the old world is dying. friends, BotBrs, now is the time for reflection and celebration!

what important progress did you make this year? what achievements are you most proud of?

i'll start: i was honoured to enter the hall of mighties . what level did you reach this year?

Happy to have continued to enter

Befriended some more people I can goof around with!!!

i made a comeback in october and dedicated myself towards getting better at music, art, and coding. i think, with my december now hitting 30 entries, i have successfully made a full-time return to battle of the bits. it's lead to me doing a lot of stuff i didn't even dream of: i've tried and retried over 2 dozen formats and have developed a passion to code in js and php, one that i hope the fruits will bear in 2023.

i think the things i was most proud in were entries like urbana suite - that was an entry that through sickness i pooled my blood sweat and tears into, and it paid off. there were other things as well - the composition homework series that i am glad to have hosted for lotepamera, for instance. i'll continue that series in the near future btw!!

starting off the year, i thought i was bound to be a studio musician, playing bass and whatnot. ending it, i realize my home was and always has been here, since it's here I've done the most growing as a person, and i think i wouldn't be able to trade it for any modicum of clout any other opportunity would attempt to give me. thank you, battle of the bits :')/

that was quite sincerely moving. thanks lumby.

i put a lot of time and effort into all the seasonal majors this year, more than i had before, and i feel like all that time spent going deeper into formats i like + formats i was interested in was fruitful. i found even more things that i like, and i solidified others, and i learned a hell of a lot. it was a good year on the online song game

specifically in winter chip i also tried to do many collaborations and that was really awesome and fun

For me showing up and putting something out there felt like a big win. Joined this year and put some good time into some battles, met a bunch of cool people, learned a ton, rubbed shoulders with musicians I admire, got frustrated with my own skills and backed off for a while, chilled out and gave it another go with a little bit of a mindset shift (expectations of myself) which helped out. Honestly the thing I'm most proud of is shifting my mindset, it feels really freeing to not get (as) hung up on stuff. Have lots of others to thank for helping me get where I'm currently at, though. Been trying to send out thanks here and there just because if I don't like leaving stuff unsaid. Glad to be around this little corner of the Internet.

Awesome year, it blows me away that any of this happened!

My plans from this year didn't change all that much since I joined last year: trying out whatever format seems cool to me, and then figure out how to make something good from it
(admittedly, I only just joined in September last year lol)

One thing that was new for me this year, is discovering Squarish as a tool for making simple, but neat looking vector art. I didn't consider myself much of a graphic designer, so it was cool to see people liking my art so much, and even getting picked for the Spring Tracks XI cover art

also smw being a format means I get to use myself as an icon on the site, which is a win in my book
^{I swear I'll actually do something for it one day}

Completed a master's degree. Omg, that sucked my life dry these last two years. I'm taking a break, but soon my life will be taken again by the PhD.

Edit: Oh, you mean on the site/musically speaking? Not too much. The aforementioned master's degree didn't allow me to progress the way I'd have liked, and my only BotB entry was my worst in years :( .

I’m honestly just proud of myself for coming back to write music again, at all, and during Summer Chip no less (the comp that
started it all for me). Probably more proud with me entering OHBs more and interacting in Discord more, social anxieties be damned.
It’s not much but it’s a lot to me.

I'm still surprised by how fast I went from level 0 to 17

I'm still surprised Kot is a higher level than me even though I joined before them by several months

I'm in the hall of IGHTY CHAMPIONZ!!!
And I'm carving a truly legendary legacy! (maybe)
My music is also getting to BALLER status.

At least that's how I feel! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@Kot i think i'm the slowest one! (i submitted nothing at all between 2014 and 2019! xD )

time to check back on what i actually did this year on botb.

hmm, i think the time i put into botb was lower on avg than in the past years, most likely because i got a job and other personal life changes going on, that took a lot of my time (not a bad thing!)

i put time into completing my 100% all badges run, getting some of the new format badges. remembering some cool little ohb marathons in certain formats like moai, smw, vgm, teletext

another thing to mention is my first-time completionism of advent calendar, which is something i mostly did because it wldnt feel complete without completing at least one of those :D

I joined the site!

Specifically, I joined the site to participate in OHBs. My usual music-making workflow is extremely slow -- I'm often writing melodies one note at a time through trial and error, or coding things from scratch in Supercollider -- and I wanted the challenge of taking the opposite approach, making more things more quickly.

And it worked better than I could have imagined! Although I still struggle with making entries longer than 30 seconds, doing OHBs has stretched mental muscles I didn't realize I had.

(A couple of side benefits: I got a good amount of practice with OpenMPT, a tool I'd been wanting to try out. And reorganizing my sample folders with the initial intent of streamlining my workflow for allgear OHBs inspired me to finish one unrelated track and start a second one.)

Looking back, apparently I entered exactly 50 XHBs last year! And now I have enough boons to host -- looking forward to more in 2023!

- Hit L28 Chipist, my level up for the year
- Got a few nice major medals and some other decent placements on some of the entries I'm proud of
- Picked up some more nifty tools/format debuts: Furnace/vgm, RMT/sapx2, Fami2Vic, Renoise
- Still badgeless :D

- continued to make things during a chaotic year
- made my first tic80 game
- finally made my first zxbeep
- got 1st on field recording major (somehow)

* I got my first 2 digit placing (top 100) in a seasonal!

* Figured out how GoatTracker actually works

* Forgot how Reality Adlib Tracker works (I've apparently hit my limit for weird per-program key mappings)

* Went to my first demoparty and got a song into CSDB (Commodore Scene Database) and the HVSC (High Voltage Sid Collection), so that's nice.

discovered BOTB

Wrote my first proper SID tune
Had my first demoscene release
Got a chip I requested added to Furnace (MSM5232)
Beat the OCD that latched onto my chiptune passion (sorta)
Experimented with a ton of new trackers, chips, composition techniques, and sound design techniques
Almost got on a college radio station and probably will apply again soon
Opened commissions and actually got a few

get into top 10 and feel like i have a purpose
2151 is a format
figured out fm proper
lotsa golds :D