Archive for the 'Site Admin Crap' Category
Revisionista
October 1st, 2008
PEGRITZ(.com)! as it is will be going away shortly. I’m just going to revamp the site into a somewhat more professional portal to my writing, music, and assorted other projects. This blog is just going to move to the address blog.pegritz.com after the Reconstruction is complete…which, knowing me, will probably take anywhere between six months and seven years. The RSS feed will remain the same, though.
Oh! And don’t forget to check out my Tumblr blog, The Collected Works of Derek C. F. Pegritz, which not only indexes this blog but every other damn blog I’ve got going—plus random little clips like quotes, fun links, music that I’ve been listening to, and assorted other miscellany. And it’s got its own RSS feed…which kinda/sorta is an RSS feed for all my RSS feeds—a meta-RSS feed, if you will. But then again, I’m a pretty meta kind of dude. In fact, right now, I’m writing about writing this very sentence! Wrap your brain around that strange loop, Hofstadter!
No Technorati links for this post, ‘cause what else would I link to? Other people’s blog-restructuring efforts? Like I care about anyone other than myself!
DISQUSting! Multi-threaded comments are go.
August 24th, 2008
I have just converted PEGRITZ(.com)!’s comment system over to DISQUS. The DISQUS system has been working beautifully on Footnotes to the Human Species, so I’m implementing it now on all my WordPress-powered blogs or CMS sites!
Don’t be alarmed if it needs a little tweaking and whatnot over the next day or so, but it’s up and running right now, so…register for a DISQUS account, get ye an awesome avatar, and go to town!
Technorati Tags: disqus,wordpress,plugins,pegritz.com
Happenings, Happenings: The Near Future of PEGRITZ(.com)!
August 24th, 2008
Well. It’s definitely been some time since I’ve rapped at ya, hasn’t it? I’ve been prettymuch incognito since July 17th, and for good reason: my digestive system once again decided to shut down on me, landing me in the hospital for a few days. Fortunately, this time I didn’t need the tubes down my throat draining the quarts of stagnant waste out of my intestines…but it was still quite annoying—especially since I have been periodically wiped out by extreme nausea every couple of days. I’m so loaded with medications that…well, I haven’t been able to do much more than write music reviews for WeHeartMusic, and that at only one a day or every other day. My complete and utter inability to land a decent-paying job certainly hasn’t made my life any easier, either. Consequently, my productivity has completely gone down the toilet.
However! Things are looking up now….I’ve been progressively feeling better over the past week, have managed to land a job at a local tech support contractor (doing desktop support for—get this—Apple Computers, the Worst Computer Company On Earth), and have been feeling a lot more energized lately. So here’s what’s gonna be happening in Pegritzland soon:
- I’m going to be writing more and more reviews for WeHeartMusic, plus doing interviews with some of my favorite artists and bands, and taking part in the weekly WHM podcast. I used to do a little college radio back in the day, and what is podcast but the glory days of college radio ported to a new, slightly different, and more manageable (not to mention more wide-reaching) medium?
- In relation to that, I’ve decided that it’s time I do a podcast of my own, as well. The Pegritzcast will be a monthly excursion into all things Pegritzian: music, literature, film, graphic arts, storytelling, comedy, retarded humor, and savage anti-Conservative vitriol. The sole purpose of The Pegritzcast will be to entertain you while exposing listeners to all manner of new ideas, arts, and experiences. I’ve been told I’ve got a great “radio voice” (I don’t even know how many voiceovers I did for California University of PA’s radio station back in the late ‘90s, so…hell, might as well do something with it!
- And in relation to that, I’ve decided to start hitting up as many open-mic nights as possible in the coming months to tell humorous stories and slap people around with ignorant, mutant humor. “Storytime with Uncle Pegritz” will, of course, feature tales from the NONFICTION! collection (which I’m getting back into writing) as well as stories about all manner of goofball crap that is sure to amuse as well as enlighten…though I can prettymuch tell you right now that the theme of all my stories is: For god’s sake, don’t try this at home. We’re professional idiots here!
