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Sorry to get on here and word-vomit. Just feeling very lonely in general and also completely lost work-wise. I haven't dropped by in a while, hope everyone's hanging in there during the never-ending plague. Not sure how it is in other countries but where I'm located in the US so far 2021 is shaping up to be more or less 2020 part II. 🙄 

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41 minutes ago, Depraved said:

Sorry to get on here and word-vomit. Just feeling very lonely in general and also completely lost work-wise. I haven't dropped by in a while, hope everyone's hanging in there during the never-ending plague. Not sure how it is in other countries but where I'm located in the US so far 2021 is shaping up to be more or less 2020 part II. 🙄 

Well, word-vomiting is what these places are for, after all. I think the feeling of 2020ishness (which is now a word) is stronger right now because it's been a full year, so here we are, boom, March 375th. I hope things start feeling better for you once the weather picks up. I'm a little less worried about getting really sick again, now that we've gotten some natural immunity from our own bout with COVID, but the new variants sound worrisome. I'm looking forward to getting my jab...

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1 hour ago, FatherAlabaster said:

Well, word-vomiting is what these places are for, after all. I think the feeling of 2020ishness (which is now a word) is stronger right now because it's been a full year, so here we are, boom, March 375th. I hope things start feeling better for you once the weather picks up. I'm a little less worried about getting really sick again, now that we've gotten some natural immunity from our own bout with COVID, but the new variants sound worrisome. I'm looking forward to getting my jab...

Thanks. I've moved to a new town since I was around last and so far I'm hating it here despite being a lot closer to my family. Just feel like I'm wandering around aimlessly in life and building a bridge to nowhere. I've always felt that way, but I think COVID has made everything way more uncertain so every day I wake up I have no idea what I'm doing or what I should be working toward. I keep hoping maybe I'll feel different about it once the pandemic is over or at least a bit less indecisive, but I can't shake the feeling that everything seemed better where I was living before. Sort of in a situation now where the only options on the table all suck equally.  

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10 hours ago, Depraved said:

Thanks. I've moved to a new town since I was around last and so far I'm hating it here despite being a lot closer to my family. Just feel like I'm wandering around aimlessly in life and building a bridge to nowhere. I've always felt that way, but I think COVID has made everything way more uncertain so every day I wake up I have no idea what I'm doing or what I should be working toward. I keep hoping maybe I'll feel different about it once the pandemic is over or at least a bit less indecisive, but I can't shake the feeling that everything seemed better where I was living before. Sort of in a situation now where the only options on the table all suck equally.  

Moving's tough. I've been in New England for four and a half years now and I still feel out of place. The aimless feeling sounds familiar to me too, and the pandemic has definitely added an extra layer of difficulty on top of everything. I hope you can find something to feel connected to. Even with artwork and the bands and my family, I still struggle with that - I have to make a conscious effort to decide that whatever I'm working on has meaning, and sometimes that's just a bit too arbitrary and artificial-seeming for my taste. The only thing I can do is push through it.  Living in crisis mode sucks. Is it good to be close to your family? I miss my parents a lot, haven't gotten to see them in several years.

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5 hours ago, FatherAlabaster said:

Moving's tough. I've been in New England for four and a half years now and I still feel out of place. The aimless feeling sounds familiar to me too, and the pandemic has definitely added an extra layer of difficulty on top of everything. I hope you can find something to feel connected to. Even with artwork and the bands and my family, I still struggle with that - I have to make a conscious effort to decide that whatever I'm working on has meaning, and sometimes that's just a bit too arbitrary and artificial-seeming for my taste. The only thing I can do is push through it.  Living in crisis mode sucks. Is it good to be close to your family? I miss my parents a lot, haven't gotten to see them in several years.

It's better being closer to my family in the event of an emergency, instead of being in my old city where I had very few/no connections. That's the main reason I moved here. But otherwise I'm hating it and I don't see much reason to stay. My aunt and uncle and one of my cousins live 15 minutes away but they hardly ever talk to me or see me, which almost makes me feel even lonelier than where I was before. My mom lives an hour away but she's not very mobile and I don't have any expendable income right now to drive down to see her. We don't get along well anyway. She and her boyfriend are always fighting and I can only tolerate that for a couple of hours at a time.

