I suppose traditionally that’s what the blog format is meant for, to just kind of shit out everything you consume in the form of links and video embeds. But really that’s more like just “taking notes” at a lecture with a cassette recorder, see what I mean? That’s just transcription. I need something to do with it all. This problem is addressed to some extent by my meticulous music library curation with foobar, and my desperate calls recently for somebody to improve on the way we manage our music.

I think a prevailing problem is that of linearity; I can write a post on here, then another post, then another, and they appear chronologically in a line. Tagging and categorizing helps to make the content on here a little less linear, but it’s still not satisfying enough. I mean what I want is to be able to have some very loose, scrapbook-y interface where I can just kind of swim through collages of things: albums, journal entries. Snapshots of various aspects of certain time-periods. Paper is free-form enough to serve a purpose like this, but notebooks aren’t searchable or easily rearrangeable, and aren’t as ubiquitous as the web.

I actually am working on a new category in here that will present entries a little differently, to accommodate the kind of note-taking that I’m talking about, but even that’s too manual. Why can’t I, for instance, while listening to a D+ album in foobar, click something that will allow me to leave a note on it? The note will be linked to the album, to the song, to the artist, and to today’s date. Later that note will turn up in searches, and whenever I focus on this song/album/artist again. There are a couple solutions for this but all of them are inelegant.

It’s almost as though this whole paradigm of nodes needs to be re-thought. Nodes don’t adequately mimic the way we think, our brains aren’t that compartmentalized. When we are consciously focused on one thing, our attention is also inadvertently directed towards related things. For instance, when you think of an apple, you’re not likely thinking only of the qualities of an apple; a small if undetectable part of you is thinking about Snow White, thinking about Genesis, thinking about pears. And when does something like an apple evolve from a confluence of impressions — their taste, their color, their shape — into something as “node”-like as “an apple”? Is an apple categorized as “fruit” (which is itself a subcategory of “food”), and tagged as “crunchy,” “juicy,” “sweet,” etc.? Not exactly. And not to mention “an apple”’s faint associations with every experience you’ve had with one. Should those experiences be tagged “involved:apple”?

Simply put I guess it’s just a problem of memory. When I listen to an album for the first time, for instance, I never want to forget when I listened to it and what I thought of it. Yet I think it happens more often than not that when I listen to something, I forget sooner than later what I thought of it, or even that I listened to it at all.

A real-world example: I downloaded the new Evangelicals record some months ago. I listened to it once, and from what I can remember, I liked it a fair amount. But I never touched it again. I forgot they existed.

When they opened for Frog Eyes months later, I barely recognized the name. I seriously believed that I had only heard their name, but didn’t have a clue what they sounded like. It wasn’t until I was at the bar ordering a drink overhearing them play “Another Day” that it clicked. Since then I’ve listened to the album half a dozen or more times and found that I really enjoy it.

So, that’s a problem. What’s the solution?

I suppose I could have rated some of their songs when I first heard them. Looking at them now in my foobar, I see that “Another Day” is tagged with 4/5 stars. But when did I do that? I don’t know! I shouldn’t have to worry about these things.

What about a world in which, on some day a couple weeks after I first heard that record, I opened my media player and it presented me with that album, as if to ask me, “Hey, you listened to this album for the first time a few weeks ago, right after you downloaded it. You didn’t rate it; what did you think of it? Want to listen to it now to remind yourself?” It’s not that far-fetched an idea. But, again: media players are largely just spreadsheets.

What about all those movies I see thanks to Netflix? What happens to them years after I watch them? It’s as though I didn’t watch some of them at all. I remember seeing Alphaville sometime in 2005, for instance, but other than some vague imagery I’ve retained, I have no idea what that movie was like. Should I have written myself a short review of it after I watched it? Where would I have put it? What is the proper receptacle for that?

Somehow I’ve been trained to think that I should be not only capable of, but in fact actively thinking about everything I’ve experienced all the time. That’s sick, isn’t it? Is that a product of the internet? Over-stimulation? Is perfect recall too much to ask?

Years ago, I used to see this ad all over Pitchfork. I thought it was funny that a label would so openly and so mechanically condone drug use; the image was memorable; and it really did make me want to go record shopping — the bands they name are such stalwarts and hearken back to the golden years of Matador in the ’90s, even though most are still making music today, reminding me of a time when people did primarily buy music, not download it. It was effective enough anyway that I had to go hunting to find it. I thought I had thoroughly scoured the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, but I had apparently missed this page, along with seven others that contained the ad, from May to June of 2004. I’m sure it was in truth thrown together in a rush and they weren’t especially proud of it at Matador.

