Buried Treasure

One would think that with as many hard drive crashes as I’ve suffered, I would be in the habit of constantly backing up my data.  Sadly, this is simply not the case.  (Is there something fundamentally wrong with my brain? Perhaps.) 

I figure that I’ve backed up my data maybe… I don’t know, maybe a dozen times.  In my life.  For some reason, it just never occurs to me.  I think maybe I need a keeper. 

The Discovery

Back in late August/early September, I was reorganizing the LEGO room, and getting rid of lots of the non-LEGO stuff that had been stacked up in there when I first moved in.  One piece of that stuff was a large, fairly heavy cardboard box, that when I opened, I discovered to be full of what looked like random junk.  Hadn’t even opened that box in the five years it had been here, and who knows how long it had gone unopened before that.

My initial instinct was to just empty the box into the trashcan and be done with it. But some part of me yelled out, “No, make sure there’s nothing good in there first!” So, I sighed deeply, and then set the box down in front of my chair, grabbed a second box (this one empty), and began to transfer the junk from one box into the other.

And a good 99% of it was indeed just junk. Nothing I needed. Nothing I would ever use. But that other 1%? That other 1% was like striking gold. Buried about halfway down in that box was a CD-R, labeled in Sharpie that read “Back-Up  01-18-08”. A back-up disk of files from early 2008? I’d had at least two major hard drive crashes since then. Who knows what would be on that disk?

By not simply emptying that box full of junk into the trash, I’d unearthed buried treasure!

The only problem was that I had no way to access whatever data was stored upon it. My current computer has no CD drive, no DVD drive. Just USB ports. So, I went to Amazon and ordered myself a portable DVD drive.  Hoping that whatever was on the disk of buried treasure was worth the $30 I was spending on the drive. (Spoiler warning: It was!)

Pictures

There were several folders on that disk. Most of them were full of stuff that I really did not need. But I was very glad to see the remaining two. “Pictures” and “Projects, etc.”

The “Pictures” folder contained a sub-folder that had a lot of photos that I’d taken with my old digital camera. Nothing really noteworthy enough to post here to the blog. (Although I was very tempted to post the photo I took of my winning hand – 1500 trump, if that means anything to you – from a game of Pinochle.)

There was also a sub-folder therein with 19 photos that my friend MMG had taken when she first got her webcam that she would periodically email to me during our on-again, off-again correspondence. These photos would all be considered too ‘naughty’ to post to my blog. (Plus, I promised her I wouldn’t, so there’s that too.)

The real gem in the pictures folder (as far as this blog is concerned) was the folder labeled CafePress. Because once upon a time, I had decided that I was going to make my fortune with a CafePress store, and started putting together t-shirt designs for it. Some were just text. Others included images. (Did I have the art skills to pull this off? Oh, good Lord no.)

The text shirts were all fairly goofy. There were a lot of Anti-George W. Bush shirts. A series of shirts with the pattern of “I’m Not a _______, But I Play One In An MMORPG”. Some shirts advocating statehood for Pluto. (Well, since it was no longer a planet, I figured the least we could do was make it the 51^st American state.)

Some of the designs were mostly text-based, but with some very simple images. I was able to put together a “Shirt Cannot Be Displayed” image based on internet humor that would be completely foreign to today’s internet user. I also split the yin/yang symbol in half, intending to sell shirts that depicted ‘nothing but yin’ or ‘nothing but yang’.

As far as the ‘original’ image-based shirts, well… lacking any actual artistic talent, I started taking images I found online, opening them in Paint (yeah, not even Photoshop, but Paint), and then first outlining them and then filling in the outlines with a solid color. I did the outlines pretty much pixel by pixel, and the fill-ins with various sized brushes. It was a ridiculously time consuming process, and I’m sure there was an easier way to achieve the same end result, but my brain insisted that I do it that way.

The ’Love the Muppets, Hate the Pig’ shirt design I previously showed in my post on the Muppets was from that CafePress era. I also had several designs that were focused on bison. I actually sold one of the Buffalo Fight shirts. And I when I finally gave up on the whole CafePress idea, I was halfway finished with the Downhill Buffalo design. All I really had left to do was put a skateboard under the big fella and better outline that downhill slope he was on.

Of course, Cyrus also made an appearance on a shirt design, back when ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ parodies were popular.

 

Projects, etc.

