HawkbitAlpha

Meeeeoooooow.

WHEN YOU'RE STUCK AT CHICAGO O'HARE, YOU JUST ASK THE BRONY WHEN YOU'RE LOOKING IN THE AIR, YOU JUST ASK THE BRONY

The Spirit of Hearth's Warming Presents is excited to bring to y'all the first Christmas edition of the SBC Community Mixtape! If you haven't taken part in it yet, this is the project where we all team up to make what's basically a time capsule of music. Well, without the time... or the capsule... I, uh, think I forgot where this metaphor was going. Anyway! Our theme this time is, of course: SANTA CLAUS IS COMING TO TOWN Smoke billows from the stone chimney of the small cabin sitting alone in the snowy forest. It's quiet, and all we can hear are the dry branches of hibernating trees rustling in the frosty wind. Somewhere in the distance, a family of deer huddles in a cave for warmth and protection from predators. But on this night, the Kid is not out for food. jjs sits alone by the fire in his cabin, a cup of cold mead in his hand, contemplating how many times he has returned to the old grind. As always, the rules: Length limits per person: you have a total of 30 minutes worth of music to play with. (This site is great for calculating the times.) Try to post your submissions using a Spotify playlist. If this is not possible for you, at least make sure that all of your submissions are available on Spotify. Joke/troll entries can and most likely will be excluded. No repeat entries (can't submit the same thing as somebody else). Most of all: have fun with it! Tentative submission deadline is next Saturday, December 17th, but as always, I can stretch the deadline if necessary. I'll also try to finally get Community Mixtape 5 put together and released pretty soon. Hopefully, this one won't take nearly as long. That said, let's get the holiday spirits moving here!

Today, we're excited to announce that the free indie game Sector's Edge will be joining SBC's future event lineup! For those of you who remember the handful of attempts at launching events on Royalcord based around the original Ace of Spades, this is a newer, similar game which takes the concept to a whole new level. In the same vein as AoS, Sector's Edge is a Minecraft-esque sandbox FPS where everything is destructible. In between combat, players can make use of environment-shaping destruction and construction tools to bend the world to their own uses, opening the door for use of a wide range of tactics. Now that Among Us is on its way out of our community, Sector's Edge provides us with an opportunity to stretch our legs a bit more and mix up the kinds of game experiences we can bring to SBC. It's been a while since we last touched anything similar (in the form of Shell Shockers), so we hope that this will be a welcome change of pace for all of you! My own personal testing has shown this to be a very smooth game to run even on a terrible computer - turns out the developers had that in mind when building the game's engine, so they implemented a "toaster" mode. The control scheme is a little bit unconventional, but with the help of the beginning-of-game tutorial, it was simple enough to pick up and play, right out of the box. The only small hurdle to getting into this game is the fact that, at least for now, it's exclusive to Steam, so if you plan on participating in our events, be sure to install both Steam and the game first. I plan on hosting an informal SBC party in this game this weekend, both to shake down any issues we may have with it, and for everyone to get a feel of how they like Sector's Edge in general. I hope y'all will come! GET SECTOR'S EDGE HERE!

I shall be the best apple harvester in all of Equestria: Applejack!

