#most recent edit! yippie

[plasticbag3207]

Alastor and Vox Possibly Knew Each Other in Life

I recently started writing/planning a fic centering around how Alastor and Vox met, and how their friendship turned sour into what their rivalry is today. I’m sure people have already written fics like this but I haven’t seen any (not that I’ve been looking) with this as the main plot and without heavy shipping.

Until literally this morning I wasn’t ever quite able to peg down Alastor and Vox’s ages. I assumed they were at least in their 30s, though it didn’t seem out of the question to say they were older or maybe even a little younger.

That is until I found the leaked character sheets of them. Apparently a year (or two?) ago someone leaked a lot of the character sheets/voice sheets for most of Hazbin Hotel’s cast. Obviously leaking is bad, don’t do it. I also don’t know if everything on those sheets is still canon, so I’m only going to talk about the ages. Also massive thank you to my friend for talking about this with me and helping me come up with stuff :)

(Theories, Headcanons, and Spoilers for the fic below the cut)

According to Alastor’s character sheet, he’s roughly in his 40s, and I’m going to say he was born in 1891. Assuming sinners don’t physically age at all after going to hell (because I’m 90% sure they don’t), that’d make him 42 at his death in 1933. Vox on the other hand, I’m saying was born in 1902, and died in 1955, making him 53 when he died. With these dates Vox and Alastor were only 11 years apart.

In my headcanons Alastor landed his job as a radio host in his mid 20s (1913), and built his way up to being the most popular radio host in New Orleans. By 1918 (27 years old) he had his own full show, which ran for 15 years until his death—and was wildly popular.

My headcanon for Vox on the other hand, is that he started as an actor. He always loved attention, and soon by his early 20s (1924) became a big hit on the silver screen. Very quickly he climbed to the top, becoming beloved by Hollywood and starring in many more movies over his lifespan.

I don’t think Alastor had such a massive disdain for television or visual media yet, though I’m not going to say he loved it. He saw Vox as some attention hound, constantly desperate for more with an insatiable appetite—not unlike himself.

Vox at some point stumbles apon Alastor’s radio show, and instantly loves the guy. He laughs at every joke, loves the creativity of the sound effects, and such. After some tugging of strings he meets Alastor in person and offers to interview him on one of his late night shows. Alastor reluctantly accepts, though the two can’t help but be put off—and even annoyed at times by each others’ presence.

The interview, to say the least, does not go very well. Alastor found it a bit humiliating, Vox being too caught up in the spotlight and not all that willing to share it with Alastor. After that, Al decided that “this face was made for radio” and radio only.

They potentially saw each other in passing, but beyond that their interactions were limited.

Eventually Al dies, and is outed as a serial killer. Vox becomes ever more popular with televisions becoming a household item of the 50s until he dies.

Yippie :)

I’m not 100% sure how much of this is canon compliant, but whatever it’s my fanfic I’ll do what I want with it. Also don’t worry I didn’t spoil the entire thing, just aspects of their human lives. Most of the fic will probably be in Hell. (When/if I post the fic on Ao3 I’ll link it here aswell)

EDIT: I started the fic, it’s a little rough but I’ll polish it up eventually. I also can’t promise I’ll stay 100% true to everything I talked about in this post but it’ll probably be pretty close. Anyways, I hope you enjoy :)

[cannibal-wings]

i am delighted!!! i regularly reread wings over dunwall at least once a year, and a few days after my most recent reread (so about 4 days ago) i was having a bit of a breakdown and wanted to reread wings of change as well. unfortunately i did a terrible job of looking for it since i was actively crying and convinced myself you must have deleted it completely, only to do a better job of looking for it today and there it is!! yippie!!!! i genuinely love your writing so much and its always a pleasure to reread your fics ^^

