You are never going to bat 1.000 in life.

And honestly? That’s totally fine. The real problem isn't making mistakes along the way; it’s the massive discrepancy between threatening to accomplish something and actually doing it.

With most people, there are far more threats than actual actions.

That "threat" stage is where all your cozy dreams, wants, and unexecuted ideas sit. It feels safe in that space because the possibilities are always going to outnumber the tangible motions of real life. When an idea is just a threat, it’s still perfect. It hasn't faced the grit of execution, software bugs, or a bad take.

But I refuse to let those unfulfilled threats bury me in the end.

It is way too easy to get hooked on the cheap dopamine of sitting around with friends, talking about how cool a project would be if you actually made it. That's pure noise.

I’m not out here to talk a big game or build a catalog of "what-ifs." I’m out here to do the work.

I’d rather take a swing, miss, collect some "battle damage," and put out a project that’s 70% of what I envisioned than spend five years pontificating on an idea that never sees the light of day. Execution is the only currency that matters.

At the end of the line, nobody remembers what you intended to build. They only remember what you actually left behind on the table.

If there's one major creative regret I carry around, it’s not backing up my unfinished projects from my earlier attempts at making music.

There are so many lost lyrics I could have salvaged—or at the very least, studied to see where my head was at back then. You honestly have no idea how useful something is until it’s no longer a possibility.

I would love nothing more than to go back right now, take the core concepts from the tracks on my very first album, and repurpose them into something experimental using the gear and mindset I have today.

But I've long since lost everything connected to that early era.

It wasn't just that first album either—there were dozens of loose verses, abandoned project files, and raw drafts that ended up inspiring whole secondary waves of albums and mixtapes. All of it got wiped out, lost to time... with "time" in this scenario being defined as my old, bricked Lenovo laptop.

When a piece of hardware dies like that and takes your early catalog with it, it feels like a fire swept through your personal archive. You lose the exact receipts of your growth.

That loss sucks, plain and simple. But if there’s any silver lining to having your history locked away on a dead hard drive, it forces you to move forward. You can’t rely on old crutches or recycle safe ideas when the originals are completely gone.

It makes every line you write today hit with a little more urgency, because you know firsthand just how fragile the work really is if you don't preserve it.

 Bringing that vocal-first "Summit" workflow over to the Pocket Operators isn't just doable—it’s the natural progression for my production style.

The mechanics of it are super clean. I can just plug my headphones straight in, flip the sync mode on the PO-33, and write directly to the built-in metronome click. No laptop screen glowing in my face, no software menus to click through—just a raw click track and a flow.

Or, if I want to switch up the angle, I can sample classic records or retro video game soundscapes, write a complete verse over that temp track to lock in the pocket, and then completely tear down and redesign the beat underneath using my own custom sound banks.

That level of flexibility means I’ve got real options.

The absolute best part about this hardware shift? I don't need to be sitting at the cool transforming desk just to test out random ideas when inspiration strikes.

I can toss a Pocket Operator into the car, pull over whenever a cadence or a bar pops into my head, and just jam out right then and there.

That’s what real creative freedom feels like. The studio isn't a physical room anymore—it's wherever I happen to be sitting with a 3.5mm cable and a battery-powered sampler.

 My favorite beat on 7 Solemn Rites, hands down, is "Summit."

It was easily the most fun I had on the production side of the entire project, mostly because the song was completely bare-bones when I recorded the template verse.

When I'm building a track, I like to use an in-the-moment freestyle to lay out the cadence, lyric structure, and sometimes the overall topic. When I sat down with "Summit," all I had running was a very basic drum pattern. I’m talking damn near a straight-up metronome—just like the minimal vibe on the album cover art.

Having that blank canvas gave me a wide-open lane to run down inside LMMS. I got to craft the entire beat around my flow, as opposed to doing what most people do and letting the instrumental lead the way.

I’ve always believed that the best music creates a distinct atmosphere around the vocals.

There are no top lists here, no competing, and none of that childish ranking nonsense. There's just the moment we have right now.

For the whole 7 Solemn Rites project, I was chasing a specific speakeasy or Def Poetry vibe, and I feel like the beat for "Summit" nailed that target dead-on. It has this deeply organic atmosphere—like standing in a dense forest at night, hearing the cold wind blow through the trees, with the subtle sounds of shadowy creatures peering over at you from the dark.

Reversing the order of operations like that opened up a whole new world. I definitely want to experiment with shifting the production sequence depending on the specific mood or feel of whatever project I tackle next.

I’ve always been the type of cat that finds imperfections to be ridiculously cool.