Is it time for another Hawk music thread? Well, let's hope it doesn't go off the rails as hard as the last one! Y'all have heard enough of me talk about my gripes with a few different genres of music over time, but I wanna take a break from that and post some stuff that I actually do enjoy. These are my choices for "essential" albums, meaning that, while they're not necessarily my favorites (although at least one of these definitely is), they're albums that: A) I'll recommend to anyone regardless of their own tastes, and B) I think a lot of people aren't likely to hear about without a recommendation. So, let's go! #5: AMARANTHE - MASSIVE ADDICTIVE (2014) What would happen if you put Ariana Grande in a metal band with the singers from Crush 40 and Bring Me the Horizon? You'd probably get something similar to Amaranthe, a relatively recent Swedish band that's managed to find an infectious middle ground between pop music and metalcore/melodic deathcore. I've come to think of them as kinda being Europe's answer to Babymetal: most of their songs are pump-up metal tracks with a heavy smattering of pop hooks, and plenty of crazy interplay between the three singers and their different styles. Massive Addictive is my favorite of their albums to date, and it's exactly as sticky as the title suggests. #4: GARY CLARK JR. - THIS LAND (2019) Meet the modern Stevie Ray Vaughan, folks! Gary Clark Jr. has been making the rounds in the world of Austin blues for a while now, and really, he deserves even more love than he gets now. Most of his work is a sort of salad bowl of blues rock, R&B, hip hop, and folk, all tied together with rich guitar work in the tradition of SRV and Hendrix. This Land was (by Gary's own statements) his first deliberate effort at making a more lyric-driven album, with songs about everyday life, family, politics, and everything in between. #3: DREAM THEATER - IMAGES AND WORDS (1992) Those of you who've talked with me about music since 2019 will know that I love quite a lot of the work by Dream Theater, the band that codified the entire genre of prog metal. Images and Words is pretty widely considered to be either their best or second-best album (behind Scenes from a Memory), and I have to agree on that. This album, with a very dreamy and layered sound throughout, was especially a huge comfort to me through the early days of COVID, especially in tracks like "Take the Time" and "Surrounded". Even for folks who don't necessarily like prog, I would say this album deserves at least a try. #2: PLINI - HANDMADE CITIES (2016) "Inhale" off of this album made it into my entries for Community Mixtape 3, and for good reason. Plini, an Australian indie guitarist, is a master of making what I can best describe as "happy music for angry people", and that perfectly applies to Handmade Cities. Guitar legend Steve Vai described this album as "one of the finest, forward thinking, melodic, rhythmically and harmonically deep, evolution of rock/metal instrumental guitar records [he's] ever heard"... and he's not kidding. If you want something that works especially well as study music, or something to put on when you need to cool down, this is a perfect album for the moment. #1: STURGILL SIMPSON - A SAILOR'S GUIDE TO EARTH (2016) Oh, Sturgill, what do we do with you? I would call Sturgill Simpson one of my favorite artists of any genre. Most people call him a country singer (and he certainly sings the part), but he's changed up his sound with every album, and I've followed him down that rabbit hole every weird step of the way. A Sailor's Guide to Earth, though, is easily my favorite of his albums: an eclectic mix of outlaw country, folk, soul, rock, and funk, with a heavy nautical theme throughout. It's an album that Sturgill made to be addressed to his then-newborn son, and you feel that passion across every single track in the bunch. In the process, he proved that even country music can be the breeding grounds for a genuinely creative and engaging bit of art. For that, Sailor's Guide is also one of my favorite albums of all time, and probably will stay such well into the future. Keep on sailing, Sturgill.

Hi again, y'all! Now that I've crash-landed into the SBC cash register, let's get down to business. While applying to become a mod here, I said that my agenda as a staff member would be to help bring more video game-oriented experiences to SBC, especially now that it seems Amogus is on its last legs for us. One idea that came up right out of the gate was the possibility of us reviving SpongeCraft, our good old Minecraft server, and using the same map. A lot of us have had some fond memories (and unfinished projects!) on SC, so if we could get the server back online some time in the future, I think that would be great! But, be warned: If we give this idea the green light, it'll take quite a while to get underway. I would most likely have to self-host the server, and while my current secondary laptop is capable of running a rudimentary server, it's nowhere near powerful enough to sufficiently run a Minecraft instance. A potential SC revival would have to wait until I can afford to either buy a new computer (and repurpose my current laptop into server-hosting duty) or subscribe for a VPS. After that, it'll be a probably-tedious process to get all of the required plugins working before launch. In short: don't expect this to happen any time soon. (Also, it'll almost certainly still be using Minecraft 1.12.2, for both server stability and ease of use for people with terrible computers.) I'm pitching this publicly to ask: are any of you interested in this idea? We almost certainly won't be hosting events on a revived SC, so it'll be around purely as a side activity for all of you to enjoy at your own leisure. If you do have any other ideas you'd like to see implemented this time around, though, feel free to let us know.

