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klungus.xyz/blog/8-14-24
Summer flew by very fast, but not for any bad reasons: working two jobs this summer was probably as good as it could have possibly been. College Football 25 came swooping in to save me when I most needed it, and it's been everything I need to keep my sanity together. Here's a great article from Slate about that experience that I found a very fun read. With college football season coming up next week, I plan to keep a very close eye on everything going on and update things here as a place to vomit all of my thoughts too elaborate for any of my in-person contacts to bear. Right now, the only decent of topic of conversation is the NFL preseason, which has already delivered.
The Minnesota Vikings have received yet another setback, with first-round pick J.J. McCarthy now out for the season after a knee injury in his first pre-season game. I'm not a Vikings fan, and I don't know any Vikings fans, but when the universe isn't allowing them to even have the prospect of a young QB to maybe start some games later in the year, we really have to check for any long-standing curses that need to be removed. After what happened with Kirk Cousins over the last 12 months, I think the NFL should be giving out consolation 1st-rounders as reparations. I guess, if McCarthy himself can seemingly accept his fate, the people of Minnesota will have to do the same.
klungus.xyz/blog/6-15-24
The internet is for posting, so I'm going to post about some posts - specifically, my favorites.
For the first couple, we're going to tackle the sports posting world. Our first nominee for best posting comes from one Jon Rothstein, a college basketball reporter. The tweet is linked here.
This one strikes me with its utter sincerity - he is not someone trying to be funny here; what he's trying to do, I'm not sure, but being funny isn't one of them. Rothstein is a reporter for CBS who pretty much exclusively covers college basketball. And by exclusively, I do mean EXCLUSIVELY. As I write this, Game 4 of the NBA Finals just wrapped up - looking at Rothstein's Twitter, he has tweeted about college basketball 9(!) times without acknowledging the better-paid adults playing the same sport in Dallas earlier tonight even once. Putting the present aside and going back to the above post, the sheer level of drama is almost hard to believe. The line "I hope they come back" seems like it can't be real. The overall scenario is alike to the Disney Channel fantasy of the 'business dad' who needs to hang out with the kids more, but elevated to the extreme. Despite this tweet going out in March, it's key to remember that this post wasn't even during March Madness - college basketball's busiest season. He is putting this much focus and investment in, not to the final rounds of the massive tournament, but to the Big East conference championship semi-finals. I hope the kids are still around, but one has to respect a level of dedication to this degree.
Now, instead of a specific post, I want to speak on someone's entire body of work: that of Dan Hentschel. You've likely seen something of his work if you've been online enough: he has a scatter-shot methodology, playing a wide variety of characters in both photos and videos designed to be as imflammatory as possible to anyone unaware of his antics.
The amount of effort it likely takes put on as many bits as possible and keep up with this breakneck pace is more than it looks. Some of these videos are 15-30 minutes long of just staying in character and riffing on an idea to fit in with the videos around it. He's also been able to stay extremely consistent with keeping up on many platforms - on Twitter, he regularly posts photos of himself with heavy photoshop to make himself look completely different for entirely separate jokes. I appreicate the amount of effort it takes to work on something this ridiculous, and I hope he's found a way to monetize it so he can be doing this full time.
Lastly, something short and sweet: this isn't exactly funny, but I just needed to make sure I made everyone I could see this image, posted by one under the handle @zambonijonez.
Yes: apparently, in the afternoon, somewhere in the South, a man in a cowboy hat decided to set up an easel in a Waffle House parking lot and paint the building. I have very little to say about it. Just... look at it. It's beautiful.
klungus.xyz/blog/5-5-24
What's up with hockey in Utah?
A few months ago, it seemed like the idea of Utah getting an NHL team was an optimistic idea that might come around in 3-5 years - Ryan Smith posted a rendering of a new arena and district on Twitter, a new bill passed that will let Salt Lake raise the sales tax to pay for a new arena (that appears to have been ratified in mid-March), but at that point it seemed like the state was pushing for an expansion team. When April came, though, the concept quickly changed, with the Arizona Coyotes franchise selling all its operations to the Jazz owners. With that also seemed to come a change in scope - instead of a massive downtown overhaul, it seems Salt Lake will only be getting a remodel of the Delta Center with some nebulous proposal to revitalize the surrounding area.
That word - nebulous - seems to apply to so much of the reporting and news surrounding the recent developments. Whether or not Salt Lake even enacts the approved tax raise is still up for debate. All stories that have come out display a fairly significant pushback to the concept of a new arena, seemingly in line with overall trends in how cities deal with their sports teams. Chicago and Kansas City seem to be calling the bluff of their current teams, and Las Vegas has been pushing back on the A's attempt to move in. It seems the balance of power has shifted from team owners to the cities in the last year or so, and it seems like Ryan Smith is taking that in mind by scaling back the proposed project. What certainly didn't hurt his public relations is the event he threw to welcome the team - free hot dogs, free drinks, free cookies, lots of chances to holler and cheer about a team that we haven't yet seen play. It seems that with the total disaster of the previous Coyotes ownership and the overall tone shift in discussions of city's sports teams, new ownership is treading lightly.
