Tag: Blog News

Blog News: Temple Of Goo celebrates its second birthday on April 27th, 2024

Dear Temple Of Goo readers,

Your (I hope) favorite blog will turn two years old in exactly ten days. On April 27th, 2024 a celebration post will be published to honor everyone who has made it possible for it to grow exponentially in a matter of only 24 months.

A small gift for all of you (**yes, you who are reading this**) will also be part of the celebrations, a reminder that Temple Of Goo always strives for diversity and rarity, in terms of the content it provides.

While we wait for this important day to shine upon us, let’s us enjoy the next upcoming posts and prepare ourselves for the event by… you guessed it… listening to the Goo Goo Dolls!

–Temple Of Goo staff

Blog News: Good Goo Radio project currently on hold

Dear Temple Of Goo readers,

Given the low interest in the Good Goo Radio project (its videos generate less than 35 views on average, with less than 10 viewers per session), I have decided to put the initiative on hold for the time being. As of now, I think it is a waste of web space and bandwidth to simply keep implementing a service only a very small percentage of users seems to appreciate.

Should more demand for it appear in the future, the project will be resumed according to its original designations and conditions.

–Temple Of Goo staff

Blog News: Download links no longer redirect to ouo.io

Dear Temple Of Goo readers,

I have decided to rescind my collaboration with the ouo.io portal, which helps shortening links on top of providing human verification services to those who want to access a given webpage.

All downloads should now direct to their original links, and should be functional.

If you encounter a non-working link, make sure to let us know.

–Temple Of Goo staff

Blog News: Temple Of Goo referred in George Tutuska’s Wikipedia entry

Today someone sent us an email informing our blog that the research we have done and later published on George Tutuska, former drummer and original founder of the Goo Goo Dolls, is being used as official reference in his Wikipedia entry.

This news makes us proud of what we have achieved, both for our blog and for George’s reputation.

Specifically, the following Temple Of Goo posts are referenced in the article:

The aforementioned matter makes the Temple an even more reliable source now.

Many thanks to whoever decided to put faith in our work and research, rendering it a trustworthy source of information.

You can check all of the George Tutuska posts archived in our blog by visiting his dedicated category.

Last but not least… George, if you’re reading this, it’s time to do an interview with us! People want to know more about your amazing contributions to the band!

Blog News: “Unified Download Center” not so unified anymore

Sooner or later it had to happen. Today we share news which is both good and bad. Firstly, let’s discuss the good part.

Thanks to our precious contributors’ support, the blog has received a lot of audio/video/image material ever since it began its online journey. This material is being gradually posted and shared as time goes by. This is amazing and it is mind-blowing when analyzing the situation in terms of the amount of stuff that the Temple has been able to put out, when we think about how small and unambitious the whole project began merely two years ago. The endeavor clearly shows there is still a considerable breadth of fans which demand for older Goo Goo Dolls releases, and we’re proud to be the receptacle for such wishes.

Secondly, the bad part. More digital releases also means more hard disk space. Initially, I thought 50GB’s would be more than enough for all of the releases I thought the Temple would have shared throughout its entire existence. Happily, that is not the case. The “Unified Download Center” relies on Mega‘s services, and those 50GB’s have now run out. As a consequence, I was basically forced to open another Mega account, hence splitting the archive into at least two sections.

Why did I write “at least”? Well, the first Mega account was an old one created when they offered 50GB’s of space. Nowadays, those types of accounts don’t exist anymore, and new ones only come with 20GB’s of storage. Therefore, as soon as those 20GB’s end up like the first old account (filled up to its teeth), I will likely be forced once again to open another one and split the archive once more, and then keep repeating the process, and so on and so forth until needed…

I understand all of this goes against the whole concept of unifying the archive in order to offer our readers with a sole, comprehensive place where to locate all of the stuff we put out (which basically is anything under the Download category), something that was at the very conceptual core of the “Unified Download Center”. Due to force majeure, that is not feasible anymore and a splitting of the archive has to happen.

In a way, at this point I would say the APP initiative ended up being the real unified place. Obliviously both services will keep running for the time being. The main difference between the two is that Mega offers better speeds and more reliability when downloads take place, while the Archive.org is usually clogged and laggy. Nevertheless, they both are marvelous resources even though they were established for different reasons, which I briefly detail below:

  • The “Unified Download Center” aimed at offering an easy way for readers to locate downloadable stuff the Temple has released, a bird’s-eye-view of everything the blog had to offer in terms of digital releases.
  • The “Archive.org Preservation Project” (APP) aimed at preserving all of the aforementioned digital released when the website would not have been functional anymore, so older readers and newcomers wouldn’t be left with empty hands.

Both services travel in parallel, steering in the same direction, but there are substantial differences. For now, I encourage our readers to utilize them both, even now that one of them has slightly changed its nature, morphing into something a bit different but still very much useful.

–Temple Of Goo staff

Blog News: A message from Christina about VHS rips quality

Dear Temple Of Goo readers,

Contributor Christina, who recently joined us, would like to make a few clarifications in terms of video quality related to her VHS rips. Below is her message to the community:

This is just a little ramble in case people have questions about the quality of these clips, or if you’re ever posting about the technical side of this stuff… I know you know all this but some younger folks might not. 🙂 I just happened to notice I had two recordings of the same event and thought it made for an interesting illustration.

Click to enlarge

Here are two screenshots of the Goos performing at a hockey game in 2003. One of these is from my own first generation VHS tape — I sat in front of the TV 21 years ago, popped a tape into the VCR, and hit record. The quality isn’t as perfect as it would’ve looked in the actual TV broadcast, but it looks pretty good! The other copy came from a tape trader. I have no way of knowing if this traded copy is second generation (the trader recorded the performance off the TV herself, then made a copy of that tape) or third generation (copy of a copy of an original,) or fourth generation, or so on. Every time the tape gets duplicated, the quality on subsequent copies degrades in various ways — in this case we can see the picture is much noisier, features are less defined, and colors are more muted.

It really was a different era for sharing media, and I think that’s just something interesting to keep in mind with this old analog material… lots of people might have a copy of something, but the best version will almost always come from an original source. Let’s hope more of those folks who were recording things in the old days still have their collections and step forward to share.

I concur with her analysis and will also add the following: Because here at the Temple we strive for authenticity, one of the reasons I never doctor any of the video and audio releases I come upon is exactly what Christina mentioned. Every time a file is modified, in terms of audio-visual doctoring, something is lost along the way. A good habit would be to try and preserve the file’s original state as much as possible, as each new encoding brings along further deterioration.

I also want to mention that Christina has been working hard on her VHS rips, she even bought some new equipment to try and optimize ripping sessions. I’m sure you all deeply appreciated her efforts. Ripping stuff for the whole fan base to enjoy is no easy tasks indeed.

As a reminder, you can check all of Christina’s releases by browsing the dedicated Category.

–Temple Of Goo staff