Popping/crackling coming from the speakers/headphones (How to fix)

Beware - This image may cause extra frames or loss of sound

    You've tried everything! Updating the drivers, trying different speakers, trying new drivers, nothing works! The headphones are popping during YouTube videos, music and games and you can't fix it, and every single guide on the internet is no help. I get it, it's all clickbait bullshit and you're fed up. Your sound card drivers are fine, trust me. They weren't popping before, right?

   I recently installed new Nvidia drivers, as it's been a while and I wanted some hot DLSS action for a few games that I have not tried out yet. Right after the update, I'm watching a Techmoan video, and there is the dreaded popping sound. It would not going away. Any amount of treble in the speech of the video would cause it. I tried to update the RealTek sound driver and a few other quick tricks, tried different headphones.. nothing. Out of curiosity I uninstalled the Nvidia HD sound drivers, and POOF. Just like that, the sound was restored to its full quality. I let Windows catch their HD drivers that do the exact same shit on the next restart so if I wanted sound over Display Port or HDMI in the future, I would have it. (Spoiler, I don't use it, and neither should you) I suppose you could just roll back the Nvidia driver to a previous, but this faster and you don't even need to restart, and it feels good to delete things. Everything works the same and you get the satisfaction of saying fuck you to Nvidia, even though you still need the graphic driver to play games and whatnot. 

     Changing to the plain jane Microsoft driver does have its benefits, like Dolby Atmos sound compatibility right out of the box. 

      How to Fix the Sound

1. Don't Trust Nvidia
2. Go to the Device Manager (Windows 10)
3. Go to the Sound, Video and Game Controllers arrow
4. Right click the Nvidia logo, uninstall HD sound driver

You're Welcome.

The Gold Coin Currency from John Wick is confusing

 

Mr. Wick pores over his treasure trove of coins.

    You may be looking for a simple answer, and I'm a simple man. The coins appear to be one ounce stamped coins, and in today's gold market as of September 11th, 2021, an ounce of melt gold goes for $1630.85. So there you go, article over, the cash value of the coin has been explained in the most simple terms. Use them anywhere! They open doors, buy silence and weapons, even a drink. When a contract is put out, it's always in real world dollars. Never are coins used outside the industry of the Wick Universe to pay for anything truly tangible.. sort of. 

It's not that simple. 

     I've watched the John Wick movies back to back at least five times now. I like modern fantasy, I think this counts. There is a certain majesty to the underworld they created, the freeness of it all, but still has a super strict set of rules; Rules based on respect. Earned or otherwise. These coins are less about the actual cost of the coins, but more accurately represent a token of respect given and respect earned. The inscription on the coin reads: "End Causa Sui," or "Something generated within itself." and on the reverse: "ex Unitae Vires," or "Out of unity comes strength."

"It represents the commerce of relationships, a social contract in which you agree to partake." -Barrada

     Let's think about it completely different for a moment. Take the the whole 'Gold is Worth X' out of the equation and out of your thoughts.. pretend they are wood instead for the sake of this paragraph. Treat the coins as if they each can be traded for a favor, and favors in this world are worth everything. One coin opens a door, one coin is one drink, one coin buries people for you, it's all over the place on what exactly the perceived value is, but if you have the mindset each coin is a personal favor, the viewpoint drastically changes. The coin or favor token change depending on the movie as well. In the first film the coins represented entry and access to exclusivity, the second film a "Marker" is used to represent the ultimate favor, above all else, a forbidden contract known to all. The third movie the Rosary is used to brand the flesh, and is honored even after John Wick is considered banned or, Excommunicado, so is even above the coins and markers. 

Still hard to wrap your mind around. 

    He tipped someone, got a cache of guns, paid for a drink, opened a door, nights in an exclusive swanky killers resort that offers 24hour security.. the list goes on and on. At one point in the second movie, a man shows Wick a map of the ruins for his next kill and gives him a handful of coins as a reward. Hide some bodies? Here is a whole handful. Internal coinage for Assassins currency has to be hell to keep track of. How do they enter circulation? We see Winston looking them over, and learned that high table doles out the coins in the third installment. Can you buy them? I would say you could, if you could buy a life with money and/or coin, then it works the other way around as well, even if we can't seen it. Who cares if the coins are tokens of respect and considered favors in the business, getting a peak at a map is not worth six full assassin favors. 

