Good Morning Friends! I hope you had a most excellent weekend. For those of us in the US, it was Mother’s Day and I hope that went off swimmingly for everyone. Me… well we spent some time on the side of a very busy turnpike because we had a spectacular flat. For anyone who might not be used to this feature of my blog, Mixtape Mondays are where I create a number of mixtapes and share them with you. As a kid, I was a prolific maker of mixtapes and loved the structure of lining up songs in a specific order to convey a feeling. The original series ran for 20 episodes before I ran out of creative juice, and now we are on week three of this revival. Who knows how long I will keep it going this time, but I still have a bit more ammunition ready to go.
Contextual Rickroll
The internet has a proud tradition of bait and switch tactics, and one of the proudest of these traditions is hyping something up and then linking the Never Gonna Give You Up video by Rick Astley. I am not sure why this one artifact of a bygone age came to represent the epitome of cringe, but it did. However too often it seems like folks view this one video as some sort of isolated incident or an odd happening that makes no sense. However friends… I am here to tell you that the theme song of the Rickroll, was absolutely an element of the times in which the song was created. I’ve kicked around the notion of creating a playlist for a while that places the song in its proper conditions. When I was in seventh grade I had fairly major sinus surgery and spent quite a bit of time laying in the hospital. Given that I grew up with cable… and as a result without MTV… I consumed as much as I could possibly watch. Never Gonna Give You Up was a new song at this time, and I present to you the auditory landscape of this era.
That friend brings to close the third Mixtape Monday in this new series. I can’t say that I am going to be listening to this one a ton, but it served a very specific purpose. Think of this as an auditory time capsule to place the Rickroll in its original context. For those who might be finding this as your first Mixtape Mondays post, I keep an archive of all of the mixtapes I have created shown below. I hope you all have a most excellent week, and I hope I manage to finish up a few more mixes before next Monday.
Good Morning Friends! I hope you had an excellent weekend. Last week was fairly dominated with guide posts about Mastodon/Fediverse, but hopefully this week we can get back to the regular sorts of nonsense that I provide. Today however I am bringing you the second new mix of what I am at least mentally thinking of as “season 2” of this project. For anyone tuning today fresh, I was one of those kids who constantly made mixtapes for myself and for my friends… even used them as a wildly ineffective way of trying to flirt. There is something about the art of placing songs in a specific order that I love, and I even go overboard enough to create some custom fake album art.
Immaculately Overwhelmed
Something that I realized in the time between my previous mixtape spree and now, is that I never really plumbed the depths of Emo Rock. I was way the fuck too old to adopt this as a style and way of life, but I spent plenty of time listening to this music. While as a Gen X I mostly viewed Emo as a resurgence of the Goth roots of The Cure and Bauhaus mixed through the party hard ethic of Blink-182. The end result was an extremely enjoyable rock phase from the mid to late 2000s. As frat rock began to fade it was replaced by this more deeply introspective version that honestly I related to quite a bit more. The scene kids that followed, even felt quite a bit like my little skater punk era. It is funny as you age, how you can clearly seen the connective fabric between different movements in music and culture. The only problem is you age out of being relevant to the oncoming generation, and as such those attempts at wisdom fade into the void. The cycle repeats for eternity.
Well folks that is it for another round of Mixtape Mondays. I hope this playlist hits the spot as much as it did for me. This would be number twenty two in total, and for those just now catching up you can check out the full list over at my archive page. I have a few mixes that are in a fluid state right now, and I will need to spend some time this week to dislodge them from the logjam they are in currently. I hope you all have a most excellent week, and we will continue this nonsense next week.
Good Morning Friends! First off sorry for the complete lack of a podcast this weekend. We were experiencing some severe weather and it seemed like a really bad idea to be sequestered up in my office as it was hitting. Next up I am bringing back Mixtape Mondays! For those who did not experience this last year, I had a semi-weekly running series where I gave you a brand new mixtape each Monday morning. I made it through twenty of them before my inspiration ran out, but recently I have been crafting Mixtapes again, and you my readers are benefiting from it.
