Minor Updates & Some Fresh Blabbing.

Greets all.

I finally got around to doing something to my website and I put in some time today making changes that aren’t even that big of a deal. Other than just a couple under the hood tweaks, I have changed my width margin from 1280 to a strict 1024, this should allow my previously king-sized webpages to fit a little better into people’s monitors. I still don’t know a damn thing about mobile web page creation, and since I make no profit of any sort, I’m not paying someone to do it for me, so there just won’t be a mobile version of my site. Why would ‘I’ need one anyway haha.

Finally, my music. Between my new job, family issues, and a serious degree of laziness and procrastination, I have slacked seriously as of late. I have completed 5 of 10 LSDJ tunes with my Gameboy that have been on my site for a good minute now, and I recently completed the first track of a 2nd project, a new and better bass CD. That really hit me out of the blue too. I had come up with this basic tune in my head out of nowhere and something compelled me to stop what the hell I was doing, sit down and make that tune happen. I wish I had such driving bouts of random inspiration a hell of alot more often.

That’s pretty much it. I’m working, paying bills, and having the occasional fight with depression. Being single for the last six years and some and not by conscious choice, man that will really damage your mind. Personality is something I lack unfortunately. That’s why even though i’m not too talented of a musician, I am nonetheless the perfect chiptuner. A totally introverted nerd. Ya gotta love it.

Random chatter: did anyone else know about an IT company out there called “BitPusher LLC?” I think that’s both unnerving and awesome. There’s freaking two BitPusher’s out there, yikes. In the last, what is almost six years, I have never heard of them. Whereas i’m BitPusher2600, I tend to use BitPusher as shorthand. I now know that BitPusher LLC does the same thing, they refer to themselves as BitPusher for short. I’m glad me and them are in two totally different worlds or this discovery would’ve been devastating. I’ve had the BitPusher alias for so many years now (almost six actually) I couldn’t imagine just up and making music with a totally different name, and looking over their website made me feel funny. Hell, ever since I decided to drop the ‘2600’ from my name on the album cover for G33kMuz1k when I had put that out, I had pondered dropping it entirely since I have no future plans to do another Atari 2600 album specifically nor is the Atari my primary focus anymore. I mean i’m (arguably) working on both another bass CD and my Gameboy/LSDJ album, which obviously doesn’t involve the Atari, so I figured it would make sense to just stick with BitPusher. Now i’m not so sure i’m going to do that. That is to say I will probably not use the ‘2600’ on my future album covers, but barring that, I don’t know what i’m going to do yet. Working on updating my website just today however had me seriously thinking of changing my banners and my web address. Pondering this notion is how I discovered that this company exists. I was investigating what might be involved in changing my domain name over to bitpusher.com until I found out it was already taken. If the idea of doing a standard web search for myself had ever occurred to me I might’ve known this sooner. It’s just weird to me that this exists. Nonetheless, it is somehow exciting at the same time. I wonder who has been pushing their respective bits longer haha. It would be my luck that these guys could somehow sue me with us having similar names, because they’re a company with LLC in their name and i’m just me, a nobody electronic musician. I wonder how long they’ve been in business, and in that time, I wonder if they’ve ever heard of me and got a laugh out of it? I’m intrigued and fascinated by all this nonetheless, I want to know all about them. Seeing my alias in such a different manner feels something like hearing someone very well known talk about a specific place you love as well, or talk about a hobby you yourself are passionate about. I guess it’s like sharing some sort of odd connection with something or someone else much bigger than you are.

