Back

When I started this thread 6 years and 4 months ago, I said "This is going to take a while. I would love to see some discussion around these ideas, but I have Many to get through, so I may not respond super quickly.

But seriously, talk to me about the things that resonate with you."

That goes double on both counts.

This is going to take a long time for me to get through, and I want to hear about the things that resonate with you.

- Analog Revolution Magazine: A bi-monthly punk zine about music, art, media, and social stuff. 14 issues, so far. Originally published this out of Analog Revolution Records in Kennesaw, GA (which has been closed since April 2016.) Last issue was August of 2016.

As of 2017, status was: Suspended, I think? This thing was a LOT of work, and I don't have many writers who are still active.

As of today:
We've released 6 more issues, including a 10th anniversary issue, and the 7th is on the way~

- Analog Revolution Records: A record store, Cassette and CD label opperating out of Kennesaw GA. Open from May 2014 to April 2016. The most work I've ever done. The most fun I've ever had on a project. The store shuttered when my business partner left to hike the AT. The record label gave out a few weeks later, when the last of the bands we were supporting broke up because everyone lived to far away for them to keep playing music. I miss it.

As of 2017, status was: Suspended, probably dead.

As of today:

- This project is very much alive We release a new cassette every month, we have two LPs out with two more on the way, and five or six CDs, and a bunch more stuff in the pipe.

We run a full recording studio. We sell records from the coffee shop. We do a regular concert series, and those get filmed and taped for new ellijay television.

- A Brief History of the Future: A quarterly pulp-style magazine of vintage and modern scifi/stories about a future that might have been but wasn't.

Published Print on Demand, eventually sold through my website for $6.

No issues released so far. Issue 1 has been complete for 8 months, and ready to print. Issue 2 - 4 have their story selection mostly finished, and their layout mostly done. Could literally go to press at any point, but marketing is hard.

as of 2017: Active, I guess?

as of today: I kept up with this one for a few issues, but it just wasn't as fun as I'd hoped it would be.

We release some similar stuff occasionally, I still publish books, and we've launched a new pulp magazine called Fight The Future, with new fiction.

- The Galactic Patrol - A DIY 3D printed Starship Dogfight Tabletop game: The rules to the game have been finalized. My play testers enjoy playing. I am currently using CC-BY-SA models, but hope to design my own soon. Lots of work lef to do on design, presentation, and marketing.

as of 2017: Active, just slow

as of today: I finished a set or two of this, and we played the game and it just wasn't fun so I gave up on it.

- Big Damn Comics: I researched public domain comic books. I picked the ones with the best (and least well known) artwork, and started about remixing them in to new comics.

We would re-write dialog, rearrange panels, and even add new artwork atop the vintage material. The end result was really neat! And I loved being a part of it! but doing the actual photoshop work required to clean up the scans and add our dialog and changes was punishing, and I struggled with it

Then: suspended, but temporarily, I hope

Now: I haven't thought about this project in years. It was a lot of fun, but it was also a lot of work.

For now, we clean up and re-release old comics, and occasionally make new ones, but we don't do these kinds of remixes.

- Analog Revolution Podcast: I want to do a podcast that features the same kinds of topics as the AR magazine. That means politics, DIY media, jazz, rock, and the weird shit that slips through the cracks elsewhere. I'm not married to the name Analog Revolution, but I like it for sentimental reasons. The only thing stopping me from doing this is that I kind of don't want my voice to be on it, because I think other people will not like listening to my voice.

Then: (Active, but only just this side of considered.)

Now: I've gotten used to the sound of my own voice, but I stopped doing this particular podcast, and I'm doing several others instead.

- Jupiter's Ghost - A Space Corps Podcast: I wrote 6 episodes of a podcast called "Jupiter's Ghost." It presents the exploits of the crew of a spaceship in the Space Corps, a civilian organization that studies deep space, through the reporting of a college student named Eliza.

Eliza is an intern aboard the ship, and has been tasked as the official record keeper. She takes to the job with a surprising gusto, and gets way in to everything going on around the ship, relaying it all in a Valley-Girl-from-venus vernacular. I need to polish the scripts, find some actors, and start recording.

Then: (Active, I guess.)

Now: Wow this idea changed a lot from then to now. Active. See the current state at https://intergalactic.computer

- The ARC: ARC stands for Analog Revolution Console. This was a Raspberry Pi based Game Console that we prototyped, and did an Alpha release of, while I was running Analog Revolution. The idea is to make something Raspberry Pi based, that takes USB game cartridges.

It is important to note that this was not! an emulation/pirate box. We were looking specifically for games that we had the legal right to release, either because they were licenced in such a way that allowed it, or because we had contacted the developers of the game.

I hacked together a custom UI and game launcher. I wrote a couple of simple games in LUA, and was working with a few others on a Doom TC (that is, we were building a new game using the DOOM I engine.) I had also experimented with an engine for playing Twine games, and RenPy games using a controller.

A combination of cost, lack of developers, and the closing of the store forced me to put this project on the shelf. I hope to follow through with it at some point in the future.

Then: (Suspended)

Now: A few weeks after I posted this I roughed out a few more prototypes on "orange Pi" boards to varying degrees of success, but I just wasn't ever happy with the performance. I probably would have stuck with it if I hadn't moved back to GA, because it was something I talked about all the time, but I have bigger fish.

- mBBS: The internet is not as safe as we once thought it was. mBBS was/is an attempt to fix that. It is a local wifi network, that does not connect back to the larger internet. Folks could share things locally, peer-to-peer, or publish them to the box (provided there was enough storage.) We experimented with various methods of moving content between various mBBS instances, in an attempt to make something federated.

Long Range Wifi worked, as did various FTP-based psudo-sneakernets. We ran a node at Analog Revolution for nearly a year, and enjoyed it a great deal.

