Opinion/Editorial/Life

Record Store Day 2023

Today was Record Store Day.  It’s moistly just, a “promotional” sort of deal for local record shops, and not really like, a “real holiday”.  I decided I would go ahead and give it a go.  There were a couple of pretty inexpensive albums that I was interested in and I’ve recently (finally) picked up a record player after many years of “I should get a record player”.

Man, now I’m just getting layers and layers of things to bring up here.  Maybe it’s best to just start at, “Why vinyl?”

I guess it’s almost, “Why not?”  Ok, there are plenty of reasons why not.  It takes up a lot of space, it’s not portable, it’s not particularly cheap, it’s not skip-able, etc etc.  Some of these are advantages though.  I listen to mostly albums anyway, why not buy a format that lends itself to album listening?  Space and cost are less of an issue as well, I don’t intend to go nuts on buying records.  There is nothing that I just HAVE to have.  If I could get an ok deal, on some things, I might buy it, but there is nothing I am desperate for on vinyl.  I’ve already had a few records for a while, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and Dark Side of the Moon, A promo single from Mortal Kombat Annihilation, and slightly more recently, the soundtrack to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I also recently bought a player for these albums.  I found one that fit what I was looking for at a garage sale and got it pretty cheap, it’s a nice little entry level Audio-Technica AT-LP60.  The main thing I wanted was a stand alone unit like this.  It takes up less space, and I already have speakers that are much nicer than most of the self contained units I come across.  It operates perfectly for my basic needs.

I had looked over the list online, and the price list I had found, and basically only wanted 2 albums.  Dodie’s Hot Mess EP, and the Arooj Aftab – Live in London EP.  I am going to skip the boring details behind these choices for now because I may do some album write ups in the future but these two were both affordable at under $20 each and both were artists I enjoy.  I had a few others lined up as alternative options or maybe if I felt spendy, but I ended up either not finding them or passing on them.  I also decided that I would go ahead and get the Taylor Swift Folklore album, if it was there, despite it being a bit more than I wanted to spend.  The price didn’t matter, it was sold out.  People camped out overnight for that thing.  CRAAAZY People…..

I was a bit worried during the lead up.  The store had been posting photos online as they unboxed everything and I had seen neither of these albums shown.  This was especially annoying because Dodie’s album was listed as “Regional Focus” and she was doing a live show off in London FOR Record Store Day.  Which sort of suggested, “Hot Mess” may be “Regionally focused to England.”  Friday night though, both albums showed up as being available.  So I was set to go.

The store opened at 8AM.  But it was also a 45 minute drive away in the next city over, and I didn’t have anything on my list that I needed to be there super early for anyway.  I arrived around 8:30, and there was still a line down the block, which was a little discouraging.  I had driven all this way though, how long could it take?  It didn’t help that it was also very cold, and I had not brought a jacked, though I was wearing a flannel shirt, in classic “I’m a 90s teen” fashion.  

The line took, a very looooong time.  It was something like 2 hours before I got in the store.  Thankfully, I got to chat up some nice strangers while waiting.  We made jokes, and talked music and concerts and records and talked other things.  Funny enough,, I never got any of their names.  There was one lady who had been at the hospital nearby and her husband had asked her to come down here and see if she could get a KISS related album.  I get the impression she did not manage to, I never saw her in the store and she had been trying to recruit me or the other dude to buy her a second copy since it was limit one.  Then there was “The other dude”, whom I really enjoyed talking with.  Talking with him was like looking at a mental and verbal mirror, though we looked nothing alike.  He was disappointed that people would leave the store and not look happy and not show off their hauls.  He ended up checking behind me and as I was leaving, I reminded him to do his fist pump as he left for the crowd outside.  There was also a younger girl who reminded me a bit of my daughter, with her slightly eccentric dress and mannerisms.  The notable store for her, she was wearing these flowered pants.  As we got closer to the store entrance, she mentioned being friends with the worker managing the store entrance.  The employee finally noticed her in line and they exchanged some pleasantries, and the employee mentioned “I like your pants”.  The young girl said thanks, then opened the front of her jacked and exclaimed, “They aren’t just pants, they are overalls!”  And everyone got a kick out of that, and the reaction of the employee.

