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Advertisement Blog [No Projects Needed] Posted on June 26th, 2010.   If you’ve read any of the previous blogs about my musical endeavors, you’ll know that I’ve had a lot of musical projects over the years.  By a lot, I mean way too many.  I created all of those projects because I was trying to explore different sounds that I felt didn’t really fit together.   There was a time during my early 20s when I did have a project that explored all of the different aspects of music that I was interested in, and that was Natthimmel.  I recorded songs as I had the opportunity to throughout 2002 and 2003, and once I had enough to put out an album, I put out “The Great Beyond” in 2003.   For numerous reasons, the album went nowhere and it discouraged me from blending all of my musical interests together until Amaranthine Skies came along in my late 20s, which featured an album of deep ambient tracks, an album of reworked older songs of mine that ran the gamut of genres, a post-metal/drone album, and another somewhat spacy ambient disc.  I also wanted an outlet to use some of the voluminous amount of photographs I’ve taken over the years as album artwork, and after applying an amaranthine-colored filter to the photos, I was able to do so for “Days Gone By, Volume One” and “Enveloped”.   Through all the projects in my 20s, my musical tastes were still evolving and I wanted to try new things with music that didn’t really fit with any of the projects that I had active at the time.  There have been times when I forego that and pursue what I want without worrying too much about genre, but they were infrequent.  Now that I’ve passed the 30 mark, I’ve noticed that I’m having a hard time finding new bands to get excited about.  I still look for new bands quite often, though most of the new music that I’m enjoying is being made by my friends and being distributed on either Concatenation or one of their music labels.   This brings me to Philistine on the Sidewalk, which was supposed to be a weird experimental drone project (inspired by Bull of Heaven) and ended up doing things for me that I was never quite able to achieve with my older work.  The most important of these things is that I’m able to listen to these songs and enjoy them without question, which is something I have a hard time doing with a lot of my older music.  It also helped me realize the direction I want to go with my music.   I wrote last week of expanding to three projects and over the last week, I’ve had a lot of time to think about that decision.  I thought about how those three different sounds that I wanted to focus on with Philistine on the Sidewalk, Amaranthine Skies, and the music I will make under my own name.  The thing is, I can mix all three of these sounds and concepts together without too much of an issue differentiating between them all.   That led to the question of which name should I use.  I’ve had the Amaranthine Skies name active since 2007 and it’s been at its best in the ambient genre and the rest of my efforts under it have been lacking.  Philistine on the Sidewalk has been around since the beginning of this year and while it certainly found its stride early and people have been enjoying it more than any of my other projects (I think), I can tell that it’s starting to run its course (if it hasn’t already).   That leaves me with Jason Vincion.  I’ve had the name since 1979 (obviously) and I’ve used my own name for an album already, so there is some precedent.  What it comes down to is that I’m over the need to have a name for a solo project.  I’ve more or less found the sound that I’m looking for and I’m ready to move forward with it.  It’ll also make things less confusing for those that enjoy my other creative efforts (for instance, this blog) which I’m continuing to pursue and build upon.   I got hung up on having a project name for a solo musical endeavor thanks to my huge Nine Inch Nails fandom as a teenager, and said idea was further ingrained in my head by Burzum in the late 90s, and more recently with Jesu.  The other thing that pushed me away from using my own name (aside from “A New Beginning”) is that I associated a person using their name with the singer/songwriter style of music and I was not making that type of music.  It’s silly that I got that in my head, as I have lots of jazz records wherein the band leader uses their own name.   Another reason I’m going with my own name is that I’m tired of conceptualizing projects.  The problem is that I get hung up on the idea and delay (or don’t manage) the execution.  There’s nothing to conceptualize here – it’s my name and I’ll use it to put music out under.  Simple as that.  I know that I’ll still conceptualize albums, but that’s more a way to figure out which songs fit together on an album and which part of my style I want to emphasize for said album.   Speaking of projects, I’m going to be consolidating them all (save for Concatenation) on to this site.  Nintendo-A-GoGo has had its time in the sun, but I’m going to be starting up a section on the site for all of my written endeavors (though this blog will still have its own section), which includes the work I’ve done for that site.  I still want to clean up the old works from the original site (mostly the game reviews) and put them up here.   There are also new things that I’m going to start adding to this site, and the streamlining is under way.  It’s time to put all of my solo efforts in one place and move forward with them together, rather than have them spread out across the internet.  I’m also looking to change the name of the site again, as “The Realm” has a few too many monarchic and feudal connotations.   I’m thinking of having the web address in a tasteful font (not Papyrus – another downfall of Amaranthine Skies) all-capped and sticking with the “For the Love of Creativity” tagline, as I still love being creative in many different areas and the content of the site will reflect that more and more as time passes.  As far as execution goes, I’m going to stick with the weekly blog for the time being and put up a website-exclusive song every month on the front page.  I’ll aim for the first of the month and I have a song that’s close to being done for July.  I’ll also debut a prototype of the new look when I put the song up.   For a guy that doesn’t need any projects, I sure have a big one that I’m undertaking!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Staying Busy] Posted on June 19th, 2010.   A lot of things have been going on in a lot of different fields of my life at the moment, so this seems like as good a time as any to sit down and take stock of everything that’s going on and get it all sorted out properly.   Music   It’s been a busy week for me musically, even though I haven’t finished much of anything.  The main reason it has been so busy is that I’ve finally figured out all of my projects and how they’re going to work.  I’ve gone back up to three, and I can’t see expanding any further as all three of those projects cover 100% of what I want to do.   The first is obviously Philistine on the Sidewalk, which is the one I’ve been creating for recently.  Most of the work has been remixing old songs while on the bus, though I’ve already finished three and started two others.  Once I finish ten, I’m going to do some final work on them here at home and put them out as an album.   I’ve also got that four song EP that I’ve done a little work on and hope to do a little more work on this weekend.  I’m tempted to bump the track number up to six, but I’ll consider that once I get further along.  There’s also a song I’m working on that I’d like to get up on the site by Monday, so hopefully I can.  Did I mention that I’ve also got three songs coming out on three different online compilations as well in the near future?  Busy busy busy.   While I’ve been working on the PotS project, I’ve been conceptualizing two others.  I’ve put some thought into them before and I’m ready to launch them now, though it may be some time before I get much done with them.   The second project is not a new project or really a new direction, but I’m ready to fire Amaranthine Skies back up soon and expand upon the sound I started with “Mindtrap” and “Dark Side of Zebes”.  In fact, I listened to both of them yesterday to get an idea on which parts of the sound I created on those albums that I want to keep and want to jettison.   The next album (whenever I start on it) will probably sound more like those albums rather than the detours that were “Days Gone By, Volume One” (which could have been an album for the next project with some reworking) and “Enveloped” (which could have been a PotS album with some reworking).  I’m tempted to add “It Came from Beyond the Oort Cloud” to that list as well, but it’s some deeply ambient keyboard music which could be used as a point of reference for upcoming works, so I’m not going to.   The third project is one I’ve been toying with for a few years, but all the pieces finally came together at the office last week.  I might have written about going through my entire CD collection and listening for what I want to keep and what I want to sell, though it’s also serving as a way to listen to music that may have been forgotten and potentially use as an influence for my own work.   I was listening to a couple of Red House Painters albums and something clicked.  Mark Kozelek from RHP is known for taking songs and rearranging them into something that sounds completely different, and it occurred to me that I should try doing that with all those old death metal songs I wrote in the 󈨞s and rearrange them into something that resembles that 4AD sound that bands like Red House Painters and Mojave 3 have.   This third project isn’t going to have a project name – I’m going to release songs under my own name.  The music will have a bit of the 4AD feel, but it will also likely sound similar to a good chunk of the latter Natthimmel songs I did, like “Alfred’s Last Day” or “Riding Still Waves”.  There might be a little overlap between this and my PotS work, though my own work is going to be more acoustic guitar-focused and mellower.   I will also be singing on a good majority of the songs, which is something I haven’t ever really done.  I’ve roared and screamed to the high heavens, but there aren’t many songs where I’ve actually sung.  There are three on “Days Gone By, Volume One” where I attempt it, but I didn't really go for it.   Thanks to playing lots of the Karaoke Revolution, Guitar Hero, and Rock Band games, I know that I have a strong voice and good dynamics.  My pitch control needs some work, but practice makes perfect and I likely won’t have anything recorded for this project until next year, which will be ten years after I released my first album under my own name.  Hopefully it will sound a little better.   I’m also in the throes of finalizing the mix for “A Chip off the Shizz Block, Volume Two”, which hasn’t been nearly as difficult as arranging the tracks.  There are 20 tracks altogether and getting the flow right for them was rather time-consuming.  Now that I’ve figured it out, the mixing has been rather easy so far in comparison.   I don’t want to rush things, so I’m hoping to take a good chunk of time this weekend, next week, and next weekend finalizing the mix to make everything sound as good as possible and have the volumes as close as possible.  I’ve also seen some of the art that’s been done for the album and it looks great.   Finally, “Nevar Say Die! Compilation, Volume Four” is in progress, but it doesn’t finish up until the end of August, so I’m not going to worry about it yet.   Fitness   Thankfully, things in this area have been surprisingly simple.  I quit going to the gym a couple weeks ago and I’ve dropped from the high 190s to the low 190s.  I’ve been hanging around 192 to 193 and I love having the extra time.   The caveat?  I lift weights here at home six days a week for half an hour a day and do a high intensity cardio workout with lots of striking and jump rope on Saturdays.  I’ve been doing an area a day with the weights – Monday for arms, Tuesday for shoulders, Wednesday for chest, Thursday for back, Friday for abs, and today (Saturday) for legs.  I do 4 different exercises and six sets each, going from 14 repetitions down to 4.  So, 14, 12, 10, 8, 6, 4.   It seems to be working like a charm so far, as my stomach is still shrinking and I’m getting more size and definition.  It’s also nice not going to the gym (save for chiropractic) because it was so sterile and boring working out there.  Also, going to the gym at 5:30 PM after work would prevent me from getting home until 8:30 PM or later.  Now that I come straight home after work, I get here at 6:15 to 6:30 PM and have a couple hours at night to work on things.  I love it!   Gaming   I finally got over my Alpha Centauri binge after trying to get a certain map working properly time after time and having little success with it.  It was starting to drive me crazy, so I figured that going back to the 360 and working on games for it would be more fun and a welcome break.  I was right on both counts.   I also noticed that before I stopped playing 360 a couple weeks before Mouse had to be put to sleep, I was in the top million in collecting achievement points worldwide and now I’m below that threshold.  I want to work my way back up into the top million and work on getting my completion percentage up, which means going through the games I’ve already started and knocking out achievements.   I’ve done Chime (though there’s one more achievement I might be able to do) and I’m working on Puzzle Quest Galactrix now.  I might get some Mass Effect or Borderlands in this weekend too.  I’m not looking to completely finish everything, but get as many achievements done without sinking ridiculous amounts of time into them.  The time-sinking achievements are ones I save for the artistic realm.   Beer   I drink it on the weekends and it still tastes awesome!  I haven’t started reading the micro brewing book yet, but now that I’m allotting a couple hours every weekend to reading, I hope to start it soon.  As far as beer goes, I’ve been really enjoying the Brew Free or Die! IPA from the 21st Amendment brewery in San Francisco lately.   Finances   After talking with my uncle last week about the stock market, I kind of went overboard and did a 10-point test of every stock that I own, every stock that I was watching, and a few more recommendations from friends and blogs that I read on dividend investing.  It took a while, but it was assuring to find out a good majority of my portfolio was well chosen.   I do have a few that look like poor long-term prospects in the group, though I think they’ll be fine in the short-term.  It would be in my best interest to not reinvest those dividends and use them instead to purchase shares of stock that will be good in the long-term, though I’m leaning towards doing that with almost all of my stocks once I build them up some more.   Of course, the whole point of all this investing is to have the dividends make up a significant portion of my income, wherein I can use what I need and reinvest the rest to create a larger portfolio and more dividend interest and so on and so forth.  It takes money to make money, as they say.   Cats   There’s not too much new to report here since last week’s post, though Barclay has started to climb under the comforter on my bed and crawl around under there.  It’s funny, because Bootsie does the exact same thing, though she usually digs herself under a quilt and stays there for a majority of the day.   Everything Else   It’s my Mom’s birthday today and with Father’s Day tomorrow, I’m going to take them both out to dinner tonight and maybe do a barbecue with Dad tomorrow if the weather is decent.  It wouldn’t be a big deal with the cooking as the grill is under cover, but who wants to barbecue on a rainy day?   I also took the time to figure out when I’m going to work on all the projects I have, which also include the revamp of my sites that are in progress.  The Realm is the one that’s closest to being done, and I can safely say that the blogs won’t look this way for too much longer.  I’ve got a whole new format figured out and I’m going to re-do all the old blogs in that style.  I have tons of plans and hopefully I’ll be able to get them all taken care of in a timely fashion.   Wish me luck!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Barclay's First Birthday] Posted on June 12th, 2010.   Not only was Monday, June 7th the 25th anniversary of The Goonies, it was also my new cat Barclay’s first birthday!  Being a workday, I couldn’t do anything too special for him, but I gave him some high-quality cat food and spent some extra time playing with him before and after work.  Now that I’ve started working out at home in the morning before work (and have lost 5.4 pounds in the process), I did have some extra time to play with him, which was nice.   At this point, I’ve had him for a couple months and I can’t believe how much energy this guy has.  I guess it’s due to having two older cats for the longest time that I don’t remember how wild Mouse was when he was young.  On a whim, Barclay will dart back and forth through the house (which in fairness, Mouse used to do even in his last year or two), playfully attack on the drop of a dime, and go from the lowest point in the house to the highest point in the house (he can get to) in two seconds flat.  From the floor to the desk to the shelf to the windowsill to the top of my chest of drawers to a high shelf in my closet in the blink of an eye.   When I think about it, I can remember Mouse being even more wild at his age.  He used to scale the curtains using his claws and rip up the upholstery on the couch and other things without fail.  Barclay’s much better trained in that aspect, as he has a nice big scratching post that he uses pretty frequently and the only thing he’s torn up are a couple of paper grocery bags that he likes to play in.  He’s still rather curious and is prone to knocking things over in the house, but I think it freaks him out more when he does it than it does me, as I’m used to hearing things crash over due to Mouse’s tenure here.  It makes me thankful that Bootsie is such a mellow cat.   The only time Bootsie’s not mellow is when it comes to Barclay.  He’s obviously really interested in her and wants to play with her, but she’s not having it.  At first, it seemed like Bootsie disliked Barclay even more than she did Mouse, but it appears to be tapering off to the level of Mouse – which was that she’ll hiss at him and swat him if he gets to close to her.  Mouse basically no-sold it and kept walking on by, but Barclay’s very expressive and he will get kind of freaked out when it happens.  It makes me want to get another cat for Barclay to play with while I’m out of the house, but there isn’t room for three cats here and there’s no guarantee that a new cat would get along with him either.  Also, Bootsie wouldn’t like the new cat either.   I know for a while there it was tough, as transitioning from the watchful sentry that was Mouse in the years before he passed to the whirling dervish that was Barclay when I got him was a shock to the system, but it’s becoming more frequent for him to be calm and find a nice place to relax by the window and I’m seeing more dynamics from him and appreciating him more and more as the days go by, even when he is crazed and highly playful.  I must say that I do like when he’s all crashed out and cute, like he is now.   All in all, it’s been a good two months with him so far and I can’t wait to see how this little guy will end up progressing over the years.  I’ve kind of blanked on a lot of Mouse’s progression (to my chagrin), so I’ll hopefully keep better documentation of Barclay’s.  Wish me luck!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Goonies Never Say Die!] Posted on June 5th, 2010.   With the 25th anniversary of the release of The Goonies coming up on June 7th, they’re having a big event down in Astoria this weekend celebrating the movie.  Mikey, Mouth, Chunk, Mr. Perkins, and Francis Fratelli are there for the festivities – though there’s no word on whether or not Francis brought his hairpiece.   They’ve also converted the old county jail (seen in the movie) into the Oregon Film Museum and the grand opening was this morning with members of the Goonies cast presiding over it.  While the new museum is meant to celebrate and educate about all of the movies made in Oregon state, there will be a specific focus on The Goonies for this weekend.   One particular thing that is very relevant to my interests is that Fort George Brewery and Astoria Brewing Company have teamed up to make a special beer for this occasion.  Called the “Truffle Shuffle Stout”, its secret ingredient is seven ounces of black truffles that are boiled in the beer for a 90 minute timetable.  They only brewed 270 gallons of it (8.25 barrels), so it pains me that I will not be able to get down to Astoria this weekend to have some.   The beer isn’t the only allure of the weekend for me, as I’m a big fan of the movie, the soundtrack, as well as the unofficial sequel for the Nintendo Entertainment System called “The Goonies II”.  I also have memories of playing “The Goonies” in the arcade when I was younger and enjoying it as well.   While I enjoyed the movie as a kid, I came to appreciate it more in my 20s due to an increased interest in nostalgia, a mental shift towards more of a “never say die” approach to life, and also that the film was made in one of my favorite areas of the world.  Every time I make it down to Astoria, I have to swing by the Goonies’ house, the museum (aka Flavel House), the jail (right across the street from the Flavel House), and down to Ecola State Park near Cannon Beach where they filmed the bicycle scene.   I must admit it’s been a long while since I’ve watched the movie, but I’m rectifying that as I type.  It’s just as great as I remembering it being, and it really has a magic to it that a lot of other movies of the time just didn’t have.  It’s likely a number of factors – Spielberg’s and Donner’s direction; Dave Grusin’s amazing score; a cast of young actors that brought lots of emotion and authenticity to a movie that would have suffered by having more professional performances; a screenplay that blended the realistic nature of the underlying situation (having to move because of a lack of money) with the fantastical nature of how to resolve said situation (going on an adventure to find pirate treasure).   It really is an amazing movie in so many ways, which is why I’m unsurprised to see that folks headed from all around the country and around the world to converge on Astoria this weekend for the celebrations.  Were it not for a new addition to the family and my unwillingness to put him in a kennel so early into his tenure here, I would have been down there this weekend as well.  I hope everyone that did go is having a great time and I’ll hopefully be living down in the area by the time the 30th anniversary rolls around!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [An Uneventful Weekend] Posted on May 31st, 2010.   After slogging through a particularly brutal week at work, I’ve done relatively nothing on my three-day weekend.  Sure, I’m blogging today, I’ve done some preliminary work on the Philistine on the Sidewalk EP, and I’ve got an album ready to launch at Concatenation Records for tomorrow, but I had a huge list of things I wanted to do this weekend and I’ve spent most of my time playing Alpha Centauri for the PC.   I think my brain rebelled after last week, as I was putting in four hour nights of sleep and working my butt off at the office, the gym, and working on my strategies for the future.  I realized that I can take this weekend off and go back to my usual gung-ho approach next week and beyond, as I’ll have my weekday mornings open and available for working on my projects.   Like I’ve said before, I enjoy blogging, but I’ve gotten to the point where three times a week is too much and I can come up with a better weekly blog than a thrice-weekly one.  Quality over quantity and all that.  I also want to focus more of my creative time towards my music and my websites, and the blog ate up quite a bit of that time every morning.  There’s no rush with it today, obviously.   I really have been enjoying myself this weekend – lounging around the house, working on music, spending lots of time playing with Barclay (which is something I haven’t had much time to do), and generally relaxing.  I could get used to lazy weekends and psychotic weekdays, especially if the 4/3 balance could be maintained.  Unfortunately, my job doesn’t allow for four 10-hour days a week, otherwise I’d do it in a heartbeat.   Though I’m not looking forward to going back to the 5/2 schedule, I must say that I’m really looking forward to June, as the work I’ve been putting into the stock market over the past few months will really start to pay off.  I’m also anticipating getting deep into recoding all of my sites and continuing to work on the first official Philistine on the Sidewalk release.  Though it’s only four songs, it’s still going to be in the 30-35 minute range, so it’s not exactly short.  In fact, I have a little experience with longer EPs, as “Dark Side of Zebes” under my Amaranthine Skies project was two songs and 41 minutes, 50 seconds long.   Also, “A Chip off the Shizz Block, Volume Two” is coming due today, so the CD will hopefully be ready sometime in late June to early July.  I’m also firing up “Nevar Say Die! Compilation, Volume Four” tomorrow, and hoping that it will be a one disc venture as last year’s two disc one was a bit of an ordeal.  I’m looking to get that one wrapped up by late September to early October, so I can have the last couple months of the year to finish up a VG cover disc for MAGFest.  Considering that I’ve already laid the groundwork for it, that shouldn’t be too hard to do.   All in all, it’s been nice to decompress this three-day weekend and maybe I’ll be more productive on the next one, since it’s only about five weeks away.  Also, the blog will now be on Saturdays for the time being, so pop by sometime in the early afternoon on Saturday and I’ll have something new up.   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Retooling Projects] Posted on May 28th, 2010.   To be in a state of flux is to be in a process of continuous change.  Everyone’s life changes from time to time, but I think I’ve experienced more changes in the past five months than I ever have.  The weird thing about that is that I feel like nothing’s changing because so much of my time is locked into certain things.  I’m working to change that too, so it’s likely good to go through how much things have changed for me this year and roll with it instead of fighting it like I used to.   Music   I’ve finally consolidated all of my musical projects into one, which is something I haven’t done since 2002 with Natthimmel.  Back then it was going from two to one, not eight to one.  I still get new ideas for projects, but then I think that I could make a new Philistine on the Sidewalk album with that idea (or at least an EP).   I used to not worry too much about genre with Natthimmel either, but with the album I put out under it (The Great Beyond), the completely different genres were all on the same album and it made listening to it a little difficult for some non-metal oriented folks that have copies.   Now, if I stick to relatively similar sound on each album, it should make things easier for any listeners.  Some may not like a black metal/trip-hop EP, some might.  We’ll see!   Fitness   I’ve lost 20 pounds and my body fat percentage is dropping with my two nights a week of weights and one night of cardio.  I’ve been meaning to work my muay thai more here at home, but the weekends tend to get away from me, so that’s something else that’s changed.  I’ve also stopped with the personal training, though my old trainer would like me to start up again because he’s bored on Monday nights now.   Gaming   I haven’t touched my Xbox 360 in over two months when I was used to playing it a few nights a week last year, but I have been playing the NES, SNES, and Genesis a fair amount – mostly for Nintendo-A-GoGo, which is something else that was started back up this year.  I’ll probably get a little 360 in with the three-day weekend, but we’ll see.   Finances   I’ve started cutting back expenses and saving as much money as I can in order to build a stock portfolio with dividends that will provide me with a steady source of passive income.  So far, things are coming along to my liking and while a couple of my picks are a little dicey, most of my portfolio is rather solid and will only continue to grow through further investment and dividend reinvestment (for the time being).   I’ve also been working on building alternate streams of passive income and I’ve got a lot figured out, but I need to make the time to do all the work that comes with that.  That’s one of the reasons I’m dropping the blog to once a week for the time being – yet another change.   Cats   The biggest change of them all was losing Mouse, since he was with me for so long and he was an amazing companion.  It was two months ago yesterday that he had to be put to sleep and he was in my thoughts a lot yesterday, even while playing with Barclay.  I had forgotten how wild a young cat is compared to an old one, and it made me miss sitting and relaxing with Mouse at my side.  Barclay’s not much for the sitting or relaxing, though now he’s discovered the joys of the window, he’s mellowing out a bit.   I also got Barclay recently and like I said, he’s been a trip.  I’m waiting for the day that he doesn’t wake me up in the morning by going wild with his toys, scratching the crap out of his litterbox, or pouncing on my chest and/or nether regions, but that day will come.  He’s really a great cat and I have a feeling he’ll settle more into the companion role as time goes by.   Job   My job has gone from two people to one and the workload has nearly doubled on top of that (almost quadrupled altogether), but it’s still the same job for the same pay.  I guess that hasn’t changed, which is why I’m building alternate sources of income.   The Rest of the Year   It’s hard to say how much more change is going to come, but with me barreling forward with all of my projects, it’s bound to change some more – hopefully for the better.   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Retooling Projects] Posted on May 26th, 2010.   If you’ve been following my blog for any amount of time, you know that I’ve got a lot of things on my plate at all times.  Most of it is my own doing, but that’s one of the side effects of being so ambitious.  One way that helps me keep it all together is being able to get tasks done, whether they’re large or small.  Here are some of the ways that help me do that.   Daily Routine Tasks Come First   There are certain routine tasks that need to be done everyday, and I find getting them out of the way right off the bat is the best way to get them done, as it helps to clear my head for the rest of the day.  In my case, I don’t have time for much of anything after work and the gym since I’m usually exhausted once I get home.   My mornings usually consist of waking up, weighing myself (down 2.6 pounds today!), taking care of Barclay (he’s a hungry kitty), checking my e-mail, browsing the social networks, then getting to business on whatever task I need to be working on that day.  Today’s also garbage, recycle, and yard waste day in this neck of the woods, so I took those out to the curb before sitting down and starting the blog.  Once I’m done with this, I’ll go get ready for work.   As you know, three of my days a week are currently taken up with this blog, but next week that all changes.  I’m going to be doing a lot of site work through the month of June, so my weekday mornings will either consist of coding or working on music for the upcoming Philistine on the Sidewalk 4-6 song EP, though I’ll need to prioritize those tasks depending on which is the most pressing.   Make a To-Do List   Making a list of all the things that I want to work on or finish over the weekend is tremendously helpful for focusing my energy.  There are usually a few prevalent things that are residing in my head which I know I want and need to work on, but I’ll totally space on doing lesser tasks if I don’t write them down.   I’ll take about 10 minutes near the end of the day to write down everything that I want to get done the next day or on the weekend.  I’ll do the most important thing on the list first, then work my way through.  I don’t do this personally as I like to mix things up, but it can be a good idea to number each task and do them in that order.   Save Previous Lists Until Everything Is Crossed Off   The way I am, I put a ton of things on my list for the weekend (as I’ve said, my week is very routine-oriented) and will usually get 50-75% of them done.  I’m usually happy with getting that 50%, but I still need to do that other 50% of things, so I never recycle a list until every single thing is crossed out.  That way, I can bring over old tasks to the new list and take care of them accordingly.   Do One Thing Not on the List   I like this one because it helps get something done and it doesn’t seem like you’re only sticking to doing what’s on your list all day. Last weekend it was going through some of the Concatenation Records supplies and organizing them. It was something that was going to show up on a list in the near future, but it hadn’t made it to one yet, so it was a nice feeling to get a jump on something upcoming.   Schedule Time for Fun   This is something I’m notoriously bad at, but it does help to schedule at least an hour to relax and do something that’s not work-oriented. Unfortunately, this is something that usually shows up on that 25-50% of the list that I don’t get to. I guess I must have fun when I sleep.   However, with a three-day weekend coming up, I have an extra day to knock out some of those put-off tasks and I may actually have time to unwind. Imagine that!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Retooling Projects] Posted on May 24th, 2010.   I’ve been doing a lot of introspection over the past couple of weekends, and one of the things that I’ve realized that I’ve got some serious retooling work to do in a couple of areas.   Music   If you’ve been reading the blog for any amount of time, you’ll have read all about the ongoing saga with my musical projects.  While Philistine on the Sidewalk is the one that’s going to stick around for the foreseeable future, there are things about the project that I feel need some tweaking.   I looked back to my [Creating a Music Project] post from the beginning of February, because I remember that I listed the foundations of the project there.  Looking at that list about four months later, some of it is still applicable, but some of it needs to be revised.   I’m fine with the “one rhythmic loop continuing through the song” idea, but the “one drum loop slowed down for the chillout vibe” idea has already been refined.  I’m going to be layering multiple drum loops together, having one panned 50% to the left, one panned 50% to the right, something going down the middle of the stereo spectrum, and perhaps other drum parts as well.   The “one extended guitar track drenched in reverse reverb” idea will be sticking around as well, though I plan on adding more reverse reverb guitar to the songs too.  The aforementioned idea ends up in the song in the higher registers of the guitar, but I want to add reverse reverb parts in the lower and middle registers of the guitar to the upcoming songs to give them a thicker and more ambient chillout jazz vibe.  I blame listening to too much lovesliescrushing lately.   The “one noise loop that’s rendered from the picture used on the page” idea will likely stick around, as I can edit that in many different ways to sculpt the sound as I wish.  It would even be doable on an album, since I’d have the same source loop for all of the songs.  I also want to keep the “at least one vocal sample slowed down and reversed” idea as well, but I need to figure out how to make that idea blend into the song more effectively.  I think lots of reverb and turning down some of the frequencies will make that work.   I’ve also instituted a couple more things, like recording the bass sound one way only, but using Reason to add post-production effects as needed.  I also want to start doing some actual vocals, but that means I need to get back to writing lyrics again.  I’ve been meaning to for a while, so there’s no time like the present.   Websites   While honing my sound is definitely a time-consuming task, retooling my websites is going to be the more massive undertaking of the two.   I want a more streamlined look throughout all of my sites, and I think the look that [Nintendo-A-GoGo] has is the one that I want to go with.  With close to 100 pages on this site and around 150 on the Concatenation site, this will be quite a project and it’s likely good that I’m slowing down the blog, as a couple of those three mornings a week will be dedicated to honing sites.  The others will be dedicated to creating music and content for said sites and maybe a little gaming too.   Conclusion   All that I can conclude from this is that I’ve got a lot of work to do.  That should be my slogan!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Getting Started in Stocks] Posted on May 21st, 2010.   A good friend of mine asked me for some assistance in how to get started with the stock market and I needed a topic for this morning, so let’s put two and two together and see if I can’t come up with something.   Step One – Find a Broker   I didn’t have to search too long for a broker as I already had an ING Direct Orange Savings account and kept hearing about their other services, one of which was [Sharebuilder].  I’ve been using them since I started investing and I have no complaints at all with their services.  Signing up is relatively easy and they offer a lot of services, even to their basic members (who don’t have to pay a monthly subscription price).   Step Two – Find Some Stocks   One really handy thing about Sharebuilder is that they have a research tool wherein you can look for stocks to buy by setting certain qualifiers such as the price range you’re looking for, the exchange (NYSE, NASDAQ, AMEX) and industry you’re looking for, the volume of the stock traded daily, as well as some other qualifiers.   For my own portfolio, I’ve worked from two different lists – one at [Alt Energy Stocks] and one at [Dividend Detective].  Those are long lists, and don’t offer a lot of information, but that’s where the next step comes in.  Before you move on to step three, write down a list of the stocks (and their symbols) that pique your interest for whatever reason.   Step Three – Research Them Thoroughly   Once you get your list together, head back to Sharebuilder and enter the symbol of your stock in the Get Quote box to the right of the page.  It’ll give you quick quote of the day’s progress and give you the option of checking out a detailed quote.  Go ahead and do this!   Once you do, look over the Quote tab for the basics.  The most important things to check on that page are the Price to Earnings (P/E) ratio, the annual dividends, and the stock grade (which you only get through their Advanced service).  Even with the P/E ratio and dividends, you can make a fairly educated guess on whether it’s worth proceeding further or not.   From what I’ve gleaned, any stock that has a P/E ratio over 20 is overpriced and if you’re dead set on buying it, wait until the stock price drops a bit and then buy it.  It’s a little hard to accurately predict what price you’re going to buy at if you’re going the automatic investment route through Sharebuilder, but if you do a real-time trade, you can buy it at the current price with an additional fee attached.   With dividends, if it just says “No” there, then I say “No” as well to purchasing it.  Again, from what I’ve gleaned, if a company doesn’t offer dividends, they’re more concerned with profits than their shareholders.  Not especially conscientious if you ask me.  As for a good value to look for, I like ones that have at least $1.00 for an annual dividend, which means you’ll get at least $0.25 a quarter per share.   You can also reinvest these dividends through a dividend reinvestment program (DRIP) which Sharebuilder takes care of for you, and it will also help grow your investment faster.  If you need the cash from the dividend, go ahead and use it, but if you let each dividend reinvest for even a few quarters, your investment will grow that much faster.   If they pass those two tests, head to the Profile tab in Sharebuilder and check out the company’s website.  There should be a link that says Investors or Investor Relations that will have a ridiculous amount of information on the performance of the company and its shares.  The dividend history page is the one I find most interesting, as it shows what the company has done with its dividends over the years.  It’s a good sign if they’re slowly increasing over the years, as it shows the company is doing well and is interested in passing that prosperity on to their shareholders.   Back to Sharebuilder, there are two more metrics I like to check – those being Yield and Total Debt/Equity.  The yield is the percentage of money that is returned to the shareholder in relation to the price of the stock.  Say you have a $20 share of stock that pays a $1 annual dividend.  You’d be getting a 5% yearly return on your investment (or a 1.25% quarterly one).  Of course, if you reinvest that dividend, each quarter you’ll get a little bit more value since you can buy percentages of shares these days.   As for a good yield to look for, 5% is pretty decent.  Most of the huge stable companies that grow their dividends year after year are lower than that (and are expensive stocks as well), but they’re very safe and will really grow as time passes.  As I’m younger and have the option of playing a little more fast and loose with my income, I have some investments in a few companies that have double-digit yields, but a lot of them are very high risk, so do your research accordingly.   I’m also partial to utilities, though they’re not growers (for the most part).  The prices are stable, the dividend payouts are stable, the yields are usually pretty good (~5-7%) and unless we go back to a log cabin culture, people are going to need handy stuff like electricity and running water.   I could talk about yields and dividends more, but I’ll move on to the last metric – the Total Debt/Equity.  This is the overall ratio of how a company’s debts compare to their assets.  A low number is a very positive sign, and most of my investments have a Total Debt/Equity under 2.   After researching those things to your satisfaction, it’s time to move on to the next step!   Step Four – Invest   If all of the above metrics meet your requirements, then go into the Trade tab on Sharebuilder and choose either Real-time Trades or Automatic Investing to buy these stocks.  I like Automatic Investing, since I can pick my stocks on Saturday (unless there’s a holiday coming up) and let Sharebuilder do all the heavy lifting.  I know a stock price will fluctuate between the time it’s picked on Saturday and purchased on Tuesday, but it’s likely to be less than the price of a real-time trade and sometime it works in your favor as the price can go down in that time.  Lower price equals more shares and more dividends at the end of the quarter.   I know I missed quite a bit and I’m no expert, but so far I’m pretty happy with my portfolio and I wish you all the best in your forays into the stock market!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Delivering Value] Posted on May 19th, 2010.   A principle I learned a while back with reading some of Steve Pavlina’s work is that if you want to be successful in your pursuits, you have to learn how to create and deliver value.  While I’ve been spending years upon years creating and honing my musical and writing abilities, I’ve never been able to get the hang of getting the word out to a large audience.  Thus, I’ve been unable to properly deliver the value that I’ve created.   This has been frustrating to me as making music and working with manipulating sound is what I enjoy doing the most in life, and I quite enjoy writing in many different formats as well, especially in writing stories or writing about topics I like.  I’m to blame for this lack of success, as I’ve spent too much time in my bear cave recording songs and albums, building sites, and writing drafts of stories without spending much effort on getting the word out.  If I had to rank my balance, I’d say I’m likely at 95% create, 5% deliver. I’d like to get that percentage much more even.   I know I haven’t been able to create much value with this blog as of late, save for people who enjoy reading my thoughts and those that like cat pictures.  I wanted to do more with this blog and I still may end up doing so in the future – going down to one time a week gives me more time to think about something, thus having more time to create an article that delivers more value than these thrice-weekly posts.  I’ll likely have to revise how I do these articles a bit and focus them a bit more, as I know I have the tendency to deviate from the topic at hand a fair amount.   As an aside, I do think the batteries are still on the low side after such a draining experience with losing Mouse, though the ideas and thoughts are exploding as far as the [Philistine on the Sidewalk] project goes.  In addition to all of the things I want to do with that project this year, I’m going to rework that 4 song EP that I had done for the now-defunct Cyanidic Rapture project and turn it into a Philistine on the Sidewalk EP.  I’m going to do that first, since that EP mixed with [Enveloped] and all of my project work on the [Nevar Say Die! Compilation, Volume Three] are indicative of where my sound is headed.  That makes sense, as I made all of that music last year.   I also have all of the songs from all but one of my Amaranthine Skies and Cyanidic Rapture CDs available for download at multiple online retailers in single song form, but the only way for someone to find them is by blind luck.  I want to take a good chunk of time next month once the blog has slowed down and do up the project websites so folks can find them more easily.  I don’t why I haven’t done it before, but I think it’s likely that I created all of those CDs before I got into my current mindset.   All I know is that I’ve got a lot more work to do in order to properly deliver all of the value that I’ve created over the years.  Miles to go and all that.   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Weekend Conclusions] Posted on May 17th, 2010.   I’ve been doing a lot of thinking this weekend in that I’ve been reflecting on the past and planning for the future.  It’s become clear to me that it’s time to cut certain things down in order to pursue my other passions more.   Blogging   I started up the blog during an exciting time of growth in my life.  I had been reading a lot about personal development and I was ready to expand my creativity in to new (but familiar) areas.  A lot has happened since I’ve done so, and now I’m contracting back.   I’ve said before that I started up the blog mainly as a vehicle for honing my writing skills, and it’s been invaluable to do so over the past five and a half months.  My ability to come up with ideas has been tested and I’m ready to start coming up with some more abstract ideas so I can start writing stories again.  