The rules don't apply everywhere, and to everyone.

    Like anything in life, some people just don't give a shit, plain and simple. The Bowery has no use for the Gold Coins, does not respect the foundation of the underworld as most people see it. They reject the reality of this universe, and substitute their own. Lawrence Fishbourne passes on 7 Million dollars easily, and in the second movie, you can see him passing tables with heaps of money on everyone being counted and collected. They deal in dollars, and favors to them have no representation in coins or anything else.

     Did we cover it all? I think so. I didn't do much research for this, I'm just watching the movies again and thought it would be as interested to explore. Let me know what you think in the comments below. 

We need to stop pretending Gin tastes good.

 

This is the face of someone who dislikes gin

    Let your mind be free for a moment, and relax. Come with me on a spiritual journey on the taste of Gin. Close your eyes slowly and just imagine for a second the smell of burning sulfur, and the acrid stench of ammonia. Holding the glass up to the light, you swirl the clear liquid around in the tumbler, easing it to your lips and taking the smallest of sips. Gasoline assaults the senses, stinging your eyes and the back of your throat. For the briefest of moments you can't breathe as the turpentine like finish burns what little taste buds you have after you found out the McRib was back. What is that you detect? Yes, oh.. yes. What some people would perceive as juniper berry and grains of paradise, is nearly undetectable to the average person and comes across as straight 1940's home surgery Ether from the movie Cider House Rules to the average person. You swallow and nod your head, pretending to like it to seem sophisticated, and take another light sip. Again you are rewarded with a tainted fiery burn, and the bitterness is nearly overwhelming now. Outside of Season 8 of Game of Thrones, nothing has left such a bad taste in your mouth.

The Herbalists Poison Shelf - Venom of the British

    Something equally as nasty, Tonic Water is also available to cut the toxic English contagion from your mouth. Almost anything is better than Gin, but Tonic Water is also another level of blight on the bartending nation. Known as the "Q" on the soda gun for Quinine, Tonic is a foul concoction of bitter herbs and crushed up Aspirin that pairs nicely with the green puke that came out of Jeff Goldblum in 1985 movie, The Fly. 

The True source of Gin and Tonic. This looked like Hoggle from Labyrinth if you squint.

This is just my take on Gin of course. This beverage has a thousand year old history, sells millions of gallons a year, and seems to have some kind of fan base. I can only imagine that British people think this is good because their food tastes like shit. They eat beans on toast and tuna on fucking pizza for god's sake. 

Making Tech Money in the 90's

 

     Let's be honest. Making money on technology in the 90's and early 2000's was insanely easy. I'll explain how I made enough money to open my own business while in college, how I made money even in high school, and the skills you needed to be able to do it.

     Years before LGR was building his dream rigs from Ebay hand picked parts, my friends and I were Macintosh gamers and soft hackers, thinking we owned the world and everything was for us. We had limited tech knowledge, but school gave us multiple opportunities to expand our skills, and we always knew someone that was throwing away an old computer. DOS gaming always seemed more primitive to what we had on the Macintosh, with having to navigate command lines and different kinds of ram management, and typically there was a Mac version of the game we wanted, and it ran better on our systems anyway. Needless to say, all of the experience I had working on PC's was 90% Macintosh related.. and they rarely broke. Macintosh was the premium, more expensive option, and they were very upgradeable. Schools used them, everything was easy to install. Plug this in, press this button, ram goes here, hard drive goes there. They were all the same. It was a niche, but I didn't know anyone in my circle of friends that preferred their IMB compatible over their Macintosh.

    I realized right away that people were absolutely terrified to open their computer. In most old Macs, there was a red button on the motherboard you press to reset the computer, and it would fix most issues right away... but that would require you to take 2 screws off and slide the motherboard out of the tray and press it. I never had a Mac just not start after I put it back together after an upgrade or a reset. People starting calling on me when they heard I could take them apart, and would pay me $50-$100 just to press a button on the motherboard, or put a paperclip in the little hole to eject a floppy. I remember once, someone gave me a $100 bill to plug in a modem to the back of the computer and turn it on, and install AOL.

