My first EP is out and available in the usual places. Released through DistroKid, which gets it to Spotify, Amazon, iTunes, YouTube Music, etc. I also posted it on my Bandcamp page. Wherever you find it, you should be able to give it a listen for free, and only plunk down $ if you think it’s something you’re gonna want to keep listening to.
Etc.
The Twitch livestream mentioned in the previous post did in fact take place, and since livestreams don’t hang around, here’s my piece of the show preserved for posterity on YouTube. Details and caveats are listed in the description. I enjoyed doing it, and the room for improvement is infinite. I’ll also think differently about how to write music that is meant with live play in mind.
Right now all three tunes for the “Sombre Hombre” EP have been mixed, and in addition we’ve got final masters for the Mort Solár EP (the first of two planned for this year).
When I started playing around with music in 2020, I figured it would be at least three years before I was doing anything worth subjecting other people to. So, I’m on schedule basically. Meanwhile, there’s a lot of terrible early stuff preserved here, like a musical livejournal of my first experiments.
Those who don’t obsessively stalk me may not be aware that most of my creative energy for the last few years has gone into music. Studying, writing, and now some performing. One of my goals for 2023 was to take the first steps toward playing live (or livestream). I’ve done some extremely unkempt jams on my YouTube channel, both solo and as Man #2 of my two-man band Mort Solár, but so far all of my music has been desktop stuff. The above show is going to be played in a remote secure location (my friend Matt’s garage), without use of a DAW…just me and some electronic musical gear. We’re not expecting many people to tune in, I am new to Twitch, but this is going to be the first toe in the water.
I’ll be performing all three songs from my upcoming solo EP, “Sombre Hombre,” as well as a couple older tunes. And by performing I mean I will be singing along to instrument versions, since I cannot actually play the musical parts live…they were all created in the lab. The EP will be out later in the year.
For that matter, we’re now in the mastering stages of Mort Solár’s first two-song EP. More on that later, if in fact I do start using this blog again. Stranger things have happened.
For all updates musical and otherwise, here’s an assortment of my various current links:
I just looked at a list of “Top Ten Things Millennials Are Destroying” and I was on it.
Why have a blog if you can’t post random titles?
And rhetorical questions?
I am unseriously looking for partners to help create my A Christmas Carol meets Dark Souls beat-em-up. It’s pretty simple:
Jacob Marley’s ghost shows up and gives Scrooge his challenge. Jacob then stands aside, but remains to sell potions and items throughout the night.
As the three ghosts appear, Scrooge fights his way through each set of memories, gaining precious stats along the way. At the end of each memory, must beat the spirit who presides over that stage—past, present, and future. (In the simplest version, he just fights the three spirits, ignoring the memories.)
The final boss is Tiny Tim, who can summon such minions as Bob Cratchit and Jesus.
There’s a secret level boss after you successfully beat Tim: Goose Boy. If you defeat him, you get his Christmas goose.
Or maybe I’ll just use this in a story, making games is a pain in the ass.
Just now I was wondering, what if there was an episode of Spongebob where it turned out that Patrick’s full name was Patrick “Starfish” O’Brian, and it turns out he had written all the Aubrey/Maturin novels. I was also thinking about a movie called A MAN CALLED SCROOGE, where the ghosts appear to Scrooge like a series of escalating boss fights and he beats the shit out them one at a time and finally goes toe to toe with Tiny Tim.
He beats the crap out of the post bossfight Goose Boy for good measure.
Bad Robot is right down the street, I should drop in. For them, I think I would package it as A VERY CLOVERFIELD CHRISTMAS.
Yakuza!
While videogames are capable of great subtlety and originality, there is no question that the popular face of the industry looks extremely familiar: science fiction games tend to rely on Star Wars, Bladerunner, and Aliens; fantasy titles owe much to the elf-and-orc-heavy lore of Tolkien and even more to Dungeons & Dragons; and horror tends to channel Night of the Living Dead or 28 Days Later. While games with subtle themes are a worthy subject, I’m going to shelve that topic in favor of one more crazy action genre, albeit one not nearly as popular in the West: the Yakuza.
Specifically, I’m going to rush not long- but whirl-windedly through the Yakuza series created in 2005 by Ryu Ga Gotoko Studio, a Sega division whose catalog is currently represented in North America by seven key Yakuza titles and several spin-offs. Many of the entries in this series have never been translated or released outside Japan, although the truly dedicated Yakuza fans will have found ways to play them regardless.
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, FromSoftware, 2019
A Plague Tale: Innocence, Asobo Studio, 2019
I’m getting old, so I should probably go to bed at a reasonable hour, but I know I will be up late tonight (and tomorrow night, and the night after that, most likely) trying to kill an enormous poo-flinging ape that guards a cave in a beautiful mountain pool overshadowed by a hundred-foot-long reclining Bodhisattva. Eventually, I promise myself, I will kill the ape. But even then, I will not sleep. Other and worse things await me beyond this lovely pool. I may never get to bed on time again.
The source of my sleeplessness, this seemingly endless series of almost unbeatable beings, is the game Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Sekiro’s designers, FromSoftware, have already robbed me of thousands of hours of sleep by way of their previous famously difficult games, Demons Souls, Dark Souls (One through Three), and Bloodborne. The major difference between Sekiro and the earlier titles is that in this one I am (much to my dismay) alone. FromSoftware’s previous games all made grudging acknowledgment of their difficulty and allowed strangers to assist one another, anonymously, through online play. But Sekiro’s lead character is named Wolf…and he is a lone Wolf. A stealthy shinobi, an assassin caught up in a blur of shifting allegiances, divine heirs, baffling bloodlines…none of which even remotely matter.