Alright, if you've checked the news lately, there's been word of the NG Audio Portal Deathmatch, a contest to see essentially who has the best ropes with production in the least amount of time. Unfortunately, this contest is being stalled because we need just one single person to enter -- which means there's about 31 people waiting to submit their badass songs in the musical duel of all musical duels. If you're interested in this at all -- a.k.a. if you like music and you're cool -- then click here, post to the thread that you'll join, and we'll be ready to go! =)

Deuces!

-Jazzman

P.S. And make sure to check out Nothing More, the most badass up-and-coming band I've ever seen. They put on a damn good show, I'm friends with them, they're fucking legit. I can't think of anybody else they sound like, which is surprising because I listen to a hell of a lotta music. If you're interested, don't be bashful to follow the second link as well! ;)

Hey everybody! Christmas has passed! What did Santa bring me this year? Hmmm...Let's see...Oh yeah, he filled up my aural war chest with weapons! Yes everybody, my sonic arsenal is essentially complete! If you've liked my music in the past, prepare for something epic that will just splatter your brains on the wall in front of you, because I've got tools now that really should take my music to a whole new level of awesome! I know I've bragged about it for weeks now, and it's finally arrived. I'll let y'all know when the first track of beauty comes out very soon! =)

Peace!

Jazzman

Hey everybody!

I know that this is about a week overdue, but I've been so freaking busy the past couple of weeks that I haven't had much time to scan the horizons on NG. I just noticed that Space Reggae is the #1 song on the site, which brings me a hell of a lot of pride -- but in a humbling way. I just wanted to say thank you so much for y'alls feedback, because it means so much! You guys, the listeners and flash players, made it possible. I also want to thank Glaiel-Gamer for choosing my song to fit the theme of Tetraform, which is one of the coolest games I've ever played on NG (and if you haven't played it yet, you need to!). This means so much to me, you guys don't even know. I hope that in the future I can somehow match this awesomeness in some way, shape or form, but I'm gonna be honest, it's definitely not gonna be easy! So, I suppose I can also thank you guys for challenging me to raise the bar once more...

And speaking of raising the bar, my "sonic arsenal" that I've been talking about is soon to be released. The next few songs that I come out with will hopefully blow your mind (if you loved Black Hole Earth Consumption, you'll love the stuff I'm comin out with). So, I gotta thank Xenogenocide for upping my inspiration tenfold.

More importantly, I'd like to thank the bands Closure in Moscow, The Mars Volta, Karnivool, Thrice, Nothing More, and several others for giving me so much freaking inspiration that I can barely contain it, and also Devin from Nothing More for providing that inspiration. I promise y'all listeners, I refuse to disappoint!

Anyways, I want to wish y'all a Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year. I hope Santa brings you everything you asked for on your wish list, keep rockin, and keep kickin ass everyone! You're the best! =)

Peace!

Jazzman

Hey there! So, I recently put up a news post that put out a negative light. A few things that I want to apologize for immediately include these:
1.) I'm sorry for seeming like I was complaining and feeling sorry for my song that got voted to neverland. This is most certainly not the case; I was hoping simply to use my own song as the basis for an argument against dishonesty on NG, something I've fought since July 2009. Unfortunately, this leads to my next apology.
2.) I'm sorry for seeming ignorant, self-centered and "elite." The real point I was trying to make is that I'm one to put hard work into my music, and so my hard work should pay off -- as it does with anything. This is true for any of y'all out there: Your hard work in your flash, music, art or whatever, should mean you reap the benefits. Unfortunately, this isn't the case on NG, and there are plenty of people who put hard work into their stuff that register barely a blip on the radar -- which leads to the final apology.
3.) I'm sorry for seeming like another "I got 0-voted" thread. It's very hard to distinguish what exactly I was going for, but in the end, something I've realized is it's not the 0 voting that's the issue -- it's the mind behind that 0 vote. People who go to the length to screw people over on NG don't have any business participating here, because they make it ten times harder for everyone who wants to do well here (and even if you're "just the artist," you can't tell me you wouldn't be happy that your stuff got Frontpaged, even if you could care less about the score on your work -- which is essentially arbitrary). Take Egoraptor, for example, who recently got his account phished. Question is, to what benefit would it be to hack into Egoraptor's account, other than to screw him over? Sadly for him, because of that little scheme, he lost some modding privileges -- something that should never EVER have happened in the whole wide world. People who know Egoraptor know he's loyal to NG and is a large contributor to the flash portal, so why does he deserve to get screwed over because some little fuckwad decided it would be funny to send demeaning PMs to people? It's all sorts of injustice I just cannot support.

