Got quite a jug full of the yellow stuff yesterday. For the first time in at least a dozen years I do not have online access to my multimedia work Shuteye Town 1999. Checking on something I was going to reference at Instapunk, I ran into this where ST99 should have been:
Note that the graphic provides no contact information. The”happy to help” is a lie.
My wife had received an expiration notice she didn’t tell me about, thinking she had updated our bank card information with those who bill us monthly and are supposed to be automatically paid by the bank. This was the second time we had had to replace the card because of a phony charge that had in fact been paid by the bank without notifying us of a suspect circumstance. The first time we agreed mutually to cancel the card and get a new one. This time, they hadn’t even informed us before shutting down the card, requiring an ex-post-facto flurry of vendor contacts to give them a new card number. She thought that the two Wordpress sites we’d been paying for on a monthly basis over 10 years time would be paid automatically by a bank who had reason to know there might be a billing issue. She thought wrong.
Result? I spent 6 hours in the middle of the night from when I discovered the ‘suspension” taking stock of what all was involved and how I might proceed from here. The suspension shut down two sites, rflaird.com and ip.rflaird.com, which together contain well over a thousand posts and the files of both Shuteye Town 1999 and Shuteye Nation. That’s about 15 years of work and an indispensable chunk of my total writing and graphic output. Latest instance of the squeezing phenomenon I’ve been talking about.
What I’ve done since and why. Took an inventory of what content from rflaird.com and ip.rflaird.com are still at least partially preserved on the Wayback Machine. This was modestly successful. So far it appears that Shuteye Nation, more writing in many fewer files, seems accessible thus far, as do many of the actual posts at both sites, with varying degrees of format collapse caused by some Wordpress glitch a couple years ago. (I have not been able to log in to revise or add to either site since some point release was not backward-compatible in its administrative code ‘enhancements’.) These Wayback researches have been seriously compromised by policy changes in the last year or so to save costs by pressuring frequent users to have monthly ‘donation’ subscriptions. I had a subscription but apparently lost it during the first hacked bank card cancellation, and I have gotten nowhere in my attempts to renew. Just as with Wordpress and their new owner Blue Host, there’s no one to tell it to. The Modern Archive has its own stick to use: informing you that you have made too many inquiries “in a given period of time” and denial of service (i.e., suspension) for some indeterminate number of days/wks. I have never been able to speak to a human being at Wordpress, Blue Host, or the Modern Archive/Wayback Machine.
My next step was to inventory my wife’s computer, which contains the only surging versions in our possession of the original Word97 version of ST99 and the HTML version that was protected for years inside its own box within the rflaird.com site. I have stayed away from that computer since my wife essentially resigned from manuscriot formatting for Kindle and moved her banking transactions to a used, very stripped down iPad she hates. I stayed away because like my online works her Dell laptop is more than 10 years old, unsupported by either Dell or Microsoft, is living on a prayer at this point.
Within the last year, I took several steps to prepare for a transition I knew would be high risk. I bought a Read-Write DVD drive that should be switchable between her PC and my iPad. I found an original copy of Word97, which is the only software that can read the ST99 graphic files. I conducted an operation on my wife’s PC to find one file without which even the Word97 SW wouldn’t give me complete access to the original: a list of the passwords to the 200+ protected files I had created when I still thought I was building a videogame, not a multimedia experience. I couldn’t get her computer to open my Google email and ship a file across the room to my iPad, so I photographed the pages of the file on the display screen.
That’s where things stood yesterday when what I’d dreaded became inevitable. I had to rescue ST99 from the dying PC before it gave up the ghost. I connected the DVD drive and successfully completed one file transfer from her machine to an old blank CD/ROM I still had. That meant that if I could find a cheap PC laptop clone, I could copy ST99, hopefully both versions, to a limited use computer that would protect the work for a few years longer.
