This time last year

I had only been on 8bc for just over a month.

I only had 3 songs uploaded to 8bc and no releases.

I was envious of everyone who went to Blip 07.

My girlfriend was making things very difficult.

I had no idea what a NSF was

I didn't own a DMG or Nanoloop

IRC was some NERD ASS SHIT

I had just started saving up for blip 08

I still took photos (for ART)

My hair was shorter

My pants were baggier

I had just bought my current pair of shoes.

I still had my busted ass blackberry




I was wondering what 2008 had in store for me.

Stuck

Is how I feel right now, until I get a new cart.

Oh well, all this non music time gives me more time to beat my giant stack of unfinished videogames, and do some more writing.

Also check out my tumblr. It's basically the same thing I do here, but with PURTY PICTURES.

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

Quoth the Oliver on the subject of nanoloop 1.5 carts:

"Well, I planned to release 1.5 in early december..

The actual release, however, depends on the PCB manufactorer. The latest news is that they could not finish the new boards before their holiday and thus can not deliver before mid-january. But earlier this week they said they would now try to drill the holes in that unlucky first batch of PCBs, with a loss of accuracy though. The hole's size and exact position are not too critical, so chances are good that this original batch can be used. According to the manufactorer, it will be sent to me tomorrow so that it will arrive tuesday. Unfortunately, I'm going on holiday myself on wednesday, so that's too late for a december release already.

So:
If the batch arriving tuesday is OK -> release around jan. 10th
If holes are not OK -> release in second half of january

This whole desaster teached me to never annouce even the vaguest release date again for future products."


FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!

Long Overdue Update

Went to The Blip festival. It was awesome. Met a bunch of people. Took some pictures that I need to get developed.

Lost my Nanoloop cart, Hard drive exploded. Switched To Linux. Musically on hold until I get a new cart.

Getting ready for Christmas, and then Magfest. And then school, and 8 Static 2.

Fun times

TURKEYS MUTHFUCKA!

DO YOU EAT THEM?



also: blipfest is in one week and I am super stoked.

I just saw the Polysics

They were fucking amazing.

That is all.

Words can not describe

How awesome it was to experience this:


Halloween Pulsewave "Mystery Guest" REVEAL from 2 Player Productions on Vimeo.

Memoirs of The Elderly/ Halloween Pulsewave

My buddy Edgar Nielsen put my song "Lock Stock and a Big Bucket of Chicken" into a short film that is now being showcased in the From Here To Awesome film festival.

Check it out here

Said song can also be downloaded here

Also this weekend I shall be in NY for the Halloween edition of Pulsewave:


So if you are in new york and wanna see one of the most epic chipshows of all time swing on by! And be sure to tell everyone that Dauragon sent you so they can go "Dauragon who the fuck is that?" Fun times will be had!

8static

On Saturday I went to see Graffiti Monsters , Cheap Dinosaurs, Animal Style, Glomag, and Bitshifter at 8static in Philadelphia.

Shit was rather awesome. I didn't get pictures and video of everyone cause I was too busy enjoying myself, but here goes:






Glomag @ 8static from Dauragon C. Mikado on Vimeo.


Bit Shifter @ 8static from Dauragon C. Mikado on Vimeo.



Philly is a pretty cool city. :)

Alright guys and gals

Do yourselves (yes, all 4 of you) a favor and bookmark this page.


Good day!

I Am Learning Stuff

Baron Knoxburry has alot of shirts

Newest Addition to the family

Sent to me from my good pal Mdotstrange. It's nice and gritted up and I LIKE IT.

Hexagram

Getting pretty hyped for the new Deftones album. Been listening to this a whole lot over the past month.



The self titled album is grossly unappreciated.

It had to be done sooner or later

Taken by 8GB at Barcade in New York City.

Lovely!

New Release: Baggage

Five Songs.


Raw. Unrefined. Imperfect.


Baggage dropped off at the goodwill that is your ears.


Out with the old, in with the new.


Download it here.

When Girls Telephone Boys

Possibly my favorite Deftones song. Been bumping it a lot lately:

Who ever said "absence makes the heart grow fonder"

Is a fucking liar.







:(

Videos From Philly

8gb at 8/8/08 from Dauragon C. Mikado on Vimeo.


Animal Style at 8/8/08 from Dauragon C. Mikado on Vimeo.


Nullsleep at 8/8/08 from Dauragon C. Mikado on Vimeo.

08/08/08

Went to philly. Met some peeps. Heard great music.





