For some backstory… I was one of those kids who was constantly making mixtapes. Since I was one of the few that had a stereo with dual cassette tapes, I had the ability to easily dub things. Growing up in a small town, when anyone got something… it was passed around heavily which lead to me crafting a lot of custom mixes for my friends. I have a specific love for the way songs flow together on an album, and I think the art of album creature has suffered in the era of buying individual songs on iTunes. So this series was my attempt to bring back the mixtape via Spotify and YouTube playlist. Since I have personally moved on to Tidal I am including those now as well.
Zombie Sexfiend
Most of my mixes have a starting point, and for this one it was Rob Zombie. I am cheating and including both a song from White Zombie and a song from his solo career… which is still more or less White Zombie. One of the things that I have had to do with this second generation… is go through all of my previous mixes and log them in a spreadsheet because it is getting too freaking hard to remember if I have used a song before or not. I have a few personal rules… never repeat a song I have used before and never repeat a band in the same mix. However I have found creative ways to cheat before… like on a mix that was Blink 182 focused I also included a bunch of things from Blink 182 adjacent side projects. This mix however is things that fit neatly into the auditory realm of White Zombie. I hope you all enjoy!
Track List
Jurassitol – Filter
More Human Than Human – White Zombie
The Chemicals Between Us – Bush
Guilty – Gravity Kills
Save Yourself – Stabbing Westward
The Perfect Drug – Nine Inch Nails
Just One Fix – Ministry
After the Flesh – My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult
That begins what is hopefully the second generation of Mixtape Mondays. This would be number twenty one if you count them sequentially however. I am uncertain how long I will be able to keep this going, but I do have several mixes that I am actively working on as well as a few that I have completed. I have a few things that I am working on that sort of stretch the boundaries of my musical tastes, so it will be interesting to see how those work out. As always if you are new to this series and want to catch up, you can check out the full archives here:
Yesterday was the thirteenth anniversary of my very first post here on Tales of the Aggronaut. I realize last week I celebrated the 9th year of AggroChat but apparently, April is just the month I start new things. It was April of last year for example that I started the whole Mixtape Monday thing for example… which incidentally is something I plan on revisiting soon. It always feels weird and self-congratulatory to do one of these posts, but also feels like something I should do anyway. Looking back I apparently missed my twelfth anniversary altogether and never saw fit to go back and talk about it. Technically I should have been making this post yesterday, but was releasing an episode of AggroChat and I have this weird hang-up about doing more than one post in a single day. According to the Wayback Machine, this is what my blog would have looked like around this time.
2011 – WayBack fails to Capture the Rift Theme Era
However, I am learning for a fact that the Wayback Machine is fallible. The graphical treatment on that first image is like the second revision of my blog theme. The very first one was a direct clone of an existing wow-based theme, given that my blog started its life as a Warrior Tanking blog. The “Sons of Hodir” themed banner would have come much later and the above image is a complete fabrication because I know by the time we reached September of 2011 I was sporting a Rift-based theme. I dove completely into Rift and was even registered as an official fansite. Truth be told last time I logged into the forums, my account was still flagged as a fansite operator. You can see a bit of evidence of this in the sidebar but this is when I switched to the blue-themed text over the brown masthead.
2014 – Non-Game Specific Theme
The ship begins to right itself around 2014 when you can see this blue masthead text actually being captured by the Wayback Machine. The main difference during the Rift years was instead of Chibi Bel wearing Zul Aman gear, it was a Chibi Bahmi seen here on the right. I am honestly wishing I had gotten in the practice of taking a screenshot of my blog every so often during its life span. For years I have mostly relied on the Wayback Machine as a way of transporting me back in time but I am guessing it is starting to succumb to the process of digital rot. This is a bit concerning because our digital memories are not going to be preserved nearly as perfectly as we might have hoped. I think this is one of those things that we maybe took for granted… but also maybe should not have. I guess I should add screenshotting my blog… to the long list of other things that I have preserved through my screenshot archive.
Chibi Bahmi Bel
Chibi AggroChat
All of the Chibi work that adorned my blog for years was done by my good friend Rae. She was one of the original members of AggroChat and is someone that at the time worked with me. I greatly appreciate all of the work that she did for me, but as the blog matured I found myself moving away from that art style. The original graphics for AggroChat seen above included Chibi versions of Rae, Ash, Kodra, and Myself… more specifically the version of my Elder Scrolls Online Imperial Dragon Knight character I was playing at the time. Ash being a bear that Rae was sitting on was not exactly a great representation, but given the other stuff, we were juggling this remained the artwork for far longer than I had intended.