I've been unemployed for almost a year because of the pandemic and finding it impossible to find work, not even a basic administrative/clerical job in an office somewhere. It doesn't help that I don't have much experience to begin with because I just graduated a few years ago and worked only one "real" job, which was in a niche industry gutted by COVID, during that time. I've tried exploring other industries where I could try to parlay my (worthless) education and (limited) skill set, and still no dice. Tried working with recruiters who were a waste of time. Can't even get a volunteer position because no one ever gets in touch with me after I submit an application and I can't get a hold of anyone when I call to ask about it. Unwilling to go back to school since I'm burnt out from undergrad/already drowning in debt and wouldn't even know what to go back for other than maybe a short certificate program of some sort. 

There are very few jobs here that aren't construction or manufacturing or retail/food service, especially now. I moved from a majority middle-class, very commercial, educated city of about 250,000 to a much poorer blue collar town of about 80,000. I've been here almost 6 months and still not used to the culture shock. The people are very different from what I'm used to. I hate to say it, but it's sort of a backwoods hick town. I've had to deal with so much ignorant narrow-minded bullshit in the short time I've been here it's all but turned me off the place completely. I've been seriously considering looking for an admin job at my old company, but I bet they'd find a bullshit reason not to hire me ("Oh, yes, you worked here for almost 3 years but you were doing a slightly different job in a different department and you don't have 75904739 years of experience as an admin assistant so fuck off"). Can't say I want to move back there anyway because I don't want to be all alone again (even though I'm still very alone here, at least I have relatives nearby even if I don't exist to them 99% of the time).

Just don't know what to do. I don't want to stay here but I don't want to move back either. Moving to some other location I've never been before is out of the question unless I can secure a job somewhere else, which is almost certainly not going to happen because no employer is going to look beyond a local pool of applicants for low-level admin work. Apparently I'm not qualified to do anything else - believe me, I've tried and got nothing but a slew of rejections - because there's no such thing as entry level work anymore. But it looks like I'm unqualified for basic admin work too. Probably can't get a job working food service at this point either because I haven't worked in a restaurant since 2015 and the last one I applied to I was told my restaurant experience wasn't recent enough and therefore I was unqualified. Which is fine with me, I don't feel like getting shot by some douche canoe who turns homicidal when asked to put on a mask.

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4 hours ago, Depraved said:

It's better being closer to my family in the event of an emergency, instead of being in my old city where I had very few/no connections. That's the main reason I moved here. But otherwise I'm hating it and I don't see much reason to stay. My aunt and uncle and one of my cousins live 15 minutes away but they hardly ever talk to me or see me, which almost makes me feel even lonelier than where I was before. My mom lives an hour away but she's not very mobile and I don't have any expendable income right now to drive down to see her. We don't get along well anyway. She and her boyfriend are always fighting and I can only tolerate that for a couple of hours at a time.

I've been unemployed for almost a year because of the pandemic and finding it impossible to find work, not even a basic administrative/clerical job in an office somewhere. It doesn't help that I don't have much experience to begin with because I just graduated a few years ago and worked only one "real" job, which was in a niche industry gutted by COVID, during that time. I've tried exploring other industries where I could try to parlay my (worthless) education and (limited) skill set, and still no dice. Tried working with recruiters who were a waste of time. Can't even get a volunteer position because no one ever gets in touch with me after I submit an application and I can't get a hold of anyone when I call to ask about it. Unwilling to go back to school since I'm burnt out from undergrad/already drowning in debt and wouldn't even know what to go back for other than maybe a short certificate program of some sort. 

