The quarantine finally got to me a couple of days ago and I had to go out for a drive to get some dinner at a place about 90 minutes away.  On that drive, I had a CD by The Good Rats and a song came on, Victory In Space.  This song is somewhat about NASA buying hookers for astronauts, but it’s also the germ of an idea I had for a NaNoWriMo novel.  The story idea – all I had – was about an intergalactic hooker in an erotic comedy genre.  That’s open to just about anything I could think up.  So when I heard that song come on, it got me thinking about the story again.

NaNoWriMo is still 6 months away, so I have plenty of time to commit and begin planning, or just let the idea waste away for another year.  Last night as I was falling asleep, I gave some consideration to the idea.  NaNo doesn’t care what format you write in, as long at it has a word count.  So I started thinking out of the box.  First I considered something like a series of blog entries.  There’s lots of ways I could present that.  First person, like a journal of the hooker; or third person, writing about her.  But blog entries always have this "newer is first" problem that makes reading a story difficult.

While thinking about the navigation aspect of such a story, it led me in a different direction.  Maybe I could write a choose-your-own-adventure story.  Hypertext and links are the perfect medium for presenting a story like that.  However,  a story like that could be a massive undertaking and while it’s literally unlimited in scope and plot, that’s also its downfall as many paths would be unfulfilling.

Considering those issues rekindled yet another memory of mine, where I would imagine I was a movie director.  My magnum opus would be one movie with at least 4 different plot lines in it and each had different endings based on the result of a climax in the second half.  The first half would reuse most of the scenes in each of the plots, but there would be some differences between them, like being shot from a different perspective or in a different place at the same time, showing extra info about the other potential plots.  The goal of the movie would be to cause a bunch of confusion at release time with different reviewers writing about the story and their reviews all conflict with each other as to what happened.

With that in mind, what if I did something similar with my adventure story where as you progress, you might end up in a different plotline depending on when you navigated to the next page?  But who would ever notice something like that?  You’d have to make it known at the beginning to watch out for it, which would just spoil the whole concept.

And all this is just thinking right now.  I’m not even sure I want to commit to another month of writing non-stop.  And if I did, it would be a planned story instead of my usual figure-it-out-as-you-fuck-it-all-up style. So that could slow me down anyway.  We’ll see…

Today, I completed a project that has been an off and on effort for a very long time.  Finally, I have all of my ripped music with high-quality cover artwork.  My definition of high quality starts at 950px, but the ones that I have been augmenting myself are 1500px.  This began many years ago, judging by past blog posts, about 6 years ago.  My first thought was scanning ALL of my CDs.  That was overly ambitious to say the least.  Then the plan was to scan only the MCA Master Series so I could print them and hang them on the wall as art.  That was doable and was completed.  Then the plan became to only scan the covers which had no suitable online version.

And that is what took me years to complete, just because it became somewhat low priority.  If I had artwork at all, that’s pretty good.  But when I started using Plex regularly, I really noticed when my artwork was subpar.  The cover would be all fuzzy and pixelated on my large TV where I was viewing Plex.  So that sort of got me motivated.

The biggest problem was identifying which albums had poor album art.  And for that, I wrote a utility that would scan my Plex database and read all the covers and get their measurements, then create an export file that I could filter and sort to what I needed.  And over time, the list of low-res covers shrank, to the point where I am today.

And while I was creating these better quality scans, I continued to upload them to my Flickr page for anyone to download, but I doubt anyone really finds them there.  So along the way, I tried to find a more popular website where I could share my work.  Fanart.tv seemed to be promising, and I did get some covers approved there, but I ran into a problem with moderators that were either too picky, or didn’t recognize the original artwork and dismissed it as incorrect.  And as I had read in their usage guidelines, you are not to argue with a moderator, just do what they say.  I chose to leave, instead.  I’ve had such trouble finding a community that I can participate in.

Despite that trouble, I’m still pleased with myself.  I’m not one to need a lot of recognition or praise, I just want to contribute.

