devblog / friday 140122 (Patreon)

Happy Friday, friends. How are you all faring? It is getting so messy on this rainy failed state of an island that the 65LABS Forward Strategies Unit is considering annexing the north of England and establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat. Wanna come? All are welcome! Except for Tories. BYOB.

THIS WEEK

- Much like the beginning of Jurassic Park, one of our remote workers, this time an archivist in one of our offsite storage facilities, made an unwitting discovery. They unearthed some kind of fossil locked deep in amber/an old CD carry case.

- It was identified as a ‘compact disc’, dated by the handwriting and the contextual rubble it was discovered in as being around 15-18 years old. By the time a ‘compact disc player’ was located, the excitement levels over at the 65LABS Ancient Media Restoration Wing were *incendiary*, so you can imagine their disappointment when the first 8 tracks turned out to be nothing but songs off of The Destruction of Small Ideas. It is possible that they are not the album versions, but in fact demos, or pre-mixes, or early mixes, but to properly establish this would mean any one of us listening to The Destruction of Small Ideas again to do a side by side comparison. And that, friends, is a tall order indeed. The last track, ‘DRONES’, is a curiosity though. This will be passed that on to those scruffy kids in 65daysofstatic for their samples collection. If they don't need it, maybe they'll give it back to the Lab for us to archive or perhaps use or release somewhere or other. Or then again there's always the memory hole...

- Other than this underwhelming discovery, the week was mostly taken up with some experimenting to figure out how plausible a video version of the final Wreckage Systems Technical Overview is. It would, after all, be nice to have a definitive explanation of everything in a way that was more digestible than a many-thousands word blog post. We are getting there. It's not certain but we might have found an approach that would make sense, and wouldn't require us investing in months of intensive CGI production and/or watching After Effects tutorials on YouTube to pull it off. So we will try getting to work on that soon. In the meantime, here's an experimental GIF detailing the 'Constellation Heart' that is a feature of all Wreckage Systems. This GIF will not be getting used on account of it not being particularly good:

(Do note that, although this GIF is bad, it is nowhere near bad enough to become an NFT.)

- We also tried a few things for the final Wreckage System that will get added to the V2 stream. Most didn’t pan out, but we have settled on something that, while perhaps not as ground breaking/experimental as we’d been looking for, you should all hopefully find particularly satisfying.

- After spending a few minutes on wikipedia reading up on ‘project management’, a roadmap to End of Season One has now been sketched out. You might have thought that a company like 65LABS that is steadily climbing into the upper echelons of pioneering tech visionaries might have considered such a discipline earlier. Then again, perhaps you wouldn’t. In any case, you will not be surprised to hear that we are already running a little behind the schedule we just came up with, so we’ll save further details for now.

THINGS TO COME

- In an effort to finally hit a deadline for the first time in a long time, we aim to have the last system finished and working in the V2 stream by the end of next week. All other Wreckage Systems priorities are secondary to this.

- Once that is achieved, work will begin in earnest on the Technical Overview, and pulling together all the other loose ends, like getting the V1 Archive release finalised, finishing the metadata for all the systems in the V2 stream, a final bug check, etc. etc.

That’s it! Until next week: take your solace where you can find it, abolish any monarchies you come across, stay safe, fuck the tories, and if you happen to have the means, dismantle all geographical borders. Good luck out there, friends.