Happy Birthday | From the Editor

Though many people have added to this project financially or intellectually, its greatest beneficiary so far has been myself by a wide berth. In the next year and beyond, I need your help to make sure that changes.

I can imagine (almost hope, even) that these letters haven’t had much readership, but they’ve forever chronicled my intellectual and emotional development in spite of my shife, fleeting memory. Writing to you has assisted me tremendously in figuring out why and how I should build this thing.

Today, the front page bears nothing but the above list of individuals who’ve invested in, contributed to, bantered with, and/or encouraged us.

Beneath their names is a heavily smushed screenshot of all the Extranet’s raw text. It’s a bit less compressed than the one I posted on Instagram — the original was 30,000 pixels long — but they both allow you to see the entirety of what we’ve created so far in one image.

The staff and I would like to thank you for your readership, your engagement, and your support of fresh digital media.

If you recall our mantra — scribam quid non legerim (“I will write what I have not read”) — note that an unstated component of that sentiment includes I want to read what I have not read. In that sense, our supporters — mentioned and unmentioned — have directly contributed to our satisfaction, as have you — even if these are the first of our words you’ve consumed.

Colleagues and friends have come and gone, but the core group — the people I chose to bet on — have remained present in some form, and the work of every one of those who’ve chosen to move on will remain in high standing.

The three of us now make up the editorial team of this publication: one damaged-goods word nerd, a chaotic, prose-slinging machinist, and a maniacal cybercountess.

Nullify Tim’s company, here on the ground, and I’m not sure I’d be able to maintain my obsession, functionally, and without Hawthorn’s sporadic correspondence from the Northwest, I’d have spun off in a cyclone of my own bullshit, ages ago.

Aside from her appearances on Futureland, I know ‘Thorn’s byline seems awfully absent, but her behind-the-scenes contributions have had a significant impact on decisions made within virtually every aspect of the organization. This is why — very soon — I’m going to be overhauling our woefully-outdated masthead to more accurately compile and present the names who make up Extratone.

In fact, I’ve already begun building staffer-specific landing pages: Tim and I have /cactus and /bilge, respectively.

Given the below-detailed commitment against compromising our visual experience, Ben Stokes’ ambitious new bi-weekly web comic could not have been pitched at a more perfect time.

My rant about Facebook is mostly conjecture — the language of its users — but it actually includes pseudocitation(!) and looks really great.

I happened to glance at the Net’s recent top searches, a few weeks ago, and discovered mention of ‘brandon from extratone’ behind only my name.

Remember that fucking business plan I told you about last month?

Well, number two has taken a lot of my time. Originally, I only wanted a web presence to easily manage the content for eventual seasonal prints, but what I’ve learned about digital storytelling in the interim has me convinced that its possibilities trump the need for you to ever hold us in your hands. Personally, it’s been 12 months of obsessively stumbling around, which is an odd activity.

In retrospect, it would seem that I’ve learned to turn my vanity into productive energy. Remember that night in July when I spent some 18 hours completely redesigning the site after I’d happened to visit it on my phone before bed? I thought this… looks like shit, so I just… threw everything away, and started over with the basic infrastructure of today’s tone.

So, our Trato has indeed grown into that titanic digihunk I predicted it would, but it’s actually gotten very lithe over time.

At origin, the whole clunky-ass intranet thing was a good joke, but I’m very pleased to announce that it (along with its registration process, forums, profiles, groups, etc) has been destroyed, forever. The loss of its dead weight coupled with a near site-wide elimination of the sidebar has reduced the net to less than half its original loading time.

Also contributing to this newfound immediacy in a big way is the visual style we devised in November of last year, which we like to call Pithed. Like a sort of cyber blackout poetry, it involves compressing the shit out of ultra high-dimension images upon render so that they look beautifully and intentionally pixelized (as opposed to just plain poor quality) at ludicrously tiny file sizes.

For example, this featured image I took at MAGFest is 4672 x 2628 — more than large enough to be malleable for the Extranet’s various display formats, yet the JPEG, itself is only 120 kb in size, which allows for even the longest-winded, most intricately visual-laden features to be briskly rendered in less-than-ideal network situations.

