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Post Next Fest Bummers

A small forward: A lot of the below is going to read like a bunch of complaining. I’m writing this for myself for a few reasons, which I will hopefully get into! I released a demo for my upcoming game Life on NEPTUNE about 2 weeks ago for Steam Next Fest. How’d it go? Not great! Being honest, I think I had my expectations set way too high for the event. I came into it with about 140 wishlists and left with 296. I’m glad there was an increase, but I am still so far away from getting to the goal of 7,000 - 10,000. In my mind, I think I imagined the capsule art naturally being intriguing enough to draw in people to play. Maybe there would be some word of mouth or a streamer would play it. In reality, there were over 4000 games included in the festival, and my game got drowned out. I’ll include a footnote with a bit of an expansion on it. A big reason for this failure is I didn’t do much/any marketing beforehand. I posted a trailer to youtube and tried to shoot out messages onto every plat...
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Habits, Goals, and POP.

I find myself picking up strange habits. Most recently, I’ve been inadvertently amping up quirky pronunciations of words. It’s not something I think is funny, and it’s not something I want to do, but it comes out anyways. Was I always annoying? I feel like a buffoon! I sit in front of my computer, poised to write dialogue for my game, Life on NEPTUNE. (Life on NEPTUNE is now on steam and can be wishlisted!!!) I have ideas for the scene, I understand the characters- yet I find it hard to fully commit. I feel like a buffoon! As I grow older I grow fonder of my lack of filter on my older projects. There seems to be a tide of forever lifting expectations that is rising over me. I think about how this applies to writing jokes. I shoot many of my jokes in the head because I consider them to be simple and hackish. In my efforts to overengineer a joke, I can barely make any. How do I be a buffoon? I think these muddled thoughts reflect my current aim as an artist. I desire a chase to simplicit...
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Long returns

I took a walk today, one that was cut short by the heat. I brought along a Zero Sugar Slurpee and a small bag of Gushers. The walk and the snack clearly balance each other out into a nice net zero for my nutrition.  Ever since I purchased The Soft Bulletin on CD, I've been listening to a lot of The Flaming Lips. The Soft Bulletin in particular is fantastic- a wonderful blend of psychedelia and melancholy. Right in my wheelhouse. On my abridged walk, however, I was listening to their album entitled Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. It's an album of theirs I'd actually heard a long time ago- maybe more than 10 years ago.  One of the great shapers of my taste in music when I was young was Pandora's Indie Dance radio station. The other two are soundtrack to Little Big Planet and a friend of my from highschool. One song that the station played here and here was Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt 1. I remember liking it, but eventually moving on and preferring other tracks....
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Walking with Ambient: Music for Airports.

 I want to write in this blog more because I wish to write more in general. I keep track of when I walk along to ambient music on my rate your music . Normally the entries are only one sentence long, but I think this could be a good opportunity to write what is on my mind more. Here's the entry:   5/8/25. I took a walk and listened to Brian Eno's Music for Airports. A friend reminded me that it's been a while since I had done this last. I wanted something under an hour- a lot of ambient stuff spills out to luxurious lengths, and I didn't wish to walk that long. I started walking at sunset, going up and down a hill, down to a park, and then looped back on a different road back home. Track 1/1: This accompanied me up and down the hill. On the way up, my thoughts were scattered and fairly sparse. I thought about my game. Near the top of the hill, a teenager tore down the road. I micro-jumped in surprise. Finally at top of the hill, looking at all of the hills and houses, I...
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a note on "Audio documents"

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 "Audio documents" is my new monthly series of music, replacing the DAYLOGS project. Goodbye, DAYLOGS. So far, I've put out two Audio documents. The playlist link is here . The newest track as of writing this is here:       With the title "Audio document" I wanted to expand beyond just doing songs- Integrating recorded sound, playing more with audio, and making things more abstract and freeform. I haven't done very well with that so far, especially with this second entry, but hey, there's 10 more opportunities to experiment! And I like this new one. On both of the new tracks, however, I have already been far more loose than usual when it comes to structure and sound. I'm trying to focus on auditory atmosphere and mood, and trying to break off of making my music sound "gridlike". When you work in a DAW, it's very easy to just align everything to the grid, and as a result things can feel very mechanical. I'm also being a lot free-er w...
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Car CDS

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 A while back, a local record store moved locations to nice big building. I started going there more often as a result, and got into the habit of buying wonderful CDs. I play them in my car. I like letting them run sequentially. I like that when I turn the car off, it just resumes where from where it stopped. I like when they loop over again. I like letting people who get in my car pick a CD to play. I try to buy CDs that I'm not that familiar with- It's fun to surprise myself with an album and sink into it. Listening to music while driving is great because it's one of the few times I get to listen without headphones. It feels like I engage more with the music. Sometimes I enter a trance like state where it just flows over me. Should I be in a trance while driving? I like that used CDs are cheap. It's fun to flip through the packaging. CDs are Good! Let's see CDs. I've organized them into groups, and put a threshold filter on them because I think it will look ni...
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2025 and DAYLOG SONGS

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2025 is off to a bad start. I'm pretty wrecked by the world, which seems at odds with my understanding of "good". It's hard to be motivated to do anything. I have to do stuff anyways. Today, I released the DAYLOG SONGS 2024 album or EP or whatever. Each month I took a phrase from the previous, wrote a short song, and made a video. It started way quicker than it ended- Especially the songs, which were tweaked on and off for about a week sometimes. Here's assorted thoughts: Most of the songs are from negative thoughts! I used these songs to cope, I guess. The saddest song is "what's to say?" I think the dominant mood of the project is Wistful. The first four songs are kind of a lie- I wrote those and made videos for those all in the month of April, I think. I only realized this was a good idea around then. At least I started before halfway through the year! There was no overarching genre or style of music- I did what I felt like, similar to SPLIT WHOLE...
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