It’s really kind of funny that we never got anyone’s names, because the other dude said something that really stuck with me.  He talked about writing some books as a hobby, and not really wanting to be a famous writer because he liked the anonymity of just, not being known.  He mentioned enjoying just sort of the basic human interaction, he had a better phrasing that I’ve forgotten.  And here we are, a small group of strangers, bonding over a shared event, passing ships on the ocean, with no real clue who we all really are.

Anyway, my turn finally came up, I went in.  The RSD Exclusives were in bins sorted alphabetically, and the front of the alphabet was open.  I quickly thumbed through the A-B bin and found my Arooj Aftab record.  The only one in there, I have no idea if there had been more earlier.  I picked it up and slid down to C-D looking for Dodie, and like the Arooj Aftab album, there was one copy of Hot Mess.  This meant mission accomplished for the day, anything else was a bonus.  The end of the alphabet was open so I slid on down there and started working my way back towards “A-B”.  No Taylor Swifts.  There was a NENA – 99 Luftbaloons I seriously considered but decided to skip.  I almost got the Garbage EP, I do like Garbage.  In the end, I decided on no more exclusives, and went over the the main part of the store.  I checked for any CHVRCHES or Aurora albums they might have and came up empty there.I checked through the “recent arrivals” and there were a few interesting ones but I decided I would wait for now.  There was a line outside, only 20 people allowed in at a time due to the store size, and I didn’t really need to linger.  I headed to the checkout table.

The Other Dude ended up behind me in line, he had a couple of albums picked out.  The real oddity here was the person in front of me.  So the store WAS having 10% off everything not RSD related.  So if you’re a collector, that would be a good time to pick up some other stuff.  The guy in front of me was buying, cassettes.  ONLY cassettes.  They seemed to be like, $1 each, and he spent a whole $8 and some change.  Like dude…..   dude…..  dude…. I am sure your cassette choices are great….  but did you just stand in line for possibly 2 hours, to spend $8 on used cassette tapes?  That 10% didn’t even save a dollar and there are a LOT of people here waiting to spend hundreds of dollars.

It seemed, very odd.

After finishing up, I went back to my car and drove around the block to…. The OTHER record store in town, Recycled Records.  This store was not participating in Record Store Day, because it’s closing in like a week.  It’s been around in town for a very long time.  I thought I had read they were doing 50% off, there was no indication that this was the case at all, anywhere.  I didn’t end up buying anything.  Not for trying, but I just didn’t find anything that jumped out at me.  There was a Radio Head vinyl I would have bought at half price, but it seemed new Vinyl was only 10% off.  They didn’t have any of the other artists I looked for unfortunately.

Afterwards I headed out to spend a few hours at my parent’s house just hanging out before heading home in the late afternoon.

Just one last bit, I’ll talk about the albums themselves later, but they are both very cool disks, and I can understand why people buy these special versions like this.

Various Activities of Late

It’s been a bit since I really just wrote out a regular blog post so I thought it would be prudent to do so, mostly just touching on some of the stuff I’ve been doing or thinking about recently. I’ll just break things up a bit into some sections, for easy skimming/ignoring.

Old Writing

Every so often, I get this weird bug to just delete all of my old posts and start fresh and the old content all sucks and blah blah blah. Then that never really works out as hoped and I kind of miss having all the old content hanging around and I drag some of it back. Well, I’m currently in the “Dragging it all back” stage of things. Part of this is also part of my ongoing organizing of all of the shit I’ve written over the years.

I tend to get frequent “Project ADHD”. By the end of this blog post, that will definitely be very clear, but every time I have started to organize all of my old writings, or I just start a new method without pulling in old stuff, I’ve left a blob of “to get to” files. This applies to things not JUST writing, but the writing is particularly bad. I’ve got some that only show up in my blog archive hosted internally on my network. I have some files buried in “to sort” folders on a storage blob somewhere. I have several different folders in my own personal archive sorted using different methods.

These span different formats from Text to WordPress DBs to Doc files to even some old files I couldn’t open (I’ll touch on this in a bit). I’ve been converting it all to the new format, which basically falls into two major categories. i am sure I have said it about previous organizing attempts, but THIS is the way.

This is decidedly the way going forward. It’s been the way I WANTED to do things for a while, I just, wasn’t motivated enough to do it. The two over arching categories essentially amount to “Journal Entries” and “Structured documents”. Sorted into my One Drive Documents (for backup) as Journal and Documents. The Documents is sorted down into Reviews, by topic (video games, toys, etc), Original Fiction, Fan Fiction, Essays, and School. I’ll get to the School bit in a later section. The others are a bit more self explanatory, but generally, these are “longer form structured writing”.