This one was killed by the technical complexity of long range (5+ mile) wireless communication, and the shuttering of the store. It's at the top of my list for projects to revive.

-Then: (Suspended, but I'm sad about it)

- Now: Still suspended, and I'm still sad about it. I've done a lot more work with offline messaging, with intranets and sneakernets and digital publishing without the web, and I've written about and talked about these topics a lot.

If I ever have six months with nothing else to do but tinker, I might come up with something that might do some good, but I'm not likely to.

- Records: I developed a method for making LP records from a polyurethane resin. It works! It doesn't work very well! There is still a lot of work to do refining the proccess.

Blockers: I need (access to) a record cutting lathe. I need someone with more experience working with these chemicals than I have -OR- I need to do a LOT of experimentation to get our mixture just right.

This is pretty cool, but it's pretty damn hard.

- Then: (Suspended, but only until I have a dedicated workshop space again.)

- Now: We have a record cutting lathe. We have a lot more experience with chemicals.

We've also had records professionally produced.

There are some new blockers (lacquers are basically impossible to find these days.)

- Space Anxiety Twine Game: I've talked about this before. I don't want to re-hash it all right now. It's a game in twine set in space, which uses anxiety and stress as a game mechanic. I'm still in the planning stages, so I'm not going to count this as active

- Then: (considered)

- Now: I forgot about this thing entirely until read about it here.

See all the details here: https://retro.social/@ajroach42@mastodon.social/97857147763237734

I worked on it for a while back then, but it was just So Big and it never really worked the way I wanted it to, and I had too much else to do, so I moved on to things that I enjoyed more.

I'd still love to see that game happen, but it won't be me that implements it.

- Short fiction: I write works of short and medium length fiction one a semi regular basis. Some of them are okay, and deserve more attention

- Then: (active)

- Now: I haven't written any fiction in a long time, but I have written lots of other things, like https://communitymedia.network

- DIY Computer Games, From Zork to ZZT: (Working Title) This is a series of essays I have been working on for several months, cataloging the history of DIY/Self released computer games. It's not meant to be a definitive work, but rather a catalog of the big movements in homemade games, and self distributed games from ~1977 - ~1997.

Then: (Active)

Now: I haven't worked on this particular project in a while, but I have a *bunch* of unreleased essays on this topic, and notes and half finished bits and baubles.

Before I got around to releasing it, the Shareware book came out, and it covers a slightly different topic than I was, but it also covers a lot of the same ground.

I had too big a scope on this one, and I should revisit it with a smaller scope.

- Retro Social: A mastodon instance, with a strong retro theme. Instance has been set up, currently skinning the UI

Then: (active, finished soon)
Now: active, in active use.

- Unnamed literary magazine/podcast (I discussed this above)

- Analog Revolution Mixtapes: I make mixtapes, and release them on mixcloud. I've done two so far, I have another recorded, and notes on a few more. I'll probably make these a regular part of my life moving forwards. Then: (Active)
Now: Replaced with https://mountaintown.fm

Blog:

Then: Active
Now: less active, but not dead. https://ajroach42.com

- Modern Vintage Film: Remixes of classic movies in the style of Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, new scores for silent films, etc. Released a couple of re-scored silent films, and got

Then: (suspended, folded in to DIYMedia.cc)

Now: Well, I didn't talk about DIYMedia.cc because I'm not sure what to say about it. It's not what I wanted it to be, but I haven't given up on it.

In the meantime, the spirit of MVF lives on in New Ellijay Television, although much altered.

- Games: I have ideas for computer games! Pico-8 games! Twine Games! Doom Mods! Beats of Rage sprite sets! Levels for various platform creation engines! an Ambitious project involved some RPG engine or similar that I planned more than 10 years ago! Other stuff.

Then: (suspended//dead, because seriously.)

Now: I haven't worked on a video game with any seriousness in ages, because I don't enjoy it.

I like playing games, designing games, planning games, but coding for games is not something I enjoy. It took me a long time to realize this, but I'm okay with it.

- Character Sheet Resume Builder: This is an idea I've tossed around for years. Basically, you feed it your work history (or link up with a linkedin account), and rate your skill level in each skill you have, on a scale from 1 to 20 (where 20 is "I'm a god"), you present your accomplishments and achievements within previous roles (or the non-work-related stuff you've done) in terms of the XP points they gave you towards your various skills.

It generates a "Professional" resume with all of this information, and also an RPG character sheet resume with the same info. With graphs, and charts, skills, and an inventory of software, or a spell book, and things like that.

Then: (considered)
Now: I never put any work in to this. I stopped job hunting, life goes on.

- Tiny Monster Handheld (totally not a pokedex or a digivice): Use a Raspberry Pi 0W or an ESP8266 wifi development board. Hook it up to a 90s Nokia brick phone screen. Write some basic code to govern behavior, draw some sprites, make a simple Training game, make a wifi battle game, maybe do some Augmented Reality stuff. Basically P O X for the modern age.

Then: (Considered/Suspended)

Now: I never built this, but I actually did prototype it out. Used an ESP8266. Got it working with the old Nokia brick phone screen. Coded up a basic battle system. It was cute, but Pokemon Go already existed, so there was no need for it, and I was solving the problem at the wrong level.

- Comic Book Publishing: There are a lot of Great! Vintage! Space! Comics! in the public domain. There are at least four series called "Space Patrol", as well as Tom Corbett Space Cadet, Planet Comics, Spacehawk, and dozens of others. Some of them are beautiful. I'd love to do a series of Nice, well made, high quality re-prints of some of the best comics of that era.

Then: (Considered/Active)

Now: We do a regular reprint of Space Hawk, we have two issues of Space Patrol and an issue of Microface in print.

We'll do more later, but it's still happening.