Chris Grigg
@subvertallmedia
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Building . “Friendly” code opinions. Benevolent dictator @ Woe. Drums @oceanofscabs . Father to a small human.
NYC
Joined June 2010
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I was going to wait to share this but the recent Bandcamp news added some urgency, so let's do it now. For the past year, I've been building , which I plan on positioning as an alternative to Bandcamp. This is my first time publicly talking about it. 🧵
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This is a bad take. We’re not leaving behind “gatekeepers” or reliance on critics, we’re moving from a world of diverse voices — some more prominent than others — sharing their love for art to a corporate-algorithm-controlled, streaming volume stats-obsessed art desert.
The death of music journalism is kinda odd to me but also makes sense as a byproduct of streaming platforms; wider access to music means people don’t need to rely on critics, gatekeepers as much to pre-vet for them what’s good and what isn’t
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My five-year-old told me she wants to be a rock star who plays monster music (death/black metal) when she grows up. “I want a red guitar shaped like lightning. And it will sound like lightning when I play it.”
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Ampwall now has a streaming audio player, basic album pages, digital audio purchase, and downloads tagging along with merch items! 🎉 They're all alpha proof of concept versions but it's a major milestone as we move towards public signups. More in 🧵
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Know what I miss? The Official Band Website. The heavily customized and fucked up MySpace page. The Geocities page. The official forum. The newsletter. We gained a lot from social media and centralized content — ease of setup, discoverability — but lost personality and ownership.
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My wife gave birth to our second daughter early morning Father’s Day, 6/16. Our little girl is perfect and amazing, my wife is heroic.
In light of added parental responsibilities, I’ve given a lot of thought about my commitments, especially in regard to music, and have decided
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My daughter drew me with a pointy guitar on a stage with flames and spiders for my birthday. All other gifts suck so don’t bother.
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I really dislike Discord and do not understand its popularity. Its cluttered and confusing UI is an ADD nightmare, like some chaotic video game that’s nonstop shit exploding and demanding attention all over the screen. It’s exhausting. Am I just old?
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I've been hearing from people nonstop for the last 24 hours about . It's wild. Thank you to everyone who's reached out and signed up for the mailing list. We're charging ahead on some milestones and I plan on sharing updates soon.
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@Austen
This was a big part of the plot. It’s the reason why the burglars are so fixated on the house. They don’t use the word “rich” but it’s clear that it stands out as the best value of all their potential targets.
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@TheUnshored
My old old old band tried to get him to do our album artwork and couldn’t find contact info.
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I wore a scarf in this Woe picture back in 2011 specifically because I knew black metal fans would piss their diapers. I was right. Easily baited spectators. Most of the people with opinions about it back then are now attending indie rock shows exclusively.
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Saw a thing including Krallice in a list of “hipster” bands. This is funny because anyone who knows any member of Krallice knows that these guys are some of the most genuine, “fuck trends”, legit metal people doing it. They also happen to be boundary pushing music freaks.
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to change absolutely fucking nothing!!!! My daughters will grow up seeing that being a parent does not mean you give up your identity or your art!
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One of my favorite Ampwall features is this little button that lets a buyer cover the small transaction fee that Ampwall draws from the sale. I pulled some data and found this gets clicked 75% of the time! That's huge!
This turns every day into BC Friday for Ampwall artists.
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My daughter (age 5) likes to draw monster pictures for me because I like “monster music”, also called “bad guy music”. Here’s one from this morning that I particularly appreciate.
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I just finished hacking in some basic page color customization features for Ampwall. This was an easy one, a couple of hours of work, and it's not the most exciting thing but obviously crucial for getting people who aren't of the kvlt persuasion.
Below: a hideous example.
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So much Ampwall work happening.
Right now, I'm tightening up account creation process as well as album, merch, and track administration. I'm laying the groundwork to elegantly support splits and comps. The payment side of this is tricky but we can at least connect all the pages.
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My daughter told me that a high-production modern black metal band was "a little boring" and asked me to turn Blasphemy back on. She's five years old and she knows. I've never been more proud.
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She came home from school with this in her bag for me
My five-year-old told me she wants to be a rock star who plays monster music (death/black metal) when she grows up. “I want a red guitar shaped like lightning. And it will sound like lightning when I play it.”
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Hackin' away on Ampwall digital audio today. I've got upload, list, price, on-page player, purchase, and download in different formats working. It's not pretty yet but it always starts with crude placeholders to prove a concept.
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Ampwall's incoming email queue is getting so intense that I setup a shared box for me and my new co-founder to monitor together so I don't become a bottleneck: hails
@ampwall
.com. He thought of it and I'm so pleased but also a little disappointed I didn't think of it myself.
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I just finished listening to my new album through its Ampwall stream for the first time. Didn't mean to, I was just checking something on the page and left it open. Feels good, man.
