A few exciting things happened this week!
The first is that I archived something I've wanted to track down for a few years now, Slaughterhouse-Five: The Multimedia Experience, a Windows 3.1/MPC-era CD-ROM that's a a lightly interactive version of Kurt Vonnegut's novel and also features what I'm pretty sure is an otherwise unpreserved interview with Vonnegut. I was able to obtain a sealed copy of it and get very clean and high-quality scans of the box and printed materials as well, so I'm all around very pleased with the results!
It isn't going to be my primary focus, but I'd like to track down some more of these older CD-ROMs that aren't preserved in a way that's easily accessible. I'd also really like to track down some more obscure console releases where there's a widely available Redump disc rip, but the peripheral material isn't particularly well preserved. For example, a lot of 3DO releases only have low-quality front box art scans, nevermind back covers or instruction booklets.
The other thing I've been doing this week is some cleanup of my AWS infrastructure, including some work on Game Mag Print Ads. It's largely behind-the-scenes stuff, but I had a mess of image files in an S3 bucket that weren't consistently named (sometimes even missing file extensions) that has now been fixed.
I also took a closer look at why some Game Mag Print Ads posts fail, and I figured out it's some combination of image file size and resolution. It's a bit frustrating because finding rules that work for every social media platform really limits image quality, although it largely isn't noticeable within the context of a social media timeline.
This has got me thinking about how I actually do want to continually expand and improve Game Mag Print Ads. I've been working on it for a little over four years now, and I still find myself intermittently, but consistently revisiting it. I'm probably going to start building some backend image processing into it so I can have different versions of each image, from thumbnails through to the best-quality image I can find for each ad.
I'm also definitely still planning on building out a web frontend for browsing Game Mag Print Ads. There's almost 4,000 ads in there now, and there's no end in sight for more ads to add. I've been seeing how the for-profit places that have been repositories for this kind of material have gotten worse (see MobyGames locking full-resolution images behind a "MobyPro" subscription), and I want to build a little nonprofit space specifically dedicated to curating game ads. This is all long-term planning, but I keep slowly iterating over it when I can carve out the time.
This upcoming week is my last one before I start my new job at Archive. My big plans are to get all my video work stuff in order. The first immediate priority is getting PlayStation Experiment episode 2 back on track, but I'm keeping my focus more on getting a long-term process established to do consistent work rather than trying to shove in too much work in my last week before starting a new job. My modest goals are just to complete the one segment that's already pretty far along (Twinbee Taisen Puzzle Dama) and have a plan to keep work going at a decent pace alongside a day job and other commitments.