- I’m writing a rather long reflection piece on being a thirty-five-year-old man living with the scourge of Fibromyalgia because September is Pain Awareness Month. It’s not going to be comfortable reading. But…let me just say this for now: chronic pain can be incredibly debilitating, but it cannot destroy your life unless you allow it to dominate every aspect of your existence. My body may ache constantly and fatigue may make it difficult for me to write for any length of time, but my mind is free. Pain can cloud your mind. It can darken your mood into the foulest of depressions. It can make dreaming and creating feel like an insurmountable chore. But no matter how great the pain, your mind can and will find a way around it. Do not feel bad if you’re physical limitations hamper your ability to express yourself creatively: even the smallest, most seemingly insignificant act of creation—like me writing up this little “Where the hell have you been, Pegritz?” feature—is a hole in the prison-wall of pain through which you can slip any number of notes and signals to the World At Large.
- A great deal of my more positive outlook on life, even after the miseries of this summer (and the even greater miseries of last summer), stems from simply acceptance of both my abilities and disabilities. Sure, there are a lot of things I can’t do anymore—like dance, work in my garden, or even eat a proper meal—but there are a lot of things I can do. I’ve been re-reading Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, particularly his brilliant “Song of Myself,” truly one of the most inspiring poems ever written. I will shortly be reprinting “Song of Myself” here on this blog so that folks who haven’t had an opportunity to experience this masterful work will be able to do so conveniently—and for free! Since I’d graduated from grad school and entered the crushing, disillusioning world of academia, I’d grown distant from my old friend Walt…but he never forgot me, and when I opened the pages of his great tome, there he was loafing and waiting for me as if not a single day had passed since last he and I lounged and loved the panoply of Democracy. In this election year, too, the words of Whitman are more important than ever, and I warmly welcome you to share in his words, camerados.
- And, of course, I’ve tons of music of my own in process, which I shall be releasing at a steady clip here now that I’ve finally finished the website for my netlabel, HPL Laboratories of Pennsylvania. Don’t think that HPL Labs exists as just a vanity label for the dissemination of my own musical products (all of which will be free, Creative-Commons-licensed downloads and torrents)—I plan on bringing together as many artists as I can, as I fully intend HPL Labs to be a modest, but effective, source for providing listeners with new, challenging music that isn’t afraid to break new ground or simply work with well-established genres. Considering the fact that the label is named after H. P. Lovecraft (and JPL, NASA’s legendary Jet Propulsion Laboratory), expect most of the music to be eerie, cosmic, and just generally weird stuff—primarily, but by no means necessarily, electronic.
- Oh, and it goes without saying that I’ll be cranking out chapters to “City of Pillars” once more over at Footnotes to the Human Species. Keep an eye out for the Elder Sign in New York City, folks! From what I hear, I have some fans who have taken to tagging abandoned buildings with assorted eldritch wards straight from the dread Necronomicon of the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred! If anyone has pictures of this, send ‘em to me by all means!
So there you have it: my plan for the next month. Will I stick to it? Largely, I hope. But my Lord and Master Nyarlathotep is a fickle muse, and who knows from one day to the next what kind of cosmic curveball he’ll throw my way. Nonetheless, stick around! There’s gonna be some fun times coming here.
Technorati Tags: pegritz,pegritz.com,weheartmusic,music reviews,podcast,pegritzcast,literature,film,graphic arts,city of pillars,footnotes to the human species,walt whitman,leaves of grass,song of myself,irritable bowel syndrome,fibromyalgia,pain awareness month
Footnotes down for the count…but not for long!
June 4th, 2008
OK, folks—take note, ‘cause this is kind of important: PEGRITZ(.com)!’s sister site, Footnotes to the Human Species, is currently M.I.A. The reason is simple: for some reason, WordPress 2.5 stopped working correctly on the site. It simply wouldn’t allow me to edit previously published posts or publish new ones. I upgraded the site to WP 2.5.1, but that did not help one bit. So…the only thing I could think of doing was wiping the installation clean, deleting the SQL database containing all the text, and just starting Completely Anew.