I think it's odd how quickly the overall conversation has dried up - with the sale of the team now final, it seems like people have accepted the team as an inevitability - but there's a large difference between a team moving into a remodeled Delta Center and a massive construction project at the point of the mountain. I hope people can realize that there's many decisions left to be made about what happens going forward, and that they know the cities have much more leverage than they might think.
klungus.xyz/blog/4-5-24
Been a minute! Forgot about this a little after the album release and the start of college, and it's been gnawing at me enough to just drop a little filler post. I'm still proud of this site, but I should be updating it more often. Hopefully I can get to doing it once per month again. Hilariously, just the other day, the new pair of headphones I mentioned getting in the last post just broke last week, so I managed to keep them alive for a lot longer. In any case, cheers to more posts!
Quick edit: also releasing some new music! It's going up on the Bandcamp and the music page here under the name Northgate, so give it a listen if you see this!
klungus.xyz/blog/8-1-23
THE ALBUM IS DONE! I ended up finding a distributor that seems to work for everything I'm looking to do, and Event Horizon should be streaming on pretty much all platforms on August 21st! I'm very excited to get this project out of my head and into places where people can actually hear it. In other news, my headphones have broken again, but in a kind of convenient way - the warranty on this model is a whole year, and I have yet to have a pair last for more than 5 months, so every time they break I get a new pair for free. Hypothetically, if this continues, I should get free headphones for the rest of my life (or JBL can simply make headphones that are more durable).
klungus.xyz/blog/7-18-23
Excitement is very present this week - college getting closer and a little more "real" each day. In less complicated news, I'm rapidly approaching completion of the album I'm gearing up to put out. Looking for the right distributor has been by far the hardest part, but I think I'm beginning to approach an answer (and a release). The music is at least 99% finished (probably more), so the rest of the material has to be figured out - including a name for the project as a whole. It's strange how hard this part of it is, but I guess it has to get done eventually.
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One of my favorite things to find lately was this video of a funk/fusion drummer listening to "Enter Sandman" for the first time and completely nailing the whole song the next time through. Learning an entire song this quickly is almost incomprehensible to me, especially without any written notes or anything, but this guy makes it look so easily. Very entertaining to hear the reaction of everyone in the room at the end.
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I've also become a bit obsessed with that time Weird Al made a DEVO pastiche that absolutely stacks up to their best work. One of the members of DEVO would later say on the song, "I was in shock. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard. He sort of re-sculpted that song into something else and... I hate him for it, basically." Absolutely deserved.
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In terms of new music, I've found two really different kinds of covers - one a hardcore cover of some "Iraq Lobster" bit from Family Guy by someone on Youtube called FoxWithGuns and the other a glittery cover of "Shake It" by Metro Station by an artist called Bad Heather.
klungus.xyz/blog/6-21-23
I've only got so long of free time today (in a good way), so this one will probably be brief. I've still been super happy creativity-wise these last few weeks, with one or two more songs pretty much wrapped up since the last blog post. I've also got yet another project that I've hopped on that seems to be mostly under wraps as of now, so I'll keep quiet here about it.
Recently, I changed my name on Bandcamp from KLNGS to Telstarred. This was partially because KLNGS is a bit hard to remember, doesn't carry very much meaning, and is horrible to search up given that search engines think you were trying to spell "Kings". So, I changed it to Telstarred. Why that?
Well, I quite like the various references it has. Telstar was a satellite from the early 60's as well as an instrumental surf song by the Tornadoes that I have good memories of. Given that my sound is quite inspired by the 80s, it may seem odd to pull in a much older reference, but I quite like connecting these two eras in this way.
One thing that synthwave and other 80s nostalgia can do is gloss over many of the complicated parts of the era it looks back on, which is a lot easier to do for the 80s than the decades that came before. I think by bringing this older reference in, it comments on the ever-present nature of history - after all, the original satellite is defunct, but it still orbits the earth to this day.
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I've fallen in love with the song "We Don't Deserve Love" by Arcade Fire recently. I recommend the whole album, but if you have to listen to one song from it, choose this.
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Next thing I found on the internet was something called schizoweb by Feverdream Painting. This album got thrown to me by the YouTube reccomendation algorithm, and giving it a listen was certainly interesting. It's a lot more intense than what I like to make, but there's no reason not to give different things a listen.
