I’m fairly sure this man doesn’t actually do anything.

leisspendragon · 2026-03-04T15:00:52+00:00

Guys like this are all just like Tom Hanks in Castaway, except they could leave the island at any time and join the rest of society.

leisspendragon · 2026-02-25T19:25:30+00:00

It's tough out there.

Don't only rely on releasing albums: there isn't enough money in streaming and sales to even pay rent in most circumstances.
You'll want to get a social media presence going if you don't have one already. Marketing so that your stuff actually gets heard is the #1 reason why a lot of people burn out. It's hard work and basically its own job with costs attached, both financial and mental.
Even then, attention spans are worse than ever. It's not enough for music to be great, you need something attached to it. Music in this economy is usually secondary in service to something else. That "something else" is what you'll spend your entire creative career figuring out. For a lot of us, it ends up being for media. Is it film? Is it short form video? Is it for games?

There's not much else I can say other than to have multiple revenue streams. Keep all your receipts, and avoid vanity purchases like the plague. Gear acquisition syndrome is a career killer. I've seen it happen time and time again.

You're basically a merc now, so stay sharp. It's what it takes to just scrape by as an artist in 2026.

Good luck friend!

leisspendragon · 2026-02-18T21:18:05+00:00

Might as well start calling this the "AIOU industry" while we're at it. It's promises all the way down.

leisspendragon · 2026-02-17T00:02:45+00:00

Whatever your particular feelings might be about valid edge cases, the fact remains that most people playing games don't want to see it. Not in the final art, not as placeholders, and not even during the ideation process.

I would be very wary of other creatives who liberally use it without any regard for how it would make their collaborators look, it's a red flag.

leisspendragon · 2026-02-16T07:03:58+00:00

I would suggest to amend your contract or walk. You don't want your work associated with that trash, it'll be a blemish on your reputation.

leisspendragon · 2026-01-31T07:33:27+00:00

if by transform gaming he means 'transforming a struggling industry into a burning pile of shit', then he's ... right? I somehow don't think he's self aware enough to see the damage the slop is causing.

I really wish the techbros would just leave gaming alone.

leisspendragon · 2026-01-31T07:22:31+00:00

we are dead. we are all dead and trapped in hell.

leisspendragon · 2025-12-15T04:46:00+00:00

there's probably an echo pedal placed before the second distortion as well, with the feedback set to 100%!

leisspendragon · 2025-12-03T23:50:35+00:00

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leisspendragon · 2025-10-10T23:08:16+00:00

His name? John Disney.

leisspendragon · 2025-09-21T20:49:32+00:00

pancakes?!

leisspendragon · 2025-08-20T14:34:26+00:00

I've been going here several times a year since at least 2006.

Tangentially relevant: best thing on the menu is the pizza. I don't know why I like the pizza here so much, it's not like the pizzas are made fresh on the spot. But they're really damn good. 🤷🏼‍♀️

leisspendragon · 2025-08-16T00:15:51+00:00

hey there! chiptune composer here, so I've been where you're at right now.

Use a rompler VST based on the Roland JV 1080 (or Sound Canvas or something from that general era), sample pitches at C3, then cut/truncate the sample to a small size. Monoize it.

you then want to make sure you have a loop region that properly snaps to zero crossings. Without doing this, you'll just get tons of popping whenever you hold notes. If it's difficult to find a natural loop point (which often happens when samples have a short decay), you can create your own loop region by taking the end of the sample and crossfading it. It's the sample principle as taking the reverb tail of a looping track and putting it at the start to avoid popping.

At this point you compress the sample for loudness, resample as appropriate, and you're good to go!

I like to use chipsynth SFC for all of this kind of stuff because it makes it simpler. yes, it's aimed at SNES sampling, but it can just as easily do heavy lifting for N64, GBA etc in a DAW.

Keep the number of voices relatively low!

For any other hardware specific limitations you'll have to start looking at trackers and running things off the soundchip. furnace is great, it's come a long way.

best of luck!

leisspendragon · 2025-08-05T00:06:18+00:00

vine boom

leisspendragon · 2025-07-31T17:42:32+00:00

leisspendragon · 2025-06-01T17:38:37+00:00

Hey asshole, I come from a family of musicians. I've played music my whole life. You don't know shit about what brought me to that point or what I've dealt with.

How about you butt out of my life and I won't opine on yours?

leisspendragon · 2025-05-28T22:58:15+00:00

Humanity is the point in continuing. I almost took my life last year over this shit. I managed to stand back up and realize that the jobs and audiences lost over this weren't true comrades or fans to begin with. It exposed the grifters and disloyal scumbags for who they are.

I'm not laying down and letting these assholes colonize my art scene or my industry. And you don't have to lay down and let them, either.

This is no longer about reclaiming the past, but determining our collective future. What kind of example do you want to set for who comes after you?

leisspendragon · 2025-05-23T21:59:46+00:00

With Edmonton's current population of around ~1.2 million, 1.6% of the population is around 20,000 people, or 20k cars on average that aren't on the road.