I’d also like to rework the two substantial stories I have sitting around here somewhere.   Now, I’m not going to stop blogging, but come June, I’m going to cut back to once a week on Saturday mornings.  I’ll hop out of bed and get all my thoughts about the past week down, then carry on with my day.  That will give me an extra three mornings a week to pursue writing stories or writing things for my other websites (mainly Nintendo-A-GoGo).   Music   I’ve also figured out that it’s time to cut my music projects down to one if I want any sort of productivity, and of course the one that remains is going to be Philistine on the Sidewalk.  I was thinking about how all of my songs on the Nevar Say Die! Compilation, Volume Three album (and there are a lot) have qualities that can be heard in my Philistine on the Sidewalk project.  The only one in which an argument could be made is for my Mystic Nova track, but I do plan on incorporating chiptune elements to some of the PotS tracks in the near future.   Starting up the Philistine on the Sidewalk project really opened up a lot for me and I think it’s going to take me somewhere that should be really interesting.   Also in the music vein, I want to redouble my efforts to make Concatenation Records more well-known.  A fair amount of that is going to link into honing my own musicality into one project, as well as touching base with folks that have put out tunes on the label in the past.  I still have some more details to work out with this, but things will come to fruition in due time.   Work   While I’m keeping my job as long as they want me there, I’m not going to be so focused on working during my hours away from the office, especially on the weekend.  I’ve got a new cat to play with, books and video games to catch up on, and other things that aren’t coming to mind at the moment.   One of the main reasons that I’ve been working so hard is that I’m trying to build streams of passive income in a variety of different ways, but the way I’ve been most successful with is dividends from stock shares.  Through building my portfolio, my dividends account for over 2% of my total income now.  While that’s not a lot yet, that number will continue to grow over the months and years as I continue to save my money, invest in the stocks, and reinvest the dividends in order to buy more shares and grow the dividends further.   I still want to create more streams of passive income, but I can take things a little easier and not stress out about it so much.   The Future   My future goals are still pretty much in place, so all I need to do is continue to rein things in some and focus more of my energy towards achieving them!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Overwhelmed] Posted on May 14th, 2010.   I’ve been sitting here for the past twenty minutes trying to come up with something to write about and most of my ideas seem to keep centering on being rather unfocused and not knowing what to do.   I still have all this stuff that I want to do with developing projects (musical and otherwise), but I’ve also taken the time recently to see how much time is being eaten up away from home.  While I do use some of that time to work on projects, it seems that my focus keeps shifting.   In the last month while commuting, I’ve created seven Philistine on the Sidewalk demo tracks for a video game cover album, but stopped as I want to build the rest of the tracks here at home.  I’ve also started a two song original EP, but I’ve put that on hold as the tracks are likely to be about 30 minutes a piece and it’s hard doing demos for songs that long when the laptop you’re working on doesn’t have that much processing power.   As of yesterday, I’ve started a remix album project for all of the original songs that I’ve put up on the Philistine on the Sidewalk page (001, 002, 004, 005, 008, 009, and 010 for those keeping track) and have a plan for a ten song album.  I’ve already started a remix of Prophets of Doom (002) and any new original song that I put up on the page will be put into the remixing fray.  Since there are generally a lot of things going on in these songs, they should be relatively easy to reshape into something new.  I also plan to keep doing these albums as I know I’m going to keep putting originals up on the site for the foreseeable future and I’m sure I can remix the songs I’ve already done more than once.   I’ve thought about remixing the VG stuff too, but only in passing.  I also have a plan for another ten song VG album once the seven song one is done, though that’ll be ready nearer to the end of the year.  Then there’s the chiptune compilation which is coming due in a few weeks and the original music compilation coming later in the year.   See?  That’s a lot of stuff on my plate, and that’s only on the music side of things.  I’ve got the Nintendo-A-GoGo site to work on (which has an almost completed feature ready to go up this weekend), some more things to clean up at the Concatenation Records site, project pages to clean up and put up for quite a few of my musical projects, getting rid of a lot of things through recycling or selling them, yardwork, and there’s this little guy named Barclay sitting in my lap that really isn’t getting as much attention as he should get (or as much as I want to give him).   At least there is some stability that doesn’t add to the lack of focus, but it does add to the lack of time that I have to do things.  I’ve got the office five days a week, the gym three days a week (plus Saturday’s striking routine), this blog to work on three days a week, and finances to fiddle with every Saturday morning.  I think I’m supposed to find some time to kick back and take a breather with the Xbox 360, but that still hasn’t happened since the middle of March.   I liked to think that I was over having Mouse gone, but drinking so much to the point of throwing up twice (which is why I missed two Monday blogs) since he’s been gone is something highly atypical for me and it was due to the grief of losing him.  There have been a couple weekends where I’ve been pretty good with limiting my consumption, and I think it’s going to be better from here on out as I purged a lot of it on Sunday, but I’ve really been unfocused since having to put him to sleep.   Everything was finely tuned and on point even up to his dying day, but since then it hasn’t been.  I still want to do all this stuff, but it’s hard when certain tasks take up so much time and there’s still a family life and social life to maintain, let alone getting too drunk to focus on doing much of anything (save for making music).   What I need to do tonight before I go to sleep is hack out a list of everything that I want to get done this year, then do a preliminary arrangement of it when I wake up tomorrow morning.  Some of these projects won’t have definitive completion dates (the remix albums for starters), but that will put them lower on the priority scale.  I’m hoping that’ll help get me back on some sort of track and have me plowing through projects left and right.  I need to get lots of things done so I can take a break!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Ex-Dividend Dates] Posted on May 12th, 2010.   I’ve been doing weekly investing in the stock market for the past six weeks, transferring one of my savings accounts with a negligible yield over into a broad portfolio of dividend-paying stocks.  In buying these stocks, I’ve been mostly watching the yields, stock grades and potential quarterly dividend increases through reinvestment.  Something I should have been paying more attention to are the ex-dividend dates for these stocks, because if I purchase the stocks on or after the ex-dividend date, I don’t receive any dividends until the following quarter.   The ex-dividend date (also known as the reinvestment date) usually follows the date in which the company that’s paying the dividends declares the dividend amount for the quarter by a week or two.  Then they pay out the dividends declared at some point usually two weeks to a month after the ex-dividend date.   By making my portfolio fairly broad, I’ve only missed a few of the ex-dividend dates in stocks that I’ve purchased, but unfortunately one of the ones I did miss is one of the highest yielding stocks that I’m investing in.  They posted their ex-dividend date right before I started investing in the company, and I’ve put quite a bit in since then.  They’re also a REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust) that’s subject to slightly fluctuating dividend payout rates, so I’m hoping for a similar payout as last quarter or a higher one like there was the quarter before.   You could say that I’m sort of fumbling towards financial freedom and hoping not to step in too many sinkholes.  Like I said before, I’ve been analyzing what the stocks have done over the years and whether or not they’ll be good investments with promising returns rather than when said returns will actually occur.   I did go through last weekend and check all of the payout dates, without paying attention to when the ex-dividend dates were declared.  I noticed something was amiss when a couple of the stocks that I have had already passed the date in which dividends were supposed to be payed out, so I’ve got to wait until next quarter to get the reinvestment ball rolling on those.   Something I’m going to do this weekend is go through my stocks again and check all the ex-dividend dates and dividend declaration dates for last quarter and do my best to predict the one for the next quarter if they haven’t already been posted.  It shouldn’t be too hard to do since they generally do them every 90 days, so that’s what I’m going to go by.   One good thing I’ve noticed is that the stocks I’ve picked have a fairly broad payout range, so I’ll be getting dividends to reinvest from June 15th to August 15th, not to mention one that pays out on Friday.  Aside from that one paying out on Friday, I’ve got a while to wait before things start rolling for me on the reinvestment front, but I’ve still got quite a bit left in that savings account that I’m clearing out and I can’t wait to start watching my investments really grow!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Becoming Worn Out] Posted on May 7th, 2010.   It’s no secret that I’ve been having a rough time with everything over the past few months.  I’ve been working hard, but I haven’t quite had the exuberance for it since the beginning of March, which is when Mouse’s decline began.  A lot of it has to do with that, but a combination of other factors has really helped to pile it on.   Problems   I’m nearing the end of the annual long stretch of days wherein there are no three-day weekends from President’s Day to Memorial Day, and while three days off in a row isn’t going to magically solve my problems, having that extra day to recoup or work on projects would be great.  It likely would have been good to take off a day or two to mourn Mouse, but I didn’t because I couldn’t afford to take the vacation time.   There’s also the fact that work takes a big chunk of my day, though that’s the case with most people.  I know that most of my co-workers have a longer commute than I do, but mine’s still an hour round-trip that luckily affords me some time to work on some music.  Still, every day that I go to the office, I’m gone for at least 10 hours.  It’s 10.5 if I have a chiropractor’s appointment and it’s 12 if I hit the gym.   The gym itself is a factor that’s wearing me out, because I work out hard and I always feel it the next day and sometimes the day after.  I could work out less or slower or with lower impact, but then I’d feel like I was wasting my time there.  My motto with the gym is “go hard or go home”.  It’s getting me the physical results I want and while I enjoy weightlifting and somewhat enjoy cardio, it’s still wearing me out.   My sleep schedule has been rather akimbo as of late too.  I get to bed at some time between 9:00 to 11:00 PM on the weeknights and while I was out of bed at 3:30 this morning (which is my normal time), I’ve been rolling out of bed at 4:30 or 5:00 quite a bit this week.  That means the things that I want to do get pushed aside or rushed, which is another agitating factor.  Even though I was able to get up at the time I wanted to this morning, I’m sitting here starting to nod off.   I’ve been entertaining the thought of going out to my friend Eric’s tonight to celebrate his birthday tomorrow, but I know with the way that I feel now, I couldn’t do it without passing out after being there for a couple hours.  That doesn’t factor in the commute time either, as getting out that way on a Friday night from downtown Seattle takes at least an hour on the bus.  I know I’ll be good to go for tomorrow’s festivities, but tonight won’t work.   Then there’s the fact that I have a lot of projects that are incomplete because I’m an overambitious sort with a limited amount of time.  I’m trying to create albums, create and build new websites, build a portfolio, create and build passive income opportunities, build my body and likely more things that I’m sure I’m forgetting.  The progress of each is slowed because I have so much on my plate.   Barclay’s been contributing to my exhaustion as well, because he’s a little ball of explosive energy.  That’s all well and good when I’m awake as well, but when he’s exploding with energy at 6 AM on a Sunday and I’m trying to sleep in, it’s a little tough to deal with.  It’s a good thing I don’t have kids of the human variety.   I’m also trying to find some time to sit back and unwind, but that might have to wait until the summertime.   Solutions   There is one large solution that would free up about 50 hours a week and mean I’d have to find a new gym, but that’s not an option.  Once more passive income opportunities are created in my spare time, it might be, but I’ve got to stay the course for now.   I’d also like to take a weekend off at some point and just chill.  I haven’t had that opportunity since March, since it seems as if something has gone on or come up every weekend since.  Then again, with everything I’m trying to work on during the weekends, this probably isn’t going to be feasible for a very long time.   The only real solution I can come up with is to get back to a weekly and weekend schedule and make it more strict and tightly focused.  Setting up blocks of time in 30 minute increments (some 60, 90, and 120 minute ones as well), working on specific things during those times and sticking to them.  Progress will occur that way, even if it is slower overall.   Maybe one of those blocks on the weekend should be a nap.  See you on Monday when I’m hopefully more well rested!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Shifting Priorities] Posted on May 5th, 2010.   I’ve been working hard on certain areas of my life and the time has come to take a step back and assess how I need to shift my focus.   Music   I’ve always been overambitious with my music and I don’t see this stopping in the near future.  I’ve recorded 12 songs for my Philistine on the Sidewalk project this year.  I’ve laid the groundwork for a seven song EP that I hope to start recording the bass for this weekend.  I’ve started working on a massive two song EP on my laptop to and from work as well as another track for this month’s Dwelling of Duels competition.  There’s a song in progress for another online compilation, and there are also plans in the works to do a remix album of the originals that I’ve done and put up on the site.   Not only have I been doing a lot of work on the musical side of things, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I want to have the project set up on the artistic and organizational side.  I’ve been debating whether or not to do something like Nine Inch Nails’ Halo system, but it’d probably be redundant since I’m going to release everything on Concatenation Records and they’d be in chronological order anyway – they just wouldn’t be consecutive.   As you can see, I likely need to put more focus on music if I want to get all of this done in a timely manner.  Considering this is already my first priority, I’m not sure how I can increase it any more, but I’ll try.   Fitness   Now that personal training is over and done with, my fitness is completely under my control and completely on auto-pilot.  I lifted on Monday, I did cardio yesterday, I’m lifting on Thursday, and I’m doing martial arts training here at home on Saturday.   I’m still honing my routine a bit, as I know that doing anything with the lower body on Monday makes Tuesday’s cardio routine suffer, but I hit my lowest weight of 192.0 this morning, which is a pound lower than my previous lowest weight.  I need to keep up with the routine I’m doing, fine tune it as I go and watch the results unfold.   Gaming   Gaming in my life is non-existent unless I’m working on something for the Nintendo-A-GoGo site.  I have been working on a feature lately, so at least I’ve been getting a little bit in, but I’d like to get back on my Xbox 360 again.  I haven’t played it since the weekend before Mouse was put to sleep.  My weekends have been way too busy to find the time, and I don’t see that changing any time soon.  I don’t have the ability to put down everything and enjoy myself any more for whatever reason.  I think I need to figure out how to do that again.   Beer   I drink it on the weekends and it’s as tasty as ever!  I still haven’t had time to read the micro brewing book and I don’t know when I will.   Finances   After reading all I could find on dividends, I’ve been settling into things some and getting my portfolio built and cleaned up.  I’m at the point where I can look over a few things, figure out which stocks I’m going to allocate my funds to on Saturday mornings and let things take their course.  Having another thing that’s almost on auto-pilot is nice.   Cats   Ever since Mouse’s health started declining in early March, I’ve been spending a lot more time petting, holding, and playing with my cats.  Also, since getting Barclay a couple weeks ago and having him as a perpetual roommate, it’s been a lot easier to get distracted from the task at hand and start paying attention to him.   I guess any time that I haven’t been devoting to gaming is time I’ve been devoting to spending with Barclay and Bootsie, and it’s been as enjoyable and stress-relieving as gaming, if not more so.  In fact, I’ve got Barclay chilling in my lap right now while I’m typing this and it’s great because Mouse would do the same thing in his waning days.  I love this little guy so much, even if he is a pain in the butt sometimes when he’s wound up.   Did I Shift Anything?   Well, I’m turning up the focus on music and cats, turning down the focus on fitness and finances, and trying to find more time to game and read about beer.  Other than that, it’s pretty much status quo.  I must say that the status quo is getting mildly soul-sucking at this point, but that’s another topic for another time.   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Winning Dwelling of Duels] Posted on May 3rd, 2010.   As you may know, I’ve been entering the [Dwelling of Duels] video game music cover competition for five years now.  On my fifth anniversary of first entering, I finally won the competition with a [Philistine on the Sidewalk] track covering a couple themes from the Super Nintendo game [Brawl Brothers], which is a personal favorite of mine.  The entries were rather limited with last month’s competition, but it’s more a symbolic victory for me.  It shows that in persevering with my music, I’ve finally achieved a goal that has eluded me for a long time.   I think the problems that I faced in not going further in earlier months may not only have been stiffer competition (which there certainly was most months), but that I was holding myself back by limiting myself to certain musical elements within certain musical projects.  I’ve entered Dwelling of Duels with Forfallen, Natthimmel, Concrete Mutant, Kuribo’s Shoegaze, Jovian Maelstrom, Amaranthine Skies, Kodiak Attack, but never made it to the top.  I’ve done well before with Forfallen, Concrete Mutant, and Amaranthine Skies, but when I finally shrugged off the musical constrictions I put on myself and put everything I do into one project, I won.   That said, I don’t expect to win the competition again unless some similar circumstances arise or something changes in the way I arrange video game covers.  The competition is generally geared towards showing off one’s technical prowess on one’s chosen instruments, though the main goal is to create a song using mostly live instrumentation.  While I certainly follow the latter guideline, I haven’t really followed the former.  I try to make my rhythms somewhat complex and groovy, but leads haven’t really been something I’ve been especially interested in playing in the past.  I’ll do them on a rare occasion, but they usually end up rather simple or sound like I’m playing them backwards (thanks to Meshuggah’s influence).   A lot of the guys that enter Dwelling of Duels are really talented players with somewhere between great and amazing guitar skills.  I’d say I’m a good player because I haven’t devoted the time to training myself to play those leads, mainly because of what I mentioned before.  I like to chug, I like to play arpeggios and melodies, and I like to groove.  I’m also a lot mellower these days and like to make music that represents the way I feel rather than ascribing to a certain style (or blend of styles) of music like I used to.   As for whether or not I’ll start incorporating leads into the Philistine on the Sidewalk – I’ll say it’s likely.  A heavy groove with a great solo over the top can be some amazing stuff and they’d fit fine into the project because everything goes.  I don’t know how soon I’ll start incorporating them or with which instrument (my keyboard solos are stronger than my guitar ones), but they will be coming along eventually.  Once I lock that element into my playing, I might be in the running to win Dwelling of Duels once again.  Wish me luck!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Evaluating Projects] Posted on April 30th, 2010.   It’s been a little over six months since I started putting some real effort into building new projects and developing existing ones thanks to getting inspired by Steve Pavlina’s writings.  This feels as good a time as any to look back and evaluate how things are going with them.   Concatenation Records   While the label isn’t an especially new project (it’s been around since August 2007), there was a flurry of activity with it right around the end of the year with “A Chip off the Shizz Block, Volume One”, “Nevar Say Die! Compilation, Volume Three”, and two revamps of the Concatenation Records website (which is still three pages from completion).   There was a new release earlier this year with Daemon9623’s “Fleshfeast”, but the label was rather quiet this winter.  Things have picked up some this month, as there are remasters for a couple Zio and TEH LOLZ releases that I finished up a couple weeks ago.   I’ll say that late spring/early summer looks to be a good time for the label, as “A Chip off the Shizz Block, Volume Two” will be coming out sometime in June, a seven song EP of video game covers under my Philistine on the Sidewalk project will come out sometime around there, and a four song EP under my Cyanidic Rapture project will come out around there as well.   The fall’s looking good too, as “Nevar Say Die! Compilation, Volume Four” will be coming out some time in September, and I’m looking to get another Philistine on the Sidewalk full-length (10 songs) of video game covers out sometime in the fall.  There’s the WCS compilation that’s still in the process as well, so hopefully that can get out before the end of the year.   I guess the label’s kind of taken a back burner to some of my other projects over the last few months, though one of the other projects I’ve been developing (which I’ll talk about after the next subject) will certainly lead to more activity through the label this year.   For the Love of Creativity   The blog is a project I started up in December of 2009 to help me tune up my writing skills so I can get back into writing stories and books, and it’s been an invaluable tool for doing so, as it gives me a forum to collect my thoughts and write to my heart’s content.  This is blog number 62 and I see myself going strong until the time that I’m ready to get back to writing stories, and I’ll likely drop back to once a week with a weekend post.   I don’t know if I’m going to wait until the beginning of 2011 or if I’m going to start sooner, but I know that I’m still not quite ready yet, as there are a lot of other things I want to develop more first before getting to it.   I must say that the blog has also been really helpful for me as of late in processing all of the emotions involved with losing Mouse, as well as giving me a forum to share most of the photos I have of him and us together over the years.  As I mentioned last time, the photo blogs were kind of a pain to code, but being able to share my fond memories of him and all the joy he brought me was great.   Then, there are blogs like this one which help me assess my progress toward my goals as well as lay the groundwork for new ones.  I have ideas for new ones, but there’s one in particular (which I’ll talk about after the next subject) that needs to be developed quite a bit more before I start anything new up.   Philistine on the Sidewalk   Since getting the idea for this project after discovering Bull of Heaven in November of 2009, I’ve made 11 songs for it since the beginning of January 2010.  Some of these songs are being used to score an independent film, one song is going to be on a compilation coming out tomorrow, and another song I’m working on is going to be on another compilation coming out near the end of May.   The video game EP is underway with five of the seven songs having the framework done and I’ll be starting in earnest on it next weekend, because this weekend I’m doing Punchfest again and adding another song to the tally up there (soon to be 12 on the site).  My production skills seem to get better with each song, but there’s always more to work on.  Still, I think the last song I finished (not the Mouse tribute – one that will be going up tomorrow) is one of my best produced yet.   This project is my biggest success of 2010 by far, so I’m going to keep working on it and doing my best to make it even better!  The only thing that could be better is that the site needs a little work, but I know how I’m going to do that.  I only need to find the time.   Nintendo-A-GoGo   Speaking of needing to find time, this project is something that I definitely need to find/make more time for.  I’ve got a feature that I spent an earnest two hours or so working on yesterday, but the site fell to the wayside once all the stuff with Mouse happened.   In looking through old pictures for ones of Mouse, I found some photos of me from times past that I can use for a new article.  This is also the 25th anniversary of the NES in, so I’m sure there’s a bunch of material that can be covered there.  I’ve got games that I’m working on that I’m going to review and re-review, but I’m not far enough in any of them to do so.  Honestly, I lost my focus with this project since it was so new once things with Mouse started happening.   I’m going to skip any new website projects until the summer at least (save for sites for my projects) and focus more on this site, since I really do want to have this site going strong.   Investments   I started investing at the time I started reading Steve Pavlina’s site, but my initial investments were hit and miss.  Once I started reading more about companies and dividends, my investments have been much smarter and doing much better.   There’s really not a whole lot to say at this point, since I’m still building my portfolio, but I’m happy with how things are transpiring so far!   Through the CD Collection   I’ve been going through my entire CD collection since mid-October 2009, and I’m currently between Nine Inch Nails and Nirvana.  I was hoping to get everything listened to by the end of June, but that’s a laughable prospect.   That said, I think going through all of this music has been really helpful for working on and developing the Philistine on the Sidewalk project, as it’s given me all these different musical ideas and sounds to get production and writing ideas from.  It’s also helped me hone my ideas about what I like about certain recordings and what I don’t.  I had a pretty good idea before, but now my ideas are even stronger.   Anything Else?   Well, my fitness is doing well – from 215 in mid-October to 193 today, and I’ll likely be hanging around the 195 mark while I build more muscle and drop more fat.  I haven’t played any 360 in close to a month, but I’d like to.  It could happen tomorrow evening if I’m not busy working on something else.  Barclay’s working out really well, though he’s an awfully energetic little scamp.  I can’t help but love the little guy!   To conclude, I know that I’m at a point where starting anything new would be a poor decision, but continuing to build on what I’ve already started should prove to be rather fulfilling!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Moving On] Posted on April 28th, 2010.   March and April have been decidedly strange months of my life.  There have been many positive things as well as negative things going on, new opportunities arising and old commitments ending.  A lot of change in such a short amount of time is a lot to endure, but I’ve been doing the best I can with it.   However, there are certain things I need to put to rest as best as I can.  Some will be easier than others, without question.   Mouse   It’s been a little over a month since I’ve had to put my best friend to sleep and not having him around is still hard to cope with.  I do have a little memorial set up with his box of ashes, his paw print in plaster, one of his favorite toys, and a rolled up ball of his hair on a desk shelf, but it’s not the same as having him around to snuggle with me and spend lots of time with me.   That said, Barclay is really stepping up to the plate.  Not only does he resemble Mouse more than a bit, he’s starting to chatter like him and he’s becoming a lot more receptive to me picking him up and cradling him like I did Mouse.  Also, Bootsie’s interacted with him now and she doesn’t like Barclay either – just like she didn’t like Mouse.   Barclay’s a great cat, I love his energy, and he’s definitely filling the void that Mouse left behind.  Still, I’ll always miss my old buddy a little bit, as he was with me from the ages of 11 to 30. In relation to that, I hope Barclay makes it until I’m at least 45.  That’s crazy to think about, but it’ll be here before I know it.  Then again, 15 seems like it was an eon ago.   While I’ve enjoyed blogging about Mouse over the past month and sharing pictures, movies, and stories about him, I’ll be glad to get past the picture blogs.  They’re time-consuming to put together, but I’m glad I did the work as they’ll definitely be good to look back on once I’ve had some more time to heal.   Personal Training   Monday was my last personal training session and this will be one of the easier things to give up, as it’s become rather unnecessary since I’m so close to my goal.  I did personal training from May 2006 to January 2009 and from July 2009 to April 2010, so I’m pretty sure I know how to work out.  I’ve gone from 305 to 195 and my leftover gut should be gone by the end of spring or early summer by sticking to my workout plan and not straying from my diet.  I also notice that I get better results when I work by myself, so why pay money to get lesser results?   My most recent trainer tried pretty hard to get me to come back, since he had a lot of fun working with me, though I wasn’t quite as fulfilled on the fun side of things.  They were good workouts, but more than once I had lingering injuries after them.  Not to mention that I shouldn’t be paying him for him to have fun.  Doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it?   His last effort to do so was last night while I was on the fifth part of my [endurance routine], telling me that there was a promotion that was a six-week competition wherein if I won, I would get the fee for the sessions back.  In order to win, I would have to gain 15 pounds of muscle in six weeks.  It’s certainly doable with abundant amounts of time and supplements, but I don’t have the former (obviously) and I don’t want to keep spending lots of money on something I don’t really need.  I’m not training for competition or for a sport – I’m doing it because I enjoy working out and I need to get the weight off.   He was also telling me that lifting weight would tighten up the loose skin I have, which goes in direct opposition to what Ting told me when I was training with him.  Ting told me that cardio (specifically treadmill/running) would be the key to tightening up the skin.  I know having extra muscle will help things burn faster, which is why I’m upping the amount of lifting I’m doing, but I’ve also noticed that the loose skin tightens up after doing my endurance workouts.  I dropped 3.2 pounds from yesterday, so I must have done something right.  There are too many incompatibilities to keep going with personal training, so I’m not.   In more gym-related movement, I’m leaving my gym in June 2011 as the office is moving to a new building close to Chinatown that month.  It’s interesting how that has worked out as that’s the month that my gym contract ends.  It’s quite a hike from the new building from my gym (which is a time issue), so it’d be more feasible to go home and train there.  Most of what I do can be done at home with dumbbells and my striking bag, so I could work out at home (and run around the neighborhood for cardio), saving time and money.   Music   As you likely know, I’ve got a ton of musical projects.  However, outside of mixing a disc for Cyanidic Rapture that I finished last year, Philistine on the Sidewalk is likely the only project I’m going to work on this year.  There’s a possibility for an Amaranthine Skies disc at the end of the year, but that all depends if time allows.   There’s also the matter of trimming the fat.  I have a lot of projects that are active that I can see going one more disc and then they’re done.  Cyanidic Rapture fits that description, as does Skies of Cyanide.  Concrete Mutant might fall under that category as well.  I don’t think Voices of Epic Fail will even get that one disc, as VG grindcore with bad VG voice samples is better in concept than in execution.   On the flipside of that, Amaranthine Skies isn’t going anywhere, though the output will be more ambient rock in its focus (save for possibly the next album).  Mystic Nova will stick around, as it’s my only chiptune project and I still have a lot in that realm I’d like to explore.  I also have one that might be launching next year that melds a lot of my heavier projects together, but I’m still figuring out the sound for that one.  Last but not least, Philistine on the Sidewalk is going to be my main project for the foreseeable future (obviously), as there are a lot of different styles that I can cover and blend together with that project.   I still want to be as prolific as I’ve been in the past, and considering the total of songs recorded so far this year is 11 for Philistine on the Sidewalk with nine in the works and one for Mystic Nova, I think I’m doing alright on the prolificity scale.  Yes, I know that’s not a word.   Everything Else   As far as I can tell, I can stay the course with everything else and be doing well.  I’d like to get a little more gaming in, since I’ve only done a little bit lately relating to [Nintendo-A-GoGo].  I haven’t touched my 360 in over three weeks and that’s definitely something I’d like to change this weekend.  I need to spend a little more time working on websites as well, but that’s getting scheduled in for the non-blog days of the week and a little bit of the weekend.   With a little more schedule organization and time, I can stop thinking about moving on and get back to moving forward.   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [The Chronicles of Mouse, Part Seven] Posted on April 26th, 2010.   With this being the last in the series about Mouse, I think I’d rather let the pictures do most of the talking, but I’ll definitely help fill in the blanks as much as I can.  I also think that I’ve really run out of words to talk about how much Mouse meant to me.  It’s hard looking at these pictures because they represent the end of a life that gave me so much joy and it’s still hard to look at some of these pictures without tearing up.   Here are the last of the photos.   Christmas Kitty   Mouse was always present for presents and affection at Christmas time, as he’d always get both without question.  The first two pictures are from Christmas 2007, the second two from Christmas 2008, and the last two from Christmas 2009 (his last Christmas).  My favorite of the bunch is the one with us out in the snow on Christmas 2008, because it’s a perfect representation of how much I enjoyed his company and how much he trusted me to let me hold him while outside in his element.   Candid Shots   Here are some assorted snapshots of Mouse’s later years.  The first three are from before the tongue cancer and the last two are from shortly after.   Our Last Photos Together   About a week before Mouse was put to sleep, I had prepared some lunch for myself and Mouse was bound and determined to get some bites, even though he couldn’t get them down.  I tried to give him a couple, but to no avail.  It was hard to watch him not be able to eat bites of food any more, but I was happy to have him pestering me for food as I knew it would be one of the last times he would.   I vividly remember the last night he pestered me for food – it was the night before he had to be put to sleep.  He couldn’t eat his own food at that point, let alone mine, but he wanted some anyway.   I remember after finishing up, I cradled him in my arms like I always did and a video package for Shawn Michaels was playing on the episode of WWE SmackDown! that was on.  There was this extremely haunting flute music that played and it always reminds me of him and how tired he felt in my arms that night.   His Last Day   These photos were taken mere hours before he was taken to the vet to be put to sleep.  I thought one more time in his favorite spot (my window) was something that he would enjoy.  He did, and spent a fair amount of time sitting there and looking out into the world.  I only wish he could have spent more time there before he had to go.   I’m not much of a religious sort, but that last picture looks like he’s ready to go into the light and he’s looking back one last time to say goodbye.   Putting Mouse to Rest   So, the time is here.  I’ve exhausted the pictures and it’s time to put his memory to rest.  He’ll always be with me, but his passing has been rather in the forefront since it happened.  It’s time to put it away and continue to create new memories with Barclay and Bootsie.   As for a final picture, I thought about putting a shot of his memorial up, but I’d rather have a picture of him later in life when he was still healthy and enjoying his surrounds.  Here it is and all I have left to say is that I miss him, I’ll always love him, and I thank him for giving me so much joy over the past 18 and a half years.   Farewell, Mouse.  I hope to see you again someday.   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [The Chronicles of Mouse, Part Six] Posted on April 23rd, 2010.   I can’t believe the amount of pictures that I had of my old buddy.  I’m going to tell a couple of stories and have a bunch of candid shots from over the years at the end.  There is still one more blog to do after this, as these shots chronicle from 2005 to mid-2007.  After that, I’ll do from the latter half of 2007 to his final day.  That one’s going to be really hard to do.   In any event, on with the stories!   Punk Rock Kitty   I remember in the summer of 2005, Mouse had a couple of abscesses from fighting with other creatures outside.  The first one he got was on his back, which was easy enough to clean up and take care of, but the second one was on his forehead right over his left eye.  I cleaned it up right before leaving for a weekend in Portland to hang out with my WCS buddies and thought nothing of it while I was gone.   When I returned, the abscess had come back and needed to be drained again.  Instead of doing it manually like before, he was taken to the vet and they took care of it.  It required surgery, stitches, and a tube in his head for the fluid to drain.  Mouse was never really the same after that and he also never went outside again unless it was supervised or if he ran out when the opportunity presented itself.   In a way, I still feel kind of bad about that because he loved being outside, but I know all the risks involved with letting a cat run around outside.  He had already been attacked by cats and raccoons (which likely caused the abscesses), but there are a lot of people that drive too fast down the street out in front, there’s an arterial nearby, and I found one of the neighbor’s cats in the driveway with a pellet hole in its head.   It was shot right between its eyes and it was so horrible to see something like that happen to such a beautiful female cat.  I know one of the juvenile delinquents that used to live across the street and up a few houses shot her, but there was no proof other than speculation and circumstantial evidence.  It simultaneously angers me that it happened and it hurts me to think that could have happened to Mouse (he was still indoor/outdoor at the time).   To return to the original topic, here are some pictures from right after the surgery and after he’d gotten the tube out of his head.   Mouse vs. Pink Godzilla   I’d come home from a shopping trip to Pink Godzilla in April of 2006 (about three weeks before I started working in the area) with a fair share of things and a rather large pink bag to bring them home with. I had emptied the bag and left it on the bed, thinking nothing of it at the time.   A few minutes later, I came back in the room to the sound of rustling – Mouse had taken it upon himself to climb in the bag and start playing in it! He was still a playful cat at the age of 14, but I didn’t expect this. Luckily, I had my camera handy and he spent quite a while in there playing with the bag and rustling around.   Candid Shots from 2005   Candid Shots from 2006   Candid Shots from Early 2007   Final Chronicle Next Week   The pictures are starting to run out, so it’s time to finish things up with the next blog. It’ll be sad to put all these pictures to rest, but there’s only so much more I can say and show about a cat that’s been gone for almost a month now except that I miss everything about him and that I love him a lot. Barclay and Bootsie have helped with the pain quite a bit, but it’ll never fully go away. It’s tough coming to terms with that.   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Barclay the Baker] Posted on April 21st, 2010.   In last week’s blog, [Playing Catch Up], I mentioned that I went looking for a new cat to bring into the house to fill the void that Mouse has left behind.  I know it’ll never be possible to replace him, but I think I’ve found the next best thing with Barclay.   Barclay was first found through the website for [MEOW], a local no-kill shelter that really takes good care of the cats that arrive there.  The cats they receive are neutered or spayed, vaccinated for everything except rabies (only a licensed vet can administer that shot), microchipped, and they have volunteers there that interact with the cats in order to assess their personalities in order to find out what kind of household that they’ll fit best in.   In his [original profile], he looked a little bit scruffy, but sounded like the kind of cat that Mouse was.  I think he will be once he gets a little older, but I’ll talk about that more in a bit.  The trip over to MEOW on Saturday was a little bit worrying because of not knowing if Barclay would get adopted in the week between visits, because he had been pulled out of quarantine on Tuesday.   One of the volunteers there, Laurie, had been kind enough to ask her fellow volunteers to keep Barclay out of the public viewing area until the weekend, which they had.  When I got there on Saturday, they walked me to a room where they have one-on-one interaction with the cats.  I sat down and a few minutes later, another volunteer brought him into the room.   I first saw this little gray ball of fluff and thought he was really cute, but he was rather nervous at first and hid under the chair I was sitting in.  After a few minutes of letting him settle in, I picked him up and put him on my lap, where he stayed for the longest time.  He was purring pretty strongly and kept kneading with his rather large paws, which is how he acquired the “baker” nickname. The act of kneading is also known as making biscuits, which led to coming up with a jingle for him that goes, “Barclay, the baker, the biscuit maker!”   Anyway, after holding him and petting him for what seemed like a really long time, I knew that he was the right cat for me.  I signed all the paperwork, payed my $80, and brought this little bundle of fluff home with me.  He meowed almost all the way back, which is the same thing that Mouse did when he was brought home for the first time.   Similarities   Mouse and Barclay really are pretty similar in a lot of ways – the playfulness and affection are rather similar, though Barclay’s playfulness level is in the red right now.  He’ll be a year old on June 7th, so he’s still mostly a kitten.  I don’t remember how playful Mouse was as a kitten since it was a long time ago, but they’re both explorers and Barclay has made it into some amazing nooks and crannies, some of which I’ve had to block off because they’re dangerous to the little guy.   I also noticed the way that Barclay was attacking my arm was the same way that Mouse used to attack his tennis ball, so I got one for Barclay as well.  Sure enough, their attacks are identical – front paws around the ball, back paws kicking at it, and chewing on it.   He sometimes sleeps on my bed like Mouse did, but when he does, it’s usually in the little cat bed that’s up on the corner of my bed.  It was originally intended for Mouse, but he was too big to fit in it.  Barclay fits in it rather well when he’s not attacking it and flipping it onto himself.   Differences   Whereas Mouse was part Russian Blue and part Siamese, Barclay is part Russian Blue and part Maine Coon.  I could be wrong, but his abundant coat and tufts of hair coming from his ears certainly match the profile.  He also has giant paws, but I think that’s more natural of the Russian Blue pedigree.  Mouse had smaller paws, which was likely from his Siamese side.   Barclay’s a lot fluffier than Mouse was, his upper fangs stick out a little bit and his eyes are yellow instead of green, but they’re both handsome cats.  Barclay’s also a lot more flexible than Mouse was and he seems to enjoy laying down with his front paws first, then flops his back end down in one direction or the other.  I guess the flexibility thing could be why he’s named Barclay – he can mold into any shape like a bar of clay.  He’s the right color for that as well.   He’s also a lot smaller than Mouse was in his prime – Mouse was 15 pounds, and Barclay’s at 8.  