Welp. I've been putting off writing a follow-up on this thread for quite a while now, but y'know what? It's time. But before we dive in, lemme clear one thing up right from the start: So, I've gotta be honest: so far, I haven't listened to any of the album recommendations y'all posted here. Not because I don't want to, but because I just have an ADHD-induced problem with sitting down and absorbing full albums of any kind (even going through Madvillainy and its string of short songs took me a while), so I tend to avoid doing so out of sheer intimidation. Still, one big thing has changed: Throw out a lot of what I said in the first post in this thread, because even I don't really know what the hell I like anymore! After I posted this thread, one of the later people to respond to me about it (in private) was Royalcord's own Omni. For those of you who don't know, Omni is a DJ with a background as a classical musician, and somebody whose thoughts on music I value very highly - she was the one who first got me to listen to Ready to Die, and has helped me build a whole song library to use for VCAP Aerobatics. All of this is to put some weight behind the fact that, after reading this thread, Omni came to me and, probably channeling what some of you have already stated, told me: you're doing it all wrong. That my fixation on lyrics and melody was completely missing the point. It didn't quite click until she also pointed out one fact that put it all into perspective: that I'm already a fan of ambient music, which itself is another genre that rides mainly on its production quality above eveything else. And, I'll be frank with y'all, I felt like a total dumbass for not drawing that connecting line before. Well, there it was. A Eureka moment! Kinda. In that same conversation, now with my brain in the process of rewiring, Omni told me to go out and look at hip hop music of various styles, and see what I thought about it all. So, rather than try (and probably fail) to summarize where the hell my standards are at now, I'm simply gonna run through a short, yet still extremely unorganized list of different songs that I've heard, mostly throughout this year, that I enjoyed to some degree or another. Here goes! Peek a Boo - Not a song that I'd really care to listen to again, but this was alright. Aside from the "cello" line being hilarious, the lyrics don't warrant much comment, but I mostly liked the flow of it all. They Know (Dey Know) - Hell to the yeah! This one's way more my speed, especially with that horn sample beat giving the whole song a lot of pump-up energy. It's the kind of thing that could easily soundtrack a Kill Bill Vol. 1-style badass entrance scene. Wicked - This was actually the song that Omni sent me to back up her hip hop and ambient analogy, and right there was when it clicked. I couldn't tell you a single lyric from this song besides the title word, but I still love it. I put it on a lot as chillout music (yep, just like that one Community Mixtape we did), and it suits that mood perfectly. Mask Off - Pretty much the same comment as Wicked, but I actually can quote some of the lines in this one. Really, these two songs were what made me understand how "mumble" rap (Future's MO, really) can actually work after all. Over the Top - Okay, this was just a great laugh by way of Smiley's delivery. Drake also sounds a bit more into it than I expected, which is a good addition. Pretty solid track overall. Ridin' - Yes, I heard the Weird Al parody first - go figure. Yes, I love the original far more, because this song just fucking rules all around! No further comment necessary. Anaconda - Think I'm kidding on this one? Well, I won't tell you I love this song, but I certainly don't get what all the hate was about! The lyrics are fucking hilarious, but even to put that aside, my only complaint is that all the build-up energy gets squandered when the Baby Got Back sample comes in for the... uh, "chorus"? Zydeco Rock - It may have nothing to do with either of the genres in the title, but damn if it doesn't get my brain going! Definitely have to play this one at a party or something some time. (And it has the Cupid Shuffle guy on the chorus!) Talk Shit, Get Shot - This one's obviously an Ice-T rap metal song, but I felt like including it anyway, because it goes hard as hell. I could imagine it slamming pretty heavily even with a regular 99 Problems-style rap beat behind it instead of the band. (There's also two versions of Ice-T's take on 99 Problems on this album!) Bridging the Gap - The classic rock riff from I'm a Man (not Bad to the Bone, you normies!), sampled by Nas? Sign me up! I Am Rock - Heard this one from the original Need For Speed Most Wanted, back when I first played that in 2020. As you might have noticed by now, I'm very fond of these jock jam types of songs, so naturally, this kind of anthemic brag track is my shit. Family Ties - Back to more recent stuff. Pretty good beats (plural?!), which alone is enough to get a thumbs up on this one. Baby Keem's flow comes across as a bit goofy, but otherwise alright, and... god damn, this song is also the first time I'd ever heard Kendrick Lamar. I see why y'all love him so much, because this man is on fire in this song! Greece - Another nice chillout track once you get past the trademark DJ Khaled shouting. I do wish it developed and progressed a little more though. And, for a really obvious ending: SICKO MODE - Speaking as a guy who's listened to probably far too much Dream Theater, I have to say: I FUCKING LOVE THIS SONG. It might actually be one of my favorites of any genre, to the point where I even used it over in YSFlight. I'd actually never heard it until this year (was too busy laughing at Twitter to even notice it during the 2019 Super Bowl show), but god damn, this was the one that really showed me what hip hop production was capable of pulling off. Gotta get to all of those album recommendations soon as well! I might post another follow-up after that as well.

BOO! Was that the sound of a ghost, or the sound of someone reacting to a particularly awful performance of This Is Halloween? You decide. Welcome, everybody, to the first holiday special edition of the SBC Community Mixtape, this community's best, err... well, only project for music pooling and sharing. So far, our various themes have been chosen somewhat at random, but this time, we're gonna tap right into the mood of this time of year. By which, I mean that, if you look at the calendar right about now, you can probably guess that our theme will be... Nightmares to Remember ...Were you already preparing to cut up some pumpkins in that first paragraph? Well, feel free to do so, but we're going a little more broad. We're looking for songs of all types that just might just leave you with a sense of dread, and thinking twice about falling asleep tonight. Halloween-themed music can work, as can other material that isn't explicitly about Halloween, but has a similar energy (for an iconic example: Thriller). Bring on the fright! As always, the rules: Length limits per person: you have a total of 30 minutes worth of music to play with. (This site is great for calculating the times.) Try to post your submissions using a Spotify playlist. If this is not possible for you, at least make sure that all of your submissions are available on Spotify. Joke/troll entries can and most likely will be excluded. No repeat entries (can't submit the same thing as somebody else). Most of all: have fun with it! Tentative submission deadline is next Saturday, October 22nd, but as always, I can stretch the deadline if necessary. Now, let's all make like traveling salesmen and go door-to-door in search of rocks candy!