    When Gateway started offering dirt cheap computers locally with everything included, I knew my Mac days were numbered. My parents were early adopters and bought a top of the line Windows 95 system for the house and of course ignored it and let me do whatever I wanted with it. Like anything, I felt it was just as easy to take this apart as it was to play one of those kids games where you stick the colored shape blocks in to their corresponding holes. Literally two screws to take the case off, and the there is a the cards, board, processor, hard drive and power supply. Some small changes like plugging in sound cards, and the CDROM had to be plugged in to that, but that's not much of a learning curve. Learning DOS seemed easy after navigating an operating system if you could visualize you were accessing folders and could memorize half a dozen commands. Within a week, I felt very confident I could fix or build a DOS or Windows PC from scratch, and work on older systems. 

    I never had to buy anything. People upgraded and just tossed out their old computers, sometimes if there was nothing wrong with them. They would ask me their old PC and toss it after I just set up their new one and got them online for the first time. A few times, I brought computers home that were better than my own, and had some unique upgrades that I could use. I started collecting parts, boxes and boxes of parts. Bags of old and new ram, monitors piled up 10 deep. Cardboard boxes of mice and keyboards. I didn't even have a business card but would get 3-5 calls a week to come and replace a mouse or keyboard. 99% of the time it was just dirty, so I would take it home, clean it and bag it up for sale. I was still living at home and my closet and the hall closet became a repository for my de facto PC warehousing. I found some beige PC cases during one particularly fruitful dumpster dive, with laundry baskets full of old IBM XT and PS2 parts and software. I knew nothing about these other operating systems and computers, or how they worked. I had never seen a server in person before, but people have asked me to work on them. All of these things combined, I decided to start networking computers together on the floor of my bedroom for fun. 

     Understanding Networking on bedroom floor with 3 junk PC's all tied together was an eye opening experience. I had networked Macs together to play games over the IPX protocol, and the GEO port to play Doom against buddies, but never for Business, and definitely not on PC. It was actually not that hard, and I had so many spare parts, it was easy to learn and make my own network and get files transferring. I started taking Networking jobs as well as I started to take my first college classes, and around that time, I made my first business cards and got started making a name for myself.

Working out of my bedroom, I was taking 20-30 jobs and house calls per week, while working part time at a gas station. Those were very busy days. 50% of the jobs were old people that could not connect to AOL/Prodigy/Compuserve, and needed a modem or just a quick reset or change a phone line out because it got pinched. I would charge $50 to show up, and $50 per hour if it did not require any parts. I was getting so much work I started turning the hourly jobs down in favor of the bigger ones. New PC setup was a big business then. I would recommend a computer or they would just buy it on their own from a magazine or the TV, and would call me and I would just hook it up for them and show them how to use it. I charged $150 for this service and took me an hour. Anything after an house, I told them I would have to come back and they would have to schedule another service. $150 to plug some wires in and show them how to print a picture of their grandkid and send an email. 

     The other 50% of house calls were always a burned up modem. I would carry an external US robotics modem in the car, bring that inside and if that worked and their internal one didn't, I would replace the modem. Where did I get the modems? I would buy them 25 at a time from PC Mall magazine for $8 each. The cheapest ones they had, 28.8 baud, no frills, Hayes compatible. I would charge $25 for the modem, which if you bought one at the store for $99, you knew you were getting a good deal. Some people would tell me they would get one at the store, then call me back and say just come put it in, because my fee and the cost was still lower. Remember, the only place you could buy a modem back then was at a specialty computer store that would 100% of the time charge 3 times too much and rip you off for any of the services. My local repair shop I dealt with for some diagnostic things would charge $90 an hour, minimum of 2 hours, and they would get it.

My job at the time was paying me $7.75 an hour, but reimbursed me for my college costs, and gave me free health insurance. Yes, free. I only worked 20 hours a week and if I called in to take a PC job they would never say anything because I was in a relationship with the store manager. I was able to save $20,000 in one year, and that's with buying a motorcycle, a car that I put tons of money in to make it fast, and anything I could want to have at the time. I did have distractions where I would take a few weeks off, like my ex-girlfriend sleeping with my best friend(s)? and moving in to my own place. I rented both sides of a duplex, did my PC stuff out of one side and lived in the other. $525 a month per side. 