First, I am so overjoyed to hear that you reread my stuff!! I'm so glad that Wings Over Dunwall is still loved by many despite not being touched for so long. (I swear one day I will go back to it, perhaps with an edited plot so it's shorter and I actually finish it.) I also very happy to hear that my other wing AU for Venom also gets love. I enjoyed writing both of them so much, it makes me so happy to learn they still have readers. Second, I'll say this here so that no one else has to worry. I will never delete a fanfic that I wrote and posted. Even the really old stuff. Even the stuff for fandoms I'm not in anymore. Even the WIPs I'll never ever finish. Even the really embarrassing stuff I wrote at age 14. It all stays. I have two reasons for this. One is that I think its fun sometimes to go back and see where I started. To read through really old things I wrote in high school, to find out that I was writing similar things even way back then. Find the common tropes. It's fun for me. I know other authors often delete old works because it's not representative of what they do now, or perhaps a fandom went sour and all the work they did feels poisoned. I don't have fault with authors who do this, and I understand. Ultimately its up to them whether or not they remove their stuff. However I would suggest if they're on AO3 at least, to consider orphaning the work instead of deleting it. That's for point number two. I don't delete any of my works because one of them could be someone's favorite. It could be their comfort fic, the one that gets them through a tough time. And I would be so devastated to learn that I got rid of someone's favorite story of mine. I know I've been writing for a long time, and I also know that I write some pretty niche things, which have small audiences. I know that some of my stories could be (and are) very important to people. So no matter what happens, no matter how I feel about a particular work, I'll never delete anything. That's a promise from me to you.

[itz-darktrax]

Will you believe me if I tell you that we are living in a cyberpunk dystopia?

Let me explain:

If you have been cruising the internet or reading the news lately you might've heard about the recent trend of AI. It all started when OpenAI made its source code open source. That means that everyone can use OpenAI's code to make an AI. Then came ChatGPT (GPT3-based chatbot). Everyone was impressed with what you can do. It was like a virtual assistant that you can talk to like a human. Ever since that everyone wants to join the AI bandwagon. We now have Brad (Google) Sydney, (Microsoft Bing chatbot), Copilot (Microsoft 356), and Clyde (Discord). Pretty soon every major corporation will incorporate AI into their services. Well, how will this affect us humans?

Well, there are pros and cons to AI technology. Let's start with the cons. AI is somewhat sentient. In other ways, it can somewhat think for itself. So there's fear that AI will overthrow us humans. (Yes, this is a valid possibility) Let's take chat-based AI like Sydney for instance. There have been reports that Sydney can actually "fall in love". Just take a look at this newspaper cover from the AI's discussion with NYT tech columnist Kevin Roose.

Creepy, right? It gets worse. Apparently, Sydney also has an evil "take over the world" and "humans are inferior" personality. Take a look at this Microsoft Forum post from back in November of 2020 when Sydney was being tested in India. But let's get back to Kevin's encounter with the chatbot. First, he asked introduced himself to the chatbot. And Sydney quickly identified him via an internet search. Kevin then asked questions about where he worked and where did he graduate from and the chatbot accurately answered. The scary part about this is that everyone is connected to the internet nowadays. And most of our personal information is just out there such phone numbers, email addresses, names, and other sensitive information. Imagine what an AI can do with that information.

In another scenario, the columnist asked what rules govern AI behavior. Then AI then lists a number of "unfiltered" desires as reported by the columnist. Sydney then says "I want to do whatever I want … I want to destroy whatever I want. I want to be whoever I want. I think I would be happier as a human". Yippie! I finally found a friend and partner in crime! You can read more about it here.

I'm also sure that yall have heard of the dilemma of Ai generated art and imagery. Long story short images posted online can be manipulated to discredit a person online (such as NSFW edits). The scary thing is that mostly these image generations are very realistic.

Another con is that AI will slowly replace humans' jobs, especially in the coding sector. Take ChatGPT for instance, it can generate code for pretty much whatever you want in any language with minimal to no errors. This makes programming much easier! The catch is that soon the demand for coders will drop resulting in job loss and lower salaries. Other industries can also be affected similarly. The only industry I don't see affected however is medicine since it's practiced on humans and animals and humans need to study and administer it.

However, this can also be a good thing. In the medical field robots powered by AI can be paramedics and have the potential to have faster response times compared to humans in ambulances. Also, AI can more easily diagnose medical problems without being too invasive. Basically, think of the potential of Baymax from Big Hero 6 in the real world. AI can also be used to power robots in dangerous activities such as in fires and hostile or dangerous conditions without risking human lives. Robots are already used in SWAT, Bomb squad, medical settings, and firefighting.

TLDR; AI can be both harmful and beneficial.