I have a feeling that he might grow into those feet of his and end up an even bigger cat than Mouse, especially if he’s part Maine Coon, since they get to be rather big cats.   Lots of Joy to Come   I can’t wait for the following days, weeks, months, and years with Barclay.  I’m sure he’s going to be a party animal for quite some time, but he really is very affectionate in those few minutes that he’s tuckered out from playing.  As he gets older, the balance will shift more and I’m sure I’ll spend plenty of time snuggling with him like I did with Mouse.   I know I’ll never fully get over losing Mouse, but Barclay has certainly filled the void rather well so far.   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [The Chronicles of Mouse, Part Five] Posted on April 16th, 2010.   Do you remember when I said that I’d be able to wrap things up with this blog?  Well, I was very wrong.  I’ve found a ton of media of Mouse that I’ll be putting up today, and it only covers from Christmas 2003 to Christmas 2004.   All of these pictures don’t include a few months worth of photos which were lost thanks to a hard drive crash – I’m just glad I had the wherewithal to back these up on to DVD before that happened.  Of course, I’m a little more careful now, as I back all of my photos up on my hard drives and my external drives.   And now, it’s time for more Mouse.   Christmas 2003   This was the year that I got one of the most useful presents I’ve ever received – a digital camera.  I had no idea at the time how useful it would be at the time, but I realize its worth now as I’ve got extensive documentation of Oregon coast trips, my early adventures with the WCS, and of course all of my pets over the years.   I’m going to do this blog a little different, since alternating back and forth between text and pictures would likely take too long, so I’ll post any pictures and movies, then get back to the text.  So, here are a couple pictures of Mouse at Christmas.   January 6, 2004 – Snowed In   Another handy thing about having a digital camera is that it tells you the exact day that the pictures were taken.  Here’s a few more from a day in January where I was snowed in and taking a bunch of pictures.  Mouse was still playing with his Christmas presents and lounging about in typical places, so here he is doing that.   I’ve also got a few movies that complement these pictures.   [Mouse Sniffing Around] [Mouse Resting on the Dryer] [Mouse Wandering Around at Night]   Spring 2004 – Looking Out and Sleeping In   Here are some more pics of Mouse in his natural habitats – in a window and on my bed.  Before I begin, I’ll mention that he didn’t drink the whole case of Alaskan Amber – he only had a couple.  What a lightweight.   Summer 2004 – More Candid Shots   The thing with Mouse dying of tongue cancer makes the pictures of him with his tongue sticking out kind of bittersweet, as it’s a reminder of what happened.  Though I have to say that at the time it happened, it was rather funny.   Also, a couple movies of Mouse in his natural habitat (my room).   [Mouse Rubbing His Cheek on My Acoustic Guitar] [Mouse with His Ear Twitching]   Late Summer 2004 – Mouse’s 13th Birthday   First, the iconic shot.  Then, him on top of his present.  He did indeed like fishies and he liked to boogie.   Here, we have Mouse in action with his catnip mat.  He loved that toy so much.   [Mouse and His Catnip Mat, Part One] [Mouse and His Catnip Mat, Part Two] [Mouse and His Catnip Mat, Part Three] [Mouse and His Catnip Mat, Part Four] [Mouse and His Catnip Mat, Part Five] [Mouse and His Catnip Mat, Part Six] [Mouse and His Catnip Mat, Part Seven]   Christmas 2004   I only have one good picture from this Christmas, as I think most of the pictures of this one were the ones that were lost in the hard drive crash.  However, this last picture really demonstrates what Mouse was – he was a gift to my life for so long.   Part Six Next Week   April has pretty much been “cat month” on the blog, and I don’t see that changing for the rest of the month, so I’ll try to get further through the pictures next time around.  It’s possible this is going to be a seven part series, since there are still a lot of pictures to go from 2005 to early 2010.   Until next time!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [The Chronicles of Mouse, Part Four] Posted on April 14th, 2010.   I was going through an old desk drawer recently and discovered another 10 envelopes full of pictures, some of which had more pictures of Mouse from the early-to-mid 1990s.  Not all of these pictures have much of a story behind them, but I can always post the pictures and describe them the best that I can.   Birthday Kitty   When I was a lot younger, I used to go to Baskin-Robbins and they served ice cream sundaes in little plastic baseball helmets that had all 26 teams (at the time) on them.  As I was a fan of both, I had quite the collection of these.   Of course, with a new kitten, you want to play with them and I was curious if these miniature baseball helmets would fit Mouse.  They did perfectly, though he wasn’t exactly thrilled at the prospect.  The Santa hat from the last Chronicle post went over a lot better than the baseball helmets did.   However, the thought was that they could be brought out on special occasions as not to annoy Mouse too much.  Then the idea occurred that I could write a number on a piece of paper, tape it over the baseball team logo, then put the helmet on Mouse when it was his birthday and get a few pictures.  It’d have to be done before giving him his present, otherwise he’d be too wound up or ‘nipped out.   As you can see here, this is from his second birthday, and these are the last ones I’ve found.  There are pictures from his first birthday too, but he looks a lot grouchier, which is unsurprising.  I don’t remember he got for his second birthday, but he certainly made out well after his first.   Then again, he didn’t necessarily need a present to enjoy himself – sometimes the wrapping was enough.   The Choice of a New Generation   Another thing about Mouse was that he was easy enough to photograph when he had something in his paws, so the thought occurred to make it look like he was drinking a Pepsi.   One thing that’s funny to me in retrospect is that I probably weighed as much there as I do now.  As for the picture, Mouse never drank any Pepsi, though he was spotted a couple times later in life lapping up coffee.  It should have been more concerning that he did so, but seeing Mouse buzzed was entertaining and not too dissimilar to a catnip high.   More Mouse and Cuddles   I found a couple more pictures of the two together, and it looks to me as if Mouse thought Cuddles was a toy.   I guess karma came back around to Mouse many years later once Bootsie showed up and started hissing and swatting at him, though I suppose that’s a little different.  This next picture makes it look like Mouse is either hugging Cuddles or eating him.   They got along all right once Mouse grew up some more (as evidenced in Part One), but Cuddles didn’t spend much time out of his cage once Mouse got here.   He Was Everywhere   I guess he did sleep on clothes when he was in there.   How does a cat lose his balance on a pillow?  The mind boggles.   There, he righted himself.  Sleeping on the pillow next to mine was a common place to find him, as I think that was his favorite place to sleep for a good two-thirds of his life.   He looks rather concerned in this one, but there’s another shot at a different angle where he looks fine.  I guess he was caught off guard.   Here’s Mouse, getting ready for a TV party tonight.  Alright!   For a while, he was the official channel changer, whether a request for changing the channel was made or not.   He really did enjoy being outside when he was let out.  It’s kind of a shame that he wasn’t let out after the age of 14, but when I talk about the “punk rock kitty” incident in the next chronicle, you’ll see why that decision was made.   The Snuggler   I’ve got two more pictures of him snuggling with me when I was younger, one of which is highly embarrassing, but I’m going to post it anyway.   This is the non-embarrassing one, as I’d crashed out on the couch for a nap and Mouse came to join me.  Sleeping on someone’s lap or chest was another of Mouse’s favorite pastimes and he’d purr up a storm while doing so if he wasn’t sleeping.   I also see I’m wearing a 3XL shirt at the time, which is pretty wild to me since now I can wear a Large without any trouble.  One company even makes Mediums that are way too big for me.  Wild stuff.   Part Five on Friday   I’m going to wrap things up this week because there’s really not much else going on that I haven’t written about already, and I’ll likely be getting a new addition to the household this weekend, so it’s time to put the memories to rest.  Our collaborative song is done, the pictures and movies will soon be exhausted, and there’s only a little bit more to retell.  I’m not sure if these chronicles are helping me with the grief or helping me hang on to him for a little while longer, though I think it’s about half and half.   I could keep going, but I’ll save any more last thoughts for the last part of the chronicles.  Here’s the embarrassing picture to which my old friend Ben quipped “Who’s your girlfriend?”  I can’t help but laugh at that now, and I can’t help but think that this picture is a perfect example of how happy we made each other over the years.   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Playing Catch Up] Posted on April 12th, 2010.   After losing my cat Mouse to tongue cancer and having to put him to sleep, I was rather drained of energy and had no interest in working on all of the projects that I have over the past couple of weekends.  This caused me to get behind on all the things I enjoy doing and things I don’t enjoy doing as much.  I made a list of all the things I needed to do this weekend and knocked a good majority of them out.   I got my stock purchases picked.  I got my taxes done (yay refund).  I got a new lawnmower, put it together and got the yard mowed (the new mower is great).  I got some music mixing and arranging done.  I got the vacuuming done.  I got my old weight bench disassembled and put in the basement.  I got some CDs ordered that I’ve been meaning to order for a month.  It was a very productive weekend, but I didn’t have time to work on anything new for Philistine on the Sidewalk and I only got 30 minutes of gaming in on Saturday night.  However, next weekend should be much more enjoyable, as I should have a lot more time to make music, do some gaming, as well as time to spend with a new cat.   I went to a no-kill shelter on Saturday and was able to see some of the cats that they had, as well as sit in a room with a few of them and watch them interact with each other and I.  Once one of the cats jumped up in my lap and started purring incessantly, I knew I was ready to get a new one, but the one cat in particular that I wanted to see was in quarantine with a cold and they won’t be able to let him interact with the public for a little while.  I’m going to find out on Tuesday when that will be, as the shelter is closed today.  They said the cold cycle is between 7-10 days, so it’s likely he’ll be available this weekend.   I did meet some lovely cats while I was there, including a little furry black one just shy of a year old named Love Muffin.  Not a very manly name, but it certainly fits him well.  He was found starving and was brought to the shelter to gain weight and go home with a new family.  He was very affectionate and at one point was resting half on my arm and half on my leg, trusting that I would take care of him.  He also had some rather amusing quirks, like using his right paw to paddle in the water dish instead of drinking from it.   It was hard not to take him home and say the heck with the cat in quarantine, but apparently the cat in quarantine is of a similar temperament and looks a lot like Mouse.  I could have taken Love Muffin home this week, and the other cat next week, but three cats in the household is likely one too many, and Bootsie would likely not enjoy that much new company.  There are also concerns that Love Muffin might not grow up to be a very healthy cat, due to being malnourished as a kitten.   I also got Mouse’s ashes back from the vet yesterday and that was hard to cope with.  It didn’t take me back to the day he was put to sleep, but it did hammer home the fact that he was gone and that this was all that was left of his physical presence.  The folks that did the cremating (or maybe the vet clinic) made a plaster print of his paw, and they placed his ashes in a very tasteful cedar box with a ribbon tied around it, a little paper heart with Mouse Vincion written on it and attached to the ribbon, and a little angel cat figurine attached to the ribbon.   It brought me to tears a few times yesterday, and I’m getting a little teary typing about it now.  The thing is, I used to be pretty emotionally turned off, but things seem a lot more vibrant now.  I hate that it took Mouse’s death to turn on my emotions again, but I know I’m going to do my best to not take anything for granted ever again.  With that said, I think it’s time I spent some more time with Bootsie now.   I’m going to wrap up this blog with being glad that this weekend is over and that I got so much done.  I also can’t wait for the next one!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Getting Back on Track] Posted on April 9th, 2010.   As you may have guessed, having to put my cat Mouse to sleep after having him for 18 and a half years was a major blow to me, as not having him in my life any more left a lingering sense of pointlessness on all of my actions.  There were things that I wanted to do these last two weekends that I couldn’t cope with doing the weekend he was put to sleep, and that I didn’t give a crap about doing last weekend.   Time does heal wounds and I snapped out of my funk earlier this week.  I’m finally ready to get back to work, and I sure do have a lot of work to do!   Making Lists   I’ve always been an advocate for making lists, but after two weekends of not doing much of anything, I have to look at the list of things I want to do this weekend and laugh.  There are over 20 things on the list, and while a few of them aren’t especially time-consuming, they’re all things that need to be done.   Most of the important stuff is finance-related, especially since I still haven’t done my taxes.  I usually do them in March, but with Mouse falling ill and having to be put to sleep last month, that didn’t happen.  Luckily, they’re not going to be too complex and I should be able to get them proofed and done in under an hour (fingers crossed).   I’ve also got a ton of music stuff to do this weekend, as well as some around the house stuff and I really need to remember to take a shower this weekend.  I totally blanked on it the last two weekends, but as I said earlier, my head wasn’t on straight.   Doing What You Enjoy   For about a week after Mouse’s passing, I couldn’t work on music. I had no interest in picking up an instrument or sequencing sounds or composing anything.  It took me until last Thursday to start working on a new Philistine on the Sidewalk track and it’s almost complete now.   It’s a tribute to Mouse and features recordings of him playing my DX7 keyboard, purring like a motorboat, and will have more samples of him added once I record them onto my computer from my hand-held tape recorder.  Of course, it’s got all the usual elements too – drum loops, thick bass, and reverse reverb guitar.  I might add a little more to it before all’s said and done.   I’ve also been digging more into the financial side of things now that I’ve started my dividend investment plan and I’ve been doing a lot of research into the field.  My stock picks definitely don’t fall in line with most folks’ choices, but there are things that I like about the companies that I’ve chosen to invest in and I see continued prosperity for them into the future.   I may end up starting a site talking about stock picks in the future, but it won’t be until I’ve filled out my portfolio more and get more comfortable in the waters of Wall Street.   I need to sneak some gaming in too, as I need to work on the Nintendo-A-GoGo site and there are some more old VG songs I want to cover, so it would help to immerse myself in the games that contain them.  It’s all for research purposes, I assure you – none of that “having fun with games” for me, no sir.   Commemorating a Fallen Friend   I’ve heard the best way to commemorate losing a loved pet is to get a new one, because it’s a sign that the old pet was a treasured companion and that it will be worth the time it takes to develop a new relationship with another one.   I know that a new cat won’t be the same as Mouse and will have his own quirks, but as long as he is affectionate and is open to sleeping on my bed (Bootsie won’t because it’s hard for her to jump up there), I’m good and will be more than happy to reciprocate as much affection as he can stand.   It is going to have to be a male cat, because Bootsie does not get along with other female cats.  She kind of tolerated Mouse, but she got into a knockdown dragout with City Kitty one time that she snuck into our house.  City Kitty sliced open one of the pads on the bottom of Bootsie’s foot and she left a little blood trail around the house.  That put the kibosh on letting City Kitty back in rather quickly.   I do have a few cats at a local shelter in mind that I’d like to check out, thanks to seeing their pictures and reading about their personalities on Petfinder.  The place that has them is a no-kill shelter that my mom has contributed money to and she worked with a woman that volunteers there, so I’m sure it’s a reputable place.   Of course, if I do get a new cat this weekend, that’s what Monday’s blog is going to be about.  I should change the name of the blog to “For the Love of Cats” and be done with it.   The Future   I’m sure the future’s going to be littered with potholes that throw me off track, but as long as I can right myself and get back to business, life will go on as well as it does.   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Five Years of Bootsie] Posted on April 7th, 2010.   Yesterday marked the fifth anniversary of having my cat Bootsie and I figured it was about time to celebrate my living cat rather than continuing to memorialize my recently deceased one (though that will continue soon).   How She Arrived   Bootsie used to belong to the son of one of my dad’s friends, and he had left her with his dad after he had moved out into another place in the Seattle area.  When he and his wife moved to Missouri, his dad didn’t want to stay in a large house by himself in Seattle, so he moved to a smaller place in Wenatchee, WA.   Bootsie was living with the dad at the time and he wasn’t going to be able to bring her with him, so he was going to have her put to sleep.  My dad would have none of this, as he and Bootsie had become rather friendly while my dad was over fixing up his friend’s place to sell it.  Bootsie was accustomed to sleeping in out of the way places, but when my dad showed up, she’d come out and let him pet her.   When the time came for dad’s friend to move, Bootsie moved as well – she moved here.   From Scruffy to Dainty   When she first showed up, she was rather scruffy and the same weight as Mouse (14.5 pounds), which was awfully big for a cat of her frame.  Her coat needed some attention and so did she in order to become more acclimated here.  Once she settled in some, she found the couch to be one of her favorite places.   She’s a strictly indoor cat, so if she’s craving the outdoors and it’s a nice sunny day outside, she’ll park herself on the floor and sleep in the sun that comes in from the skylight.   Since she showed up, she’s dropped to a much more frame-suiting 11.5 pounds and she’s as pretty as can be.   Extremely Positionable   One of the things that’s great about Bootsie is that nothing really bothers her that much.  You can roll her over on her side and she’ll look up at you with an expression of curiosity, rather than disdain.   She can be rather vocal, but that’s only when you interact with her or when she’s picked up.  You can turn her into a Christmas present, and she really doesn’t mind.   Extremely Expressive   Another great thing about her is that her expressions are very easy to read.  She can be nonplussed at your efforts to photographer her:   Or she can be as sweet as can be.   She’s not a very action-packed cat like Mouse was, but she can give you a great idea about how she’s feeling with just one look.  She’ll also be happy to tell you how she’s feeling with a vast variety of meows.  She’s taken to chattering at night since Mouse passed, which is strange to me as I’ll get to in a second.   Mouse and Bootsie   I was thinking about saving this for the last of Mouse’s memorials, but there’s really not much to tell.  As soon as Bootsie got here, she’s wanted nothing to do with Mouse.  If Mouse got too close to her, she’d hiss at him and if she was feeling especially grouchy, she’d give him a swat.  It was the funniest thing, because Mouse was a big strapping cat and he never fought back once – he just got out of her way with a quickness.   There were a couple of times that I was able to photograph them together, but I’m not sure what aligned in the cosmos to allow that to happen.  The first time wasn’t too hard to fathom, as though they were both on the couch, they were at least on different levels of it.   The second time I got pictures of them, they were actually sitting right next to each other and I don’t know what compelled them to do so, but I made sure to get a ton of pictures of the event.  This was the best one:   This was taken about six months before Mouse was put to sleep, but the event didn’t change Bootsie’s attitude towards Mouse, as she’d still hiss and swat at him after this happened.  As I said earlier, she took to chattering after Mouse passed, making me think that she missed having around to hiss and swat at.  Cats are rather peculiar sometimes.   The Future   I’m not sure how much longer she’s going to be around, as it’s not known how old she is specifically, though the thought was that she was Mouse’s age when she got here.  That’s been revised a few times, as I’ve also heard she was 10, or she was 11 or 12. I’m going with her being 16 now, which may not give her too much more time here.   However, like I did with Mouse, I’m going to enjoy her company the best that I can while she’s still here and still healthy.  I’ll leave you with a picture of her from yesterday, looking extra photogenic on her fifth anniversary here.   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [The Chronicles of Mouse, Part Three] Posted on April 5th, 2010.   I found even more old photos of Mouse this weekend, but I didn’t get a chance to scan them in and they’re chronologically somewhere between parts one and two.  At this point, it’s looking like I’ve got at least a five part blog, though I’m going to hold off a bit on parts four and five.  I’ve got some other things to write about this week and I’ll definitely need next weekend to get all the pictures together, as this weekend was relatively unproductive.   This set of pictures comes from his middle era from 1999-2003, as the pictures all come from sets I got back from the printers that had 3.5 inch floppy disks with the pictures included.   Not a Fan of Vacations   One thing that I always found amusing about Mouse is that as soon as I got back from a vacation, he’d be up and lounging on an opened or unopened suitcase before it had been unpacked.   I think it was his way of saying that he wasn’t a fan of me taking off for long periods of time and that I shouldn’t go anywhere without him.  That wouldn’t have been feasible, as having him crammed in a hotel room and cruising around with him in a crate for a good majority of the day wouldn’t have been very enjoyable for him.   When my folks were taking care of him while I was in Tennessee for over two months back in 2000, they told me that he was rather beside himself for quite a while after I’d gone, as I’m sure he was wondering where I went.  I know when I finally did come back to Seattle, he ran from me the first time I saw him.  The bonds were rebuilt quickly thereafter.   His Favorite Toy   I remember at one point I had found an old tennis ball sitting around in the house and I had a bottle of spray-on catnip that I used to freshen up his other toys.  I decided to put the two together and I made Mouse a toy that he enjoyed the most of all of them.   Any time I’d show him the tennis ball, his eyes would go wild and I’d toss it in his general direction.  He’d get a hold of it with his front paws, kick at it with his back paws, and tear at it with his teeth.   When he’d get too tired to keep attacking it, he’d often just stop and crash out with the ball still firmly in his possession, like he was snuggling it.   Out in His Element   Mouse was always the happiest when he was outside.  He was an indoor/outdoor cat until the “punk rock kitty” incident, which wasn’t until just before his 14th birthday.  In his younger years, it was quite common to see him prowling the sidewalk, making sure his territory was free from renegade cats.   He was fine with the neighbor’s cat City Kitty coming to hang out in the yard, but if one of the other cats in the neighborhood came into the area, he was on the attack and they would take off quickly.  He would always find a good place to perch to survey the surrounds in order to get the jump on any trespassers.   As much as he liked to go outside, he knew when it was a good idea to stay in and watch the world from a window.   Sleeping in Unusual Places   Last time, I talked about how he used to sleep in strange places – I don’t have a lot to add, but this photo may top any of the others.   He was sleeping on old drapes which were on top of a clothes basket, which was on a table, which was behind the television set.  It was out in the open in a potentially loud area, but he was perfectly content to sleep away the day there.   Part Four Next Week   I think I’ll go back through the older photos I found of Mouse this weekend in part four, and save the final years of his life for part five.  It gives me a great deal of joy to know that the wherewithal was had to document Mouse’s life so well, as he was truly a one-of-a-kind cat.   I’ll close this one out with a picture of us at Christmas in 2002 – the holiday had its pitfalls for him (see the pic), but he usually made out pretty well with a new catnip toy and lots of love.   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [The Chronicles of Mouse, Part Two] Posted on April 2nd, 2010.   I’ve had an emotionally and physically draining week at the office and after especially grueling days on Wednesday and Thursday, the only thing I would have liked in the world is to come home and crash out while snuggling with Mouse, but I had to fall asleep without my buddy.  It’s still rough, but it’s good to be able to sit down and go through pictures of happier times.   Investigator of Appliances   Cats tend to be of the curious sort, and Mouse was no exception.  He was always checking things out and ending up in places that would not be considered suitable for a cat.  Case in point – the washing machine and the dryer.   He knew better than to sneak into one when it was loaded with clothes and ready for use, but if there was a recently emptied dryer or a soon-to-be-filled washing machine with lid open, he’d be in it without fail.   I’m not sure what the allure of it was, but the above picture did make for a great desktop image at one time.  I had all of my desktop icons lined up on the left side of my desktop and it looked like Mouse was investigating the shortcuts to my applications.   Aficionado of Fine Birdbaths   When Mouse was still an indoor/outdoor cat, he enjoyed nothing more than drinking heartily from the birdbath on a hot summer’s day.   As soon as fresh water was sprayed in there, he’d be on it and drinking in no time flat.  City Kitty, which was the neighbor cat at the time, watched him do this on more than one occasion.  She thought it was a good idea as well, so I’d catch her drinking from it too.   Unfortunately, I don’t have any pictures of her doing so, but it’s nice to know my buddy was such an influential teacher.   Basket Case   One of the great things about Mouse is that he would always find ingenious places to sleep.   There’s a furnace grate that he and Bootsie used to trade off sleeping on top off, they’d both sleep by the furnace grate under my bed, but some of my favorite places to see my buddy conked out were some of the most nonsensical.   Seeing him passed out on top of the freezer made sense, as it radiates a lot of heat.  Seeing him passed out on a pile of my clothes made sense, because they retained heat and he likely smelled me on them.  Seeing him passed out in a little basket that was barely big enough to fit him?  What the…   I love his expression that’s a mixture of “Hey, I’m trying to sleep!” and “What are you doing with that thing?”  He was always inquisitive, even to his dying day.   The Nuzzler   I wasn’t sure there were any of these documented, though I did manage to find a picture of him nuzzling me.  It’s from a much heavier time in my life, but what the hey.   It wasn’t too uncommon occurrence for him to nuzzle my cheek, as when I’d get home from work and pick him up, I’d ask if I could have a nuzzle and lean in for one.  95% of the time, he’d lean back and nuzzle up against my cheek.  He’d pop out again after a second or two, so I’d ask for another one.  Again, he’d usually oblige.  Sometimes he’d even give me thirds.   Suffice it to say, it was always nice to come after a long day and receive this kind of unconditional affection.   Part Three on Monday   I know this blog was a little shorter, but time has been relatively absent since the last one and my weekend is wide open, so part three should be conclusive.  Also, huge.  I’ll finish this one with another picture of us together in happier (and somewhat thinner, but not compared to now) times.   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [The Chronicles of Mouse, Part One] Posted on March 31st, 2010.   While I needed to do Monday’s blog as catharsis for all the pain I’m feeling from losing my best friend in the world, it is now time to celebrate his life and adventures.  There are going to be at least three parts and Monday’s blog will be a monster, as I’ll have had a chance to go through all of the digital media I have of him this weekend.   The Origin of Mouse   Mouse was born on August 21st, 1991 in Shoreline, WA along with his four brothers and sisters.   They were born in the house of a family my mom knew through her work.  He was the first one born of his brothers and sisters, and he was born under a bed.   At the time he was born, the daughter of my mom’s co-worker was looking for Mouse’s mom and wasn’t able to find her until looking under her mom’s bed.  She saw my buddy first and said, “Eek! A mouse!” The name stuck, as he was the runt of the litter and very small and mouse-like at the time.   These Polaroids were taken of Mouse and his brothers and sisters shortly after they were born.  There was Mouse (he’s peeking over the rim in the upper left photo), Boots (who looks rather similar to my cat Bootsie), Tiger, Tigress, and Duchess.   From what I remember, Duchess didn’t live too long, Boots ran away from his new owners, and I’m not sure what happened with Tiger and Tigress.  As far as I know, Mouse was the last living member of his family.   Bringing Him into Our Family   My mom and I went to pick him up about eight weeks later at the parking lot of the Fred Meyer in Shoreline, WA.  I remember him being so tiny when I first picked him up and put him to my chest.  He was rather inquisitive (as he always was) and decided to climb up my shirt to perch himself on my shoulder.  I was deathly afraid at the time that I was going to drop him, so I clung on to him for dear life and hightailed it back to my mom’s car.   I remember for the whole car ride home that he was mewling, though he finally settled down once we got him inside the house.  He was interested in everything, but he seemed to be rather at home in the windowsill, and there are so many pictures of him perched up there.   He looks a little startled from the attention, but he was more than happy to stay in that window for long periods of time.  In fact, some of the last pictures I have of him are in that same window.  They’re a lot harder to look at as they were taken mere hours before he was put to sleep, but I know sitting in my window that overlooks the backyard and sitting in the plant window (where his last photo was taken) were his two favorite places to be.  He could survey the wild from them.   Mouse and Cuddles   When we brought Mouse home, I also had a pet dwarf rabbit named Cuddles.  That could have been the source for some serious conflicts, but Mouse was more playful as a kitten than vicious, so he got along with Cuddles relatively well and never hurt him.  Cuddles was usually in a cage anyway, so they didn’t have a lot of interaction, but when we’d let him out and Mouse was in the vicinity, Mouse would follow Cuddles around and sniff him a bunch.   I have a better picture of Mouse and Cuddles together with Mouse’s paw around Cuddles’ body, but I can’t find it.  So, this picture of them together on my bed will have to suffice.   My scanner seems to have crapped out for the morning (not surprising), so I’ll tell a couple more stories that I don’t have pictures for and reconvene on Friday.   Aficionado of Fine Bread Products   One thing we found out early on is that Mouse was a big fan of bread products.  He liked muffins, biscuits, donuts, cornbread, and even sliced bread.  The first time we found this out was when we woke up one morning to find a bag of homemade biscuits torn open on the counter.   What he had done is jumped up onto the three-foot high counter during the night, torn open the bag with his teeth, and proceeded to nibble on all of the contents.  We were dumbfounded and nonplussed at the time, though it’s really rather amusing in retrospect.   The Raccoon Slayer   Mouse has had three encounters with raccoons over the years, and while the last two resulted in abscesses (one of which will be talked about later), the first one found him to be victorious.  I don’t remember the specifics of this one very well, but I’ll set things up as best I can.   We used to have a family of raccoons that lived in our attic and there are pictures of the mother and her babies coming down a tree one afternoon that were taken around the same time as that picture of Mouse and Cuddles up there.  A couple years after those photos were taken, the babies had grown into normal-sized adult raccoons and were often seen in the neighborhood.  At the time, Mouse was still an indoor/outdoor cat, so we hoped that he would be careful around them.   I remember one afternoon in the summer that I had pulled the blinds on the window that looks out towards the neighboring house.  There’s a fence that separates the two properties and right as I opened it, there was a raccoon walking across the top of it.   The raccoon was oblivious to my actions, and it was also oblivious to the fact that Mouse was down on the ground, stalking it.  Mouse seized the opportunity, jumped up to the raccoon with claws bared, dug his claws into the raccoon’s side, and yanked it off the fence.  My eyes went wide as saucers and it’s likely the eyes of the raccoon did as well, as the raccoon bolted after this happened.   Mouse, content at what he’d done, ambled after the raccoon for a moment, but decided that he didn’t feel like chasing the raccoon and sat in the yard.  I went outside immediately after the coast was clear and picked up my buddy.  He was fine and I was so glad.   Part Two on Friday   Time is running short for me and I’ve still got a bunch of stories, so I’ll reconvene on Friday and leave you here with a picture of me and my buddy in much earlier days.   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [A Farewell to Mouse] Posted on March 29th, 2010.   As you may have seen on Facebook or Twitter this weekend, I had to put my 18 1/2 year old cat Mouse to sleep on Saturday.  He couldn’t eat on his own, was really resisting being fed through a dropper, and was losing weight rather rapidly.  He went from 15 pounds to 11 pounds in the matter of a month and had become rather weak from the hunger.   This was the last thing that I ever wanted to do, as I got him as a kitten when I was 11 years old and we had an extremely strong bond.  He was my first pet and he helped me through some really rough times in my life.  I wish he was here to help me through this one, as this is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to deal with.   He was with me through many of the years I had to deal with weight issues, through much of my education and the stresses that caused, and he was always there, ready to snuggle, purr, and give lots of affection.  The weight loss issues are mostly resolved, the education was completed years ago, but I could never get enough of the snuggling, purring, and affection even with everything else being more or less good at this time.   Though I would never have been ready for him to go, I know that he was.  He was still alert and affectionate to his dying day, but he had almost no energy and the cancer on his tongue had grown to a rather large size.  He couldn’t keep his tongue in his mouth any more, as the tip of it hung out of the right side of his mouth for the last few days of his life.  He was drooling pretty heavily after that and he bit his tongue a few hours before he was taken to the vet to end his suffering, which made him drool blood.  I knew it was his time to go before then, but that was the clincher.   I wish I could have done a few more of his favorite things with him before he had to go, as he loved to get loaded on catnip and go crazy, but that would have been a cruel thing to do since his tongue didn’t work properly any more.  I did take him outside to wander around a bit on Wednesday and while he was enjoying sniffing everything, I did see him wobble a few times, which broke my heart.  The cat that used to be the terror of the neighborhood and yanked a raccoon off of a fence was now having a hard time walking.   Having to put him to sleep was absolutely brutal and he was gone so fast.  The vet explained everything and said it would be fast, but I didn’t realize he’d go from alert to gone in the span of two or three seconds.  After the injection was administered, he slumped into my hands and he was gone.  I put him down and doubled over in agony, tears streaming from my eyes.  I spent a long time with him after he’d passed, petting him and saying I was sorry, thanking him for everything, and telling him that I loved him.   I’m not an overly emotional person, though I used to be and this has really stirred everything up.  I’ve cried more than a few times writing this, though I knew I would because it’s so hard to live with the fact that the cat that I grew up with and that gave me unconditional love and emotional support through a good majority of my life is gone now.   Since this has happened, I’ve had little motivation to do anything and I’ve had many a moment where I wanted to give up and forget about doing anything any more.  As you can see, I’ve overcome that – otherwise I wouldn’t be writing a blog post this morning.  I’d say that I have Mouse to thank for that.   I used to look at Mouse as an example of strength and determination, and that example was amplified greatly after he toughed through a month of tongue cancer, when it seems that most cats that get it pass away rather quickly after developing it.  I know that if the tongue cancer hadn’t happened, Mouse would have made it into his 20s without fail.  He was still a strong and healthy cat otherwise, but the cancer was too much for him to overcome.   I’m using this time to grieve his loss and grieve the fact that he’s no longer around to do all those things that endeared him to me – like snuggling, purring, nuzzling his head under my chin, licking my forehead when I was sweaty, tapping my leg for food at the dinner table, and so much more.   I’ll fondly remember all the time we spent snuggling together, especially after I found out about the cancer.  The true last moment for us together was him asleep on my stomach for close to an hour, and he was so still and warm.  He was so tired and he wasn’t purring, but I know he was happy to be with me and to spend some of his final moments with his best friend in the world.  He was mine as well.   On Wednesday, I’ll be celebrating his life and his adventures, but I need more time to reflect on everything, as well as put together a collection of his pictures, videos, and the sound clips that I have of him.  I’ll close this blog out with the one picture of him that was easily his best picture and reflects him as I want to remember him – strong, vigilant, handsome, and out in the wild.   Rest in peace, Mouse.  You meant so much to me and I’m glad you were a part of my life for such a long time. I wish you were here for more adventures and snuggling, but it’s not meant to be.   August 21st, 1991 – March 27th, 2010. Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [For the Love of Finance] Posted on March 26th, 2010.   I made a brief mention of my interest in finances in Wednesday’s blog, but I didn’t really go into any detail.  I plan to do so today!   Now you may be expecting a giant screed like the other “For the Love of…” posts concerning music and fitness, but there’s not as much to talk about in this realm.   Academy of Finance   My first real introduction to the world of finance was in my junior year of high school.  I had some extra time in my school schedule that year as I had passed the tests to get into the Running Start program and take my English classes at community college, so I signed up for the Academy of Finance program.   It was comprised of two classes per semester my junior year and one class per semester my senior year, wherein we learned lots of useful information like how to do our taxes, how to write a check, how to balance a checkbook, how banks and credit cards work, the basics of marketing and accounting, and how to play the stock market (among other things).  We even had a mock stock market game going during the senior year, but I don’t quite remember how my team did.  I think we came in 2nd out of 4 teams.   Finance was a subject that I did well in, as I’ve always had a head for numbers.  I got mostly As and a couple Bs, but after I got out of high school, I didn’t really follow up with it.  I took an overview of Economics class at the community college which I got a 4.0 in, but I was headed towards the hard sciences at that time thanks to an awesome teacher.   The Era of Consumption   I didn’t get my first job until the last half of my senior year, and armed with all this knowledge and a new found income, I decided to blow most of it on CDs and video games.  Well done indeed.   It wasn’t all frivolity, as I did have a savings account that I’d occasionally put money into, but the interest rate was (and still is) negligible.  After a couple of years working at my job in pizza, I had enough money to invest in a Certificate of Deposit when the interest rates were still good (above 5%).   I saved a little more through the pizza job, but I was still spending money like gangbusters on things I didn’t really need.  I never got into debt because of it, but my reserves were a lot lower than they should have been.   Once I got to my job in the educational research field, I was given a 401k that I didn’t have to pay into and they paid 30 cents into it for every dollar I made.  I received a good amount from that arrangement, though I can’t touch that money for another 29+ years unless I want to lose a big chunk of it and get taxed on it as well.   The next 401k was through my current job but through my old contractor, so once the contractors changed, they closed that one up and I had to start yet another 401k plan.  I’ve been thinking about dumping the first two into an annuity through my bank, but there’s another venue that I’m more interested in investing in, and I’ll talk about it in a minute.   As the years have passed, I’ve become more knowledgeable with my savings, though I’ve still spent a lot of money on myself since starting my new job.  The pricy expenditures have changed from CDs and video games (which I still get on occasion) to health and fitness.  It’s definitely a more beneficial expenditure, as it should let me enjoy all those CDs and video games for a longer period of time, but those purchases have still impeded some of my savings goals.   The Era of Frugality   I’d say that I’ve been heading this way for a couple years, but it was Steve Pavlina’s article entitled [10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job] and browsing more of his posts that really kickstarted this whole thing.  It wasn’t the thought of quitting my job that stuck with me (and it’s definitely not now as I have more responsibility and things to do) – it was using my time more efficiently to develop sources of passive income.   I do have a few smaller streams working for me already, but I’ve been hunting for a bigger one.  It didn’t dawn on me until a couple weeks ago when I stumbled on a blog posted on Steve Pavlina’s forums talking about stocks with dividends ([this blog] in particular).  It was something that we’d talked about in the Academy of Finance, but I hadn’t done anything with that knowledge before reading the dividend blog.   I had already been investing in some green energy stocks through [Sharebuilder] when I read that, so I went to see if any of the ones I’d been investing in had them, and sure enough a couple did.  As a side note, I didn’t start investing in the market until reading the aforementioned post by Mr. Pavlina – I’d been thinking about doing it for a long while, but I never got around to it until being inspired to.   Anyway, reading about dividends and yields got me interested in what other green energy stocks had dividends and what their yields were, so I went through the entire list of them (found [here]) and was blown away that there were green energy stocks that had about four times the yield (yearly dividend value divided by the stock price) of the ones I was investing in.   My next stock purchase included a couple shares of that stock with the larger yield, which got me thinking outside of the green energy arena and into the rest of the market.  I was wondering if there were any other stocks with higher yields, and when I ran across stocks that had over three times the yield that the one I had just invested in did, my eyes about bugged out of my head.   After that, I started poring over lists, researching companies, calculating yields and dividend amounts – my head was awash with numbers and ideas.  The path to the what I have been striving for over these past months was right in front of my eyes.   Sacrifices to Be Made   I’m well aware it’s going to take a lot of hard work and frugality to achieve my goal of getting to the point where I have more time for my true passion (see the name of the blog for what that is), but I barely spend anything on myself any more and I’m cutting all of my fitness spending (save for my chiropractic) out.   I’m going to spend quite a few quarters (most dividends pay out every three months) reinvesting said dividends to build up my portfolio more, along with contributing a fair share every month to building my portfolio in a way that spreads the wealth around.   