#sunsetters

so I like to have my "secret projects," things which will be publicly posted when they're done (or otherwise at some later point of development), because I value the experience of suddenly having a Big and Complex thing dropped onto the internet to discover. but I also value talking about what I'm working on, and there's probably some "good practice" in posting consistently about my work. and, like, I have other projects I can stay quiet about. I think this one is at a point where I can present it in a wip form.

so of course you know about The Concert. that's my sprite animation machine where the Sunsetters (my fictional band of OCs) plays Sunsetters songs (midi music written by me and my friend). I'm working on a v2 of it right now which will be fleshed out contextually, with some new cool features for the animation itself. that's not ready. that's not gonna be posted until it's ready. that's not what I want to talk about.

let me tell you about The Circus.

Sunset Circus is an "internet forum" from the "2000s." it is where "fans" of the "Sunsetters" gather to talk about their "favorite band."

it has skins:

it has threads:

it has user profiles:

and, crucially, it is 100% fictional.

the Sunsetters are just midi music, they don't exist. but the artistic point of the Sunsetters Project is to pretend their music is real rock music played by real people. and a real rock band from the 2000s, particularly one that makes elaborate prog music and concept albums like Sunsetters do, would have a fandom. and that fandom would gather on the internet to discuss.

so, I did the natural thing: I decided to build an entire fictional forum.

I spent about a week figuring out the shell of the thing first, of course. I have enough HTML experience to know that making a page for every thread and user profile manually would be an absolute nightmare. we have programming languages for that, so I learned some basic python and made some template HTML pages that can be automatically filled out with the fictional content. this process separates the Circus into a Shell and the Content-- I can tweak the shell, the forum's appearance (and any new features, such as that search feature that doesn't work yet but I plan on making work) without risking screwing up any of the content, and likewise I can write as many threads and forum posts as I want and they will in fact just work. this system excites me. this is my playground now.

of course, it's not done. the shell is pretty advanced (as that has been my focus), but the content is like.. not even 1% written. forums are big. forums have lots and lots and lots of posts. hell, forums have lots and lots and lots of users, and I have made like.. 30. this forum does have a total span: it runs from June 2002 to like.. December 2011, before it is shut down and archived. (and we, the readers of the final product, will be reading the forum archive, hence why we can't make posts ourselves.) but I've made only a handful of threads. and also it's gonna take some higher-level planning and shit, really? I'm currently at the "wow, I have a fucking awesome shell in place for a fucking awesome idea!!! ...now where do I start" phase.

and of course I'm gonna be making threads! it will take time! a picture of a community will gradually form! and I'm probably gonna want to publicly post about some of the cooler things, so it does make sense to make this post right now introducing the concept. keeping this a secret project would have been annoying, not logistically but, like, in terms of pride.

I also, uh, I also have a system in place for other people to contribute to this. o:

like, as I'm automating much of this with python, the actual contents need to be written in JSON format (or, specifically, HTML nested within JSON), and yeah that's doable, but it gets in the way of the conceit of "I'm posting on a real forum!" so, during that week of setup, I also came up with two webpages that act as UI.

this is cast.html. this is where you can add fictional Users to the forum. make a username, add an avatar, decide on your role, make a signature! make as many users as you want! and then, when you're ready...

..go to office.html and make a thread! the text box is dynamic rich text (I'm using Quill, it's very robust), I wanted it to feel like what you'd see making a new post on an actual forum.

these are the tools I use too! (well, okay, I have separate offline versions of these pages on my computer, along with an offline build of the whole forum, so I can work much faster. the Circus has been a crash-course in python for me.)

so! so yeah!

that's what I'm working on now. The Circus, or Sunset Circus. technically a hypertext novel? I'm working on this concurrently with The Concert, because both are subsets of The Sunsetters Project as a whole. we're into phase 2 of the sunsetters story-- this is the part where we flesh out the world! even The Concert is there to flesh out the world, it gives you a visual performance to help you pretend that Sunsetters are a real band, to help you imagine what fans in this world are seeing.

4 albums! 2 EPs! 2 secrets!

9 hours of music, and all of it bafflingly good!

11 years in the making!

1 brand-new creepy little horror story for you to find!

you have no idea how much effort this has taken!

if you're new to the Sunsetters Project, you'll find a thorough and very-readable summary on the website! welcome to the midi machine!!

if you're a returning listener, you'll find a whopping 32 of the 40 old songs are new again! plus the new stuff! and just look at that website, seriously!!

hi. I posted about The Circus yesterday, and in that post I mentioned The Concert. I didn't go into it then, partly because I've been posting about it on my tumblr in the last like month, but I think it would be beneficial to talk more plainly about it.

so there's this thing, The Sunsetters Project. it started with a series of ideas: "I like to write stories" > "I like stories that have music lyrics in them" > "music lyrics for all my favorite bands are copyrighted, so maybe I'll just make up some lyrics in my stories and pretend they're from a band" > "I guess I should make a little rough plan of what this band's albums are, their tracklists and stuff" > "hey Jordan this is your best friend Lindsay, I like your ideas, and I think I'm going to do something wild and create the actual music for this band" > "hey Lindsay this is Jordan, can I help" > YEARS OF WORK LATER > "hey wow Lindsay we have somehow written six hours of prog rock music. I think I am going to make a website to present it all in a neat organized fashion."

that band is Sunsetters. it has kinda taken over my life, I focus more on it than I do on the stories their lyrics were supposed to enhance. I kinda care very very deeply about it. it's the most fun I've ever had creating something, and I've created many things.

