AI is taking over! It's all over YouTube, Spotify, and probably Apple Music too. Heck, a few beloved musicians I follow have been caught using AI in their own music recently. So I would like to share with you some AI-free mixes that I listen to regularly during work/study. I will continue to curate more mixes for you, but please do me a favor by following and supporting the individual music artists who wrote this music!

As a starving artist myself, I can understand the struggle of writing music and having long periods of writer's block, but AI isn't the answer creatively. I know it's been said a million times, but in many ways, struggling with the creative process is part of the art itself. We love the art because we know how hard it is to create, but with AI, you give it a prompt and boom—you have your product. No effort, no struggle, no pain, just possible gain. It's a seductive trap, but today people despise AI art and music.

My wife always reminds me to stop and think about why I'm creating my art because sometimes the writer's block is so stressful I start to feel guilty that I haven't created something in a while. Does that guilt come from me and my desire to make art, or does it come from the pressure of "releasing something for my fans"? If you're a musician, artist, or content creator, obviously we need the fans, but the most important factor is that you make art for you and no one else.

If you're an artist, please stay encouraged and enjoy the process!

!NSFW!

My dad bought me my first console—it was a GameCube and I got the Mario Kart bundle. I was so excited, so happy; that's where my love of video games started. I was aware of them, I saw them, but I didn't get too much into it until my dad got me one for my birthday. Man, I still remember the day. From there, he said, "Hey, if you get good grades in school, I'll buy you an Xbox." Enough said, I got that Xbox. My dad wasn't weird about games and stuff. You know, growing up, you played your regular Tony Hawk's, your racing games, and stuff. But when it came to like first-person shooters, he really didn't care, he didn't really mind. He never really told me anything about it—like even when we went to GameStop and he bought me my first Call of Duty, they're like, "Hey, just to let you know, this is rated M because of this and this and this," and he was like, "Okay, cool." Maybe it's the fact that he didn't understand English then, and I had to translate it to him in Spanish—maybe I didn't tell him the right things, I don't know—but he never once said, "Hey, I don't want you to be playing this," or anything like that. When I lost him this year in July, it was a really tough time for me. During his final weeks, he got really sick, and it was tough, and the only thing that kind of gave me a break, even just for a game or two, was gaming with my friends. I appreciate them so much; they've meant a lot to me. They were there at my really low points, and in those moments where I felt stressed, where I felt sad, heartbroken—video games, they might seem simple, they might seem flashy from the outside, but it goes deeper than that. It's an escape, and for me, it was therapy, for me it was comfort, it was a safe place, it was a place where things like life just kind of take a backseat just for a moment. So I want to say to my friends, thank you, I appreciate you so much. Those gaming sessions that we had during those weeks meant the world to me, and I will always remember those.

The only thing I can say is this is probably going to go down as one of the greatest isekai animes in recent years. The amount of story, the animation, the characters, the voice acting, the powers—everything is really amazing and really good in this anime. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. If you're caught up, man, you know it's about to hit the fan with the way this show has left us off in this recent season. Oh my goodness, I just can't fathom it right now. There are three seasons in total, and you can see these on Crunchyroll. I really don't want to give out too much, but a pretty quick synopsis of this show is this: a guy who was—I don't want to be mean—but a loser a nobody who lost his family dies alone . He ends up reincarnating into a world where there's magic and, you know, the same old same old. He keeps his memory from his past life, so he turns into a bit of an OP character. But the twists and turns, the highs, the lows, the climax—everything in all of this show is top-tier. Once again, it's probably going to go down as one of the best isekais in recent years—probably one of the best animes, not going to lie. Even better than AOT, but don't get me started on that.

Around 2015, some friends and I started a chiptune pop-punk band called Rocketchip. We would play a ton of local shows, but the best part about it was being able to hang with our best friends, have fun, and make awesome music. As we got older, we all got our own careers, so being in a band wasn't the main focus anymore. We all went our separate ways musically, but remain good friends to this day. I continued on with Rocketchip as a personal project, writing new music and releasing older tracks that we all wrote together. I went on to do more pop-punk, but recently I've been doing more lo-fi and dance tracks. I'm really excited to be working on a new song with an amazing EDM artist named opal.wav. There's something about chiptune that scratches my ADHD brain just right. I've been in other bands and have written many different genres of music, but the chiptune sound palette is something I always come back to. I'm not sure if it's a familiarity thing or what, but I can't deny it's a passion of some kind. There's also an addicting challenge to writing chip music on a tracker like FamiTracker because of the tracker's limiting form factor. FamiTracker forces you to write an entire song with only four main “Pulse” channels, 1 sine wave channel, 1 saw channel, DPCM, and the iconic noise channel. Other trackers like MilkyTracker provide way more functionality and you can get some really awesome sound palettes from it, but it's more of a 16-bit chiptune tracker than FamiTracker's 8-bit sound fonts, which is what I tend to really like.

I've had my ups and downs like any artist, but I don't think I can ever stop writing for Rocketchip. The band will always have a special place in my heart. As I've refined my skills as a writer, artist/designer, producer, and musician, I can't help but feel like I want to do more musically. It's tough being a one-man band, and for the longest time I didn't have anyone to bounce ideas off of. I moved to St. Louis, leaving a lot of friends back home, almost feeling like I'm on an island out here by myself. Luckily, thanks to social media, I'm starting to meet more people with the same passion for music production as me, which has led me to really branch out and grow as an artist. I've always been a jack of all trades in my bands, being the graphic designer, web designer, video editor, songwriter, and band manager. It sounds overwhelming, but there's something fun about building projects and seeing them come to life. I feel like Rocketchip and designing for Dead Pixel Society will give me an outlet for this artistic energy.

Thanks for listening to me ramble on about my little music project! You can check out my merch store at rocketchipband.com and buy my music directly on Bandcamp. With Bandcamp, a majority of the sales actually goes to me, not to major corporations, which is nice. But with the merch, I had to outsource, so I get less of a cut. I'm poor, so merch is real tough to finance 😅

I have been an avid follower of the folding phone craze since day one. I almost purchased the Samsung Galaxy Fold 1 but opted to wait until the Fold 2, and that phone was hands down my favorite phone I've ever owned. I was one of the lucky few people who had zero issues with the screen, the hinge, or any massive battery issues, and that phone lasted me until 2024 when the battery finally died. I ended up swapping to my old iPhone 12 Pro and am surprisingly still using that phone today with no issues.

Recently, Apple announced its own foldable phone called the iPhone Duo, and I have been losing my shit in excitement. I'm not excited for the folding function because that's been around for a while now; what I'm excited to see is Apple's take on a foldable device. I have always loved Apple's design and UI logic, merging simplicity and aesthetics with common-sense UI design. We are finally starting to see reviews pour in from YouTubers and tech enthusiasts everywhere, and so far the results have been amazing to me. I love that they decided to go with a matte finish interior screen along with a beautiful opening and closing animation for the left side of the screen, really tying in the liquid glass vibe that they have been building over the last year. I've attached my favorite review so far. Aside from the steep price point… I think Imma get it 🤫