By focusing a good chunk of my job income and all of my smaller streams of income into this larger one, I will make my dream become a reality.  If I can lose 110 pounds, I can do this. Wish me luck!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Streamlining Projects] Posted on March 24th, 2010.   As you may have noticed over the past few months, I’ve been starting up projects like wildfire.  Now that I have these projects somewhat off the ground, it’s time to focus on honing them and building them up more, so I can make them even better/get better results.   Music   I talked about this one in Monday’s blog, but I’m going to do my best to stick with [Philistine on the Sidewalk] as the primary project I work on this year.  I still have a chiptune to finalize for the “A Chip off the Shizz Block, Volume Two” compilation I’m putting out through [Concatenation Records] in a few months and I’ve got a few albums to mix that aren’t PotS-related (though one will have a track from the project).  That said, I won’t be starting any new albums through any of my other projects until 2011 unless things go really well with the project through the spring and summer.   If they do, I may undertake a video game cover album for my [Amaranthine Skies] project in the fall that I was going to do last year at that time.  I’ll worry more about that when the time draws closer.  Things are panning out a lot differently than I thought they would at the end of last year, but that’s usually the case as time transpires and musical pursuits evolve.   Fitness   Thankfully, there’s not a lot left to do in this arena outside of some slight tweaking and continued work.  Once April comes, I’m going to alternate my Thursdays between my [endurance routine] and some form of weightlifting routine – either [working with pyramid sets] in some form or my old hybrid martial arts and weights routine.   It’ll likely be the latter, as I’m going back to weight routines on Mondays when my personal training sessions come to an end.  I’ve considered continuing, but I’m trying to save some serious money (which I’ll talk about later and on Friday) and I’m sure with the diligence I’ve been putting in that I can get to the “finish line” without any more help.  The trainer’s got four more weeks to win me over, but he’s giving me homework and boy howdy, I’ve got enough of that already.   Gaming   I don’t know if gaming is technically a project, but I need to get games played and reviewed if I’m going to further develop my [Nintendo-A-GoGo] site.  The thing is that I’m currently enjoying gaming on the Xbox 360 and reviewing games for the current systems isn’t really what the site is about.   The original plan for the site when I started it in 2000 was to have an Nintendo-themed site with occasional Super Nintendo reviews and reviews for games that are sequels to NES and SNES games.  The only 360 game that I have that fits the bill is “Star Ocean: The Last Hope”, as the first one was on the Super Famicom and I reviewed the 2nd one for the original incarnation of the site.   As it is, I’ll be expanding into Sega Genesis and older portable territory, especially since Game Boy Advance has “River City Ransom EX”.  I still want to focus on NES and SNES titles, but I need to find the time to do so.   I redid my schedule recently, which has retro gaming scheduled for Wednesday nights and Sundays, and current gaming for Saturdays.  I’m going to stick with that for the time being and see how well that works.   Beer   As I enjoy beer on the weekends, it makes sense that I should read about it on the weekends as well!  With Mouse falling ill, I’ve started laying in bed with him for extended periods of time on the weekends, which is the perfect opportunity to catch up on some reading.  I’m still working on my Bruce Lee book, but as soon as I finish it, I’m going to start reading my guide to home brewing and take notes on what I need to do to make some awesome brews.   Webpages   While I’m happy with the layout of most of my websites, the Philistine on the Sidewalk one needs some fine tuning to fit more in line with the ideas I’ve been having concerning the project.  I spent yesterday morning scouring other sites I visit for inspiration and started some preliminary work, though it may be a while before I finish up.  I’m looking at Tuesday mornings and the weekend to work on the site, so I’ll hopefully have a new version of the site functional sometime in early April.   I still have some work to do on the Concatenation Records site that I’ve been putting off for ages and I need to clean up/create sites for my other projects as well, but first things first.  Cleaning up the Philistine on the Sidewalk site is my priority right now, so I’m going to do that and then move on to everything else.   Finances   I’ve been doing some serious financial planning over the past couple of weeks, and I’ve found the stock market to be the only worthwhile arena to accrue any interest these days.  Banks are a place to store money, but any interest that is generated on one of their savings accounts is rather negligible.   My interest was piqued when I stumbled across a blog on dividends.  I read it, something fired in my brain (likely a memory back to my time in the Academy of Finance), and then I started doing some serious research.  I’m running out of time today, but I can follow up with my findings on Friday’s blog.   Conclusion   Now that I’ve got most of my projects more streamlined, any stress I did have about getting things done is dissipating, and I have a feeling I’m going to be getting a lot more done in these areas in the coming months.   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [A Renewed Sense of Purpose] Posted on March 22nd, 2010.   This is a follow-up to Friday’s post, wherein I was talking about changes at my office.  That change is that there’s been a downsizing in my department, wherein it’s gone from two people doing the job to one person.  I was the one they kept in the position since I’ve been there a lot longer and know the job extremely well.   I’m happy that my former co-worker landed in another department through our contractor so she’s able to stay employed, but as long as I’ve been in the job, I’d say it’s been overstaffed for over three years.   When I first got there, it was insanely busy and my co-worker at the time and I were barely able to keep our heads above water.  We had a huge backlog of cases that kept piling up and I remember at one point, we had huge stacks of cases lining up against the wall and we were close to two weeks behind.   I got there in May of 2006 and by September of 2006, they finally approved a couple weeks of overtime for us, though things were beginning to taper off to a manageable level by then.  Then things tapered off some more, and by the beginning of 2007, I’d say things were slow enough that one person could handle the job.  There were certain projects that came up which made things busy enough for two people again, but those were often short-lived and it was back to a slower speed.   Now it could be because I’m inclined to work really fast because of my time in the pizza kitchen, but I’d say that even at a non-frenzied pace, the job is doable by one person.  One thing that’s interesting is that they’re increasing the workload shortly here, so I should really have to be on my toes when I’m at the office – that suits me fine.   There’s another key area of my life where I notice that I have a renewed sense of purpose thanks to things that have occurred recently, so I’ll tell you about it too!   Music   This has been a big one that kind of snuck up on me, as my Philistine on the Sidewalk project has taken over my musical output this year.  I’ve finished eight songs for the project so far, totaling a little over 78 minutes worth of material, giving me almost a completely full CD’s worth of tunes in a little over two months.   I have demos for at least a few more tracks and ideas for so many more, not to mention ideas for albums in various formats.  I’ve been getting a rather positive response from everyone that’s been kind enough to comment on the output.  I’m also able to listen to these songs multiple times, which I have a hard time doing with a lot of my previous work.   What’s surprising is that with all the disparate elements that I’m using in the project, a sound is really starting to come together.  I haven’t tried streamlining the sound at all, but I keep running into various elements that work really well together.   I can also find or record a loop of something and go to town building at least a five-minute improvisational track off of it.  Working rather fast with this project is something I can also do, as I’ve put together two of the songs in under six hours thanks to participating in Punchfest.   With all of that in mind, I’m supposed to be working on a Concrete Mutant album right now.  I’ve done little work on it outside of track arrangement, some precursory drum programming and a little guitar riffing, which shouldn’t be a surprise given the previous four paragraphs.   I still want to make music for my other projects, but with all the enjoyment I’m getting out of Philistine on the Sidewalk right now, it seems kind of pointless to stress out about getting an album done for another project.  I’m the only one that’s pressuring myself to do so, so why suffer the grief?   I’m not going to any more, so I’m putting all of my other projects on the back burner until I feel I’m ready to bring them out again.  I don’t want to disband Amaranthine Skies, Concrete Mutant, or Mystic Nova as they have sounds that I still want to explore, but I’m not going to force myself to make music for one project over another because I feel I have to.   With that said, I’m going to start working on the first EP for Philistine on the Sidewalk in the very near future, then a full-length album which will feature the leadoff track from the EP on it.  The EP and the album are going to be full of spacey video game tunes, so hopefully I’ll do them justice.   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Changes in Life] Posted on March 19th, 2010.   I’ve noticed that there have been a lot of changes going on in my life this month – some for the better, some for the worse, and some of which I feel will have a more positive effect in the future than they have immediately.   It could have something to do with Spring right around the corner and it being the season of renewal, but my interest lies more in all the things happening at once rather than when they’re happening.   The Better   While it’s due to my own diligence, dropping below 200 pounds and hopefully staying below that weight by the end of the month is something that’s had a profound effect on me.  Perhaps it’s lessened a bit by the fact that I took so long with it (close to four years), but losing over 100 pounds is likely my biggest achievement and the only other person I know that did so is my cousin Cathy.   I don’t want to make light of her choice to do so, but she went for one of the gastric bypass surgery options, whereas I changed my dietary habits and worked out like a maniac.  Granted, she was a lot more overweight than I was and she’s older, so the more immediate option was likely a better choice in her case.   Another positive in this month was my friend Eric getting married and I’ve never seen him happier.  I do remember a time not too long after his break-up with an old girlfriend when we were cruising the streets of Seattle and decried the institution of marriage with vulgarities and a fist bump, though he’s definitely had a change of heart as he’s found the right woman for him.   As for me, that may be one of the things in my life that likely won’t change for some time.  I’m not opposed to marriage for other folks, but I know that it (along with dating) is not something that’s going to fit into my life in the foreseeable future.   I’m away from home anywhere from 10-12 hours a day during the week and my weekends are usually spent working on my own projects, or occasionally with friends who knew me before I got on this ultra-productive streak.  There’s no time to create a new relationship with all the other creating I’m doing otherwise.   Speaking of work, there have been some changes going on there that have been beneficial to my attitudes and latitudes, but I’ll talk more about that on Monday.   The Worse   Obviously, Mouse being on his way to his final resting place has torn at me quite a bit this month.  It’s a cruel way for a cat that loves to eat to go out, though I know he’s had a long and full life.  I looked it up and 18 1/2 cat years is equivalent to 90 people years, so he’s done a lot better than most do.  He’s otherwise healthy, which is probably how he’s been able to endure for so long.   I hope he’ll keep hanging on for a while to come, but if it gets to the point where he needs a feeding tube to eat, that’ll likely be the time for him to go, as that would be quite the reduction in his quality of life.   Things with Future Positive Effects   I think losing Ting as my personal trainer may be a positive, as it’s likely to get me off of this personal training merry-go-round once and for all.  I’ve learned so much from most of the trainers I’ve had over the years and I’ve got enough knowledge and willpower to formulate and execute my own training regime.  If you’ve been following the blog for a while, you know I’ve already done a couple – one for [weights] and one for [cardio].   I also see it as a positive as that’s a good chunk of change that’s going to come back into my realm and I’ve already thoroughly planned on how I’m going to invest it in my future.  I’d write more about it, but again I’m running out of time and I’d like to research more before I go spouting off.   Stop It!   That said, I think I’ve had my fill of change for this month and I hope that I can at least coast into April before anything else changes significantly.   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Mid-March Madness] Posted on March 17th, 2010.   Happy St. Patty’s Day everyone!  I’m kind of short on time this morning, so I’m going to give a rundown of how things are coming along for this month – some of which I outlined in Beware the Projects of March.   Mouse   This is part of the reason I’m short on time this morning, as I spent a good 45 minutes this morning laying in bed snuggling with him.  Before he got tongue cancer, that number would be in the 10-15 minute range, but I’m trying to spend as much quality time with him as I can before it’s his time to go.   It’s one of the main reasons I haven’t done as much as I’d like this month, but projects can wait in this situation ’ spending time with the cat that’s been with me since I was 11 is easily more important.  I already talked about laying in bed with him and reading for an hour and a half on Saturday, and I’m hoping to repeat that this weekend as well.   A Chip off the Shizz Block, Volume Two   It’s started!  Other than that, there’s not much to say.  I did find an old chiptune that was almost completed on my laptop (only needs mixing), so I’ll clean that up and go with it.  I haven’t received anything from anyone else yet.  So far, so good I guess!   New Concrete Mutant Album (Ruination)   Outside of some preliminary work on the album (track order, a bit of drum programming and riff writing), I’ve done very little.  I actually had a decent-sized post started about the momentum that’s building with the Philistine on the Sidewalk project and how I was having a hard time finding inspiration to work on this project, but after I wrote it, I started thinking more about Ruination and how and when I could work with it.   I’m going to start on it this weekend in earnest, and I’ll try to at least get all the songs named and a few tracks more fleshed out.  I’ve had (and still have) a few too many social engagements this month to put as much time into it as I can, so I have a feeling that I’ll be engaging hermit mode in April and working like a dog to get this album done.   Creating Project Websites   Outside of getting the banner done for the Concrete Mutant site, I’ve done nothing on this.  In theory, it shouldn’t take too long to get these going, as the layout for them will basically be the same as this blog and they’ll all have the same pages (news, albums, mp3s, etc.) between them, so it’s only a matter of sitting down and getting to them.   Mastering a Cyanidic Rapture Album   I haven’t touched this since talking about it, but there are still a couple albums to come out on Concatenation Records before it has any sense of urgency to it.  I seem to think I work better under pressure, though I’m not sure that’s the case any more considering my Philistine on the Sidewalk project.   Then again, the last song recorded for Philistine on the Sidewalk was done in six hours and it came out well and was well-received, so it depends on the circumstances.   Remastering Two Zio and TEH LOLZ Albums   I’m sure Zio and his LOL buddies will be happy to know that I am working on this actively.  It’s currently my bus project, which means I’ve been dedicating my commuting time to it.  I’ve got a rough mix of Chemicaldyne done and I’m a little over half way through tweaking the mix of Subfusion: Ice Light Army.   I’m hoping to finish it up this week and get a better mix of both going on the home monitors, since there’s only so much I can do on a laptop with a pair of earbuds.   One Week On, One Week Off   I’m thoroughly convinced this only works if your job has flexible hours.  Mine doesn’t at the time, so I’m going to go back to the usual way of doing things for now.  That being blogging on MWF, doing something music-related T&Th, and getting whatever I can knocked out on the weekend.   I do have my Wednesday nights back now that I’m closer to my weight goal and don’t have to do four nights a week in the gym, but those go by way too fast and I’m finding that I like to use them to catch up on sleep.  Ah well.   Personal Training   I’m on my 8th personal trainer now and we’ve got five sessions left.  I can tell he’s a lot more standard a trainer than Ting was, and it seems like he’s going to try to run me through the meal plan and get me on the gym-endorsed supplements.  Been there, done that, don’t need to do it again.   I’m really close to my goal and I know how to get there and tweak it as need be, so I’ll finish up my sessions and call it a day.  He wants to work with me through June and wanted to get together twice a week, but that’s not happening.  I decided this after he ran me through a bunch of plyometric drills, which I’ve done with trainers and on my own a bunch of times before.  He’s got five weeks to bring something new to the table, so we’ll see.   Another thing that’s funny is that he’s given me a goal of losing 1.25 pounds per week starting at the 204 mark, even after telling him on Monday that I was carrying weekend weight and would drop it by the next time we got together.  He set a goal of 185 to end up in June, so I guess I’m already five weeks ahead of the curve!   That said, if I can make it to 185 by April 20th (the last session), that would be awesome.   The Office Job   Things have been changing fairly rapidly around the office, most likely for the better.  I’ll have more to say about it on Monday, since that’s when things are really going to pick up.   You’re Out of Touch, I’m Out of Time   I’m making a decent go of things so far this month, as I’ve got some other non-music projects I’m working on that I didn’t have time to write about, and Philistine on the Sidewalk is still going strong, so that’s good.  Until next time!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Identifying and Conquering Weight Loss Setbacks] Posted on March 15th, 2010.   As I wrote in my Status Report, I’ve jumped up to 204.4 today after being at an all-time low of 197.6 on Friday.  Gaining seven pounds in a weekend isn’t unprecedented for me and I’ve jumped eight pounds before, but it goes away quickly with a little diligence and perseverance.   This is how I do it!   Identify   It’s obvious to me what I did wrong.  I ate way too much food that the calories couldn’t be accounted for, I drank way more beer than I normally do, and I didn’t eat at the proper intervals, which led to my metabolism slowing down this weekend and the weight sticking around.   Friday night was pizza and a normal amount of beer, Saturday was shrimp pasta and a heightened level of beer, and Sunday was a trip to Maritime for a grinder, a salad, and beer, which I topped off at home with a marathon of beer.  I had a lot of tasty food and a lot of tasty beer this weekend, but I’m paying for it today.   This tells me that I need to stick with my weekly routine on the weekends, even though I’ll have to shift my dietary schedule to when I get up.  I’ve been slacking off and getting up at various times on the weekends lately, though I should go back to my 5:30 AM rising time, which would keep me pretty well on schedule.  That, and I might actually get more done on the weekends again.   Conquer   Getting back below 200 shouldn’t be too hard, but it will take a couple of days.  The first thing I need to do is flush out my body.  Drinking about double the amount of water I normally do will help flush out the excess sodium that’s in my system, and it’ll loosen up the insides.  It also seems to be waking up some dormant alcohol in my stomach, but I’ll be alright once I get some coffee in me.   As for the water, I’ve already put away over a quart this morning in the hour or so that I’ve been out of bed, and I’ll match that with coffee before I go to work.  I’ll also have some more water on top of it and get back on my food schedule, which is like this:   • 5:45 AM – Fiber Plus bar • 7:45 AM – Protein drink • 10:30 AM – One half of a protein bar • 1:30 PM – Lunch (either a salad or half a sandwich) • 4:15 PM – The other half of a protein bar • Whenever I get home – A small dinner   That is the food schedule that I’ve stuck to for quite some time and it’s been essential for helping me drop the weight.  The other essential part has been exercise.  I do enjoy weight lifting and having more muscle helps burn more fat, but cardio is what really does the trick in getting the excess weight off.   There are days where cardio doesn’t really do much to my weight, but that can be attributed to what’s been eaten after the cardio sessions.  I can usually tell that my stomach has shrunk after a good cardio session, even if it’s just a little bit.  Every little bit of progress is great though, as that’s a little bit closer to making it to my goal.   Back Under 200   If everything goes according to plan, I should be back in the 190s by Wednesday or Thursday and definitely by Friday.  I’ll have to be diligent with my diet this weekend, which might be difficult as I have plans both days, but I will do my best!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Breaking the 200 Pound Barrier] Posted on March 12th, 2010.   If you’ve been following my Status Reports on previous blog posts, you’ll see that I’ve made it down below 200 pounds on multiple occasions, with the first big breakthrough coming two days ago when I hit 198.2.   Since then, I’ve made it to 197.6 and I keep getting closer to 190, which is my current goal.  I have a feeling I might want to go lower once I get there, but I’m not going to worry about that right now.  Let me take you back to when it all began.   The Backstory   When I first started at the gym in May of 2006, I was 307.5 pounds and my fitness level was rather shoddy.  I could lift a decent amount thanks to all the years I’d worked with weights, but my cardiovascular ability was negligible and I had a ridiculously high amount of body fat.   After the initial assessment, I started working with a personal trainer that got my diet going in the right direction and I would spend at least two hours a night at the gym after work (one hour of weights, one hour of cardio) and an hour with the personal trainer on Fridays.  The weight dropped off pretty fast that first year, as I lost about 60 pounds by the beginning of 2007.   I slowed down in the gym after that, but still managed to drop around fifteen pounds per year since then.  I was 235 in 2008, 215 in 2009, and now below 200 in 2010.  I’m not waiting until 2011 to hit 190, because I’m going full speed ahead since rediscovering my fitness goals on January 20th.  I’ve dropped 12.5 pounds in about seven weeks, which is pretty great for being so close to my goal!   Crossing 200   The first time I saw a number on the scale that was below 200 was on Friday, March 5th and I about jumped backwards off of my scale in excitement.  I had barely crossed it at 199.8, but seeing myself at a weight that I likely haven’t been in close to 20 years was amazing.  I went from seeing 3XX.X on the scale at the beginning to currently seeing 1XX.X, and that’s an incredible feeling.   It was a great payoff for the four year journey in fitness that I’ve worked my way through.  It also made me think back to the last time when I was that weight. I don’t remember specifically, but I want to say I was around 12-13 years old at the time.  I remember that I was 240 when I hit my current height of 6 feet, 2 inches at the age of 15, so that seems right.   It’s not like the weight gain all happened at once, as I started putting on extra weight when I around the age of 6.  The weight gain wasn’t necessarily due to a lack of physical activity – it was mostly due to growing fast and eating faster.   I knew nothing about proper nutrition and my folks always wanted me to be part of the “clean plate club”, so I obliged.  I still am, but I make sure to take smaller plates with much healthier food resting atop them.  I also don’t mess around when it comes to exercise, as my posts on my endurance routine and working with pyramid sets will attest.   Why I Did It   It’s pretty simple, really – I want to live a long and healthy life, so I need to get myself in the proper shape to do so.  I’ve cleaned up my diet and tuned up my physicality to a level I’ve never achieved before, but there’s still some room for improvement as I’ve still got a few areas that jiggle.   I’m not going to get as high as I can go because I refuse to give up beer on the weekends, but that’s a small price to pay for the lovely taste of beer.  The whole beer thing may be a moot point, as I tend to get my weekend weight off pretty fast these days – usually by Tuesday or Wednesday.   I also did it to prove that I could.  I don’t recall anyone around me saying that I couldn’t do it, but I wanted to prove it to myself.  All of my previous attempts to lose weight were fairly halfhearted and I wanted to do better this time around.  Before these last four years, I’d exercise for a while and get my weight down some, then I’d give up on it and the weight would come right back.   I had no idea that fitness was a lifestyle choice that you make for yourself, rather than something you do every once in a while because you feel you should.  Once you decide to make it a lifestyle choice, it involves straightening up your diet, figuring out a fitness routine for yourself that you’ll stick with, deciding on what your physical goals are and how you’re going to achieve them.   It’s a lot to take in and there are many variables along the way that can interfere with getting there – reaching a plateau will require a reassessment of the way you work out, getting injured can halt progress completely and will require even more effort to attain your goal once you’re healed, and every once in a while a family emergency will pop up and put a halt to your routine as well as take you out of fitness mindset due to having something more important to think about than yourself.   That said, all obstacles can be overcome with a true determination to achieve your goals.  It make take quite some time, but you’ll get there.   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [One More Trainer Down] Posted on March 10th, 2010.   I was sitting at the office yesterday morning doing my usual work and I got a call on my cell phone.  I don’t usually answer it at work, but I recognized the number – it was the number of the gym I work out at.  The first thing that popped into my head is “oh, my trainer quit and now I’ve got a new one”.  I was right on the money.   I couldn’t help but chuckle a bit when talking with the fitness director, as this is the 5th trainer that I’ve worked with that walked from the job without notice (that I know of).  At least one of them had the decency to call me and let me know that he’d gotten a job elsewhere that served his talents better.   It makes me wonder if I was too much of a challenge for him, as I’d take everything he threw at me, push through it (even though some of it was rather hard), and still have a little energy left over when I was done.  He never failed to tell me that I was by far his hardest working client and that he had to prepare for me.   In any event, he was fun to train with the eight times (I think) we got together and worked out.  He was also a good teacher, likely due to his being in the personal training field for over 10 years.   Things I Learned from Ting   I think the most important thing I learned from Ting was from the smallest question that I asked him right after the first time we worked out.  I inquired as to whether doing the elliptical or the treadmill would be better for cardio after our workout.  He pointed me towards the treadmill and talked about how running was a natural instinct and how it toned a person up more efficiently.   That little tidbit struck a light in my head and led to my current endurance routine that I’ve been pushing myself with as of late.  I’ve been trying to get rid of my stomach for years and these routines have been whittling it away slowly but surely.   The other thing that left an impression was talking about the theories behind and engaging in pyramid workouts.  It hadn’t occurred to me before to climb all the way up, then all the way back down the pyramid the same way.  Once he planted the idea, it made perfect sense.  It’s turned out to be a good way to increase my tone and strength levels, which is what I’m going for over bulk.   Who’s Next?   The fitness director told me I’ll be working with a guy named Carl, who was the strength and conditioning coach for the football team at Western Washington University.  I met him last night and he seems like a good guy.  I’m sure I’ll learn some useful fitness strategies from him, though I hope he stays at the gym through the duration of my remaining sessions.   I don’t imagine that I’ll need to renew my personal training sessions at this point unless I really like the guy and get a lot of benefit from his help.  I say this because I’m less than 10 pounds from my final goal (at the moment) and know how to cut weight and build muscle and strength in a multitude of ways.   That said, I’m going in with an open mind (I always do) and hoping to get put through the wringer a few more times!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [The Wedding of Eric and Breanna] Posted on March 8th, 2010.   On Saturday, I attended my good friend Eric’s wedding at the Renton Community Center in Renton, WA and had an excellent time!  It was great to be able to go there and support the two of them on their special day and their wedding reminded me of my good friend Steve and Bridget’s wedding in that it was about 10% wedding, 90% party.   I got a ride there from my friend Mark, who came down from Canada to attend and crash at my place after the wedding.  He got held up at the border for three hours when the wait was supposed to be 70 minutes, so he arrived at 4:15 PM instead of the figured 2:00 or 3:00 PM.  We exchanged pleasantries, then hopped in his car and headed for the wedding.  We hit all the usual topics on the ride – music, fitness, and gaming.   We almost made it there without difficulty, but we overshot the final turn by a few blocks.  We turned around and came back, arriving at the wedding at 5:10 PM or so.  The wedding didn’t get underway until 6:20 PM or so, so we arrived in plenty of time.  The both of us talked with Eric when we arrived, talked with his cousin Andy for a little bit, and then made our way outside where our friend George was taking photos for the wedding.   After talking with George for a minute or two, our friends Alex, Dan, Chris, and Kevin danced their way on over and we got to talking for a while before heading inside.   WCS Reunited   After more conversation and shenanigans, our friends Matt and Josh showed up, which almost reassembled our original group that got together one fateful day in May of 2005, save for our friend Mike up in Alaska.   That original group being George (he hosted at his house), Eric (he gave me a ride home that night and began a great friendship), Alex and Dan (the virtuoso brothers), Josh (he likes Cheez-Its), Mark (the shredmaster), Mike, and myself.  It’s been a while since Mike has been to Seattle, but he made it to [MAGFest 8], so at least I’ve seen him fairly recently.   What happened is that we all got together to listen to a monthly video game music cover competition ([Dwelling of Duels], which Mike ran at the time) and were inspired to do a cover of “I Am the Wind” from the Castlevania: Symphony of the Night soundtrack.  The resulting song was entitled [We Are the Wind], and it was something of an epic nature that would be recreated during karaoke later on in the evening.   I mentioned Matt, and while he wasn’t there for the first one, he was there for the 2nd time we all go together in July of 2005 (which Mike was missing from) and we all covered “Ninja Rap” by Vanilla Ice from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Secret of the Ooze movie.  We called it [In Loving Memory of Crimson] (Crimson is our friend Mike’s nickname) and it honestly sounds better than the original.   There’s also video footage of this incident that has yet to see the light of day (save for at a few gatherings), though I’d be rather unrecognizable as I was over 300 pounds back then.  That, and I was wearing the Michelangelo bandana that I talked about in [this article]. The art of disguise definitely helps with not incriminating oneself.   In any event, it was great to have the gang back together (mostly) for such a special occasion as this, as now George and Eric are the married men of our group.   The Ceremony   As I mentioned, it started at about 6:20 PM and was over by 6:35 PM.  Eric and Breanna’s friend and co-worker Alicia presided over the ceremony and it was a very short and nice affair.  It was a pretty standard ceremony with the entering of the groom, then the groomsmen & bridesmaids, then the bride herself.  Alicia presided over the ceremony, Eric & Breanna said their vows, they exchanged rings, kissed, then exited.   I think having the wedding ceremony in the same place as the reception kept the mood lively and the proceedings moving along.  It was also nice to make out strains of certain Final Fantasy pieces that George recreated specifically for their wedding.  Unfortunately, it was turned down pretty low so I couldn’t hear much of it.  Hopefully George will have it posted online somewhere soon.   A Diet of Decadence   Oh man, the idea to have an all-you-can-eat taco bar was a great one that absolutely destroyed my weight goals.  I could have shown some restraint, but I only party every once in a while and I can get it off with getting my diet back to normal and pounding it out in the gym this week.   There was also a pony keg of Henry Weinhard’s Hefeweizen that I worked on all night and an absolutely decadent three-tier cake.  The cake’s top two tiers were a lemon cake with blueberry filling and marble frosting, and it was delicious.  I didn’t have any of the bottom layer, which was chocolate with marble frosting.   Time to Dance It Off   During and after all that food and beer, there was much dancing that was done – mostly by the WCS crew.  We danced it off to a plethora of tunes with great beats, incorporating such great moves as the gotcha, the t-rex, the scoop, the scoop launcher, as well as some rave, popping, and cossack dancing.  We don’t worry about formal dance moves, we just go for it.   The festivities started with “Let’s Dance” by David Bowie and the booty-shakin’ beats were pretty much non-stop from there on out.  They had a homemade playlist and I requested “Ready or Not” by Herbie Hancock, which got all of us WCS gentlemen out on the floor and dancing it off for its seven-minute duration.  Epic times indeed.   Karaoke Crazy   There was some karaoke later in the evening, but the most memorable part of it was when Eric and Alex recreated their duet from “We Are the Wind” and the rest of us were waiting in the wings to join in on the final chorus at the end.  They sang over the top of the original, so there was no liquid evil guitar solo, but it was mostly identical to the original.  Eric and Alex have become better singers, George didn’t hit his monster high note and I sang instead of roared my part, but otherwise it was the same.   A Fond Farewell   Festivities wound down around 10:30 PM, so we got some more cake for the road and said our goodbyes to the new bride and groom in the reception hall, then to each other in the parking lot.  We were all together for around five hours, but they were very memorable and I hope we can all get together again in the near future.   Borderlands Before You Go-Go?   After Mark and I got back from the reception, we crashed out and then when we woke up the next morning, we hit up Borderlands on the Xbox 360 for a little while.  I was talking up the game quite a bit on the car ride down to the wedding and we had about 45 minutes before Mark had to take off for Canada, so we went through the introductory stages of the game and had a good time before he left.   All in all, it was a great time and I wish Eric and Breanna an outstanding life together!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Bachelor Party Shenanigans] Posted on March 5th, 2010.   After Wednesday’s post, I need to lighten things up.  This is the post that I was originally going to write and with my friend’s wedding occurring tomorrow, I should write it now!   Previous Experiences   I’ve married off four of my friends so far, but only two have had bachelor parties.  The first of which was a barbecue that the bachelor hosted and the bachelorette was there, so it wasn’t a true bachelor party.  It certainly had the rest of the elements, though – copious amounts of food, alcohol, unhealthy ideas (fried cheese sticks on a hamburger because we were out of cheese), and dancing it off on a tree stump.  What a night.   In any event, this last weekend was my friend Eric’s bachelor party and this time it was a true bachelor party – not a bachelorette in sight.  The night of the party started and ended with four people, though it rose to nine of us at its apex.  We all turned things up to eleven and had a wild time.   Elysian Brewery   This is where the night officially began and I began it with a pint of the Immortal IPA while the conversations also began.  I remember lots of gaming talk, some UFC talk, and a riveting discussion about the necessary evil of zoos and aquariums – though that happened much later while we were there, after having more IPAs (one more Immortal and two that I think were called Resurrection) and a tremendous piece of pork schnitzel.  Really, I can’t say enough good things about it!   We were also surprised at the disappearance of the bachelor for an extended period of time, thinking that he may have already needed to pray to the Porcelain God.  Thankfully we were mistaken, as he had run into an old MMA training buddy at the bar that had bought him an especially tasty tripel (The Trip V) that he couldn’t stop talking about.   The Garage   After drinking, eating, and talking a bunch, we half-fumbled our way over to The Garage to play pool and bowl.  Conversations were giving way to the intensity of pool games and I somehow managed to win three games in a row!  I guess playing three-person pool is more my forte than the one-on-one variety.   I don’t know how Eric was doing with the pool as I was kind of focused on the game and was continuing to get beered up on Manny’s Pale Ale, consuming two pints worth.  I don’t imagine that the Irish Car Bomb that I bought him (and he slammed) helped his skills any.  He wanted a Jägerbomb, but The Garage doesn’t carry any energy drinks, so the waitress helped us improvise.   After more games of pool and more drinks for all of us, we got a hit on the electronic pager that our bowling lane downstairs was ready.  I had to square up my tab first, then I rented some shoes and made it downstairs.  My bowling consisted of a strike, a spare, and countless gutterballs – my pool finesse did not translate to bowling.  Most of the other partygoers were doing better than I was, but I had close to a gallon of beer in my system and I ain’t the best bowler when I’m sober either.   Right around this point is where I reached the gallon mark and the bachelor finally got religious a few times.  We left shortly thereafter to crash at Leif’s place, who lives fairly close to The Garage.  I had my arm around Eric to make sure he got to our destination alright, as he wasn’t exactly on stable legs.  It’s a wonder that I was.   The Night   We made it back to Leif’s and crashed about two in the morning.  I vaguely remember taking off my Jesu hoodie, getting things out of my pockets, and sliding into a sleeping bag that was laid out on some cushions on the floor.   I woke up at a quarter to five to go to the bathroom, which I managed to do and wash my hands without difficulty.  However, I crashed out on the cold tile floor shortly thereafter because it was so nice and cool.  I’m not sure how long I was there, but I eventually figured out that I should go back to the sleeping bag.   The next time I woke up was around nine o’clock.  While I was doing better, I still wasn’t feeling great.  I used the bathroom again and made it back to the sleeping bag this time without a floor nap.  I had the good fortune of being placed right in front of a slightly-opened door and the cool Seattle morning air felt so good on my face and arms at that time.  It eventually got a little too cold, so I tucked back in the sleeping bag and passed out again.   The Next Morning   A quarter after eleven in the morning was rising time for the zombies, and the bachelor was having a harder time of things than I was.  He had woken up in the middle of the night (around seven in the morning) with an absolutely splitting headache and was still feeling the effects of it.   He was hungry though, so we decided to go to the Kingfish Café for breakfast and that’s where I failed.  I was drinking coffee and water like it was going out of style, but I could barely eat any of my food – a shame, because what I did eat was rather tasty.  I’d like to go there again sometime when I can actually digest food properly.   After eating, we made it back to the apartment just in time for Breanna (the bachelorette who had her own wild party that night) to pick up Eric and myself.  Eric had originally planned to drive down to the airport, but he still wasn’t confident enough in his ability to drive to do so.  The reason we had to go to the airport was to pick up one of the wedding guests flying in early to check out Seattle and hang out with some of our other friends.   A Wild Shizzie Appears!   We got to the airport about half an hour or so before our friend Chris arrived, so the three of us sat in the cell phone waiting lot and made small talk by sharing stories of the respective bachelor and bachelorette parties.  He eventually landed, so we went to the airport parking garage, spiraled up long enough to potentially induce nausea and found a parking spot!   We met Chris in the airport baggage claim and Eric and I gave him big hugs.  We decided to head to get some food and Chris had never been to Jack in the Box before, so we went there.  I had an appetite by then, so I got their bacon bacon cheeseburger (which was lacking in the bacon department) and the curly fries (which were tasty).  Too bad my appetite wasn’t around a couple hours earlier!   We ate and Breanna drove the three of us back to Eric’s car (which was still out in front of Leif’s place), then we all decided to head to the Goodwill on Dearborn and Corwin to look for some good deals on games.   Misadventures in SoDo   Unfortunately, Eric didn’t know how to get there from Capitol Hill and I was thinking it was somewhere else, so we took a long drive down 4th Ave. S. until we said the hell with it and headed north on I-5.  Thankfully, we’d gone further than the Dearborn exit, so we hopped off there and made it to the Goodwill shortly thereafter.  Now that I know where it is, I’ll easily be able to find it again.   Goodwill Gracious   I can say that I’ll definitely want to find it again, because the Goodwill on Dearborn and Corwin is absolutely huge.  We found some good deals on various things, but the luckiest find was found after deciding to dig out a cubby where some games had been (and Eric had picked up).   There was something in there blocking more games and I found an interesting looking one called Sorcerer’s Kingdom for the Sega Genesis.  I gave it to Eric and he said he thought it was a shooter, but he’d call his cousin Andy to confirm.  I told him that if it was a shooter, he could keep it.  We found out later that it was a 3rd person action RPG and he knows that I really like those, so he gave it back to me.  Best thing – it only cost 99 cents!   I have played the game since and I like it so far – it’s a little rough around the edges and the music is decidedly average, but the gameplay is rather interesting.  Unlike most action RPGs, you don’t hack and slash – you run around until you encounter an enemy, then it goes into a tactical battle mode.  You have to be really careful at the beginning until you can boost your defense, because it’s ridiculously easy to die before you do.  If I get any deeper with the review, I’ll be overlapping with [Nintendo-A-GoGo], but I’m enjoying it so far.   I also found some interesting CDs there, including a disc of Tomaso Albinoni’s adagios and a sealed CD on how to make pants.  So random, I love it.  Eric found a GI Joe collector case full of GI Joe figures in various shape for $5.99, which he can probably split up and make some decent bank on.   Goodwill Gracious, Part Two   Thinking that going to one Goodwill wasn’t enough, we went to another one that’s close to my place.  Eric was giving me a ride home, so we figured why not?  We weren’t as successful there, but I did manage to find a disc full of DOS games for $2 and two sealed Wesley Willis CDs for $3 a piece.   After we checked out, we were originally talking about going to a Value Village even closer to my place, but Eric was unsurprisingly getting rather tired, so he dropped me off at home and I proceeded to apply the hair of the dog.   24 Hours of Wild and Crazy Times!   From beginning to end, this was a fun adventure.  It wasn’t balls-to-the-wall excitement every second, but it was definitely enjoyable and memorable.  I’m sure it was probably more memorable for tomorrow’s groom, but with those prayers that he said, maybe not so much.   He had another bachelor party last night that was more of a gaming party, but I couldn’t make it to that one ’ my schedule pretty much destroys my weeknights and he’s a long bus ride away from the office and home.  I’m sure he and everyone else had a blast!   Like I mentioned, the wedding is tomorrow night and I’m sure I’ll have another tale to tell about it!