With that said, I feel sorry for no person that thinks they have the balls to do shit like this. Nobody deserves it. In my last news post, although their was a major incongruity that needed to be cleared up, people ATTACKED me, for absolutely no reason except to produce white noise on a thread and look like a little badass. If you read the post though, the only thing that I can read that is only mildly offensive is "people suck on NG," which, to some degree, in my opinion, is true -- but it doesn't single out, haze or slander anybody! I'm sorry, but a person that takes a major offense to "people suck" needs to grow a pair and move on; it's not offensive, it doesn't mean anything except to make my point. And with that, there would be no reason in the world that people should tell me "fuck you" and that "nobody wants to listen to [my] shitty music." Okay, thanks a lot guys; I come to this site to show people some of the music I produced, and I get this. Since day 1 on this site, I've had to put up with dishonesty, unnecessary and cruel obscenity, and just downright meanness, and I've watched and seen plenty of other people struggle with it, too -- not that I DON'T expect it, being on a site like this, but seriously? It's gotten out of hand, pretty much.

Knowing that, there is no way in hell I'll apologize for talking back to somebody who is obscene to me. In fact, if you try to demoralize me, I'll make sure to know you're the real doofus, since you won't be able to make sense of anything I tell you -- or I'll just outwit you. Of course, this is to anyone who IS obscene, which is different from being critical. Critical is something I can roll with, because even though it might be just as harsh, if it's more than a "fuck you" then that means you put some time and effort into letting me know that I really do suck, which is in turn something that I can respect. I don't respect anyone who treats another human being like a piece trash that needs to be thrown out, because, in effect, you're telling me that you just don't give a shit about anything or anybody in your life and you'll tear down anybody to get your way, much in the way of a criminal. THAT'S why it's so offensive to me to see that on either my posts, or someone else's.

Anyways, I hope that, at some point, some of this sort of activity can be regulated, or at least funneled off somehow. Many apologies to Egoraptor, once more, and, more than anything, just go out there and enjoy yourself on NG; don't take into account what anyone else says unless it scars you for life!

Jazzman

The picture in this post is pure, unadulterated proof that people suck. I actually think it's pretty funny that someone would do this; I know my stuff shouldn't just get zero-voted on the drop of a hat because I put more time into my music than the average bear and deserve credible feedback and criticism. For everyone out there who produces music and get zero-bombed to neverland instantly, I'm speaking for you, and you're not alone. This picture is proof that voters on NG are sometimes nothing but sneaky douche-cakes. Hence, there needs be a change!

So, I've had a lotta good fortune of late. A song of mine made it on the All-Time Top Scoring -- a personal triumph -- and a few other of my DnB songs have stayed relatively toward the top of the rankings. I have all of this sudden underlying "prestige" (if you could even call it that; I consider it more like a good amount of luck), but now I need to follow up with that.

If any of y'all have heard the beginnings of my Peril series, I give you good news: I'm trying to add a third song to its ranks. However, I'm finding this to be exceptionally difficult because of one thing: Writer's block! Since July, I've been trying to follow up Distant Star, but everything I've made since then just can't seem to match it in design and amount. I know writer's block is extremely common and that all the good artists -- ESPECIALLY the good artists -- undergo it frequently, but at the same time, my mind is infected with thousands of different sounds just waiting to come to fruition. It's extremely frustrating to make something, but see that it's going nowhere. I'm tired of this; I would love more than anything in the world to get my inspiration back.

