece.

I did get it done, though. Fifty-five tracks are now MP3s on my hard drive. And I’ve shut down Audacity for a nice little rest, in hopes that whatever was causing those crashes will go away.

Next up, a tape of some of my high school friends doing their own attempts at improv comedy.

The Music Will Never Stop 83

Well… the quality on Reel No. L is not bad, but on the other hand, Tom Lehrer albums are surprisingly cheap, so I’ve downloaded “That Was the Year That Was” and bought a CD of “Songs and More Songs by Tom Lehrer.” That covers the three albums I recorded whenever it was.

But that leaves “Conceptionland,” by the Conception Corporation, which is not readily available. “Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him” is a cheap download, so I downloaded it, but the Firesign Theatre’s “Dear Friends” is another relative rarity, and I have Side 1 of that on the tape. (It’s a compilation of bits from their radio show.) Unfortunately, the quality isn’t all that great on those, but I’ll see what I can do.

(I don’t really even have all of Side 1 of “Dear Friends”; the tape ran out
midway through the sixth track, “The Someday Funnies.”)

The thing is, “Conceptionland” has forty-nine tracks, most of them very short. It’s going to take me awhile to work through all that.

The Music Will Never Stop 82

Huh. Audacity’s “remove bass rumble” filter works surprisingly well. I converted “Roll Over Beethoven” to MP3 using that filter, and it sounds roughly as good as it would over a very cheap AM radio.

But subsequent Beatles songs, not so much.

The problem here is that I apparently recorded this tape with very cheap microphones rather than a line in, and in order to get a good signal-to-noise ratio I played the record loud.

Which meant I overloaded the microphones on every loud bit. It’s not bad on “Roll Over Beethoven,” but it gets much worse on songs with a heavier beat.

As for Side 2 of “Oldies,” the list is indeed accurate. I converted those fifteen unsourced oldies tracks, even though the quality is kind of marginal, but the two Beatles albums, which were much inferior in sound quality, are on order from Amazon in CD form. (They weren’t available as downloads.)

The next tape is cued up on the machine — or is that “queued”? Anyway, it’s all set to record.

The box is labeled, but it’s hard to read. Here’s what I could make out at first:

“Reel No. L Title: [faded to illegibility]/Conception Corporation/[faded to illegibility]/Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him/Dear Friends”

When I took a closer look I realized the second illegible part says “Firesign Theatre,” but I still couldn’t (and can’t) make out the first.

But inside the box was a typed track list that told me what it was, and why the Reel No. was “L”: Tom Lehrer. About two hours of Tom Lehrer. I really hope the quality is good.