I have said a bit about myself on the front page and in my blog, but I figured I should have a page for this. Most personal websites seem to. This page is full of random information about myself that doesn't really matter.
My first exposure to "alternative" music was my neighbor at my dad's house when I was a kid. I was about 7 when she first showed me Black Veil Brides and Set it Off. She would play music from her iTunes while we played with My Little Ponies or LEGOs. She was a few years older than me. Looking back, I think she only came over so much because I had a lot of toys. She played a lot of normal pop music too. A song I liked a lot was Counting Stars by OneRepublic. I knew it as the song that was related to Earth to Echo. I never watched that movie, but I wanted to. I liked In The End by Black Veil Brides. She told me I should listen to it more when I got older, and I followed her advice in middle school. My first ever favorite song was Animals by Maroon 5. I'm not ashamed, I was like 6. It's a really weird song though, I don't know why my parents let me listen to it. I enjoyed a handful of pop songs from the time over the years until around 4th grade when I started listening to music a lot. I was obsessed with an MMO called Animal Jam. I'd watch youtube videos about it in the background. There were videos set to music made with the avatars from the game called AJMVs (Animal Jam Music Videos). This was the main way I listened to music until a few months into 6th grade. I discovered Twenty One Pilots and the pop songs from Fall Out Boy this way. I'd listen to Alone Together and Centuries on loop. I liked a few song from Kesha too until I listened too close to Crazy Kids and realized she swore. I was so offended. I also just didn't want my parents to get mad at me, even though they probably wouldn't have cared. I liked Imagine Dragons in 5th grade. Everybody did. I also really liked Sensitized by Kylie which I discovered through Animal Jam YouTube, of course. I started to mostly watch actual music and lyric videos in 6th grade. A different neighbor, this time at my mom's house and only 1 year older than me, got me into kpop. It was really not cool to like kpop at this time. People don't think anything of it now. They might complain about stans but generally it's accepted. I couldn't tell anyone except her and a few other kids on the bus I loved BTS and Blackpink. I pretended to hate it. That's how common it was to make fun of it. When I stopped pretending, my friend who I was always off and on with since 4th grade said she couldn't be my friend anymore because I liked kpop and watched anime. Eventually I stopped listening as much and listened to normal pop music, even christian music. It was a dark time. That was what the kids in my class listened to. Liking contemporary christian gave me something to talk to them about. It was always just noise to me. Some was catchy but it's not really about anything except how great Jesus is. I like some christian music. I absolutely love old Twenty One Pilots, and that was them at their most christian, but those songs have actual meaning. Sometimes I revisit kpop to see if I can like it again, and it's not for me anymore. It's just modern pop in Korean. I wish I didn't let bullying change the music I listened to though. There was a girl in my class who didn't just like what everybody else liked. We weren't friends really, but we would talk to each other. She was also one of the first openly queer people I knew. One day, she handed me an earbud and told me to listen to a video called "Welcome to the Black Parade bass boosted." She just thought it was funny since she was already familiar with the song, but I was so focused on how great the song was that I didn't pay attention to the meme. I knew of MCR from the video NateisLame did. I thought they sounded cool, but I didn't start listening to them until after that. I still basically only listened to Welcome to the Black Parade and SING.I also listened to a lot of songs from Gacha Life YouTube in this era. It was a dress up game in an anime style where people would also record videos of the characters set to music. There were a few songs I liked that I just discovered from spending too much time on YouTube. I even listened to Sabrina Carpenter a bit, long before everyone knew about her. The kpop neighbor was also emo. She got me into Panic! at the Disco. It was the pop stuff mostly. It took me a few more months to listen to their older albums. The event that had the biggest effect on my music taste was in 7th grade. I was talking to this kid I had a crush on who was just awful, but I liked him anyways. We were talking about music, and he said he really liked Twenty One Pilots. I said I liked them too, which I did, but I only knew their popular songs. My autistic self decided to listen to all their albums in order so I could know them better and impress him. I was 12 years old, I had listened to alternative music before, but nothing this dark. I heard Implicit Demand for Proof for the first time and it absolutely blew me away. I loved the whole album. I tried talking to him about it on the bus and turns out he only liked the most popular songs. He said the other ones were trash. I liked them so much that this interaction didn't discourage me. I got to the rest of their albums over the next few weeks. I listened to them so much that I memorized basically all the lyrics pre Trench. Trench was out at the time but I never connected with it as much. I even listened to Tyler's old solo album. I was obsessed with them. I had no idea how to navigate my hyperfixations, so everyone in my class knew that I was into Twenty One Pilots a concerning amount. I eventually added other gateway alternative bands into the mix. I got properly into Panic! at the Disco, Fall Out Boy, and My Chemical Romance. I started listening to Paramore and a few songs from a bunch of other 2000's-2010's emo bands. I had so much fun discovering all this music. I think Twenty One Pilots appealed to me so much because their songs articulated the feelings I had for years that I could never put into words. Especially Regional at Best. They set me on the path to actually find myself instead of just doing what I thought others would approve of. Of course, I wasn't completely over that stage. I stopped listening to Twenty One Pilots as much. I stopped going to public school because of bullying and it was the beginning of Covid so I was super depressed. I got into Set it Off and listened to the Heathers the Musical soundtrack a lot. I also liked musicals. I discovered Hamilton in 5th grade and slowly got to the other 2010's pop musicals. It's not super important, but nothing on this page is. I was a part of an emo discord