I do everything I should, too: I listen to other producers out there on NG, I listen to music, I hear things in my head when I hear someone else's stuff. I play my guitar to hear new harmony in my songs. In the end, all of it is for nought, because I can never get to the end of a project.

Right now, I have no clue what I should do. Over the past month, I was finally fortunate enough to come to the end of a piece of music I made; I have a completed version of "Peril 3," but honestly, I can't see it making a ripple anywhere...influencing anything...MEANING anything. I want my music to have meaning and to be antiparallel to everything mainstream -- I want my music to INSPIRE somebody else out there, so that they can make music too, and I want them to read into the emotions of my music -- but how can I do that with writer's block?

I'm making this post not to complain, but to ask for some advice. What do y'all do when you can't complete something? How do you cope with it? Do you force yourself to finish something even if you think it sounds like junk in the middle of the song, or your drums or mastering are off?

And another thing I'm wondering: How do y'all go about producing? Do you inch-worm your way along and get it all to sound perfect from the get-go, or do you map it all out and flesh it out as you go? How do y'all derive the patience to make something extraordinary when you know at the present it's nothing but a sketch? How do you gain the faith to make that leap from sketch to final product?

So, I tried posting a cool photo I had taken in the Art portal. That was until I read the disclaimer that said "NO PHOTOGRAPHS!" Bummer! I'd really like to show people a little bit of my photography, but I can't.

Then I came up with an idea: Why not have a section to submit photos to NG? I can see that they might not want pics cuz they don't want this place to turn into some crappy blogger-type site like Myspace or Facebook, but on the same token plenty of people I'm sure have photos they want to share with people. So, why not just allow people to submit the stuff, have it judged to make sure it isn't someone's typical blogger profile pic, and let it be reviewed just like anything else of artistic quality on this site? Like I said, it's just an idea; I'm looking for more feedback than just "That's a dumb idea." With that said, any ideas?

So, my bro gets left 4 dead for christmas last year. we both try it out, and it's a fun game. however, what i DIDN'T realize is that when my brother installed the game, he had to sign up on Steam. a few months later, i find out that Steam is like the Xbox Live or PSN of PCs (haha i suppose i'm that uncultured =P). i thought "okay, no big deal, that's cool with me."

Lo and behold, a few days ago i bought a brand new laptop, beautiful: quad-core processor, one of the best video cards on the market, huge 17" screen, never gets that hot, etc. it's ideal for playing games, so i decide i'll buy empire total war cuz i heard it was pretty pimp. i find out that Steam is required to play empire, but i figure "whatever, it's just for DLC and multiplayer." so we go on vacation where there isn't a good internet connection, and i figure that's okay because empire can be played single-player anyway, and there's no use worrying about the multiplayer. i try to install my game, thinking it will install like any other game. i install the Steam component, which took forever with the shitty connection, install the game, which only takes a handful of minutes, and figure "okay, now my game should work. i did everything it needed me to." WRONG. i find out that not only do i have to bear witness to the fucking Steam network, which doesn't work with a crappy network anyway, but i also have to keep my game UP-TO-DATE to even play it OFFLINE. okay. so i try to update, and it starts downloading at fucking KB/s. typing this message, the dl is sitting at 4% and at a rate of 18.0 KB/s. i don't want to fucking dl the update now cuz it's impossible, but on the other side i am REQUIRED to keep it up-to-date to play. wtf? what an inconvenience.