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Preparing to Lose an Old Friend] Posted on March 3rd, 2010.   In Friday’s blog, [Old Goals Fulfilled and Unfulfilled], I talked about my cat Mouse, who recently turned 18 and a half.  I also mentioned his nerve issues and his slobbering.  While the nerve issues are nothing serious, the slobbering is.   It turns out that he has cancer on his tongue and it was preventing him from properly taking in food.  He could still eat and drink, but doing so caused the slobbering due to his tongue becoming inflamed.  He was put on a special watered-down canned food and was having an easier time eating that, but he still needed to go to the vet for surgery.   The surgery was yesterday, and while they were able to remove some of the cancer, they couldn’t get all of it because it encompasses most of the left side and the entire back of his tongue.  He was mostly unable to eat last night (save for a bite of tilapia that I gave him) and he’s been pacing around because of it.  I’m guessing that his tongue is still in pain from the surgery and he should be able to eat with more frequency sometime soon.   On the bright side, he still seems spry as he’s jumped up on to my bed without any issue and got down fine as well.  His purr sounds better than it did before the surgery and he’s still receptive to affection (thus the purring).  He’s also alert and I’m sure frustrated that he can’t eat, because he almost took my finger off when I gave him that bite of fish last night.  Thankfully, he didn’t break the skin.   Another bright point is that the vet said that the cancer hadn’t spread to any other part of his body, which will likely give him more time.  That said, I know that it’s just a matter of time before he passes, but the vet has yet to give an estimate as to how much longer.  He could make it to 19 and beyond, or he might not see the end of the month.  That’s what makes it so hard, because before this happened, he was really getting up there in years, but he was still in good shape.   This has been tough for me not only because I’ve had him since I was 11, but because he’s the most friendly and affable cat that I’ve ever encountered, and he’s been an outstanding companion for all of these years.  I know he can’t stay around forever and I’ve got tons of great pictures, a few sound recordings, some short camera movies and lots of enjoyable memories that will live on with me, but not having him around to beg for bites of food, to sit on my lap, or to jump up on my bed and snuggle with me while I’m sleeping (like he did this morning) is going to be rather difficult to cope with for quite some time.   However, he’s not gone yet, so I’m going to do everything I can to make the last part of his life as enjoyable as possible.  I only hope I don’t have to write his farewell post for quite some time.   Update: He’s already been to his bowl twice this morning to eat some of his canned food (which he did), so that’s definitely a good sign.   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Beware the Projects of March] Posted on March 1st, 2010.   Perhaps that title’s a little more ominous than it needs to be, but this month is looking a bit cluttered and massive.  A few of the projects starting up this month are going to span longer than its duration, but there’s still going to be a lot of work going into things in a somewhat shortened amount of time.   A Chip off the Shizz Block, Volume Two   Today marks the beginning of the next volume of the chiptune compilation that was brought to me last year by [Wizwars] at [The Shizz] to help organize and distribute through [Concatenation Records].  The first volume had some hurdles to overcome in being released, but those hurdles were worth jumping, as the compilation is well-lauded by those that have heard it.   This also gives me a chance to fire up the Mystic Nova project and put together a chiptune, which is something I haven’t done in a while.  I already have quite a bit of music on my plate for this month, but the deadline for song submission isn’t until the end of May, so I have time to get things together.   I’ll be announcing the compilation officially over at The Shizz later today, so I’m looking forward to see who signs up!   New Concrete Mutant Album (Ruination)   This is an album that I’ve been wanting to do since relauching the Concrete Mutant project back in July of 2009.  I’ve been doing songs on compilations to hone the sound of the project in order to get one that I’m happy with, and I was able to do so with the last song I did for the project at the end of last year.  I may still need to tweak the bass sound a bit before recording, but that’s the only part of the sound that I’m not 100% on yet.   In any event, the album will be called “Ruination” and I already have the artwork and preliminary drum beats done for the songs.  This will be one of the last albums I already have parts of the music created for, as all of my old song ideas will be collected from all of my project folders and placed into the [Philistine on the Sidewalk] directory – and yes, that is another project for this month.  Of course, that won’t take more than a couple hours, so I’m not too worried there.   I’m not sure when I’m planning on getting the album done, but I’d like to get all the music done by the end of April if at all possible.  I’ll be working on this one while commuting to and from work, so that should speed things up.  Concrete Mutant isn’t all that complex a project, so it should be doable.   Creating Project Websites   In launching a new album under my Concrete Mutant project, it would be a good idea to have a website that lets people know how things are coming along with the album, when the album will be ready, and links to the Concatenation Records site once the album is ready to go.  The problem is that I don’t have one.   On the plus side, I already have the template I want to use for these project sites, so it shouldn’t take too long to put them together and create all the necessary information.  Obviously, Concrete Mutant’s getting the first one, then I’m going to retool the [Amaranthine Skies] site in that style, then the Cyanidic Rapture one and so on with the rest of my projects.  I also don’t need one for the Zud project any more, as it’s been absorbed by Philistine on the Sidewalk.   Mastering a Cyanidic Rapture Album   I’ve been working on an EP for the Cyanidic Rapture project since October and it’s basically been done since December except for the mastering.  I was going to record guitars, bass, and vocals for the tracks, but the songs are already really thick with the layers of synths and powerful drum samples, so I decided the weekend before last that they didn’t need them.   I also intend this album to be a specific release number on Concatenation Records, but there are still some albums that need to come out before that number is reached.  It's likely that this will be the last album for the project, as the sounds and ideas for this project are mostly covered by Philistine on the Sidewalk at this point.  I’ll never say never with my projects, so I’ll say it’s on an indefinite hiatus until I figure out if there’s more material for the project or not.   Remastering Two Zio and TEH LOLZ Albums   I’ve been asked by Zio of Zio and TEH LOLZ to remaster two of the albums on the Concatenation Records label – those being [Chemicaldyne] and [Subfusion: Ice Light Army].  I said I’d be happy to and I will, since I’ve had some experience with mastering chiptunes now with the [A Chip off the Shizz Block, Volume One] compilation and my own work for Mystic Nova.  It’ll also be a nice warmup for the inevitable mastering needed for the upcoming “A Chip off the Shizz Block, Volume Two” release.   One Week On, One Week Off   This is where the fun part begins, as [an article] I read over at Steve Pavlina’s site has inspired me to take this approach.  It’ll be more difficult to fully follow this with having to work the full-time job and keeping my fitness in check, but I think I can manage in my remaining time.   The idea behind this is that you take one week to go all out and work until you drop, then you take the next week to do things you enjoy without being too lazy about it.  I have a feeling it’ll be difficult to place music into either of these categories, so I’ll likely be working on it all month.  It may end up being that I work on the recording/mastering of albums during the on weeks and do Philistine on the Sidewalk songs during the off ones, but it’s hard to say for sure as this month is only a handful hours old at this point.   I’ll be starting this month with an on week, so I’ve got lots of work to do.  Once I get this blog post done, I’ll likely start on the next one, and try to get all of next week’s posts done this week (save for the Status Update portion).  That way, I can focus on other things next week, like catching up on reading, gaming (which leads to more material for [Nintendo-A-GoGo]) and working on a new Philistine on the Sidewalk track.   Is That All?   Nope!  I’ve still got some social engagements to attend this month, not to mention all the ordinary minutiae that goes on with life.  I may fail miserably at this new approach this month, but as time passes, things should start transitioning well and fall into place.  Wish me luck on all counts!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Old Goals Fulfilled and Unfulfilled] Posted on February 26th, 2010.   As you may know, I’ve been working on my [Nintendo-A-GoGo] site as of late by completely updating the look twice in less than a month, playing through NES and SNES games again (the best part), and working on rewriting the material from the original version of the site.  In doing the last part, I’ve been perusing all of the site and one page in particular caught my attention – the Profile page.   It’s an interesting snapshot into how I was during the summer of 2003, though I’m not sure exactly what month.  It was after I graduated from college (June), but before I left Pagliacci for the 2nd time (September, I think).  In any event, I’m going to take a look through the most interesting bits and see if things pertaining to how I wanted to live my life in the future (aka now) have held up.   Old Goals Fulfilled   I had a section that I entitled What do you want to do with your life? and while it was beyond tempting to put “I wanna rock!” (kudos if you get the reference), I actually went with the straight answer.  Here it is:   “Get a job that allows me to comfortably support myself, yet still allows me time at night and on the weekends to make music, work on websites, or what have you.  I would like to get a bit of musical reputation going, but I’m not looking for pop stardom or anything.  A cult following would be peachy.”   Done and done.  Well, I’ve got the full-time job, I have time in the morning instead of at night (though that's my choice), and defining the amount of interest in my musical works by using the words “cult following” is likely stretching it somewhere between a bit and a lot.  That said, there are a fair amount of folks interested in at least one of my projects, and I’ve got somewhere between three to five that are interested in collaborating on the [Philistine on the Sidewalk] project, so that’s definitely cool.   As a musician, you always like more people to hear your work, but I’m happy with what I’ve achieved in these areas so far.  I’m still looking to achieve more musically and I think I may be outgrowing the traditional 9-5:30 fare, but not quite yet.  The stars have yet to properly align in order for me to do so, but I can tell it’s coming.  All the work I’ve put in over the past four months is starting to show some signs of paying off.  I’ve got to keep working and keep creating.   Old Goals Unfulfilled   The next bit is still on the goal list, but I’ve yet to achieve this one.  The original is in a few sections, so I’ll summarize:   “I was born and raised in Seattle, Washington, but I don’t want to live here for the rest of my life.  I really enjoy spending time on the northern Oregon coast, so I’d like to live there.  However, I need to put away some serious money before that can happen.”   I’m still working on the serious money part, though the goal’s still in place.  I hadn’t set a specific time for this to happen when I wrote this, though I have now.  Time will tell if I’m able to meet that goal, but I’ve made a realistic plan and I’m working on realistic ways to get there.   I’d be closer if I hadn’t worked part time (or not worked at all) until I was almost 26.5 years old, and if I hadn’t spent so much money on fitness over the past four years.  However, complaining about spending on fitness is stupid, because I’ve gone from 305 to 200 in that time and there’s not much point in having a nice place to live if I’m in crappy shape, is there?   One thing I have spent too much over the years is material goods – a lot of which I don’t plan to use any more.  Thus, one of the goals this year is to sell off a good majority of these things.  I do have the eBay Auctions section listed on the front page of The Realm, but I haven’t started any up yet.  That should change in a few months, but it’s not on March’s goal list.  Maybe it’ll be on April’s.   Holy Crap, He’s Still Around?   I also wrote a section about my cat that I’ve had since I was 11 and put it under a section simply called Pets:   “I have a cat named Mouse.  The story goes that he was born under a bed.  The daughter of the owner of the mother cat heard noises from under the bed and looked, and saw Mouse.  Then she said, “Eek, a mouse!”  The name stuck.  He kind of does look like a giant mouse though, doesn’t he?”   Mouse is still alive and kicking, recently turning 18.5 years old on the 21st.  He’s starting to get a few nerve issues and he about drowned me in slobber the other night, but he’s still friendly and snuggly and likes to block the way through doors and hallways.  The picture I had up is out of date and I don’t have any current ones readily accessible (he’s off hiding somewhere), but he’s a big Russian Blue Siamese.   The Next Iteration   So where do I see myself in another six and a half years?   Nearing 37 years old, living on the Oregon coast, and still creating like nobody’s business.  Other than that, the sky’s the limit!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Experiences and Experiments] Posted on February 24th, 2010.   As you may have noticed by now, almost all of the things I’ve written about on For the Love of Creativity so far are related to these two topics.  I plan to dive a little more into the ideas behind the blog with this post.   Experiences   I’m a firm believer in that what a person experiences affects aspects of their life in some way or another, whether it be the most exciting of things or the most mundane.  I’ve already written a few monstrous posts detailing my past experiences and how they’ve molded who I am today, and I’ve still got a few more of those posts to write.   As it stands, my focus in life has been rather narrow in that I really haven’t experienced a broad variety of things.  Instead, I’ve chosen to focus on the things that I already enjoy and create new experiences in those areas.  I suppose everyone does that in their own way, but I don’t think I’d enjoy doing new things that aren’t related to the things I already enjoy at this point.  I’m still full of energy to experience new things relating to the things I enjoy, but broadening my horizons sounds less and less interesting.   It’s likely due to the extreme lack of free time I have these days, since work and my commute takes up about a third of my week and sleep takes up another quarter (yeah, I don’t sleep enough).  Then again, that’s still about 40% of the week that I have to myself, and I use that to the fullest to experience things in the realms that I enjoy.   If you’ve been reading the blog with any regularity, you should know that the things I focus on are music, fitness, gaming, and beer.  Sometimes, these things come together and when they do – that’s when the magic happens.  For example, if it wasn’t for our love of music and gaming (and game music), the [WCS] would have never come together and all of us would have missed out on close to five years of amazing experiences together.   That said, I imagine that once I get a few more goals achieved and a little more time freed up, I’ll be able to shake off these constraining feelings and go broaden my horizons some more.  It’s gonna be hard to write about things in blog and story form if I don’t open myself up to checking new things out, so I’m sure I’ll relish the opportunity to once it arises.   Experiments   I’ve conducted more than a few of these since starting up this blog – as a matter of fact, the blog is an experiment in itself. I wanted to see if I could keep up a weekly blogging schedule and I’ve managed pretty well with it so far. Some days have had better topics than others, but it’s hard to bat 1.000 with something like blogging. This post is proof!   I’m always thinking and wanting to try new things, but that doesn’t always mean doing something completely new. Sometimes, I want to set something up that takes elements of the things that I’ve experienced and combines them to create something new. This is where experiments are born.   Of course, I can’t go a week without mentioning my Philistine on the Sidewalk project, which is easily my most successful experiment in a while and is breeding more ideas and excitement as time goes on.   The project was intended to be solo and internet-only, but now I’ve got people interested in collaborating and I’ve already planned a few albums in various forms of media. I’m getting ideas for t-shirts and I’m considering a monthly or bi-monthly podcast once I get at least 10 songs done.   The quality of the project in increasing as well, since the production of the songs is sounding better the more I work with all these new and unusual sounds. In that way, it’s been an experiment to get my production skills better and it’s working quite well so far.   Also, I keep finding more and more clips of things that I recorded months and years ago that I can work with to create new music. Concerning the latter, going through all my music folders and looking for “new” material to work with is going to be one of next month’s projects.   It’s really starting to expand and I’m surprised at how fast it is as well - not too shabby for a project started a little over a month ago that was an experiment in creating music using only the barest (and rather different) essentials.   Since I’m not one to throw all my focus in one pot, I’ve got some more experiments up my sleeve for this year. I haven’t talked about them yet, but most are somewhat related to the ones I’ve already started this year, and they build off of experiences I’ve had with certain things over the years.   Conclusion   I know as long as I keep experiencing and experimenting, I’ll have a good time with life – that’s the idea, right?   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Maritime Pacific Brewing Company Returns] Posted on February 22nd, 2010.   This weekend was the grand re-opening of the Jolly Roger Taproom and the Maritime Pacific Brewing Company.  It’s been a rather long wait, though going to the new taproom (which is a lot like the old one, except bigger and brighter) made it seem as if the place had never closed up.   They shut down their old operation last summer (July or August, I believe) to move to a bigger facility about four blocks away.  They’d been having issues with the state getting their beer license to them in a timely fashion, which was part of the reason for the delay.  They had planned to re-open in late January, but I think that was part of the reason they hadn’t.   It’s all pointless speculation as they’ve re-opened and have not lost a single step.  The food is still tremendous, the beer still goes down like water, and the ambiance hasn’t changed a bit – you still can’t hear a thing anyone says, as the volume is at a steady roar.   That’s part of what gives the place (and what gave the old taproom) its charm.  I would imagine that the roar was increased this weekend due to it being the grand re-opening.  The official opening day was Saturday, but I decided to take my mom down there for lunch on Sunday, since we’d done Sunday lunches at the old Jolly Roger Taproom on more than a few occasions.   We got there about five minutes after they opened and got the last table available.  They’ve doubled the size of the taproom, so that’s definitely a testament to the quality of the place.  While I can’t say the food service was prompt (which I fully understand), the beer service was and their Imperial Pale Ale was very tasty.  The hop wasn’t too strong and it went down very smooth.   This was the first time I’ve had their IPA (I usually stick with the Flagship Red or the Nightwatch Dark), and I’ve been missing out!  When they closed down, I was still IPA-phobic, thanks to a really bad one from another local brewery which I will not name, but they’ll likely lose business as they’re in the same vicinity as Maritime.   Thankfully, Dogfish Head’s 90 Minute Imperial IPA cured me of that phobia, and I enjoyed Maritime’s IPA so much, I got two imperial pints’ worth and brought a growler of it home!  I’m not sure when I’ll get a chance to crack it open, though I’m sure I’ll enjoy it thoroughly once I do.   As for the food, I said it earlier – it’s still great.  When it did finally show up, the fish was hot, the salad was cold, and the taste was abundant.  No complaints here!  It’ll be nice to go back in a few weeks once things have settled down (maybe) and get a little faster service, but I was enjoying good beer and good conversation, so waiting longer for food was no big deal.   All in all, I’m so very glad to have one of my favorite haunts back and I can’t wait to haunt it some more in the near future!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Endurance Routine] Posted on February 19th, 2010.   I figured I’d skip the fitness update since it corresponds with this post – I’m down to 201.8 as of this morning, which is my lowest weight yet and less than two pounds from my current goal.   I’d like to say was in part to the monstrous cardio routine I put myself through last night.  However, I was 202.0 yesterday, so maybe not so much.  I’ve contested that weight loss is about 70% diet, though hard cardio after a weekend of not eating as well is a way that has been useful in getting rid of the excess weight gain.   On the plus side, it certainly shows that my endurance has increased tenfold, as there’s no way I could have done this workout even six months ago.  Would you like to hear about it?  Here it goes!   The Basics   As it stands, I’m trying to build up my endurance and tighten up my body, so I’m putting myself through a lot of steady cardio.  I’ve tried doing 20-25 minutes of straight cardio on the treadmill, then 20 minutes on the elliptical, but it seems I can only hold a steady run speed of 6.5 miles per hour for 25 minutes.  While being able to run close to 3 miles in 25 minutes is great and something I never would have imagined being able to do when I was younger and much heavier, I want to push myself more.   I’ve done 7 miles per hour for 15 minutes at most, but I usually start fatiguing at the 10-12 minute mark.  That gave me an idea – I decided to break up my cardio into ten minute chunks and alternate between the treadmill and the elliptical machines.   Now I tried this on Tuesday, but I set the elliptical resistance too high and crapped out in the middle of the 3rd part.  I kept going and recovered fine for the 4th and 5th parts, but I was still unimpressed by my performance.   The Routine   I break things up into five parts – three parts treadmill and two parts elliptical.  I do a steadily descending pattern as I go along, so I can endure longer and get more calorie burn out of it.  All of the parts are 10 minutes long with a 3 minute cooldown.   Part 1 – Treadmill   • 10 minutes at 7 mph • 1 minute at 4.5 mph (cooldown) • 1 minute at 4.0 mph • 1 minute at 3.5 mph   As you can see, I’m able to get my ten minutes at 7 miles per hour in and then I can rest my legs a little bit so I can get more of a workout in.  What I was trying to do before is do as much as I could at 7 mph, then kick it down to 6.5 mph for the rest of the 20 minutes.  That didn’t work especially well, as my legs would be gassed from the 7 mph and I’d find myself sliding from 6.5 to 6.0 to 5.5 down to my cooldown speeds, which is walking.   Part 2 – Elliptical   • 1 minute at 9 resistance, moving forward • 1 minute at 10 resistance, moving forward • 1 minute at 11 resistance, moving forward • 1 minute at 12 resistance, moving forward • 1 minute at 13 resistance, moving forward • 1 minute at 13 resistance, moving backward • 1 minute at 12 resistance, moving backward • 1 minute at 11 resistance, moving backward • 1 minute at 10 resistance, moving backward • 1 minute at 9 resistance, moving backward • 1.5 minutes at 7 resistance, moving backward (cooldown) • 1.5 minutes at 7 resistance, moving forward   The change in movement is meant to put focus on different parts of the legs.  The forward motion focuses more on the quadriceps (the leg muscles in the front of the upper leg) and the calves (the leg muscles in the back of the lower leg), whereas the backward motion focuses on the hamstrings (the leg muscles in the back of the upper leg).   The return to the forward motion at the end of the cooldown is for two reasons – to balance out the amount of work done on the legs, and to get the legs back to moving in a forward motion, as that’s the one used for the treadmill.   Part 3 – Treadmill   • 10 minutes at 6.5 mph • 1 minute at 4.5 mph (cooldown) • 1 minute at 4.0 mph • 1 minute at 3.5 mph   I go down to my steady running speed on this part, which after doing 26 minutes of other cardio is a little bit tougher than jumping on the treadmill and going for 20-25 minutes, but still quite doable.   Part 4 – Elliptical   • 1 minute at 7 resistance, moving forward • 1 minute at 8 resistance, moving forward • 1 minute at 9 resistance, moving forward • 1 minute at 10 resistance, moving forward • 1 minute at 11 resistance, moving forward • 1 minute at 11 resistance, moving backward • 1 minute at 10 resistance, moving backward • 1 minute at 9 resistance, moving backward • 1 minute at 8 resistance, moving backward • 1 minute at 7 resistance, moving backward • 1.5 minutes at 5 resistance, moving backward (cooldown) • 1.5 minutes at 5 resistance, moving forward   This is pretty much the same thing as before, only with a little less resistance this time.  I used to try to do these while keeping my steps per minute at around 160, but I’m able to pace myself and maintain it at 140 naturally, so I do that instead.   Part 5 – Treadmill   • 10 minutes at 6.0 mph • 1 minute at 4.5 mph (cooldown) • 1 minute at 4.0 mph • 1 minute at 3.5 mph   I go down to my warmup speed on this part, which after doing 52 minutes of other cardio is a little bit tougher than jumping on the treadmill and going for 10 minutes to warm myself up for some lifting, but my legs were still functioning at this point.  Not in good shape, mind you – but functioning.   Conclusion   All in all, I burned 920 calories for 65 minutes of work – well, 50 minutes of work and 15 minutes of cooldown.  It seems like a good routine to stick with for now, as I gauged the level of difficulty at a 6 after I hopped off the treadmill, cranked it up to 7 once I started taking the stairs down to the locker room, and had it up to about 7.5 or 8 by the time I hit the shower.   I’ll admit that it was pretty brutal and didn’t really do much for my weight loss, but it certainly tested my endurance and I’m trying to build that up as much as possible for my martial arts training and to keep my general fitness level as high as I can.   Suffice it to say, I definitely had a successful workout and I can't wait to do it again Tuesday!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Déjà vu] Posted on February 17th, 2010.   It dawned on me yesterday morning that I had forgotten to include a reversed vocal sample in the newest Philistine on the Sidewalk track “Genius Is Never Understood in Its Own Time”, which if you recall from my [Creating a Music Project] post, is one of the five pillars that make up a Philistine on the Sidewalk song.   I panicked a little bit and then listened to the song again – the reason I hadn’t included a reversed vocal sample is because it didn’t need one.  There was enough interplay between the massive low-end rhythm, the higher reverse reverb guitar and the extended feedback loop to keep things interesting enough.  The reversed vocal sample would have been overkill.  That, along with the fact that I’ve already started tweaking with the drum loop samples (which I wasn’t going to do) by slicing and dicing them for the next song got me to thinking – do I really need to stick to the five pillars for each song?   How Projects Change   When I think about it more, I don’t know why I bother trying to stick to a certain sound or presets for a project – it’s fine for an album, but as soon as I’m not interested in evolving that sound any further, the project unravels shortly thereafter.  I think there are at least three or four of my projects that are at the “one or two more albums, then they’re done” point, and there are an untold amount I’ve shut down because of this.   That’s what so great about Philistine on the Sidewalk – there is no defined sound and anything’s game.  The songs are still likely to be extended trip-out jams, but the five I’ve done so far have been distinct in that they’ve all used somewhat different elements.   Amaranthine Skies is following the same tack, as the first four albums have sounded different, even though there’s a few common threads between them, and the next two (at least) will sound a little different from those as well.   I’ve also been in talks with a few other folks about collaborating under the Philistine on the Sidewalk banner, and it’s likely this will close up another one of my projects (Zud).   I know some bands do pretty well with creating songs with the same sound over and over again, but that would absolutely bore the crap out of me as there are so many great styles of music out there and I want to put my spin on as many of them as I can.  This is why I’ll never be a pop star – the prodigious beard doesn’t help things either, as it scares the tweens.   Sometimes They Change Too Much   On the flipside of that, I’ve had projects that I’ve shut down because they changed too much.  If you recall from my [Projects from Days Gone By] post, Forfallen was one of those cases, wherein it started out pretty close to where Concrete Mutant is now (hmm), and ended with trying to cross that sound with more mellow elements.  Suffice it to say that it didn’t work at all and the project evolved itself into a corner.   Natthimmel was the same way – it started out all over the place and ended up in a softer rock arena with a focus on the Yamaha DX7 keyboard.  It sounded fine, but the style has been done better under my Amaranthine Skies and Philistine on the Sidewalk projects.   Opening Musical Possibilities   I think the best part about Philistine on the Sidewalk is that everything goes.  There are ideas for the sound, but the knobs don’t have to be tweaked in a specific way like they did for my other projects.  I have sheets and sheets of guitar and bass presets that I use for my other projects, and while they help to keep a project sounding a certain way, they add a sterility and precision to things that occasionally make me not want to pick up my instruments.   Also, it gives me the opportunity to use all the folk instruments that I picked up during the waning days of Natthimmel and have yet to find a place for in Amaranthine Skies material (though that’s where they were supposed to end up).  There are a couple of toy keyboards that I was going to use for a short-lived project that could come in useful – I could go on and on.   Great Project or Greatest Project?   When it comes down to it, I want to create.  I want things to sound and look as shiny as they can, but when I focus on that aspect, it sort of takes me out of the creative experience.  I grew up in a time when most of the music I listened to wasn’t crystal clear and had a rawness to it that gave the recording character, so I don’t worry about production too much when it comes to Philistine on the Sidewalk because I don’t have to.   Also, I was going to keep Philistine on the Sidewalk an internet-only project, but now I’m getting ideas for physical media as well, because the project has a sound that would be well-suited for vinyl, I can do a CD tie-in with Concatenation Records and perhaps some other types of media for various situations.  I’m also coming up with ideas for video game cover albums and maybe even t-shirts – I’ll tell you, the sidewalk’s the limit.   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Déjà vu] Posted on February 15th, 2010.   I was sitting at my computer working on the most recent Philistine on the Sidewalk track yesterday when all of the sudden, something had fired in my brain telling me that I had done the exact same thing before, even though I hadn’t.   While I won’t deny that I’ve spent more than my fair share of time sitting at the computer working on music, there was something specific about the way the applications were opened and the way that the bottom right-hand corner of my desktop picture showed through.  What I experienced can only be what’s commonly known as déjà vu.   Frequency   Déjà vu tends to happen for me fairly infrequently any more, though there were points in my life where I’d experience it about once a month or so.  It seems to occur at points in my life where either doing something that I want to be (like last night) or when I’m somewhere I want to be – I’ve had it happen multiple times in Tennessee and on the Oregon coast.   I know it hasn’t happened to me in quite some time, likely due to the monster rut I’ve been in over the past few years.  I’ve been working towards lots of major goals for quite some time now and the problem was that I had a little too much tunnel vision going on in attempting to achieve those goals.  Over the past few months, I’ve diversified my ways of getting there and it seems to have pulled me out of said rut and help me rededicate myself.   Physiological   I can’t say for certain on the previous times I’ve had déjà vu, but I was somewhat out of it yesterday.  I was rather listless, kind of groggy, and having a hard time getting motivated to do much of anything.  When I did find that motivation, I almost fell asleep a couple of times while working on the Philistine on the Sidewalk track.   Granted, most of the songs I’ve created for that project put me into a trance-like state after listening to them a few times (which is part of the idea), but this was your garden-variety “I need some sleep, so quit working and take a nap” sleepiness that I’m rather accustomed to at this point.  I ignored it (like I usually do) and a couple hours later, you guessed it – déjà vu.   After Effects   I’ve always found déjà vu to be a bit disorienting, but I generally attach a positive connotation with it, even though it’s not logical to do so.  The positive connotation is one I heard a while back and I don’t recall as to where I heard it, but the thought is that when one experiences déjà vu, it means that they are on the right path in life.  It’s a small reassurance that helps me continue on with the task at hand and knowing that I’m doing something that I “should” be doing is a nice boost.   Also, experiencing this makes me want to dig out my NES cart of Deja Vu and play through it again.  With Nintendo-A-GoGo up and running again, there’s no time like the present to give it a few plays and write about it!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Working with Pyramid Sets] Posted on February 12th, 2010.   Pyramid sets in their basic definition are nothing new – they’re exercises with 3 or 4 sets of 3 or 4 different weights, wherein you climb a pyramid.  Let’s say you’re doing bicep curls, so your basic pyramid would look something like this:   • 12 repetitions of 20 lb. curls • 10 repetitions of 25 lb. curls • 8 repetitions of 30 lb. curls • 6 repetitions of 35 lb. curls   I’ve been doing those for years upon years – I think I learned about them in high school.  However, it didn’t dawn on me until recently (thanks to talking with my trainer) about climbing back down the pyramid, which is weird since I’ve been doing pyramid workouts on the elliptical for months.  With the elliptical, I start off light, build the resistance to an apex in the middle, then switch directions at the top and ease off the resistance going the other way.   With last night being a weight night, I decided to do a pyramid workout.  I focused on chest and arms primarily, while doing leg work in between the pyramid sets to get a breather and hit other parts of my body.  I usually took a 30 second breather between sets since I wasn’t working real heavy, though if you are working really heavy, it’s recommended that you take between 2-3 minutes to rest between sets.   To start, I did a 10 minute warmup on the treadmill at 6 MPH.  It’s a good speed for me to get the heart rate up without wearing out too much for my workout.   After finishing my warmup, the first exercise I did was basic incline presses on a Hammer Strength machine, where you sit upright and push the handles forward at an incline.  I didn’t want to overload myself on the weight, so my reps looked like this:   • 12 repetitions of 70 lbs. (35 lbs. each arm) • 10 repetitions of 90 lbs. (45 lbs. each arm) • 8 repetitions of 110 lbs. (55 lbs. each arm) • 6 repetitions of 130 lbs. (65 lbs. each arm) • 8 repetitions of 110 lbs. (55 lbs. each arm) • 10 repetitions of 90 lbs. (45 lbs. each arm) • 12 repetitions of 70 lbs. (35 lbs. each arm)   I was a little burnt on the chest after that, so I decided to do four sets of what I like to call 1550s.  I strap on ankle weights (4 lb. ones are the heaviest they have at the gym), then throw 15 knees with each leg into my hands, which are placed together at about mid-chest level.  After I get through those, I do 50 jumps with a jump rope.  Four sets of those had me wobbling a bit, so it was back to the arms.   I like to punch with weights quite a bit and I usually super set my strikes with the 1550s, but last night I decided to pyramid things up.  With the punches, I threw a jab with an empty left hand, then I threw a straight right with these weights and repetitions:   • 14 punches with 10 lbs • 12 punches with 12.5 lbs • 10 punches with 15 lbs • 8 punches with 17.5 lbs • 10 punches with 15 lbs • 12 punches with 12.5 lbs • 14 punches with 10 lbs   I went through those with a 10-15 second rest between each set, then I did the same thing on the other side (right hand jab, left hand straight).  After that, I rested for a few minutes, because my arms and shoulders were just put through the ringer – my biceps were absolutely lit up, and my forearms and shoulders were feeling the effect as well.   I figured one more chest/arm set would do the trick, but I wanted a break in between the two.  I decided on some deep squats with a weight plate in my hands, which was centered at chest level.  My sets were as such:   • 12 squats with a 25 lb. weight plate • 10 squats with a 35 lb. weight plate • 8 squats with a 45 lb. weight plate • 10 squats with a 35 lb. weight plate • 12 squats with a 25 lb. weight plate   I got a decent burn going off of those, though I should have done more reps or used dumbbells and gone for a heavier weight.  They do have a couple 100 lb. weight plates around the gym, but all that would be is a good way for me to throw out my back again.   The last set I did was similar to the first, though it was more striking-oriented.  I got down onto a Hammer Strength bench and focused on doing one-armed exercises.  I would press/punch with the left, then press/punch with the right in a fluid motion and roll my upper back a little bit while going back and forth to keep my arms as straight as possible.  This set looked like so:   • 12 repetitions of 25 lbs. each arm • 10 repetitions of 30 lbs. each arm • 8 repetitions of 35 lbs. each arm • 6 repetitions of 40 lbs. each arm • 8 repetitions of 35 lbs. each arm • 10 repetitions of 30 lbs. each arm • 12 repetitions of 25 lbs. each arm   The only rest I gave myself was to get up and put on/take off the additional 5 lb. plates, and I was a bit wobbly afterward.  I still had about five minutes before the CD I was listening to on my iPod was over (Neurosis’ “[Enemy of the Sun]”), so I wanted to get something else in.   I decided to grab a pair of 45 lb. plates and do flights of stairs with them.  It turned out that I only got through one flight up and down.  Going up wasn’t too bad, but coming down I felt like I could have gone ass over teakettle.  I put the weights away and went back to the locker room.   By the time I got my locker opened up, my body was expressing the confusion and displeasure with the new workout I had just put it through.  That said, I’m not really feeling the effects of it this morning, but tomorrow will be the indicator of how brutal it was, as it’s always the 2nd day after a hard workout that things catch up with me.   Doing the full pyramid with a few different exercises was definitely an interesting workout experience and I’m sure I’ll do it again sometime soon!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Nintendo-A-GoGo] Posted on February 10th, 2010.   I started Nintendo-A-GoGo up about a year and a half after getting back into the “NES Renaissance” as it had been dubbed.  I found a couple of used games at Fred Meyer on December 6th, 1998, hooked up my Nintendo again on my 19th birthday (December 10th, 1998), and started playing again until February rolled around.  That’s when I went nuts.   I started buying tons of used games at great prices, got a toploader NES with all the fixin’s for $40, and had a blast going down to the University District here in Seattle to look for used games every weekend.   There was also a FuncoLand nearby that I frequented for games, and their online ordering system was handy as well.  I remember I spent over $100 on an order of 16 cartridges back in 1999, two of which were a couple of my all-time favorite games – The Battle of Olympus and Destiny of an Emperor.   I had quite a few games by then and I’d already done a few reviews for my site, but I wanted to start something a little more focused.  It took a little while for this to happen, though – the game buying spree went from early to late 1999.   The Beginning and the Development   I got my Associate’s degree and cut ties with a terrible relationship in March of 2000.  After graduating, I went to Tennessee for a week then came back home and stagnated for a couple of months.  I needed a new project.  I had been playing my Nintendo at the time, so it seemed like a great idea to fire it up again and go to town.   I started Nintendo-A-GoGo in June 2000 after spending about a month immersed in the system (when I wasn’t at work), and I got a few things done in the three-month span between then and yet another Tennessee trip.  This trip lasted two and a half months, but I got going on things again after I got back.   2001 was a better year for the site, as I was very proactive with reviews, articles, NES Scene-related material and message boards.  I kept up with my involvement in the site and the scene through 2004, but I could tell things around the scene were starting to slow down a bit.   The Flameout   It was 2005 – the NES Scene was starting to break up and people were closing down or taking down their sites.  I wanted to keep going with mine, but the stagnation of the site intertwined with my increased involvement with The Shizz and the WCS.   I had a group review site going at that time that burned out after six months, and I tried to keep updating my NES site, but I was too busy with work and doing covers of NES and SNES songs at the time.  After a while, I put up a message saying that the site wasn’t going anywhere – which it didn’t.  I also said that it wasn’t too likely that I’d update it any more – which I didn’t until recently, of course.   The Rebirth   I got it in my head a few months back that I wanted to bring back Nintendo-A-GoGo bigger and better than ever.  The old scene is starting to rekindle a bit and a lot of the old sites have gone out to pasture or disappeared completely, so there’s more of a need for opinions and material focused on the NES and SNES.   I knew that it would take tons of time to re-review everything, so I decided to run with the one page that was ready to publish (that being my [River City Ransom] page) and go from there.   Everything from the old site will be cleaned up for the new site in due time and I’ll likely add brand new material as well.   I’m fully aware that the site design needs some serious polish as well, because what works for my other sites doesn’t really work for this one so much.  I’ve already started working on the cleanup, and now is definitely the best time as the site is still rather minimal in its design.  With what I’ve got in mind, I may be able to shrink things a bit more before expanding them out.   The Future   I’m not sure where the future will take the site – my rekindled interest in writing will certainly be helpful in keeping the site active, as will the joy that I find in spreading information and helping people learn about the quality of these games.   With that in mind, why don’t you take a look around the site?  [http://www.nintendo-a-gogo.com]   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Remembering to Relax] Posted on February 8th, 2010.   It seems that the three-month spree of work that I did between November and January has left me a little exhausted.  I still want to work on my projects – thus the continued blog, four nights a week at the gym, and two to three [Philistine on the Sidewalk] songs per month – and I’m still inspired to do tons of stuff, but the batteries are getting low and need recharging.   The solution?  Have a good time!  I was invited to celebrate my friend (and fellow [West Coast Shizzie]) Tony’s birthday via a Rock Band party that my friend Eric (also WCS) threw for him at his place.  It was a chance to celebrate a friend’s birth, and a chance to kick back and unwind by doing some rather good vocal recitations of Alice in Chains, Nirvana, Pearl Jam (what can I say, I’m a Seattle native and grew up with grunge), Smashing Pumpkins, Ratt, Cannibal Corpse (that was an ab workout!) and Faith No More.   There was gaming after [Rock Band 2] had to be turned off (silly neighbors and noise ordinances), but I slept through almost all of it as my body quits functioning properly after about 10 PM or so.  I got a few games of [Super Smash Bros. Brawl] in with other people, but I absolutely suck at the game, so I passed the controller along after a few games and passed out.   I felt bad that I couldn’t spend more time having a good time with the birthday boy and everyone else, but as has been witnessed by the blog, I’m kind of a crazy workhorse and function best in the morning.   Relaxing Everyday   It isn’t every day that I get invited to a party or a social occasion, so I have to find other ways to relax.  One of my favorite ways to unwind is not relaxing at all (working out), so I need to make time for the activities that actually are relaxing.   Gaming is something that I’d kind of put on hold until last month, and I’d become irritated when I actually did make the time to game because I wasn’t doing something productive.  