new music news! (no, seriously)

so, you know how this usually goes: i get on the blog once every four or five months and blather on endlessly about all manner of fancy-ass music shit that i have planned.  sometimes it's a new album, sometimes, it's being able to afford lots of new equipment, sometimes it's new gigs, sometimes it's a new website.  often, it's a combination of these with an extra helping of a vague promise of someday selling albums on iTunes and playing a sold-out Cedar Point concert while riding a rollercoaster.

then, reality sets in and i realize i'm working upwards of 70-80 hours a week (at least during fall and winter, more like 30-40 in the summer) and making 9,000 dollars a year, and nothing ever happens.  which is a bummer, because i love making music and i'd love even more to be able to approach it more seriously than i am now.  but, to do so would most likely be to fail out of grad school, or at least do less than my best, which would be sort of silly at this point...i mean, i've gone to school for 24 of my 29 years on earth.  i might as well finish the last two years with a bang.

anyway, i'm getting off-topic.  i really liked my idea of starting a real website last year, and even better i liked my idea of consolidating my photos, essays, poems, songs, and other such fun stuff into one site.  so i spent many of my off-hours for a few weeks tooling around with microsoft web expressions, trying to come up with something that represented all those different forms of media effectively.  i came up with a few interesting ideas, visually and structurally, but in the end it really just came down to the fact that Facebook is a better media hosting site than what i could build myself.  it's easier to upload things to, and it hosts videos and photos directly...much more of both than i would be willing to pay to host for my own site.  i can link it to my blog so that every time i post a piece of writing on here, it shows up there, too, and i already have a facebook page for lazy blazers, which gets more visits and listens than my reverbnation page, or my old home page ever did.  plus, all of those hosting features are wrapped up with the social networking aspect: any time i change any of the site's content, it immediately informs the 125 people i'm friends with on Facebook.  i don't think ceding defeat to Facebook is all that bad; my lazy blazers page is pretty awesome, and besides, a lot of the time i would have spent designing and maintaining a website over the last few months has instead been dedicated to working on collaboration with lindsey, practicing old songs to get them back up to snuff, and playing monday nights at rico's, which is what's more important in the larger picture of music-making anyway.

so yeah...i suck and am lazy and what's the news here again?

thing 1: i'm ditching reverbnation.  it's a great site, but it's for people who actually want to super-publicize and make money off of their band.  i'd like to do those things, but to have to navigate that intense-as-all-hell menu system with band ratings and street team notifications and all that crazy mumbo-jumbo is not what i ever wanted in a site that i was hosting my music on.  it's just intense and crazy.  so i switched everything last night over to soundcloud.com.  it pretty much just posts your tracks and nothing else, and allows you to post a widget into Facebook and that's it.  if people want to come to my page and listen to my music, huzzah.  no crazy cross-linkages or multiple clicks or any such bullshit.  in case you're interested, the soundcloud page is here.  you can access it directly through the lazy blazers page on Facebook (become a fan if you're not already...it won't give you cancer, i promise) or just through my normal Facebook profile as well.  i also took down all the links to my youtube videos and am in the process of uploading any and all music-related videos directly to Facebook.  basically i figure if i'm ditching plans for a personal music website (at least for now) in favor of Facebook, i might as well host everything there.

thing 2: lindsey's been doing excellent designs for the band recently.  in case you haven't seen them yet, they're here, here, and here so far.  i really want to cover all my guitars and guitar cases with stickers made from these designs, as well as the possible bumper sticker-size design i'm trying to talk lindsey into drawing.

thing 3: speaking of lindsey, she wants to make an album in the next few months, and i'll be recording, mixing, mastering, and all that jazz.  i might even be playing some guitars and maybe a banjo or mandolin and singing some harmony.  i might even have my cake, and also eat it.  anyway, her songs are great and i'm really excited to have a copy of them to listen to WHENEVER THE FUCK I FEEL LIKE IT.  besides, this fills the gap nicely when you're a guy who wants to write and play and sing new songs, but you suck too much to actually write your own.