Things started to slow down, where the only business I was getting was building new PC's and networking large jobs. It was weekly work and allowed me to save further. I got a new girlfriend and treated her to vacations and a good way of life while she was going through Hair School locally. I brought on a friend to take the jobs and he ended up buying the business from me and making it in to something great. I called an ex-girlfriend who I knew had a younger brother interested in tech and gave him all my inventory that wasn't being used for free. Wrap up below:

- Made 20k a year from 1998-2000

- Made 40k in 2001

- Made 66k in 2002 and in 2003 sold the business for 15k after taxes

Facebook is super broken - COViD19 Misinformation on a page

 

  If Facebook was a person, I would give them an angry look and clench my fists.. like really hard and look at them in a not-so-nice way. Yeah.

     The above message from Facebook is but one of many messages I've got reporting comments for "False Health Information" on news articles posted by verified local news organizations. This comment in particular, was some Microsoft paint level info graph that outlined how the Vaccine kills you, and that COViD is fake, with a picture of Biden with a swastika on his head, holding a dead baby. This post specifically, an article on the number of deaths at a local hospital, with statistics on how many people have died, listing number of those dead who are vaccinated and unvaccinated, and their age and some other random stats was very plainly said and informational. These updates were also released on the hospital's Facebook Page the same day for everyone to take a look at. It was very easy to see how this would go very, very wrong. Yes, I live in Florida. 

Sad right? Not according to Karen it's not! Thanks Biden.

     Instead of worrying about the dead piled up like cordwood in the parking lots at the hospital, which there are pictures of in said news story of refrigerated trailers with steel drawers full of bodies; anti-vaxxers swarm to the comments to post their rhetoric and extreme conspiracy theories on the full transparent stats released by the hospital group. The comments range from racist to just cruel and horrible, and then back again. See some examples below:

Like my Scribbles of Protection +1?

     I copied and pasted those from that very same article. On other posts there are tons of YouTube links, garbage links to bogus medical websites, and fake info graphs saying millions of people have died thanks to the Vaccine. Lots of housewives posting things like, "I know someone..", and then some bullshit story about how they died or worse from getting vaccinated. I see one wonderful example of a human explaining to all that will hear how to take horse paste safely, and how to give it to your children. When I click on these accounts, they have no public information, do not live in the South Florida Area, and only history on the internet is constant and very consistent posts on social media articles. As a matter of fact, the same 20 or so people have been commenting on every post with dumb opened ended questions, never replying when called out, but are VERY consistent. I followed one gentlemen and reported all his fake health and science posts, over 20 on different pages, and his terrorist comments that he going to cause unrest, and every single time I got a message like the above, that Facebook would NOT take the posts down, that they do not go against their posting policy. However, according to Facebutt and other sources, they are working taking these accounts down.  More lies? I think so. 

Zuck Data Accumulator 5000 powers on for the first time.

     I have some questions. Does Facebook give a fuck anymore? I can't go a single day without seeing an article make national news that Facebook is getting tough on misinformation. Bullshit. Full fucking bullshit. Facebook is contacting news outlets and writing their own stories. I'm telling you, there are doing NOTHING to remove the false information, fake accounts and terriorist-like health threats on their platform. I report them all. Nothing. Someone is literally selling horsepaste on the Facebook Marketplace, I reported it every time I saw it, and it's still there. The same 20ish people, posting on every single thing with garbage questions with a questionable Facebook profile. Even "famous" people are getting in on it. 

This guy is a fucking loser.

