Frustration.

A little over three years ago I recorded an audio book edition of H.P. Lovecraft’s Call of Cthulhu. It was designed to be the inaugural entry in the Mythos Audio Library, to be followed by the much larger and more complex project of At the Mountains of Madness. Unfortunately, the original distribution plans for the audio book (and the Mythos Audio Library) as a whole fell apart completely before it could be released.

So I was quite excited, when prepping City Supplement 1: Dweredell for release, to discover the Lulu.com also offers an audio CD service. I quickly went in, converted the audio files to the proper format, and started uploading them to Lulu. (A process which took a not-inconsiderable amount of time. Uploading 700MB takes awhile.) While the upload was proceeding apace, I was preparing a cover and CD label for the project.

But when it came time for the project to be completed, I received only an error from Lulu’s web interface: “Cannot create ISO.” After spending several days trying to get in touch with customer service, I finally succeeded and discovered what the problem was: For some reason, Lulu can’t produce CDs with a length longer than 70 minutes (whereas the typical CD has a maximum length of 74 or 80 minutes.)

The length of Call of Cthulhu? 72 minutes.

Gah.

I’m not sure what to do about this. I want the Mythos Audio Library to feature unabridged versions of the stories, so simply excising two minutes of audio is essentially impossible. I could simply split the audio book across two discs, but Lulu doesn’t offer CD bundling. So not only would you have to pay nearly twice as much, you’d also have to order essentially two separate products just to get 2 extra minutes of audio. Plus the story is dramatically designed to be absorbed in a single gulp — there’s no good place to put an intermission.

(Obviously I would split the audio down the middle of the story if I did this, not just tack 2 minutes onto a second CD all by themselves.)

The other option is to convert the files to MP3 and offer the audio book as a download-only. I’d probably do that in any case, but I really want to make the CD version work somehow.

Sigh.

Welcome to the new lay-out of the Alexandrian. With the advent of Dream Machine Productions, the Minnesota Fringe Festival production of John and Abigail and the near-future advent of several other projects, I felt it was necessary to make it a little easier to navigate around the site.

You’ll also notice that, as promised earlier this week, Google ads have arrived. I know, I know. I’m a capitalistic whore. Hopefully you will find that I have been successful in integrating them tastefully into the site’s new design.

Sales have been very brisk for City Supplement 1: Dweredell. If you haven’t checked it out, yet, I think you should! (Of course, I might have a slight bias in this matter.) It remains unavailable on RPGNow and the ENWorld Download shop due to continued technical difficulties on the part of OneBookShelf, but you can still find it at Lulu.com and DriveThruRPG.

Tomorrow: Actual content.

Minor site news: I just got done fixing up the What I’m Reading review pages. There have been some broken links on those pages for awhile now. Those have now been cleaned up and I’ve also taken the opportunity to add blatant commercialization, as well.

That’s right, ads are coming to the Alexandrian. (Try to contain your horror.) I promise to keep them integrated tastefully into the lay-out. There will be no pop-ups, pop-overs, or pop-tarts mucking up your computers.

Well, it looks like Comcast is behaving itself now. My internet service is still intermittently disappearing, but it appears to be limited to only a few minutes at a time now. And I’m able to make FTP connections again.

However, I’m leaving town this weekend and there will be a brief break from the Diplomacy essays for awhile. When they resume (probably sometime next week) there should be two more installments: The optional rules mentioned in yesterday’s post and then a fourth set of design notes where I talk about the design decisions I made and why I made them.

In other news: My mother is the award-winning historical mystery author Margaret Frazer. I have just finished designing her brand new website. You should check it out.

We get our internet through Comcast Cable. It’s been intermittently out of service all weekend. (You may have noticed how late the May 12th entry was posted.) At the moment I am completely unable to get a stable FTP connection to this site in order to upload the next installment of the Diplomacy rules. (I’m posting this through a bit of a hack.)

As soon as I can browbeat Comcast into admitting that there’s something seriously wrong with their service (and, then, get the problem fixed), the site will be on a brief hiatus. I don’t anticipate this lasting more than another day or so. (And even if it does, I’ll figure out some other way of getting the next installment.)

Thank you for your patience.