It helped to incorporate gaming into one of my projects (playing lots of River City Ransom for the Nintendo-A-GoGo site), but I’ve recently got it through my head that I can’t be productive all the time without completely burning out, so I’ve been doing some old PC gaming (Master of Magic) and working on my Xbox 360 achievement point total.   Granted, the former and the latter have something productive attached to them (though I don’t know how productive getting achievement points is), but firing up a game of Master of Magic and strategizing world domination through armies and magic is quite the employment of time in a profitless and non-practical way.   Balancing Achievement and Relaxation   It’s hard to come up with a set schedule for relaxation, because with the way I am, I tend to work until I can’t.  I’m going to try to figure out a good balance of productivity and relaxation (and combining them when I can) for this month that can hopefully hold things steady until I’m ready to start charging forth with a renewed sense of that death-or-glory work ethic that I’ve ingrained into myself.   Knowing me, that’ll probably be next month, but hey – I’ll take a break when I can get one!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Finding Inspiration] Posted on February 5th, 2010.   As you may have guessed, it’s rather easy for me to find inspiration in things.  I’ll freely admit that I’m a workaholic, but I’m a workaholic because I’m inspired to work on many projects and create things – be they songs, albums, websites, or blog posts.   Inspiration in Music   A great song can provide so much inspiration.  In my vast library of music, I can’t even tell you how many songs that I’ve heard which have inspired works of my own.   For example, the most recent [Philistine on the Sidewalk] track, “A Scenic Thoroughfare” was inspired by crossing Eluvium's “Taken” with one of my own songs under my [Natthimmel] project entitled “Pico Gets His Groove On in Port Town”, which is a very loose interpretation of the Port Town music from the Super Nintendo game [F-Zero].  The time signature is the same as the Natthimmel track and the drumbeat is only slightly modified.   The F-Zero track was inspired by the Port Town music from F-Zero (obviously) and an older [Natthimmel] track entitled “The Great Beyond”, which itself was inspired by repeated listens of Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon”.  I could give many more examples, because music has been so inspirational to me for so long.   Inspiration in Fitness   When I was younger, I was inspired to have the build of a professional wrestler because I watched it all the time and thought pro wrestling was the coolest thing ever.  Yeah, it's basically guys talking tough, then coming out to the ring in mildly-stereotypical costumes and proceeding to put on a stunt show, but who doesn't enjoy a good movie-style fight?  It's not nearly as wild as the stuntwork coming out of Thai movies these days, but it's still rather enjoyable at its best.   In any event, I changed my mind on that after I read about how high-maintenance their physiques really are.  You can prattle on about steroids all you want, but the wrestlers still have to put the time in at the gym to look like that.  A lot of those guys spend 2-3 hours in the gym a day training and most folks don't have that kind of time, unless bodybuilding is their main way to get enjoyment out of life.   Also, as I got older and realized that I'd been bulky (in the wrong way) for most of my life, I wanted to be lean.  I currently find my inspiration for exercise through wanting to attain the physique of a mixed martial artist.  I don't have any inclination to compete in the sport, but the level of fitness that the MMA competitors achieve is definitely inspirational and Muay Thai is a rather enjoyable discipline to practice.   MMA competitors tend to walk around with around 8-10% body fat, so I've still got some serious work to do before I make it to that level.  Losing 6-8% of my body fat was fairly easy at the beginning, but it's been rather tough at this point.  Thankfully, I'm determined to get there no matter what, as espoused by my previous blog post.   Inspiration in Gaming   One might not think that gaming would be all that inspiring, but playing a game with a good soundtrack can certainly be inspiring to musical creativity (as I mentioned earlier with F-Zero), and unwinding with a good game can lead to inspiration in other areas since it allows the opportunity to relax and let the imagination flourish.   Playing the right game can be a great stress reliever too, which can lead to being more inspired to be creative or productive afterward.  I know I've had more than a few good gaming sessions where I've finished up, then hopped on the computer or on an instrument and started sequencing, riffing, and/or recording.   Also, gaming inspired me to create my own gaming site close to ten years ago called [Nintendo-A-GoGo].  It's been dormant for over four years, but I'm almost ready to relaunch it with revised content and new perspectives.  I'm hoping to get it up this weekend as there's some new content ready to go, but I have to finish the coding.   Inspiration in Beer   Beer is inspiration in a bottle (or pint glass, can, etc.) and if it’s not, you’re not doing it right.  I know I’ve recorded more than a few songs under the influence and it really loosens up the playing and frees the mind to explore sounds and ideas that might not arrive while totally sober.  At least a couple of the reverse reverb guitar improvisations for Philistine on the Sidewalk songs have been done under some influence.   I know alcohol affects folks in different ways, but beer always makes me happier and more conversational than usual.  I'm not afraid to apply it liberally and let things unfold as they will, because I know a good time will ensue.  Granted, I generally drink on the weekend (Fri-Sun), because while it helps my mood, it certainly doesn't help my belly fat.   Inspiration in Everything   When I find something I greatly enjoy, I want to either tell the world about it or use the positive influence I receive from it and incorporate it into my own works.  Hopefully my blog posts and Philistine on the Sidewalk songs and everything else I've been doing and posting about on Twitter and Facebook and everywhere else have been coming off as useful and enjoyable, but only time will tell.   So how am I doing? Let me know!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [The Will to Succeed] Posted on February 3rd, 2010.   The idea for this blog came to me Monday night while I was winding down in the sauna after a fairly vicious striking and core workout.  Even though I was sweating profusely and so wiped out I couldn’t do any cardio without my knees starting to buckle or tipping over on the treadmill, my eyes were lit up, focused, and I was beyond ready to keep working out.  Why?  Because I know that workouts like that one are the key to getting all of this leftover fat off from when I weighed 100 pounds more than I do now.   I thought to myself that even after pushing myself so hard and being physically exhausted, I was ready to keep going because I jumped a big hurdle on my fitness journey and I wanted to jump some more.  That is the will to succeed.   Defining Success   Success can mean many different things to people.  A lot of folks seem to associate money with success, though it’s usually a by-product of the real success, which is likely getting a high-paying job.  I’m a little more abstract in my thinking, in that I see success as losing 100 pounds, completing an album, or even something as small as getting a blog up on time without any errors.   I do have an ultimate definition of success for myself that I’m nowhere near getting to, but I’m on the road to it and I am determined to get there no matter how long it takes.   Overcoming Obstacles   Any road to success that you embark upon is going to be obstructed by a number of obstacles with all sorts of variables.  The common denominator will be that you are lacking something.  Whether it be time, money, energy, passion, or that in which I titled this blog, all of these things can be found or allocated in one way or another.  The trick is figuring out how to do so.   Allocating Resources   Time: The easiest of the group to find.  Unless you’re an absolute time management dynamo, there’s certain to be a few areas in your daily routine that you could tighten up or omit in order to fit in progress towards success.   Money: If you’re employed, there are definitely ways to cut expenses.  You still need to enjoy yourself some, but wouldn’t coming closer to succeeding in something be more satisfying than buying something to get your mind off of not being successful yet?  Think in the long-term.   If you’re unemployed or lacking some form of income, acquiring a source of income should be your first priority.  As unfortunate as it is, it’s hard to succeed in what you want to without at least a little extra money.  I’m sure there are some successes that can be achieved without money, but it would be hard to think of success when you’re struggling to keep yourself afloat.   Energy: This one can be variable, since some days you can feel great and some days you can feel like crap.  A good way to get a boost of energy if you need it is to exercise.  It gets the blood flowing and wakes up the body.  Also, cleaning up your eating habits (more fresh food, less processed/fast food) and cutting back on certain excesses (alcohol/tobacco) will boost your system.   Passion: If you don’t have passion for success, why are you bothering in the first place?  If you want to succeed, the passion will be there.  The passion can burn out over time, but even when you’re exhausted, it should still be in the back of your mind.   Will: This is the voice in your head that is telling you that you need to succeed.  Listen to it!  It will be louder at certain times and this is when you should really get to thinking about how you can get around whatever obstacle is blocking you from getting closer to succeeding.  It’s likely that you will come up with something.   Only Quitting Is Failure   As long as you are willing to keep pushing forward no matter how many setbacks get in your way, you haven’t failed at anything.  Success can take a very long time, but it will eventually happen if you keep working on it.  It took me close to four years to get 100 pounds off and I could lament that it took so long, but I know why it did.   I focused on fitness for about a year and change before starting up [Concatenation Records] and lost about 70 pounds in that time.  The weight started coming off slower once I started working on the label and my music projects more, but those 30 more pounds came off eventually.   Once Success Is Achieved   Enjoy it!  I’m sure it’s been hard-earned, so take it in and revel in it.  Appreciate all the hard work it took to get there, then get back to thinking about the next way you’re going to succeed.  Success is a way of life and once you start succeeding in one area, the other areas of life that you wish to succeed in will come in time.   Good luck on your road to success!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Creating a Music Project] Posted on February 1st, 2010.   This seems like a rather relevant topic for me to talk about, since I recently put together Philistine on the Sidewalk and have put together at least 25 music projects over the years.  Granted, most of them have been solo projects and not all of them had recorded output, but they were all different in one way or another.   It’s not especially difficult to start up a music project, but there are a couple of important factors to know before you jump into project creation headfirst.   Have a Sound in Mind   The first thing to figure out in creating a music project is what you want it to sound like.  If you’re thinking about doing this in the first place, it’s certain that someone’s creativity has inspired you, so go ahead and try to emulate their sound.   That said, you shouldn’t stick to one artist/band to be inspired by, as you’ll likely only create a watered-down version of what they sound like.  It’s better to mix the sound from a few bands that you like and I’ve heard a few different takes on how many is a good number.  [Neurosis] used a list of six bands to draw influence from and as I’m rather influenced by them, that’s the number I go with as well.   It should go without saying that these six bands should be a little different in their own way, and I’ll go ahead and cite Neurosis’s list – Black Sabbath, Black Flag, Pink Floyd, Joy Division, Amebix, and Rudimentary Peni.  You’ve got the pioneers of metal, one of the pioneers of hardcore punk, a very creative space rock band, one of the pioneers of post-punk, one of the pioneers of crust punk, and a rather experimental anarcho-punk band. They had lofty goals and creatively speaking, I’d say they’ve met and surpassed them.   Have a Solid Foundation   Next, you should figure out what the staple elements of your sound are going to be.  The traditional set-up of vocals, guitar, bass, and drums is a fine way to go, but you might want to consider being a bit more specific.  Do you want to be more experimental with your sound or do you want to have a very streamlined specific style that you don’t stray from too much?   Also, if you want to go more experimental, it’d be a good idea to have a few foundation points to work from.  For example, my Philistine on the Sidewalk project has five basic staples:   • One rhythmic loop that continues through the song • One drum loop slowed down for the chillout vibe • One extended guitar track drenched in reverse reverb • One noise loop that’s rendered from the picture used on the page • At least one vocal sample slowed down and reversed   Other than that, the sky’s the limit!  Granted, those five things have pretty much put the project into the chillout genre of electronic music, even though only one of the tracks so far ([Contemplate the Evanescence]) really sounds like electronic music.  All the songs are rather trance-inducing, though that was the idea when I started the project.  You could say I had a sound in mind.   Conclusion   The main reason I’ve started up so many projects over the years is that they’ve all encompassed a sound I wanted to explore that I couldn’t reach with a project that was already active.  Once I created the concept of that sound, I decided whether or not it was worth exploring.   If I let my mind wander a bit too much, I’ll usually come up with a few new sonic ideas that in times past would be developed into new projects.  These can be tempered down into concept albums or even songs at this point (thanks to Philistine on the Sidewalk), but for someone starting out, it’s best to focus all of these ideas into one project to begin with (like I did with [Natthimmel]) and then begin splitting into multiple projects if you are so inclined.   With that said, there’s never a better time than the present to get started, so good luck to you!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Monthly Projects] Posted on January 29th, 2010.   Quite a few things coincided late in the month of October 2009 that lit a fire under me and made me want to accomplish tons of things I’ve set out to do but haven’t gotten around to yet.  My friends would say that I was already ambitious before this, but I don’t think I was ambitious enough for my own satisfaction.  I still don’t think I have enough time to be, but to be able to do so requires a change in lifestyle that I’m not ready to make yet for a number of reasons.   So, in order to appease my insatiable zest to create and achieve goals, I’ve been focusing on starting one big project per month and doing my best to focus on putting as much effort into said project as I can before the next month arrives.  Here’s what I’ve been working on!   November 2009 – Cleaning up the Concatenation Records site   This one is still a work in progress, but my biggest goal was getting the site compliant with the W3C standards.  I’m only trying to meet the HTML 4.01 standards established in 1999, so it’s not the most difficult thing in the world, though some of the pages had upwards of 150 errors (one of them still does) and now all but four of the 163 pages of the site meet those standards.   Of those four, two should be rather easy to fix (info & links), one will take a little more time (shop), and one is going to be quite an epic undertaking (artists), though that one will be more because of content issues rather than coding ones.  Though the vast majority of the work is done, I’m still spending a few hours once or twice a week working on the page.   Also, in getting the Concatenation Records pages compliant with said standards, I’ve been able to carry that page format over to my other sites and I’ll be using it (or slight modifications of it) for the pages I’ll create in the future.  Definitely a win-win situation in my book!   December 2009 – Starting up For the Love of Creativity   In the months leading up to December of last year, I began reading a lot of blogs besides my two usual favorites ([Invisible Oranges] and [Metal Sucks]) and I thought that it might behoove me to start one up.   I’ve enjoyed writing for a long while and at the time I started up the blog, I felt like I hadn’t been doing enough of it.  I’ve been wanting to get back to writing stories and potentially novels, so I thought that writing something on a regular schedule would help me to get warmed up and ready to do so.  Two months and three times a week later (save for while I was at [MAGFest 8]), it’s coming along to my satisfaction and I still have a lot of things I want to cover.   I also wouldn’t have started the blog if I thought I didn’t have anything to talk about.  I know I have some insight to share with people about my adventures in music, fitness, gaming and beer and I’ve been doing my best to do so over the past two months.  I know the latter two have yet to be covered much, but they will be when the time is right.   That said, the blog hasn’t come off quite as I thought it would, as I was going to do my best to be informative and helpful to all readers with my topics.  It’s fair to say that a good majority of these blogs have been focused on events relating to my personal life and things I’ve taken part in creating rather than focusing on a specific topic.  It’s all worked out, because some of the personal blogs have been more helpful to folks than the ones that focus on a more concrete idea.   In any event, I look forward to continuing with this blog for an indefinite amount of time.  I plan to get back to writing stories at the beginning of next year, though I don’t imagine I’ll stop blogging when I do so.   January 2010 – Starting up Philistine on the Sidewalk   I know I’ve already talked about this one specifically in a blog post, so I’ll keep this short.   Discovering [Bull of Heaven] coincided with a lot of the other things going on in my life this past fall and I’ve been wanting to do something more improvisational for quite some time now, ever since I put together [Streams of Consciousness] for [The Great Beyond] back in 2003.   Philistine on the Sidewalk was originally going to be an offshoot of my [Amaranthine Skies] project entitled “Adrift in an Everlasting Sky”, but many other elements came together and led me to starting up a new project that would focus on such creations.   Things haven’t been quite as improvisational as “Streams of Consciousness” was, as that song was free improvisation on every recorded part and the only parts like that on the new songs have been the reverse reverb guitar parts.  Then again, I really like combining the free improvisation and loops, so why mess with what I enjoy?   Unlike Bull of Heaven, I knew that I didn’t have time to create and put multiple hours of drone online in a day, but I thought if I could get a track up every week or two, that would be great.  So far, that schedule has worked out pretty well and I’ve already been able to complete three songs.   I’m working on a fourth, and I’m looking to get it done this weekend.  It also has the potential to be one of the prettiest songs (if not the prettiest) I’ve ever done.  It’s a little ditty in F Major with a 23/16 time signature.  The current title is “A Scenic Thoroughfare” and I’m hoping for a Sunday evening release.  Wish me luck!   February 2010 – Rebooting Nintendo-A-GoGo   Ever since letting the site fizzle out in 2005, I’ve had plans on getting Nintendo-A-GoGo cleaned up and thriving again.  It was going to happen in 2006, but then I got a new job and lifestyle.  It was going to happen in 2007, but then getting [Concatenation Records] launched and functioning became a priority.  It was going to happen in 2008, but then I got asked to write and redo the old Nintendo-A-GoGo reviews for [Good-Evil].  It was going to happen in 2009, but completing albums and compilations took priority.   What I’m hitting you over the head with saying is that this has been a long time in the making, and it was going to be launched this month, but I was still formulating things and working on how much would be covered about the first game to be featured (which has been played and completed on the hardest difficulty setting).  At least I’m actually working on it now!   I’m going to have my old collaborative VG sites (Game Frenzy and Nintendo’s University of Classic Gaming) available through it and the original version of the site will stay up as well, because who doesn’t love embedded MIDI files?   The new version of the site will take the material from the old site and give it a rather complete revamp as well as add new material.  I’m hoping to get the site up on Thursday the 4th, so again – wish me luck!   March 2010 and Beyond   I still have plenty of projects I need to embark upon, and I’m not sure if new albums will be counted in those projects.  If so, I have even more to do!   I need to get websites up for all of my projects, even if they are as minimal as the [Philistine on the Sidewalk] one.  There’s an old, somewhat functional site up for Amaranthine Skies and a splash page for Cyanidic Rapture leading to the album release page on Concatenation, but none of the others have one.   I also have new ideas for pages that I want to get up and running over this year, but I still need to figure exactly how I’m going to execute them and when.   Then there’s the beer!  The big goal for this year has been to start brewing beer on some scale (likely a small one for now).  I still haven’t had a chance to look at that micro brewing book I got for Christmas, but I’m going to make some time to read in this upcoming month.  I’m not sure when, but I will.  A trip to the nearby micro brew supply store is also in the cards for the near future.   In conclusion, a new project every month sure keeps life interesting!  It also keeps me from getting burned out because I’m not trying to do everything at once.   Do you have any new projects you want to get started?  Come by and talk about them at the forum.  There’s no time like the present!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Daemon9623 – Fleshfeast] Posted on January 27th, 2010.   While I forgot to post the update on the intro page to this site (which has since been rectified), if you visited the [Concatenation Records] site yesterday, you’ll have noticed that there is a new release up.  It’s from Sean Babbitt, who goes by Daemon9623 at [The Shizz] and he’s put together a short and concise collection of high-speed chiptune tracks entitled “Fleshfeast”.   The collection is comprised of 4 tracks and only runs a little more than 7 minutes, but it certainly packs a wallop in that short span of time.  The material was inspired by the board game made by [Twilight Creations Inc.] entitled [Zombies!!!]   Track 01 – They Came from Beneath   This track starts off unassumingly enough with a slow and tuneful melody and the samples crescendo with each note.  At the 20 second mark, the noises begin and the kick drum starts up shortly thereafter.  The kick speeds up, then all hell breaks loose at the 30 second mark as the melodies fly at the listener at a breakneck pace like an alarm.  The drums go warp speed and the time signature slightly shifts to disorient the listener.   At about 45 seconds, there’s another dizzying intro before the song kicks into gear at the 53 second mark.  High-speed melodies and a driving drum assault propels this track forward with an extreme sense of urgency – these must be the fast zombies of current times.   A warp-speed solo starts up a riff change, then back to the intro with a riff that’s a bit of a breather to follow.  It’s a more melodic passage that sticks around for a little bit and continues while more blast beats come to rampage through it.  Another riff change signals the end of the song which fades into a noise channel.  “They Came from Beneath” has been an absolute rollercoaster ride at the short duration of 1 minute, 55 seconds.   Track 02 – Fleshfeast   This one comes in to destroy right away with warp-speed melodies, blast beats and an extreme sense of urgency.  There are a multitude of melodic and riff changes that fit extremely well together and the song rampages forth with great intensity for a little over half the duration of the track.   It continues to get more and more intense until the the 1:18 mark, which sees the song completely change tempo and acquire an epic metal feel.  The new riff drives forth with a ridiculously strong drum beat and nice harmonic variations.  The drum beat continues to build in intensity until the end of the track, where everything stops on a nicely syncopated set of notes.   At 2 minutes and 12 seconds, this one will assuredly melt your face.   Track 03 – Unsilent Sanctuary   This is my personal favorite, as it has a eerie mid-paced arpeggio that drives the song.  The octave trills that the [Follin brothers] are famous for are an excellent addition, as they blend really well with the arpeggio.  There is a sparse drum beat and some glitch sounds added to the equation and they work well with the rest of the song.   At about 18 seconds, a sound starts up that I can only imagine would be zombies trying to claw and gnaw their way into this unsilent sanctuary.  More glitches and eerie bass bends add to the creepy atmosphere.  The octave trills that sooth the tension a bit show up again at the 35 second mark while more glitches and bass bends continue to add tension.   A new melody appears at the 52 second mark that simultaneously makes things more tense and calm, however that works.  An octave trill-based melody appears for a bit which eases off the tension a bit, though the noises are increasing which builds it back up.  The song goes back to the previous melody which is a lot eerier this time around.   The original melody comes back at 1:28 and fades out at 1 minute, 36 seconds.  While this track isn’t a rollercoaster ride of speed, it’s chock full of creepiness and tension.   Track 04 – As We Approach the Dawn   The last track on the EP ends on an optimistic note, as there appears to be a chance to escape from the zombie menace.  It’s nearly as frantic as Fleshfeast with a more upbeat feel.  It’s filled with a variety of riff changes and melodies that really drive the song along.   It goes all out at the 1:01 mark with what seems to be a quick speed up in tempo and an absolute rhythmic melodic flurry.  It returns to a slower pace at the 1:09 mark that signals the ending loop at 1:25 which drops out the drums and presents a somewhat upbeat conclusion to this 1 minute and 36 second track.   Conclusion   I know I keep saying it, but this album is an absolute rollercoaster ride and a really well done chiptune collection.  I know some folks might want something longer, but Fleshfeast really makes its point with such a short duration.  It’s a concept album that’s executed brilliantly and succinctly that demands your full attention.   Also – it’s free!  You can get the songs here – [Daemon9623 – Fleshfeast]   I know you’ll enjoy them as much as I have!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Punchfest] Posted on January 25th, 2010.   I participated in an online music competition called [Punchfest] on Saturday, and the goal of the competition is to start and complete a song in six hours.  The name comes from the idea that there will have to be a lot of punching in (aka overdubbing) used to create a song that fast.  The theme is revealed a few days before the competition, so it gives the artist a chance to come up with an idea for a track to work on.  All of the themes are videogame-related, and they’re usually ones that allot for a plethora of game soundtracks to choose from.  All of the participants get together on IRC to talk while working on their respective tracks and to talk about all of the songs once they’ve been completed.  If you’re into covering videogame music, it’s a good challenge and a lot of fun!   Now this isn’t my first Punchfest experience (okay, it’s only my second), so I’ll talk about this one and the one previous.   Punchfest 5: Sunsoft vs. Data East   This competition came on the heels of a [WCS] gathering where a group of us went to Benaroya Hall and saw [Distant Worlds] (which was excellent, by the way).  My friend Mark had come down from Canada for the show and had decided he wanted to do Punchfest.  He thought it would be more fun to do a collaborative Punchfest entry and I agreed, so he crashed at my place for the night and we got to choosing something the next morning.   He’d always wanted to do the main theme from the SNES Shadowrun game, and I’m a big fan of that soundtrack, so we got on it.  He took care of all the guitar duties and I handled the tracking and production side as well as most of the chatroom “duties”.  I was going to record live bass for it as well, but the part was kind of tricky and we were running out of time, so I sequenced it instead.  The listening party was really silly (as they usually are) and there were a lot of great tracks to listen to.  Our track came out a little lo-fi, but you can only do so much in six hours.   You can check out the songs here: [Punchfest 5: Sunsoft vs. Data East (Jul. 12th)]   Punchfest 7: Sequels   I saw that a new Punchfest thread had gone up on [The Shizz] late last week and I was debating whether or not I’d participate.  The time frame was good, but it was more a matter of being able to get things scratched off my to-do list since it is a six hour competition, not to mention the listening party and post-listening chat.  I figured that I should, since it’d be fun (something I’ve been shorting myself on lately) and it’d give me another track to put up on the Philistine on the Sidewalk page.  I’m glad I did!   Given that the theme was one that made it pretty easy to select a game, the song I chose was one that I’ve been wanting to do for a while.  It’s a track from Dragon View (aka Super Drakkhen aka Drakkhen II) called “Ice and Snow” and it’s rather mellow and ambient in a nice D major scale.  It’s also in 9/4, which kind of threw me to begin with, but that’s not even close to the weirdest time signature I’ve used (29/16 would take that honor).   I decided to jettison the 2nd half of the song and focus on the intro melody, since it was very nice and easy to build off of.  I’m happy with how it came out except for all the inexplicable clipping.  I’ve gone over each of the tracks multiple times, but I don’t see any weird spikes in volume that would cause it to do so.  I guess that must be the sound of snowmen evolving.   In any event, the track went over well in the listening party, but the most enjoyed part was the reversed speech loop I put in the song and the subsequent deciphering.  The consensus came to be that he was saying “slaw is for everyone”, and it has kind of stuck as a meme for Punchfest 7.  All in all it was a good experience – I got a new song up for Philistine on the Sidewalk, I got a cover out of the way that I’d wanted to do for a while, I helped create a meme, and I had a lot of laughs!  I can’t wait for the next one!   You can check out the songs here: [Punchfest 7: Sequels (Jan. 23rd)] – they’re not up yet, but they should be shortly.   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Achieving Goals] Posted on January 22nd, 2010.   Since my last post on this blog focused on figuring out goals, I decided to make this one about how to achieve them.  For those of you that know me personally or that have been following my blog for a while have likely picked up on the fact that I get a lot of things done.  I set goals for myself and more often than not, I’m able to achieve them once I really set my mind to doing so.  In this post, I’ll give you some tips on how you can do so as well.   Defining and Prioritizing Goals   The first thing you should figure out is what your goals are.  Write them down on a piece of paper (or in a text document on your computer and print them out) and do a revision or two so they’re listed in the order that you want to get them done.  You’ll want them on a piece of paper so you have them on something tangible that you can refer back to.   Once you do that, figure out what your long-term goals are and figure out what your short-term goals are, then revise again accordingly.  Long-term goals should be ones that will take at least 10 dedicated sessions and short-term ones are ones that could be knocked out in a session or two.   For example, my long-term goals are generally related to working on albums or websites (and brewing beer this year), whereas short-term goals are ones that are recurring but don’t take a lot of time – doing a striking workout on a weekend, cleaning up clutter, cleaning up page coding, getting a new blog post up, etc.   You should focus most of your energy on achieving the top goal on your long-term list, but make sure to schedule in the short-term goals as well.  A smaller goal being accomplished will boost the spirits and make it easier to achieve that long-term goal.   Another thing I’ve noticed is that over time, the number one goal can move down the list of priority to make way for something else.  If you feel that’s the case, revise your list and work on your new number one, since that is the most important thing for you to accomplish at the time.   Seeing something through to the end if you’re close to being done (within a few dedicated sessions) is fine, but if that top goal is a long way out of your reach, it’s best to bump it down the list a number or two.  Working away at it without giving thought to other things you want to get done will leave you frustrated and potentially lead to burnout.   The progress you made on said goal will still be there, provided it doesn’t require regular maintenance.  If it does (like maintaining a skill or a weight), make that one of your short-term goals to take care of.   Also, space your goals out some if you feel like doing them everyday would be overwhelming.  That’s the main reason I blog three times a week instead of five to seven, as I can come up with three topics a week, but any more and I think my head would explode.  That, and I’ve got other goals to take care of on the days I don’t blog.   Optimizing Time   So you’ve got your goals set and figured out what route you want to take to achieve them, now I’m sure you’re wondering how to take advantage of the free time you do have.  I know that a lot of folks have full-time jobs (myself included) and certain commitments that take up a good chunk of time.  Weekends are definitely essential to goal completion, though time can easily be optimized during the week to help progress towards your goals move right along.   One of the big keys that I’ve found is that you make sure that the time that you do your best work is available to you.  I used to do most of my work late night/early morning, but I’d get fuzzy-headed and end up with tunnel vision after a while.  Then, the distractions came and I didn’t get as much done as I wanted to.   I decided to change to working towards these goals in the early morning hours, right after I got up.  As it was, I already got a fairly early jump on my day (5:30 AM), so getting up earlier made sense if I wanted to get more done in the morning.  I now get up at 3:30 AM and while it’s hard to be a riff monster at that hour, typing blog posts, coding websites, sequencing tracks, and mastering tracks is very doable.   Also, if you have any time where you’re idle (say, riding the bus to and from work), that’s a perfect time to achieve some goals.  Reading is an easy one to tackle, though I prefer to sequence and master music on my laptop.  I’ve got around an hour-long commute round-trip, and that’s plenty of time to get things done.  In the past month alone, I’ve set the foundation for six tracks for a collaborative project and am currently working on a seventh.   Removing Distractions   This one is pretty simple, as all you need to do is make sure to jettison anything that’s not related to what you’re working on.  Close your e-mail application and browser, turn off your television, turn off your phone, separate yourself from other people – make it a point to be focused on the task at hand.   One distraction I do allow myself is music (no surprise there).  As for music choices, I generally won’t be blasting anything with “core” as a suffix while I’m blogging or coding. I’d say that anything instrumental or mostly instrumental will do the trick. I’m partial to ambient music, though jazz works well too.   Schedule Time for Fun   While having your goals listed, having your time optimized, and having your distractions removed to get your goals accomplished are outstanding feats, you still need to schedule time to have fun.  Spend it with friends, veg out on the couch, play video games – whatever you choose.   This is the one I have the most difficulty with, but I do enjoy working on most of my goals.  I can tell that I need to schedule more fun time as I’m starting to wear down a bit.  I haven’t seen any of my friends since MAGFest, and I haven’t touched the games I got for my birthday or Christmas.  I do have some video gaming planned this weekend, but it’s a means to an end for starting up [Nintendo-A-GoGo] again.  It makes me laugh, it really does.   Conclusion   I think this should be pretty self-explanatory – define and prioritize your goals, optimize your time, remove all distractions, schedule some time to have fun and you’ll be on your way to achieving your goals in no time.  Good luck to all of you!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Rediscovering Fitness Goals] Posted on January 20th, 2010.   After Monday’s post, it should be pretty obvious that I’m looking to make it down to my goal weight this year and I’m going to do whatever I can to do so.  It’s going to require a lot of mental and physical work, and there’s no time like the present.   Narrowing it Down   First things first, I’ve got to set a goal weight.  It’s been difficult to do so, as I’m still stuck in a bit of a “more weight loss = better” mentality.  I’ve gone as low as wanting to get to 185, though I have 175 pounds of lean mass on me, which means I’d need to get my body fat down to a little less than six percent.  It’s doable, but fairly hard to maintain.   192.5 would be ten percent body fat, which would be on the lean side, but that’s fine as it’s right in the middle of a five pound range.  I know my body well enough to know that I make it down to a certain range and bounce back and forth between two weights (right now it’s between 205 and 210), so adjusting that range down three more notches is doable.  It’s also easier to set the small goals, which would be one notch at a time – get to between 200 and 205, then between 195 and 200, and finally to between 190 and 195.   Then there’s my trainer, who wants to add a little more muscle mass to me and get me to 200.  That would put me a little above eleven percent if I can tack on five more pounds of lean mass (up to 180).  I could shoot for 197.5, which would be just a tad below ten percent and would put me in the 195-200 weight range.   I know it’s important not to get lost in the numbers and percentages, but when I started working out, I was just shy of 36% body fat and between 305 and 310 pounds.  Now I’m just north of 17% body fat and between 205 and 210 pounds, so I know I can do whatever I set my mind to – all I need to do is set it.  It’s also another way of quantifying a goal that gives me something to work towards.   Getting to Business   I’ve already lost 100 pounds – how do I lose 15 more?  I’m going to have to trim up my diet more and exercise more.  I already do four days a week for close to an hour (two hour-long weight days, two 45-minute long cardio days) and a striking routine for at least a half an hour on the weekends, so I’m not quite sure how I can get more into my week except for doing some weights and cardio in the mornings before work.  It’ll cut into my site and blogging time, but I’ll have to prioritize what is more important to me.   As for diet, I’ve already started down that route with some unconventional things.  I’ve been making a pretty loaded protein drink in the mornings for quite a while – I use one cup of 1% milk, two scoops of protein, 1/2 cup of oatmeal, a teaspoon of cinnamon, a banana, and a cup of mixed berries.  It’s very filling and gets me loaded on nutrients early in the day.   One of the newer things I’ve done is that I’ve started putting curry powder in my black tea that I have with lunch.  It tastes like soup broth, curry is a known metabolism stimulator, and there’s no quicker way to get it into your system than by drinking it.   Speaking of which, I’ve also looked into juicing and I made a concoction that was tasty and filling on Monday.  I’m not sure it was juicing since I put everything into a blender and went for it (like I do with the protein drink), but it certainly hit my system fast and I felt kind of charged after drinking it.  The drink consisted of two cups of fresh-brewed green tea, a navel orange, a Meyer lemon, an Asian pear, a cup of baby carrots, and a banana.  It was a little potent on the citrus flavor, but it had a good body and went down easy – I sound like I’m reviewing a beer.  It did take some time to make, so I know that I’ll have to stick to the weekends for juicing or somehow optimize my protein drink in the morning to get more fruits and vegetables in it.   Progress   Since going a hair above 210 on Monday (210.4), I’ve lost 3.2 pounds in two days.  I usually gain on the weekends, as I get somewhat off my regimen and put on weight, then I get back on my regimen during the week and it drops right off.  I really don’t want to give up beer, but I think it’s the snacking on chips (multigrain, pita, and rice – no potato for me) that does most of the damage.  I can trade that for juicing, no question.   I’ll track my progress over the subsequent blog posts with a small blurb at the beginning and let y’all know how things are coming along.  For right now, 200 or bust!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [A Change in Profile] Posted on January 18th, 2010.   I was tagged in a bunch of photos on Facebook from MAGFest 8 recently, and it really sunk in how much weight I’ve lost since starting my fairly intense diet and workout regime nearly four years ago.  It’s compelled me to compare and contrast two photos – one from right before I changed my way of life to become much more fitness-oriented, and one from the present.   Exhibit 1 – February 2006   This was at one of the [West Coast Shizzie] gatherings where our adventures into Karaoke Revolution began and we were enjoying copious amounts of it.  I believe this was the one where I earned the nickname of “Material Bear” for my near-perfect rendition of Madonna’s “Material Girl”.  It’s been re-attempted a few times since, but it has yet to be replicated.   As for the picture, it makes me cringe.  I have a hard time believing that I could let myself get and stay that out of shape.  All I can attribute it to is not knowing that I needed to regulate my diet and get more exercise.  If I recall correctly, I was lifting and doing striking drills on my own at the time, but not with enough frequency to counteract the unmonitored intake of food, soda, and alcohol that was negating any progress I did make.   It would be three more months before I would begin on my current fitness journey and I do recall some scary times right before doing so.  I remember laying in bed on more than one occasion with my heart pounding and not being able to sleep because of it.  You may think that it was too much caffeine, but my caffeine intake back then was lower than it is now.   I’m sure it was an excess of sodium in my system, which is liberally placed in a lot of food that’s bought in the grocery store.  Processed foods are definitely a big culprit and I was eating a lot of those at the time.  Granted, excessive sodium can be counteracted by flushing (drinking lots of water), but I was loathe to drink water at the time as the tap made it taste strange.   Suffice it to say, I was stuck in a cycle that I wouldn’t break free from for another three months.   Exhibit 2 – January 2010   As I mentioned above, this is from MAGFest 8 in the Shizz Suite.  I was having a conversation about music with a fellow Shizzie after an enjoyable day of working the Concatenation Records merchandise table and rocking out to some outstanding videogame cover bands.   Here you can see a much slimmer and more defined version of myself, and while I still have some intense work to do to get where I want to be, I’m much happier with everything these days.  Even while I was away from home, I was able to maintain a fairly routine diet of healthy foods in the morning and afternoon by going to the grocery store before festivities began and stocking up.   I did come back to Seattle at 215, even with doing three hour-long weight and cardio routines, but I think eating at the hotel restaurant each night as well as drinking a fair amount (though no more than on a usual weekend) contributed to my weight gain as well.  However, after getting my diet and exercise routines back to normal, the weight has dropped right off and I’m back to my usual range (between 205 and 210).   As it is, I still have a few reminders in certain areas of my body (mainly my stomach) that I’m not done yet.  When I do reach my goal (between 190 and 195), it will make all the work I’ve put in even more fulfilling and I can put that long chapter of unhealthiness in my life to rest.   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Projects from Days Gone By] Posted on January 15th, 2010.   I was kind of at a loss for what to post today, so I figured that going the music route again seemed like a good tack to take.  I can talk about music all day long if given the opportunity, so I’m going to write about some of the more important projects of mine that have fallen by the wayside for one reason or another.   I’ve had a lot more projects than these, but these are the ones that had the most significance in my development as a musician.   Amaranthine   I’m almost inclined not to add this one, as Amaranthine is the official origin of Amaranthine Skies.  I started the project in late 2005 and I launched it off the back of the [Mindtrap] album.  I added the “Skies” to it in early 2007 because there are way too many bands named Amaranthine on MySpace and it sounded right to add something to the end of it to make it more distinguishable.   Amaranthine is not only a reddish-purple color – it also means everlasting, and if you think about it, a sky is everlasting as long as there’s a planet there to support it.  