There are very few jobs here that aren't construction or manufacturing or retail/food service, especially now. I moved from a majority middle-class, very commercial, educated city of about 250,000 to a much poorer blue collar town of about 80,000. I've been here almost 6 months and still not used to the culture shock. The people are very different from what I'm used to. I hate to say it, but it's sort of a backwoods hick town. I've had to deal with so much ignorant narrow-minded bullshit in the short time I've been here it's all but turned me off the place completely. I've been seriously considering looking for an admin job at my old company, but I bet they'd find a bullshit reason not to hire me ("Oh, yes, you worked here for almost 3 years but you were doing a slightly different job in a different department and you don't have 75904739 years of experience as an admin assistant so fuck off"). Can't say I want to move back there anyway because I don't want to be all alone again (even though I'm still very alone here, at least I have relatives nearby even if I don't exist to them 99% of the time).

Just don't know what to do. I don't want to stay here but I don't want to move back either. Moving to some other location I've never been before is out of the question unless I can secure a job somewhere else, which is almost certainly not going to happen because no employer is going to look beyond a local pool of applicants for low-level admin work. Apparently I'm not qualified to do anything else - believe me, I've tried and got nothing but a slew of rejections - because there's no such thing as entry level work anymore. But it looks like I'm unqualified for basic admin work too. Probably can't get a job working food service at this point either because I haven't worked in a restaurant since 2015 and the last one I applied to I was told my restaurant experience wasn't recent enough and therefore I was unqualified. Which is fine with me, I don't feel like getting shot by some douche canoe who turns homicidal when asked to put on a mask.

Well damn. I'm sorry to hear all of that. I really hope things start looking up for you. Best wishes.

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  • 5 weeks later...

Mixing and album artwork for one of my bands, another large sidewalk painting for a local business, a small illustration show, two album cover paintings for other bands who have become repeat customers, designing and getting some tattoo work finished up, and an upcoming trip to see my parents, finally, after having to cancel last year for obvious reasons. I thought I could cut back on my obligations to everyone else and focus on my own painting ideas for a while... Ha! Maybe next year.

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 4/10/2021 at 9:22 PM, FatherAlabaster said:

Mixing and album artwork for one of my bands, another large sidewalk painting for a local business, a small illustration show, two album cover paintings for other bands who have become repeat customers, designing and getting some tattoo work finished up, and an upcoming trip to see my parents, finally, after having to cancel last year for obvious reasons. I thought I could cut back on my obligations to everyone else and focus on my own painting ideas for a while... Ha! Maybe next year.

So are your art or bands publicly known here on the forum or would you rather stay anonymous? Just curios.

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1 hour ago, Sheol said:

So are your art or bands publicly known here on the forum or would you rather stay anonymous? Just curios.

I took most of my stuff down a while ago. Not really for anonymity's sake, I just suck at promoting myself and hate the process. Here's the thread I made for my artwork:

 

I care deeply about art but I have mixed feelings about most of what I've done. Proud of some of it in context, happy to have had the opportunities I had, but really unhappy with it overall and intensely frustrated I haven't done more. There are three or four paintings I think I got right, and the rest is firewood. I find myself wishing I'd stuck with some of the less gratifying and more confrontational art I tried when I was younger.

My two current metal projects are Black Harvest and In Human Form. I joined IHF after their latest album was recorded, so I'm not on the album, but I'm playing guitar on the live tracks. I also play bass in a mathcore/noise rock group called Heavy Meta, which I haven't shared here - that's the project I'm mixing and doing artwork for right now. The cover art came out pretty cool, I might post that when it's all done.

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Holy fucking shit man, that was great! I've actually seen several of your album covers; Marrowfields and Afterbirth specifically. "Victory" and "Justice" are both really evocative, feels like many of your images tell a story, a before and an after, if you know what I mean?

 

I understand the selfdoubt and not being satisfied with the end results, but if there's anything I've learned from my more talented artist-friends is that they're never fucking happy with anything, so you're not alone. But I also know that as a consumer I can derive great pleasure and satisfaction from something, even if the creator hates it :)

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28 minutes ago, Sheol said:

Holy fucking shit man, that was great! I've actually seen several of your album covers; Marrowfields and Afterbirth specifically. "Victory" and "Justice" are both really evocative, feels like many of your images tell a story, a before and an after, if you know what I mean?