If a video game gives me an option to unlock an alternate skin for a character where their clothes are all tattered and torn, that’s the skin I’m picking to beat the game. If I was channel surfing back in the day and stumbled upon a classic Kung Fu flick that was already halfway through, I was locked in—purely because the protagonist looked like he’d already been through absolute hell and back.

Back when the original Jurassic Park movie blew up, Kenner ran these TV commercials for their action figure line where you could literally tear off a rubber piece of the dinosaur’s flesh to reveal the ribs beneath.

They branded that feature "Dino Damage," and as a kid, I thought that was cool as fuck.

There is real weight in that aesthetic. A character getting roughed up adds a massive level of aura that instantly sends your imagination into overdrive. It makes you care. You want to see the hero pull off the impossible comeback. It gets you asking questions: How is the plot going to resolve now? What happens if X takes control after Y dealt that massive blow to Z?

Over time, I’ve adopted "battle damage" as a core term in my personal vocabulary, applying it to how I live and create.

The main context I’ve settled on is using it to describe situations where I have to compromise, adapt, or build a makeshift alternate path to reach my goal.

Let's be real—plans rarely go off without a hitch. Whether you’re trying to navigate software bugs, gear limitations, broken workflows, or just the general nonsense of the world, you’re going to take some hits.

The pivot is almost always the direct result of getting roughed up along the way. Battle damage isn't a failure—it’s the character design you wear while making the necessary adjustments to just get the fuck done. It proves you were actually in the arena instead of sitting safely on the sidelines.

 When I was first designing MicMage.com, I knew right out of the gate that I wanted to stick to a Dreamcast-inspired color scheme.

I tried really hard not to go overboard with the iconic orange accents, and I wanted the main background fields to sit in that clean, slightly off-white gray that matches the shell of the base system.

The problem was that the first revision of the layout looked way too bland. It had the colors, sure, but it felt flat and lifeless.

To fix that initial dryness, I added custom sidebar icons to anchor each main section of the site:

• The Music Page: Featured a classic portable boombox icon.

• The Gallery: Got a clean little paintbrush graphic.

• The Homepage: Rocked a totally non-Sega-sanctioned orange swirl. 🍥

That initial pass was cool, but it still felt like something was missing. Then I remembered the subtle trick GamePro used back in the 90s.

Their magazine pages rarely used solid white or flat color blocks. They used low-opacity, blurred-out background artwork to give every page real visual depth.

That technique works exceptionally well for websites running light-colored themes. The background art stays out of the way of the actual text, but it adds just enough texture to make the whole layout look like it was thoughtfully engineered rather than just thrown together.

The best part? It’s really just me finding inventive new ways to repurpose old media.

The homepage background is actually a faded-out image I originally made for the cover of the Ruin album, and the music section reuses the boombox graphic as a watermark.

It’s that classic "battle damage" mindset again: take the assets you already have, remix the presentation, and let a little retro-magazine magic turn a flat grid into a place with a legit vibe.

Before I launched MicMage.com, I spent a couple of years messing around in the trenches of Google Sites.

It was actually pretty fun learning about all the stuff you couldn't do in their site builder, and then trying to figure out clever, inventive workarounds to bypass those limitations.

One of the absolute most annoying things I discovered about Google Sites was how it handled grid layouts on mobile screens.

If you built a section on desktop where an image sat on the right and text sat on the left, the engine wouldn't swap or stack them properly when scaled down to a phone screen. It was an absolute disaster for readability. You’d end up with text fields that looked completely disconnected from their subjects, or two images awkwardly stacking back-to-back while the text got buried underneath.

Back then, there was zero way to write an exclusive layout for mobile users. You were forced to align every single image to the left (or place them on top, if you wanted to be weird and boring) just so the mobile version wouldn't scramble the entire page into nonsense.

Now that I’m building on my own terms without those clunky constraints, I don't have to worry about such an odd obstacle.

For the Sketch8 gallery, I went ahead and built a cascading, alternating layout for the desktop view. Having the artwork Zig-Zag across the screen makes the page feel way more dynamic than just lining everything up in a rigid, vertical column like a spreadsheet.

I’m not even 100% sure where I originally got the instinct for that aesthetic. It’s almost certainly something I subconsciously stolen and remixed from an old GamePro magazine preview layout.

(Honestly, there are plenty of other visual elements scattered across the site that were pilfered from 90s gaming magazines, so I definitely wouldn't put it past me.)

It’s just another example of taking a piece of "battle damage" from a bad platform experience and turning it into a clean, custom design that actually has some personality.