Matthew Supert

As you know, over the past couple of months I have been slowly increasing my record collection. The purchase and setup of a record player in my house has been a sort of cathartic and enjoyable experience. It seems that there is a definite upswing for record sales purchases as of late. 

While records themselves represent a paltry 6 million in total sales, their increase over this past year has showed a definitely trend upwards. I have noticed just this past weekend while shopping, that the local Urban Outfitters, very prominently features records in the front of its store now. 

While a lot of this may be a bit "hipster" for these sales, there is certainly a level of satisfaction that you get when buying a record. Don't get me wrong, I still prefer mp3's for most use cases. For me they sound good and their convenience far outweighs anything else, but having a physical product in your hand or at your doorstop is something that I haven't felt in a long time. I remember back in high school going to Best Buy or the big Virgin Music on Michigan Avenue to buy a CD. Walking out of that store with a physical thing that I would tear the cellophane off of was exciting. Liner notes and those inner booklets were always something I looked forward to with CD's. 

That whole physicality has been lost with digital music. When was the last time someone cared about the design of the booklet in a digital album beyond the cover? Yes, this is a bit of nostalgia funk, but at the same time there is something special about having to deliberately hold the album, look at the track listing and then sit down and listen to it. It all just makes me want to get more albums. 

Woot. I am proud to say that I once again completed Nanowrimo again this year. I actually finished on Friday, the 29th with a total of 50,053 words. I had a big day typing on Friday, a bit over 7,000 words since I got no writing in on the 27th or 28th. 

Most of that day was productive with some really good text put down, but I have to admit that the last 2,000 words or so was just a garbled mess as I tried to hit my word count. Now of course comes to the all important part of going back and editing and in some cases, completely rewriting the stories. I never finished my editing on last year's project, so it is time I get back into doing that. 

I am planning to have a much more productive time with my writing over this winter and planning out my editing in a much more controlled fashion. At this point, I think I am going to take a break from Apath and Spice and head back over to last year's novel to keep working on that. 

Well, we are getting down to the wire here. Just about a week left for Nano. The past week was a fairly difficult one and was more of me just sort of spilling words onto he page opposed to an actual story coming out. I literally had three or four story progressions occurring on a single idea before I was finally able to sort of solidify it into some comprehensible. That mash of ideas though is still just sitting in the document file as a complete mess. 

I started another segment over the weekend, which I like the idea of, but haven't figured out a way to fully flesh out. I was going to have my main character just walk through the city and just describe and characterize the city itself, exploring some of the different neighborhoods and locations. I want to keep it simple, nothing dangerous or violent happening to him. I got a good way in, but eventually hit a brick wall. It is an idea I like, but need to figure out a way to make more interesting. 

I started last night my revenge tale, which should be good for pumping out some words. I am sitting at 38,844 words as of yesterday, so I think I am in pretty good shape. It is going to probably be a good push though through this weekend. 

So today is the end of day 16. That means we are just past halfway and this past Saturday as the "write in" Saturday where writers are supposed to lock themselves in a room and dedicate the day to writing. I was proud to say that I once again had a productive write in by getting nearly 6,000 words completed. I needed it as I was behind a couple of days at the end of this week due to scheduling conflicts. 

I have three short stories completed now, two of which are solid ideas, but I can already see that they are in fairly rough shape. I already have taken some notes on how I would like to adjust those and tweak the tone and settings for future revisions. The current story that I am working on focusing on Apath, our main character being lost in the wilderness, due to a trade deal gone bad. He was left to die by a syndicate gang that refused to uphold their end of the delivery. Apath is then found by a hidden group of outlaws who are now living in a small city they have built outside of normal civilization. The question that remains now is are they going to let him leave for fear of them exposing them and potentially putting all of their lives in danger?

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So we have one full week of Nanowrimo under our belts and so starts week two. This is the tough week where most people feel the doldrums and I can tell that I am already feeling them myself. I knocked out the first short story last week fairly easily, but this second story is turning out to be a bit longer and more complicated than I anticipated. I was hoping to keep it under 10,000 words, but we are rapidly approaching that limit and I am hoping I can wrap it up here soon. 

This particular second story features Apath and Spice who get caught up in an animal burglary when an eco-terrorism entity steals animals from a research lab. These animals are more than these seem. APath gets caught in the middle of a trade deal gone bad and they end up transporting the thief and the stolen animal while being chased by another syndicate. Their only chance of coming out unscathed is to strike a deal with the same organization that the animal was stolen from and may be they can find out in the process what is just so special about this stolen animal. 

