Hey Friends! It is that time again, time for another MixTape. I have managed to do this three weeks in a row which is pretty great for me. I have this bad habit of starting a series and then just wandering away like a bored toddler. For anyone who might be tuning in for the first time to this spectacle, I missed the era of building custom mixtapes for friends. Since you are all my friends I am now building custom mixtapes for you my audience. The idea is to put a number of songs together in a way that the combination is more than any of the constituent parts. The challenge however is how to make this actually work for the digital age.
The answer to that is that I am doing this largely on Spotify and also including a YouTube Playlist as a backup. I greatly favor Spotify however because it allows me to make some nonsense custom artwork, but I guess you are going to see that anyway if you are reading this blog post. I also try and come up with a good name for the mix to sort of set the tone. Occasionally these are pretentious nonsense and others like this morning are just pretty straight forward.
Push Me Punch You
One of the things that I love is a music that has a cohesive nature but no real cohesive name. This music is referred to as punk, post-hardcore, indie rock, garage rock, alternative or just the very boring and generic “rock”. Whatever the case it is music with a slight edge but that isn’t super hard about it. This is probably the mixtape of the series that I probably listen to the most because it most represents the general state of what I want to hear in a song. I attempt to parade some b side cuts and maybe some bands doing things that you might not expect from them. This is technically the second mixtape that I created in this sequence but I wanted to try and space things out a bit since the first one also had a little bit of an edge to it.
Bull In The Heather – Sonic Youth
Mistaken for Strangers – The National
Bulldog Front – Fugazi
Somebody to Shove – Soul Asylum
Head Injury – Soundgarden
Been Caught Stealing – Jane’s Addiction
Backwoods – Red Hot Chili Peppers
Relatin’ Dudes To Jazz – fIREHOSE
Out There – Dinosaur Jr.
Cut – The Cure
Jessie – Paw
Nearly Lost You – Screaming Trees
Ana Ng – They Might Be Giants
Hey Now – The Regrettes
Sunday Morning Coming Down – Me First and the Gimme Gimmes
Spotify
YouTube
Tidal
I hope you enjoy it and drop me a line below with your thoughts. Also what the hell do YOU call this brand of music? I mostly just call it Punk even though it isn’t the sort of Johnny Rotten/Exploited/Safety pin as a nose ring era that the term generally evokes.
Hey Friends! It is once again time for a Mixtape Monday where I dive into some of my favorite songs and blend them together into a custom made mix just for you my friends. As a quintessential GenXer I was a producer and consumer of the artform known as the Mixtape. It was so much more than just putting a number of your favorite songs on a single tape for convenience. I dug more into the flow of a mix and how the songs blended together to produce something greater than any of the parts.
Now I am doing this same process but instead presenting it in Spotify and YouTube Playlist forms for your pleasure. I am also creating custom album art for each mixtape, which is super pretentious and nonsensical but would you expect anything else? This is the second edition of this feature so here is hoping I don’t get distracted and can keep this up!
Mellowcore Cantriping
I have to be honest, I am not entirely certain I would explain the inspiration here. Effectively I built this entire mix for the sole purpose of building up to the last song. Everything leading up to that is just there more or less to prime the pump for the optimal delivery of what is bittersweet musical perfection. There will always be mystery shrouding the death of Jeff Buckley, but Grace the album released shortly before his death is sublime and I wish we would have had enough time to get more from him. The problem is that Last Goodbye is a weird genre bending song that took a very special mix tape to do it justice. I hope that I did at that.
What’s Up? – 4 Non Blondes
You Wouldn’t Like Me – Tegan and Sara
Black Gold – Soul Asylum
The Girl Underground – Cloud Cult
All I Want – Toad the Wet Sprocket
First of the Gang to Die – Morrissey
The Old Apartment – Barenaked Ladies
It’s A Shame About Ray – The Lemonheads
Breaking the Girl – Red Hot Chili Peppers
High and Dry – Radiohead
Milk – Garbage
Possession – Sarah McLachlan
Last Goodbye – Jeff Buckley
Spotify
Youtube Playlist
Tidal
I hope you enjoy it and drop me a line below if you did.
Good Morning Friends! I have been planning some nonsense for awhile now and today represents the first day of a new series on this blog. As a GenXer I come from the golden age of the Mixtape, and was one of those people who would create lots of them and often times hand out to friends. The thing that has been lost in the age of the single and iTunes is that there used to be an intelligence to the placement of songs on an album. There were various bands that had what I used to call a “listen through” experience, where the flow of the music would happen in just the right way to have high points and low points and provide an experience that was greater than the sum of its parts.