I dunno if anyone else has had similar problems with Steam, but my brother did with his left 4 dead. he stopped playing for a while, and then when he decided he wanted to play it again, he forgot that he NEEDED to log into steam in order to play. unfortunately, he forgot his password. so, he tried out a few passwords he thought were correct, but Steam ended up locking his account after he tried typing in a password "too many times." he didn't even remember his recovery question, and Steam wouldn't allow the info to be emailed to him. it was definitely stupid on my bro's part not to write down the info, but on the same token, who HASN'T forgotten their login info from time to time? essentially, he was banned from using his own game. he tried uninstalling it and reinstalling, but when he got to the screen asking for the product key, it already said that he did that in the past and "there was no need to enter it again." he even tried creating a NEW account for the game, but it wouldn't allow him to play left 4 dead cuz it wasn't on the new account. so, in the end, he couldn't play his own copy of the game. again, wtf?

I ended up doing a little research, going to different web sites and forums, and found out that Steam is essentially forcing people to use a "clean" network to stop pirating. A few people liked where the idea was going, but said that it was preventing people from doing typical things, such as lending a game to a friend (which is explicitly denied in the TERMS OF AGREEMENT; this is so fucking lame cuz now you can't sell a game once you buy it, lend it to a friend, give to someone as a gift, etc. all cuz you can't give people your old/current Steam account cuz it's fucking denied, and if you get caught you get banned), or creating multiple copies on different hard drives (what if you wanted to transfer the game directly via a jump drive? you can dl your game through Steam onto any PC, but then you have to worry about Steam itself on the computer). There are other problems with it too, such as people getting randomly banned cuz of glitch errors in the Valve Anti-Cheating system, people getting screwed out of their game cuz the server went down out of nowhere when they were entering the product key, and the fact that Steam is supposed to prevent cheating and viruses, but people can still get away with phishing someone's account and getting it irreversibly banned if the phisher cheats. while there are many good things i'm sure that come along with Steam, it just seems like there's too many pains in the ass to even get the benefits of crap-free multiplayer and an easy way to transfer and purchase new games, as well as the fact that there are the other everyday scenarios that occur that Steam just seems to throw out the window (like my internet connection right now, and my bro's password dilemma).

My question is, why the fuck is this thing so anal? I saw an article that blamed Steam for causing people to pirate games even more, and for the problems i can understand why. It's so stupid. I, and I'm sure many other people, just want to play the fucking game out of the box, worry about DLC and multiplayer later, and not have to worry about subscribing to some nazi-oriented online system, when things such as TCP/IP connection, LAN, and, more recently, third-party online networks such as Age of Empires 3 and ESO, worked just fine. and if we must subscribe to the PC equivalent of PSN or Xbox Live, why can't they make as convenient as those networks and offer benefits such as anti-hacking, anti-spyware, anti-phishing, etc? and shouldn't it let you play the goddamn game even if it's not up-to-date, updating it later once it's possible or up to the discretion of the user (who would be screwed out of further benefits at his/her own will)?

Too damn bad they canceled Toonami like a year ago. Not only did they have badass shows in the beginning, but the drum & bass songs they would play were pretty interesting. If you want to, just plug in "toonami" on playlist; not only will it bring back memories of the good ol' days, but the songs are also good for some inspiration. =) Just thought I'd share with anyone who cares.

Here's a few things I understand: This is not the first post ever in the history of NG that discusses the voting system. I did my homework and saw that there were over 100 threads in the forum that discussed 0-voting alone. EVERYBODY complains about it, and on the same token, it happens to EVERYONE, no matter what media or genre they submit to. A lotta people say "the voting system doesn't matter and those who care about just suck at life," but that's just a way to shut up the people who annoyingly complain and compile thread after thread about zero-voters because their grand opus didn't stay on top for more than 30 seconds. I think many agree that the voting system can be used as a method to gain advice, learn from mistakes, and improve the overall quality of everything that comes to this site, but the number itself, on the scale from 0 to 5, should also represent the quality of a piece of work. THAT's where most people get butt-sore over it: When their work is sitting at a 2.7 instead of a 4.5 because some random person that they don't even know comes by and gives it a low score because they're trying to gain experience and just haphazardly click (with the audio and art portals it's totally different, because there's absolutely no reason for the community to spend their time there, unless they need a song for their flash, in which case they just go to the top-scoring songs; nobody wants to scroll through 100 pages of crap just to find 1 song that might actually be epic but was voted on unfairly in the beginning, knocking the life out of it from the get-go). Just the fact that people have been complaining about this stuff for years on end tells me that there is a flaw in the system. I'd say before the decade's over, the people who run the site need to do something about it - in essence, a new beginning.

