Sockpuppet Blog.

The show

As usual I performed from a VR space using my avatar¹, which was a first for them. Unfortunately my hand tracking setup wasn’t working (you can read about those woes over on my main blog) but I don’t think it really mattered. I also finally got to make use of my new audio setup for an actual show (having done a couple of dry runs in VRChat over the past week) and I got a lot praise for the audio quality, so that was super nice to hear.

I played acoustic versions of Come Out, Behind a Mask, and Adding Up to Nothing, and all three songs went over really well. I also took a recording which I’ll be posting on my performances section at some point, and it will also appear on their own performance archive.

Afterwards they invited me to stick around for their status meeting so I could hear about a lot of the amazing work they’re doing. Back when I was a software engineer I’d actually considered applying for a job with them, and this whole thing has me thinking I’d like to do that again! Even though I’m too disabled to work a full-time job anymore. And super burned out on software engineering. 🙃 But Mark Graham, the director of the Wayback Machine, said that they take all kinds, so maybe there would be something there for me anyway. I’ll have to look at their open job listings.

Preservation

Anyway. I definitely want to share some thoughts about the Internet Archive. I am super glad that it exists and that they specifically operate like a library, not like a tech company, because it’s such an amazing resource for everyone out there, especially when it comes to preserving open-license and public-domain content, as well as abandoned/lost media.

A while back I started to write an AI-driven lyric search engine so that I could find a song that I’d had stuck in my head and couldn’t remember the name of. Eventually I used my human brain, and not AI, to remember enough context cues to track it down; the song was “Lolita” by Moneyshot, off their debut album Bliss. This music is, as far as I can tell, completely lost to the world, as is everything about that band.

But fortunately, I could remember enough things about the album to track things down; I had bought this album from CDBaby back when they were an online record store and not just one of many cogs in a corrupt machine, and CDBaby’s record store had a very specific and easy-to-remember URL scheme (which feels like a luxury today). So with just a little more work I was able to find the original listing page and from there I was able to get the band’s website². All thanks to the Internet Archive.

I’ve also been trying to recover a bunch of lost media as well. For example, back in grad school, a friend of mine was releasing weird abstract electronic music on hand-burned CD-Rs. There is absolutely no information about him or his music anywhere online as far as I can find. So I took action³. I also intend to take such action on so many other CDs that I own which are impossible to find online, this lost media from a time when music meant something.

Internet Archive also reminded me of a band I loved back in college, and how their sound has evolved over the years was a direct inspiration to the final track on Transitions, as well as much of the sound of that album⁴.

My personal efforts

Most of my websites run on my own platform, Publ, that I designed specifically to make sure that it’s as archival-friendly as possible. Pagination is stable, nearly everything is done with server-side rendering, and image renditions⁵ are generated in a cache-friendly way, ensuring that the right rendition is served up based on whatever render spec was provided at the time the page was served up.

There’s also a helper tool I wrote, Pushl, which helps to maintain links between sites, particularly with protocols like Webmention, but another thing it can do is automatically ping the Wayback Machine with every webpage it sees, ensuring that things get archived if possible. Because the web is nothing if it cannot be preserved and cached and stored for later and remain open.

My website is also built such that the Internet Archive can find and preserve the public previews of my music. I use another tool I wrote, Bandcrash, to generate the preview players, and have some glue to import Bandcrash’s output everywhere on this site. So in theory, when the Wayback Machine next crawls this website⁶, everything will be preserved for later, including the player, which is also built to be IA-crawlable.

I am also working on an idea for an indie-friendly streaming system — think RSS but for Spotify-like purposes — and I have prototypical microformats throughout my website to facilitate this, as well as a design for an overarching music/streaming syndication format that makes use of these microformats, as well as providing an easier-to-parse JSON rendition. (There are technical reasons why I’m not simply extending RSS for this purpose.)

I also intend, at some point, to upload my entire discography to the Internet Archive, because as I’ve said before, my main interest is in gaining listeners and people who are willing to support me in ways other than going through the war machine, and I care more about my stuff being heard and preserved than I do about it making me a millionaire. I have enough money to live on (thanks to my aforementioned past as a software engineer), what I need is the satisfaction of feeling successful, and also I need to know that my music will outlast me and my frail, fleshy self.

In conclusion

The Internet Archive is amazing, and we should all do what we can to support it, for the good of the future.