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Extremely fucked. This reads to me as current BC leadership completely misunderstanding the role their editorial team plays in maintaining the product's cultural edge.
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Stoked to have control of
@ampwall
now! used to be a reddit-style music site. I got in touch with the old developer, extremely cool guy, and he's helping me get into these accounts he setup. It's not top priority but i want to have them to avoid confusion.
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The gatekeepers and critics are now algorithms and playlist editorial staff. They are social media trends. They are engines driving the movement of money. They are centralized around the whims of a few corporations whose priorities could not be more alien to artists who create.
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@CPTMoorgan
We both lived through the frustrating hell of 1-2 “Democrats” torpedoing attempts to do just about anything, right? Were you there for that or was that Biden’s fault too?
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Alriiiight... Another small milestone hit: multi-origin merch orders. Ampwall supports calculated shipping costs based on content, origin, and destination. Now it will get as many quotes as needed for the order. It was a lot of work for a small change that most people won't see.
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The lack of options for sharing and selling independent music, merchandise, and art bothers me. Most of the big options out there are owned by major corporations: Spotify, Apple, Google, Tidal (Square), etc,... Bandcamp were the outlier until Epic acquired them.
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Damn, even Satyricon is getting into this AI art thing
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Quick little Ampwall dev update. TBH, I haven't exactly been avoiding these but I haven't been eager, something something attention economy end-of-year lists burnout... The big news: I see no technical reason why we can't start tests with more users. So that's what we're doing.
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Woe recovered the rights to “Quietly, Undramatically” and “Withdrawal” from Candlelight/Spinefarm/Universal. I finally finished a remix of QU that I’m truly happy with. I’m not sure what we’ll do with it but I’m glad I can decide.
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This is cool. Stripe texted me to inform me of my first Woe payout from Ampwall. That’s some test sales and first couple customers. Feels good.
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Just got back from partial Woe rehearsal. We sound fucking ferocious. Can’t wait to finally get together with our new drummer in a couple weeks and dial it in for this Europe run.
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I feel less angry about Spotify's per-stream economics when I think of it as a promotional tool. While I can't prove that it's any better or worse for bands like mine than torrents/blogs/etc, I do get some amount of data, which I enjoy seeing as a person who just likes metrics.
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Yesterday, we debuted Ampwall's new look. We redesigned and rebuilt artist profiles, albums, and merch. Seen here is the page for Get Well (
@getxwell
), a noisy hardcore band from Philly, who've been helping us test.
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Those first 999 plays pay around $2-3. Spotify’s economics are built for the music industry and megastars. The new pricing is a reminder of this, nothing changes. The best way to support artists is by buying direct.
Confirmed: From 2024, tracks on Spotify will have to be played 1,000 times before they start earning money
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Video from Woe’s first full band rehearsal in damn near two years. “Scavenger Prophets” with vocals for the first time ever. First rehearsal with
@jsmckinney
on bass!
Feels good.
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Built a little microblog/news feature for Ampwall last night. It’s simple but cool, supports links and formatting w/Markdown. The day before that, I slapped together a little Artist Bio feature. Lots of tweaks, fixes. We’re inviting in more users every week. Constant progress.
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Industries I hope to see ended in my lifetime:
* Payday loans
* For-profit prisons
* Manufacturing and distributing the glitter used on children’s Halloween and dress-up costumes
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People who don’t get attached to any possessions… what the fuck? I have 1000+ comic books here plus boxes and boxes and boxes of CDs. They’ve been in a closet collecting dust for more than a decade. The thought of throwing them out makes me sick. The fuck is that about?
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Yesterday I posted about color customizations on Ampwall pages. One detail that I think is cool: text color adapts to background to ensure high contrast. Seen below, some quirks to work out with the banner (which I'm frankly not convinced we need anyway).
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The news that Bandcamp was being sold (again) makes it clear that we need more options. Independent art and music cannot and should not exist based on the whims of executives who are so far removed from the folks who depend on their products.
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Cassette tape cult. Never thought I’d come around but there’s too much music that only exists on tape and YouTube: the corniest way to stream music. So here we are.
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My father (age 86) is moving into a home. Today I’m going through drawers and filing cabinets. Almost everything gets thrown away. I keep finding old old handwritten notes from my mom who’s been gone 10 years. The history of their adult lives. It’s really rough.
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@bigcartel
are still independent. From what I can tell they're one of the most ethical out there. Tons of respect. But they don't do digital audio, don't focus on music. So they're not an equal alternative.
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Shit! They’re onto me!
What if Ampwall was just an elaborate psyop to get people to listen to Woe
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“AI is theft!” shouts man whose career is built from rewriting Bolt Thrower riffs
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This was such a productive week for Ampwall product development! In addition to page customizations, I hit some serious milestones on the path towards Labels and the larger group of features that'll power them. I can't wait to share the details in the next few weeks.
