I think I mentioned before how I have an old external hard drive that is dying. Well, I’ve been saying it is dying for several years now and it is still kicking. What it is doing is being really, really slow. Trying to read any file or move anything around takes a very long time. So long that it is basically useless. Thankfully the vast majority of the files on that drive are also on my Amazon Drive.

Since Amazon told me they were going away, I’ve been downloading those files onto a working hard drive. Today I finished that project. This doesn’t really mean anything to you all, but it is important to me. It is also one step closer to…something. I just don’t know what that something is.

My next project is a massive one. I’m going to go through all of my hard drives, make sure all the shows are on my list (and if they arent’ add them to my list), and then organize everything. Right now many artists have shows on multiple hard drives so I’ll be consolidating them so that everything is easier to find. I’ll also be going through my list and verifying that everything on it does in fact exist on one of my hard drives.

This is going to take me a long while since I have thousands of shows to go through. I’m hoping I can have it done before April when all of my files on Amazon Drive go away. I also hope to have a plan by then as to how I’m going to be sharing shows in the future.

When I first started The Midnight Cafe back in 2004 I was using it as a journal to document the year my wife and I spent in France. Over time I started writing movie, music, and book reviews to fill the pages. By the time we got back to the US it had become a full-on pop culture blog.

Eventually, I started writing bootleg reviews which then led to me posting links to the shows. Slowly the bootlegs took over the blog and the pop culture stuff disappeared. With Amazon Drive dying I’ve been thinking about what comes next for The Midnight Cafe. My desire to continue the bootleg blog and nothing but the bootleg blog is nill. I will find a way to continue sharing the music, but I do not know if that will be through Discord, or a chat box on this blog or something else.

But I’ve also been thinking about returning to my roots. Truth is I’ve continued writing movie reviews at a site called Cinema Sentries. I kind of like the idea of talking about pop culture again in these pages.

I don’t know if that will happen. I have no idea what I’m going to do next.

But, the thing is I have a whole lot of pop culture writing that has been sitting dormant in these pages for years. Whenever I turned the Cafe into a private site I made everything that wasn’t bootleg related invisible to everyone. With the Amazon links dying I’ve decided to go back to making the Cafe a public blog. And with that I’ll be making many of those old pop culture posts visible again.

For whatever reason whenever I make those old posts visible WordPress sends out an e-mail like the old posts were new ones. I can’t find a way to bulk edit those old posts and so I’ll be doing it individually whenever I feel like it. So you can expect some e-mails with old movie reviews and other random pop-cultural musings for a while.

Honestly, some of them are kind of embarrassing to read now, as I wrote them many years ago, but they are my words and I own up to them. Point being, if you don’t want to get e-mails with movie reviews from me for the foreseeable future you might want to unsubscribe. It will most likely be April before I make a real decision as to how I’ll be sharing more music so you can ignore me for a while.

My Amazon Drive just put me on notice. They are discontinuing their Drive services in December of next year. That gives me plenty of time to figure something out, but for the moment I don’t know that I want to continue uploading shows to the Drive if they are just going to disappear next year.

This is going to take some serious contemplation.

The thought of having to reupload all the shows on my drive to some other service and repost good links on the blog just sounds exhausting. I could just upload news shows and then reupload old shows whenever I get a request. That is a possibility.

I’m also contemplating the idea of some kind of newsletter or substack. I’ve really enjoyed the times when I’ve shared shows from a particular tour or some other similar theme. I like the idea of a biweekly newsletter in which I could share all the shows from a certain time period or maybe shows from a certain city or venue, etc. I love the idea of doing something like that but also writing an essay about those particular shows.

I also like the idea of doing mix-tapes. I could create the greatest hits from different tours or years, or whatever. Or do mixes of really great songs from different artists. I’ve done a few of those in the past and they were a lot of fun. If I did that I’d probably also share all the shows used to make the mixes.

Or maybe I’ll do something else. Or nothing at all. I really don’t know what is next.

For now, I’m taking a break. I’m gonna need some time to figure out where I want to go from here. This makes an excellent opportunity for you all to start digging through the blog and downloading anything you don’t already have. Whatever comes next I’ll definitely keep you all in the loop and will post about it on the blog.