With astronomers continuing to find evidence of new extrasolar planets almost daily (at least it seems that way), there will be a sky somewhere, thus making them everlasting.  No wonder my output under my Amaranthine Skies project is so spacy.   Getting back to the music, most of Amaranthine comprised of downtempo electronic music mixed with some light organic instrumentation.  It doesn’t quite explain how Amaranthine Skies has ambient, rock, and post-metal albums in its wake, but putting together Mindtrap was extremely helpful in developing my electronic music skills, which I’ve used on all the Amaranthine Skies albums in those aforementioned genres.   Influential to: Amaranthine Skies, Philistine on the Sidewalk, Skies of Cyanide   Music: [VR003], [VRC018], [VRC017]   Art. Human   This project I started in 2003 is likely the most important of my harsher projects, as it laid the groundwork for anything I’ve done with an industrial or noise edge.   It was originally Artificial Humanity, but there was another band from Toronto (I believe) using the Slipknot gimmick with that name.  I had already shortened it to Art. Human as an abbreviation, so I went with it as the actual name to make things less confusing.   As for the music, most of it was either groove-heavy, guitar-driven industrial metal or sparse industrial with the focus on being creepy.  The most influential song from the project was easily “Inundation”, which was recorded again under my Amaranthine Skies project for [Days Gone By, Volume One] and remixed recently under my Skies of Cyanide project for [Nevar Say Die! Compilation, Volume Three].  It’s one of the least complex songs I’ve done, but it still resonates well to this day.   The reason I stopped working with Art. Human back in 2004 was that I was growing out of my interest for this style at the time and the whole thing with two bands having the same name was kind of off-putting, which is likely why my project names are rather odd these days.  The other band didn’t last past 2006 either.   Influential to: Amaranthine Skies, Concrete Mutant, Cyanidic Rapture, Philistine on the Sidewalk, Skies of Cyanide, Voices of Epic Fail   Music: [VRC009]   DJ WarMECH   Before I started using trackers, I was remixing videogame music for this 2004 project in Reason.  I did it because I enjoyed working with videogame tunes and to get my skills up with Reason – which worked rather well and was helpful for creating Mindtrap and other electronic-based musical ventures.  I still use Reason with all of my projects today, so the time I spent with the project was very useful.   Things went smoothly for this project up until the last song, “Mysterious Ruins of Abell”, which took me about five months off and on to finish.  Once I did, I put this project to rest as another of my projects (Forfallen) was starting to get a full head of steam in late 2004.  It wasn’t until I started up Mystic Nova in late 2007 that I worked with music in such a way that required so much precision and attention to detail.   Influential to: Amaranthine Skies, Mystic Nova, Philistine on the Sidewalk, Voices of Epic Fail   Music: [VRC013]   f-jan   With a name that stood for “free jazz and noise”, this was a project that came about in 2004 during some rather tumultuous times at a previous job.  I was doing my best to make some nasty and creepy noise tracks as a way to vent my frustrations.  Mission accomplished.   As for its influential nature, it ramped up the noise quotient that I had been dabbling with in Art. Human tenfold.  Almost every track had some form of blistering noise element to it, and some of it is fairly listenable without being exhausting.  This is really the project where I got into tempering noise with music, though I’ve toned it down a bit in my advancing age.   The reason the project ended is that I finally left that job and all the stress went away.  Now I do noisier stuff for the joy of it, rather than as a response to my environmental pressures.   Influential to: Concrete Mutant, Cyanidic Rapture, Philistine on the Sidewalk   Music: [VRC012]   Forfallen   I started this one up in late 2004 after finding my interest in industrial metal again.  While it started off as some massive sounding originals (not too far from where Concrete Mutant is these days), it eventually evolved into my primary outlet for covering videogame tunes.  This is likely due to discovering [Dwelling of Duels] right after doing my first videogame cover for the project, “Silver Points and Metal Joints” from Chrono Trigger.   Forfallen was not always that well-received due to being a bit more experimental and caustic than most of what was being released through Dwelling of Duels at the time, but it seems to have made a lasting impression on some folks and it was the genesis of my distinct throat-ripping scream that I’m somewhat known for these days.   The project sputtered out in early 2006 when I had no idea where to take it.  The last song I did for the project was a colossal flop, was part of a catalyst for a meltdown I had at the time, and would have been better suited under Amaranthine Skies (had it existed yet).  I also had received some rather ill-worded mail from a band called ForeFallen that wanted me to cease and desist with Forfallen or they’d sic their lawyer on me.   With all that nonsense combined, it seemed better to put the project behind me and move on to new things.  It’s too bad things fell apart, as some of the best times I’ve had and some of the best friends I’ve made intertwine with the majority of output from the project in 2005.  Ah, memories.   Influential to: Amaranthine Skies, Concrete Mutant, Philistine on the Sidewalk, Zud   Music: [VRC016], [VRC014]   Natthimmel   This was my first real project, hands down.  Even though it started in 2002 (a solid eight years after I’d started playing and had already recorded a full-length under my own name), it was the one I dedicated the most time to and likely still holds the record for the one I’ve done the most songs under.  Amaranthine Skies is right there (I haven’t counted the songs), but that’s the only other one.   The whole idea behind Natthimmel was to get really experimental with my compositions.  My earlier work had been fairly standard metal fare, but this was the project that I started embracing everything and trying to make the songs sound different from each other while still trying to maintain a similar vibe – not too far off from the mission statement for Philistine on the Sidewalk, really.   I d like to think that I achieved this, as I put out a 13 song album in [The Great Beyond] that taxed the physical limitations of a compact disc at 78 and a half minutes long, and put out many other decently-sized collections of tunes – original and videogame covers ’ over the years that cover a wide range of genres that would take a while to list.   Similar to Forfallen, this project sputtered out in early 2006, with a few songs showing up here and there throughout the rest of that year and one as late as the end of 2008.  That last song was proof that the Natthimmel project had become redundant and Amaranthine Skies was its worthy successor, though it can be argued that Amaranthine Skies needs more pennywhistle before it can truly take the place of Natthimmel.   Influential to: Amaranthine Skies, Concrete Mutant, Philistine on the Sidewalk   Music: [VR002], [VRC015], [VRC011], [VRC008], [VRC005]   Radiant Star   This project was running concurrent with Natthimmel in 2002 and it came to a point where it was either this project or Natthimmel that became my main project.  Natthimmel obviously won, but this project was my first real dabbling in electronic music.   I made some eerie tunes (one of which was unbelievably silly as well) with more primitive software – every song from this project was made in MTV Music Generator.  The software’s tremendously dated at this point, but I’d still use it in Philistine on the Sidewalk if it worked properly on my computer.   Influential to: Amaranthine Skies, Cyanidic Rapture, Philistine on the Sidewalk, Skies of Cyanide   Music: [VRC003]   More Projects to Come?   Boy, I hope not – unless I’m working with other folks, that is.  There’s one more solo project that I’m comtemplating about – it’s like Voices of Epic Fail without the videogame elements, but I have no idea when I’d start it. It’s mostly influenced by all the technical metalcore and grindcore that I’ve been listening to over the past few months while working out, but I’m still unsure about how to pull off the execution.   After that launches (if it does), I’m done with new projects unless a wild hair gets under me to do some singer/songwriter tunes with me and an acoustic guitar of some sort, but I’d use my own name for that.   That should wrap things up!  I might do one on my not-so influential projects in the future, but I’m not sure if there would be enough material to get my minimum 500 words up about them.  It’s likely though, as a couple have juvenile stories behind them and I’m not exactly one that’s short for words.   Do you have any other questions about my older projects?  Feel free to pop by the forums and ask away!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Philistine on the Sidewalk] Posted on January 13th, 2010.   As you may have seen yesterday, I launched yet another music project.  You may wonder why I did so when I already have six solo projects and currently two collaborative projects.  Of course, if you’ve read a few of my older blog posts, you may not.   Removing Compartments   Anyone that is familiar with the way that I work on music knows that my musical projects are highly compartmentalized.  I get set on trying to make each of my other projects sound a certain way and I try not to have much overlap at all (unless it calls for some).  Amaranthine Skies is heavy on the ambience, Concrete Mutant is just freakin’ heavy, and the others have their specifications.  Skies of Cyanide is the only one that calls for overlap, but that’s due to it being a combination of synths from my Amaranthine Skies and Cyanidic Rapture projects (thus the name).   With Philistine on the Sidewalk, I wanted to do a mostly freeform project that lets me come up with a musical idea of any kind and see where I can take it.  A solo jam band, if you will.   I say it’s mostly freeform because all of the tracks will have guitar of some sort.  There’s also likely to be some drum loops that have been slowed down and some vocal samples from various sources that have been reversed and slowed down as well.  Why?  It interests me.  I don’t question inspiration; I go with it.   I’ve done work with slowed down drum loops before (check out [Drinking from the Oil Drum] from my Forfallen project – about four minutes in), but having slow, looping, pummeling drums adds to the hypnotic factor that seems to be permeating a lot of my work as of late (though it’s really nothing new).   In any event, the first song released entitled “Contemplate the Evanescence” pulls a bunch of random sound samples I had on my computer from various sources and couples them with a close to eight minute freeform guitar track drenched in distortion and reverse reverb that ties the song together.  It’s undoubtedly a repetitious work, but hypnotic drone generally falls under that category.  The only part that’s more or less random is the aforementioned guitar track, but I still stayed within certain scales.   Inspiration from Unlikely Sources   One of the things that I find amusing is that the genesis for this project was rather inspired by [Bull of Heaven], though it sounds almost nothing like what they’re doing.  The droning is sort of there, but it’s done in a completely different way.   I might be able to do something in that vein in the future, but I like to layer things a little too much to really strip things down to that point.  I’m not one to rule anything out, though.   As for the name and the song titles – there is a source tying them together, but I’d rather not spill it and let people figure it out for themselves.  I have spilled the beans to some esteemed colleagues under the influence of some tasty [Samuel Adams Winter Lager], but that happens when combining excitement and alcohol.   The art is a completely random idea that has nothing to do with the project name or the song titles and I’ll leave people to figure out the source of as well.   Future Songs   So far I have a few ideas, though the next one striking my fancy is something chugging and doomy, which is an area I’ve had a lot of experience with over the years.  However, I want to take it somewhere new – somewhere I wouldn’t have taken it before.  I’m thinking dual guitar tracks and polyrhythms and all sorts of wackiness stretched out into about a 12+ minute anthem of decimation.  It should be fun!   It’s hard to say where the future will take this project, but as I’m going to devote some time every weekend to doing freeform and experimental recording and song construction for the foreseeable future, I imagine it should lead to some interesting places.  Feel free to join me on the journey!   [http://www.philistineonthesidewalk.net] – the songs will always be free with donations accepted if you enjoy what you hear.   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Being Overambitious] Posted on January 11th, 2010.   As I sit here and reflect after a whirlwind weekend has drawn to a close and not much has been accomplished, I have to wonder where the time went.  I think that I’ve been pushing myself too hard, but I’m rather blind to such indicators, even though I had to come straight home after work on Thursday to take a nap instead of putting my usual cardio time in.   I don’t know if it’s age sneaking up on me or if I’m driving myself too hard (probably a little of both), but the ambitious nature of my mind is starting to take a toll on my body.   Weekend Goals Missed   I had a lot of things I wanted to get accomplished this weekend that passed me by – I wanted to get guitar tracks recorded for one of my projects, I wanted to get one of my new projects off the ground, and I wanted to not do a last minute Monday morning blog post, but my wants and hopes were quashed by certain recesses of my mind needing some down time after a trip across the country that was a non-stop rollercoaster of business and pleasure.   Overlooking Accomplishments   One thing I’ve had a problem with for years is that I overlook what I do accomplish, and the things that stay on the to-do list take precedence over what gets taken care of.  For instance, I’ve mentioned the things that I wanted to get done this weekend but didn’t, but haven’t mentioned what I did get done this weekend.   My biggest accomplishment this weekend was getting all of my important documents backed up off of my old desktop (circa 2005) that’s starting to go downhill and put on to my newer computers, as well as setting up my laptop to be my internet-based computer and my newer desktop to be my creative-based one.  I already had all of my musical projects set up on the newer computer, but now I’ve got my website and writing files on it as well.  This is definitely helpful, as I can listen to rough mixes of songs while I blog.   Then there was the project I completed with archiving more of my CDs and syncing up my iPod with all the new music I’ve acquired over the past few months and old stuff that I want to listen to again.  That took a good majority of Saturday because I’d waited too long to catch up on everything.   I also mostly finished up the song for my new project, but there might be a few things I want to add and there might be some mix tweaks that need to be applied as well.  I recorded what could be considered the backbone for the song, as it glues the other elements together rather well, but there may be something else that needs to be added.   Beer Is the Mindkiller   It seems that I didn’t get my fill of alcohol at [MAGFest] last weekend and I drank more than I should have this weekend, which is counterproductive for wanting to get more things accomplished.  Getting back to the daily routine after having four days of non-stop new experiences was a little more than I could handle and I think a subconscious part of me was wanting a little more of that party atmosphere, but that wasn’t a possibility without excessive inebriation.  Honestly, I think I drank more this weekend than I did at MAGFest.   I think what has also happened is that a case of PMD (Post-MAGFest Depression) has manifested, but it has done so in an aggressive nature this year.  I don’t get depressed any more, but when I went back to work on Tuesday, I was pissed off.  I think what it was is that I was able to make money in a way that I enjoyed at MAGFest and having to go back to the office was somewhat infuriating.  All of the people I work with are great, but the work itself has become completely unfulfilling – probably because there is so little of it.   A Balance to be Found   My ingrained vision is that hard work will lead me to the life that I want, and any weekend that I botch things up (like this one) is one more week I have to wait to achieve my goals.  That’s part of the reason I get up so early on the weekdays and make sure to put in at least a few good hours of work on the sites or on music before I head to the office everyday.   I’ll write this weekend off as allowing myself to catch up after being across the country and the biggest party of the year, but if I screw up next weekend (especially with it being a 3-day one), I’m going to be very frustrated with myself.   Is there anyone else out there as driven as I am (or more so)?  Stop by the forums and detail your megalomaniacal plans for world domination!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Working a Merchandise Table] Posted on January 8th, 2010.   I wrote about getting a merchandise table to sell CDs from my [Concatenation Records] label at [MAGFest 8] on Wednesday, but I didn’t really go in-depth on my experiences there.  I plan to do so with this post.  I know that I’m not the most successful person ever to run a merchandise table, but I did sell 80 CDs in about 14 hours altogether, so I have some insight that I’d like to share.   I was a little nervous right before the first day of working the merchandise table, as putting myself out there in the public and attempting to sell things was a new concept for me.  I had some previous success with selling CDs at earlier MAGFests, but all of the sales were to friends in familiar places – either in my hotel room or in theirs while they were drunk.   Engage Your Customer   When you’re sitting at a merchandise table at a convention, you notice almost all of the folks passing by.  Some of them completely ignore you, some give the table a passing glance, and some of them linger.  Go after the lingerers, as they might be uncomfortable bridging the communication barrier.  The point is to sell something to them, and it’s hard to do that without actively engaging them.   Ask Questions   A good way to get their attention is by asking them a question on what they’re interested in.  For example, I would ask them if they were into chiptunes, videogame covers, or original music, which are the types of music available on my Concatenation Records label.  If they showed an interest, I would continue to describe what I was selling and give fairly detailed descriptions of the contents of said CDs depending on their interest.   Have Something Free Available   While I was doing my best to sell CDs, I had free fliers available on the merchandise table with a description of everything that I was selling.  I also sold the point that there is free music available for download at the website address – [http://www.concatenationrecords.com] – that I put at the bottom of the flyer.   I counted 63 fliers that were distributed, which is 63 potential customers in the future and 63 people that may tell their friends and associates about what’s available at the Concatenation Records site.   Fine Tune Your Plan for Next Time   As luck would have it, certain CDs sold out, some got close to selling out, and some didn’t move much at all.  While it’s a little hard to fine tune a plan when you have a limited stock on hand, it helps you think ahead to the next time that you’re selling and to think about the audience you’re selling to.   Have Fun   While you should be trying to sell your product, you should also enjoy interacting with your customers.  Exchange banter, tell stories, do whatever you can to leave a favorable impression of you and what you offer in their minds.   All in all, it was an enjoyable experience working at a merchandise table.  Selling CDs that I have put lots of hard work into in the months and years previous was extremely rewarding and not just monetarily.  I’ll definitely be getting a merchandise table at MAGFest next year and I’ll hopefully be able to sell even more!   Do you have any insight into selling merchandise at a table in a street fair, marketplace, or concert setting?  I’d love to hear about it on the forums!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [MAGFest 8] Posted on January 6th, 2010.   You might have noticed that I missed a couple of days to post blogs, and that’s because I was at [MAGFest] from Thursday to Monday.  It’s a music and gaming fan convention with lots of live music, tons of games to play from consoles to arcade machines, as well as many other things pertaining to that realm.  When I think about it, this convention encompasses the four main elements that I base this blog on – I listened to a lot of music, I worked out multiple times, I did some gaming, and I drank a fair amount of beer.   It’s difficult to get my thoughts together on this weekend filled with non-stop action, but I’m going to attempt it.   Thursday   I flew out with a nervous knot in my stomach, but I couldn’t really tell you why it was there. I was excited to be headed to MAGFest, and wasn’t worried about anything in particular. Thankfully, it went away as soon as we took off. I opted to read on the plane, so I started and finished the [The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds book in the 33 1/3 series] and got about 100 pages into my Jeet Kune Do book.   Once we got to the hotel, my friends on [The Shizz] started popping up out of the woodwork.  I had flown in with one of them and rode in the shuttle to the airport with a few of them, and once we all got to the hotel, I started seeing more and more of them.  That's the best part of MAGFest for me – seeing all of my old friends again.   Eventually, we congregated in a huge circle on the lower lobby level and began talking about anything and everything.  It was a lot more fun than celebrating the turn of the new decade, as some of us were waiting in line to get into the room with the celebration when midnight struck.   We did manage to get in a little after midnight, but the band wasn’t to our liking, so we went back to the circle of conversation.  A couple of us went back in to watch [virt] do some chiptunes, which was definitely high energy and enjoyable.   After that, I spent a lot of time with my friend John, who does chiptunes under his project entitled Zio and TEH LOLZ and has three releases on Concatenation Records – [Face Stomper], [Chemicaldyne], and [Subfusion: Ice Light Army]. Being a New Jersey native, he was kind enough to bring a case of beer from the [Flying Fish] brewery and we had some good conversation about music over some tasty beer.   Unfortunately, this conversation was interrupted by the alarm, as there was an electrical smell coming from the 11th floor, so we all had to evacuate to the lobby.  Hijinks ensued from there, but that happens when you’re drunk at 3 AM and have to go somewhere you don’t want to.  After the incident, I went back up to John’s room, grabbed some of his CDs to sell at the table, then went up to my room and went to bed.   Friday   I started my three day routine of eating breakfast, working out for an hour, showering, eating lunch, then hitting the Concatenation Records table this day, though I had to sneak in a trip to the CVS between eating lunch and working the table to get a couple things.  On the way back from the store, I saw something in the bushes that intrigued me. It was a black squirrel, which is probably quite commonplace to folks in Virginia, but we don’t have them here in Seattle.   After getting back, I spent four hours at the table and was able to sell around 35 discs, with about a 50/50 ratio of people I knew and people I didn’t.  I was able to do some networking with [Original Sound Version], so when I get a new release on the label, I can contact them and they’ll announce it and possibly do a write-up.  Very cool!   The three concerts that night were all really enjoyable, and the acts that played were [Armadillo Tank], [Rare Candy], and [Metroid Metal] – the latter of which blew me away even though this is the third time I’ve seen them.  They threw a pretty good shout out to [Meshuggah] by adding a section of “Future Breed Machine” into one of their songs, and they absolutely nailed it.  So good!   After the concerts, I made my way to the Shizz Suite, wherein I enjoyed many tasty beers and danced it off.  There was a quick trip back to the concert room to watch [naxat] play a short set (which was great), then it was back to the Shizz Suite to dance it off some more until I couldn’t.  I don’t actually remember getting back to my room that night, but I know I did without any trouble.   Saturday   The weight room was rather overpopulated on this day, but I still managed to get a full workout in.  I wasn’t quite as successful at the table, but around 25 CDs were sold in four hours and more networking was done.  John was kind enough to join me for quite a while, which made the time go by faster.   As far as the networking goes, I spoke with a woman in a start-up gaming company looking for either background music makers or jingle writers.  Considering I wouldn’t know what to do with the latter, the former sounded more intriguing.  I’ll get back to her this weekend and get a better idea of what’s going on with that.   The rest of the evening consisted of music, music, and more music!  I watched sets for [Select Start], [Armcannon], [The OneUps], and [Temp Sound Solutions], and all of them were extremely impressive.  Then I spent three hours at the [Dwelling of Duels] listening party, which was probably a bit much, but I powered through it.  Then I slept for a minute or two.   Sunday   I did my morning routine and worked the table for six hours, selling around another 25 CDs and this time networking with a podcaster that’s going to get in contact with me before he starts using tunes from the site, so it’ll be interesting to see what he chooses for his show (and to check out his show as well).   I managed one show this night, as I saw [The Smash Brothers] and they put on an excellent set even though their lead guitarist was pretty hammered. I hung around for the DoD results (which I didn’t fare well with) and The Shizz Family Photo before heading to the Shizz Suite – which was completely empty save for one person sleeping it off.   There were some shenanigans going on out in the hall and those eventually settled down once the Sidequest (aka the Traveling Dance Party) returned to incite new and different shenanigans.  Then we all went into the suite and danced it off for a while.   A quiet room formed just off of the suite and a few of us went in there and talked for a while. My buddy Zach (founder of [Good-Evil]) got a [Stylophone] for Christmas and was showing it off to everyone – it’s a little keyboard that you play with a stylus and can twist a knob on the back of it to alter the pitch and make it sound something like a Theremin.  Very cool!   Exhaustion soon took its toll on me, so I found John again and we went back to his room so I could get some more of his CDs for the trip home.  He hooked me up, then I went back to my room and finished the last Yuengling that I had and went to bed.   Monday   The last day of MAGFest is always the worst, since it means saying goodbye to everyone that you can find.  After cleaning up, packing up, and turning in my room keys, many goodbyes were said in the hotel lobby and there was a lot of waiting around for the shuttle to take us to the airport.   At least things ended well with a late lunch/early dinner at a restaurant in the Reagan airport with a small group of my friends.  The flight back to Seattle seemed to take forever as naps, an Alaskan Amber and a shot of Crown Royal couldn’t make things go faster.   Eventually, three of us landed in Seattle and then we went our separate ways – one continued on towards a flight to Anchorage, one went to the baggage claim, and I went home.   Back to the Grind   I went back to work yesterday morning and a severe case of “what am I doing here?” washed over me.  After spending four days with some of the best people I’ve ever had the good fortune to meet, coming back to this part of my life seems like drudgery at its finest.  Going from being busy for every waking minute and loving every second of it to having almost nothing to do and being bored out of my mind was quite the annoyance.   My trip to MAGFest has made me more determined to put 110% effort behind my projects this year, so that I can eventually jettison the dead weight from my schedule, focus on said projects even more and enjoy future opportunities to spend time with the people that I consider part of my family.  For the love of MAGFest!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [2009 in Review] Posted on December 30th, 2009.   I know that I already went over this in a fair amount of detail in my [Ten Years of Twenties] post, but I wanted to hit upon the other aspects of my life since I have the tendency to document my life by what I’m doing at the time with my music instead of looking at the big picture.   Music   This was definitely the year for my [Amaranthine Skies] project, as I did a Chrono Trigger cover entitled “The Future of Destruction (Demo)” in March, then a Drakkhen cover entitled “Machinations of the Drakkhen” for the [Dwelling of Duels] competition in April.   After that, I finished up two releases for the project by mid-year ([Enveloped] in June and [It Came from Beyond the Oort Cloud] in July) and did the track “Elemental” for [Nevar Say Die! Compilation, Volume Three].  Granted, I did a track under all seven of my projects for NSD3, but that’s beside the point.   This year was also the year for [Concrete Mutant] to rise from the pavement, as the project was on indefinite hiatus since March of 2007.  It was brought back to life with the “Resurrection” track that came out on [Avalanche on Play, Volume One] album, shortly followed by the “Seasick” track for NSD3.   In fact, I’ve been doing at least a track or two for this project over the last three months, with the Ninja Gaiden 3 cover entitled “Ominous Death” for the Dwelling of Duels competition in November, a cover of “Jingle Bells” for [Avalanchers on Sleigh], and maybe I did something for the upcoming Dwelling of Duels competition with a listening party to be held at [MAGFest] this year.   [Cyanidic Rapture] is another project of mine that I thought may have been headed for the scrap heap in early 2009 after [Dragons of Putrescence] came out and I had no idea where to take the project, but that changed this fall when I figured out where to take the project.   Once I figured everything out, I did the “Narcotic Interlude” track for NSD3 and finished almost all of the electronic parts for the upcoming “Sphere of Conspiracy” EP, so 2010 will start with recording the vocals and instruments for it.   It was fun working on the Zud song entitled “Decay” together with a couple of other folks from different areas; one from the east coast of the USA and the other from Russia.  That’s one of the things I love about the internet; the ability to create with other folks over long distances with relative ease.   All of my other projects had fairly minimal output this year, as the new material under said projects showed up on NSD3. The two songs on [A Chip off the Shizz Block, Volume One] from my Mystic Nova project were from 2007, so those don’t count.  In any event, these projects aren’t quite as major as the first three that I mentioned, so there wasn’t as much focus on them.   I also started a song for my new project last weekend, but I’m going to wait to talk about that until I get a song up.   Fitness   This was really the year of revolving trainers, as I’ve worked with five different ones this year.  My last sessions with Dave were at the beginning of the year, and I also quit MKG around that time.  For a good five to six months, I was training regularly at home doing lots of striking routines and dumbbell drills.  I only went back to the gym because my contract was about to expire.   I was going to cancel my membership, but Richard set me up with a sweet discount on the membership fees and personal training, so I kept going.  I’ve already covered most of what happened from that point in my [For the Love of Fitness] and [Revolving Trainers] posts, so there’s no point in repeating myself (more than I already have).   I have worked out with Ting a couple times since those posts, and we definitely had good workouts.  We did a striking workout last week and it was great to get back to training my striking with an actual person again.  The session on Monday was a bit more normal, but there was a part of the training where I was hammering a medicine ball into a tractor tire and tore the skin off of the insides of my thumbs.  All’s fair in the pursuit of a good workout!   Gaming   Gaming wasn’t an extreme priority this year (it hasn’t been for quite a while now), but that didn’t deter me from picking up an Xbox 360, mainly because I’d been sold on [Fallout 3] and some of the other titles.  I did play a ton of Fallout 3 when I first got the system and managed to knock out all of the achievements on Civilization: Revolution.   The game I’ve been spending the most time with lately is [Borderlands], which combines the best parts of Fallout and Diablo and I love the sense of humor that the game has.   Other games that I’ve spent quite a bit of time working on are SoulCalibur 4, EarthDefenseForce 2017, Phantasy Star Universe, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, A Kingdom for Keflings, Crystal Defenders, and Catan.   The achievement point system is a blessing and a curse – I love achieving things in the games, but it’s kind of wrecked gaming on other systems for me because they lack those achievements.  If I’m going to start up the [Nintendo-A-GoGo] site again next year, I’m going to have to get over that quickly.   Beer   This was a pretty monumental year for beer, as I went to Astoria three times (March, July, and September) to enjoy the goodness that the [Fort George Brewery] and the [Astoria Brewing Company] have to offer, which is a lot.  I came back each time with two growlers a piece from each brewery, not to mention a growler from the [Pelican Pub & Brewery] on the September trip.   I certainly got well-acquainted with how to pack a cooler this year, since beer needs to be nice and cold to properly travel from place to place.  I’m not hauling beer across the Pacific Northwest to risk it getting skunky from getting warm.  Anyway, this knowledge also came in handy when the refrigerator died in October and the replacement didn’t come for a couple weeks.   Locally, it was a little disappointing that the [Maritime Pacific Brewing Company] moved locations because the folks down in Olympia have been dragging their butts on getting the beer license for the new location back to them, which meant they haven’t been able to open up the new restaurant yet, which will hopefully still be called the Jolly Roger Taproom.   I had some good times there earlier in the year, but at least they’ve got production up and running, so their amazing Jolly Roger Christmas Ale is in the local stores.  It’s hearty, tasty, and with a 9.5% ABV to turn you into a fumbling mess with a quickness.   I also got a book on micro brewing that I mentioned in the [Turning Thirty] post, but I haven’t had a chance to crack it open yet.   Writing   There’s not a whole lot to tell on this account, as I started “For the Love of Creativity” at the beginning of this month and I’ve been keeping up with it tri-weekly.  So far, so good!   Webpages   This one’s pretty easy to sum up as well – I revamped the Concatenation Records site at least a couple times this year, and it helped me to figure out a basic template that I want to use across all of my sites, so now it’s a matter of fine tuning everything.   2010   I have a feeling that each of these paragraphs will be the size of the music one next year, as I have quite a few plans in each of these venues that I’m going to execute.  I have a strong suspicion that the upcoming year is going to be my busiest yet, which seems to be the case as every year has gotten busier and busier since 2006 or so.  I hope I can ease off a little in 2011, but we’ll see.   This is my last post for the year and I’ll be back in a week with some epic tales of revelry!  Happy New Year everyone!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Musical Goals for 2010] Posted on December 28th, 2009.   With 2009 wrapping up, I’ve decided to sit down and map out my musical goals for 2010.  I was able to make good on most of my goals for 2009, but I have a feeling 2010 is going to be even better.   New project   I’ve got a new solo project that I was hoping to have at least one track finished for by this morning, but it’s still in progress.  That’s just as well, since I’d have to launch the page for it as well and time’s rather short at the moment.   Anyway, the project falls in the experimental ambient drone realm and it’s heavily inspired by [Bull of Heaven].  I’ll blog about it in full once it’s ready to launch, which should be next month sometime.   The idea for this project is to do one song at a time and put them up on the page, rather than strive for an album.  I don’t have any set idea on how many tracks I want to do for this project next year, though one a month is a goal that’s showing up in my head.   Ambient album with xoc   I’m in the process of putting together an album with [xoc], who is best known for his video game remixes, but has lots of projects as well – definitely a kindred spirit.  We’re also both musical workhorses, so it seems an obvious pairing.   We do have one collaborative effort between us on [The Wonderful World of Willow] compilation as The Powerful Shizzards, but that included quite a few other folks as well.  This time, we’ll be combining a thick ambient and musique concrete sound, though we’ve still got some more details to work out about everything.   Cyanidic Rapture   I’ve spent the last three months putting together the framework for a four-song EP under this project.  While it’s an EP, it still exceeds thirty minutes.  It’s a little more upbeat than [Dragons of Putrescence] and definitely more textured.  I think most of the Reason work is done, so it still needs lyrics, vocals, and live instrumentation.   It’s going to be called “Sphere of Conspiracy” and it’s going to be the 23rd release on Concatenation, due to the relations of that number to some of the album content.  The next open slot is number 20, so I’ve still got a little time, but I want to have it done by the time that the 23rd slot is ready to go.   Concrete Mutant   I want to get the first actual Concrete Mutant album out this year, and it’s already starting to come together.  Its working title is “Ruination” and it’s looking to be ten tracks of reworked old and new material.  It’s still in the very early developmental stage, so things are subject to change.   I keep having sound changes with this project, but I think things are finally settling.  I continue to record new songs for various compilations and competitions, and the sound comes together even more with each track I record.  I think that’s how it usually works, and I also think the sound is ready for recording an album with.   Amaranthine Skies   I’m hoping to get two albums done for this project this year, but that might be a bit too lofty a goal with everything else on my plate.  I have so many albums that I want to do for this project that it’s hard to pick between them all, but the one that seems to be calling to me the most is a Norse Mythology-themed one entitled “From the Roots of Yggdrasil”.   It’s going to be nine tracks with an instrumental intro and outro, and I’m finally going to flex my vocal muscles as I’m going to sing on this one.  There’s also a couple of recording-related things I’m going to do with this album that should have it sounding different than my other Amaranthine Skies albums, but then again, none of them have really sounded the same.   The second I want to do is the full video game cover album, which was a goal for this year that was severely derailed by the two compilations this year.  I think I may drop everything in September and get on this if that’s what it takes.  The two compilations should be wrapped up by this point, so it shouldn’t be a problem.   Mystic Nova   I’ve had some decent output from this project, but I’ve been meaning to get a full chiptune album going for a while.  I tried putting one together in 2008 and 2009, but I only managed a few mostly finished ideas and quite a few ideas that still need a lot of development.  I want to take those ideas and reapply them to a more realistic SNES sound template (eight tracks in each stereo channel) and put together an album that has a fairly similar sound running throughout.   I think what foiled me last time is that I was working with far too many things to keep track of.  Instead of working with eight tracks in each channel, I had 27 tracks and samples.  I’ll likely go over the eight sample mark, but not to that extent.  That means that I’ll have to do some rearranging of the old source material, but that suits me fine.   Voices of Epic Fail   I may go for this, as if I really get on it, I could get the album knocked out in a couple of weeks.  Video game-related digital grindcore isn’t exactly the most time-consuming pursuit, but it certainly is fun!   To recap – I’ve got at least six albums (potentially seven) that I want to do, not to mention the monthly project, and the two yearly compilations as well as other compilations that spring up on online.   With all those things, I’m going to have to find new ways to optimize my time, as that’s a lot of work to do.  It should be doable, as I’ve already started on at least half of the aforementioned things.  My old modus operandi was to be happy with finishing half of the things on my list, but I’d really like to get all of those albums done this year.   Though they may not be as lofty as mine, do you have any musical plans for 2010?  If so, what are they?  Please post about them on the forum!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Merry Christmas] Posted on December 25th, 2009.   Merry Christmas everyone!  Perhaps not all of my readers celebrate this joyous day, so I wish that those of you that don’t celebrate Christmas have a happy holiday for whichever holiday you enjoy celebrating!  I also know a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses, so I hope you have an enjoyable three-day weekend!   This one’s going to be a bit of a challenge for me, as I’m rather loaded on alcoholic eggnog at the time being, and I’ve also had a shot of single barrel bourbon and a shot of whiskey from one of my favorite micro breweries on the Oregon coast, [Rogue].  I might have a bit of a time getting my thoughts together, but I still have a pretty solid internal editor when I’m hammered.   To get to the nitty-gritty, what does Christmas mean to me?   Family   Spending time with my family is definitely the most enjoyable part of the Christmas season for me.  Last night, I went up north with my mom to Mukilteo and spent time with my aunt and uncle’s side of the family.  Most of them are my cousins and 2nd cousins and a lot of them are children, so it’s nice to be surrounded by such youthful energy!   We all got together for a nice meal and many desserts, though I had to do my best to eat well since I’ve been trying to keep my weight down after last week’s indiscretions.  I’m only up a half of a pound since yesterday, so I did pretty well, though I think this morning’s nogscapades might ruin me.   Speaking of this morning, I spent it with my parents and we all had a good time opening presents around the live Christmas tree.  It’s on the small side, but once things warm up outside, it can be planted and will hopefully flourish outside.  Last year’s tree didn’t end up so well after trying that, but it’s still hanging in there.   Presents   I got a pretty good haul of things, though I think the present I’m most excited about is Bruce Lee’s book entitled [Jeet Kune Do: Bruce Lee's Commentaries on the Martial Way].  It’s a book that describes his fighting style and his philosophies on fighting and life.  I can’t wait to read it!   Other notable gifts would be [Tekken 6] for Xbox 360, as I’ve been a fan of the series since the 2nd one for PlayStation and it’s one of the two fighting games that I’m actually halfway decent at (the other being games in the SoulCalibur series).   I also received a copy of Slayer’s new album [World Painted Blood] from my mom, which is weird considering I used to drive her crazy in the mornings listening to Slayer as a teen while she was going through menopause.  I guess that’s all water under the bridge, since that was so long ago.   Enjoying Christmas for family and presents may not be the most traditional reasons for Christmas being celebrated, but I’m not an especially religious person and I really enjoy the warm and familial surroundings.  I’m at a point in my life where I’m busy pursuing so many different things that I rarely get a chance to slow down and enjoy the people that mean the most to me in life, and the holidays (especially Christmas) afford me that opportunity.   So, Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Revolving Trainers] Posted on December 23rd, 2009.   No, this post isn’t about some new kind of gym shoe, it’s about the number of trainers I’ve gone through in my three-and-a-half years at Pure Fitness/Xplore Fitness/Vision Quest and the difference in their training styles.  What’s funny is that the name of the gym I work out at has changed only half as much as the trainers have!   Becca   Becca was the first trainer I worked with and while I enjoyed working with someone my age from a rival high school (Ingraham), she didn’t really instill me with any new knowledge about working out.  She quit after a few months to go back to college.  I could tell her heart wasn’t really into it, and I think she figured that out too.   Jason   Jason was a polar shift from Becca, as he brought a heavy martial arts dynamic to our workouts.  He was the influence for me really getting into the martial arts as well as becoming a lot more experimental with the way I work out.  He taught me to “think outside the box”, as it were.   He was trained by Daniel Inosanto, who was one of Bruce Lee’s pupils and is well versed in the principles of Jeet Kune Do.  Jason was also quite the fan of Muay Thai (and Tony Jaa movies), so we trained techniques in both of those styles as well as doing exercises that helped strengthen the muscles required to really get the most out of each discipline.   Jason also had two other people at the gym that he trained that were interested in the same level of intensity that I was.  Their names were Justin and Victor, and the three of us started doing group sessions in addition to personal sessions.  