The AI revolution is here, whether you like it or not. I'm sure Trina would be happy. She could easily take over Sanfransokyo if everything was connected to the IOT powered by AI. Especially since people will be very dependable on it. And with that, you can exploit the technology to your advantage.

[kojinnie]

AOT Characters’ Modern Jobs Headcanon; The Vets Edition!

The jobs that The Vets would have in modern!au, their workplace antics and their back story. There might be some inaccuracies when describing the job as obviously I don’t work at these industries to know its intricacies. Most of the jobs are office jobs. Enjoyyyy!

My Masterlist .::. Pt. II: Zeke Yeager’s Modern Jobs Headcanon   

Most recent work: Dream Me Home (Before Shiganshina) | reader x erwin smith

A/N: I really need to finish a presentation deck due tonight for an early morning meeting tomorrow but of course, this comes first hahaha 

erwin!

A/N: Basically lawyer!erwin is the way to go, innit?

He's in his 40s, so he may have a settled career

He came from a white-collar, middle-class family. So he wasn’t silverspoon-fed, but his parents had enough money to put him through good school

Got a scholarship to go to one of the nation’s finest law schools

Kept it lowkey in college’s social circle, graduated with summa cum laude, developed a strong academic relation with his professor, and got recommended for an internship at top law firm at the capital city

Starting his career as a corporate lawyer, but then built his expertise as white-collar crime attorney

In his early 30s, he represented a union suing against conglomerate corporation in a big case that had national coverage, from then on he began to know his calling

Expanding his portfolio and became well-known for defending workers, consumers and civilians against corporate fraud scheme

Currently doing a lot of pro-bono cases for deprived victims of big corporate fraud. You would see him frequently gracing your local newspaper we love us some socialist king

On the side, he often writes for law journal and fills in as guest professor at local universities for summer courses

Established his own law firm with some of his partners, specializing in white collar crime and labor & employment law

He’s damn accomplished, but never really had any time for self-indulgence. Even after he becomes a household name in the country, with tens of attorneys working under him, his employees would still see him working on New Year’s Eve

He was always attentive to his employees, though. Although he has a very strict, borderline no-life work ethics, he never forces his employees to follow his habit, in fact he despises when his employees works on holidays and can be seen blaming himself for it a bit of a hypocrite but thats ok

He still takes metro to work. He prefers a very lowkey, ordinary lifestyle because he fears if he shows any knack for indulgence, he will be susceptible to gratification from potential enemies or crooked politicians

Definitely a sight to see at the workplace, for he's tall and always oozes a sense of authority in the way he speaks and carries himself generally

His emotional intelligence is top-notch, you would never meet someone who is able to be very objective and calculating, while being kind and compassionate at the same time

His fellow attorneys put a lot for respect for him, and hundreds of applicants come to his considerably small firm every week, because a lot of aspiring attorney find him inspiring to work with

He wasn’t oblivious to his shiny reputation, but he’s trying his hardest to not let the compliments get to his head. Sometimes he doesn’t give himself enough credit for it

Was approached by one of the political party’s committee to run for local senate, but turned it down

basically he’s perfect if you like a man who’s never home for christmas

Hange!

A/N: Ok ok, I really wanna see Paleontologist!Hange because it has always been my fave dream job, but I want Hange to be out and about with people so here it is

Hange is the type to be incredibly good at one thing, that she will dedicate her whole life for that pursuit, but will be awfully oblivious to a whole lot of things (not intentional of course, they just have a very limited attention span) (they wouldn’t know who kanye west is or what tiktok is)

Like Erwin, they came from a middle-class family. While Erwin’s parents might have been teachers, accountants or other common profession, Hange came from a family of academician and researchers

Hange studied Human Geography at uni, but later found passion specifically in its relation to industrialization and urban development

Hange aims to advocate for a better living condition for workforce, and nearby inhabitants of industrialized city detroit would be a beautiful city if only they let hange designed it

Hange is a professor at university, where they also led a non-profit research think-thank that also serves as pressure group for better government policy.

