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SITE F.A.Q.'s (from real questions I've been asked)

Q. "Is it supposed to load this slowly?"

A: Yeah, my hosting provider says it'll be slow because of the low traffic. I try to keep things minimal around here so that it's always readable. It's just jpgs and text, and a built in audio player sometimes.

Q: "This looks weird on mobile."

A: Probably! This site is best viewed on a computer, but I've tried to format things so that mobile browsers don't get too goofy with it.

Q: "Are there ads/cookies? Do you make any money off this website? Do you have a day job?"

A: No ads, no cookies, no money; and yes, I have two day jobs. Everyone's monetizing their hobbies nowadays, but I think it kicks ass to do something you love for its own sake. 

Q: "Can I email you?"

A: Hop over to the contact page. 

SITE HISTORY 

WELCOME TO CLAREMONT COMETH. This started out as a fansite for DiskothiQ/Party of One/Sonic Enemy, then branched out to include Refrigerator. That version of the site, Claremont Cometh ver.1.0 - 1.5, operated mostly on string and tape, coded by hand on a laptop without a working spacebar. I updated the site in my free time from early 2019 to summer 2021. It ran on hotfixes and a confusing mess of links and abbreviated filenames. So in summer 2021, when I planned to expand the site further, I got lost in the weird little maze I'd built. I figured a total overhaul would be better. But I wanted to find all the little compilations with stray Paste tracks, and get better scans, and better audio to transcribe lyrics from. I wanted something I could plug information into gradually, if need be. I spent 50 hours a week at a manufacturing job, bought new equipment, and worked up guidelines for myself: filenames, folder structures, image dimensions, all standardized. It took a year to get all of the legwork done. Claremont Cometh ver.1.0 - 1.5 was scrappy, and fun, and fun-damentally unserious. The goal for Claremont Cometh 2.0 is to build something organized, informative, and faithful to the fun and simple 90's web. No comments, no widgets, no bootstrap, no scripts. This is a site run on HTML and graphics freehand-mouse-drawn in MS Paint. 

And the dream for this site, the ultimate goal, is this: picture a roomful of unlabeled tapes. You have to reassemble information about all of these tapes, but all you have is a folder in front of you with pages of text and images.

Going off just those pages and those pictures, you can identify what tapes are which releases; something about the people who were involved in making them; where in the world they came from; how any of these tapes ended up having music on them at all. This website is where I build that folder to the best of my ability, for the stuff I want to preserve. I'd like to preserve the music, too, but I need a lot more practice there. :-) My wheelhouse is information, cataloging, connections, and organization, so that's what I'm trying to do here. I hope people print off these pages sometime. Right click, save-page-as. I just want it all to have a better chance of surviving. 

THANK YOUS:

Thank you to my old-school-web inspirations:

• Mark Givens of Wckr Spgt, whose site preserves something like 1,000+ mp3s, has some great mouseover text all over the place, talks about the history -- it's great. it's the best. 
• Luigi Falagario of Almost Halloween Time, whose I Hear Strange Music pages were fundamental documents in my getting started here
• Jon Nall whose wonderful work on themountaingoats.net inspires me to keep things simple and thorough. Same to K.B. of Annotated Mountain Goats.
• Peter, for the old (R.I.P.) tour diary index on his site fivetools.com, where I learned about Refrigerator, and Wckr Spgt's Everybody's Dead (Oh No), and so stumbled into the thing that I wanted to dedicate myself to.
• The sites of the Wayback Machine:
  • lonesomesurprize.com
  • ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/billmagdziarz/
  • geog.ucsb.edu/~batts/npb/info/index.html whoever you were

Thank you to the old guard:

• Joel Huschle, who mailed me so many zines
• Mark Givens, who in addition to a million other things, got me my first few crucial audio rips of Sonic Enemy tapes
• Both of the above, who got the VHS of Traumafeast 1994 online
• Bob Durkee, who advised me on getting better sound equipment, and whose perfect memory of the early 90's makes him a living treasure
• John D. and Steve Folta, who mailed me tapes
• Allen Callaci, who has been a cheerleader for the site from day one
• Dennis Callaci, who's made me feel so welcome in the scene

Thank you Allen Callaci, Bob Durkee, Bill Chen, Franklin Bruno, John Davis, and Scott Feemster, for the go-aheads to cover things on the site. Thank you to Tom, for the encouragement. 

Thank you again to Mark Givens, for everything, all the time. 

Thanks especially to my guy Peter. Someday I'll figure out a way for my dumb little website to do you some good. Thank you for your patience and good humor, especially in the site's earliest days. 

All right, everybody go home. 

any images, lyrics, song titles, etc are property of the original artists, where at all possible images are pulled from my own scanned copies and any found/submitted images are noted and credited. this is a fan site without ads, trackers, or even so much as one of those site counters from the late 90's. if you see your intellectual property here and want it removed, email away. thanks