devblog / friday 280122 (Patreon)

Another Friday! Another Devblog. Never before have 65 been so rigorous in their timekeeping as we have been publishing these updates. At this rate, future cyberspace archeologists, carving out slices of internet, will able to calculate the age of data based on its proximity to a 65LABS devblog.

[PHOTO: A SLICE OF INTERNET]

THIS WEEK

- The Wreckage Systems Technical Overview has eaten up this whole week and is now finally coming together. Slowly. Explaining ourselves has never been top of our list of skills, and the teams over in the 65LABS How To Explain Yourself Wing have been mysteriously absent for a while now. Not sure why. Nevertheless, we are trying to document the workings of Wreckage Systems for posterity and, presumably, international critical acclaim. So the final instalment of our Technical Overview series has now become part essay, part video, and part fact-finding, avant-garde polygon research for unlikely future 65LABS endeavours.

- Part One: Wreckage Space, is now complete in video form. And mostly sorted in essay form. The video will give a broad strokes overview of the project that hopefully all of you will find interesting. The essay will then be an unedited-for-brevity-tech-heavy-monograph for the 3 or 4 of you who really want to know what's going on. It will get right into the cyber-plumbing. In both cases, Part One gives a top level overview of how the various entities that exist in Wreckage Space connect together to generate the endless stream of music that you see and hear on the internet.

- Part Two: The Constellation Heart, is very much unfinished at this point. It will go deeper into how a single Wreckage System works at a micro level. It will delve into its Constellation Heart and break down how the un-formalisable sparks at the core of each system get wrangled into a standardised set of behaviours, so that all the different ideas/sounds/techniques and approaches they use can hold together inside the overall Wreckage Systems structure. At the current rate of progress, this is due to be completed at some point in 2028. But since Season One is supposed to be about to end, we will try to speed that up going forward.

- That is kind of it for this week’s progress at 65LABS. Everything else got put on pause. So here are some screenshots of Part One to keep you going.

END OF SEASON ONE: DETAILS!

Time tumbles on. We are hurtling down the cliff face of dreams into the churning ocean of undecided futures. In an attempt to grab hold of anything that might give us a chance to take a breath, to better plan our downward trajectory and perhaps aim ourselves at a friendly-looking wave, we are implementing the End of Season One. Here are some details about our humble efforts to reign in this infinite project of infinite scope.

The tentative date for the Launch of V2 and therefore the the End of Season One is Monday February 14th. TBC. It might end up getting a little delayed. On or before this time, you will be receiving the following:

• The Wreckage Systems Technical Overview Final Instalment info dump.

• The Wreckage Systems V1 Archive software.

• DEBRIS - A new album-length Bandcamp release that will neatly pull together all the miscellaneous little bits & pieces of audio we have released on the Patreon, all in one place, tagged correctly, tracked nicely, and properly re-mixed/mastered where applicable.

• We will organise a live Q&A for anybody interested, probably on our Discord, probably after the Technical Overview is released just in case that ends up producing more questions than it answers.

After all this, we are going to take a break. Not from being 65daysofstatic in general (there is no escape from that), but from actively working on Wreckage Systems.

SO WHAT IS GETTING PAUSED, EXACTLY?

• This weekly devblog will go on hiatus.
• The Wreckage Systems V2 stream will become the canonical stream on the public links, and we won’t be adding any new systems to it. (It will of course still be online and streaming.)
• There will be no further Wreckage Releases during the break. The Season One Collection comprising of Under the Summs/Tomorrowd/Available Data & Mimik will be canonically complete with the release of companion album DEBRIS.

SO WHY IS THE PATREON CONTINUING?

Despite this break, we are going to keep the Patreon active. There are a few reasons for this:

• There’s still lots left to explore here in the long term, whether that’s an eventual Wreckage Systems V3, or a different angle on the Wreckage Systems Extended Universe, or perhaps a new project from 65LABS entirely.
• The Wreckage Systems public stream will remain online and be continuously broadcasting across the whole of cyberspace, and so the running costs of the various Wreckage Systems servers will also continue.
• We do still plan to share things with you all during the downtime! Just not quite as regularly.
• Beyond the scope of 65LABS, this Patreon is incredibly valuable in keeping 65daysofstatic as a whole ticking over in this new pandemocene. You are many times more directly useful than Spotify, and enough of you seem to have cited a general support for 65daysofstatic as your reason for signing up for us not to feel too exploitative temporarily doing this.

HOW LONG IS THIS BREAK GOING TO BE, EXACTLY?

We are not sure yet. Of course, you’re welcome to stop your subscription whoever you like, but we hope you won’t (and you should at least wait until you get all the imminent new bits like the V1 Archive and DEBRIS!). As mentioned above, this break is not going to be a complete absence of new content, it just won't come at the same rate for the duration of our downtime.

If it subsequently becomes clear to us that actually, we need to take a longer break than we currently think we do, we will pause the subscriptions until such a time when 65LABS is once again ready to go full tilt utopian stylez.

Anyway, that's all still at least a couple of weeks away. Plenty more confused future to come your way before then. So that’ll do for now. Stay glitchy, stay hydrated, stay safe, never trust a tory, abolish any and all police you have the power to abolish, call out manufactured consent where appropriate, remember to always laugh at celebrities shilling for crypto, disrespect any politician standing in front of a flag, believe in coffee, hack the metaverse, back up your data, and have a calming weekend. See you next week, noise comrades!