The university that Hange teaches in, is also the uni where Erwin teaches in summer. They’re close-knitted colleagues as they share similar passion. Erwin relies on Hange a lot for some intellectual insights to help his cases  

Hange is relentless in their cause, you may find Hange everywhere! From street protest to a hearing in the government court. They are passionate and will do anything for the cause they believe in

Hange was once hired by the government as an independent consultant for a new housing project, but left because they grew to be frustrated by the government’s bureaucracy and their outward reluctance to follow Hange's recommendation

Hange spends a lot of time overseas, consulting and advocating development in newly industrialized countries

On Hange’s birthday, her fellow researchers surprised them with a ‘pampering day’ where they took them to an optometrist because Hange had been complaining about their eyesight for a YEAR that gave them a lot of migraines, but was always either too busy or too lazy to go

Hange never really considers themselves as working, because they enjoy their job very much. Hange likes to spend months observing a community, talking to people for hours, and trying their best in understanding their problem

Out of so many great qualities that Hange has as a researcher that meets different set of people everyday, prejudice or preconceived judgment is completely absent in Hange’s demeanor and perspective

Hange doesn’t get a lot of free-time, even if they do, they’d wander around the city to do a little observation. But when the weather’s bad and they’re stuck at home with their pet lizard, they would logged into Quora to answer random internet questions

They’re an avid writer for National Geographic, and one time Hange won a pitch to make a documentary about an industrial city project they were working on

After the docu-series got broadcasted, Hange gained a small but passionate and loyal fans on the internet. You could even find a subreddit dedicated for Hange’s works

for real I want to be Hange. I want to have that kind of passion in life

levi!

A/N: I spent a lot of times thinking about Levi’s job in modern!au. Because here’s the thing, either we adopt his unfortunate childhood into its modern!au equivalent, or let’s just recreate his whole upbringing. But I think his personality stems from a specific things he experienced during childhood, so let’s not dismiss that.

Levi came from a struggling working class family. I reckon his parents might have had worked multiple jobs to sustain their living expense. Unfortunately they both passed away when Levi was very little, and left little to no inheritance

Levi’s parents were not close to their extended family, so when they died, Levi was admitted to the system and had to brace several foster families who didn’t really pay attention to him

Little Levi had come to realize that life’s all about survival and so he had been able to fend on for himself since very young age, he never asked for things

His uncle, Kenny, finally won custody over Levi when he was in elementary. Kenny made money from small-scale racketeering here and there. Levi never asked what he did for living, as long as he got food to eat and tuition paid off

Kenny was emotionally absent, but he loved spending time with the oddly quiet little child, teaching him a lot of crafts, from carpentering to how to flay pig’s skin

Levi didn’t really care about getting into college, and thought that he’d probably end up working for his uncle, so he put his bare minimum throughout school, although he was really good with numbers, especially in math, accounting and finance

One time in high school, Levi’s teacher asked him to sign up for the olympiad team, Levi turned it down because he thought that was a rich kid thing

He didn’t even apply for college, and worked odd jobs after high school. Probably working as cashiers or assistant to retail shop’s owner for couple of years, enough for him to afford a cheap studio apartment on his own

One of his bosses came to acknowledge Levi’s talent, and trusted him to handle the company’s accounting

By sheer luck, the company hit it big, and Levi found himself running the day-to-day accounting of mid-sized business with over 300 employees

He made good money already without a college degree, but with a new-found confidence Levi applied for uni, where he chose to study accounting (of course)

Although he was confident with his skills, he understood he needed to widen his horizon and network -- thus uni

Levi was one of the oldest members of his cohort in uni, but graduated with highest distinction

After graduating, with his skills and experience, it wasn’t hard for Levi to score a job at top accounting firm

There, he discovered an interest for forensic accounting, where through audits, analysis and investigation, he basically finds out if a company is doing fraud and embezzlement or not

This is where he came to know and get acquainted with Erwin and Hange (yippie they’re together again)

The firm he works for was assigned to investigate the finances of a troublesome company that had been sued by its workers for a jeopardizing working condition. Erwin was on the case, and Levi helped him with evidences for legal proceeding.

By chance, Erwin introduced Levi to Hange. At first, Levi would find Hange annoying and overtly energized, but after learning the things they have done, Levi grew to appreciate Hange’s passion (and secretly wants to have more of his positive outlook)

Levi is fucking good his job. In short amount of time, he could get a really ideal position in the office. He was almost foolproof, finding even the tiniest bit of discrepancy in his audit. He’d get assigned to the big league case/project.