Oh, don’t worry: no content (aside from maybe a “Here’s what I’ve been doing lately” post here and there) has been lost, as I’ve got all that stuff backed up in about five thousand different places. But it will take me a little time to get the site back up and running, with all its plug-ins and enhancements running smoothly (especially since several of them have new versions that are very incompatible with previous versions). Ohwell. Might take a day to get the site back up and running, but remember:
All of the chapter to “City of Pillars” that I will be publishing on the site, Chapters 1 through 7, are the revised versions—many of which are so heavily revised they bear little resemblance, if any, to the originals. You might as well just start back at the beginning, because this thing needed major work to come even close to my standards of quality.
Never, ever start writing something in the middle of a semester of teaching and “make it all up as you go along.” I’ve learned you can’t even do that with a short story of only 1,000 words…let alone a beast that started with an expectation of novella length, but is clearly demanding to be treated as a full-scale novel.
Here’s a heads up on the newly revised “City of Pillars 2.0” that all readers so far hooked on the story should keep their multiple three-lobed eyes peeled for:
Look for a tangential character in “City of Pillars” to be the protagonist/narrator of “Naming the Nameless City”. Also look for Yours Truly, me, appearing in a later chapter that sets up the basic concept of “Iä!”, the story which contains most of what readers familiar with the first incarnation of Footnotes will recognize as the first part of “Trois Frères”—expanded with plenty of sickening details revealing just how horrific the March of the Squidheads is for Humanity as a whole. “Trois Frères” will return as a wholly separate tale, a direct sequel to “Iä!” that sets up much of the action in “Goodnight, Antarctica” and “The Fifth of Five Forms”.
Please bare with me, folks. I want to give you THE best free fictional experience you can possibly get, and I will admit: I’m aiming to be known as the premier literary descendant of H. P. Lovecraft (though, of course, I’ll gladly settle for being known as a really good rip-off artist, as well). If you know me, chances are you’ll probably find yourself in one of these damn stories—but I must warn you: just because we’re best friends, that doesn’t mean you’ll survive. Hell, it doesn’t mean I will survive any of this!
Remember the Footnotes to the Human Species motto: “Who are we to stand before the Gods Themselves and beg for their forbearance”?”
Indeed…who are we? What is Humanity to transcendent alien minds like the Great Old Ones, utterly incomprehensible minds like the Other Gods, and even post-Singularity entities like the Great Race, the Fungi from Yuggoth and their Million Favored Ones, and the Elder Things themselves? Think about that. Are we cockroaches between their feet, or can we be something more?
The Third Nail in Trip-Hop’s Coffin?
April 17th, 2008
Salon.com has an interesting review of Portishead’s uneven, disappointing, and…oh, hell, let’s just call it what it is—shitty—Third album and the “death” of trip-hop. Mind you, I find trip-hop to be alive and better than well in the form of artists such as Little Dragon, Jade, Laki Mera, and even Juno Reactor (yes, their latest album Gods and Monsters is surprisingly downtempo and moody, as you will see in tomorrow’s Friday Fivehead), but I think this excerpt from the review of the album itself prettymuch sums up the album’s main failure point perfectly:
Gibbons’ lyrics used to suggest an assertive, liberated attitude. She closed out “Dummy” demanding a reason to be a woman; on “Elysium,” from “Portishead,” she insists, “You can’t deny how I feel/ And you can’t decide for me!” On “Third,” however, she treats her indecisiveness like a torment on the level of psychosis — a one-dimensional, even stereotypical, view of womanhood as equivocal and weak. “I’m always so unsure!” she laments on the album’s dismal closer, “Threads,” like someone about to throw herself off a bridge because she cannot afford a life coach.