While seeing all of those otherwise long lost pictures was nice and nostalgic, that folder wasn’t the actual buried treasure that I was excited for. No, the real treasure was in the “Projects, etc.” folder, and all of its contained subfolders.

There was a lot of stuff to sort through there. And once again, there was a lot of stuff that I simply didn’t need anymore.

A lot of checklists. DVDs I had wanted back in 2008. Action figures I had wanted. Books I had wanted. And so on. Also a fair number of episode guides, read orders, and chronologies for various media.

A lengthy interconnected schedule of bus routes. A document tracking my spending habits in 2007. A list of all the books I read from 2005 to 2007. A list of all the tattoos that I would get if I were going to get a bunch of tattoos (which even when writing that list I knew I wasn’t going to do). Just all sorts of stuff.

But there was good stuff, too…

Other Blogs

One of the folders was named “Blog” and contained a bunch of subfolders for blogs I had intended to do once upon a time. One of these folders contained elaborate notes for a blog that I did eventually do. (A blog about sex from the POV of someone who wasn’t having any.)  A couple of others were notes and half-written blog entries for a couple of false starts.

Then there was the subfolder named “Autobiography”, which I looked at and thought, “What the Hell is this?” (I thought “What the Hell is this?” about a lot of the folders that were on the buried treasure disk. Ah, the ‘new’ discoveries of a faulty memory…) Once I opened the folder and started reading the documents, I slowly started thinking, “Hey, wait—I remember this!” (I thought that a lot, too. Sadly not as many times as I thought “What the Hell is this?” though.)

I had, at one point in time, planned to do a non-sequential autobiographical blog, just telling stories from my past. And in preparation for that, I had plumbed the depths of my memory, making a list of the events that stood out in my mind. A list that was 71 items long, which would have translated into (at least) 71 posts, had that project ever gotten off the ground.

I still think that it’s a good idea, and now that I remember having once had that idea, I’m very tempted to start adding things from the past fourteen years, just in case it ever does get off the ground.

Board Posts

I used to peruse a lot of message boards. Generally your basic nerd stuff. Comic books. Action figures. Role-playing games. And some of the longer posts that I made on these were collected in a folder labeled “Board Posts”.

The majority of those posts from the buried treasure disk were from a Marvel Comics message board site, where I chose “The Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Thingamajig” as my screenname. (Which several people quickly shortened to “TELBET”. And that caught on so thoroughly that even I started calling myself that.)

It was rare that I would ever actually start a thread of my own, but if someone posted a question that had the potential for a lengthy answer, I was there to rattle off a long-winded post whose word count would sometimes rival my current blog posts.

E-Mails to MMG

If the email I’m going to write is going to be of any sizable length, it’s rare that I actually write it in the email window. I tend to write these on a word processor and then cut-and-paste them over to the empty email.

So when I saw a folder entitled MMG, I immediately knew what it contained. My half of a series of long running conversations between her and I. Over 60 word processor documents worth of me talking to her.

I’ve reread a couple of them now, and while I like the reminiscence and nostalgia, overall they just make me sad. MMG was able to beat cervical cancer. But her inability to quit smoking made the doctors list her cause of death as lung cancer.

MMG was the closest I’ve ever come to having an actual girlfriend, and I miss her more than I can easily express.

Other Depressing Stuff

Two other items of note, while we’re on the topic of things from the disk that depress me.

One of these items was a document titled “What’s Wrong With Me”, which I vaguely remember writing, probably as an intended blog entry. It was just what it said on the label, a list of the medical and psychological problems that I was afflicted with at the time. It is a lengthy list, and fourteen years out of date. Nothing on that list has been cured/resolved, but there have been so many new notes that would need to be added to that list.

The other item was the incomplete first draft of a suicide note I wrote back in July of 2006. I’ve read it several times since recovering the data from the disk. Every reason that I had to self-terminate then still applies today. And just like the “What’s Wrong With Me” list, there is so much more to add.  When I stop and let myself really think about it, I’m honestly surprised that I’m still here.

Phrase of the Day

Okay, enough depressing stuff. I found a few chunks of the Phrase of the Day on the buried treasure disk, the rediscovery of which filled me with joy.

I’m almost certainly going to do a blog post about the Phrase of the Day at some point, as it was a large part of my life for well over a decade. So I’m not going to go into great detail about it now.

Suffice to say, it was a project that my friend Mike Reinsch and I started in March of 1993 that involved adding a new phrase to the list for every day that passed. Somewhere between four and five thousand phrases, most of them pretty bizarre.