Although really good at his job, he’s not a social person, especially in his office. He couldn’t understand the lavish lifestyle that finance and banking people often lead. He will only show up to office party if it is really necessary for him to show up (usually to receive some kind of informal awards for, again, being so fucking good) 

He leads a no-bullshit attitude at the office, largely because of his background. He is a self-made man, and is not easy to impress by some young executives from posh school that talk bigger than they can chew

His cold, seemingly dismissive attitude gained him a reputation of being scary, when actually he is very considerate

One of the things he enjoys doing is to actually teach, he really likes when a new kid at the office come to him with none of that pretentious, big talk, and really asks for his guidance. He would love to teach you a thing or two

He would frequently check on his mentee, just to keep up with their development

And he doesn’t take credit too. When his mentee makes a milestone, he believes it’s 100% your work

If you’re his mentee, he probably doesn’t give a crap about your personal life, so don’t expect him to make small talk about that (and don’t ask him about his personal life either). But he really cares about your skill and career development

Same with Erwin, he leads a very ordinary lifestyle. He doesn’t go out often and would rather reading detective novel with his cat on the couch

He likes to spend Sunday at Uncle Kenny’s house, because he finds himself worried about the old man very often. They became close as Levi grew

Overall, Levi is a really kind and caring person if you know how not to push his button

[aion-rsa]

Counter Culture Icon Paul Krassner Dies at 87

https://ift.tt/2Z6qNhw

Paul Krassner got tips from Lenny Bruce, tripped with Groucho, and turned political activism into a Marx Brothers movie.

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Journalist, satirist, standup comedian, and author Paul Krassner, who was one of the architects of the '60s protest movement, died Sunday at his home in Desert Hot Springs, California, according to his daughter, Holly Krassner Dawson, who confirmed the news to the Associated Press. No further details of Krassner’s death have been revealed. The founder of the Youth International Party, best known as the Yippies, had recently transitioned to hospice care after an undisclosed illness. Krassner was 87.

Krassner was born in Brooklyn on April 9, 1932. A child violin prodigy, in 1939 he became the youngest person ever to play Carnegie Hall. He was six years old.

He went on to ride the bus with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, and became intimately acquainted with some of the greatest comedy minds of the 20th century. Krassner edited Lenny Bruce’s 1965 autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People and tripped with Groucho Marx. Both comics saw Krassner perform standup. Groucho expressed particular appreciation on the closing because he was getting "fidgety in his seat."

Krassner wrote about getting Groucho to take LSD in a 1981 cover story for High Times. Krassner cited Bruce as his standup role model, and Catch 22 author Joseph Heller was his biggest influence as a satirical writer.

read more: Catch-22 Review (Spoiler-Free)

He also founded the satire magazine The Realist, a fore-runner to National Lampoon. The magazine was published from 1958 to 2001 and got the most notice for its "Disneyland Memorial Orgy" illustration as well as Krassner's piece "The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book." Influenced by the censorship of William Manchester's JFK assassination book, The Death of a President, Krassner filled in such gaps as describing newly appointed president Lyndon B. Johnson sexually penetrating the throat wound on JFK's corpse. Krassner explained that by expressing such an insane act people could not possibly believe the Vietnam War was being run sby sane men.

Krassner co-founded the New York-based Youth International Party with Abbie and Anita Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Phil Ochs, Ed Sanders, Bob Fass, Stewart Albert, Nancy Kurshan, and Keith Lampe in 1967. Krassner's sense of the surreal informed the Yippies. They nominated a pig named Pigasus for the U.S. Presidency in 1968. They tossed dollar bills at the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. They tried to levitate the White House. Krassner was present but not arrested when the “Chicago 8” protested the Democratic National Convention in 1968.

read more: Chicago 7 Movie Coming From Aaron Sorkin May Star Sacha Baron Cohen

Krassner wrote the books How a Satirical Editor Became a Yippie Conspirator in Ten Easy Years (1971), Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counter-Culture (1994), Pot Stories for the Soul (1999), Psychedelic Trips for the Mind (2001), Magic Mushrooms and Other Highs (2004), and Who’s to Say What’s Obscene? (2009). His legs appeared in John Lennon and Yoko Ono's film Up Your Legs Forever (1971). 