We were all put through the ringer by Jason multiple times a week and I know we all seriously benefited from the sessions.   Jason and I worked out together for a year and a half, and I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach when I got the phone call that he’d left our gym to train guys at Maurice Smith’s gym.  It’s definitely a better job for him, as people that are training to fight could make use of his skills more effectively.  Still, he was a blast to work with and I learned so much from him.   Dave   Dave was one of Jason’s workout partners at the gym and I remember he came with us (Justin, Victor, Jason and I) to go see the most recent Rambo movie right after it came out.  Dave came from a power lifting background, so he taught me the importance of proper form while working out.   Before I learned proper form, I had about six weeks of downtime due to using improper form on a deadlift, which caused my back to go out.  After that mishap, I really focused on getting my lifting techniques down and I’d likely still be training with Dave if he hadn’t switched to mornings.  I did the 7 AM sessions for quite a while, but I couldn’t maintain it.   I could maintain it now as I regularly get up at 4 AM, but it would cut into some prime working time.  Granted, it’d only be one day a week, but it’s a moot point as I don’t think Dave works there any more.   Richard   Richard played Huskies football in his formative years and won the 1994 Guy Flaherty award, which is an award for the most inspirational player.  In training with him, I fully understand why.  I have never worked with a more enthusiastic person and every time we trained together, it was a great experience.   His training style was obviously more football-oriented, which was good for me because I was looking for a high-impact workout at the time.  Richard and I worked together from July to November of this year, and every session he kept me on my toes and he appreciated the ferocity in which I worked out.   Richard was also the general manager of our gym at the time, so getting a half-hour of his time was a privilege.  He eventually became too busy to do the workouts and got me set up with other personal trainers.  He’s currently down at the Auburn Vision Quest applying his enthusiasm and work ethic to their gym, and I’m sure things will get better with him helping out down there.   Alex   I can’t say much about Alex because we only trained once or twice together.  He had a similar training style to Richard, but had nowhere near the same level of enthusiasm.  He didn’t show up for one of our scheduled training appointments right before I went to the Oregon coast this year, and he was no longer employed there when I got back.   Damarr   I was enjoying working with Damarr over the past couple of months, as we were doing some rather intense workouts involving ropes, tractor tires, and kettlebells, but he disappeared as well after I worked with him three or four times.   Ting   I’ve only worked with Ting once so far, and my next session with him later today should be a barnburner.  I’ve acquainted him with my background and he told me that he’s been a friend of Ivan Salaverry’s for quite some time, so he’s familiar with the martial arts disciplines.   We’re going to do some bag work and high-intensity routines, which should be a nice kick in the behind right before Christmas! I can’t wait!   As far as personal training goes, I've had some great experiences with it and have had some tremendous workouts.  I’d definitely recommend it if you can find the money to do it.  It is expensive, but I’ve learned ways to exercise more functionally and effectively from almost all of my trainers.   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [For the Love of Fitness] Posted on December 21st, 2009.   I’ve been into fitness since I was little, as my folks tell me of when I used to run incessantly back and forth between our yard and the neighbor’s yard before my dad built a fence between the two properties.  That didn’t last, as I became rather overweight for quite some time due to growing fairly fast, having an excessive diet, and not doing enough cardio.   While I haven’t kept on top of the diet and cardio until the last few years, I’ve been into weightlifting for quite some time and I also enjoy performing feats of strength like flipping tractor tires.  With Festivus coming up on Wednesday, it’s fitting that I chose this point in time to do this post.   Childhood Sports   I did quite a few different sports when I was younger, such as tee ball, softball, soccer, shot-put, Ultimate Frisbee, and disc golf.  Not a lot of these had much impact on me, though I do seem to have a few vivid memories of when I played soccer.   I was nine years old at the time and I was the right guard.  We used to practice at the Ballard Community Center and play games all over the greater Seattle area, usually during pretty miserable weather – I recall one game at Interbay where it poured the whole time.   We weren’t a great team by any means, as our record was 2-10 or something terrible like that.  It’s not surprising, as I ended up kicking one of my other teammates in the balls after he gave me a tremendous amount of grief for some reason.  I had to run laps for that one, but I remember it being worth it.   While I don’t remember if I was the greatest soccer player (seems like I was alright), I do remember that I could block a soccer ball with my face pretty well and get right back up.  That said, I played one season of it and had my fill.   Karate and Tae Kwon Do   I went to the Loyal Heights Community Center during the summers of my pre-teen years due to my folks both working during the day and them not trusting me to stay at home by myself.  I would have been fine, as I was on a huge gaming kick at the time and wouldn’t have caused any trouble.  It could’ve been that they wanted me to go and socialize with other kids instead of staying inside and gaming all day.  Go figure.   In any event, one of the counselors taught karate after the daytime program was over, and I thought it would be fun to take her class as I believe my old friend Ben was taking her class as well.  Unfortunately, the only thing I really remember from that time is that I got kicked almost in the balls (it landed a couple inches to the left) and I went down like a sack of potatoes.  Perhaps it was karma catching up to my for my previous infraction while playing soccer.   I ended up doing Tae Kwon Do not too long after that, and I stuck with it for a year or so.  I had a really good and friendly instructor named Paul, and he was good in training us how to do the katas and all of the particular strikes.   I passed both of the tests I went to (you have to perform your level’s kata and spar with someone from a different gym) and made it to first-degree yellow belt.  Unfortunately, I ended up getting the flu shortly thereafter and didn’t continue with it in a formal setting.   I did remember most of the strikes (especially the spinning back kick), so when I got a striking bag a few years down the road, I continued to drill what I had been trained to do (save for the katas).   Weightlifting in High School   Four classes of physical education were necessary in high school to graduate, and while my first class was a general physical education class (which usually entailed sneaking off to the lower gym and hanging out or playing Magic: The Gathering), the last three I took weight training and I was serious about it.   I don’t have any real strong memories of the time, but I remember working out pretty hard on all those machines that they had in the dingy little basement gym of the old Ballard High School.  It was pretty cool to go in and press some weight first thing in the morning, as it helped to take the edge off the rest of the day.   I don’t think I got especially strong at that time and I wasn’t losing any weight (thanks to the diet & cardio issues mentioned above), but it planted the seeds well for what was to come.   Weightlifting & Walking at Community College   When I made it out to North Seattle Community College, I used their workout facility quite a bit.  It was quite a step up from the basement at Ballard.  The machines were nicer, there was a big window, and I could use it as I pleased.  It was a little cramped, but the wide array of machines they had to work on was great.   I bulked up a little in my time here, and finally dropped some of the weight I’d been hanging on to, though it was from walking home from college three days a week.  It was about a two-and-a-half mile walk and I got down to about 250 during this time.  Unfortunately, the weight came back after I graduated, but that's what happens when you quit working out and don't watch your diet.   Anyway, I really enjoyed walking and I don’t think I’ve been on a good long walk for a couple years now.  I should rectify that soon.   Weightlifting at the University of Washington’s IMA   Working out at the old IMA before the remodel was kind of weird.  The gym was a giant room with lots of great weight and cardio machines, but there were no windows.  At least when I worked out at Ballard in a windowless facility, it was because the room was underground.  The big gym at the IMA was on the 2nd floor.   I did use the workout rooms on the lower floor as well, as they had the dumbbells and certain machines that weren’t upstairs.  They reminded me more of working out at Ballard, as they were smaller and there weren’t any windows in there either.   Another issue I had with the IMA is that most of my classes were in the Red Square area and it was a good 10-15 minute walk to get there.  While I won’t complain about the extra exercise, that was an extra half-hour round trip to go work out.   I was spoiled at NSCC since the gym was right next to the building.  I know UW is a huge campus, but they could have made the gym a little more centrally-located.  Suffice it to say, I had a bench at home that got more use during my UW years than the facility did.   Weightlifting at Home   As I mentioned earlier, I got a weight bench and a striking bag for home, and I did use those to some extent during my UW time.  I still used them after I graduated and before I started at my current job, but not with enough frequency to get any real results.   Pure Fitness/Xplore Fitness/Vision Quest   Shortly after I started my current job, I signed up at what was Pure Fitness at the time.  They got me started on personal training, a meal program, and dietary supplements that really made the results appear.   When I started there, I was at 305 and I lost 50 pounds in the first eight months.  Fifteen of those pounds dropped off right away with the change in diet, which was due to watching the quality of food I ate and reducing my caloric intake, as well as eating smaller meals more frequently through the day and drinking more water.   I dropped another 15 in 2007, dropped another 20 in 2008, and I’m about around the same this year.  I was down to 205 at one point this year (as I’ll talk about more in an upcoming post), but I’m back up around 210-215 now as I’ve started lifting a bit more in the last couple of weeks.   My diet hasn’t been the best lately either, but that’s a discipline fault that will be tuned up once 2010 is here.  I can’t complain too much though, as my body fat percentage is about the same with the increase in weight.   In my time at this gym, I’ve also gone through a slew of personal trainers, but that’ll be the focus of Wednesday’s post.   Jeet Kune Do, Muay Thai, and MKG   One of my personal trainers (that I’ll talk about a lot on Wednesday) got me into watching Bruce Lee and Tony Jaa movies, whose martial arts disciplines are Jeet Kune Do and Muay Thai, respectively.  I was extremely impressed with the finesse and brutality that both of these arts possessed, so when I found out that MKG (Minnesota Kali Group) had classes in both and was within walking distance of home, I signed right up.  Two of my good friends had trained there over the years and could attest to the quality.   It was a pretty fun experience to begin with and it helped step up the intensity in which I train.  However, the value of it began to decline quickly as they cancelled the Jeet Kune Do class fairly early on in my time there, and they only had one Muay Thai class per week that I could get to due to my job.  This led me to train Savate at well, which is French kickboxing.  I like the finesse of that art, but there’s little brutality.   Also, in these classes I’d usually get paired up with someone that was interested in punting my head through the goal posts rather than honing their technique.  One of the disadvantages of being tall, I suppose.   Current   I’m currently in the gym four days a week, Monday through Thursday.  I do an hour of weights on Monday and Wednesday and 45 minutes of cardio on Tuesday and Thursday.  I’m trying to get a supplemental Saturday session going here at home, but the weekends have been a little too busy as of late.  That’s another goal for 2010!   Monday’s usually my personal training day, so that workout is up to the trainer.  Wednesday is the day that I get to get creative with my own routines, and I’ve been focusing on doing “giant sets”, which is doing three different exercises in a row, taking a breather, then doing them all over again.   I was doing four giant sets with 15 repetitions of each exercise, but the 3rd and 4th sets kept feeling excessive, so I’ve dropped it down to two giant sets currently.  This also allows me to hit more areas of my body and keep my muscles guessing more.  The last time I worked out, I did six different giant sets, which is 18 different exercises.  It equated to a set every 10 minutes, which is a lot of work to do in a short period of time, but I know I got some good results from it.   The Future   In 2010 and beyond, I’d like to finally get below 200, and I know that’s going to take a ton of hard work.  It’ll also require a lot of creativity, because if I stick to the same thing over and over again (see my high school and college days), there won’t be a whole lot of results.  The routines have to be changed up after a while (usually a month or so) to get the most benefit.   One resource I find useful for keeping things interesting in the gym is [Strength Training Anatomy - 2nd Edition] by Frederic Delavier, which has an absolute wealth of different exercises you can do to train your muscles.  I also find that doing my striking drills with a pair of dumbbells in my hands for the punches and elbows and wearing a pair of ankle-weights for the knees and kicks help to give me better speed, endurance, and balance.   Do you have any good weight training tips to share?  I’m always interested in learning new things to incorporate to my workouts.  Let me know on the message board!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [How to Write Concisely] Posted on December 18th, 2009.   This may seem amusing as my previous post ([Ten Years of Twenties]) was a great wall of text, but I do have the ability to write concisely.  I felt it was necessary to do a post like this to help reign in my future work.   I’ve used this skill very little since graduating from college, but I still remember how.  I’ll share a few tips so you can do it too!   Be Ready to Work   Writing concisely can be difficult, as you have to think about the words that you use and how much impact they will have.  When you are given a limitation, get as close to it as you can to make the most out of it.   I’ve given myself a 500-word maximum limit on this article (not including headers), which is normally my minimum limit for posts.  It’s taking more effort to condense my ideas, but it’s also a nice challenge to tackle again.   Eliminate Excess Words   There are two things you don’t need when writing concisely: adjectives and prepositional phrases.  When you’re writing something that requires brevity, you’ll want to trim the fat wherever possible.   To give an example: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” can be shortened to “The fox jumps over the dog”.  It’s not as exciting to read, but it leaves more to the imagination and gets the point across.  Also, do your best to keep obvious statements and tangents out of your work.   Find a Smaller Word   Having a large vocabulary is useful for creative writing, but finding the most widely-known word works best for being concise.  A thesaurus is thought to be useful in finding more colorful words, but it does work both ways.   This is the hardest task for me, as I majored in the Humanities and being wordy was encouraged.  I also have a love for language and like to use variations of words whenever I can.  This is making the article even harder, as the largest word for what I’m expressing will show up, but I know that I can’t use it.   Don’t Undercut Yourself   When working on an article with a word limit, don’t overlook themes that would add quality to your writings.  You may end up getting rid of something that should have stayed.  Only take out themes that aren’t useful for your work.   Break Up Your Ideas   Writing one or two short paragraphs broken up by headers will get across the themes you want to express.  It also makes things more readable, as few people like to read giant blocks of text.  They do have their place in creative writing, but never in a shorter work.   Proofread   I do this with all of my posts while I’m writing them and a couple times after I’m done, but it’s more important to do this when keeping things short.  You never know when you’ll miss an error in your work that word processing tools can’t fix for you.   With these tips, you will be writing with new-found clarity and quality!   Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]!   [Ten Years of Twenties] Posted on December 16th, 2009.   How’s that for a title?  Be prepared, as this one’s about double the size of my [For the Love of Music] post.  I should go ahead and write my memoirs now to get it over with.  Too bad I’m only 30!   This one will be similar to the “For the Love of Music” post, as I’m going to cover the major plot points now and get more in-depth about certain aspects at another time.   20 – December 10th, 1999 to December 9th, 2000   My first year in the twenties hit both extremes, as I was in a really bad place when it started, but in a really good one by the time it was over.   My 20th birthday found me in the tail end of a laughable relationship that I should have never bothered pursuing in the first place.  It still leaves me shaking my head ten years later (for different reasons now than it used to).   I wrote in a journal frequently around this time and I was absolutely miserable.  I thought the relationship was going to make things better, but it just made things worse.  Miserable people shouldn’t try relationships together – the codependence level goes through the roof.   In retrospect, it’s not so bad since I got a handful of songs out of it, but it’s likely the reason I put all of myself into my work and haven’t bothered with a relationship since then.  It’s been working well for me, so I’m going with it.   Anyway, after that whole thing fell apart in March (which coincided with getting my Associate’s Degree from North Seattle Community College and never having to see her again), I went to Tennessee for the first time in eight years.  It was great seeing a lot of my family again and spending time down on the farm.   After I got back, I more or less stagnated for a few months.  I got fed up with the way I was living my life, so I decided to quit my job at [Pagliacci Pizza] and head down to Tennessee for a little over two months.   September 6th through November 15th was one of the best periods of my life so far.  I spent a ton of time with my half-brother (the same one that got me hooked on MTV), worked as a laborer cleaning walls and painting handrails at the Purina plant he was managing, went to Hooters with him at least once a week and had a great time even though I was a few months shy of drinking age, among other a plethora of other things.   I got to spend a fair amount of time with my grandparents while I was down there too and it was the last time I’d get to see my grandfather, as he passed a couple years later.   When I came back home, my cat Mouse didn’t recognize me and ran the other way when I walked in the door.  I also found out that I’d been accepted to the University of Washington and I got my old job back at Pagliacci.  I was riding high off all of the positive energy I acquired while down in Tennessee.   21 – December 10th, 2000 to December 9th, 2001   My 21st birthday coincided with the Pagliacci Pizza Christmas party, so it was full of hijinks, free drinks, and bowling.  No complaints there!   My first quarter (Winter 2001) at UW was quite awful.  I was rather foolish in deciding to take psychology, chemistry, and geology classes all in one quarter while also working part-time.  This was the only time I can think of where I actually burned out (see my [Avoiding Burnout] blog) and didn’t care about anything.   I withdrew from all of my classes in the 8th week (the last week I could) and took a month off to regroup.  I was set on giving the college thing “the ol’ college try”, so I took another quarter of classes with the intention that if I couldn’t really make it work, I was going to leave it at an Associate’s Degree and go find a full-time job.   I only took two classes that quarter – one was a class on C++ (which was alright, but wasn’t really my thing) and the other was a class about the Finnish folk epic poem Kalevala.  I was only familiar with the Kalevala due to the band [Amorphis] using it for inspiration for their [Tales from the Thousand Lakes] album.  I took it on a whim and ended up with a bachelor’s degree in Scandinavian Studies.  What does that tell you?   Okay, I’ll elaborate a little more.  This was a small, tight-knit class as opposed to a lecture hall, and I’ve always worked better within small groups.  My teacher was outstanding and she was very open to all aspects of Finnish culture, being a native Finn herself.   The other classes I took this year are a little fuzzy without referring to my college notes (which I still have), though I know I started up Norwegian language classes in the fall of this year.  I went with Norwegian because I was extremely into some Norwegian bands at the time and I liked the look and sound of the language.  I guess you could say I did it all for the love of music.   Speaking of the love of music, this was the year I finished my first album under my own name entitled [A New Beginning]. I don’t quite recall why this didn’t have a project name instead of my own name, but it might have been a backlash against having project names.  I know that if I do ever use my own name for a project again, it’s going to be singer/songwriter-styled music, which is not outside the realm of possibility.   In any event, the album was an ambitious pursuit, and it was a much needed piece of catharsis to get all of the bile that was left over from the previous year’s relationship out of my system.  Too bad my production skills were severely lacking at the time, but I like to revisit my songs and re-record them on occasion, so more of these tracks will likely get that treatment in the future.   22 – December 10th, 2001 to December 9th, 2002   This year’s on the fuzzy side for me.  I was taking a lot of classes in the Scandinavian Studies field and enjoying them.  Working at Pagliacci’s was also more enjoyable at this time, as there were more musicians employed there, so talking shop about music was always an entertaining and sometimes insightful distraction.   I know I was jamming a lot with my long-time friend and fellow Pagliacci employee Brando in our ridiculously-titled project Chyppmonk Teknoporn, which was him on bass and me on drums and vocals.   I don’t remember too much about it, except for our intentionally poor covers of a popular South Park ditty and a jam we did that had the “Where There’s a Whip, There’s a Way” song from the Lord of the Rings animated film as the intro.  I still have the songs around somewhere, so I’ll have to give them another listen in the near future.   There was another collaborative project this year with my long-time friend Drew that continued through 2004 (and had a send-off in 2009) entitled Oort Cloud (which I talked about in the “For the Love of Music” blog).  This year’s sessions were one in late August and one in early September at my place, and we used keyboards, guitars, drums and various sound generators (a stuffed monkey that made howling noises was a key element in one of the tracks) to create… something.  We had fun and made some crazy sounds, so the mission was accomplished.   This was also the year I had a ton of side project ideas, but Natthimmel was the main project I was pursuing and it kept me busy through 2004, with occasional revisits through 2008.  The only reason it isn’t around today is that it became redundant with my [Amaranthine Skies] project being so prominent and using very similar elements.   23 – December 10th, 2002 to December 9th, 2003   This one’s also a bit fuzzy, but I know there was another pair of Oort Cloud sessions in February, one of which Drew and I brought my long-time friend Steve into play.  The musical composition was similar, except Drew brought over his cello and I had a crappy trumpet that came into play.  These sessions were a little less abstract than the first two, but they were still rather strange.   This was also the year I graduated from college and it couldn’t have come any sooner.  While I enjoyed the classes I was taking, close to twenty years of education was more than enough for me.  I remember sitting in that black robe, sweating away in the heat while waiting to get my diploma.   There’s a picture of me at Memorial Stadium with a tassel in my beard and my Thor’s Hammer necklace askew, but I was genuinely happy and relieved to be done.  This was compounded by knowing that I was going to quit my job at Pagliacci soon thereafter, pick up [Reason] with some of my graduation money (it's become an extremely useful tool for my music), head down to the Oregon coast (which is a font of topics for me to blog about), and take some much needed time off before going job hunting again.   Once I got back from the coast, I started doing Monday drinking nights with Brando and other Pagliacci folks.  I was focused on my studies and music while I was in college, so it’s safe to say that I definitely partied harder after I graduated!   We used to start our nights at 10 or 11 or so, drink up, play pool, and close out the bar (The Spot Too), hurry to the QFC to get more beer and snacks before they stopped selling at 2 AM, then go back to Brando’s apartment to drink and play poker until the sun came up.  I’d usually catch the first or second bus of the morning and get home at 5:30 or 6 AM.  Those were wild and awesome times.   This was also the year I finished my 2nd disc.  This time, it was under my Natthimmel project and entitled [The Great Beyond].  With this one, instead of recording everything in a month (like I did with “A New Beginning”), I was recording a song or two a month and I used my favorites out of those to put together the album.  It was rather rough around the edges, but I still find myself listening to tracks from it on occasion.   24 – December 10th, 2003 to December 9th, 2004   The folks in the drinking group introduced me to Everquest and it ate up a few months of this year.  I remember I was at the point of playing Everquest all day and night, going to bed at 8:30 AM and getting up at 4:30 PM to do the same thing over again the next day.  Suffice it to say, I don’t play massive multiplayer online role-playing games any more.   All this playing and drinking and not having a job was eating into my savings something fierce, so I went back to a different Pagliacci’s store for a few months.  Brando had been promoted to associate manager there, so I was a shoe-in for the position.   This stint at Pagliacci’s only lasted about three months, as the vibe of the store was way different, and I came to find out later that the general manager, the district manager, and one of the other employees (that got fired for stealing tips) wanted me fired.  I definitely felt the love and that’s part of the reason I don’t get their pizza any more.   While there was a lot of negative emotion involved towards that store and the time I was there, it certainly helped with my creativity, as I put together at least an album’s worth of songs under a few different projects, and got two more Oort Cloud sessions knocked out with Drew at his place this time.  Both sessions were him on guitar and vocals and me on electronic drums and screaming in the background, as he was the only one with a microphone.   Brando also got married during that time and he and his wife have been together for five and a half years now!  How time flies.   After that all went down, I took another period of time off to regroup.  I don’t know if that job got me to the point of burnout, but I was sure close.  The final (and up until recently, lost) Oort Cloud session was recorded about a month after I quit, and that was Drew and I on our respective keyboards.  The session was remixed recently and released under my Amaranthine Skies project under the title of “It Came from Beyond the Oort Cloud”, which I'll talk about more in my 29th year.   A couple months later, Steve had been doing part-time work at his aunt’s educational research project, but he decided that he wanted to go to something full-time, so he asked me if I’d be interested in working there.  It was a data entry position with some light office work, so I took him up on it.  Steve was also my hookup for the original job at Pagliacci’s, so I thought this could work out well.   I interviewed with his aunt, things did go really well, and I got the job in October of that year.  The pay was good, the hours were great (three 8-hour shifts a week, which left four day weekends for recording), and the working environment was small and friendly.   25 – December 10th, 2004 to December 9th, 2005   Unfortunately, the office job ran out of work to do in August of that year as well as ran out of grant funding for my position, so I was laid off.  They said that they may have some more work and funding in October, so I decided to take a trip down to Tennessee with the time I had off.   I only spent two weeks in September down there, but I had some good times.  My strongest memory is going to a bonfire at my granny’s neighbor’s place and indulging heavily on cheap beer and marshmallows, which is actually a better combination than you might think.  I remember consuming this nutritious repast, occasionally becoming hypnotized by the ever-growing bonfire, watching their dogs run around and beg for marshmallows, and talking wrestling and UFC with folks.  Good times.   Backtracking to earlier in the year, I’d have to say the biggest thing that happened to me in my 25th year was joining [The Shizz] in April after finding out they’d been checking out some of the video game song covers I’d been doing under my Natthimmel project.  There were many folks there into video game music – which is unsurprising, as The Shizz was home to the message board for the [Minibosses], one of the first video game cover bands (and definitely one of the best).   I enjoyed the online community there in the Minibosses forum, and when the opportunity came up for the local members to get together and have a listening party for [Dwelling of Duels] (a monthly video game song cover competition that I’ve participated in many a time), I jumped on it.   There were eight of us there for the get-together and it was absolutely epic.  We ended up doing a silly, but earnest cover of “I Am the Wind” (the ending theme from [Castlevania: Symphony of the Night]) in order to add to the already abundant number of tunes in the competition.   As around half of us already had serious tunes in the competition, it had to be entered as an alternate.  Despite the alternate status, the eight of us captured some sort of energy together that day that could be heard in our performance, and every time I hear it, it takes me right back.   We also needed to come up with a name for ourselves.  We decided on calling ourselves the [West Coast Shizzies], and for a period of a little over three years, we had some seriously epic parties.  Things have dwindled now that we’re getting older (and the party host got married), but we still have MAGFest, which I’ll talk about in my 27th year.   It still amazes me to this day how well that first get-together came together and how well the following ones went, especially the one from July 4th weekend where we got together and did a cover of Vanilla Ice’s “Ninja Rap” interspersed with musical parts from the Nintendo Entertainment System game “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Arcade Game” for the Dwelling of Duels joke tune competition that month.  There was also video footage taken for the song, but nothing has been finished.  A shame really, as the footage is amazing and hilarious.   There were so many ridiculous things we did that were unbelievably fun – games of shirtless Rampart, Ultimate Ultimate Sundaes, long jam sessions and recording tunes for Dwelling of Duels, going to the [Penny Arcade Expo] year after year and rocking out; the list goes on and on.  This was all before alcohol was introduced into the mix – that didn’t come along until the next year.   26 – December 10th, 2005 to December 9th, 2006   I was unemployed up until May of this year, and a video game original soundtrack competition was devised by one of my West Coast Shizzie buddies, so I decided to enter.  The premise was to create an idea for a video game, then write the soundtrack for it.   This turned out to be my [Mindtrap] album, which was originally a 14-track album of downtempo electronic music.  As far as sound quality goes, this is the first album that I’m really proud of.  The original version (for the competition) was a little thick on the reverb, so I remastered the whole thing and added three more tracks that I had been working on while putting the original together.   Also, before I got my job in May, an old friend of mine found me online and invited me to a New Year’s party at her place.  I went and had a great time, and we continued to get together with her and her friends for the following four months until I got my job.  Then we lost contact outside of the social networks.  I had two wild social groups at this point in my life – no wonder I was in no hurry to get a job!   This time also included my first and last jaunt into the world of online dating, as I met someone during the early months of this year and we chatted online and talked on the phone for six hours straight.  Then, things fizzled out quickly.  She really wasn’t my type and I still wasn’t in the right mental place to be dating.  Now that I am, I don’t want to.  It’s funny how that works.   Anyway, a few days after the epic blowoff, I found myself employed!  A full-time gig with benefits and vacation that was busier than all get-out when I arrived.  That suited me fine, as I was used to that pace from working at Pagliacci.  It eventually tapered off some, though I was happy to be employed again.  I’m still there and it’s still a pretty good gig.  Mellow office, nice co-workers, good pay – I can’t complain.   Even though a paying job was definitely necessary at the time, something that was even more useful was having a gym that was kitty corner from the office.  I signed up on my 3rd day of employment and they got me set up and weighed.  I was at a scale-topping 307.5 pounds.  Granted, I'm six feet, two inches tall and I carried my weight fairly well, but that was just revolting to me.   I’m 100 pounds lighter now, so I obviously stuck with it and I’ll talk more about it when I get around to my “For the Love of Fitness” post.  It’s also likely that I’ll do a blog about how to lose 100 pounds sometime here in the near future as well.   While things slowed a bit with the West Coast Shizzies later in this year, an event we did in October was my first trip outside of the United States into the Great White North.  It was an enjoyable trip once we got into Canada, as we were held at the border and questioned, since we were five guys in a station wagon coming up to hang out with people we’d met on the Internet.  It was entertaining, but nothing really to complain about.   Once we were there, we played lazer tag in a rather legit facility, went on a late night absinthe hunt, got some delicious poutine, enjoyed some Treatza Pizza, and gamed ourselves silly.  We did do a tour of Vancouver and that’s an interesting city to be sure – there aren’t many places where you can go from the ritziest part of town to skid row within a matter of blocks.   27 – December 10th, 2006 to December 9th, 2007   This year began with my first [MAGFest], which as far as I’m concerned, is a yearly get-together for the members of The Shizz to drink up, act foolish, and rock out to video game cover bands.  The best memories from M5 were the two-hour [Chromelodeon] set of pure bliss, and a group of Shizz members (myself included) being playfully harassed by a highly-intoxicated underage girl with her minions in tow.  That just scratches the surface, as there are so many amazing things that go on at MAGFest.  I’ve enjoyed it greatly every year I’ve gone.   Perhaps not all that significant compared to my first MAGFest, but it’s rather memorable to me as it concerns my main music project – in February, Amaranthine morphed into [Amaranthine Skies], because there were a ton of bands on MySpace with the name of Amaranthine and there had been something nagging me in the back of my head to tack “Skies” on the end of it.  So I did.   Right around then, I made my most recent foray into dating, where my dad was kind enough to hook me up with a bartender.  She was very fitness-oriented, so we had that in common.  Unfortunately, that was about it, as I was focused on making music and getting fit, whereas she would meditate for hours each day.  She was a nice woman, but there wasn’t really any chemistry there.  I can laugh about it now, but it was frustrating at the time.   Going back to a topic I like talking about (music) – in April of that year, I saw my first [Jesu] concert and followed it up with a second one in November.  Jesu is one of my favorite bands (as you can tell from the pic up waaaaay up there), mostly because I was a big fan of [Godflesh] and when Justin Broadrick decided to do Jesu, I followed along for the heavy, yet melodic ride.  While some folks are more enamored with certain parts of his output as Jesu than others, I can say that outside a couple of tracks, I enjoy it all.   I also signed up for a martial arts gym at this time.  A couple of my friends had trained there and recommended it, and the trainer I was working with at the time was very well acquainted with martial arts (he trained with Dan Inosanto, who was one of Bruce Lee’s pupils) and encouraged it, so I joined up and learned some ways to improve my technique and some more facets of various disciplines.   The ones that were most interesting to me there were the Muay Thai and Jeet Kune Do classes, but the Muay Thai classes were only one night a week and the Jeet Kune Do classes were on Saturdays, and eventually were taken off the schedule.  I learned from the weekly Muay Thai class, but I benefited the most from a two-hour Muay Thai seminar that took place one weekend.  After that, I kind of lost interest in anything else they were teaching, so I suspended my membership in 2008 for a good part of the year and eventually cancelled in early 2009.   An outside reason that I lost interest was that I had decided it was finally time to get my new record label up and running.  I had Vincion Records going, but I wasn’t doing much of anything with it and I wanted a name that would promote more community, so I went with [Concatenation Records], and built the label and site around that idea.   There wasn’t a lot going on with it until the [Nevar Say Die! Compilation, Volume One] album fell in my lap.  It had already been pressed before I got it, but some of the folks weren’t keen with it being on CafePress, so it was pulled.  Another Shizzie had an idea in mind to remaster it and re-release it somewhere else, and I volunteered my label for the job.  The re-pressing worked out really well and all of the original copies that were pressed have sold out.   The tail end of this year also brought my 4th album, which was my first on Concatenation and the first under my Amaranthine Skies project. The album [Dark Side of Zebes] is an album comprised of two twenty-minute tracks (the idea was borrowed from Jesu’s “Heart Ache” EP) which are ambient reinterpretations of the music from [Super Metroid] for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.  The first track stayed closer to the source material, whereas the second was a little more liberal with the composition.  I’m very proud of what I accomplished and it’s my best-selling work to date.   28 - December 10th, 2007 to December 9th, 2008   While “Dark Side of Zebes” was finished before I hit 28, it was released eight days after.  Luckily, I got it out in time for MAGFest 6 in January.  The music at the convention was outstanding as usual (especially [The Advantage]), but the rest of the weekend is kind of a blur.   I remember lampshades on heads, a shoe in a chandelier, hotel adult channels, Old Grand-Dad Whiskey, bear shirts, passing out in uncomfortable positions (not me), Mad Elf Christmas brew (soooooo good), Lancaster Brewing Company beer (also tasty, especially the Strawberry Wheat), getting kicked out of hotels for borrowing game room consoles (also not me), shilling CDs and trading them with other artists, and the alarm sound went WHOOP WHOOP when the pipes in the garage froze, causing most people to get stuck outside in their t-shirts.  There was a lot more, but MAGFest experiences could definitely be summed up better in their own post.   The next month followed with my first [Neurosis] show, and that was quite the experience as well.  The music was absolutely spot-on and the vibe given off by it was very raw and primal.  The smell of stale Pabst Blue Ribbon rising from the ground as well as the sweat generated from being shoulder-to-shoulder with so many folks created a disgustingly intoxicating odor that was whipped up by the slow-churning maelstrom of people caught up in the power of the music (myself included).  Best show I’ve been to, no question.   Going back to partying, the West Coast Shizzies were still going strong at this point, and we ended up having a get together in May on a weekend where it was well into the 80s and maybe the lower 90s.  We decided the best thing we could do is get a thirty pack of Busch and buy a generic brand Slip ’n Slide.  Thus, the Busch Olympics were born.   We set up the Slip ’n Slide and started doing tricks on it while lunging for open beer cans placed strategically on the sides of the slide.  There wasn’t any formal judging, but there certainly was an extreme amount of fun that was had, even with the scarring and cracked rib (not me on either account).  It was so good that once we had depleted both commodities (drank all the beer, wrecked the Slip ’n Slide), we went back to the store later on that day, restocked, and did it all over again.  What a day!   There was also the Penny Arcade Expo 2008 celebration in August, which was likely the zenith of the West Coast Shizzies.  We had 35 Shizzies out at the party house, and it was absolute carnage in the best possible way.  I can barely remember anything about that weekend except for awesome music, awesome gaming, deep-frying anything and everything we could think of (and subsequently eating it), and I remember espousing the merits of Civilization IV in a rather long-winded way (inconceivable!) to a fellow Shizzie.   The rest of the year was focused between compilations and solo albums.  The first of these was the Willow compilation entitled [The Wonderful World of Willow], which was another compilation that I took over when I saw that things weren’t getting done in a timely fashion, and it came out in July of this year.   The project was originally a request made in 2007 to the original project leader for more Willow covers, since he had done a 15-minute one for Dwelling of Duels.  He decided to bring the project to the community, and when he couldn’t continue to manage it due to personal issues, I stepped up and got everything together.   We ended up covering the entire soundtrack from the Nintendo Entertainment System game in the order that the songs appeared in the game.  It turned out very well and the person that commissioned the project as well as the friend he requested it for were very happy with the results.   The next album was my 5th solo album, which was my 2nd under my Amaranthine Skies project entitled [Days Gone By, Volume One], which came out in August shortly before the Penny Arcade Expo mentioned above.   It’s a collection of reworked songs from projects I’ve done over the years.  There were two from “A New Beginning”, two from “The Great Beyond” and the rest were culled from various [Vincion Records Collections] that I’ve done over the years.  I’d say it was a little rough around the edges and some of the songs came out a little better than others, but I’m happy with how it came out.   The [Nevar Say Die! Compilation, Volume Two] album was next, and it was a smooth process all around.  The songs were sent in a timely fashion, the art was as well, the mix was easy enough to do, and it came out sounding great!  It was also a re-introduction to a project that I’d visited twice before entitled Cyanidic Rapture.   Speaking of which, the 6th solo album was next, which was my 1st under my newly resurrected [Cyanidic Rapture] project entitled [Dragons of Putrescence].  The project started in 2002 with a few songs, was resurrected in 2004 with one song, and finally came back and has hung around.  While its future was uncertain for a while, I’m currently working on a four song, 30+ minute EP for the project that will be out in 2010 and there are ideas for a few more discs down the road.   As for the album itself, it’s a massively sinister wall of sound.  Industrial-styled vocals over a bed of weird noises, big drums, and heavy guitars and bass.  I still find this one a challenging listen for some reason, as it’s a rather unusual album.  The title comes from the artwork, and while I don’t want to spill the beans on how I made it, it does look like some sort of putrid dragon.   29 – December 10th, 2008 to December 9th, 2009   As it turned out, I had quite a few more CDs to peddle at MAGFest this year, but I would hardly say that was the focus.  The musical highlight of the festival for me was the debut of [Metroid Metal], closely followed by a lot of the other bands and the chiptune shows.  The Shizzies got together and rented a suite, which was home for an untold amount of shenanigans.  I remember lazer tag with metal panels on the gun that would shock the owner when they were shot, which led to one of the guys sticking the gun down the back of his pants and yelping for high heaven when he was lazered repeatedly.  There was also a bidet in the suite which led to even more hijinks.   Outside of the suite, there were elevator dance parties, chiptune raves, all-night jam sessions… I can’t even remember all the shenanigans.  I do remember it was my introduction to Victory’s Baltic Thunder Porter, which one of the guys had nicknamed himself after the year previous.  The beer was rather tasty, but I didn’t luck into finding it ou