and you begin

Tom: http://madison.craigslist.org/m4w/1568706277.html
Tom: HAHAHAHA
Tom: You can be his “girl”, Mark.
Mark: He looks like the kind of guy who would drug my drink.
Mark: No thanks, i’ll pass.

So what better way to spend a Saturday than to go a friendly neighborhood Goodwill and buy two cheaply priced VCRs and travel to a dollar store and purchase blank VHS tapes? I may be a couple of cables short of what I need but i can purchase a couple of those super cheap off of monoprice.

The word of the week is Lo-Fi!

i’ll be taking a bit of video i made and other video from the great internet archive for a good ol’ music video. For which song, you may ask? You’ll have to find out. The idea is taking all of that footage from digital means back into analog tape (vhs). Then that same footage from that tape gets recorded to another vhs tape, then back to the previous and so on and so fourth. In other words, i’ll be looping this video through two tapes, hopefully degrading the quality further as it passes. The trick here is getting that video BACK into my computer. don’t know how i’ll manage that.

i didn’t have the videos ready at the moment, so i did record some music (notably Strangers and a bit of Nova Scotia from Artificial Horizon) onto a VHS. I then proceeded to remove the tape and crumple it up with my hands and smeared my fingers all on the top side of the tape. Then i neatly rolled it back into the case. The result is a beautiful warble effect:

Strangers / Nova Scotia (Lo-Fi) by the chief of thieves

i also plan to get a tape deck and do the same thing, only with cassettes.

at one point, i did manage to get the vhs tape stuck, for whatever reason. I had to open the VCR and see how i could manually remove it. In defense, the VCR managed to give me a nasty cut on the thumb. I got the tape out but now i have to leave the cover off to manually push the tape downward, if i’m inserting a new one. not a big deal, really.

We regret to inform you that after this new 2.20 firmware update, we will no longer be developing or updating for your Mark™ Character. The decision was a difficult one but it’s best for the company. We will instead be focusing on newer, more advanced Characters for personal enjoyment. Your Character will still be fully functional, but will no longer be issued any new updates. If you would like to continue to stay up-to-date with the latest features, please consider replacing your obsolete model with a newer one. We’ve made it easy to replace him. Do note, however, you can not be in possession of two live Characters at once.  It is highly recommended that you disable your old model rather than completely leaving him. Leaving your model may cause him to do unexpected actions or behave uncontrollably. To replace an older model, we recommend making a back-up of any data so it can be transferred. The killswitch must then be activated and the final shut down sequence will begin. You must then throw your old Character off a bridge, incinerate him, or bury your old Character.

New in this update:
Now compatible with IRL engine 4.10
New mini games can now be played when performing tasks
Loading times have been decreased
Dream notebook has been added – Allows for recording of dreams in real time
Kodak Zi8 – Allows your Character to record his environment in 1080p High Definition
Achievements – 60 new achievements to unlock

Bug fixes and updates:
Fixed a graphical issue where new shoes would not show up properly
Fixed an issue that made music creation more difficult than it should be
Fixed an issue where inventory would not be displayed properly
Fixed an issue where the backpack would disappear when walking into a new location
Fixed an issue where waking up at a certain time of night would cause him to behave strangely
Fixed an issue where background music would play suddenly
Fixed an issue that caused the Character to be stuck in the bathroom door
Applying for a college class no longer displays graphical bug
Health bar now disappears when there’s minimal damage – can be brought back upon request
Fixed an issue where the stamina bar would be stuck on screen after being completely drained and regained.
Trade system has been modified and updated to accommodate for recent items.

..we ended up using bbPress after all.

We’ve been meaning to add our own forums for I/O (and general netlabel) community for quite a while. Since we decided to bring I/O up from dead, we thought we would go ahead and go with the idea.