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Say what you want about Pitchfork, as they’d certainly say what they want about you if they felt the need, but its unceremonious demise through corporate greed is another symptom of the devaluation of music, its role shifting from art to commodified art to pure commodity.
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Writing a DSBM album about buying a huge pack of the thinnest weakest toilet paper ever made
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My father is in the hospital. I sat in the ER with him for 8 hours today. Things are stable. It is not a good situation but he’s being looked after and we are adapting. I spent the day on the internet trying to stay occupied. I feel quite numb, it’ll hit me later.
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One of Ampwall’s most requested features (other than a public signup page 😐) entered testing tonight. I’m so fucking stoked. I’m not ready to talk about it but it rhymes with “tree hoarders” and I can’t wait to show it off.
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Woe's "Legacies of Frailty" is out today. Check it out. Thanks for all the support so far.
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Now that we have a decent number of users on Ampwall, I finally put together a Search feature! You can search by artist name but also genre, tagline, and location. Genre is the most interesting for discovering new music.
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Why should MASSIVE corporations have a monopoly on DIY music sale and promotion? I saw a Tweet yesterday calling Bandcamp an "existential cornerstone of DIY music." Until yesterday owned by a corp with a $32 BILLION market cap in 2022.
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I just merged a gigantic update to Ampwall that migrates the platform to a new Component Library and theme built with React Aria and
@panda__css
. It was a ton of work that mostly looks like... a color palette shift, new buttons, new form fields. It's a lot more. 🧵
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Big Ampwall week 🎉 User testing is officially live and we have users who don't have emails! Bands that I'm not in!
I spent the week making adjustments to the registration, onboarding, and artist creation + administration pages based on their feedback.
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While most of the folks I interact with here know me as a musician, I am by profession a software engineer. In particular, I build and work on web products. I am especially proud of my work with small startups. I was the first engineer at
@ProteusMotion
, I worked at
@jukely
,
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The company is registered as a Public Benefit Company in Delaware. Being a PBC means that it's for-profit but the company is obligated to prioritize a benefit to society alongside profit. I expect this to attract like-minded partners and codify our commitment to the arts.
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Wife went out of town. Kid's asleep. Time to drink some whiskey, watch a bad movie, fucking chill!
Jk I worked on Ampwall for 4 hours nonstop. I found and fixed some obscure and fun bugs. It is now 12:30 AM. I'm tired and hungry and I don't think I'll ever see Morbius.
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Ampwall can now do bulk uploads of albums. It's funny that *some other platforms* 🤨 treat this as a premium feature. It's less "power user thing" and more "don't be a dick, respect my time" thing.
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Damn am I ever proud of this album. I've been working on tabs to ease rehearsal and fell back in love. It's rare that I can put on something I wrote and recorded 1+ years ago and still love it. I don't know if I can ever top this one.
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@adidasoriginals
you guys should be embarrassed. This app is the buggiest thing I have ever seen released by a company of your size.
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Hot damn Ampwall pages look so good so easily. Look at this 👇
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We’ve been working with a small group of users to test and refine Ampwall’s UI. One of those users, from the and Witnesses, uploaded the majority of their discography and it’s now for sale, making it the second artist to launch on the platform. Link below 👇
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Ampwall now supports selling from international currencies! We also added a new Artist Setup experience, tightened up our global navigation, and improved the display of long song names. I want public signup to begin before the end of August.
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I know that music Twitter is mostly for arguing about black metal but hear me out: the drum sound on Sunny Day Real Estate's "How It Feels To Be Something On" doesn't get enough love. The moments where it chills out and you can hear the room sound are incredible.
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This is fucking awesome. MAGA restaurants should open with no health inspectors. Get rid of soap in bathrooms and those bossy “employees must wash hands” rules, too. Bring back indoor smoking. FORCE children to drink beer so we know they’re not feds. FREEDOM.
This is the face of a scumbag. She ruined breakfast this morning at a Boston Diner to do an unannounced health inspection.
The immigrant family running the place had to stop to accompany this psycho. Don’t give me the she’s just doing her job line. She’s what is wrong with
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I took my daughter (who’s turning 5 in two weeks!) to see Sonja tonight. She wore her Iron Maiden shirt and Glorious Depravity sweats — she was so proud of her outfit. It was great. She asked me to put their album on as soon as we got in the car so I think it made an impression.
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I'm going to take a break from this app.
Follow
@ampwall
. We'll post from there more. We're building a better competitor to Bandcamp. Public signup starting up soon.
DM or email if you need me.
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@LibsSuckaBigOne
Most of these look like normal people working hard, selling food to provide for their families with businesses they operate themselves. That’s as American as it gets. Maybe you just don’t like America or working class people?
