About

Updated 2 weeks ago

Blue Planet Warp

I’m Jeff, a Gen X hipster tech nerd who lives between Texas and New York and likes to blog about cool stuff with an obsession for detail. This is a 100% non-commercial general interest website that lists what I consider “the Best of Everything.

How would a Machine describe this website?

Tranceam is a massive online archive and resource dedicated to psytrance music. It features extensive playlists categorized by year and genre, historical information about the genre, and related content such as event listings, news articles, and a community forum. The site also includes a broad range of additional content, spanning various topics including politics, technology, and pop culture. Despite its eclectic nature, the core focus remains a deep exploration of psytrance music and its cultural impact. A significant amount of time and effort has clearly gone into curating this site’s enormous and diverse collection of information.

Mission Statement

To collect and document cutting-edge art, music, videos, science, and information.

“Neurotics build castles in the air. Psychotics live in them.”
I made this site simply as a way to efficiently organize all my data in a cool-to-me format. A concrescence of novelty in the Terence McKenna tradition, without the fluff.

I am a collector and list-maker by nature in the Aristotle tradition. I seek to document and enshrine every insight I have learned, and every interesting experience I have had.
And forget puddles. I aim to be wide as an ocean, and deep as an ocean.

Put in another, less-bullshit way, I collect addictions and stuff them, take out the guts and mount them in my addiction museum which is this website. Layered on top is an addiction to internet hoarding.

More specifically, this site was made to share interesting things that I have collected for my friends – the coolest and interesting things in life, including the psychedelic trance movement in the United States, skepticism, science (especially neuroscience), history, infographics, music & culture, art, books, games, and comics.

A long-running dream of mine is to simulate the reality of New York in the late 90s and early 2000s so vividly that it will manifest itself into the present.

Lately, I have become obsessed with the preservation, of family, home, and community, through various outlets such as AI-driven photograph restoration and Google maps.

Finally, the recent developments in 2020 with the Covid-19 pandemic, and in 2022 the invasion of Ukraine and the advent of AI, have both added to Tranceam’s focus.

TranceAm.org celebrates 25 years

TranceAm.org celebrates 25 years

Take a tour from 1996 The 1990s were an exciting time for the dawn of the Internet, neuroscience, drugs, and music, and New York was ground zero for big money getting funnelled into these areas. This website started in 1996 as Brainmachines.com - a seller of light and sound meditation devices. Also relied upon heavily were various groups on Yahoo Groups, with a million and a half lines of text over the years that are archived in raw form here, and in modern format here.Brainmachines.com accumulated over 2 million views and was a staple of the early Internet underground. After a friend got a seizure from using brainmachines glasses, I pulled back on retailing the product. After the brainmachines.com URL ...
Tranceam Takes Major Step Forward: Hosting Moved to Fastest, Most Cutting Edge Web Provider

Tranceam Takes Major Step Forward: Hosting Moved to Fastest, Most Cutting Edge Web Provider

Today Tranceam makes a major step forward. After 26 years of ghetto life, I have moved hosting to Rocket.net, the fastest, most cutting-edge web provider in the industry. In every crisis, there is an opportunity. For several years I knew my host, Bluehost, was mediocre at best and dreadfully slow. I only chose them because they were solid, had been in business since the 90s, and were recommended by Wordpress. Only later did I realize Bluehost pays them.I had also learned that Bluehost was acquired by Endurance International, an evil conglomerate that, like some evil corp in an 80s movie, that buys and companies and then sucks them dry. After an unexplained outage with zero communication from Bluehost for days ...

The Name

Trance is “a half-conscious state characterized by an absence of response to external stimuli, typically as induced by hypnosis or entered by a medium.”
It is also the name of a style of repetitive, hypnotic electronic music that I have long enjoyed, especially in the late 90s and early 2000s.
AM – signifies “America.”
Transam – the car from Smokey & the Bandit, an enduring symbol of the American free spirit.
Throw all these semiotics in a bowl, and stir, and we have my URL.
The “.org” suffix signifies a noncommercial, open-source, community focus.