Twas fun. :)

Stuff You Should Listen To: Vol. 1

I sit here at work, fairly bored flipping through songs on my ipod to play at very low volumes and I am suddenly compelled to needlessly bombard whomever stumbles upon this wee blog with my music taste.

Things that have been on heavy rotation on my iPod:

A Tribe Called Quest - The Low End Theory


















In my humble opinion THE perfect, quintessential Hip Hop Album. If you ever wanted to explain what Hip Hop was and what it is SUPPOSED to be, this album should be the top example. The beats get you on your feet, the incredibly tight bass lines rock you to the very core, and the lyrics enlighten, empower and amuse you all at the same time.


Nine Inch Nails - The Slip


















Yeah, I liked it. I liked it ALOT. Sue me. I honestly enjoy this album greater than most of what Trent Reznor has done since The Downward Spiral. It is by no means a return to form, but more of a return to basics. It doesn't try to blow you face off with sound, nor make your parents cringe with lyrics about religion and hot sweet animal lovin. It just takes you fun little musical ride that you will want to experience again and again and again. Download it for free (if you haven't already) here.


Portishead - Third


















As soon as I heard the opening *tick* *tick* *tick* *tick* *tick* *tick* *tick* *tiiish* of cymbols in "Silence", the first song on the first new Portishead Album since 1997, I knew I was in for something very special. This album is a massive departure from the Portishead of the 90's. Gone are the super slick jazzy beats and triphop turntableisms. Gone are the breaks and sharp venomous lyrics we grew so used to from Beth Gibbons. Here instead, is the dirty, gritty, pulpy, scratchy, unnerving soundtrack to the greatest pulp drama never made. Rarely does a musical work have the same resonance with me as a film or a novel, but after the droning guitar of final track "Threads" ceased, I couldn't help but just lay there on my floor and allow what just heard to soak in fully.


Various Artists - The Liverpool Chiptune Compilation


















A hotly anticipated compilation of chiptune cover of songs made by bands from Liverpool. featuring chip musicians such as Nullsleep, Goatslacker, Seed AI, AutoDaFe, and Bud Melvin. Not much I can really say other than this compo is FANTASTIC!
A stand out track for me would be "While My Gameboy Gently Weeps" by Seed A.I, a cover of one of my favorite Beatles songs. Download it here.

Thats it for now. I may do more of these in the future. Now it's time to return to *shudder* work.

Things to come

Over the past few weeks i've been debating on registering my own domain name and setting up a little website where I can gush and show off all of my various overly ambitious projects in one place. Doing so would give this blog a new home, and maybe a change of pace. It would go from a more personal blog to a more progress oriented blog centered around my various "art" projects.

Lets see how this goes.

Anywhoo, more music news;

As I stated in my previous post I recently received a music program for the Nintendo Gameboy called Nanoloop. It's basically a 16 step sequencer that produces sound from the Gameboy hardware. Here is a video of some one fooling around with a nanoloop demo:




It's a real blast to mess around with. I can wrap my head around the interface quite nicely (which makes nanoloop far more usable for me than other "tracker" style interfaces used by programs such as LSDJ and Famitracker), and it makes pretty unique sounds.

You can hear a little track I made after messing around with it for a day or two here.

exciting things ahead!

Fucking Kittens!

I have recently acquired two kittens and they are KYUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUTE. The little buggers eat and poop like it's going out of style though O_O. They also keep me up at all times at night, but I love them to death!

They couldn't have wandered into my life at a better time. Right when I was getting ready to die from boredom and loneliness, these little fur balls come around and supply me with limitless duty and entertainment. Keeping them from running out of my room (my grandmother wants to make the rest of the house kitty safe first) is pretty much a full time job.

Alright so what have I been doing? Ahh thats right. MUSIC!

I'm currently kicking myself out of a musical drought by working on a small split album with fellow chiptune hombre, Big Chip. It will be raw, it will be nasty, and there will be lots of nekkid *bitches.

In terms of musical equipment, a few weeks ago I ordered and received an R4 flash cart for my Nintendo DS, which allows me to use all kinds of home brew programs on it. There are lots of really cool DS music programs out there!

I have also just now ordered a gameboy program called Nanoloop

So in the near future my musical set up shall be:

• Laptop w/ Fl Studio
• Nintendo DS w/ Nitrotracker/Glitch DS/ Protein DS
• GBA/Gba SP w/ Nanoloop

Experimentation is fun kids!

Untill next time,

-Dauragon


* Dauragon does not endorse the use of the terms Bitches to describe people of the female gender in a derogatory manner. Don't hurt me ladies.

Life update, and such..

So, just to keep a proper log of things, my live has been split into two very distinct parts. The internet land world place, and the "Real World". Internet land world place first.