Journal is everything else. This post, is being written into Journal, in a file called “2023.03.22 – On Recent Activities.md”, though that may not end up being the blog post title. This is the way. Everything starts in the Journal, with a date in the filename, because file system dates are incredibly unreliable, and then gets posted elsewhere, sometimes.

Ok, not everything starts there. Some of the Journal Entry documents start as Joplin Notes from my phone, because I’m not near a PC. Or they start as Reddit comments that end up going on long that I want to keep a note of later, where they get copy/pasted into One note, and later turned into Journal files. But, it is the ultimate repository.

I’ve been diligently converting old files to this format. Part of why I don’t just stick everything in there is that reviews often contain images, and the simple file format requirement of Markdown makes images a pain. Yes, Markdown can do images, but it’s much simpler in a Word Document. The issue in the past was that could mean I can’t open those Word Documents anymore in the future, but keeping things in One Drive helps stop that from being a problem, since everything these days is connected, and I have confidence that Microsoft will keep my documents up to date.

School Documents and Old Documents

Which brings me to the school documents. And as I said, “Documents that can no longer be opened”. A lot of my super old documents from the 90s, are in a Microsoft Works format, WKS or WPS. Word can’t open these. Notepad can sort of open them but they don’t have a proper format to them at all.

So I’ve collected these files up and spun up a Windows XP Virtual Machine. Thanks to Archive,org, I can get a copy of Microsoft Works from the 90s. I wanted to go really pure on the experience and run a Windows 98 VM, but I couldn’t get it to recognize the CD drive ISO to install Works, so Windows XP it was.

Fortunately, Works can save out .DOC files. They are Word 97 Doc files, and modern Word throws up a warning about them, but it can open them, and they are properly formatted, so that’s the goal. I also snagged an old copy of Microsoft Publisher from archive.org, to do the same with some ancient Publisher files. The modern Publisher Reader available online literally says “These files are too old and can’t be opened” when I tried that route. I also had some old CAD files, though those were able to be opened by the modern Autodesk Viewer. I kept the files, but I also did a bunch of print screens on each one to preserve them in an easier to view format.

I don’t really know why I need all of these old files, but file storage is cheap and they don’t take up a lot of space.

Lameazoid Rebuild

I started off with this as the first topic but rambled off into other areas, so I’ve moved it down here. As part of my organizing, I’ve been republishing, with, approximate original dates, a LOT of old content to Lameazoid.com. I pushed up like 100 old Video Game reviews. I have a few more movie and book write ups I’ve done on deck to do next. I am going to dig into old Toy content next, but I think there is less of that missing than other content.

Some of them are kind of trash they are so old, but honestly, despite calling them “reviews”, they are more just a “write up and record of my thoughts on whatever”. They are just, “Fancy journal entries with pictures”.

It’s all mostly for my reference.

Also, several of them are literal jokes. The Zero Wing review is written entirely in “broken English” like the Zero Wing game uses. I actually scrapped it, but I wrote a review of Morrowind once that was actually just bitching about how shitty the game’s performance was and all of the images were from Counter Strike, not Morrowind. Several are just an excuse to throw a bunch of funny screenshots on a webpage surrounded by text.

Things I WANT to Do

I also have a small list of things I want to do, that I’ve been mostly just, collecting resources for these potential projects. I’ve been increasingly looking into building some sort of simple games. Specifically, games for the NES or PICO-8. Throwing back to my “archive all the old things” writing above, I once made a Breakout Clone in Pico 8 on one my my CHIP computers but I can’t find it anywhere. And yes, I checked on the CHIP boards. It may still just be buried somewhere, I’ve actually found at least one large document project I had started on while sorting old files.

I also really want to do some Solo RPGs. This has been a bit of a growing trend I think online, or maybe I am just seeing it more since I gained some interest in it. A lot of these seem to amount to “Dice based story writing”, which is fine. I’ve actually done one or two of them, though a least one I decided was not for me and archived it off. I have a huge pile of Solo RPGs available through some ITCH.io bundles I’ve bought. I actually plan to blog about these once I do some that seem worth blogging about.