First forum software i thought of was phpBB. It’s free, it’s popular, everyone knows about it. It’s also extremely complicated (from the admin look of things) and creating templates from scratch can be hard and time consuming. We started looking for other alternatives and we came across one called bbPress, which is a nice little lightweight forum. Very simplistic and minimalistic. Problem is, it hardly comes with any features built in. Out-of-the-box, it doesn’t support:

• custom avatars
• attachments
• signatures
• post count
• ability to display members online
• bbcode
• private messaging
• polls
• smilies/emoticons
• topic icons
• post preview
• ability to report post
• display unread posts.

That’s right. From a clean installation, bbPress doesn’t have any of that. Features that are common in even the most obscure php based bulletin boards. bbPress, however, does support plugins. And guess which features i listed above are available in plugins? All of them! Which means people who were willing to use bbPress had to go and manually find (Or write their own!) the plugin they want, download it, upload it to the proper folder via FTP, then activate it from inside bbPress. Repeat this process for every single plugin to cover basic features that other bulletin boards have from the get-go. Oh, let’s not forget that if a bbPress update were to come out, there’s a good chance that upon upgrading, you’ll find half of your plugins malfunctioning and/or completely dysfunctional. At least the community is a little more helpful than a certain other plugin.

So for all the work of modifying the theme and uploading a ton of plugins just to do basic shit, we’re moving back to phpBB. It’s just not worth it.

I do salute you, mr/mrs. developer, who may have spent countless hours of their own time, writing plugins for such a shameful excuse of a bulletin board. Let’s just hope your plugin doesn’t spontaneously combust if a bbPress update were to come out.

i’ve been nearly at it the entire-freakin’-day setting up the shop outside of the main UL website. As you recall earlier, the plugin on the UL site went haywire and had to disable it by deleting the plugin via FTP. Attempts to renable the plugin have failed and the site had been stuck without a functioning cart for over a day.

In comes the unnecessary work of adding a second wordpress blog to the “shop” subdomain! Since i couldn’t gather any of the settings I used for the plugin when it worked, i had to redo everything from scratch. On the bright side, I do kind of like the idea of separating the shop from the main site and it’s a lot more cleaner as well. Here’s to hoping this plugin doesn’t crash and burn! Again!

It’s kind of a little terrifying working with these plugins. This one in particular, does have a development team but they aren’t doing much as to helping out individuals who need the help. In other words, their “Support” forum (notice the quotes) is bombarded with questions (of which I even posted my own with no reply) and hardly a post gets responded with helpful information. Topics from over a year ago are still left unanswered and demanded by newer users. Documentation is abysmal and out-of-date.

Why I continue to use this plugin you ask? Well, because it’s capable of doing functions i desire. Notably donation-based downloads. This is perfect for our “Pay-what-you-want” (User input price) MP3 downloads and it’s the only shopping cart i’ve seen that’s capable of doing it. Okay.. maybe that’s the ONLY function I really desire.

So all of that is done and i finally got the I/O site fixed up (minus the M3Us, i’ve still got to get on that). All that’s left is the i/o forum, which requires CSS modifications to match the i/o site.

more coding, great! tom is helping with that bit though.

on the bright side, i’m learning more as I go.

Will 2010 be any better?

Don’t know.

In the mean time, i’ve been hard at work these past two-three weeks working on several projects. One of them being the Unnamed Label website. We made the decision to integrate a cart into the website. It worked for a while and then something fucked it up and I had to take it down. So this has me in a sdoihsiubewqwomd!

I’ve got to get it back up so i’m thinking of moving it to another domain.

I’ve also been hard at work completely revamping the I/O website. Yes, it’s back up and we’re going to start releasing free music regularly, like the old days. The new site is pretty nifty. Every album on its corresponding release page has a flash music player embedded and every song is fully playable. We’re still working on getting those M3Us up for those people who refuse to use flash.

oh, i guess, new material coming soon?

how’s “depressing music for depressing people” sound?

Bad? Good. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it anyway.