In my own opinion, the voting system just isn't fair. First, the fact that people can vote without reviewing tells me it's just a gimmick to rack up your experience points so that your vote is worth more. Second, the fact that voting is weighted based on how much you've voted in the past leaves the door wide open for bad behavior. It's extremely easy to get away with too because the only way you can flag people is if their work is dishonest and plagiarized; the system tried to implement protection for submitters, but it doesn't counteract the voting flaws whatsoever.

I think it's also interesting that a site dedicated to providing free media would base its system of giving an opinion on assumptions. They assume that people will be honest if they have a high voting privilege, but that's not necessarily true; people are still people. They assume that an item that is flagged by someone with "great experience" knows exactly what they're doing. They assume that high-level voters will vote for what they like, and that they control the site. Do you catch my drift? Dishonesty and anger is rampant throughout any online community (WoW, Facebook, Myspace and YouTube are all perfect excamples), but the assumptions and power that people can get on this site promote the bad behavior even further. In fact, I can almost guarantee that someone will bash this exact post that I'm putting up just because they can. It's utterly inevitable, and personally I don't mind. I just expect it because a good 50 to 60 percent of the people using this site don't give a shit about anything because they're bored and have nothing to do. They don't realize that this is a place to submit a work of art and gain an underground fanbase. A few great and popular things have come from this site that are now a part of everyday life after all, including Alien Hominid, ParagonX9, Madness, etc. Why should dishonest people hurt the honest ones who are trying to achieve a piece of fame?

I don't know what good it does explaining what could be done to cut down on the dishonesty, seeing as this post will be erased from the attention of the site in mere minutes, but something needs to be said. I would say instead of voting on a scale of 0 to 5, we could vote "Thumbs Up," "Thumbs Down," and "Thumbs Sideways," because you can only feel 1 of 3 different things when you vote for something: You either love it, hate it, or don't particularly care for it either way. The scale on the review is obsolete, because you could technically be dishonest there if you wanted, voting 10 on your review but 2 or 3 on the actual quality of the work. I don't know if this bugs many people, but when a song has, say, 10 votes but no one has reviewed it yet, or it has 30+ votes and only about 4 bothered to leave anything behind, tells me that people just piss their time away here; if a person wants to have an opinion on your work, they should be willing to leave a comment about it for your own betterment. Users should also have the ability to flag the dishonest people and get rewarded for it, which would force users to either leave a funny, helpful or critical comment - there is no reason to leave behind something stupid or retarded. In theory, the weighted voting makes perfect sense, even though there will be those people that naturally abuse it, but I think a shrunken scale would allow the honest ones to neutralize the negative effects better, especially with the threat of people who could catch you abusing. In essence, the better-quality stuff would have more thumbs up, while the lower-quality stuff would have more thumbs down.

The greatest flaw in the whole system is how fast new content cycles through the list. It makes sense that there are hundreds of submissions that come onto the site, but they only get a few minutes in the limelight. In order for new submissions to undergo a fairer process, they should be cycled through the registry for at least one day, and then voted on that way. The final score for the submission by the end of the day reflects its placement within the genre. This allows a submission to more easily be fairly judged.

Alright, that's pretty much it. I realize that any system is going to have its flaws because of dishonesty, but it's minimizing the potential for misconduct that's key. As of right now, the site allows for too much bad behavior.