MP3s, always - I like to have total hotkey control, offline availability, and use of files for what I listen to. I used to get them from Youtube, but now pull them from streaming platforms for better quality. Originally used Windows Media Player to play them, but in 2016, switched to Winamp (yes, the ancient one), and have solely been using that since. For mobile, I do the same thing, but with the app Musicolet instead.

Now we can start our own Bounce FM!

Didn't think it would be back again so soon, but I think we're on a roll now. So here goes! Welcome again to the SBC Community Mixtape! If you haven't taken part in it by now, this is where we gather around the campfire and sing our Campfire Song to pool together big stockpiles of songs, and with it, introduce each other to new music and artists. To carry on the practice of giving our mixtapes some consistency, our theme this time is: Play That Funky Music Picture, if you will, that George Clinton is asking you to host a modern-day funk radio station. Your job is to broadcast the groovy sounds descended from slap bass and soul singing to the world. This could be anything from the classics of Kool & the Gang and Parliament-Funkadelic, to the synth-heavy sounds of Cameo and Zapp & Roger, to the genre-blending styles of RHCP and Primus. What do you choose? As always, the rules: Length limits per person: you have a total of 30 minutes worth of music to play with. (This site is great for calculating the times.) Try to post your submissions using a Spotify playlist. If this is not possible for you, at least make sure that all of your submissions are available on Spotify. Joke/troll entries can and most likely will be excluded. No repeat entries (can't submit the same thing as somebody else). whoever adds Uptown Funk will be stared at, awkwardly Most of all: have fun with it! Tentative deadline for when submissions to this will close is this coming Saturday, September 24th, but as always, I might knock it back if I feel it's necessary. Let's get down, get down, y'all!

Over at VCAP Aerobatics, I mantain a big playlist of "filler" songs, mainly AAA type material, to play in our shows in between acts. Most of it is stuff that I dredged up from either my college radio station or Youtube playlists, and that I don't actually listen to on my own volition. Well... maybe that was a mistake.

Catch!

So, uh... No one saw me take over a year to post this one, right? ...Right?

Thought I'd forgotten about this? Well, you'd be wrong on that! Welcome back, y'all, to the SBC Community Mixtape, for the third entry that I've been putting off for a while. I said on the previous one that this series would run on musical "themes" going forward, and I still intend on carrying that practice forward... and if that's the case, we've got a nice, big one here. Our theme this time is... Chill Out Without a doubt, the last couple of years have been driving a lot of us absolutely insane, and making us want to light up the whole damn sky like the 4th of July. I've found in that time that, for me, a great way to manage the stress and anger levels is to disconnect from everything for a while, and put on some real smooth music. Y'know, the kind where you can easily fall asleep while listening to it. Even as mainstream music has seemingly gotten a lot more minimalist over the last few years, and "relaxing music" streams on Youtube are now a dime a dozen, I feel like this vibe hasn't gotten quite enough love. So, how about we pool some together 'ere? The submission rules remain the same as last time: Length limits per person: you have a total of 30 minutes worth of music to play with. (This site is great for calculating the times.) If possible, try to post your submissions using a Spotify playlist. That makes the process of building the master playlist a lot faster. Joke/troll entries can and most likely will be excluded. Try to make sure that what you're submitting is available (i.e. not copyright-blocked) on both YT and Spotify. No repeat entries (can't submit the same thing as somebody else). Most of all: have fun with it! Tentative deadline for when submissions to this will close is next Saturday, September 10th, but as always, I might knock it back if I feel it's necessary. With all of that said... folks, let's get hypnotic up in here. Let the vibes commence.

I'm not sure who you are, but I like you already.

So, in spite of the fact that this is clearly a joke thread, I'll respond to this anyway and say... uhhh, no? That's not why? That kind of thing just has no place or relevance to a goofy, manic cartoon like SB. (And it's probably set in the Pacific, definitely not the Gulf, but that's way besides the point.) Also as an aside: it's not hard to explain to a kid what an oil spill is and have them accept it... that is, unless you're me, someone who actually personally knew one of the workers who died in the DWH blowout.