The Big Squeeze

Kept thinking, What should be next? Haven’t really answered the why, have I? Not expecting much specific from this site. Thought I needed an ear, I guess. My wife’s ear is failing, literally and figuratively. She is losing her hearing by degrees and is often faking having heard what I said. But she’s also losing her short term memory at an alarming rate. We have reached the point where she will read the same news headline to me three times in as many hours, as if she’s just discovered it, and obviously has no memory that I told her about the story behind the headline yesterday.

It isn’t a new process for me. Went through it with one of my grandmothers and again with my mother, the long loss and the changes in behavior and personality that go with it. This time the difficulty is figuring out how I can best help her through it. There is the desire to slow the process with reminders, stimulating activities, and modest nagging about hearing aids and memory-specific over-the-counter dietary supplements. Unfortunately these all tend to make her mad, and her temper is quicker first thing in the morning and then in the evening, when body aches and pains spike, and when the Sundowning (a real thing) occurs. The alternative is becoming a kind of keeper, an odious and false role that pretends you haven’t heard the exact same thing three times already today. But that’s where it’s trending now. I worry about her driving, which thankfully she doesn’t do much of, just a weekly trip to the chiropractor and incidental errands she can’t be dissuaded from. But I’m not terribly mobile myself, and she has a lifelong penchant for fussing about this and that, up and down the stairs with cats and the dog, the sullen daughter who lives downstairs and isn’t much help, and the administrivia of a household falling gradually into disrepair.

This isn’t a bitch session. This isn’t something that is happening to me. This is the “in sickness and in health” part, and I love her as much as ever. She’s 82. I’m the right person to be with her. 

But it’s part of the sum. I’m getting squeezed from every direction. If you do as much writing as I do, the AI additions to AutoCorrect are not just an irritation; they are a plague that’s becoming a predatory (and highly unintelligent) monster. That’s a day-to-day, hour-to-hour squeeze on my patience and productivity.

There are much larger squeeze factors at work too. The following list is not meant to force you into depth reading but only exploratory scanning and sampling visits. Everything on the list is under some form of immediate threat from the “nobody answers the phone” rulers of the Internet:

Spilt Ink: (More about the problems here in some future post)

https://thespiltinkfiles.blogspot.com

Shuteye Town 1999:

https://shuteyetown1999.blogspot.com

This is my most endangered work, not trivially because it is as big and important in its way as The Boomer Bible. I built it in two years against the deadline of January 1, 2000, putting in many hours a day, seven days a week, including the day of my father’s funeral. It is gigantic, somewhere between 3,500 and 3,800 custom graphic files that are simultaneously a work of fiction, a video game, and a time capsule recording the state of the nation in the final minute of the 20th Century. 

ST99 also has two spin-off books and separately available sample texts from its bookstore..

It’s a time capsule in which you the player write your own narrative by the choices you make in where and when you travel perpendicular to the ticks of the clock. You’re always at 11:59 PM, but you can be in any place you want, and even if you’re killed in the city you can continue. Each entry to Shuteye Town is a test though. When you hit a dead end you can’t back out of , you have finished writing the story you had in you this time and must start all over again from scratch. 

At the very least, ST99 is an historical artifact unlike any other. It does sit precisely on the line between 1999 and 2000. Worthy of investigation on that basis alone. What has changed and what is the same in this newer, even angrier century?

At its best it is a telling portrait of the cultural baggage all of us 20th century folks carried from that century to this one. It knows that we’re headed for trouble. Amazing how much it still knows about who and what we’ve become.

Like The Boomer Bible, ST99 includes a premonition specifically suggestive of 9/11. TBB’s three testaments contain exactly 2001 chapters. Not by design. A fact discovered after the towers fell. Speaking of the towers, though, here is one of few renderings of Shuteye Town viewed from the air by a predator:

The twin towers of Shuteye bracket the city.

It’s been a 20-year uphill fight to keep Shuteye Town alive and accessible since its initial release on CD in January 2000. Written and drawn in Word97, Word2000 eliminated the app’s backward compatibility, which required a conversion of the whole thing to html. A brilliant man named Guy Tellefsen performed this monumental feat as a labor of love. What could not come through unscathed was the text and sound files. The html version was uploaded as an Internet site with some usage assists and background info in the early 2000s. The sponsoring app went out of business after requiring hefty monthly fees for the first time subsequent to an acquisition. The current version is still in the process of reconstruction, but it is hanging onto life by a thread thanks to the arbitrary negligence of both Wordpress and Google. In fact, ST99 is the only surviving, accessible content of the blog the files were stored in, and every time I open the Google site I don’t know if the files will still be there. (I still have html files on my wife’s computer, which is easily 15 years old now, unsupported by Microsoft, and afflicted with e-mail problems that make file transfers problematic at best.) Enough about all that for now.

Shuteye Nation:

https://shuteyenation.blogspot.com

Just as The Boomer Bible has its own independently accessible companion work (Punk City), ST99 has a companion work called Shuteye Nation, completed early in 2002. The work has suffered through its own pilgrimage from one web home to another and hangs to life by the same Wordpress thread as ST99. The current restoration is still in an early stage. There is much other background and video material that’s intact and available for integration in the new site, but the biggest squeeze of all is my available time for what needs to be done.

The Instapunk Blogs:

2,000+ posts at Instapunk.com (The Internet Archive, only intermittently available at present)

600+ posts at  Instapunk Rules

700+ posts at  Instapunk Returns

Some possibly helpful links:

The World According to Instapunk

This Interruption Brought to You by TruePunk

The Modern Archive is a problem because they are now rationing the number of times you can access your own work in some unspecified increment of time. I suspect upping your monthly ‘donation” can alleviate this restriction but AI haven’t broken the code on how to give them more money without going through PayPal. Wordpress problems already described. Google is the home of all my current blogsites (20 some) and they are a jealous God. They won’t display a video linked from Rumble. And they are also hinting about the possibility of converting from free to paid sites. In recent months, I feel the wrist slap of Blogger’s refusal to post an image file on the first attempt. It takes three consecutive attempts until some unspecified session milestone is reached and a first attempt will finally work. They make it slyly clear that I am out of the free blog business whenever they choose.

Facebook:

https://instapunkreturns.blogspot.com/2025/11/a-big-missing-piece.html

The biggest pig in my poke that can’t be accurately quantified. 10 years worth of posts and videos that can’t be counted or freely accessed except by specific dates. It’s a huge volume of work all told. 

I’ll leave the squeeze discussion at that for now. I told you I figured I needed an ear. It helps me to write this down. It would be nice to know that you’ve looked at what I’m sending you, but I think you can see I’m making no requests or demands. Maybe you’d be comfortable regarding all this as ‘things he can no longer discuss with his wife.’ 

I appreciate any time you do give it.

P.S. Just so you don’t think I’m completely down at the heels, this is still pretty much how it feels to be me when I’m working on something I care about…. From Quantum 19 (July 2920)