 

I understand the selfdoubt and not being satisfied with the end results, but if there's anything I've learned from my more talented artist-friends is that they're never fucking happy with anything, so you're not alone. But I also know that as a consumer I can derive great pleasure and satisfaction from something, even if the creator hates it :)

Thank you man, I'm glad you get something out of the work, and I appreciate your comments. Self-doubt does seem to come with the territory. It gets crippling sometimes. I just hope I can do a good job on these next few projects quickly, so I can finally get started on some of my own ideas again. I've had some of them hanging around for years.

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1 hour ago, navybsn said:

Your art looks pretty fucking great to me.

Thank you, I appreciate you checking it out.

Next one up is a new piece for Rannoch - as much as I wish I could be doing my own stuff right now, they're always great to work for. Should be fun.

 

On my mind: about to take my son in for a dentist appointment. He flips the fuck out at the doctor and has to be physically restrained for his shots, so I'm really really hoping this doesn't turn into the massive clusterfuck I'm almost certain it'll be. And I've got my first COVID vaccine scheduled for tomorrow, yippee.

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Wow. You are exceptionally talented in technique and composition. Thematically this is obviously challenging stuff, not going to appeal to some. But holy sh*t...you are really good. Never doubt that. Get out there and self-promote man, the world needs all kinds of visionaries and you may be surprised by the demand. That's the only way to connect to people - you never know what your visions will mean to someone out there. You should receive things of value from the world in exchange, whether it be money or reputation...that's how you stay in balance. Don't just put everything out there and expect nothing in return. Will look for your tracks too. Man, all you truly talented people on these forums really humble us all! Thank you for doing what you do!

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Wait a sec, this Father Alabaster character is the same dude who did the cover art for the last Afterbirth album?!? Holy shit, then you must know Cody?! I've been posting with Cody for years! He's part of a 13 man text thread we have going all the time made up of various refugees from the old Amazon metal forum which closed down several years ago. We were having a convo last year sometime, guess it was right after 4DF came out about your art. We all asked him about it and he sent us to your website. Really cool stuff man, no shit. I really like that one, The Farmer. But those covers you did for Bethledeign, Black Harvest and Marrowfields are all fucking badass too. All of it's fantastic really, I'm very impressed.

Have you ever seen any of Cody's art? He's done some wild shit too, although I suppose now that he's a nurse and a family man as well as a progressive death metal guitarist he doesn't have as much time as he'd like to pursue his artwork.

CODY DRASSER Vomitous Mass ART ZINE | Crucial Blast

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7 hours ago, Hungarino said:

Wow. You are exceptionally talented in technique and composition. Thematically this is obviously challenging stuff, not going to appeal to some. But holy sh*t...you are really good. Never doubt that. Get out there and self-promote man, the world needs all kinds of visionaries and you may be surprised by the demand. That's the only way to connect to people - you never know what your visions will mean to someone out there. You should receive things of value from the world in exchange, whether it be money or reputation...that's how you stay in balance. Don't just put everything out there and expect nothing in return. Will look for your tracks too. Man, all you truly talented people on these forums really humble us all! Thank you for doing what you do!

 

52 minutes ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

Wait a sec, this Father Alabaster character is the same dude who did the cover art for the last Afterbirth album?!? Holy shit, then you must know Cody?! I've been posting with Cody for years! He's part of a 13 man text thread we have going all the time made up of various refugees from the old Amazon metal forum which closed down several years ago. We were having a convo last year sometime, guess it was right after 4DF came out about your art. We all asked him about it and he sent us to your website. Really cool stuff man, no shit. I really like that one, The Farmer. But those covers you did for Bethledeign, Black Harvest and Marrowfields are all fucking badass too. All of it's fantastic really, I'm very impressed.

Have you ever seen any of Cody's art? He's done some wild shit too, although I suppose now that he's a nurse and a family man as well as a progressive death metal guitarist he doesn't have as much time as he'd like to pursue his artwork.