I just need to start saving everything I am mildly amused by in passing.

More than that, I think we derived a certain satisfaction from its impossibility. It’s a daily occurrence to watch your cherished bands get snatched up by the popular media, and this photo was a reminder that some of our enthusiasms are very, very safe.

I first spotted it on the WFMU blog (”I can’t imagine Paris getting more than a few bars into Frown Land before ripping it out of her CD player and throwing it out of her window at some homeless person”), but they of course got it from Gawker (”That is truly a cultural juxtaposition”), who got it from goldenfiddle.

Then when I ran across this image of her holding In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, I had to find the original photos that were manipulated. Finally, I did! Here, here, here, and here. There’s even a thread about it on Snopes.

I only wish I knew where it originally appeared. Since goldenfiddle is the oldest reference to it I can find, I blame them for not citing their sources.

And don’t forget Banksy’s take on her album.

One of the best things about it is its artwork. The colors are stunning, it’s peppered with painstakingly subtle, winking touches, and there’s a weird juxtaposition of ruler-guided lines and rough, endearingly sloppy details like lettering or rows of windows. But it didn’t used to be that way; it began as a spinoff to John Allison’s previous comic, Bobbins, which shifted from hand-drawn to vector art on January 15, 2001, a distinctly digital style that continued through Scary Go Round’s first couple years.

It was shortly after I started reading, in 2006, that the comic went “permanently” (for now) hand-drawn, which to me is far preferable, allowing for much greater nuance in gestures and expressions, and more equipped to carry John’s sense of humor.

Lamenting the fact that I didn’t get to watch its evolution in realtime, I decided to catalogue notable dates in its history, coupled with context from John’s blog and the Scary Go Round forum, because I am curious and anal.

If you still need more, El Santo has a huge write-up on SGR.

Things I’ve learned while putting this together:

• phpBB needs a way to sort topics by creation date, rather than last modified date.
• Blogger suuuuuuucks.

A nice fallout of this archiving is that whenever content you’ve subscribed to disappears from the web, you’ll still be able to access its (admittedly homogenized) Reader copy, forever; “forever” here meaning “presumably for as long as Google is around.” When (if?) Google dies, will its data die with it? Despite my intuition that Google will long outlast current notions of what computers are and how they work, I still don’t like entrusting important data to other people, not to mention data that is accessible only through the web. I want a local copy.

But they don’t make it easy for you. Reader is all AJAXed out, so even simple page saves don’t work. Copying/pasting would be a nightmare. Screenshots? Too sloppy. Emailing copies of each item? Too time-consuming. Tagging them with a special tag, making that tag’s feed public, then subscribing in, like, Thunderbird or something? Even if that weren’t absurdly roundabout, the public feeds only have twenty or so items.

I’m talking specifically about a blog I loved, but that up and disappeared one day, completely, leaving the only copies of the lost data scattered throughout Netvibes, Newsgator, Bloglines, and Reader. Google searches turned up nothing like a straightforward guide to saving from Reader, which surprised me. But there were clues, and using only a couple tools, I finally got it. It’s actually pretty easy, I was able to save 118 items in about ten minutes with this method. Let me show you it.

You need Firefox, the two plugins Greasemonkey and ScrapBook, and the Greasemonkey script Google Reader Print Button. Then it’s just a matter of clicking “Print” for each item you want to save, which opens it in its own tab, then using ScrapBook’s “Capture All Tabs…” function, which automatically does a “Save Page As, Web Page, complete” into your %AppData% folder for each tab, then finally optionally using ScrapBook’s “Combine Wizard” (in the tools menu of the ScrapBook sidebar [Alt+K]) to put all the items into a single folder with a single index.html file.

The “printing” part is the most cumbersome, but goes by pretty quickly with the repetition of a series of clicks and keystrokes:

1. Click “Print”
2. Press Esc (to close the print dialogue)
3. Press Ctrl+Tab (to get back to Reader)
4. Press J (to go to the next feed item)

Do that mindlessly for a couple minutes, and they’ll all be there, waiting to be saved. I’m gonna put the word “disk” in here too so that anybody Googling for a solution might find this.

Fear not. By some stroke of divine fortune, I was inclined no more than two months ago to mirror the whole series on my own hard drive. Rest assured: as long as I am alive, Square Lake will never die. The soon-to-be-even-more-revamped Square Lake Vault is up and running. And just think: we came this close to losing them forever.