Internet Archiving and You - The Necessary Job of Our Future To Make Today Matter

Hello world and internet archivists of the future (by me recognizing your profession, you have to save this blog's contest in the future. That's the rule here in the past. It's true, look it up. First link you'll find is this blog. Citationed). Welcome to another posting in our new weekly time slot of Monday. Maybe. Who knows. I'm trying to get myself to blog just to blog. Not really attach a day on it.

If you just randomly clicked on a link somewhere and you ended up here, and now you're all compelled because I'm talking about internet archivists and such, let me tell ya a little something about me. I tend to not do well with structure, and really prefer to do things when I do them within my ever so endless checklist of wants and needs. I have the feeling that I have an obligation to do things, and I blame it on being allowed to put things in archival lists and queues. It was just steamsale, man. I have like ten more games to play now, and I want to try and rebuild the heavy metal theme park my buddy & I built back in the day on Roller Coaster Tycoon. Why are you trying to deny me that? Anyway...

You would think that expressing myself to a potential audience as a voice shouting in the crowd would give me more drive to actually do it, but man, I got other stuff going on just like you. I have to actually do all the stuff I talk about in order to talk about it. Lest someone call me out about it in the comments one day and go, "Yo that shit's lies, man. Ya dindo shit lolfag" and then I'm the one who's the asshole. No thanks.

But to quote Stan Lee in Kevin Smith's overstated commercial flop and understated cult hit, Mallrats, "You keep reading them, I'll keep writing them."

And more refers to stinkpalms.

So, yeah, Holidays and flash flood warnings, and playing Mass Effect, and trying to find a copy of Christmas Vacation and having to settle on the edited for basic cable where they abuse the hell out of saying non-defecation, "shit," but heaven forbid you let grandpa drop that he drank to deal with Christmas going to hell. I don't really feel like going on a censorship rant for no reason, but the mood may hit me.

Habenero Hot Sauce Tamale Shooters - only @ Black Angus

I made tamales with my family. AND for my first time ever, hot sauce, from my bongwater grown habaneros. We've got the beginnings of a Mexican restaurant from the amount of friends and family asking for some, so that's cool. Ended up with 16 or so dozen out of 75lbs of masa. We ended up doing a number of variations with the fillings. That is to say, when I took over stuffing, I mixed it up with all of the ingredients and stopped being as stingy as my sisters with the filling. My mom & I had a spirited back and forth about spreading masa. She's all into the glop it on and spread method, and I'm all about the nice even layer. I feel the superior tamales were shown in the final taste test. You know what the best part of masa is? The thin little bits that get stuck on the hoja that are all crispy. All I gotta say.

In the hot sauce department, it was cool making something out of a plant that grew by complete accident. Inspiration hit in thanks to catching up on Pretty Good Cooking. As luck would have it, the latest episode at the time was Habanero Hot Sauce. My only deviation from Phil's recipe is I added garlic, substituted lemon juice for lime, and in my final blend, I added cilantro. I feel that really boosted the flavor of it, while giving it a nice look in the bottle. Your food should always be pretty. Picture up above notwithstanding.

Present Day

So, yeah, that's what my week was full of. And serving coffee too early in the day and trying to slang words by night. Still waiting for responses back on all of my pieces. The waiting game sucks. Just silent indifference after an autoreply@donotrespond. But it gives you the opportunity to futz about with other things, as you nervously edit everything down by self doubt, and because you realize that rough drafts are way too unimaginative and stale.

I mentioned last week I have a lot of chapters done already that I haven't posted, so today's ramble about antique computer games and a potentially current discipline within the social sciences that will preserve internet history for as far as evolutionary life will allow us to spread the past knowledge of the internet, our diligent internet archivists, leads us to one of those chapters. Those stream of consciousness, mid sentence asides, are exactly what you came for. Same with meta, fourth wall breaking nods to an audience that was never really there. That one was for the internet archivists of the future that know when I finally abandon this site. I'm really swinging for the fences in this one.

Which is just silly because the chapter today is also silly. We met Trip's trainwreck of a mother back in what was at one point chapter 9 (my novel is going through metamorphosis) and now in, for continuity's sake, chapter 21 we meet Decker's. This chapter is light and airy and still needs some work, but it's meant to be a breather chapter before everything gets all serious (well, as serious as it could be).

