Since the beginning of Synaesthetic, i was being hosted by Godaddy. Back then they weren’t just a new player on the stage, they were /craving/ business and had reasonable rates.

I could never complain about the reliability of Godaddy nor their support but over the years, those reasonable rates became… unreasonable. For my two very, very small domains, i was shelling out upwards of $40 USD/ month.

As such, it was time to shut down my sites- both synaesthetic.com and shellytumbleson.com until i could find another provider.

I’m not being compensated in any manner for this but i wanted to share that so far, my new hosting company, Hostinger, has been a fantastic value. It’s affordable, flexible in the number of sites i want to run and while I haven’t had to contact their support directly yet, there are a lot of tools that are accessible and my request to activate this site took less than 24 hours.

One word of caution, though. Don’t be like me and kill off your current hosting company before you migrate to Hostinger. Had i known they had tools set up to migrate currently existing sites, it would have saved me a few months of being offline.

As for me, i’m mostly fine. Autumn is here which is always a welcome respite from the summer but we’re now looking at a long stretch of rain— the kind of rain that washes away roads, erodes river banks and floods houses (I’m looking at you, Sumas and Everson). We had a system like this two years ago. It caused millions of dollars of damage and i’m not entirely sure anything has changed since.

I’m keeping this short tonight. I just wanted to say i’m back and there’s some stuff i’ve been working on. And by “stuff” i mean, i’ve been converting old miniDVs and VHS tapes and posting them to YouTube.

The MiniDV tapes were just the wanderings of my life in the late 90s, early aughts and the VHS tapes are of the shows that i did when i was a producer at Austin Community Television (ACTV)— Catharsis, Box of Bugs, Red Herrings and yes, even a tape of Brainfarts survived.

It’s been… odd. Surreal, even. So much of that time was before i met Michelle. Then there’s this huge period where i was madly and passionately in love with her and then there is this entire swath of when she was gone and while i was able to put on a show, i was utterly and completely broken. But beyond that, i’m continually… i don’t want to say “embarrassed” because all that does is invite shame but let’s just say that my sense of humor is so very different now than it was then. In regards to the prank callers, there were quips and responses that i would never think to do now and so many things that i thought were so important then just… just… just…

Just not important to me anymore. And haven’t been in a very, very long time.

And while some of that is just the nature of a misspent youth, i know much of it was also the fact i was getting 2 hours or less of recuperative sleep a night and that had been going on for years beforehand and would continue for many years after. I was just so utterly and completely physiologically incapable of thinking clearly. And i know i’ve gone over this before but it’s impossible to discuss anything to do with my life from my early 20s until 2008 without seeing it through the lens of the obstructive sleep apnea that not only carved so much of my life out of me but it kept me from dealing with my own stupid shit and sometimes idiotic behavior as a result.

I’m meandering and like all good meandering, there’s no real point to it other than to anyone that happens to read this, please consider what i’m about to say:

If you know anyone that gasps for air and/or stops breathing in their sleep, please know that this is not normal. Snoring is one thing, which may require investigating if it’s bad enough, but if someone you know stops breathing and then gasps for air, please get them help. It’s not just that their under duress in their sleep but when someone is going through those phases, they are unable to get recuperative sleep and without recuperative sleep, they are NOT going to be able to navigate their life with any quality, regulate their emotions, control their words and it will hold them back from being able to grow in any capacity.

That’s enough of that.

It’s good to be back and while my focus is mostly on dealing with my backlog of VHS tapes these days, i still have more than my fair share of backlogged shit on this site that need to unload.