current projects, as of October 2014

This is somewhat me organizing my plans and somewhat asking for help. It’s long and boring and not a lot about lucha libre. Not everything can be the Lucha Underground spoilers (but I hope this too is posted elsewhere without attribution!)

I had a very long thing here I just ended up deleting because it was too self indulgent. Here’s a short version: I have many lucha magazines. I would like to scan them all so I have easy access to them. That would take forever with my current scanner, which is slow and works poorly. This would take near forever with a camera. This would take not that long with a document scanner camera, only it would also take lots of cash. ($650 is the one I’ve been looking at.) That is way too much money. I considered crowdfunding the concept by giving people the magazines if they donated, but realized I’d just want to give away the magazines to everyone even if they didn’t pay. This last sentence is why this site will never make any money. I have no idea how I’m going to resolve this.

Actual projects:

– while scanning whole magazines seems out of the question, scanning covers to magazines is not that hard. And – as I’ve probably said too many times – I really liked it when Box Y Lucha used to have a gallery of cover images from over the years. Why not just try to recreate that, but for any lucha libre magazine?

We’ve started that over in the LuchaWiki, in the new magazine category. The big picture idea is every lucha libre publication gets it’s own page, each issue of a magazine has a brief page, and there’s galleries of cover images to link the two. There’s a ton still to add, but the idea of being able to look at a stretch of cover images and get a better sense of what lucha libre looked like at that moment seems like it’d be fun. There’s some ancillary research benefits – I’d be surprised if we got every cover of Box y Lucha ever, but it’d be interesting to know who was on the cover the most of the ones we could fine.

I’m looking for any lucha libre cover image you can find. I’d love to know more (publication date, number of pages, anything about the contents), but just getting the image and issue number is a fine start.

– I’ve been adding all the posters that KrisZ has found since March. It’s a lot of work, a lot of typing (and not always well done), so I’ve worked a bit harder at trying to figure out ways to make better use of that information. The pages of posters for one building is one idea and I’m working on more. (Maybe a Twitter account that individually send them out after I add them? maybe some more state by state info now that more of them are represented?) It’s so much extra work that I’m not totally sure if I’m going to keep doing it unless I can find more uses.

That’s posters for the future, though. I’d happily take posters from the past. It’s not hard to put them up when I’ve already put in the framework and typed in the lineup! I’m looking for images of any posters, preferably from CMLL, AAA, and IWRG or bigger indy groups and preferably as they appeared on the internet (not a photo), but beggars can’t be choosers. I need just the ones which I don’t already have on the website (which means prior to March of this year for most, prior to 2013 for IWRG.) And if you have a site that includes a database of carteleras and would be OK with me using it in my own database, please let me know – especially if I haven’t already asked.

For this and the magazine cover photos, I’d take the images by email if you’d like, I’d take links to the imaged, I’d take you uploading them to the luchawiki themselves, I’ll take them whatever way you want to send them. I will work to give you whatever credit you’d like or would not like. My terms are pretty flexible.

– There are odd and ends I’ve been thinking about to fix which just haven’t gotten done.

I’ve got over 3000 luchadors tracked in the database and would like to add a lot more, but everyone I add is another name included on the matchfinder and that think is crazy bloated and slow as it is. I’d love to restrict the default matchfinder down to a much smaller amount of people, but I can’t decide on the criteria: just active CMLL/AAA/IWRG wouldn’t work for anyone who wanted to look for older matches (which it gets used for a bit), just people with 100 recorded matches would mean new people may take a long time to show up (which also doesn’t help.)

I also need to figure out why it’s lost track of matches counts on a show (again.)

The main Result Index page is mindnumbingly long and hard to read, even by the standards of this exact post. I probably should have everything before 1980 (or even much later) spill over into it’s own page so it doesn’t take a day and half to load. That’s just programming time.

All of the posters I have added has led me to do more with locations, and more needs to be done there. Every show is coded by state (where sometimes the state is Jalisco and sometimes it’s Japan because I’m lazy) but that should turn up in sorting and match finder. I have a sketch of an idea about how I can use that to spelling accuracy (both in location and in luchador name), but there’s a lot of work I have to do there.

I’m behind on adding links to the YouTube database. There are definitely emails I keep forgetting to respond to. There’s surely other things I’ve said I’d do that I’ve completely forgotten about and could use a reminder.

I still haven’t done anything about getting a new hosting company and don’t know where to even go with that.

– I’m not completely bagging on “looking up old results on the internet and typing them in” thing I was calling research earlier this year, but it’s going on hiatus while I work on other things. I got another foot or so of magazines from Mexico that I want to go thru, and simultaneously I’m going thru a collection of digitized “Lucha Libre” magazines (which gave me the idea to scan stuff myself and to start posting covers.) Those are giving me plenty of old lineups to go thru at the moment

– also, I’m occasionally watching lucha libre! What a concept. I’m massively behind. It wasn’t really the trip that killed me, it was being busy the weeks prior and after to give me a month worth of stuff to watch (while new stuff keeps rolling in every weekend.) As I’m writing this, I’ve got three full weeks of recaps mostly done, except creating the gifs, and four more weeks of shows mostly not done. Stuff will start getting posted…at some point. I dunno.

I’d really like to be caught up by 10/29 because I think the vague plan is to post Lucha Underground recaps on the night of the show, at least at the start. I’m sure I’m going to have to stuff I want to say about the shows, I might as well do the gifs right away.