My comrade in arms has identified top priorities for our efforts. High on the list in terms of results is turning existing content into books, probably at Kindle or Amazon (print) or both. Even though I haven’t been able to surmount the PDF formatting requirements with my own geriatric hardware and software, it has long been my practice to establish markers for myself with book covers with the understood caption TBD. Doing the cover is usually more than a graphic indulgence. It’s a discipline for envisioning what pieces I have in mind to put together for the given title.
Thought I’d show you the covers I’ll be forwarding to him, though I haven’t yet added the explanatory notes and hyperlinks he will need to nominate his choices for publishing in what order.
Just the covers and some captions here today. I know there’s some overlap, but that’s unavoidable. One may wind up bumping another, but there is differentiating content for all of them. I can ad specific content links after I get your feedback on what to start with. In all cases there will be some tricky, annoying edits to deal with the lack of video support. In some cases, it will be disqualifying, but in other cases necessary nonetheless. When color graphics are indispensable, the only near-term alternative is Kindle. I can live with that.
My complete series of ‘End of Year’ posts for the past 8 years. From 3 different blogs.
A lot of content from all the Instapunk sites.
An overview of what the ‘Brand’ encompasses (present and future),
more like a guide or user manual than a book, although
there will be discursive content included, explaining
why’s and wherefore’s by genre.
Definitely a Kindle project. A great deal of this has been done, some of it
still tricky to access. Very color graphic intensive. The Pangloss angle is perfect.
Hard part is choosing the content from so much. Should be the kind
of ‘Best of’ omnibus that includes every kind of topic and writing
genre from cartoons to heavyweight sermons. Best approach I guess
is picking a page count and filling it in.
There will be exceptions, of course, but most of this content will come from the
Afterpunk 19 site I’ve never promoted and darker stuff from Instapunk Returns.
The serious side of the AI topic including my own unique qualifications
to comment and the many technical and physical issues involved.
What you might call the lighter side of the AI topic (Turing Test!) ,
including for example the early detection of censorship even in the
popular freeware AI graphics apps.
A ‘nice to have’ entry. Quite a parade of dogs and cats since the first book, much
written, much more in the form of photographic reminiscences for dog and cat fanciers.
This is more autobiographical than the Dementia Tour, not quite as dark but
deeper on the discussion of racial and ethnic context than seemed important
at the time. A very important part of this is the transcription of multiple
extemporaneous voice recordings by me from YouTube, including for
example my series work on country stores, the Francis Hine world,
and travel and auto adventures in my youth.
The value of a cover doodle. Didn’t realize at the time that this is the perfect way of
presenting the materials retrieved from the South Street Mystery site. Max Lute
has a history all his own. (His dad wrote one of the many books about the
‘Hollow Earth’ claims following Richard Byrd’s overflight at the North Pole. I
have a pic of the battered surviving cover of that book.) Great and easy way to
collect/present existing stuff from his own site and the subsequent contribution
of the South Street Irregulars, extending even into the Last Chance Garage
site and the mystery of Johnny Dodge’s missing foster-daughter. Work to be done
but easy to do. Max is no Frelinger hung up on ‘evidence’. He’s a web hacker.
This is important as part of the historical provenance of Shuteye Town 1999. Done years
ago by the 3rd party video gamer Victor Drago, it’s been languishing because it tries to
solve the problem of the missing text files before the problem was solved. Ergo, includes
wrong stuff needing replacement. Equally important, I also wrote a response (not terribly
long but necessary) by the South Street Irregulars that had its own cover and was meant
to be a trick printing job. You could read his book first, flip it upside down and read the
Response version, which leads to the upside down Drago dissing of ST99. That MS went
missing when my iPad went suddenly tits up on me and a bunch of Word documents
were lost with it. Still have their cover though. To wit:
Manuscript in progress. Mark is the son of Frank, whose book about the
Cream King Trove is excerpted in Punk City. The son inherited the father’s
obsession and he believes he has uncovered the grand conspiracy behind the
reality of Punk City, which he accepts absolutely. He’s the one who found the real
company names behind the Punk City fiction. He believes R. F. Laird was part of a
coverup designed to hide the punk writers in plain sight by fictionalizing them. But
Laird is now dead, murdered by either the intelligence community still obsessed
with recovering punk technology — or done in by a new mystery player who calls
himself The Rifleman and has been generating Laird content himself since c, 2014.
Mark has evidence, but the reality is he’s one more confusion factor and his many
‘exhibits’ of Cream Trove photos and videos are automatically suspect. His MS
needn’t be long. He’s a cut above Victor Dragoman and Max Lute, but he’s more
conspiracy theorist than academic researcher./journalist.
The existential purgatory of Daniel Pangloss. Having lost his memory to the
drugs used on him during his detainment by the feds (still seeking punks,
technology, and Laird) in the 2020s, he is contacted in prison by someone
purporting to be Laird, who informs him he began his existence as a
fictional character in Shuteye Town, wrote extensively for that work and
Shuteye Nation, and was shuttled to an alternate universe after all of
human consciousness split in two after Y2K ended human civilization.
He is alive now, and he needs ‘Laird’s help in restoring his memory. For
what reason, no one will tell him. He escapes custody by mysterious inter-
dimensional assistance and is now deep into the quantum world himself…
he has never laid eyes on Laird, but he has recorded his not very friendly
dialogues with him…
More about the design, order, and purposes of The Boomer Bible…
Designed to illustrate the very wide range of Laird writings in the IP sites,
including both iterations of the Instapunk Times.
My own intellectual and professional background and experience,
as explicitly documented and commented upon by me.
The book version of the content in Death of the Republic and subsequent
developments in U.S. and world politics and culture.
A chronological collection of my development as a cultural pessimist
playing the long game for future generations.
My orphan project… still dying on the vine.