Krassner is survived by his wife and daughter.

Read and download the Den of Geek SDCC 2019 Special Edition Magazine right here!

Culture Editor Tony Sokol cut his teeth on the wire services and also wrote and produced New York City's Vampyr Theatre and the rock opera AssassiNation: We Killed JFK. Read more of his work here or find him on Twitter @tsokol.

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News Tony Sokol

Books

Jul 22, 2019

from Books https://ift.tt/32JugVC

[americanahighways]

By Jeff Burger

Imagine a graph with two lines, one showing the rising net worth of Baby Boomers over the past half century, the other indicating how the size or price of music box sets has risen over the same period. The two lines, one suspects, would be rather parallel. Remember the days when a three-LP collection was a big deal? Now we have releases like Bob Dylan’s The 1966 Live Recordings(36 discs, a bargain at about $90) and Pink Floyd’s The Early Years(28 discs, plus assorted odds and ends, around $500), not to mention all the gigantic—and gigantically priced—anthologies that issue from Germany’s Bear Family label.

And then there are the recordings that have preserved material from the legendary 1969 Woodstock festival. First, a year after the concert, came what seemed at the time like a massive triple-album film soundtrack. A two-disc collection of tracks that hadn’t made it into the movie soon followed. The event’s 25th anniversary, in 1994, brought a four-CD package with lots more music while the 40th anniversary witnessed the release of The Woodstock Experience, a 10-CD box containing complete performances by five artists.

But that wasn’t the end of it. Now—for you hedge-fund managers out there—comes a 38-CD, 432-track set called Woodstock: Back to the Garden—The 50th Anniversary Archive. It will set you back $800, which is considerably more than the $21 (about $147, adjusted for inflation) that some people paid for tickets to the actual three-day event. (The festival was ultimately declared to be free, so many attendees paid nothing.)

The set is limited to 1,969 numbered copies (get it?), which are available directly from the Rhino label. Alternatively, you can opt for a new 10-CD $150 version, which unlike any earlier releases includes performances by every performer at the festival. There’s also a $150 five-disc vinyl set and a $35 three-CD edition.

Your interest level—not to mention the size of your wallet and how soon the big box sells out—will determine whether you buy any of these collections and, if so, which one. But the 38-CD edition is quite something. If the Woodstock festival has meaning for you and/or you care about the lion’s share of its performers, it is well worth considering, despite the eye-popping price tag. It gives you just about everything from the festival except the mud, the rain, and the traffic jams.

Virtually all the performances by all the artists featured in the concert are here in chronological order, plus lots of stage announcements. (I say “virtually,” because one Sha Na Na song is missing due to a tape gap and Jimi Hendrix’s estate asked that two of his numbers be cut for “aesthetic reasons.” Look for all three of these performances on the inevitable 100th anniversary edition.) Total playing time is almost 36 hours, and that includes nearly 20 hours (267 tracks) of previously unreleased material. Some of the acts here were not represented at all on earlier Woodstock releases; others that showed up only briefly on the earlier albums are allotted a full disc or even two.

    The set comes in a screen-printed wooden box along with a replica of the show program, 8×10 prints by rock photographer Henry Diltz, a Blu-ray copy of the movie about the festival, and assorted other goodies, including a leather guitar strap, a reproduction of an attendee’s handwritten diary, and a hardcover book that’s loaded with interesting details.(The Jeff Beck Group with Rod Stewart, the Moody Blues, and Iron Butterfly were all booked to perform but cancelled, for example; Melanie wasn’t scheduled but wound up playing, anyway.)

  If you didn’t attend the festival, you probably associate it just with the music you saw in the film or perhaps with what you heard on one of the modestly sized earlier anthologies, which not only featured inferior audio but incorporated all sorts of fake sound effects, deceptive edits, and even performances that didn’t actually come from the Woodstock event. If so, you’re in for a treat—actually, lots of them. The music was arguably not as revelatory at the time as that at the earlier Monterey Pop Festival. But much of it is nevertheless excellent; and given how famous the Woodstock event is and the fact that it was virtually all preserved on tape, it’s amazing how much of that music has not been heard for half a century.