But wait, there’s more! Not only did I find a big company with my name, there’s also http://www.bitpusher.in which seems to be some minimalist website for speaker enclosure specs, there’s http://www.bitpusher.tk which is some fellow’s blog, there’s http://www.carbon.bitpusher.co.uk which is some web consulting agency in (you guessed it) the UK, there’s a github repository named bitpusher at http://www.github.com/bitpusher, and who knows what else is out there. I had no idea my alias was ‘that’ kind of common. If any of these companies or people had that name before 2009 when the first iteration of my website went up and I had released Pixelize The System online, (or maybe I could start from 2010 when I turned that EP into a real CD via Amazon), then they have more official claim to the name than I do. That shit just tickles my brain, the poor thing. Why is this saddening to me. Probably a stupid topic to write about anyway, but it is presently on my mind. It has been that side of me that is separate from my adult working life, the nobody musician. Just strictly inside my own delusional world I love being BitPusher, i’m proud of the music I’ve made simply because I made it, similar to the notion of a small child scribbling something with a crayon and being proud of it when they give it to you. Discovering this LLC and these other things with the name BitPusher attached has made that side of me feel was just shaken, or that I might’ve lost something, but no, I haven’t and it won’t. I want to look at it as yeah, there are BitPusher’s out there, but then there’s ‘BitPusher’ the chiptuner and bass boomer, and he’s both badass and an awesome fellow. You might not believe me just now, but nope, no drugs are involved are in my blabber.

Anyway, before I go, I want to say thank you so much to the folks who have ever emailed me and downloaded my stuff. It’s definitely not often, but every great once in a while I get an email from someone who actually likes my tunes and asks questions which makes my day. Real life introvert in the extreme, online wanna-be attention whore. Figure that one out. I also find it pretty awesome when I check in on my site stats and find a nice number of downloads in a month, so I know people are checking me out. What more could an indie musician actually ask for?

See ya.
–BitPusher (the music making one) 😛

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iMiss The Old Days Of Apple.

I am a fairly nostalgic fellow in the first place, but lately I’ve had Steve Jobs on the brain, and it’s funny to look back and remember my earliest youth and especially my teens and ponder what it was like being an Apple user vs how it is now.

Nowadays, it’s not an occasional “Mac Sucks” vs “Windows Sucks” debate and it’s over, now it’s typically just Android vs iPhone, there isn’t much depth beyond that. There is rarely debate over the companies cultures and how often do we see flame war fanatics delve into Apple’s other products and software unless the Apple person so happens to bring it up directly? Personally I never felt PC arguers could offer much beyond mentioning the ability or not to a play a certain game or two, but this was all a much different era and different line of thinking entirely.

That all aside, being an Apple user nowadays simply gives you stereotypes, as in you’re either tech incompetent, rich, or excessively uppity. I have never been any of the above, but again, this is the stereotypical perception of an Apple user now. I simply miss the old days, that aspect of my youth for me as the nerd that I happen to be was so important and I will never forget that stuff.

I’m probably a fairly standard tune for the young-middle age crowd; I’m 33 years old at present and have had Apple in my life pretty much my whole life. I got a Mac SE for my one and only Christmas present when I was five (this puts me just a few months away from turning six.) I only know that model from research because I do remember the lines cut into the design of the case and that particular Mac was the only one with those lines. Anyway, that became an obsession for someone so young, between that and the Nintendo. I do not remember exactly if I was ten or eleven but somewhere in there I had finally gotten a new computer, and I still can’t figure out exactly what model of Mac it was. You’d think I would too because I lived and breathed that thing, but there were so many Macs designed similar to that one. It was flat and the monitor sat on top of it, like traditional desktop style. It had a floppy drive and holy crap a CD-Rom. Mac Tracker has helped me nail down a few but I’m still not sure.

Anyway, there was that. I spent so much time on that thing that my mother used to actually have to force me to go outside to play. If left alone, I would likely be on that computer. I had me some internet, albeit slow it was fun. By the time I had hit my teenage years, and I mean thirteen on the nose, I knew a good bit about Apple, some of the struggles, and I certainly was a bit of a Steve Jobs worshipper. The names Bill Gates and Microsoft were cuss words to me and it was honestly a blast. The idea of Apple ever going bankrupt was just not going to happen though that rarely came up in my world. At any rate, it was a good time to be a loud and proud Mac kid, it just felt good. I remember having those desktop cases of Mac formatted floppies, and I was one of very few that had the same stuff the schools did so I could do a lot of homework and projects for school on my own computer, then bring the stuff in and resume work or show if need be.