There’s really a stigma against failure, especially in America.  It is expected that you keep trying until you succeed, regardless of the consequences of doing so.  While my tale of defeat is nothing of consequence, with little to really be lost from non-success, it kind of makes me sad for people who are not given the opportunity to fail.  And further, to even classify the result as failure when it really should not be.

A week or so ago, I replicated a piece of artwork I have in my house, using my CD collection instead of the cassette tapes that were used in the art.  The picture of the CDs turned out pretty good, I thought, and I was inspired to grow it to a massive scale.  Where my original picture had maybe a couple hundred CDs featured in it, I wanted to scale it up to most of my collection, somewhere on the order of 1500+ CDs.

Over a series of nights, I spent my time placing the CDs in the pattern on the floor.  Keeping the pattern correct and also trying to make sure the CDs varied enough in their grouping was a little arduous.  But, I did persist and came up with a very large, organized mess of CDs.  Then the challenge became how to capture it.

I have a fair collection of photography equipment and so I was able to do some experimentation.  Experimentation was all I could do because I really had no idea how to accomplish the task.  The first attempt was to capture as much as possible in one picture.  I held the camera above the arrangement using a tripod and the self-timed shutter.  This kind of worked except when you would zoom in, you couldn’t read any of the CD spines.  So, in other words, it didn’t work at all.

The real solution would be to take multiple photos and stitch them together.  So, that was my next attempt.  I scanned one row of CDs and took a series of pictures, then took them to the computer to mate them up.  That proved to be very difficult because each picture had to be adjusted to compensate for rotation and zoom and also lighting.  This was proving to be a non-solution as well.  I had a massive number of CDs arranged on my floor and I was running out of ideas to photograph them.

Since the problem with my stitching/panorama concept was consistency, I came up with the idea that I could build a trolly-type of rig to suspend the camera over the arrangement.  This would keep the camera at a constant height and angle where each picture would be the same.  It was a pretty clever idea and made me feel pretty inventive.

So I went to work assembling the rig and shot the first row of CDs.  I took the pictures to the computer and stitching them was actually pretty simple.  This was promising.  I evaluated the size of the arrangement and determined I would have nine rows of photos to stitch up.  This would take days, certainly.  But that’s ok, as long as I made progress.

I shot the second row of photos and brought them in for stitching.  Suddenly, things weren’t lining up anymore.  The first couple photos worked out, then all of a sudden, the scale didn’t fit any more.  Thinking I must’ve shifted the camera somewhere along the way, I re-shot the row of photos.  Again, at the same place, the photos failed to line up.  I wasn’t sure if it was the first row of photos that were somehow misaligned and causing the second row to not match up, or maybe it was just something that was intrinsic to the photos themselves.  I was noticing there was a slight fish-eye effect from the 35mm lens I was using, so the CDs on the periphery of the photos were skewed from the ones in the center.  As I would line up the images on the outer edges, they would be distorted from the ones trying to be matched in the center.

At this point, I had had my CD collection completely dismantled, on the floor, for a week.  This was causing me a little bit of stress.  I was unable to use my listening room for any listening because the floor was consumed with this arrangement.  I was adding new CDs to my collection, but they were in a separate stack, not integrated yet.  My patience was running low, and my prospects of success were low as well.

The next thing to attempt would be to use my 50mm lens on the camera, which wouldn’t fish-eye as much, but that would take much closer images of the CDs, unless I built the rig even higher up, which I wasn’t too keen to do.  So, I accepted failure and began the process of dismantling and reorganization.

And the point here, accepting failure, is the key.  "Failing", or "giving up", is not a bad thing.  There are plenty of other phrases that exist to make yourself feel better about the situation, like "cutting your losses", and something about "reward vs. effort".  those phrases get closer to the reality of the situation.  Right now, this is not something I want to tackle.  It was a good idea, and one I may revisit in the future with an improved vision and more commitment, but I want a return to stability.  There would be no way I could clear my mind enough to consider any means of improvement with everything all out like that.

In the next iteration, if there is one, I would definitely test out some techniques on smaller arrangements, instead of committing fully to a full collection dissection.  That was days of effort to dismantle and it will be days to reassemble, too.  So until next time, fail on.