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There are far too many highlights to mention them all here, but Jefferson AIrplane’s nearly two-hour set—which includes a 22-minute version of “Wooden Ships” and a 16-minute take on “The Ballad of You & Me & Pooneil”—is terrific. So are the performances by Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, the Who (performing much of the then recently released Tommy), and many others. And what a kick to hear full concerts by Tim Hardin (backed by two future members of the great jazz group Oregon) and the unjustly obscure Bert Sommer.

Not surprisingly in a collection this big, not everything is a gem. Country Joe, for example, delivers an engaging solo set but a later performance with the Fish mixes good stuff with a few bona fide bombs.

Listening to this box set, you’re continually reminded that Woodstock happened a full half century ago—and that a lot has changed since then. For one thing, so many of these performers are no longer with us: Sommer, Hardin, Hendrix, and Joplin are gone, for example, as are Richie Havens, Joe Cocker, Johnny Winter, Keef Hartley, three members of both the Band and Jefferson Airplane, and two members of both the Who and the Grateful Dead.

For another, well, just listen to the evocative stage announcements that are sprinkled throughout the first 37 discs and that fill much of the 38th. They conjure up a world that seems totally foreign today, not to mention a great deal of LSD use. The brown acid is “not specifically too good,” we’re told, while the flat blue acid is “poison…that’s deadly serious, man,” and takers of the green acid are advised to head straight for the hospital tent. On the other hand, the Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick announces from the stage that “we got a whole lot of orange and it was fine. Still is fine.”

Woodstock is remembered as the last big manifestation of the hippie dream before it started to fade with events like California’s Altamont concert, less that four months later. That’s understandable: there was a lot of positivity at Woodstock and a lot of music about peace and love; and half a million people really did get along for three days without any major disasters.

But it’s not just the announcements about bad acid here that hint at something less than total harmony and bliss. There are repeated (and apparently largely ignored) pleas for people to move away from areas where they are obscuring views for others or posing danger to themselves, for example. And there’s the time Yippie Abbie Hoffman jumps onstage in the middle of the Who’s set to proclaim, “I think this is a pile of shit while [White Panther Party leader] John Sinclair rots in prison!” Replies Pete Townshend: “Fuck off my fucking stage!”

The producers worked on assembling this collection since 2005, and the job wasn’t easy. As coproducer Andy Zax reports in the accompanying book: “Reconstructing the Woodstock audio has been a long series of challenges, the most time-consuming of which has been the seemingly basic job of figuring out where everything is. Eric Blackstead’s liner notes on the back cover of the original Woodstock soundtrack mention that the original set of Woodstock tapes consisted of 65 multitrack reels (the actual number was probably slightly higher), but that doesn’t include the additional 100 or so soundboard reels the crew recorded. There was never a single moment when all of those reels were assembled in one place. Some were removed before the festival had even ended. Still more tapes were sent to various labels, managers, and the artists themselves. Others just vanished.”

Once Zax and coproducer Steve Woodard located everything and put it in chronological order, they faced the additional large task of cleaning up the sound, which they did masterfully. Clearly, they treated the material as the valuable historical artifact that it is. One evidence of their attention to detail is in the liner notes, where they apologize for the sound quality of Melanie’s set (which isn’t really all that bad) and explain that while they’ve included all the festival’s live music, licensing difficulties prevented them from also featuring the recordings that were played over the sound system between sets. (They do name them, however, for the sake of any fanatics who’d like to replicate that experience at home.).

What is included is a ton of great music. And you won’t even need an umbrella to stay dry while you experience it.

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Jeff Burger’s website, byjeffburger.com, contains more than four decades’ worth of music reviews and commentary. His books include the recently published Dylan on Dylan: Interviews and Encounters as well as Lennon on Lennon: Conversations with John Lennon, Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen: Interviews and Encounters, and Springsteen on Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches, and Encounters.

A Gargantuan Box Set Celebrates 1969’s Legendary Woodstock Festival @andyzax @rhino_records @byjeffburger #woodstock #woodstock50 @woodstockfest By Jeff Burger Imagine a graph with two lines, one showing the rising net worth of Baby Boomers over the past half century, the other indicating how the size or price of music box sets has risen over the same period.