So far, so good

Scott and I have been working on this for a few months, the site is coming up on its two month anniversary (yay!), and we haven’t really written down anything about our process, what we hoped to do, what we’ve achieved, and what we hope for. This was because we were really focused on getting content created, and absolutely not because neither of us had any experience with wordpress.com and we couldn’t figure out how to make a blog post that wouldn’t crash the way that we had set up the pages.

Where to begin?

When you have to start somewhere, start at the beginning. Except we don’t play by the rules, so I’ll start in the middle. Middle age. We have both reached it, some of us earlier than others. We have happy families, we have lovely homes, we have…jobs. But both of us were yearning for a creative outlet and had long ago agreed to do something together. It was time to fish or cut bait, and so we made a plan.

It took a few weeks to settle on a format and a style. Then another week to figure out where to start. Then another week…or maybe two…or three…to figure out wordpress.com and here we are!

Well, not really. There was more trial and error before we ever pushed the publish button. We eventually landed on a go live date of July 8, 2021. We arrived on this date through a combination of vacation schedules lining up and a growing realization we’d been working on it for weeks and if we didn’t push the button now we may never do it.

And thus history was born.

How do we do it?

It takes roughly 2 weeks for each review. Our schedule (it’s important to make one and stick to it) is to get our individual drafts done by the Tuesday the week before we publish. We usually meet that day to publish our announcement posts for whichever band we’re doing that week. By Thursday, we should have our combined our first drafts into one document. On Friday, we get our final version ready to go and then that’s it until the following Thursday when we meet again to set up the review to publish the next morning.

That’s the plan anyway.

Some of the posts have had longer lead times, some have been shorter. This is still a vanity project, so it has to take a back seat to life (and the things we do to pay for those lives). Luckily, we haven’t missed a date yet (though there was one time I messed up the automatic publishing and didn’t realize it until later). We’ve done a pretty good job of encouraging each other, and honestly, this project has been a bit of a safe haven as our lives go through a bit of upheaval.

How do we do it? We have no idea. We’re just doing it and love seeing people reading it.

What are we hoping for?

To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.

Conan, Conan the Barbarian (1982)

Okay, that’s a little much.

What do we want? We’d like the site to succeed, which means a regular audience of people reading our stuff. We know every post is not a hit. We’re still working out the kinks and figuring out how to write these things.

Mostly, we want to see what this becomes. We’ve been batting some things around about what we’d like to do next. While there are literally decades of popular music to choose from, the supply of One Hit Wonders is finite.

Merchandising, merchandising, where the real money from the movie is made. Spaceballs-the T-shirt, Spaceballs-the Coloring Book, Spaceballs-the Lunch box, Spaceballs-the Breakfast Cereal, Spaceballs-the Flame Thrower.

Yogurt, Spaceballs: The Movie (1987)

Just kidding! Not kidding. Who wouldn’t want a YBWE bumper sticker or t-shirt or facemask? We’re hoping not many. I mean that we hope not many people wouldn’t want one. It’s like a double negative. We don’t have any merch…yet. But man, when we get some, we hope you buy it.

Are you really listening to these albums? Is this real?

This is 100% real. We listen to every track. There is no skip button. There is no fast forward. No matter how much we may not be enjoying it, we sit and listen to the whole thing. Except, you know, the one thing that we’ve all listened to.

Scott has an extensive music collection. He knows way more than I do about music, the industry, names of the albums, names of the people in the band. I’m learning a lot from reading his half of the posts. Me? I know “Weird Al”, and the songs he parodies (though I know fewer of them as time goes on).

I am always surprised when there are songs that we both agree are great, and I’m even more surprised when there are songs that I liked more than he did. He knows more than I do and has tons more audio experience than I do, so it’s always so weird when he’s wrong like that.

Thanks for reading!

Sincerely, thank you for reading. If you have any questions, you can find us on Facebook or on Twitter through the links below. Or above. Or somewhere…Still learning.