~FreshStartWithABrokenHeart

Hello everyone, and a [hopefully] happy 2024!

Annual update journals have become a bit of a tradition for me, as…well…I’m not posting much else these days. But 2023 has been a big year, and hopefully the next one is too, so I want to let you know what’s been going on!

The big thing I needed in 2023 was a new place to live, and I have fortunately found it with my brother and a friend as roommates still. We’re just renting instead of buying, as the buying market around here isn’t great. (Is it good anywhere?) But it’s a really nice place in a location with so many options for all of us, and it’s just been fantastic and liberating! I put in all the work finding this place and getting it locked in, and my reward has been a MASSIVE master bedroom suite all to myself! It even looks like we’ll be staying put here for another year, so I’m all good in that department!

Work has been interesting this past year, providing me with a refreshing new role for most of it. For most of 2023, I had probably the best role I’ll ever have at my current employer. It was still KIND OF call center work, but more outbound than inbound, and every now and then you just had to guide a customer through an online application process. The last part was a little time consuming, but overall, the job was a lot more relaxed than pretty much all the other clients I’ve worked for!

But alas, all good things come to an end, and come Fall, I had to switch to another client. I PLEADED with my company to not go back to the same things I was doing before these past two interesting clients, i.e. the usual stressful side of a healthcare call center, but the new client is very much that unfortunately. This time around, though, it’s been a little different. The training, first of all, was pretty great and provided a really smooth transition from just practicing to taking live calls with customers. And second, although we did have shift bids, it was just easier for everyone else that I took the late shift. This means I get off around 7:30pm instead of the usual 6 or so now, but this also means I avoid the busy first part of the day and get a more relaxed final 1.5 hours each day. Did I mention there are bonuses for working this shift as well, as it’s a little more important to show up with much fewer representatives working at that time? There’s also a chance of working a weekend every now and then, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. More bonuses for that, too, at least. Aside from a few frustrating calls, this is working for me so far. With this shift schedule, my weekday sleep schedule actually matches my weekend one, and it’s nice that work conformed to my schedule rather than the other way around.

Despite personal concerns mentioned last year, I have been continuing to consistently stream games and make Twitch/YouTube content throughout the year and into this one so far. That’s partially because 2023 was an INCREDIBLE year for game releases. It was so difficult to stay away! My relatively new Xbox Series S has been getting WORKED this past year, as it’s been a perfect little console to keep in my bedroom and play stuff privately. My Switch and PS5 have been suffering as a result, but I have big titles I’ve been chipping away at on them with Super Mario RPG and Spider-Man 2 respectively. I also tried and completed some interesting side games this year, like Astral Chain and My Friendly Neighborhood! More recently, I’ve been playing the CRAP out of The Finals! I was in the market for a Call of Duty alternative, and The Finals is incredibly fun and impressive! Definitely give it a try if you like shooters!

PC gaming has also been fairly frequent, as I have the game of the year Baldur’s Gate 3 on it! All this time, though, and I’ve just BARELY gotten out of Act 1 across multiple files. I really like the game, but it’s getting to a point where I don’t know if I could bear playing through Act 1 ever again. I have also been on a huge kart racing kick throughout the past year, playing several at a time in some intervals. Disney Speedstorm and DreamWorks All-Star Kart Racing have kept me pretty entertained!

I hope everyone had a good holiday as well! Christmas was really nice for me this time around. I didn’t watch quite as many of my traditional holiday specials this year, but I tried a lot of new ones and revisited some I hadn’t seen in a while. Not sure if I get more or less holiday points for that. Spending time with family went pleasantly. Had good food and festivities, and my haul this year was pretty great too! The most notable items were some piano books, a book all about Studio Ghibli, some new shoes (Vans, in fact), and some high-end studio headphones!

I REALLY want to talk about MUSIC, though! That’s where the BIG things are happening!

First off, CONCERTS! Two huge ones happened for me in 2023! Well, actually, one was big and the other was pretty small, but both were incredibly important to me.

First, I FINALLY got to see Owl City live! He released an album back in March, as did another favorite artist of mine, Andrew McMahon. The Andrew album didn’t really do much for me this time around, and while perhaps not as good as his previous and incredibly personal album “Cinematic”, Owl City’s “Coco Moon” album still has a lot of really fun and interesting stuff! With a new album comes a new tour, and I saw he was coming close enough for me to finally see him! The last time he came this close was part of the “Cinematic” tour in 2018, but it was out of town and on a Wednesday night, which should be illegal. This scheduling wasn’t incredibly better, but I got time off of work to go! It was a small venue – actually the same exact venue I saw Andrew McMahon in back in 2021 – but it was a great show and I had a great time!