     JP Sears, the guy who made Youtube videos making fun of vegans, gluten intolerance, and the whole crunchy hippie essential oil culture is using his social media following to promote anti-vax statements, and anti-government propaganda. The comments are pure lunacy, with every kind of conspiracy theory you could dream of. The Adventures of Baron Von Munchhausen seems tame compared to this. News sites have been picking up on his garbage, but no one seems to care. His youtube videos stay up, and every discussion he starts about the subject does not get removed. He is spreading misinformation to millions of people per day, and no one is doing anything about it. He even has a post that has a full discussion thread on where his followers are going to meet and carry out "Civil Unrest". At the time of this writing, people in the comments are organizing meeting up, which guns they are going to bring, and where they are "Going to hit next." What the fuck? I can't make this up, click the link above and look at the replies. Some people, once fans of his sarcastic dead pan videos, have taken to the comments as well to ask what in the hell is going on. 

See something missing from this graphic? Its only 75%. That's because the other 25% not represented are absolutely out of their fucking minds. 

     Confirmation bias is the elephant in the room.. right? Call them what you want. Trumpers/Anti-Vax/Anti-science/Conspiracy Theorists.. etc. They all have one thing in common: Extreme confirmation bias. The people that want to believe something that is not true or supported by known research and science with interpret, translate and only recall the things the things that support their belief in said thing. Not to be outdone, scientists have been researching and drawing conclusions on the beliefs on confirmation bias, and how to mitigate that when dealing with the vaccine. These scientists are under the firm assumption that we can clear up this bias with enough education and transparency, which is just fine, but they forgot one thing: That Facebook Anti-vaxxers are an entirely different breed of fucking stupid. CDC, hold my beer.

Let's wrap this up. 

    Darwin is smiling down from above as the world fixes itself, which in a way is cruel magnificent poetic justice; Karma for the ones that believe it. The ultimate way to prove a point is here for the taking, just remove the ones that do not conform in perpetual eventuality. Flawed decisions from organizational, financial and faux-science contexts blurs reality on a massive scale we have never seen before. Social media's filter bubble only showing the people what they are interested in, ironically mostly just displaying something they are likely to agree with, which are rarely opposing viewpoints. The technology of social media let's you herd in with like-minded folks, where you don't have to understand any other point of view, or care for that matter. This in particular has hurt society on a scale that no one expected, except maybe Bill Gates. 

Get vaxxed fuckers!

Stray Thought - What is considered a "popular" blog?

   Is it average readership people are looking for? Dollars earned? Followers?

     My average readership is between 3000-5000 unique visitors per post. I would trade 500 reads/views for a few comments and interaction, some conversation with my viewers. That could be my fault. I never ask anyone a question, or review something and ask people what they think in the comments below. My other blog that I have not updated in 4 years gets tons of comments and not nearly the readership. There is a balance there, and I'm not sure what it is. 

     Adsense is another way to judge a popular blog. I show very little ads, and its mostly on mobile because I don't have to look at them. I leave the auto-ads on, and just ignore it. I get an email from google each day with how many impressions I get and ignore that as well. How much does this readership pay per month you ask?

    

   I whopping 13.80! 73 people clicked on things last month, one of those people bought something and there you go, 13.80. I've read on reddit r/blogs weekly about people asking what it takes to get a better blog. It's not the look, trust me. I've done that. It's the content and constant posting. Do something that you like, take your own pictures when you can. The magic of my book blog works so well because its 100% me, I don't take pictures or content from anyone else.

    I put a ton of effort in to the design and look of my book blog. I wanted it to be inviting and warm like an old leather chair, with a stack of books in the corner. I used backgrounds blended together and hand picked fonts. I tried different looks, don't get me wrong. I had a dark cartoonish fantasy book case look previously, and asked various critics to pick it apart. This blog was the result of that trial and error.

    

    The readership is.. Meh. When I went off the rails and went flea market hunting, I saw big gains, and links from other places all over the internet who loved to come along with me. I struck gold with "First Edition Hunt" posts where I just gave a value and how to tell if your book is a certain edition. Those were the most popular over time, and still get visited frequently. 

    So one last time we ask the question.. how do you know if it's successful? I think the answer is harder to gauge than you think. I get a lot of thrill from the comments section, so my heart is in the comments. But from the sheer numbers of readership, you do get a little bump to your ego.. don't get me wrong. In the end,  let your heart decide.. then twist that heart until it's black and money pours out of it.

Jackie Chain: City Hunter (1993) Full Movie and Thoughts

 

This fucking movie is wild. 