CODY DRASSER Vomitous Mass ART ZINE | Crucial Blast

Thanks guys. I appreciate the positive feedback. :) I do indeed know Cody - we actually met through one of our old moderators on this forum, BlutAusNerd. I haven't met him in person but we've had lots of great conversations via text and email. He's an awesome guy and an awesome guitarist, and I'm sure he's an awesome dad, he seems totally in love with Ziggy. All as it should be. And his art rocks, too, his knowledge has made it a real pleasure to work on the Afterbirth covers. Even if I do wind up tearing my hair out at times. 

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2 hours ago, MacabreEternal said:

Day after the AstraZeneca vaccine and although I have mild aches I have had worse hangovers - still great excuse to stay in bed all day and do fug all.

That's a funny coincidence, I just had my first shot of Pfizer yesterday. I'm a bit worn out but surprisingly I don't feel like complete shit yet. Still waiting for the hammer to drop, fingers crossed it doesn't.

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16 minutes ago, FatherAlabaster said:

That's a funny coincidence, I just had my first shot of Pfizer yesterday. I'm a bit worn out but surprisingly I don't feel like complete shit yet. Still waiting for the hammer to drop, fingers crossed it doesn't.

The ache in the joints is the worst part for me.  Two paracetamol tablets have cleared that nicely but I feel heavy still despite a good 10 hours of sleep.  The fiancee was bad for two days after her first jab but her immune system is terrible normally anyway.  

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On 4/30/2021 at 10:00 PM, FatherAlabaster said:

 

Thanks guys. I appreciate the positive feedback. :) I do indeed know Cody - we actually met through one of our old moderators on this forum, BlutAusNerd. I haven't met him in person but we've had lots of great conversations via text and email. He's an awesome guy and an awesome guitarist, and I'm sure he's an awesome dad, he seems totally in love with Ziggy. All as it should be. And his art rocks, too, his knowledge has made it a real pleasure to work on the Afterbirth covers. Even if I do wind up tearing my hair out at times. 

I know Blut Aus Nerd irl as well but I know him as Jayke. I think he was 20 when I first started posting with him, 26 the first Time I met him in person at MDF and now he's a middle aged man of 33. He and his wife just had their third girl last year. Between work and his family and the band I guess that doesn't leave him much time for foruming. Funny he mentioned a few times in passing several years back that he was active on some metal forum and they'd made him a moderator and stuff but he never volunteered a name or a url or invited any of us to join him or anything. Now I've found my way here on my own but he's long gone. 

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6 minutes ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

I know Blut Aus Nerd irl as well but I know him as Jayke. I think he was 20 when I first started posting with him, 26 the first Time I met him in person at MDF and now he's a middle aged man of 33. He and his wife just had their third girl last year. Between work and his family and the band I guess that doesn't leave him much time for foruming. Funny he mentioned a few times in passing several years back that he was active on some metal forum and they'd made him a moderator and stuff but he never volunteered a name or a url or invited any of us to join him or anything. Now I've found my way here on my own but he's long gone. 

I miss BAN.  I think FatherA keeps in touch with him still but he is much missed on this board with his seemingly bottomless well of knowledge on metal.

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1 hour ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

I know Blut Aus Nerd irl as well but I know him as Jayke. I think he was 20 when I first started posting with him, 26 the first Time I met him in person at MDF and now he's a middle aged man of 33. He and his wife just had their third girl last year. Between work and his family and the band I guess that doesn't leave him much time for foruming. Funny he mentioned a few times in passing several years back that he was active on some metal forum and they'd made him a moderator and stuff but he never volunteered a name or a url or invited any of us to join him or anything. Now I've found my way here on my own but he's long gone. 

Yeah, I miss having him around. There are quite a few people I wish were still here but BAN being absent is a real loss to the forum. We stay in touch. I actually mentioned you guys joining up last time I texted with him, and he said he was tempted to come back, so who knows?

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