Final Entry

Today's my next birthday, and also the last day I update this blog. This surely will be disappointing news for my few loyal readers, but a great relief for me, since running this blog takes too much time and effort without giving much in return. The era of music blogs is clearly over, since you can find almost everything on Youtube and/or Bandcamp nowadays. Moreover, the subcultures from the time I started this blog (2009) are mostly dead by now (and the modern "doomers", whom I can somewhat relate to, still aren't a worthy replacement), so there's not much audience for the stuff I post. Not to mention I'm listening to much less music nowadays than I did a decade ago...

That said, I've found a few great people (including musicians) due to my blog, and I hope my posts will be useful to at least someone in the future, while I move on to new things in life. I had rather serious issues with depression (F32.1) and social anxiety through nearly all my life, which shouldn't surprise my readers, considering what kind of music I mostly post on here. When it got especially bad in late 2016, I finally made a lot of effort to get rid of it, and while I still have a lot of stuff to fix, I feel significantly better about my life by now, and still hoping for doing something really great in my lifetime. These days I'm mostly active on Instagram where I post travel-related stuff, and I'm thinking about starting a popular science blog in the future (not sure in which language and on which platform, though). Anyway, if you don't want to lose contact with me, you can always write me using the contact form. Birthday greetings are welcome, as well as wishes for luck with my homework on the AI/neural networks design, which I'm doing right now.

P.S. For those who are celebrating Christmas, here's a "heavy" cover of a classic Elvis Presley song by the beautiful and talented Daria Zaritskaya (in collaboration with Halocene). While I'm not a big fan of such "bluesy" stuff, Daria surely can sing well, and she knows that today is my birthday too :) Isn't it a great feeling when you open your social media feed on your birthday, and see everyone celebrating and greeting each other? And as far as my tastes go, a music video with Daria wearing a short red dress and high heels is an excellent birthday gift for me:

Happy New Year 2019!

Happy new 2019 year to all my readers! I didn't listen to that much music in 2018 and haven't wrote that many reviews because I had a lot of other stuff going on in my life, but I hope you still enjoy reading my blog. 2018 was a relatively good year for me compared to the previous few years, and hopefully 2019 would be even better.

I have several insteresting projects to work on in the coming year, some of which probably would be announced here shortly. Wish me luck! And now, have a Christmas/New Year photo of the beautiful and talented Justine Daaé, the vocalist of Elyose:

Happy New Year!

One more year has passed, and I still have no idea why I continue to waste my time on a blog that has nearly no readers. Anyway, a little practice in English won't hurt, and arguably the best way of doing it is writing about something you're genuinely interested in (music, in my case).

It isn't in my habit to post "best of the X year" album lists, so I'll just make a wish that the coming year will be better than the passing one for everyone who reads my blog - and for me, of course. The second half of 2015 was pretty bad for me, and while I don't have much hopes for 2016 either, the life still goes on. Right now I'm playing WoW (without much enthusiasm, though) and wait for the new year to come...

A brief update

For those who wonder why there weren't any updates for last two months: I've lost ~300 Gb of music (including some quite rare stuff) due to a hard drive failure. After several unsuccessful attempts to repair it by myself, I decided to find a specialist, which turned out to be easier said than done (almost no local repair shops work with HDDs).

When I finally managed to find one, he said it's going to be quite expensive, and the success isn't guaranteed at all. Not the most pleasant situation, to put it mildly. And even if the music would be recovered, I'll probably continue blogging mostly on review-only basis, without unauthorized download links (maybe with some exceptions for really rare and obscure stuff).

Domain name change

As you should have noticed, I finally decided to use my .net domain for this blog. At first I planned to use it for a Wordpress-based mirror of all entries from here, but it turned out that a free blogging platform (Blogger) is more convenient to use than Wordpress on a paid server.

The process of domain change turned out to be a hassle, with unexpected problems appearing at nearly every step, but hopefully everything works OK by now. I'll work a bit on improving the blog design and description in the next few weeks; hope I'll have some free time to write several new reviews as well.

☆

Not so long ago, BreadGod has made some good points on how small music blogs cannot compete anymore with the big portals like metalarea.org or dark-world.ru, especially when the bands themselves are joining Bandcamp in droves, and dealing with the DMCA warnings is becoming harder and harder (especially if they come for the least expected reasons - a DMCA warning for Iszonyat's demo, seriously?). My blog has a mission statement that's quite similar to his one, and I also was downloading a lot of music from DC++ before discovering music blogs, so I can relate to a lot of things he's writing about.

Right now I'm working on setting up a Wordpress-based mirror of this blog on a professional hosting platform, but frankly I don't feel like I'm going to put any significant amount of work into it in the future. There are other options to improve my English skills, and there are better ways to spend my free time that writing reviews of (mostly) very obscure music and visual arts for a blog with hardly any readers. Maybe I'll still continue doing it, but my blog is going to be purely review-based (no download links, unless they're explicitly approved by the band members themselves).

By the way, today's my birthday. Greetings are welcome, of course, even if they're going to be a bit belated.

2014

2013 was a pretty bad year for me and most people around me, so I'm happy it's finally over, and can only hope that the next year would be better. I also turned 27 y.o. a week ago; of course you can congratulate me with that too, if you want. As for this blog, I actually don't have much interest in continuing it, but I see I have some regular readers, so I'll try to post new reviews at least from time to time. Happy 2014 for everyone!

My last post in this year

Happy 2012 year to everyone reading my blog! Hope I'll get some more readers in the next year, so i'd know that my work isn't in vain. As of today, I'm keeping this blog up just to share some rare music and to improve my English skills. I don't really have much time to update it on regular basis, but I still hope it'd be useful to someone. Stay tuned!

My 25th anniversary

From today I'm 25 years old ;) Feel free to greet me!

To start once again...

As you might have noticed, I completely forgot about this blog, because only a very few people read it, and I had no time not only for this blog, but for my Russian-language blog too. But now I know what I'll post here: rare music, which is hard to find on other music blogs (I have lots of such music!). Of course, I'll post not only rare releases, but any music which I like and want to share with you, regardless of genre. Most of music which I plan to post here, is distributed freely, so I hope I won't ever get in trouble with copyright violations...

Well, let's begin! Maybe I'll post not only music, but also videos, pics, links to interesting sites... and my thoughts on various subjects - culture, politics, religion, science/technology, mental health issues, etc... Stay tuned!

Forewords

So, here I am, and it's my new blog. Hope you like it.

My English is far from perfect, but at least I'll try my best. I also know a little German and Hungarian, but I doubt if I can speak these languages any good. My dream is to know every language of the world, but of course it's impossible...