No purpose to this day. Requested time off from work but it looks like I picked a rain day. No epic-length walks, like yesterday, which was not my idea of epic but it had its moments. I passed 4 or 5 pizza establishments and shook my head at the quality of the offerings. Certain pepperoni slices looked blackened, like oreo cookies, as the cheese looked closer to stale mustard than anything dairy. Wait, is mustard dairy? No going to look it up.
I’ve been dumping stuff into the abyss of archive.org. My witlessly-named page (sorabji.com) now contains full scans of literary magazines from my high school, including a few from years before and after I was a student there. I liked some of those magazines but find them a little hard to get through now. Hard to stomach.
Maybe the dumbest shit I’ve posted of late was a publication called “Where are you now, John?” If getting through those old high school literary magazines is hard to stomach this volume is almost nauseating. If my sometimes foggy memory is more or less accurate I and countless others were handed copies of this publication upon leaving a Paul McCartney concert at Giants Stadium in 1993.
But the real earnestness of the moment with respect to archive.org has been my efforts in posting videos of 24-hour duration. I knew this would be a tedious chore but it’s worth it in the end, I think, to have a peaceful view from a window I rarely look through myself. The problems I encountered with creating these day-long videos are mostly resolved, and I can assemble them almost with a one-liner. The videos are stored by the camera in 1-minute chunks, meaning I have to assemble them with ffmpeg, or perhaps there is a suitable alternative. No way Premiere Pro or any other video editor I know anything about is useful in concatenating that many files into an 8-10gb mp4 or mkv.
Assembly of the 24-hour clips is mostly under control but it seems archive.org itself has troubles playing them back. I swear it was not like that at first, and that the videos just played like any other. Now I find that it can take several minutes and more than a few tries to get the thing to start. I have the patience for it but most people would not. Maybe it’s a question of viewership, which is another puzzle within Archive. I’ve viewed one of my videos 4 or 5 times, but the view count still shows zero.
Another mystery about how Archive processes these 24-hour videos is that it generates a bunch of thumbnails but nothing appears to be done with them. In my shorter videos the thumbnails are used as expected when you move your mouse horizontally over the bottom part of the video. In the 24-hour clips only one thumbnail appears.
Yet another puzzle with respect to 24-hour videos is why extra time gets added. The video above is shown to be 24:02:07. Where does the extra 2:07 come from when the video starts at midnight and ends at 12:00:01am? I have not watched this frame-by-frame, nor do I intend to watch it frame-by-fucking-frame. But there must be some moments of stoppage or lag in the recording and those moments add up to 2:07. Or something like that. I don’t even know.
What I’d like to do is connect these videos to Roku or other platforms, like I did with Payphone Radio. This way I could see them on my bigass TV. Actually I could do that via PLEX, couldn’t I? But that would only be for private viewing, and I want these available for all the world to lavish upon itself, my endless gift of digitally hoarded hours, days, years. To do that via Plex would mean making it public. I don’t keep Plex running 24/7 and I don’t like giving out access keys.
I also sometimes send up other video to twitch.tv/sorabji. I’m doing it right now, to capture the noise and rumble of the streetwork going on outside. I’ve often lamented what a boring view I have from here but the road work of late has at least been non-monotonous. But then I appreciate the monotony, thinking of it more as serenity. Calm. The world whizzing by just as observed by a stationary device. Transience captured. Not exactly a new concept, I know, but I’m trying.
Thing is, I’m very much wanting to quit my job but I’m not sure I can until end of month, or later. I’m a hive of anxiety right now.
