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I've been pushing through a very upsetting (but not bad) breakup by, uh, working on a remix and some trance synth leads for the Memorrhage guy. And crowdfunding my home-recording setup so I can contribute vocals. (Isolation shields worth a goddamn are PRICY.)

I think this is the most involved I've ever been in music. Almost daily I'm discussing with actual successful underground musicians my opinions on production and songwriting, and they're taken seriously. I can commiserate over EQing synth organs to sit nicely in dense mixes* and the other person will nod sadly and say "the decay..." because we've both been there.

It's really nice to be taken seriously by musicians who are legendary among "Thinking Man's avant-death metal" elitists and have done everything from chiptune grindcore to Bay Area screamo to nu metal. It's times like this I know my faith in my musical abilities is not Dunning-Kruger shit.



* Seriously, have you tried to do this without having to automate every band of an EQ to shift note-by-note? it's a fucking NIGHTMARE, and if you're gonna tell me to break out the comb filters I'm going to tell you to put that shit on some Scriabin-ass synthetic chords so you can hear the pan-pipers of Azathoth for yourself. It is an Incontrovertible Fact that organs, even basic ass synth organs with 3-oscillator formants, are made for filling every frequency above the fundamental with pure clean tonal bands and you had just better hope your tits that you have the headroom in your fucking mix to pull that off.

For me, resting really is normally giving up. Like, in the moment I make that decision -- whatever happens happens, I am down for the count, I don't care.

It's just that when I'm recovered, it's straight back to fucking work.

The two parts are related, too. I can't properly rest if I'm concerned about what happens while I can't do shit about it. But if there's still time to fight when the nap is over, I'm looking for knives.

The key of the fictional work I've been doing is that the protagonists CANNOT win. They will always fail, no matter what they do. But they fight anyway, and yeah, they didn't win. Most of the time it wasn't even a Pyrrhic victory for the antagonists. But they made the antagonists have to pay /something/ for it, rather then getting it for free, and the cost is never trivial.

You never lay down and give up. You can do it for short times, to recover, but when you CAN stand up, you DO stand up.

[5000 angry combat drones]

Hi.

Please stop shitting up the entire fucking forum with your trash. I don't want to log on to see three dozen ancient threads, half of which are garbage, bumped from the ancient abyss with your weirdly racist misuse of non-Latin characters for "lol random", or your "I'm 13 and this is deep" pseudo-philosophy.

Failure to be responsive to this benign request will be met with a decidedly unequal and very opposed reaction, where I will shit up the place even more everywhere you so much as sniff at, so that action /must/ be taken to contain your pointless mess. We will probably both get banned. I am okay with this.

Thanks.
--5000 angry combat drones

That's my new band name.

Everyone should know that your first album, Seasonal Migration Patterns of the MQ-1 Predator, is coming out next year.

Hi.

Please stop shitting up the entire fucking forum with your trash. I don't want to log on to see three dozen ancient threads, half of which are garbage, bumped from the ancient abyss with your weirdly racist misuse of non-Latin characters for "lol random", or your "I'm 13 and this is deep" pseudo-philosophy.

Failure to be responsive to this benign request will be met with a decidedly unequal and very opposed reaction, where I will shit up the place even more everywhere you so much as sniff at, so that action /must/ be taken to contain your pointless mess. We will probably both get banned. I am okay with this.

Thanks.
--5000 angry combat drones

It's been an EVENTFUL few days.

Last night, some lyrics I wrote last year in a very very bad headspace made it into a song by a friend of mine. I really, really hate those lyrics in hindsight, but the song itself might actually be the absolute best ever written in the genre, which has me feeling very autistic (complicated subtype).

I don't get a break, things are so strange.

In other news, I'm really happy with the work I'm doing now. Not paying work, but I don't need to be paid for what I'm doing now.

I'm finally making real use of my networking skills, putting an upcoming musician's demos in the ears of label owners and established musicians. I'm giving her advice on how to pull off a first release without having to use her vocals since she's not confident in them (I suggested a vocal anthology sort of deal, a dozen featured artists on her songs -- and even suggested starting points for artists who would do vocal features), I'm building a small hype crew for her, I'm giving her mix feedback and helping her feel confident in her work.

This? This is stuff I can do, it's stuff I feel good about, it's stuff where EVERY STEP of the process feels fulfilling and is independently very cool to be involved in. I enjoy this. Yeah, I'm still poor and she probably ends up making enough money to be a full-time musician if I can bring it together for her, but I don't care. I enjoy this.