server. Someone from the server introduced me to a new band that wasn't emo at all but they were very intriguing. That band was Tally Hall. Shortly after I heard about them in the emo server, one of my friends from church posted something with The Bidding in the background, and I was again reminded to check them out. I got really into them after that. It was honestly concerning at some points, but through their fandom I got into a lot of other music. The most notable being the big classic rock bands. Like I had done before, I started listening to Pink Floyd to impress a girl I liked. I pretended to have listened to them to seem cooler but I had not, so I actually listened to them. We ended up dating and we were both kind of obsessed with them. Of course, relationships at that age are effectively meaningless. She came and went, but the music stayed with me. I also began listening to Queen and David Bowie a lot. Bowie specifically was who I listened to after I had (almost)completely overplayed Pink Floyd for myself. His music was different. It was from the 70's but a lot of songs had queer themes which meant a lot to me as a teen that wouldn't be caught dead listening to Lady Gaga or whatever else us gays are supposed to listen to. I listened to him all the time. I had another hyperfixation that heavily effected my life. I was somehow convinced I was the only person in my high school to "get" Bowie like I did. There's a small chance I was, going to a small town school in the south and in 2021, but it's still unlikely. I was always listening to music in high school. If the teacher wasn't directly talking to us, and sometimes even if they were, I'd have my earbuds in. Which constantly broke because I never had enough money for skullcandys. I was also a Spotify user. Disgusting, I know. I discovered a lot of great music there though. In the summer between 9th and 10th grade, The Doors were my obsession. I was playing Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 and I needed something to listen to. I put on their self titled since I knew a few songs from it, and I loved it. This lasted well into the school year itself. In all these bands, I had a habit of trying to emulate one of the members in some way. Usually the frontman. Jim Morrison was no different. I distinctly remember going thrifting and finding a pleather jacket that looked like it had nothing wrong with it. I thought it was a great deal and I really wanted a leather jacket because of Jim. I wore it to school with a white shirt just like he did. I felt so cool.. Until I realized that there were black particles everywhere I went. The jacket was coming apart. I don't know if it was dry rot or if it was just really old, but I never wore it again. I would always look for YouTube videos related to The Doors. Doing this, I discovered a channel called Abigail Devoe. She had recently made a video about LA Woman. Of course I had to watch it. Her content was different than the other reviews I had seen. She talked about the bands history. She talked about the history of the tracks themselves, and it wasn't boring at all. She made videos on other bands I liked, so I watched them. I liked her style so much that I also watched videos about bands I had never heard of. This lead me to her video on Kick Out the Jams by MC5. I went and listened to them and I really liked them. I was now aware of "proto punk." I already loved The Velvet Underground. I listened to them in my Bowie era. I wanted more. One day I was watching a different music reviewer, Anthony Fantano. I didn't watch him a whole lot, but he made a video about his favorite 70's albums, which I watched because I loved 70's music. In this video, he mentioned Marquee Moon by Television. I hadn't heard of them, but I made a mental note. After them, I started noticing them more and more. They were incorrectly mentioned as being proto punk, so that made me interested. When Spotify recommended I add Marquee Moon the song to my big classic rock playlist, I decided to listen to the entire album. I had never heard anything like it before, but it somehow sounded like everything I already liked. I had a similar reaction to 12 year old me first listening to Twenty One Pilots. I wasn't quite ready to admit it because of how attached to The Doors I still was, but this was my new favorite music. I quickly found out that it was not proto punk but a genre I was unfamiliar with called post punk. I had heard and liked Disintegration by The Cure before, but I knew it as "goth" and nothing else. I wanted to find another band like them, so I listened to all the post punk I could find. I still haven't found another band like them. Interpol are close, but not nearly as good. I have discovered a lot of amazing music in my quest to do so. Echo & The Bunnymen, Siouxsie & The Banshees, early The Cure, The B-52's, Felt, and so on. Listening to them also lead me to be more comfortable listening to music that wasn't just old rock. I rediscovered my love for emo pop. I got super into gothic rock which lead me to gothic metal. I hated all metal for so long. I still don't like the majority of it, but I'm fine with a lot of things considered "alt metal." Television are still my favorite band. I'm over my nearly 2 year long obsession, but there's truly not another band like them.
I started using the internet when I was 5 or 6 years old. I exclusively played the flash games on the Nick Jr. and Disney Jr. websites, but it still counts. I properly got into it when I was 7 because I discovered Minecraft. I watched a lot of YouTube videos about the game. I created and began uploading to my first YouTube channel when I was 8 in 2015. This was probably not a great thing, but I had a way better experience making content than a lot of people my age. I would upload content based on whatever hyperfixation I had at the time or just random clips of my life. I continued to upload inconsistently until around 2022. I've thought about returning to YouTube, but I don't think it's for me. At least not right now. I've had various social media profiles over the years. Most of them are either gone or inactive. I've always had a love hate relationship with the internet. In 2022 I discovered the "old web." Someone in a Discord server I was active in talked about SpaceHey. I thought old MySpace was cool so I quickly made an account. This was my real introduction to coding. I went on scratch as a kid but never did anything that cool. I loved being able to customize my profile. In March of 2023, I wanted to add a small online record label that I was involved with to rateyourmusic. The label has to have a website to do this. I had a carrd for it, but I wanted to make a site that had actual coding. So I created this website to practice.