     An ex-girlfriend and I never got along. We had very little in common. One thing we both liked to do was get a bunch of junk food and rent Jackie Chan movies from Blockbuster. They had a whole wall of $1 rentals, movies and sequels to movies I have never even heard of. I'm not kidding, they had 30-40 Jackie movies easily, all for $1. Some of the same actors are in the same movies, even the stuntmen I recognized from one film to the next. City Hunter was top on the list of "What the fuck am I watching" Hong Kong Action Cinema. 

   This is the movie where this popular animated GIF and random video snips of Jackie as Street Fighter Characters comes from. At one point of the movie he gets tossed in to a Street Fighter Arcade machine and turns in to those characters, even going as far as doing their move sets. See for yourself.

     City Hunter is Chinese comedy/action film based on the Manga of the same title.  Jackie plays Ryo Saeba, a car owning playboy that seems to be surrounded by women and bad life choices. Right away we are thrown in to Ryo being tapped to find someone's runaway daughter, snubs a hot girl romantic interest that's after him, and they jump on a cruise ship. I'll be honest, at this point, I'm half paying attention to what's going on and just waiting for the action scenes or Street Fighter shit to happen. 

    

     25 Minutes in, you get to see this oiled up dude working out and doing some impossible Van Damm-esk stretches. Dragging in to the rest of the movie, it plays out much like an anime or manga. No shortage of action, tons of humor, guns and very attractive Asian women in various states of undress. Our hero almost gets the girl plenty of times, but its interrupted several times by aforementioned oiled up dude. 

    More and more action, this time by the ladies with tons of gunplay ensues. Good guys are dressed in all white and villain's are dressed in black or red I just noticed. Another thing I noticed, the villain's from this movie are the same as the ones from Mr. Nice Guy, and Who Am I? The guy holding his girlfriend hostage is from Rumble in the Bronx. Some of the gun scenes are a little over the top, but well filmed, bright and clearly taking from the manga. 

    All in all, even if you have not heard of the Manga or Anime OVA, give this a watch anyways. It's 100% classic Jackie Chan Campy goodness, he is in his prime and is in great shape, and there is a scene where he is super hungry and thinks a women's tits are cheeseburgers.

Why the 1986 Movie "Legend" is important to me

The title sounds stupid, but hear me out.

     14 year old me just moved to Florida, I had very few friends, not much to do, but I did have well-to-do parents that gave me a tab at the local movie rental store, Prime Time Video. (See my rambling blog post about rental stores, here.) At the time, I knew I liked fantasy and Sci-Fi movies, but being from a house of 7, I never really got too much of a choice of movies when we went to the threate or rental store. I had seen Goonies, Neverending Story and Labyrinth enough times to know those were my very favorite. I played a lot of Nintendo and Super Nintendo and loved the RPGs of the time. For the first time ever, I had an area to call my own I didn't have to share with anyone, my own TV, hell, my own living room! Our house had two of them. This is when I discovered Legend. 

The frequent watch-a-thons

    I was crazy about AOL during this time of my life. 1994 brought us a way to connect with people online VIA American Online which was just insane for my parents to fathom back them. My new step-mother supplied me with a top of the line Macintosh, dedicated phone line, printers, modem, a Conneteix Quick Cam.. I even had an AV capture device which was most likely an expensive add-on for its day. Locked in my room with the power of the internet for the first time, I would get on AOL MTV chat rooms and troll people and try to get on TV when they had their AOL/Connect streams to live TV. For the uninitiated, the chat room talk was displayed on live TV on MTV alongside videos. Instead of commenting on the video, I would swear and say amazingly horrible things. VH1 had their own version as well, and it was easier to get on TV. Late one night in those very chat rooms, VH1 had an 80's movie marathon after midnight and the first movie playing: Legend. 

                                       

     Pop Up Video  was huge at the time, and was on all the time. Old music videos would play, and these thought bubbles would pop up on the screen with little behind the scenes factoids. They applied this to the movies shown late at night, and I got to watch Legend for the first time, and it included these pop-ups. I was absolutely fascinated by the music and made notes on my computer. This was not that first time I've heard Tangerine Dream playing, but the first time it was explained to me, the viewer. The popups said who did the soundtrack, the directors.. the alternate score, multiple different versions.. So many cool inside facts about an obscure movie. I rented the movie that next day, and watched it day and night. I had to know more about this movie, I needed something.