Second, I had to make my EDM quota for the year. I did the great big Decadence festival for 2022 into 2023, which I mentioned in last year’s journal, and now I’ve also seen Madeon at Red Rocks! He’s been doing his great big “Good Faith Forever” show for a few years now, and I went to one of the very last performances for it! It was Colorado in November, so it was absolutely FREEZING at an outdoor venue, but holy crap was it worth it. If you’re not aware, this is a show that was done at Coachella a couple years back. What we saw was better than the Coachella performance though, as some things needed to be cut from that iteration to meet time. But if you haven’t seen Madeon’s “Good Faith Forever” show, I HIGHLY recommend it. ESPECIALLY the live performance for his newest track, “Gonna Be Good”. It’s a borderline religious experience. Luckily, Madeon actually streamed the entire show and it’s available on YouTube for free! You can watch the Red Rocks show online and know that I was there in person freezing my ass off!

As for my own personal journey with music, FANTASTIC progress has been made. I mentioned in my journal last year that I was aspiring to become an electronic music artist in the future after being fundamentally changed by Decadence, and the first step was to find a way…some kind of program…that I could use to construct songs. I was HOPELESSLY uninformed in this area to start with. I could play an instrument or two, but just had no idea how to actually build the music digitally and get it out there. I started 2023 not even knowing what a DAW (digital audio workstation) was. I only knew about Audacity! But in the first few months of 2023, I quickly took to learning about them online via video tutorials, and I got hands-on and tried a few. I started with Ableton, but its layout just…didn’t make any sense to me whatsoever. Then I stumbled upon FL Studio and saw its “channel rack” feature in action, and I knew it was the one for me. Plus it’s a bit more of a budget choice, as it just takes a one-time purchase to own/use it rather than a subscription. So in just the first few months of 2023, I had learned about DAWs, found and purchased one that worked for me, and got to work actually building my music! I even locked in my choice of DAW by purchasing a MIDI controller built specifically for it. More recently, I just got another DAW, MPC Beats, for free to try as a backup if ever needed.

It didn’t take long to at least have my first song built, but the hard part has been mastering it and trying to get it to sound the way I always imagined it to be. I’ve sat on built songs for months, though also been pretty distracted with a move and some games to be fair. Unfortunately, I’m still not quite there yet. But with every video I watch or feature I mess with, I feel myself getting closer. I’ve just recently figured out a neat trick with how FL Studio limits audio that could potentially fix all my problems on its own! I’m close enough now that, right before the year ended, I went ahead and made a SoundCloud account for my soon-to-be music project! I hadn’t really tried the site/app before, but I’ve really been enjoying my experience there! It’s like a more social Spotify, like Spotify and Twitter combined. Sure, you can like songs and make playlists, but you can also comment on songs, artists can reply to those comments, and artists have spots to add descriptions to what they post! I’ve been thinking that my songs would NEED to sound studio quality in order to merit a post, but I’ve also been reassured by some SoundCloud accounts posting demo versions or even WIPs for their tracks. I TRULY feel an actual music upload from me is in the VERY near future there, and that 2024 will be a big year for having this project come to life and find its form!

Where does that leave everything else, you ask? Well…I want to talk about that too, although it’s a lot less exciting, and…you might not like it.

I’m sure you’re all aware of the recent fiascos with Patreon and PayPal cracking down on people with our…interests. Well…that shit kind of SCARED me. I’ve always felt or sensed that these projects and different parts of me need to be “separated”, and lately I’ve been feeling pulled in different directions, and one day I will come to the hard decision of needing to choose just one. Seeing all this happening, I felt supremely validated in this. I really feel like I’m making the “right” decision in going in this one direction with music, and music completely detached from my usual self here at that.

I can’t ever completely disown these parts of myself, as I like what I like and it’s probably too late to try and change that, if it’s even possible. But going forward…maybe I shouldn’t “advertise” those…interests anymore. I had already been getting fewer commissions, as money’s been a little tight here and there, but now I’m honestly scared to. I had already been having trouble finding motivation to work on the astounding backlog of stories and things in my pipeline…and now I’m not sure I want to do them at all. There are still so many things I was working on that haven’t been finished, and so many things I was going to try, and I am sorry for that. All this time I thought I wanted to be a writer, and now I just…don’t want to be that anymore. In any capacity. I’ve been belittled and shamed in a major way like many others affected by these crackdowns…but there’s another path forward for myself that I’ve already been following. For the foreseeable future, this is the path that I’m following, and everything else may suffer because of it. If you don’t like it, blame Patreon and PayPal, as their actions have steered me further into this.

Sorry to end on such a somber note there. If you already know me and interact with me, know that things probably won’t change that much. What you’re going to start seeing are external changes to the appearance I put on here and the content that I put out. In addition to the music project, I’m still finding myself streaming games and stuff, as that’s separate from all this too. Let me know if you would like my Twitch, YouTube, or SoundCloud information!

And as always, thank you for reading my overly long journals.