Then I ordered a refurbished Chinese laptop clone for $67 and priced direct PC-PC Ethernet FILE-transfer cable from Amazon, that and a box of three 7GB DVD/ROMs are available for about $30 or so.
I also created a new Blogger site on my wife’s iPad, so that I and designated others can still access Shuteye Nation at the Wayback Machine without experiencing the “too many inquiries” blockage of my own device. Here’s the link: Shuteye Entry Pages.
Contacting Blue Host and sorting out things with them is also on the list, but not with much hope.
Next? Started working on the mixing of “lemonade” this morning. The traumatic history of Shuteye Town 1999 is actually a coincidental (serendipitous) component of a larger work I’ve alluded to here and elsewhere in the past. There have been four Shuteye Town websites since Y2000, two of them full-featured dedicated sites and two others transitional holding areas. Both the dedicated sites were done in by vendors who turned “free” into “paid” with about two weeks notice. The Blogger version just blown away by the Blue Host suspension was a placeholder, as was the ST99 linkage in the original Boomer Bible website.
The backstory of the punk writer movement has always included the explicit possibility that what was presented as fiction might be a cover narrative for events that really did occur. Why there are two prefaces of The Boomer Bible. And why, back in 2018, I wrote a two-part user manual for Shuteye Town that quietly surfaces the possibility that punk writings were written by real punk writers who lived secretly on South Street for seven years before disappearing in a single night. The first and principal part of the manual was authored by an also-ran video game developer named Victor Dragoman whose final verdict on Shuteye Town was a thumbs down because, given its timeline and troubled technological history, it was obviously a rush job by a man who had lost everything and was just sounding off about everything.
The second part was a response to the draft Dragoman published, taking issue with his narrative and his research. The authors of the”Response” called themselves the ‘South Street Irregulars,’ a mysterious gang of fugitives who had appeared in a previous terminated website called “The South Street Mystery,” which did in fact exist side by side with “JDoe.com” until the vendor named Simplesite was acquired and subsequently canceled five other major websites with which R, F. Laird was affiliated.
Here are the authors of the “Response”:
Here was the cover for their “Reboot” of Shuteye Town:
[On a personal note, I must tell you the most intoxicating thing about Sherlock Holmes was that he began as a fiction and became so real that his lodgings on Baker Street now exist in fact, and my guess is there are a lot of young people (at least) who do believe he was a real detective, the one who discovered fingerprints and sinister messages written in code. Why this frame of an unpublished autobiographical vid I made to amuse my wife highlights reading matter that was inspirational in my earliest years:
The cat, also real, was named Jade. She lived to be 21.]
The Response manuscript was not so fortunate. When the iPad I wrote it on died a sudden death, my files were not lost for the most part. Except for Word documents that had been stored in ICloud. They never returned and “Reboot’ joined a very long list of lost writings.
As a result I did not proceed to publication of the Victor Dragoman manuscript. I wasn’t in the mood to restart what I thought was done, and I hated giving up on my original conception for a unique print book design. It was to have two front covers. You picked the one you wanted to start with. Read page by page until you ran into print that was upside down and backwards. Close it up, flip the book over and oriented with type from left to right and start reading the real book.
So I never did the technical cleanup stuff at the end of Dragoman MS. Since I also hadn’t restored enough of the missing texts from Moon Books and elsewhere in Shuteye Town to satisfy me, I went back to work on those without resolving in print how readers would locate them.
Which brings us to this morning. I hauled out the Dragoman guide, made a few minor copy edits, and produced a linkable PDF version You can read here.
Click here to learn about the history of a work that has at least briefly passed away from life on the Internet. The Shuteye Town 1999 User’s Guide
All the lemons I can squeeze in a little over 24 hours. Last hint I’ll give you. Punk City vanished on the night of the MOVE Bombing in Philadelphia. I have photographic and documentary proof of that buried criminal action by agents of a shadow federal government who wanted the technology only the punk writers of South Street possessed. That’s been the deepest element of the narrative all along…
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