thing 4 (the ultimate thing): actually, i have written a song.  just yesterday, in fact.  it's a little different than the usual guitar-and-singing thing, in that it's a chiptune.  that may not be an exactly fair characterization, because i'm not using an actual amiga or commodore or NES to get the sounds...but i am using a bunch of soundfonts and VSTs to get sounds very freaking similar to the original NES sounds (i'm working, at least for now, with NES exclusively, since i grew up on its funky 5-channel music).  so yeah.  i spent the last few nights reading and downloading software and screwing around with samples, having no idea how to use a DAW or a tracker or anything (seriously, if you clicked on any of those wiki articles, i was reading them for the first time ever about 48 hours ago).  i ended up settling on downloading a windows port of linux software called LMMS, which seems to have a lot of the same features and functionality of high-end programs like FL Studio, but for the price of free dollars.  then i went here and downloaded tons of NES related sounds and junk.  and it turns out, it's really freaking fun composing this stuff.  what i REALLY need is a midi-compatible keyboard so i don't have to click each note in by hand with a mouse.  but otherwise, it's really great.  like a really need something else to halfheartedly screw around doing in my spare time, right?  i mean, final fantasy 10 isn't going to beat itself.  but.  i wrote an original NES song, and if you want to check it out, make with the trip to clicktown:
 Ascendancy (Chiptune) by lazyblazers  

that is one indolent sport coat!

so i was kicking around the idea of building a website for my professional, English-y stuff today (as it occurred to me that I probably wouldn't want to send potential future employers to lazyblazers.com to find my CV), and while checking the availability of benbunting.com, i decided to check the availability of lazyblazers.com as well, just to make sure that it would come up as unavailable.  it did, but i also got a list from google of similar domain names, in case i wanted to buy one.  here are some of the best they gave me:

slothfulblazers
lazysportcoat
indolentblazers

some intriguing music news coming shortly, but first: teaching awaits!

my smartphone's menus are hilariously intense.

it always makes me oddly sad when my mom calls when i'm in the middle of a meeting or class or something, because to reject the call, i have to hit this comically huge, bright red "REJECT" button right underneath this picture:

google chrome extensions are better than everything

so i started using chrome about six months ago, when my firefox became so bloated with (admittedly) awesome plugins that it took netscape-era amounts of time to load.  oddly enough, when i uninstalled all but like five plugins, firefox still insisted on sucking.  thus, enter chrome.  now i have a batmobile's worth of plugins for chrome, including some fiendishly awesome ones (shareaholic, rememberthemilk, gmail+, and chromedbird) and chrome's performance doesn't seem to be effected at all, even when i have like 10 tabs open (which is always).  seems that separate-process-for-each-tab was a great idea after all.

that said, i wouldn't recommend running a post-2006 FPS game with graphics maxed out while minimizing a 10-tab chrome window in the background.  shit goes down.

anyway, time to go eat thai food.  more lightning typing in the future!

speaking of the future: jetpacks?

introductions are in order

blog, meet ben.  ben, meet blog.  it's been awhile.  welcome back to the internet of opinions.

i had a lot of feelings this summer.  most of these feelings were had driving from pullman to canton to kent to nashville to canton to cambridge to sharon to kent to canton to pullman.  7000 more miles to my name.

i'm sort of implying through my tense use above that my summer is over.  not nearly; however, the part where i drive around in a car and do fucking awesome things is likely over.  and that's not necessarily a bad thing, because as usual, all the travelling was a great experience and gave me some always-necessary and valuable perspective on life that's just not possible to get when you're always in the same place, doing the same thing, even if that place is pullman (awesome!) and that thing is teaching and playing music at bars and eating thai food and having great friends (awesome!).

there have been so many great and noteworthy moments in the last month or two that to do my usual picture-posting-storytelling-thing would result in my absolutely leaving 95% of the coolness out.  so i won't.  in related news, as i've no doubt mentioned before, i now share almost all of my articles, photos, and videos and such via facebook.  i know it's not everyone's favorite platform, but the fact is that almost all my real-life friends are on there and i have the fuck-yeah-tastic shareaholic plugin for chrome which lets me share with everyone in one click.  so friend me if you haven't already, because facebook's going to be where the action is.  this blog is just going to be where the rambling, semi-coherent madness is.

and on that note, bye for five seconds!