Sunsetters are not real. Sunsetters music is not "real" either, it is polished MIDI music. at first, this was just a necessity of our writing software, but as time went by I got kinda good at polishing the MIDI to sound pretty damn good, and I realized, "wait, I like midi music, I want it to stay this way." I grew up with computer games (like Doom, with its rock music rendered charmingly in midi form) and video games (like Nintendo games, which used limited music channels on old hardware to produce music that was layered and really sounds sufficient as it is). I always had an interest in video game music, how it was actually made. midi music, this particular sound that Sunsetters music was gradually standardizing into a consistent style, satisfied me. it didn't look like a substitute or a rough draft to me, it looked like its own thing, its own art.

and I also have, for years, had this idea that Sunsetters music could be visualized in a particular "video game-y" way. I was thinking of one reference in particular, one video game series that loved to play with music.

I was thinking of MOTHER.

all three MOTHER games have sequences where characters "perform" music on stage. in the first game, it's just the player characters singing and dancing, but starting with the second game, there's a whole fictional band to follow: The Runaway Five.

the Runaway Five concerts in EarthBound are some of the most memorable and iconic in the game, arguably on the SNES as a whole. they play this charming 16-bit Blues Brothers music while the lead singers move around on stage. they even have like two or three different songs they play at different points. even though you know they're not literally playing the music (they're just sprites standing around as more BGM plays), you have no trouble playing pretend that you're really there attending a concert. and goddammit, it is so fun to get to pretend in that moment, it makes my heart go pit-a-pat.

the third game took this concept and really refined it, giving us a rock band called DCMC.

these concerts are absolute gems. you can tell the developers really wanted to capture the feel of live music-- there's sequences of changing stage lights, spotlights, dramatic darkness, and the actual character sprites are animated very well. MOTHER 3 is one of my favorite games of all time, and the DCMC are a part of that.

so, the point here being, I had some ideas swirling around in my brain. I had a website, I was learning the tricks of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and I had this whole fictional band-- specific characters!-- with a ton of midi music to work with. for years, I wanted to do one thing: make little sprites that bob up and down or something, a simple 1-2 animation toggle, as music plays.

and that's where The Concert came from.

that's The Concert in its current form, v1.8. eagle-eyed readers will notice that the sprites for the drum kit are straight-up traced from the DCMC drumkit. (for my first tests of this idea, I did literally use the DCMC sprites. and when I had to make the actual sunsetters sprites, I mean, that drumkit looks fine enough, I wasn't gonna be able to draw something better than that.)

one of the great things about midi music is computers already know how to interact with it. JavaScript can filter through a midi song, break it down into separate instrument tracks, and can recognize when notes are playing. so once I learned about Tone.js (the library that makes this whole thing work), well, it was off to the races. the guitarists (bass included) and the keyboards all follow the 1-2 animation toggle I mentioned earlier, their sprites go from "downstrum" to "upstrum" as each note in their track plays, so you literally get to see them play each note, you won't see them awkwardly playing while nothing is happening. (this perhaps looks odd for the keyboard, but, I am not an animator, I'm hardly even an artist, my goal here was to keep things Simple). the vocals operate a little differently, I think the jargon is they're a "key-driven schedule." the vocalist's mouth is either Open or it's Not, and it's mapped to the notes, so it's Open when there are vocal notes playing, and it's Not Open otherwise.

(the drums... *flips my hair nonchalantly* I may have gotten carried away with those. for some damn reason, I've become someone who pays a lot of attention to drums in the music I like, and I put a lot of care into the drums in Sunsetters songs. I'm not even a drummer. I think prog music is just like that, it brings that out of me. but also, I think in an animation context, the drums are the ones that can get away with laziness the least. they are very.. what-you-see-is-what-you-get. they needed to look right. so, I decided on a set of percussion, the pieces of the drum kit, that would each get its own separate "key-driven schedule." simplistically: the snare, the tom, the splash, the ride, and the kick drum. each of these trigger a "Hit" sprite only when the midi track calls for it. and there are patterns to this, a hierarchy of rules, as the drummer only has two hands. sometimes the songs are written with too many drum parts happening at once, like a snare and a ride and a crash will happen at once, and it sounds right in the song so it stays that way-- in the animation, in that case, the crash would take priority over the snare. stuff like that, there's rules. 60% of my time tinkering with The Concert is me tinkering with the drums. but the end result is a drum animation that I think looks compelling while still fundamentally being basic, like the rest of the band.)