Now, here’s the thing: I like dreary, dismal music. I’m a horror writer by night, and a weekend Goth, for the Other Gods’ sake: dark, dismal, depressing music is part of the soundtrack of my life. But that’s not what I want from Portishead. From Soul Whirling Somewhere, Lachrymosa, Sopor Aeturnus, yes…but not from the band that brought back the “James Bond” sound and slathered it with a new, slinky hip-hop vibe. Alas. How the mighty have fallen.
WordPress 2.5
March 31st, 2008
I just updated all of my blogs to WordPress 2.5 today, and I must say that I am very impressed with the new functionality and the “backstage controls’” new look.
WordPress 2.5, much like Renoise 1.9, does not look or act like merely an incremental upgrade. The administrative functions have a whole new theme and have been completely redesigned and reordered. I’ve already come across several examples of people online bitching that the WordPress developers moved too many things around and made it difficult for some users to find certain functions…but I completely familiarized with the new Dashboard layout in less than two minutes. I find the new interface remarkably intuitive, more powerful, and elegant.
Upgrading was simple enough, if a bit time-consuming (removing files and uploading new versions took about ten minutes per blog), but I’ve dealt with worse. A number of plugins had to be updated in order to ensure that they work the same with the new version of WordPress, but awesomely enough, WordPress now has built-in plugin upgrading: just click “Install new version” and BING! WP downloads and installs the revised plugin entirely on its own. Once the plugins were updated, however, they all worked just as well as they did in previous versions.
All in all, WordPress 2.5 is a much more significant upgrade than its .5 version number would indicate. Much of the processes remain the same, but so much new functionality and design options have been added that it feels as though I’m writing this on WordPress 3.0.
Unlike the many smaller past incremental upgrades (which were released primarily to fix security problems in WordPress’ PHP coding), 2.5 really is an upgrade: a fresh new Testarossa with a familiar, but supercharged, engine underneath the hood. And, as always, it’s a free sports car that costs less than pennies a day to fuel. Your mileage may vary, but so far I’ve been speeding along very happily here.
What am I doing here, anyway?
December 27th, 2007
Wow. The last time I posted anything here was…ummm, in June. A lot has happened since then…and very little of it good. However, many months, a new job, and massive amounts of therapy later, it looks like I’m officially Back in the Saddle and ready to spray the Internet (and, therefore, your eyeballs, Dear Reader) with my particular, peculiar blend of juvenile enthusiasm and world-weary spleen!
What does this mean? Well, for one…a new theme: something grey and depressing, but easy-to-read and clean, almost minimalistic. But also, a number of older posts have disappeared. Important or interesting stuff remains, of course; I’ve simply deleted material that A) never developed properly; or B) is neither timely anymore nor of any historical interest. Simple housecleaning, that’s all.
What does the coming new year promise? A great deal more writing. For one, readers of PEGRITZ(.com)!’s sister sites, NONFICTION!, Oneirophrenia.net, and Footnotes to the Human Species will discover said sites brought into closer alignment with my primary site and completely revised/restructured/remade for 2008. Don’t worry: redirects will abound. Readers may need to update an RSS feed here or there, but that’s about it.
My band, Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos (official site), will be finishing its “second” album, Strange Aeons, in the early months of 2008, and will, of course, provide it free of charge online as high-quality (>256kbps), Creative-Commons-licensed mp3s. That’s right, free.
Plus, I’m working on a ton of other music, as well. Expect new jams from A Doctrine of Works, Retar-D2, and my latest project, Excitable Boy!
Speaking of music…my music-review blog, The Spacing Guild Guide to Good Music, is going away. Vox.com barely gets any traffic, and, though it features some excellent tools and abilities that make maintaining a music-blog very easy…well, the site barely gets any traffic. So, all of its content is going to migrate over hyar, and will be expanded considerably with even more reviews and mp3 samples! In other words, don’t just take my word on a piece of music: give it a listen yourself.
This year, I resolve to do my absolute best to update this site regularly. I doubt I’ll be able to do so, but…hey, I’ll try.
