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This week's schedule is going to be shortened a little bit. I'm out of town for the week so there won't be a livestream on Sunday. I attempted to record two weeks of videos in just one week and almost made it but I caught an upper respiratory infection over the weekend and never got to finish the last 3 theme videos for this week. So Wed-Fri will just be 1 video each but there's still an Album Review on Saturday. Next Monday won't have any videos but we'll be back to the usual schedule starting Tuesday (March 25th).

As always you can find the current schedule in the first tab of the CR spreadsheet in Google Docs at this link docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1j_tVAV075xhqF3qsRa…

1 month ago (edited) | [YT] | 36

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A quick reminder that the U.S. enters into Daylight Saving Time tomorrow which means that my timezone will be moving from UTC-5 to UTC-4. For some of you this changes nothing but for others my videos will release an hour earlier. This is most important for the livestreams, including tomorrow's, which will start at 3pm UTC.

1 month ago | [YT] | 35

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I know it's last minute but today's stream is cancelled.

With there being a couple of cancellations this week I figure I should give some context. My kid has been sick for over a week with flu like symptoms. Some days have been better than others but she's been fairly miserable through it. We were visiting doctors every third day and every test came back negative so we've been treating it as if it's a virus. Finally yesterday we got a diagnosis, it's pneumonia. So now, after 10 days, she's finally on meds but recovery is going to take time and she's pretty wiped out this morning.

I should have made a decision on today's stream sooner and I apologize about this cancellation coming so late. In addition to the stream, there won't be any Early Access links for patrons for tomorrow's videos. The release schedule for this week should be as expected however the double Album Review will probably be on the 15th, with Frost*'s "Life in the Wires" being the only Album Review on the 8th. I know there are some really long songs at the top of the Special Selection queue that might get shuffled to the following week as well in order to reduce my workload for this week a little.

Thanks everyone for your understand and patience.

2 months ago (edited) | [YT] | 145

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There won't be an Album Review today. I'll do two next Saturday to make up for missing this one.

2 months ago | [YT] | 29

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Quiet River, a blackened progressive metal project, released an album this week and they gave me a 95% off coupon code (Bandcamp) to share with the community. The code is "quiet_river_95_discount" and the album comes out to just $0.52 USD / €0.50, which is wild for a 70 minute album.

quietriver.bandcamp.com/album/aeolian-chamber

2 months ago | [YT] | 62

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After yesterday's livestream I uploaded it Youtube as I always do but this time it was blocked. So I blurred out the music video that flagged the livestream and re-uploaded it but now Youtube has been "processing" the video for about 10 hours. I've never seen this before and don't know what it means. That's the only thing stopping the release, everything else is finished. If it isn't ready to go by tomorrow morning then I'll just release the unedited version on Odysee and post the usual "blocked livestream" video here.

2 months ago | [YT] | 29

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Found out today that roof work is being done....by hearing banging on the roof 😅. Today's usually my Album Review recording day which isn't gonna happen. Given that I have a lot of stuff to get done tomorrow I'm regrettably going to choose not to release an Album Review this weekend. We'll have double Album Reviews on both of the following Saturdays to make up for it.

In positive news, I'm ready to debut a new format starting in February that will let me check out more albums and provide better analysis for some of them. I have plans to expand it for albums that really click with me but for the time being I want to get the foundation right. Stay tuned for more updates about that.

2 months ago | [YT] | 44

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I'm going to cancel today's livestream and I'll only be doing 1 video per day this week with the exclusion of Monday which won't have any video. I think I want to do things a little differently and will showcase some cool songs this week rather than try to fit the theme into a shortened week or just do Special Selections.

2 months ago | [YT] | 86

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I've been in and out of doctor's offices this week and had some surgery planned for Monday that got bumped up to tomorrow instead. I'm fine -- and will be better after this (hopefully) -- but it has impacted the release schedule this week. Both of Saturday's videos are canceled and Sunday's livestream is tentatively scheduled and will be dependent on my energy and pain levels.

Additionally, Monday is a holiday in the US so I'll be parenting/uncle-ing that day since the kids are out of school. I had planned on getting some extra reactions recorded this week to cover that day but that's not going to happen. So I doubt there will be reactions for Monday and I'm not sure about the rest of that week but I'll figure it out when we get there. Keep an eye on the usual channels (here, Mastodon, Discord) for updates regarding next week's release schedule.

2 months ago (edited) | [YT] | 140

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‪@vishalnaidu‬ released their second album recently which is full of great atmospheric guitar and violin instrumental folk music. There are a couple of moodier tracks on it but if you're in the mood for relaxing, pensive music then I can't recommend this album enough. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4a4QF...

2 months ago | [YT] | 8