Monday, April 21, 2014

A quick update

Good morning,

It seems that I have been rather quiet here as of late, and I wanted to take a quick minute to address the whys, hows, and huhs about it.

Actually there is nothing that exciting to say on the subject, but transparency does have its perks.  Primarily that there is a tendency to actually believe what I have to say.  I am sure there is a witty comment about the government in there, but frankly it is too early in the morning to find it.  I am sure you can think of it yourself, and when you do let me know so I can steal it.  At least I'm being transparent!

Basically there are two large factors at play here.  First of all is the website which instead of writing I have been busily working on.  I'd say we are at about 75% now and slowly progressing.  I'm hoping around May it will be ready for an 'official' launch.  We are discussing the best method of going about that, and what we want to do to celebrate the occasion, but nothing official is set in stone.  Suffice to say that if you live in the Chicagoland area there should be some festivities to be had in the not too distant future.  We will make sure to make a big brouhaha about it when we do make a decision.  Just so you know, spell check told me to spell brouhaha that way.

The website has been a much larger task to take on than I had imagined, but it has been a really powerful process for me.  Just the ability to see this thing begin to take shape and come to life has been really an awe-inspiring experience.  It started off as a jumbled mess and is now a jumbled mess that somewhat resembles a website.  I can't wait to share it and show you what we have been working on for the past few months.  I think you will really like it.  There are a few things I am working on that may not be quite finished by the time we launch, but the bulk should be good to go.  The biggest hurdle has been transferring everything over and making all look clean and uniform.  Thanks to some help from my 'tech support' the process has been getting progressively streamlined as it has happened meaning the work is getting faster and faster as it happens.  That is pretty great, and it means each step is less daunting than the last.

Naturally this leads to the question of why this has been taking so long.  Easy, and this goes into the second issue of why I am not writing much (for fun) lately.  Mainly it is because school this semester has been a monster and the time I can commit is relatively small to writing.  This has also, in turn, stunted work on the website which has been my primary focus.  Even as I write this I am cringing at what obligations I am ignoring.  This is all compounded on the fact that this venture into building a website is all new to me, and therefore when a problem arises I can not solve it immediately, it is a slower process than I'd like it to be.

What all of this means is that writing has stalled a bit on my end, and that is a disappointment.  I have a few ideas bubbling for when I have time to commit to writing again, and I hope the summer will be filled with endless journalistic nonsense for you to sink your teeth in.

With all of that said I do have to politely plea (again) that you take the time to share our page once it is up, does not matter what social network you use, but help us out.  The more eyes on us, the more it motivates us to grow and do bigger and better things (Like the fabled Riff 'N Ralk G-string).  I think it is safe to say we will likely never be as powerful a machine as say Rolling Stone, but if we can carve out our own niche than I think we have done a good job.

Before I vanish again into the series of tubes that is the soon to be .com I wanted to take a quick minute (because I also want to procrastinate just a bit longer) and also introduce a few additions to our team.

First is Nathan, who created the colorfully bizarre Fookcast early in the month.  He has been doing the show for a while and his show has now found a home here.  It is still very much 'his show', but we are so glad to have him use us as his base of operations.  I think its a great symbiotic relationship.

Then, and I don't think I ever introduced him, we have Kenny who since late December has been doing the weekly Saturday Night Hype Masters mixtapes.  Kenny used to (still kind of does) run s'Tracks on the Daily' and this is sort of a spiritual successor to that.  We will be building a log of all of them for the site as well so make sure to keep looking.

Finally we have Dante, who is from Argentina (we have gone global!).  Dante created El Espectro de Color some time ago and because I'm a horrible human being I offered to take him from his child and join our growing and ballooning Riff 'N Ralk monster.  Dante still runs El Spectro and contributes to us as well.  He will be providing album reviews and news commentary, an area we had not really delved into just yet so I'm glad to be able to check that box.


I hope to have a clear 'launch date' soon.  Keep looking and thanks for waiting.


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