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So this past week Megan got me a nice vinyl edition of Oasis' What's the Story Morning Glory. This is one of my favorite albums of all time, and is actually the first album I purchased with my own money back around 7th or 8th grade. 

The vinyl copy is nicely done. Now, this album has historically been well known to be highly compressed. Personally I think it is representative as a product of its time where high compression and zero level metering became popular. Anyways, the album included the download of the Deluxe edition of the new re-mastered version of What's the Story Morning Glory. Upon initial listening I noticed that the album was quite a bit louder than the original that I ripped from my CD. 

Out of curiosity I decided to load the audio files into Audacity for comparison and you can see how the new audio file is really normalized up to 0dB. Now I don't have the tools to truly analyze the audio, but it is interesting to take a quick look at the audio files and see how compressed both the audio files. At first glance  I initially thought that the files were basically the same, with just one that was boosted. But upon a little closer inspection you can see that the waveforms are a bit different and there has been some "mastering" or EQ'ing on there. I noticed this most prominently on Champagne Supernova near the beginning where you can definitely see a difference. 

It has taken me forever to get this stuff uploaded. The recent updates to OS X have made getting GoPro video into iMovie and extra conversion step. All the way back on October 19th (remember that?) I did my second annual fall color ride down the Illinois River Road to Havana, Illinois. This is a nice scenic ride that I have done a few times and turned into an annual thing. The fall colors this year were spectacular, especially in Starved Rock. 

The ride had a nice group this year with a total of nine riders I think. The weather was super cold in the morning but warmed up nicely towards the latter portion of the day. 

Overall the ride turned out fantastic and the fall color was very vibrant. Special thanks to Matt C. who took some excellent photos, especially at starved rock. Below is my GoPro video, which isn't my best, but hopefully is still fun. 

So Nanowrimo 2014 has officially kicked off as of yesterday. As I posted a couple of weeks ago, I wasn't originally planning on doing Nanowrimo this year, but after having one of those "shower thoughts" moments, I decided to work on a collection of short stories. So far I have been doing really well. Last year my target word count for each day was 1,500 words. That is slightly below Nano's stated word count, but I felt it was a manageable goal for a new comer. This year I do still have that as my stated target daily word count, but after two days I am sitting comfortably at 3,396 words. 

To give you a quick synopsis of my story idea, my short stories are a collection of adventures for my characters Apath and Spice. They are a husband and wife rapid delivery team set in a sort of despotic sic-fi future. It is all very sci-fi tropish, but I am hoping that I can get some fun stories out of the two characters and their interactions. I am taking a lot of influence from "Cowboy Bebop" for this design. I always loved how that series balanced comedy, action and some remarkably heavy topics. 

Here is a quick list of my character profiles for both Apath and Spice. These were brainstormed with my wife and I one evening and truthfully the character profiles are loosely based upon the two of us. Of course, I have attached a little snippet and you can hit the "read more" button below to check that out. 

Apath

Megan and I finally had an opportunity to go to a Halloween party and we got to get dressed up. We went as Kiki and Tombo from Kiki's Delivery Service. I think the costumes turned our pretty well. 

On friday I had delivered to me a record from an audio project called "Moment's Lost" from Indiegogo. It was a music project to create an homage album to the Blade Runner Soundtrack using the same tools that Vangelis used. I received the digital copy of the album a couple of months ago, but just this past Friday the vinyl record came in the mail. 

The record set is very pretty and super well done. There is some beautiful artwork in in this set and I cannot wait to listen to it. Thing is though I don't own a turntable. So this weekend I ended up ordering a turntable and I am setting up some of my older audio equipment in the living room to setup a sort of listening room. 

But, I don't have any furniture in the living room. So we went out and bought a couple of chairs to setup for listening. I now just need to get the console purchased and setup in the next week or so for this whole thing to come together. Megan spent a really good portion of this weekend designing a custom setup on Ikea's website and I have to say that I think it will really turn out nice when all said and done. My living room is much smaller than it looks and we realized quickly after getting tow chairs that not much else is going to fit in it. It is one of the reasons we have had such a frustrating time trying to find furniture for it in the past. Hopefully it will all come together here in the next couple of weeks.