When I used to build mixtapes for my friends, or as an often times failed vehicle for flirtation… I attempted to apply this same sort of care to the placement of songs. The majority of my life I always had some sort of soundtrack to my activities that would be playing in the background. I would associate songs with places and people and now listening back to any of those invokes this tapestry of feelings and memories along with a very concrete sense of time and place. However for the majority of the past decade this has been absent in my life and replaced with a combination of NPR and podcasts. Very recently I have been immersing myself in music and it is like a sense that I had once lost came rushing back to me.
Along with this has come the desire to start building mixtapes once again. I’ve cobbled together a number of these and I decided that the best way to share them with you my friends… is to do a weekly column of sorts. I am notoriously bad at keeping this sort of thing going for very long, but for until I get distracted by some other shiny object… I will be posting a new mixtape every Monday morning.
Contours of Indecision
This first mix tape has more of an industrial bent. I often times gave my mixtapes pretentious names, so I figured I would start off this process with a doozy. I spent hours adding and removing songs from the list until I ended up with a balanced product that sorta fades in on a strong note and releases you on a very melancholy and reflective note. There are a lot of what I would consider rarities on this specific mix tape, or places where an artist is acting in a manner other than what we expect from them. I hope you enjoy, here is the manifest:
Burn – The Cure
Everything’s Ruined – Faith No More
All Wrong – God Lives Underwater
Eye – Smashing Pumpkins
I’m Afraid of Americans – David Bowie and Trent Reznor
The Witch – The Cult
Ruiner – Nine Inch Nails
Animal – Prick
Down – Gravity Kills
Army of Me – Bjork
Trip Like I Do – Filter with Crystal Method
Girl – Beck
Tech Noir – Gunship
Tidal
Spotify
For those without Access to Spotify, I also have provided this in a YouTube Playlist, with the key difference being you won’t get my custom album artwork.
YouTube
I hope you all enjoy my nonsense. Drop me a line with your thoughts about this project.
Good Morning Folks! I was realizing this morning just how completely out of date my blog side bar is when it comes to the games that I have been playing regularly. In theory I claim that this is my semi-monthly process of trueing up the sidebar so it represents the sorts of games that I am playing. What actually happens is that I go for large blocks of time without updating this and when that happens massive swings occur. For example the last one of these that I did was in October of 2020 and some stuff has changed. So here goes an attempt at maybe doing these regularly again for a bit. For those not already indoctrinated into the process I divide things up into a few categories:
To Those Remaining – The games that I am still actively playing or at least expect to be playing within the month.
To The New and Returning – The games that I am either dusting off and revisiting or are brand new experiences that I am enjoying.
To Those Departing – The games that I am finally removing from the list for one reason or another.
Ships Passing in the Night – Games that I don’t expect to regularly play but I spent some time with over the month and enjoyed enough to talk about.
To Those Remaining
Diablo 3 – PC and Switch
My sweet sweet Diablo 3, you are rarely ever gone from this list. There is even a new season starting this Friday and I am looking forward to going through the routine of the seasonal grind. This season has a bunch of changes to the game and as a result they sorta gave us a greatest hits collection of sets available through Haedrigs Gift. As a result I am looking at probably starting a Whirlrend Barbarian for this season because those are so stinking fun to play.
Ghosts of Tsushima – PS5
I am going to be honest, I am leaving this one on the list more as an aspirational placement than a game I am truly actively playing. I boot it up from time to time and play through a few encounters and then put it to bed for a longer period of time. I hope to get back in and play it more intently because also while we have been spilling truth… I feel a little guilty that I am not really doing much with my PlayStation 5.
Hades – PC and Switch
This one retains its spot because it is still probably my go to “playing switch from bed” game. The pattern of play just fits spending a few minutes before falling asleep. I am not terribly good at it but I enjoy it mechanically and thematically. This is the only game I have played where I enjoy losing, because it means I am going to get some more story beats.
New World – PC
I am leaving this on the list for reasons of which I am contractually not at liberty to talk about. It comes out in August officially and I am looking forward to that release. I’ve never seen a game that has gone through quite so many changes during its late development cycle as this one. It is going to be interesting to see the state of this game at launch. I have quite a bit of faith in it.
Retro Games – Retro Freak Console, RG350, Retroid, Raspberry Pi 4
Still very much spending a chunk of my time playing games that I grew up with… that are now referred to as Retro games. Still feels really weird to be calling them Retro to be honest. Actually yesterday I literally just got an 8 gb Raspberry Pi 4 model in that I am going to be playing with. That is probably going to become my main emulation device for the short term for anything other than higher end stuff like Cemu that absolutely requires the power of my gaming PC.
To The New and Returning
Destiny 2 – PC
Putting this one back on the list because I am technically playing it again. I am nowhere near as engaged with it as I would like to be and I am not exactly certain why that is the case. From all accounts this is a really good season but I find myself just unable to get stuck into it very deeply. Since we are trueing things up it is in somewhat regular rotation so it is going to get a spot on the list.
