Things are continuing to continue. VoidDweller's Big Old God Damn Christmas List released a couple days ago alongside a rerelease of the rest of my christmas songs from the past like 7 or 8 years or whatever. As far as strictly music updates, I'm working on a new full length record that may be a 2025 release or may be pushed back to 2026 so I can do a proper album rollout and hopefully tour on it a little bit. I have ideas for a couple of music videos for things and would like to get the merch and Business Product aspect of it completely squared away before I blast it to the public, although I am certain I will end up posting a zip of the record in my discord server early as soon as it is done because sitting on finished music sucks. I will definitely have some sort of something to put out in 2025, it just may not be the full length in question. It's very punk influenced and hella fast but with enough weird bells and whistles and shit to be interesting. Instrumentals are like 85% written, minus some tweaking and maybe one or two new ones at the end to finish it up. I've got a split done and ready to go once the other artist and I get everything squared away. I'm also trying to play as many shows in the Pittsburgh area as possible and hoping to maybe do a small tour or a couple weekenders over the summer depending on transportation and employment logistics. Got a lot of ideas for a lot of other music projects & like future albums and things I'd like to do also.
Being back in the workforce again has been nice for stability reasons and to help fund some of these endeavors but I am going to have to get much more disciplined and mindful about how I spend my free time. To that end lately I've been experimenting with cutting out social media and mindless youtube consumption. I had a really solid streak of replacing watching youtube with Law And Order SVU but I've now finished that entire 25 season 480ish hour show, and have been fucking off putting new videos onto my phone so I've fallen back into the Content hole for the moment. The switch admittedly makes zero sense on paper but I feel like at least if I'm working through tv shows instead of random youtube stuff at the end I can say that I've watched all of a show rather than just that i've spent 500 hours on youtube watching junk. The shows are junk too but it feels more honest or something to me. It's idiosyncratic and hard to explain. Being off of social media has been nice to free up like mental bandwidth to think about actually important stuff but it has left me feeling a little isolated as of late. I blame a bit of that on seasonal depression as well, but it is interesting to me how much shit on youtube or twitter or whatever I considered important or that i wanted to see at the time that I just haven't thought about at all for weeks. I think the plan is to eventually delete Instagram and twitter completely, although I hesitate to do that as I keep telling myself they're good marketing tools, but recent experience has demonstrated that that argument too is total bullshit.
The numbers don't lie, and they spell disaster for my spare time on these platforms. And then you add bsky to the mix? Your chances of being productive drastic go down. I like the culture on the butterfly app a little bit more even if it's kind of aggressively millennial, but I'm just not trying to put in the work to make good Posts so I will do better on the Posts website. I'll pull myself back from going farther down this tangent as I am planning on writing a song about it for the (probably) next full length I was talking about earlier, but I mostly bring all that up to say that I'm planning on implementing some sort of email / sms / physical address collection system on the website (http://voiddweller.xyz) soon prior to the social media deletion. This Substack is not long for this world either. Ideally I will just host these types of updates on a blog section of the site, and then send out the email / sms / maybe physical mail blast directly to your inbox with no middle man or bullshit algorithm dictating if it is shown to you or not. If you put in your information, you want to see it, and if you decide you don't want to see it anymore you can click the button to not see it. I am not interested in maximizing engagement and monopolizing peoples time.
I would like to stick to making these updates at least quarterly but we'll see how that actually goes. I suppose if there's nothing to say they will just be real short, even though I am really good at waffling on and on. I'll wrap this all up by just saying that I appreciate your support and interest immensely, I hope y'all have a wonderful and peaceful holiday season, and as my favorite local band facebook page with 14 likes would say "big things coming soon!!!!"
- VX