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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 out here on the west coast (Victory is a Pennsylvania brewery) until last month, and it’s as tasty as ever. Shortly after the convention, another project was brought to me and eventually titled “A Chip off the Shizz Block, Volume One”. This group project and the other one this year – Nevar Say Die! Compilation, Volume Three – would each have their fair share of turmoil attached, but I’ll get back to them later, as I finished up two solo albums before either of these came out. The 7th solo album, which was my 3rd under my Amaranthine Skies project was entitled [Enveloped] and it’s also somewhat of a wall of sound. There are six songs that range from nine to twelve minutes long, and they are mostly walls of guitars and synths with a heavy beat behind them. Even though the guitar distortion is a little fuzzier than I prefer it these days, I’m happy with how this album came out and still listen to it a fair amount. Piggybacking that album was my 8th solo album (sort of) entitled [It Came from Beyond the Oort Cloud]. It was comprised of that lost Oort Cloud session I talked about in 2004, but as it was, it wouldn’t have made much of a listening experience. I ended up splicing Drew’s keyboard parts and my keyboard parts into listenable sections and made a deep space ambient album out of them, looping things where needed and applying a fair amount of reverb. It came out fairly similar to the “Dark Side of Zebes” disc, which is definitely a good thing. I still haven’t heard back from Drew about his opinion on the disc, but like I said in the “For the Love of Music” post, music isn’t really much a part of his life any more. Getting back to the compilations, [A Chip off the Shizz Block, Volume One] finally came out in October after being commissioned in January. I still have mixed feelings about how this one all came together, but I’m very happy with the end result, and I know a lot of other folks are too. It’s 25 tracks of chiptunes from chip artists around the globe, a couple of which have been professionally commissioned to create music for games. For those unfamiliar, the idea behind a chiptune is to use the sounds from and limitations of old gaming software to create new music. Most stick to using the format of the Nintendo Entertainment System, but some use the format of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (my project Mystic Nova, for example), as well as the formats from Commodore 64, Nintendo Game Boy, or the Sega Genesis among others. Once the chiptune comp had wrapped and I was still waiting on art for the “Nevar Say Die! Compilation, Volume Three” album, I decided to get going on the (hopefully) final revamp of the Concatenation Records website. I had been reading a lot of articles by Steve Pavlina about life optimization, and I thought that applying some more optimization to my sites would be a good idea. So far it’s gone pretty well, and these articles also inspired me to restart my blog, which will probably go a little smoother once I get all this life backlog out of my system. This post, “For the Love of Music”, and the rest of the “For the Love of…” series will definitely help with that. In the midst of the previous paragraph, the art for the [Nevar Say Die! Compilation, Volume Three] album was completed and it finally came together and was ready to launch as of last week. While this one was a little troublesome, mostly due to not having all of my ducks in a row and perhaps biting off more than I could chew, it came out rather well. It’s a two-disc, 38-track album comprising of over two hours of music from The Shizz ranging in styles from classic thrash to post-metal to surf rock to ambient to digital grindcore. It’s quite the smorgasbord, and I don’t need to talk about it much more since I already blogged about it last week. Although, I must say I know better than to make next year’s comp a double disc. In reality, I think the best birthday present for my 30th wasn’t the home brewing book, it was getting this completed and out two days before it. 30 Is Here, Time to Reflect Looking back, it seems that as I got older, the workload increased while the partying has become mostly isolated to MAGFest, occasional West Coast Shizzie gatherings and certain occasions. I do make it down to the Oregon coast every year, but that’s not really much of an accomplishment or a major period of my life. Granted, I made it from the south to the north coast in my 27th year (as well as making it to California for the first time) and was down there beering it up for a good portion of two weeks of my 29th year (as well as mastering “A Chip off the Shizz Block, Volume One”), but that’s a post for another time (or possibly multiple ones). The 20s were quite the wild ride and while I know I missed some of the smaller stuff, I’m pretty sure I covered the best parts. At close to 6500 words, I would hope so. All I know is that I’m doing as close to a 500 word post as I can on Friday. Any ideas on a short post I could do? Sign up for the message board and let me know! Discuss this post at [The Forum of Jason Vincion]! Posted on December 16th, 2009. |
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 Compilation Volume Three |
 Shizz Block Volume One |
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