If you at any point and someone else discovered you were Macintosh lovers, no matter who, you almost instantly had a friend. It was fun to swap discs, which I suppose was sometimes technically stealing software, but what of it? It was all fun and good times. I have vague memories of being in very small groups of us who loved the Mac and everyone else in the school had PCs in their homes. It was kind of fun to get made fun of if that makes sense. Being a Macintosh user and an Apple loyalist was a really truly self-defining thing, a point of pride and expression. How in the hell, you ask, would a computer or an operating system be so defining? How could it matter that much? Maybe that was the magic of Apple, the people in that camp were an outsider bunch and full of craziness. Who would hug their Mac? I did, I admit it. Who else would get so deeply emotional about a computer and feel so liberated every time they fired one up? Mac users. I certainly did and am not embarrassed to admit it. It might be hard to picture such a young kid so in love with a machine or a cause like Apple fandom, but baby it was true and it was me.

Finally, I have to mention high school. The latter three-fourths or so of my high school career was powered by the blue iMac I had gotten for Christmas, and talk about an unhealthy, obsessive relationship. It was pure joy. Fortunately for me, I still have the same iMac that was sitting in my room throughout high school sitting in my bedroom right now. I wish I could see the Macs from my earlier youth again, but this one, I somehow never parted ways with although I haven’t fired it up much except to serve as a music player to sleep to on occasion. That and it’s funny to poke around and look at what little bit of school stuff is still on there though when I graduated I’d tossed away a lot of it. Still, the memories. I will probably still have that old iMac long after the screen dies and it is a big paper weight. I’m ‘that’ breed of nostalgic. For now anyway, I’m glad that puppy still works just fine.

So anyway, what is the point of this giant blab session? Well, it’s just a little whimper for how awesome that piece of my youth was, and a recollection of what Apple used to be. Being a Mac user now is a totally different world. If you even mention Apple in the modern day, the iPhone is the only thing that comes to most folk’s minds. The spirit of unity, the attitude, and feeling of the world on the outside are all toast. If I pull out my iPhone and see someone else with an iPhone, do you suppose that other person gives a shit? Nope, why would they care? I have an Apple product and so do they, so what? That is normal and how people work now, but the point is it didn’t used to be that way. It’s so difficult to articulate, to younger folks especially, how being an Apple man was something special and how much it mattered to one’s sense of self. The Macintosh was joy to those who “got it.” Now, Apple is pretty much just a posh brand name more so than a crusade.

These were such wonderful times in history folks. To have been a part of home computing from it’s earliest times and to have seen it evolve, the mystery and the excitement, it really was a different world entirely than the one now where the youth is coming up with this stuff and it’s as normal and fluent as having a fridge in the kitchen or a toilet in the bathroom. I apologize too folks, I’m not exactly a writer and I’m sure a proper wordsmith could articulate everything a lot better than I have been able too, but I just felt like conveying some emotions thru writing. I dearly miss the Apple that was. I miss the tech world before smartphones, when the center of certain nerd’s worlds was a beautiful little Apple logo dotted Macintosh. They were special times and I’m fairly convinced you have to be both old enough and actually been a part of it all to understand, otherwise it can sound nothing but absurd and you cannot fully get it. Here’s to fond memories, and a special dedication to Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9, the systems of the last true Macintoshes.
–BitPusher

PS:
Well, now I feel slightly foolish. I just noticed poking around in my WordPress here that I just did a writeup on Apple nostalgia and Mac OS 9 just here in June. I really suck at the blogging game; repeating stuff even if by accident is probably not the best way to do things. Oh well.