Of course, it wouldn’t make sense for us to sacrifice our reading experience to page load times — that’s what old new media is for — but I think Pithing will continue to have a smoothing effect on your digital thumbing, along with its resulting lack of caching necessity. In fact, there was actually a significant increase in overall site speed when I disabled it to live-edit something a few weeks back. (Remind me to buy a 10-gallon hat for such occasions.) Until a more tailored professional solution becomes available, the Extranet will remain live and uncached.

Out of all forms of human communication, the comic format has always been the most alien to me, by far. When attempting to absorb a comic book — print or digital — I’ve never been able to escape my utter ineptitude. (I’m sure I’ll be able to improve after some experience, one day, but for now, the fact is inconsequential.)

In the case of Ben’s Harvey T. Halloway, I was provided an enthralling new challenge just in the nick of time. When he originally submitted Page 1, I simply chucked most of the raw image on the homepage. Apparently, some mobile browsers do not allow pinch-to-zoom in that format, and ya can’t just take every panel in at once on a smaller screen.

The most reasonable, short-term solution I could come up with was to install Harvey on its own instance. I pulverized a free theme’s CSS (which is why navigation appears quite glitchy, at the moment,) and mustered a bare-bones platform that seems to function adequately for the time being. The Halloway section on the Net is still the best way to browse and share pages, though. (The entries are simple redirects.)

If you’re an experienced consumer and you’ve got the time to send your feedback, please do.

My early focus on user account registration exemplifies how disturbingly profound my naivety was regarding the state of the internet in 2017. I knew enough to avoid anti-open web CMSs like Medium or Tumblr, and to foresee a universal re-analysis of where the fuck our words go, (and I just needed to play around again,) but I had no idea how many brilliant internal communication solutions were available.

Nor did I realize the extent of the noise which one is now confronted with when attempting to create a media company. A primary quandary all along has been sorting between what is expected (of a digital magazine/blog/news site,) and what makes sense. It’s a particularly essential one — the answer will likely decide the relevancy of our existence.

For instance, Discord is basically capable of everything that any/all communications services have ever offered, yet even the most modern publications are still using Slack, internally, which is simply unnecessary. Most of the web looks like shit, including those few publications with way too much money to concede to fucking mobile versions of their sites and their readership’s Facebook habit, while others have stooped to just treating their audience like five-year-olds.

If Extratone was subject to this cowardice, we’d probably have a significantly greater revenue stream by now, but we wouldn’t be making anything worthwhile. It’d be senseless.

Though it’s been sporadic — and much too male — there are people visiting this website. We’ve gotten some mud on the tires, and the experience has suggested that non-contributor user accounts are senseless. There’s no reason for you to worry about another set of credentials — another opportunity to put your information at risk, or for me to have to worry about putting it at risk.

As such, I have disabled account creation, removed the ✒️ drop-down menu from Meta, and finally disabled comments, site-wide.

Methods of engagement with us still abound, and would-be contributors can simply email me to have their account made. It’s a lot simpler this way.

My gift to the Extranet for its first birthday is this version — 3.6 — which includes a bunch of additional tidying-up with that digital flipping ideal in mind.
(I’m just thankful I’ve yet to have a dream — or nightmare — about editing the website.)

The search function has been removed from Hustonia — the main nav menu. There really is something about “online magazine” and the necessity of exploration. Take your time — you might have fun digging. If you must search, you’ll still be able to use the functionality in this format: /?s=[term]. E.g. extratone.com/?s=piss
Most sections (categories) have been re-visited and irrelevant meta trimmed away as much as possible. It doesn’t make much sense for every thumbnail in Words of David Blue in Red to include “by David Blue.”
Archive display pagination has been revised. There are now a set maximum number of posts-per-page displayed, so — if you find yourself remembering something you found while exploring, you can reliably remember where you left off by page number.
I tweaked the about page slightly, removing parallax to further smooth things out.
Since it’s still debatably the best part of this website, it’s worth noting that I’ve visually updated our 404 page.

Since these letters have really just been another, long-winded form of Extratone aggregation, it’s prevalent of me to revisit some of my favorite content from the past year.