On the internet, The following has been done:

Released my first 8-bit album, Bass_Avenger

Started writing several short stories/scripts that I plan on bringing to life at some point.

Launched my little gaming blog, Disk Read Error

Met lots of really awesome and inspiring people from 8bitcollective


In the real world, my life has, for lack of a better term, gone to shit.

I was unable to register for classes for the spring semester because of near soul crushingly painful financial aid fuck ups, which lead to me owing Montgomery College over 4 grand.

I'm still jobless, because getting a job is such an unnecessarily hard process when you don't want to flip burgers.

Overall between those two things I have been pretty depressed. The problem is that the depression keeps me in the house, which in turn hinders my job searching ability, which in turn beckons forth more chastising from my mother and grandmother, which in turn flares my depression. It's OK though, cause I will be trying my hardest to break the cycle over the next few weeks. This can't continue, It's not good for me physically or mentally.

So yeah, thats what I have been up to in the first few months of 2008 :D

Do you like movies?

Bass_Avenger!

Hey if you have the time be sure to download my first chiptune effort album:



The debut album of Dauragon C. Mikado. 7 tracks of sweet sweet hippity hoppety blippity bloppety awesomepants!

BEATS SO GOOD, MAKE YOU WANNA SLAP YO MAMA! XD

Spur of the moment Blog Talk Radioing

Episode 3 of Dauragon's Lair


more episodes to come :D

Guns. Lots of Guns.

You'd think The Matrix couldn't get any cooler. You'd be wrong:

Life is like a box of chocolates

So, like always, I am sitting in front of this computer when I damn well should be sleeping. Alas, sleep does not come easily for me. I lack what people would call an "off switch". My cranium, for better or worse, runs at full speed for around 22 hours out of 24 each day. You would think "well golly, that much make you one sharp block of cheddar!", but I'm not so sure if that is true. One thing is for sure it makes me more paranoid than a pothead at a traffic stop.

Anwhoo, apart from my sleeplessness, life has been turning out to be pretty great recently. My grandmother called me today (er......yesterday) and told me that the people whom I owe student loans from now recognize that I have transferred schools and they are no longer poised to rape me up the ass with a tire iron, and snatch my first born straight out of my future wife's womb.

..........at least not YET


I have been playing an ungodly amount of Halo 3 lately because of my recently acquired replacement Xbox I received from Microsoft (and an extra free month of Xbox live, THANKS MAJOR NEILSON!). So lets just run down the major differences between my old and new xbox.

My old xbox 360 was basically a portable room heater that just so happened to play games. Seriously, I would play Viva Pinata for 30 minutes and that bitch would be hot enough to cook an egg. So you could imagine how hot it would get whilst slaying hundreds of zombies at a time in Dead Rising. I'll give you a hint: SUPER FUCKING HOT. So hot, that it fell victim to the dreaded Red Ring of Death (or RROD to us geek types who love to abbreviate everything). For those who dont know, the Red Ring of Death is the slang term for red flashing led's that circle around the power button on an xbox 360. It's basically the xbox'es way of saying "OH FUCK!!! MY KIDNEYS!" and a cue for you to rue the day you spent 400 dollars on this machine. I worried not though, because Microsoft recognized that they make a major oopsee in the design process of the 360 and decided to set aside 1 billion dollars to repair (read: replace) peoples 360's free of charge. So I immediately went on to xbox.com and made a request for a box (read: coffin) that I could ship my xbox away to magical repair land (read: giant furnace somewhere in texas) with. I shipped my xbox away, and lo and behold, several weeks later a brand spanking new xbox 360 was at my doorstep. This 360 has a HUGE heat sink (for the less technical types, a heat sink is pretty much a fat slab of metal that sits near the processor to suck up all the heat it generates) that you can see through the vents, and supposedly a smaller processor. All that matters to me is that this new system runs COOL. I recently played 4 straight hours of halo (I'm getting a job....I swear...), and my xbox didn't go a degree over a weee bit warm. It's amazing. Needless to say, I have been a happy camper as of late.

I guess thats enough geek-a-tude to last a few weeks, and I probably should sleep a bit.




Good day everyone. ;)

another late night, another cup of coffee

Sometimes my mind wanders.

Drifts away to far away place.

A Place that isn't here.

A place where I am perfect.

Where I can please everyone.

Where life isn't so hard.

Where academics aren't everything.

Where student loans are paid off.

Where the caliber of my success is only limited by my imagination.

A place where I am not separated from the one I love.

A place where people believe in me.






But eventually,

It wanders back

Sleep

Is for the weak