The Discovery

    I rollerbladed to the mall the next weekend, and went to Tape World as a part of my normal location. I searched the movie soundtracks and saw Legend, the Tangerine Dream Score on tape. It was super cheap, I want to say it was $5 on sale. They were closing out tapes and making room for CD's, and change the name of the store eventually to FYE. I listened to the tape over and over, pulling out sound bytes and converting them to System 7 Sounds on my Mac. Keyword Download on AOL allowed people like me to upload files to a database for everyone to enjoy, 2MB limit, but upload as many as you want. I used my capture device to snag all the quotes I loved from the movies, music from the tape.. maybe 50 uploads in total. It was a labor of love, I'll tell ya.. As the downloads of all these quotes and snips of the music gained some popularity, I was asked to upload the WAV versions for Windows, which I was happy to do. While this was going on, I was taking screen shots from the movie, grainy 320x240 grabs from the over watched VHS copy I perpetually rented. The video store allowed me to keep it after 5-6 rentals, they knew my parents and didn't miss it, so just told me to keep it. Uploading and editing, cleaning up photos, learning about sound and file conversation was amazing for me and kept me busy. People reached out to me and Instant Messaged me, and we would talk for hours about the movie Legend. I had a friend group and a custom chat room of about 15 people that would meet up and just chat about the movie. The notes I wrote down from the Pop-up video made me an instant expert on the subject of the movie. The screen shots and access to clips, sounds, and a pictures taken straight from the VHS copy that I could access at any time gave me a feeling of importance to this little community.

     Someone pointed out there was 3-4 websites on the subject, small little websites with a few pictures and sometimes sounds and such. I loved reading why other people thought the movie was important to them and their little stories about how they discovered the movie. There was a website which is now considered the de-facto omnibus on the subject, The Legend Faq @ Figment Fly. It had a few factoids and some limited information and links to other sites that had some information. Maybe three pages total. I talked with Sean Murphy and to a smaller degree Geoff Wright about the information I have and the technology I have access to. They mailed me a VHS copy of a Japanese rip of the European version of the movie, and with some help from their friend Dragonstarr from Drexel, I started my own small website using AOL's hosting and starting ripping straight video and screen shots, and even more sounds for download.

Popularity and Limitations

     AOL was at the time limited to 2MB per screen name. I was not able to upload my vast archive of media, and they did not allow links to other places to play media directly through HTML. I taught myself how to make a website using Adobe Sitemill, the precursor to Dreamweaver with help from some friends in the Legend community, and my new tech friends I met at school. I learned Adobe Photoshop and got a free copy from school, and became adept at converting images to GIF, and cutting them down to the smallest size possible to have a presentable website. I abused the loop hole of having a max of 5 screen names, so I had a total of 10MB of website space to play with, Advertisement free. At the time if you had a site and could afford hosting, it was super rare. Most fan-sites of the day had a few horrible backgrounds, a handful of low res pictures taken from someone else and that was it. When I rolled out my site, it looked professional and polished and offered new information and high-res custom art that some sites did not have the space to host. Behold, Demon's Page of Legend:

     I offered two versions of the site, one text only and one that was full color with Adobe Photshop textures. Links, images that I could downscale enough, sounds and even a few very very limited low quality video clips were available. I converted all the characters from the movie in to character sheets for various roleplaying systems. I organized and moderated a chat room, bulletin board and RPG. I met some really great lifelong friends (Oona/Kali) and together we found out lots more about the movie, (Daven Blix/Stepahnie?) found and typed up scripts bought out of magazines and Ebay, and provided a wealth of information to the Legend Faq to complete everything we knew about the movie. After a year of having the website open, it amassed 47,000 unique visitors, and I joined various webrings, including the Legend Ring, below.