2015 – The End of Chibi Era
The last era that still featured Rae’s Chibi work was in 2015. I had gone to a very streamlined look in the masthead and used a cropped version of the ESO Bel Chibi that I was at the time using as my Twitter avatar. This also begins the era of me stopping fiddling and trying to roll my own theme. I test drove several third-party paid themes and finally landed on Generate Press, and have more or less been using it since. I figure this is probably the beginning of the “modern” era of the blog as not a ton has shifted since this point. I desperately need to spend some time modifying my sidebar at this point. Some releases back WordPress added block support, and it would be so much easier to maintain if I just nuked it and started from scratch. However, that seems terribly daunting and I keep putting it off.
2017 – Beginning of Ammo Era
In 2017 we saw the first introduction of a Masthead featuring artwork from my good friend Ammo. The whole “how I met Ammo” thing is a truly contorted mess, and at some point, we are going to sit down and record an episode of Bel Folks Stuff to sort it out. Basically, I originally crossed paths with her mom Sol back in World of Warcraft as we were all on Argent Dawn US, but I am guessing I first met Ammo through Twitter. None of that really matters though because I love her artwork, and you should absolutely check her stuff out if you have ever experienced it. I mean she has a traditional website, but I still feel like the best place to experience it is via Tumblr. She cut her teeth on comics just like I did, and as a result, there is a very comic book nature to the art style. Right now she is working on enshrining my Guild Wars 2 Necromancer in artwork form, and it is so damned cool. I can’t wait to be able to share it with you all.
2019 – The Masthead Full of Ammo Art Era
Then by that time we reached the pre-pandemic Aggronaut, you have the masthead full of various individual commissions from Ammo. Each one of those was done separately but I have merged them into a single cohesive image. If you compare it to the current masthead it is missing the PSO2 and New World themed “Bels”. This madness all started however because I commissioned Ammo to draw an image for my seventh blog anniversary that I just fell in love with. I was enamored with the concept of having her illustrated the various versions of my primary “Belghast” character in each game because they all share some deep similarities.
Original 7th Anniversary “Faces of Bel”
So left to right you have my World of Warcraft Warrior, my character from Secret World, my Exo from Destiny 1 and Bahmi from Rift, then my ESO Dragon Knight, and finally my Lalafel Warrior from FFXIV. She still has the original shirt up for purchase on her TeePublic store. That all came about because I wanted a shirt made off this image, but wanted all proceeds from the sale to go to Ammo in case anyone else bought one at some point. Then when I decided to fiddle with my masthead I asked her to take the LalaBel featured in this image and blow it up into a full-sized graphic. Then one by one as I had her draw more things for me… we kept that same format allowing me to composite them together afterward.
The Streamer Moogles
Some years back I commissioned a series of moogles screwing around with “streamer” gear. Originally this was to be part of my Twitch page for a foray into streaming that never really happened. More recently I have used them to adorn the masthead. However, the next project that I am going to give Ammo is to do a similar treatment for other cute monsters from video games. I know for example I absolutely want an Arctic Quaggan and a Choya Pinata from Guild Wars 2. I am sorta brainstorming a list of cute critters I want to be done up, and at least mentally these are going to be part of a more broad site rework. I am hoping that by the time we reach the fourteenth anniversary of the blog, we have maybe moved forward a little bit in the way it looks.
I have to admit, this is not exactly the post that I had intended to make this morning but it is the post that came out. There are times that you just have to go with the flow when writing, and that has been one of the secrets to my maintaining this site for thirteen years. I wish I had been more prolific early in this site, because as I age… I find having this living journal to be a benefit for pinpointing exactly when various things in my life happened. Here we are some 2876 posts later and I am still getting up each morning to do this nonsense. That would average out to be 221 posts a year, but we all know that is a lie since my prolific nature did not really kick in until April of 2013. The part that shocks me more though is that I have had just shy of 9000 comments… especially when you consider how freaking bad I am at actually interacting with them.
Basically what I am trying to say in my very meandering manner is… thanks for reading and being here with me on this journey.
