The Tale of a Graffiti Artist Sticker

Since I haven't given myself the chance to talk about my personal life outside of content creation and convention trips in a long while, I thought I'd expand out a bit and try writing about something that I found in a town that's just south of my home, and well, something that spans several years of mystery.

Years ago, along a road close to my home in the middle of a big expansion, there was an old, condemned building with white paint that was a popular target for graffiti artists to express themselves. At one point, a particular piece of graffiti would decorate the front of this small building: a bust of cartoon character in a flashy suit with large eyes and an afro. It would be soon painted over and before you know it, the building would be demolished. Even with the building gone, I would proceed to see the graffiti one, maybe two other time(s) in the local area, all before it would seemingly vanish from my eyes for the next few years.

That was, until that same graffiti popped up once more, this time as a two-tone black and yellow sticker on the back of a sign on the sidewalk. The graffiti I had seen all these years ago was now joined by a figure in a suit of some kind, sporting a smooth, clean-cut black afro reclining on a chair with a yellow suit of sorts. Unable to resist the urge, I snapped the sticker with a camera to replicate the exact definitions of the original image, though as someone that prefers to keep something of a low profile when it comes to public sightings and occurrences like these, I do not wish to post the sticker on this blog nor investigate it (and the graffiti itself) further, especially in the chance the image spreads out even further than the scopes of this blog.

So with that said, you may be wondering, what drove me to make this blog post in the first place? Well, as an artist, I've always had some form of appreciation towards graffiti, even if I would never stoop to doing it as a form of vandalization. Plus, I've always been pretty big into Jet Set Radio (along with its spiritual successor Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, despite not having purchased it yet as of this writing) for its artstyle, attitude, and the creative gameplay and spectacle featured within, and similarly latched onto The World Ends with You dualogy, which also heavily freatures graffiti. It's just, no other piece of graffiti has ever captured my attention to such an extent by featuring an recurring character of sorts, and then attaching said character to an otherwise unknown person. It's something I'd love to research and find more detail on, but again, I want to keep myself and everyone else safe, especially as someone that enjoys graffiti as an art form and a sign of expressing one's creativity, but not as an act of vandalism.

And that 's all I got for now, I wanted to get this out before the month ends as it's the first time this blog has received an article on Leap Day... To think these only happen every four years, and I'll admit, I was caught off guard earlier this morning when the day first came to be. As for what will be next for the blog, things should slowly begin to get more productive around here, now that March is here and I spent too much time this Winter R&R'ing instead of furthering my own projects. Who knows, maybe I'll follow my own promises and goals from last year and go create something?

Naughty Ones (Commodore Amiga) Soundtrack

Well I couldn't figure out something to post last month so to kick off February I'm posting another game soundtrack that, to my knowledge, has not received a modern rip: A little-known Commodore Amiga game that goes by the name "Naughty Ones".

Released on both the Amiga and it's console counterpart, the Amiga CD32, Naughty Ones is what happens when a group of people decide to make an elimination platformer that bucks some of the trends of the subgenre birthed by the runaway success of Taito's Bubble Bobble. You move John (and Jim in two player mode) from room to room, chucking destructive rubber balls at whatever enemies came up in the minds of the developers in order to escape the surreal reality the heroes have been trapped in.

(...Can conform, rubber balls are really destructive)

You all probably recognize the game from the Angry Video Game Nerd's episode on the Amiga CD32, which was how I myself came across the title years ago. It drove me to break out the Amiga emulator and try the game for myself. It manages to dodge the "europlatformer" trope common in Amiga games where they pad out the gameplay with collectathon elements since the worst it gets is having to find a single key to reach the end instead of dropping you inside a huge maze and tasking you with grabbing every single last thing in the level.

While based on existing soundtrack rips, said rips either combine all the songs into one video (i.e. Youtube uploads) or are simply the raw audio files extracted from the game, including the level intros in the same audio files as their parent level. This rip takes the audio files, separates the intros into their own audio tracks, and converts everything into more universal mp3 files. For the audio tracks that were already separate, they were simply copied over and converted with no further alterations. Thus, I cannot claim full credit for this rip, just the part of making it easier to listen to individual tracks in the soundtrack. 

You can download the full set of songs here. I am uncertain on if and when I'll decide to create another soundtrack rip, but the next one that gets posted here will (hopefully) have more effort put behind it on my part aside from just "throw into foobar2000 and press convert". As for what else is in store, that is on my terms to figure out.