Zach Likes to Yap

                                                        Hey all, just coming on here briefly to tell you to listen to more music. There is so much music out there from countless genres that use thousands of different instruments in many different ways that you have to experience to even begin to understand what is all out there. I personally began expanding my taste in music through listening to albums, which includes the songs that people don't necessarily think of when speaking to the salience of an artist. I started listening to rock music, slowly inching into classical rock, shifting rapidly to Hip-Hop and RnB, and finally landing in jazz. Listening to albums from artists like Steely Dan, Keith Sweat, Aaliyah, JID, and hundreds of others taught me that music is more than what it seems on the surface. I've been surrounded...

           Over the course of the past summer into the fall semester, I have taken on multiple projects creatively outside of school and work. I've detailed some of the projects I'm working on in my previous blogs like the game Scenario, the debut of Jazzmatik and many other side projects I haven't mentioned. On top of this, I failed to realize that going into senior year of college would make for a drastic change in the amount of assignments and research projects I would have to take on. Needless to say, I filled my plate and began using the table for the extra food.      Side and personal projects aside, school work this year has been absolutely ridiculous with the amount of things I have to work on. Multiple 1-3 page papers due at varying days of the week, three research projects/papers for my final psychology major classes, building a social media strategy with a real client and having a full 400 page book to read by October 16th. One wou...

            Over the course of the last three years, my friend Gabe has been working on a solo video-game project, developed in unity and drawing inspiration from media such as Superliminal, I Spy books, and attempts to capture the feeling of a dream-state like childhood wonder. Since the game is not fully complete, I will leave the description of the game at that point to not spoil. The purpose of this blog is to detail our efforts as a team to form a roll-out schedule to maintain and complete things necessary before the deadline of January 1st, 2026. Things we need to complete before January 1st, which is the proposed release date, are things like the Game Manual, which contains walkthroughs for each level that have been graphically designed from scratch, a storyboard or epilogue entry, how to use the base mechanics, and the system requirements for running the game. Along with the Game Manual, we need to have the game itself finished before the turn ...

     Over the course of the last few years, I have been trying to garner awareness for my music career, with many failed attempts of engagement tests and the lack of return on investment for promotions and advertisements of my brand. Failure however is the best teacher, and being comfortable with that failure can take you a long way toward reaching the goals you have in mind. To help myself build a better understanding of the landscape of social media I started taking classes for a minor in social media here at ONU. So far, I have improved my engagement and focus on things that are actually important like metrics and brand identity, rather than trying to force content into the mainstream by posting consistently without having a solid backing holding up the structure of my brand. Taking this class into consideration of my journey in social media fluency, I hope to learn skills to apply not only to my own social media presence, but also understanding what all goes into plan...