Decker's mother is sort of an amalgam of my Grandmother and my mother. As well as how my far more latino friends were treated by their mothers. That on and off switch of, "I love my sweet Angel, even if he is a worthless troublemaker," is what I tried to capture. I really need to work on my Spanish in between classes. Would my audience grow if I switched languages?

Is the English speaking world tired of me already? Am I over conflating the dynamics of grassroots marketing with a lazy and self-driven exploratory energy to make myself seem like, to an internet archivist of the future, on the cusp of my game, ready for a breakthrough? Probably.

I always imagined releasing this novel when I was first outlining it. I couldn't keep up with the schedule of that, so this has worked for me so far. I have until, what, February or something for it to be a year of me posting chapters? Lazily at that? I wanted to release a book online then package it at the end, and when I think about it, that's exactly what I've been doing. I thought of it more along the lines of me releasing chunks of chapters, and adding in notes and such in hyperlink, like above, to hilight where certain ideas were pulled from, in order to give a better understanding and more tangible world to the text. Since this is my first time doing something like this, it's pretty unpolished, and sorta slapdash put together since I'm learning on the fly, but like I said up at the top, I do things at my own pace and be real about it.

And that pace has ramped up to give you the chapter I've been hyping up as if to overconflate its value as a pet scene. How you feel about it may vary, but here's my pet dog in his Christmas cape.

Source: Internet Archive Photo - Dogs in clothes

"You're shooting stars with the barrels in your eyes."

Hey to my tiny but powerful reader base. I'm back. I didn't forget you. How could I forget you? You're so quirky and have excellent posture.

So yeah, I took last week off from my rigorous schedule of blogging once a week for my birthday.

I also have been spending a lot of time engaging with humanity in the wild and at work, as well as at school. I started my new semester taking my Noir fiction class. Finished up discussions on The Maltese Falcon and am on to The Big Sleep. I realized I made a fatal error in not rereading The Big Sleep, since it's been almost exactly a year since I read it, and the details are hazier than I expected. Hopefully no one notices me mostly commenting about the movie.

Aside from school work, and work work, I've been playing Fallout 4 in the wake of the Far Harbor DLC being released. I've been farting around bringing all my settlements up to snuff and rearranging my house furniture with all the new things added for settlement building. I spent all last night doing this:

From Drab

To Fab

Thanks to a post on /r/fallout, and me not reading patch notes, I found out how to rotate items on multiple axis's, so once again I spent a full work day straightening up my personal settlement. Welcome Home.

I've of course been playing the DLC but I've been having issues with live broadcasting on twitch lately so I don't have anything to show for it. I've mostly been doing side quests and I haven't advanced the main plot for Far Harbor yet. I've been running around the island being chased by mutated angler fish. But I finally decked out my guns with top quality mods, and I'm getting into more of my Charisma perks, so needing guns will hopefully be a thing of the past. Pacifying a Deathclaw and sicking it on someone is fun.

I've also been on a huge Deftones listening kick. If you're a fan and haven't picked up their latest album, Gore, I would do so. I'd say quality-wise it falls in between Diamond Eyes and Koi No Yokan, and has just as many awesome old school metal sounding riffs (especially Doomed User) as shoegazing walls of sound (like Phantom Bride). I've been a fan of them since '98 after I stumbled upon Around the Fur, and they're a band that's grown in maturity alongside of me just growing. As much as I love the nostalgia drummed up by listening to Adrenaline-White Pony, I feel their last 3 albums since losing Chi have just gotten more focused and adventurous with their sound. Having been listening to their albums in chronological order, the teenage bombast of Adrenaline has its fingers all over the rest of their catalog, but the last 21 years have morphed their sound into something all together different. What started out on Fireal and Fist closing the album with powerful soaring guitars with weird sounds and effects has become their signature sound.

And in the last 2 weeks where you haven't heard from me, I also finished chapter 8 rewrites with chapter 9 almost complete (had I not been playing Fallout till 5 in the morning, I would have).  So I'm gonna close out on the requisite dog picture and chapter posting. See you next week, gang.

Someone get this freakin' thing off me!

EDIT: I also managed to finish chapter 9 today, so I added that below. It's two for you, because one won't do.