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If you're subscribed to Ampwall's mailing list, you should have received an email with a survey for artists and labels. If you can take a few minutes to fill it out, we'd appreciate it! We're using this in part to find partners for our testing rounds.
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Public signups won't start for a while but I've had a lot of conversations with friends and their friends and some of their friends, too. You can sign up for the mailing list at or reach out if you want to talk, of course.
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Big day of Ampwall updates as we get close to opening:
* Added the ability for logged in users to Follow artists (expanding this to anonymous users ASAP)
* Every artist, album, merge page now has a "Share" button that gives an easy click-to-copy link and a QR code
(More below)
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Vader were so preposterously good last night! They're a legendary band but they deserve even more attention than they get.
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I was reminded that announcing an announcement is corny so I deleted it and hereby denounce my announcement of a pending announcement.
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My longtime therapist asked, “Chris, when are you going to give up this music nonsense?”
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How’s your day going? Mine started with my five-year-old patting my stomach and asking it, “Little baby, when are you going to come out?” I’m feeling confident.
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Glorious Steakpravity: the Glorious Depravity steak dinner
Guess how many times we were asked if we’re rock stars
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Thank you to everyone who reached out about my dad after my post the other night. I’m pleased to say he’s stabilized, though still really weak and fucked up from days in the hospital at age 86. We think he’ll be released this week and then we’re changing his living situation.
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Even before the most recent Epic/Bandcamp craziness was announced, the lack of options in the market bothered me.
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Beyond that, even if Bandcamp were still wholly independent, options are important. I think someone with a different perspective and more closely connected to DIY music can offer a valuable alternative. What I'm building has features I've always wanted from BC. I am my own user.
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and for the past ~20 months I was a staff engineer at
@shippo
. I like building products that help people, collaborating with folks, and solving tough problems. I even built a pay-what-you-want service to sell Woe's first album in 2007, before Bandcamp!
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Woe in Europe and UK, Oct 8 through 18. This was booked by our new friend Jake from Mythology Agency and the UK portion with be alongside Sidious. The poster was done by Mike from Envoy of Death Design. We are beyond stoked, or, “chuffed” as I guess they say.
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I know John Longstreth is human but I’m also not totally sure
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I visited my dad last night. A notification about this came in right before I left so we watched it together. He's in his 80s, a retired jazz musician and composer, and he's been a huge supporter of my music even if he doesn't get it. This brought him real joy. You should watch.
🦫 NEW REVIEW 🦫
I gave my thoughts on the latest from Woe, "Legacies of Frailty"!
Sprawling and cinematic melodic black metal out of Brooklyn, New York!
WATCH HERE:
#blackmetal
#metal
#Reviews
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Had a dream last night that I went to see a legendary war metal band perform. Main dude was this gigantic powerlifter looking beast. Then he got on stage in a diaper and stomped around doing a baby voice, “BABY NEEDS BOTTLE” in between playing hateful ignorant noise.
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Propelled by furious negative energy, I must remind you of this album's unholy power as you consider your year-end lists. Hails and thanks.
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SO FUCKING PROUD OF and EXCITED FOR my friends in SONJA 🖤
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I finished Ampwall's 2023 by doing some unsexy work that I fucking love: integration tests to provide more safety for some of the complex database work happening in the server. This gave me the safety new to (FINALLY!) allow cart content updates from the checkout pages. Nerd 🧵
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That's all I got for now. Announcing something before it's ready strikes me as jumping the gun so I don't blame anyone who looks at what's up there now and isn't impressed. But I hope you'll follow along and give me some time to show what we've been cooking up.
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Looong interview here that is ostensibly about Woe but we mostly discuss the what and why of Ampwall. It was a pleasure talking, thank you for the time and opportunity
@INecrosphere
!
Chris Grigg of Woe joins me this week to talk about “Legacies Of Frailty”, how he discovered heavy metal and Ampwall - his soon-to-be launched Bandcamp alternative focused on independent artists.
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@REALSONICDANGER
Actual nazi music from an actual nazi who’s been making worthless music that’s also racist for like 10+ years. There’s nothing to see, bad art, bad ideas, not worth space on your or my timeline.
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Ampwall has a big mailing list for pre-release platform with no marketing presence. Cool but I hate newsletter spam so I try to avoid using it. Still, we're doing so much cool work that it's a shame not to share. So I sent out a message. Link in my reply 👇
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Good news: vinyl arrived
Bad news: vinyl arrived and I have to pack them
Please buy Woe records to get the remainder out of my apartment.
- the band gets more $ here (plz send feedback!)
- the classic
Thank you 🙏
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So that brings us to Ampwall. I built nights and weekends for the last year, taking some time off to finish Woe 5. I've been doing it full-time since the start of September. My wife (also a software eng) has been contributing at night and we have some design help from a friend.
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