Things I Want to Do…. But I’m Not Doing Them

Just for the sake of throwing it out there, I also have other things I WANT to do that I have not been doing at all. I have a nice sketchbook that’s been sitting on a shelf nearby collecting dust because I really want to start drawing again. I used to draw a LOT but I have not at all, in years.

I still really want to learn to play the Piano, which I sort of started doing back in 2020 for a few months. But since then, the keyboard has just say dormant, next to my PC, as a silent reminder that I should be learning to play it.

I also still want to start cycling. I really need some sort of actual exercise outlet. I actually have an ok road bike I got a deal on at an auction, back in like, 2015 or something. I’ve ridden it like, twice, ever. I really need to get a proper helmet first. Which has been my excuse for not doing it. Another part of my hang up has always been that looking into online communities for cycling, it’s a group that is full of snobs, and that’s a huge fucking turn off. If you aren’t riding some $2000+ super bike then you’re completely wasting time and WILL get killed when it shatters into a zillion pieces after 3 rides. Like yo, you’re driving away anyone just trying to get into a new hobby.

People I Follow Online and Social Media

I actually wrote up a private journal entry about the whole Twitter mess, but I’m really really trying not to fuel that drama, so I’m refraining from actually posting anything about it. It’s gotten me thinking some about social media and following people online in general though. I’ve been online for a very long time and I’ve used computers almost my entire 43 years of life, and that is not an exaggeration. I am, and will forever be connected to technology as a core piece of who I am. And as such, I also flock to social websites. But the funny part is how each one sort of manages to slot into it’s own little place in my world. And how irritating it is when they try to change things and be something I don’t want them to be.

Take say, Instagram. I resisted Instagram for a while, and even once I started using it, I honestly have never been super committed to it. But I do like seeing other people’s photos. I have two accounts, one that is almost exclusively toys, and one that is “everything else”. Which is usually bands and musicians I like, family members, cats, food. In that order. Though lately, they keep trying to turn themselves into TikTok, which I hate, because I don’t want dumb video clips, I want photos.

Instagram of course is part of Facebook, though it serves it’s own purpose. Most of my actual contacts on Facebook are people I actually know. Family, all those people from High School I added when FB first launched, and friends, both from real life and online. Though I want to add that in this case, “Online Friends”, for the most part is, “Actual friends.” People I have been online friends for longer than I’ve been friends with anyone else. People I’ve been connected to cross platforms and in quite a few cases, people I have met with face to face at least once. I also use Facebook some for groups, but it’s pretty much limited to a couple of toy based groups and groups related to musicians I like. I tried using Facebook for news, but the comment sections are always cancerous idiocy so I had to drop all of the news sources I was following.

Beyond that, things get a bit more nebulous.

Take, for example, Reddit. I use Reddit a lot, probably more than is healthy, but i don’t have any friends on Reddit. I basically do not ever look at user names. I do follow a couple of accounts, but it’s mostly just people I actually know, and mostly for the sake of, “This is an easy way to remember who they are on Reddit”. I don’t actually look at their Reddit feeds, because I follow them all through other platforms where I will hear about things they want to say in a much more efficient manner. I do follow and check a shitload of subreddits and regularly browse posts on /r/all. My “Reddit Recap” for 2022 says i was in the “Top 1% of all Redditors”. I’m not sure I’m proud of that one. It’s probably the one place that’s great for getting good information from actual people on a wide variety of topics.

Then there are places like Twitter, which I’ve replaced the functionality of with Mastodon. These places, basically boil down to, “If your profile information meets any one of a dozen or so criteria, I will follow you”. Post about Video Games, Toys, Nerdy Tech shit, almost instant follow. Post snarky one liners about life that I emphasize with, that’s a follow. Post memes about cats or something frequently, but not so frequently it pollutes my feed, you bet, I’ll follow that. I treat Micro Blog platforms more like…. RSS for people’s shit takes and hot takes.

Which brings me to another way I follow people, RSS. I love RSS. RSS is so perfect for following and I am still fucking salty about Google Reader being closed and will always be because it basically killed RSS to the world. As of now, I follow around 500 blogs and news sites. I have a ton more bookmarks, waiting in a folder called, “Todo -> Add to RSS”. And i regularly go through this folder. The criteria for following a blog on RSS are similar to the Micro Blog criteria, but probably in a more broad sense.

I think in the end, I just like hearing people’s stories and random thoughts. Even if I don’t always give feed back with a comment or a like or whatever. I want to know what people think. Especially things that seem completely banal and pointless.