The Icon

The icon is inspired by the late 90s file-sharing service, Napster. I value the spirit of open source and am nostalgic for the 90s.

FAQ

How different is the mobile version to the desktop version? 

It’s mostly that desktop has a sidebar with YouTube music playlists, A linked to New Images, and a table of contents. Pages with Google Maps are going to look a lot better on desktop. Also the background on pages and posts are usually video on desktop and static on mobile.

What content management system do you use? 

WordPress

Who is your webhost?

Rocket.net.  Highly recommended.

What font do you use?

Sweden Sans.  Not too much, but not too little. Something in-between and right in the middle. 
Taking on one challenge of a kind, which is to design a typeface that reflects the heart and soul of a country, Sweden Sans was created as a unique yet practical and versatile typeface – we call it a ‘Lagom’ typeface.
Old road signs, monospaced fonts, classic sans serifs and Scandinavian design were the inspiration for a typeface developed as part of a new brand identity at the request of the Swedish government.

To whom is this site targeted?

This site’s target market is me. I am an information junkie with OCD tendencies. I build robust and detailed digital structures.
A secondary target is politically moderate people who have possibly had their minds opened by psychedelics at some point in the past, with a corresponding appreciation of its peculiar esthetics in music, art, and sciences.

What are some of the more unique features of this site?

Sheer breadth and volume: tens of thousands of images, hosted via Google Drive – updated several times a day; millions of lines of text (much of it historical), and several dozen Youtube playlists with over 10,000 songs and videos.

I see a lot of psytrance genre coverage. Is this New York focused?

I have a micro-focus on the late 90s early 2000s psytrance milieu, which was an extraordinary, seminal phenomenon.
This is the old NY site from 1996 (see below for site history.) It is NY focused because I am NY focused, even though I haven’t lived there since 2010. I plan to return, but NYC is a hellhole at the moment (at least in terms of quality of life) so we will see. The site has photos flyers and history from Maine to Georgia to Ohio, and its organizer directory extends from Canada to Costa Rica. Its articles are generally international and general interest.
I would expand it all to include Florida, Midwest, and West Coast, but i know little about those areas. I wasn’t there. If I find people willing to put in the effort like I did for the East Coast, AKA “scope creep,” I will sign them up and the site’s history and flyer coverage could go national. Frankly, it’s all volunteer, thankless work and I don’t expect a lot of takers.

Why don’t you tag photos of people so we can find them more easily?

To protect people’s privacy.

Where do you see this site in 10 years?

This site is my life mission, my chef-d’oeuvre, my magnum opus. I have spent years on each detailed rabbit hole.
This site is something I would encase in Voyager, if they let me be the guy. But I have harbour no delusions of grandeur though – I don’t aim to be Ozymandias:
“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains.
Round the decay.
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare.
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Many years from now, this will all be simply locked away in the Wayback Machine.

Who writes the articles?

I do, unless it’s from some other media source, in which case a link is always included and the name is included at the end of a title.

Can I link to this site?

For linking, yes, of course, and you don’t need permission. We take open source here seriously. Copying and pasting entire blocks of texts as passing it off as your own, however, is strictly prohibited. Use common sense. The same goes for all copyright-free images, the distinction of which you have sole responsibility (see Terms of Service)

Site History

Started in 1996 as Brainmachines.com – a seller of light and sound meditation devices. Also relied upon heavily were various groups on Yahoo Groups, with a million and a half lines of text over the years that are archived in raw form here, and in modern format here.

Brainmachines.com accumulated over 2 million views and was a staple of the early Internet underground. After a friend got a seizure from using brainmachines glasses, I pulled back on retailing the product. After the brainmachines.com URL was sold to Mindmachines in 2006, the site split into two different sites in 2005 – Nootrition.com, a nootropic company that lasted only two years, and Tranceam.org.

Dormant for a decade, it’s back in 2018 and I began reconstructing it in 2019.
You can get a glimpse into the past, minus all the light glasses information and purchase forms, by looking at the old brainmachines.com website here.

You can get updates to this site by clicking here.

More about me

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