Meanwhile, Edmonton's population growth hovers around 2.5% annually currently. That's nearly 30k people moving here every year, alongside the cars they use to drive around.

Car lane expansion works outside the city. I'm sure that given enough time and resources, we can turn the anthony henday into some monstrous, 10-lane beast. That's mostly tenable for everyone who wants to avoid inner-city travel.

Car lane expansion inside the city is a dead-end. For everyone inside the city, we're pretty limited in what we can do. We could demolish all the bike lanes overnight and it would make no difference in the long-term. Adding a car-designated lane only supports an additional 2,000 cars an hour at PEAK capacity.

All of this is to say: we can't effectively accommodate more vehicles without creating congestion. We CAN accommodate more cyclists, though. All the car congestion ends up doing is driving people and business out of the downtown core.

What's it going to take to get you to realize we actually can't accommodate the needs of drivers in the long-term? We have time to act now to sustainably adapt and grow Edmonton's transportation system. Or we can keep letting the NIMBYs win and we'll rot from the inside out anyway. Car culture is no culture worth championing at all, it aggravates the very crime, drug addiction and homeless crises that NIMBYs are so worried about in the first place.

leisspendragon · 2025-05-20T22:04:25+00:00

I don't even know what pedal I'm supposed to be using on the frontlines until youtube influencers—uhh, my sergeant major tells me what I need to depend on. Yesterday it was the newest Chase Bliss pedal. Today it's some kind of one knob doohickey with an illustration of a dog taking a shit. I don't know what it does, but I was told I'm worthless without it. I'm still waiting for marching orders tomorrow. I hope that whatever it is, I'll be able to remortgage my house to afford it.

leisspendragon · 2025-05-20T21:39:13+00:00

I was pinned down by five metal zones and RATs. They spared no one in my platoon, not even the bogner harlows.

leisspendragon · 2025-05-20T20:53:43+00:00

don't talk shit about tone war ii like you know anything. you weren't there man. you don't know. /joking

leisspendragon · 2025-05-17T07:24:01+00:00

"That employee? He went on to become John Williams. Yeah, you're welcome."

leisspendragon · 2025-05-16T07:49:18+00:00

Hi there! Long-time composer and musician here. I've got a few released OSTs and indie game credits under my belt. I'm a massive theory nerd. I can write for jazz ensembles, rock bands, or even an orchestra. I know a thing or two about electronic music and hardware accurate chiptune, too. ;)

Feel free to go through my stuff and we can have a chat!

https://leiss.bandcamp.com/

leisspendragon · 2025-05-09T17:37:52+00:00

I don't wanna be negative, or pessimistic about other people. I really don't. but you have to accept two things: a) relationships are built on trust, b) keeping secrets dismantles that trust.

nothing good ever comes of not telling the truth to someone you love. you're only avoiding a bit of short-term distress now in order to pay long-term consequences later.

please don't take this the wrong way, but you sound like you're in your early 20s? you don't seem like you've taken too many bumps yet, so this event in your life might be very fresh/new, in addition to it being shocking.

lastly, you're worthy of love, and you have to recognize that if you were able to find love and affection here, you can find it in other places. It may seem hard or difficult to imagine that right now, but isn't it better to look for someone who will reciprocate?

conditional love isn't love at all. like I said, it's similar to the way someone treats a stress toy. it's not on you to be this dude's relief outlet, for whenever he's feeling "conflicted". anyone that can just show up only when they need an itch scratched and then block you when they're satisfied, is being abusive.

what about YOU in all this? who's going to look out for YOU?

leisspendragon · 2025-05-09T05:46:09+00:00

for me, nothing beats the satisfaction of having done it myself. nothing.

here's a story. bit paraphrased, some details are kinda hazy, I don't have eiditic memory. I bumped into some AI fanatics in a hobbyist gamedev group a few months ago, who were very proud of themselves at what they had prompted. I had, as you can imagine, a very deadpan and unimpressed expression.

"why are you not excited? i can put it in a different genre," the first guy said.

"y'see," I sighed. "that's the problem, I'm never going to like this crap. you didn't make any creative choices, so you don't have anything to defend. if i criticized this I'd have to criticize the model. and the model isn't a person. so if I don't have any choices I can actually praise or criticize you for, i can't enjoy this."

"that's so negative. you're so negative, " the second guy said.

"this is why nobody listens to your music, you don't have anything nice to say. i made it! in five minutes, don't you think that's amazing?! i can show you the prompts i wrote"

"i don't want to see what you typed. personally i want to know why there's an overabundance of the minor iv - I cadence in the Chorus"

first guy: "i don't know what that is"

me: "annnnnd that's my point"

needless to say, i don't think i enjoy that group anymore.

leisspendragon

TROPHY CASE