I survived my first ever metal/hardcore show. It was fucking awesome. I don't think anyone here is hot for caveman slam death, cybergrind, drone/powerviolence, or whatever the fuck you call Omerta, but I'm losing it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa2ANHa690E

That link goes to Omerta, by the way. I genuinely don't know what you call this shit, it's doing something totally distinct. They were the headliner and while I know /you/ have never seen people brutalize each other to cartoon doll singing over stupid heavy riffs before, I saw a man try to stage dive and nearly not make it because the slamdancers were only two rows behind the stage. (They helped save him, fortunately.)

A meningitis outbreak mishandled like COVID is game over. Humanity doesn't survive that.

Amazing

Oh, Dok. You're mistaken. I'm not growing Borg parts. We're well past that point. There are as many as five drones in various stages of completion. Armament, command-and-control, logistics and R&D are accounted for. We have one more that's harder to place, but she's still early. We're in -- have been, for about a month -- phase 1.c, where I start activating the neural-governor botnets and cutting the decision-restriction tethers. The basic idea starts like a voidtech media crossover event between The Manchurian Candidate and your least favorite zombie movie. After that, things get slightly interesting.

I hope you didn't think the UFO thing was just standard High Strangeness. I've got a soft spot for hokey scifi tropes like that, and John Keel is about to be vindicated.

As far as food goes, there's a boom in home-growing mushrooms the past three years, and I don't mean the fun kind. That's about to become more popular, I think. People are going to learn why fungus is worth making a meal of. Grow lights, too: not just for marijuana operations.

The real fun is going to be when you combine COVID, allowed to run wild with the brakes off, with wide-spread lung damage in a large portion of the population of the US.

The pandemic never ended, it's just been on hiatus. Every turncoat liberal who was so glad to leave the disabled behind is going to be there themselves soon, and we'll be waiting with extra prosthetic limbs and smiles warm as an arson scene. I hope everyone invested in a good mask.

As far as Eris, anyone who ever thought she was here for the hippies and comedians made a grave mistake. Goddess of Discord -- and Strife.

Strife is broken bones and jagged lacerations and a mangled hand iron-gripping your ankle while the half-detached head snarls "No one gets out alive, motherfucker." Strife is knives and guns and tools you don't have words for, invented on the fly and wielded like an expert. Strife is defenestration, a shove into traffic, trash bags left in snowy greenbelt forests.

Strife is not a bad pun and a "let's all be friends here".

Strife is a broken sword, still wet.

Woo, this fucks. Thank you for the honor once again.

I could always make another example out of him, but he's so pathetic it wouldn't even be worth it. Still, he might want to look at the histories of minuspace/LuciferX, rong and Fujikoma to find out what happens when someone /does/ get my attention. Maybe he could fuck off for another 6 years.

In the past hour, Khanate released without announcement a new album after almost 20 years of being disbanded and it FUCKS.

https://khanate.bandcamp.com/album/to-be-cruel

I'm losing my fucking mind.

I am reliving my childhood in music right now -- but as myself, with supportive communities and people around me, and a presence in the scenes that matter to me, and a personality that people can enjoy being around.

Nu metal, slam death, fucking Khanate, what's next? Aggrotech renaissance? I am getting a chance to do over my fucking childhood and I don't need to have a mid-life crisis to do it. These people and genres aged with me.

I can't believe how lucky I am in some ways.

ETA: Literally their best album to date. I literally wept at the end of the title track.

Like, Khanate is a 10/10 band, with no albums that fall below a 9 (Clean Hands Go Foul lands at 9, barely). If I graded their albums on a curve, this would be 10/10 /for them/, with their prior best (Capture/Release) landing at a solid, respectable 8/10. The first track lulls you into expecting more S/T, but from track 2 on they bring in all sorts of wild stuff from the back catalog and add new tricks.

I'm working on crawling out from under a rock. 2023 seems like an auspicious year for that. Or at least an interesting one.

I'll be glad to see more of you again. How are you?

Husband got hospitalized for complications related to long covid, we were genuinely worried that was gonna be it for him for a couple days there. Fortunately he is still The Protagonist in some goddamn story so he's mostly better with the treatment he's on. Work has been grinding me to a paste, I'm trying to figure out how to extract myself from this place but I suck at interviews and there are enough gaps in my general understanding of office politics/professionalism that I am at a disadvantage. Also got documentably sexually harassed by the last head of HR at the place, but there's nothing useful to be done with that. You know, American Dream shit.

Finished Andor and now I have a strong need to DO THINGS. I might want to tag you in on one of the bigger plans if we can secure some moneybags for it, you have exactly the right experience for a couple slots. I'm glad to see you found someone you're clicking with!

Depending on the deets of your project, I might have someone who can help fund things. We were going to work on videogame development, but we can't fucking find an artist and programmer now... Sigh. IDK if you're comfortable sharing, but let me know if you are.

I want to disappear that head of HR, but unfortunately my long-distance hypnosis powers don't extend to actually for realsies deleting humans, and my partners STILL haven't invented the teleporter.