The Elder Scrolls Online – PC
I am experiencing a massive renaissance of Elder Scrolls Online and it has rapidly become my primary game over the past month. While I am mostly leveling alts right now, I am going to return to the normal course of trying to quest my way through all of the content in the game and maybe just maybe be ready for the launch of the next expansion in June. I somehow doubt that is going to be a thing because I have to make it through large blocks of content and I know I will become distracted by other games that spring up along the way.
Minecraft – PC Java Client
Another thing that happened since my previous update is that I have returned to Minecraft in a huge way. I spent a lot of time playing solo and even recorded a semi-daily YouTube series on my adventures. Now however I spend my time either popping between my own private Realms world or a closed server run by my friend Zeli. Not playing near as much as I was but I am still popping in and wandering around. There is a stronghold in the nether that I am clearing and trying to set up a dual blaze farm right now so I still have projects that I am plugging away at. Right now I am likely going to wait to re-engage heavily until the new caves update comes out and create a brand new world.
Outriders – PC
Outriders is the new looter shooter hotness that is shipping tomorrow officially. I played the hell out of the demo and now am looking forward to consuming this game peacefully. I am not really planning on playing it as my primary game because I am super engaged with Elder Scrolls right now, but I am absolutely going to slow grind it. The launch time is just really bad because it overlaps with a bunch of other things going on like the launch of a new Diablo 3 season.
Valheim – PC
Valheim is freaking great. If you do not already own this game you should pick it up because it is dirt cheap and one hell of a lot of fun. I’ve reached a point of equilibrium with this game at least until new content ships. I had been playing regularly on a server but I have mostly been playing lately on my solo world. When the hearth and home update ships, I might start a new world depending on how deep the changes go. I will likely always keep Beltopia around given that it is set up nicely for crafting and such.
To Those Departing
Genshin Impact – Android/PC
I have no real idea why I bounced the way that I have from this game. I think partially it might just be that I don’t love “maintenance gaming” where all I am really doing is dailies. However in this game that isn’t even true because they have released a ton of story content since I last played and I never can quite bring myself to come back and play it. There are a lot of things about this game that work so well and then a lot of things that just frustrate me. For example the fact that I feel like I don’t have a reasonable manner in which to level new characters and catch them up to my core party… means that I largely feel like I am stuck always using my core party. Maybe at some point I will return when it ships on the Switch but for now it is a distant memory.
World of Warcraft – PC
Shadowlands is a bad expansion filled with systems that I am not interested in engaging with. In fact I would probably say that Shadowlands is going to be up there with the worst expansions of all time. I talked about how frustrated I was with Battle for Azeroth, but at least that is an expansion that I actively enjoyed the leveling process. Shadowlands I barely made it to the level cap with one of my characters and couldn’t even manage to stomach a single zone on my alts. I am not exactly sure how things went off the rails in the manner that they did but for now at least I am done with the game. Like I have not talked about it a lot because in truth I am not even sure it is worth talking about it. I miss hanging out with my friends who play the game but I miss nothing about Shadowlands.
Ships Passing in the Night
Cyberpunk 2077 – PC
Unlike most of the internet I have nothing but love for this game. I apparently had a sufficient system to play it and lucked out on not encountering many bugs during my play through. As such I am actively craving more content for it, but throwing it on the “ships” list because I have more or less put the game aside for the moment. When DLC releases I will either play through the DLC on my current play through or start a brand new campaign. I hope the issues surrounding this game do not kill this franchise because I loved it deeply on so many different levels.
Dragon Age Inquisition – PC
Dragon Age Inquisition was one of those games that I had bounced off of so many times in the past and then suddenly was able to play happily. I have found with the hustle and bustle of the end of the year… I crave deep single player experiences. This is one of those games that I played during that period and had a blast. Looking forward to this story continuing.
Jedi Fallen Order – PC
When this game first released I tried playing it with a controller because it seemed like that was the proper way to play it. I bounced because the game is not terribly good at explaining when you should leave a planet. However over the holiday break I returned to the game and had a blast, this time playing with my more native control scheme of keyboard and mouse. Truly great game and great experience. If you have not played this game you really owe it to yourself to do so, especially if you like Star Wars even in the least bit.
Knights of the Old Republic 2 – PC
Another game that I have bounced off numerous times is Knights of the Old Republic 2 and for some reason over this break I managed to make my way through it. Like the game is a mess… there is no getting around that but it is a mess that I am happy to have experienced. There is a lot of interesting things going on in this game and knowing now that this released before Fallout New Vegas I can see some of the things that they expanded upon later and made work better in that game. Would I recommend it to someone else? Probably not, but I am still very happy to have experienced it myself.
Summary
The funny thing about this is that I just realized upon writing out this post… that my sidebar was never actually updated from the October edition meaning it was even more out of date than I realized. Now I will hopefully remember to do the thing and actually make the updates once I finish with this post. Here is to also maybe doing this at least once a quarter going forward… if not monthly.