Here’s the hoping 2008 won’t be as miserable as 2007 was!
Upgrade Update!
May 10th, 2007
This is just a quick note to mention that I’ve upgraded PEGRITZ(.com)! to WordPress version 2.1.3. Yay for me.
Switching Themes
April 17th, 2007
Pegritz.com is currently Under Construction, as I’m switching my blog’s theme to something minimalistic, clean, and easy to read. I am currently adapting the Upstart Blogger Minim 0.1 theme, which is one of the cleanest, nicest, most accessible themes I’ve ever come across.
But it’s also one of the buggiest. To put it simply, the PHP code in this theme is allllllllllllllllllllllll screwed up. Mind you, I am no PHP wizard, and most of the WordPress coding that goes into building a theme is completely opaque to my right-hemisphered brain…but even I can tell that the code is really jacked up here. I don’t know if the theme author originally wrote this theme for an earlier version of WordPress or what, but…it’s going to take a while to fix all the innumerable errors (generally caused by improperly-written function calls in the WordPress “Loop”).
So bear with me here. We’ll be returning to our regularly-scheduled broadcasts of invective and lavish hero-worship soon!
Upcoming Pegritzian Attractions!
December 2nd, 2006
Yeah, I know. To quote my boy Jim Anchower, it’s been a long time since I rapped at ya….I haven’t posted anything here in nearly two months, which in the hyperaccelerated, Singularity-bound, short-attention-spanned bloggerworld is an friggin’ eternity. No doubt y’all have forgotten about your homie Mr. Pegritz, just like, earlier in this decade, y’all forgot about Dre. That’s okay. I‘ve forgotten about myself, too! The past two months have been really busy for your boy Flava Pegg: I’ve been teaching steadily - and very busily - at Waynesburg College, working on a great deal of fiction, nonfiction (and NONFICTION!), and of course music. I’ve been writing occasional reviews of wonderful new, or nearly-new, music over at The Spacing Guild Guide to Good Music…but, really, that’s about the extent of my internet publication for the past two months.
But fear not, Loyal - and, no doubt, Infrequent - Readers! During my absence, as I noted, I’ve been particularly busy…and soon you’ll begin to see the fruits of my long-suffering, bloody-fingered (and -minded) labours. I’ve been writing a number of long essays concerning everything from the tragic shadow-lives of former students to the Horrors of Medical Insurance, Asian horror flicks, and the abject necessity of human upgrading and enhancement in the coming Accelerated decades.
As many of you know, however, my first great love is fiction - in particular, Lovecraftian fiction. However, I must admit: much like HPL himself, I have a longstandiong guilty…wait a second - I have no sense of guilt! Lurid, horribly-written pulp fiction and penny-dreadfuls like Varney, the Vampire: or, The Feast of Blood and anything by Edgar Rice Burroughs is a straight-up honest pleasure of mine. I just can’t get enough awful dialogue, ludicrous cliffhangers, and…of course, six-breasted Venusian women. So check it out: I’ve decided to write a serial pulp-fiction/alternate-history adventure novel involving Howard Phillips Lovecraft himself as a character - as well as Percival Lowell, Emily Bronte, a society of semi-robotic British analytical-engineers, Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, the continent of Atlantis/R’Lyeh, Planet X, Wells’ invading Martians, and Kong Kong! The novel is going to be called Howard Phillips and the Flowers of Yuggoth, and will soon be debuting on a subdomain of this site. There will be twelve chapters, each to be published on the first of the month from January of 2007 until December of 2007.
Best of all, this novel is going to be taking advantage of all of the many possibilities inherent in web-publishing and RSS serialization/syndication. What does that mean, exactly? you ask. Well…tune in and find out! I’m certain you’ll be quite enthralled and excited!
So keep your eyes and aggregators peeled to PEGRITZ(.com)!, ’cause there’s gonna be some serious Pegritzian heat coming your way soon. Word to your mothers.