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Lastly, I found this website called Radio Garden, which lets you listen in on radio stations from all around the world. It's great for my focus to find some foreign house station and just listen along.
klungus.xyz/blog/6-6-23
The last few weeks have been extremely creative! I've been experimenting with perfecting the sound of a lot of genres I mess around with - instead of making synthwave-esque things, for example, I've looked into how to properly recreate the 80's sound and made some pretty cool tracks with that idea. Also, I've been playing around with using my actual voice, which has been surprisingly easier to integrate into my music than I figured it would be. Since I've got so much music put together that I haven't posted, I figured it's about high time I wait just a little longer and put these together into an actual album (tentative name is DIEGESIS, but that's still up in the air). Right now, lyrics are sparse, but I've generally enjoyed playing around with the concept of human relationships being existential in nature, like how you see in Kiss Me (Kill Me) by JerryTerry or more earnestly in This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal-El Mohtar and Max Gladstone. A good mixture between eldritch horror and standard pop romance seems to keep things grounded enough to not sound out of place while still keeping those fun themes.
I figure now is the part of the blog post where I show off some things I found on the internet.
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First, an awesome tutorial on the 80s sound by Eliana D'Angelo - the tips on layering the drums helped out a ton with one of the tracks I made recently. The video goes into choosing samples, tips on getting groove, and some music psychology.
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This one is similar, but with a lot more specific of a use case; a tutorial on getting an 80s synth bass sound. Even those this tutorial uses Serum, I was able to port it all into my beloved free wavetable synth, Vital. This sound will be getting a lot of use from me in the future.
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In a more general music sense, Adam Neely's video on the subculture of video game music in jazz was a very fun watch, and was just generally quite inspiring in that way that just makes you want to make music.
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This may not be the most original topic for the last couple months or so, but I had a ton of fun playing myhouse.wad. As someone who has never had much interest in DOOM or DOOM modding, it was a ton of fun to see all the tricks happening (and the fact that I'd already read House of Leaves made it a blast to see all the different references).
Hope you enjoy all of this! Until next time!
klungus.xyz/blog/5-20-23
The last little while has been back and forth; emotional and emotionless, ecstatic and exhausted, deep feelings and small ones alike swimming out of each other. Feelings are infinite, but antonyms are not, so I'll diverge.
I guess I've been thinking about why I bought this domain and created this website in the first place - was it to learn skills and put some things I'd been taught to practice? Partially, yes.
Was it just because I was bored, and this website is that kind of project that always seems to take up exactly as much time as you need it to? Also yes, but only partially.
My best guess is that I was motivated by a prelapsarian idea of the internet; by the time I could perceive The Internet as a space in and of itself, the blog was already on its way out, and by the time I could access it consistently, it was about as prevalent as it is today.
Once I was able to put myself on the internet, it could only be through a Platform, the process of self-expression simplified, flattened, and gameified all at once.
The change was obvious; making this website actually took a fairly surprising amount of research and effort, and making an account on another website is as painless as it can be.
Beyond just the aesthetics of geocities websites and bare-bones CSS, I suppose I just wanted a piece of that self-expression that existed in the past, when people could represent themselves with websites that were crude, possibly simple, but importantly theirs.
So, insofar as I carry on that tradition, excuse the clunky CSS and clunkier ramblings you may see here. I'm just trying to live in the past, one blog post at a time.
klungus.xyz/blog/4-4-23
It looks like the idea of polishing up the website went well! Learning html and css has always been very dry to me, but I found some good-looking websites to take as examples.
Namely, this website that I used as an example to figure out these cool-looking boxes has been extremely helpful.
Now that I've fixed the music tab, the next item on the agenda is probably to figure out how to get another font onto here, but I'll probably save that for another day.
But, for now, things have been going well otherwise. I have plenty of creative projects to keep myself occupied (including this website), so I haven't allowed myself to get very bored.
klungus.xyz/blog/2-25-23
Well, not too much has really happened since the last time I saw this
I have a lot more song ideas than I did before and I got some new audio equipment to make them happen, so hopefully that starts resulting in some actual finished products
Going to be trying to make this website look... just a bit more polished, hopefully. Working without any experience and just referencing off of sites I find that look cool, so hopefully that goes okay
klungus.xyz/blog/12-17-22
Work was definitely something - finished everything I had to do by 12:30 and barely anything new came in before I was out at 5
Finally hit 1000 ELO and terrified to ever play again for fear of it going under again
Probably going to see the new Avatar film (and hopefully The Whale) soon
Media I've been enjoying:
klungus.xyz/blog/12-9-22
Slept in well this morning - still haven't made my bed as of 10:51pm
Looking to do a little more with this website, possibly turn it into a blog sort of deal like it was 2005 or smthn
Had a very important (I think) interview for college, so fairly excited with that, though not sure if I should be looking into scholarships at this point
Big into chess since I last updated this site, been winning a lot of games recently, almost to 1000 ELO on chess.com, which I'm quite proud of
Completely taken me out of video games in general though, it's a little bit all-consuming but generally worth it
So, I think that's it... stay tuned, if you're out there, I guess
Media I've been enjoying:
- Glass Houses - Billy Joel
- Knives Out Soundtrack - Nathan Johnson
- Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery dir. Rian Johnson