Mike will sometimes point out to me the grand cosmic injustice that the Phrase of the Day ended before Twitter started. The latter being almost the perfect vehicle for the former.

A Grand Miscellany

Plus, a great many things that don’t rate their own individual bolded-and-centered subheading here in this post.

A partial list of mix-tapes that I had planned to put together (including a personal soundtrack for my life).

A list of strange business plans I’ve had throughout the years.

The details of Tribal Name Day, a holiday I created and celebrated for two years where I renamed all of my friends with oddball and vaguely tribal-sounding names. Like Hungry Turtle Chasing Sandwich. Bucket of Chicken Travels Through Time. Or Nearsighted Clerk Ruining Two Special Days By Mixing Up Nitrous Oxide and Helium Tanks. (I’d say that it happened during a strange point in my life, but really, all the points in my life have been at least a little strange.)

A partial list of character classes for a D20 Modern-based Ghostbusters role-playing game I was putting together. 

The lyrics to a Christmas song sung by a man in a mental institution.

And even a little bit of poetry.

The Writing Projects Folder

So far, everything I’ve talked about here is stuff that I’m definitely glad to have recovered, but very little of it is stuff that I have periodically felt that I’ve needed throughout the years since burning the disk. But now…

Now we talk about the “Writing Projects” folder. Because that’s where all of the really good stuff was hiding.

Smut

Ever since the writer’s block set in back in 1997, I’ve been desperately trying to find ways to circumvent it. A lot of times that meant trying to find a type of story that seemed like it would be easier for me to write than my usual projects. This is what led to the creation of the “Lit” folder.

Lit in this case was short for Literotica.com, and signified the beginning of my I-should-just-write-erotica period. I figured (at the time) that just writing stories with minimal plot and lots of descriptive sex should be relatively easy to complete. (Spoiler warning: It wasn’t.)

The plan was to use erotica to break through my writer’s block, write a bazillion short smut stories, get them all published to Literotica.com (which doesn’t pay for their stories), and then take first place in their annual Lit Survivor contest and win whatever comparatively paltry prize they offered (if memory serves, it was just a couple hundred dollars worth of Amazon gift card).

Over a period of years, I managed to write one very short story. (It was right around 1600 words, and took me weeks to write. Which is weeks longer than it should have taken.) I submitted it, and it was accepted, and that was the end of that.

(I just went to the site and took a look at that story. According to the stats, it has had over 16.5 thousand views, and an average rating of 4.26 stars out of 5. Only five people commented on it, but all were very positive, and four of those five requested a continuation of the story.)

But despite only actually writing the one tale, I had notes for more. A lot more. I mean, a whole lot more. There was one document in that folder where I kept a running list of the stories I wanted to write, organized by Literotica story categories. Most of those story ideas were just a title and a one line synopsis, although there were also those whose synopsis ran to a whole paragraph. That document is in 10 point Times New Roman…and is 73 pages long.

Fan Fiction

Another one of the folders inside of the “Writing Projects” folder was filled with fan fiction ideas. That was another thing that seemed like it should be easier for me to write, as fan fiction was the bulk of my early writing output.

There were a couple of outlines for Doctor Who stories (all modern era stuff featuring Doctors Nine and Ten). Plus an original Whoniverse character named Anizdella Lolomber, who was an homage to Doctor Who comic character Abslom Daak (the Dalek Killer).

There were also some notes on a concept I had for a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles story where they kept meeting alternate versions of themselves that had been trained in something other than ninjitsu. (Teenage Mutant _______ Turtles, including Jedi, Ghostbuster, Ranger/Anla’shok, Gangster, Gunslinger, Pirate, Astronaut, Caveman, etc.)

Another folder was named “18 Months in the Life of Batman and Robin”, and was full of notes for an epic fan fiction novel I planned to write that covered a year and a half of Gotham City adventures. October of let’s-call-it-year-one through March of let’s-call-it-year-three. The over-arching plot involved the Calendar Man on a year-long crime spree, but eventual subplots had Batman and Robin fighting pretty much their entire rogues gallery.

But the big fan fiction folder (itself filled with innumerable sub-folders) was dedicated to Marvel Comics stories. Mostly Fantastic Four and Defenders, but with a number of Spider-Man tales thrown in for good measure. I never really liked the direction that the Fantastic Four comic took in the late 80s after writer/artist John Byrne was fired, so I decided to split off an alternate reality and tell different stories for the team. All my other Marvel stories took place in that same alternate universe.