     There was such a firm limitation on the space allowed on the internet for webhosting, I was looking for a way to upload more information, and I met another college student from Drexel that Dragonstarr introduced me to. He, like Dragonstarr, had unlimited access to Drexel.edu and could host thousands of megabytes of information for free, just for being a student. We worked out a deal with Umbriel? that I would upload all the stuff to him and he would host it. His site was the first flash site I've ever seen, and so professional and was a repository for all the 640x480 scans, videos and high quality MP3 sounds from the movie. I was overly protective, and would often call out people by name and site that used the images and sounds that we worked so hard to preserve on our own web spaces. I did eventually find a way around the 2MB limit on space and released my own cut down site with just clips from the movie and rips from the soundtrack, and released my vice-like grip on the community. After all, I was stealing myself. Yes, I did the work, but anyone could do it with the right PC and equipment. Right around 1997-1998, I moved, met some new online Legend friends who were starting their own sites, and I helped lots of people join the ring and find their little niche on the web. I loved helping, and I didn't have to do big updates to my site anymore. Figment Fly took a new approach with their site and stop crediting people for getting information or working on certain projects. There was a specific thank you on their page to me for helping for so many years, and it was removed, but I said nothing, as I had not talked to those guys in years. Our information was near complete, the scripts were typed up from hard copies and 3 different versions of the movie were picked apart and documented. One of my friends Daven Blix who had a really great site with Fan Fiction, typed the March 10th script by hand and offered free printed copies, who was very instrumental in attracting people to cosplaying the movie, was no longer credited by the site that we idolized and help get all the information they needed. Artist friends of mine who made sculptures and props for the movie that got me in tough with people to get a Convention started, all lost interest, and by 1999, my senior year in high school, I added my Fan Fiction to my page, and announced this would be my last update. On May 4th 2000, I accessed my site for the last time, downloaded all the files and HTML and announced I would be leaving the page up mirrored on a friends site for archive purposes.

I learned so Much.

   I learned HTML, sound and video editing, how to write, basic Adobe Photoshop skills, and so much more. I won two awards for my site in national design competitions. Mind you, this was the mid-90's and there was not many sites out there. I met some really great people that had a huge impact on my life. The journey was insane, and to be at the beginning of a cult awakening for a film at such a pivotal time... its crazy to think about. The things myself and others put in place in the mid-90's built the foundation to encourage people to fan-out about a movie, gain access to the music and information they wanted after the movie was over. Don't tell me you never watched a movie and said to yourself, "Do you think there is more? There has to be more." Even googling the script seems so trivial now-a-days, but then, if you had access to the internet and used a search engine to find who was in the movie, your only outlet for information was one of these fan-sites. There was no IMDB, no google, just some limited Yahoo and Webcrawler. You relied on these fan sites to point you in the direction of people that had the information you were looking for. Link portals like the one on my site would have descriptions of the sites in question. Want to learn more about the ring Lili wore in the movie and where to get your own? Go to this page, this guy will make them custom for you for a price. Looking for poems and stories? Right here. And so on, and so on. We all loved and promoted each other and made it as easy as possible for visitors to find the information they were looking for. It was such an innocent time, so free to say and do what you wanted, and so much fun. 

The End?

    I was listening to a podcast while driving to Miami for work, which I often do to kill time, and the next recommended podcast was about Legend. They talked about the different scores, the cult status of the movie, and talked little factoids and information about the cast. I listened to this podcast until the very end, and almost cried when it was over. They did mock some parts, but they did a great job encapsulating what people like about it, the magic of it all, and how timeless it looks on that massive sound stage. Oh the glitter! Tom Cruises naked legs everywhere, creepy butchers from Hell and the majesty of Tim Curry. The community lives on in these pod casts and youtube reviews. The sites are all but gone, the only way you can get to them would be on archive.org. Anything made on Geocities or Yahoo or Tripod is gone. Gone, to the ether. It's a shame, but I'm happy how it all happened. When someone says a movie is a "Cult classic", I now know how these things come to be, what started it all, and who was there at the beginning. 

Archived version of the Legend Site from way back when.

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Update 8/29/21 - If you were part of this Legend community way back when and want to reconnect, we made a discord to join for some of the people who have read this and reached out: https://discord.gg/fE3RvWTZ