lyrics are also a thing. that took the other 40% of my time. I had to manually write down all the lyrics and exact timestamps for them. it was a fucking pain. but I only needed to do it once, and it's all done. even the MOTHER games don't show us the lyrics when they're being sung! (and there's a handy "Lyrics: ON" button, the user can turn lyrics off if they want!)

so, like. that's The Concert. that's why and what it is. it brings a lot to this whole project. it's literally sprite animation, the sort I grew up with on newgrounds, just without flash. it's even mobile-friendly. it's.. so cool, to me. it is both a sign of and a contributor to my passion for this whole project.

(and the next thing The Concert needs, something the MOTHER games have but I don't yet, is a backdrop. we need to see Sunsetters on a stage. we need a light show too. and maybe some more features. those are all coming in v2.0, which is not done yet and won't be for a while, I have a specific release schedule in mind for it, it will release alongside Something Else I have in the works.)

(but even v1.8 is enough. and it will stay like this; v2.0 will basically be a separate page entirely. I do actually like having this version, with the sprites arranged symbolically on black. it lets you focus on each instrument as you please, nobody gets priority.)

it's all about playing pretend. The Sunsetters Project, in a real sense, is my tribute to the joy of playing pretend. it is, in fact, an art project exploring that space.

yeah so here's the actual links, here's cast.html and office.html.

to be utterly clear on instructions here, if you wish to use this:

THESE PAGES DO NOT GENERATE CONTENT THEMSELVES! that's because my websites are hosted on neocities, which doesn't allow for direct user-generated pages like that, it's a security issue and not something neocities wishes to prioritize. so if you make a cool thread and make 50 posts for it and click "Build Thread JSON" you will not actually make a thread. if you refresh the page it will all be gone.

what you are actually doing when you click "Build Thread JSON" is generating text locally, just for your computer. see here, for example:

see the white-on-black text in the bottom half of the image? that's JSON code. that's what happens when you click "Build Thread JSON." I want that text.

how the forum works is, every thread is a separate .json file containing that exact sort of text. so this example thread would be like... "i-love-bass-riffs.json". and my python script will take that file and automatically turn it into a proper HTML page.

if you wanted to do this super optimally, you'd take your generated text, create a text file on your computer, name it "your-thread-title-here.json", and then send that to me. (send it to me however you want. I can probably come up with a specific place to point you to, but, like. look, whatever works.)

but you don't have to do all that. if you want to just take your generated text and send it directly to me, in a tumblr ask, or some chat message, or anything like that, then I'd gladly accept that.

and then likewise, cast.html! to make a new user, you fill out the form, it's pretty self-explanatory, then you click "Add to JSON," and this time the generated text will be at the top of the page! (you can also paste existing JSON there and edit existing users!)

see that at the top? there's a bunch of text in that window. if you've made users and Added them to that box, then I want that text!

this time around, I don't need any separate .json files; all the users on the forum are kept in one master document, users.json. so just.. send me the generated text and I'll add it to users.json myself.

does this make sense?

and remember, if you're not sure how to contact me, Send Me An Ask On Tumblr! include the JSON text! that's fine!

finally, I'll leave you with this: I'm gonna drop the full contents of my "users.json" as it currently stands. if you copy the following text, and then paste it into the json box in cast.html, then click "Load / Refresh," you will get a full gallery of users. :3 and they're editable too!!! seriously! click on someone's username, or avatar, or signature! you can edit them all there! play around! have fun!

it is double-finished!!!

The Concert now has lyrics fully implemented. I had to set every single one of them manually, so, you're welcome, it's got a personal touch. sometimes I got lazy where I could get away with it, but all of this was still effort.

with that, I really am.. Done with this!!! until the next album comes out. which will be a long while. so, I'm Done.

We Excavate, for instance, is the third album, the water album. Its nine songs tell a strange story of a protagonist walking on the ocean floor to the lowest point in the sea. "You" are the body of this protagonist, "I" am the voice in the protagonist's head. And together, we see some miraculous and surreal things.

The lyrics have existed since 2020, and they were never hard to parse, but I took the time to write out a prose treatment for this story regardless, weaving it into the "lyric booklet" to mimic some of the real rock operas I've loved over the years. Picture it: You buy this CD, We Excavate by the Sunsetters, and before you even put the CD on, you take out the lyric booklet and give it a read, getting a full little prose story to accompany the music you're about to hear! It's like a video game instruction booklet! Or, y'know, a rock album's liner notes.

Isn't that fun??? It was fun to make! The Sunsetters Project is all about the fun of pretend. It's art!

Though that book focuses on each song, giving the prose and then the lyrics for each song, which might be a little confusing? So here, I'll write out just the prose story and put it under the break.