Miscellaneous Novel Projects

Lots of file folders for novel projects that I wanted to tackle. Like “Voting Outside the Box”, which was supposed to be a political novel that took the main character from being a high school senior running for the local school board, through becoming mayor, governor, and then his campaign for the presidency.

There were several superhero novel projects that each had their own folder (as well as each one being set in their own individual superhero universe). Included among these were a novel where the superhero reveals his secret identity to the reporter love interest (yeah, I know – but it’s a valid trope in the genre) and grants her an exclusive interview in order to keep her occupied while an escaped criminal tries to hunt her down for the expose that put him in prison. 90% of the novel would have been their interview with various flashbacks.

The other main superhero project was an attempt to write a novel version of a superhero ‘event’ that usually covers most of the comics published by a company over a three or four month period of time. Only I was using all newly created characters for my story. Biggest ensemble ever.

“No Such Thing” was about paranormal investigator Ryan Tannenbaum being hired to stop a group of cultists from recreating the lycanthropy curse some twenty-five years after the top secret US Paranormal Rangers squad hunted the werewolves to extinction. This was meant to kick off a whole series of Ryan Tannenbaum novels. Lots of notes in that folder.

I also discovered notes for several novels set in the Esciem Realms (my old D&D/Pathfinder campaign world). Chief among these was “Makieve’s Nine”, which told the tale of a shapeshifting identity thief assembling a group of professionals to stage a raid/heist on a hidden fortress to retrieve untold riches and magic. Unbeknownst to the rest of the group, the master thief called Makieve that is leading their group is secretly the shapeshifter himself, and all sorts of potential double-crosses are at play.

If I were to go ahead and catalog everything that was in the “Writing Projects” folder, this post would be both ridiculously long and very, very late. So I’m just going to mention two more before I end this post.

“Existential Rangers Novel”. The not-at-that-time named project outlined in this folder went through some serious transformations before it reached its current, present-day state. But I had thought that this earliest rendition of it was forever lost. Skimming through the notes contained here (with a promise of a more in-depth study to come) has really put a kind of nostalgic spin on the project as I see it.

Just what is this project? As it happens, it’s something that I’ve scheduled its own post for in mid-December. (Well, okay, a third of a post.) So I’m going to wait until then and then talk about it more fully. Rediscovering the original notes for it are just going to make the writing of that forthcoming post more fun for me.

And finally…

Return of the Return

There was one folder on that disk that I would have been happy to find all on its own, with none of the other content I’ve previously discussed. The one folder that was ‘worth the price of admission’.

Back in mid-September, I posted a piece to the blog called “Three Projects”, in which I discussed, well, three projects. The three projects currently on the rotating schedule of stories that I am theoretically working on. The projects that – if my writer’s block were to disappear right this minute – I would select one of to begin writing immediately.

One of those projects is the novelization (and continuation) of a comic book script that I wrote long, long ago. A script that I intended to write an entire series of scripts for, but whose notes were all destroyed when my Macintosh died late last millennia.

I did manage to partially resurrect the Mac for a short while, but discovered that most of its files were corrupt. What I only really vaguely remember is using a program to look inside the guts of some of those corrupt files and sorting through fragments of usable notes interspersed with machine gibberish.

The more I think about it, the more I can remember writing those fragments down in a notebook, and then later on transcribing them into a new word processor file on my next computer. But that was many years and several hard drive crashes ago, and my assumption was that even those partially reconstructed notes were gone forever.

So imagine my surprise and delight when I found a folder titled “Captain Buffalo Rebuild” on the buried treasure disk. A wealth of long lost information on what was originally to have been a comic book series called “The Return of Captain Buffalo” which I have recently decided to retell as a series of novels called “The Return of Captain Bison”.

A series of novels that I feared I was going to have to make up new plot details for. Come up with new character names to replace those I couldn’t remember. All of which my obsessive-compulsive brain would know were ‘wrong’ because they weren’t the originals. But now, many of those original answers have been restored to me.

I suspect that if I had discovered this disk six months earlier than I actually did, this year’s NaNoWriMo would look completely different to me than it does now with me sitting here on the sidelines just hearing about other people participating.

Sure, I still have the writer’s block to deal with. But having this much of the original source material for this comic project turned novel returned to me fills me with hope. Opens the project to so much potential.

All right, that’s probably enough out of me for this post. Things to do, recovered files to read, and so on.