In early October, we watched the Second Presidential Debate between Clinton and Tump, and I was able to get our very-liberal friend Ivy Holivana to chat with Virgil — Studio Eat’s Marxist guardian angel, and Alek Michael — Extratone’s Alacrity Editor and singular Donny-voting staffer. It was published under the now-deceased Off The Grid brand, but was like nothing else we’d ever done. It’s a bit of a surreal listen, considering where we’re at, currently. There was a lot of interruption, but everybody was able to articulate their particular, universally-fresh perspectives on The Tump Problem. Nothing much has become of our hesitant Tump section yet, but that discussion is the essential takeaway.

The first episode of Futureland to bear the name included an interview with Glenn of Vine fame, but discussing his excellent Expert Opinion podcast ‘out-of-character,’ as well as his dilligent study of comedy proved to be much more interesting than the service’s destruction.

Way back in September, I got to record a conversation with a podcaster whom I’ve admired for a long time. DomanarK co-hosts Clueless Space Nerds, an Eve Online community icon which I used to consume religiously. It’s no surprise we got along so well, I guess — ultimately, we are both Midwestern rednecks who’ve played the goddamn game.

We started off this year by attending MAGFest 2017 — our first event ‘coverage’ as a publication. Though we only got a single episode of Futureland from the floor, itself (in the corner with the trash and the flies,) a later, much more sober reflection in the aftermath recorded with Whitney, Jab50Yen, Kali, Isiah, and Juni proved to be an effective followup. Though it’s only been a few months, the written bit — my first attempt at a “big feature” — is already quite cringey in layout and voice, but perhaps that’s a positive thing. I may finish its companion — The Sincerity - one day when I have time to kill, but the experience taught me — if anything — just how irrelevant most of my presumptions were. Rounding it all up, Jab50Yen and I had a conversation about YouTube Poop to a depth I can safely claim as the premiere offering, anywhere, which is uh… very on-brand, at least.

Alexa’s extraordinarily articulate rants in the last fifty minutes of Futureland’s 22nd episode are some of my favorite of all time. Imagine if we had the means to pay her for more rants and hard-hitting prose.

The whole section has been great, really, but Tim’s sons is probably my favorite.

I have come from a line of Great men
and lesser men
men who lead proud and fulfilling lives
and those who died before they had time
these men worked with their hands
and with their minds
strong men and smart men
locksmiths and welders,
engineers and miners
soldiers and sailors
grunts to commanders
their blood flows through me
They were sons of America
She brought them prosperity and disparity
they loved her and hated her
so when i die
i will be buried in her heart land
next to her mightiest river.

Of everything?

Terrifying

because it is more complex than any of us could’ve imagined.

There will be exponentially more information to absorb than the combined exchange of all human communication, and our methods of distributing it will be (and are being) brutally tested, but ultimately, the message is always more important than the medium.

I’ve brought you along for my experiences returning to (somewhat) worldly awareness because this context — what you see in front of you — is the only method I’ve found for myself to accomplish both the academic and personal development that university exists to accomplish (by declaration, anyway.)

Obviously, I’m grateful for the personal progress, but the danger of my person on its future has made itself apparent. Ultimately, Extratone cannot be me; cannot be mine.

I’ve been learning to love this town, but it’s far from where we belong. As I explained in March, we’re planning to head toward our friends in the Northwest, next year — conserving our community building energies for a more target-rich environment. Early on, I was adequately convinced that face time (as in, person-to-person) was no longer necessary for intercommunication for the ‘truly-modern’ organization I wanted to build, but — as I’ve said repetitiously — my perception of even our own bubbled industry reality has changed drastically, since.

No amount of VoIP, text channels, or file sharing services can replace proximity in the process of a publication flying the nest. An office space will always be the ideal environment for our sort of collaboration.

It’s really all I daydream about, these days.

I can tell you that I, myself need to slow down a bit, while I still can. A year of web development has gained me plenty of knowledge, yes, but it’s also cost my body a lot. The groundwork has been laid, and I’ve been slowly acclimating to a more reasonable lifestyle.

There’s always more to say, but it can be left to the coming months.

Until then, we’re going to continue doing our best to deliver extraordinary digital experiences, and we hope you find yourself invested in our creation.

Happy Birthday, Trato

Y O U

E D I T O R I A L L Y

M E C H A N I C A L L Y

A U D I O

T H E P A S T

T H E F U T U R E

by

David Blue