Chiptune Music Blogging
2012-2021
From 2012 to 2018, I wrote music articles under the handle “The ChipWIN-tern” for the website Chiptunes = WIN. This site was a mostly tongue-in-cheek fan site for a genre of music known as “chiptunes” - which is a term that depending on how granular you want to define it includes music created on vintage computer and videogame hardware, or music that emulates those styles and sounds. While much of my work for the site started off as describing the songs that had been submitted to our yearly music compilations, it quickly grew into providing live event coverage of concerts, interviewing musicians, and eventually becoming a lead editor for the site for other peoples’ submissions. While much of the music has been preserved on Archive.org, the blog posts very much have not been. While I have the plaintext for most of my work, perhaps it is best to let some ships rest beneath the waves.
In 2021, I published an updated version of a post I had originally made for the ChipWIN blog on how to manage your own brand in an age where everyone was having difficulty managing parasocial relationships and exactly how much to leverage that to grow your own personal brand. You can find that article here, for now.
geekbeatradio - Online Radio Host
Various times between 2011 and 2020
Rob Carballo began the internet radio station geekbeatradio as a part of Boston, MA’s own indie radio project, UNRegular Radio. This is when I first met him, and as part of a college course he helped me arrange to interview a number of musicians I needed to speak to for a music business class. We became fast friends, and over the years I would pop in or submit pre-recorded content of me interviewing everyone from musicians to game developers to voice actors. When geekbeatradio transitioned to more of a podcast format, his regular cohost Ethan Desautels would reach out to me to continue interviewing videogame and tabletop roleplaying game creatives we were both passionate about. Sadly, the computer containing the brains of geekbeatradio went offline in 2020, and it has not yet been resurrected.
Chiptune Monthly
2024
In late 2023, a large number of posts began to circle around the dying husk of Twitter about the death of chiptune, and how it felt like the only artists people ever heard about anymore were people with established fanbases. People felt there was no way to break into the scene anymore, if there even WAS a scene anymore - with the onset of COVID-19, most local scenes shriveled up and died, and with the fracturing of the microblogging sphere, it seemed as though that would be the end of it. I reached out to my former geekbeatradio co-host Ethan, as I knew he was as frustrated as I was about this vibe - because we knew it was untrue! We’ve recruited some friends, and since February 2024 I’ve been the project manager of Chiptune Monthly, a completely free newsletter where people send us their project releases and upcoming show dates and we package all that up into a newsletter and send it off to as many places as we can get it. The newsletter is hosted over on Patreon for ease of use, but you can check out all of our social media links here.