A New Editor for DMU

Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of the Ottoman Empire (Ilya Repin, 1891)

I have replaced David Rosales as the editor at Death Metal Underground. Platitudes about how I expect to retain continuity with the long past of the website while keeping quality high and perhaps even bringing my own voice to the site aren’t really my style (although that admittedly just was one), so I thought I’d offer you a bit of background information on who I am.

First of all – my name is Gabe Kagan, and I live in Massachusetts. I’m a historian turned web developer; oriented towards building cool browser-based software with trendy languages and frameworks; I also compose music and keep my own personal music review blog. Compared to those, I expect my content for this website to be more serious and critical, but I expect that my own voice and biases will show up in my writings. Odds are that I end up breezier and less formal in my prose than many of the contributors to this site, but I’m not particularly worried about that. So far, the job has proven to be interesting and challenging, and I expect this to continue as I spread DMU’s various messages and ideals to the masses.

I don’t know how particularly interested the community here would be in this, but one interesting thing I’ve done lately is build my own music creation software. It has its various gimmicks (primarily based on the idea that arranging music data in a fully traversible two-dimensional space opens up new ways of organizing and thinking about its structure), so maybe the musicians of the DMU community might get some value out of it, although due to it being based on sound samples and not having a great deal of sound convolution options, it’s probably not too optimal for metal. That shouldn’t deter you from experimenting if you’re interested.

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16 thoughts on “A New Editor for DMU”

  1. DeathFuck says:

    Is David Rosales still associated with the site? If not, why?

    I thought David’s analysis was great.

    Also, welcome.

    1. Gabe Kagan says:

      I’m not entirely sure what David’s current relation to DMU is, but he has left me (and any successors I may have) big shoes to fill.

      1. Daniel says:

        What’s the best email to reach you by to continue to contribute content to DMU?

        1. Gabe Kagan says:

          Currently, email sent to the editor@deathmetal.org account is forwarded to my own personal account. Also, the submission you sent has been received and should go up in the next few days.

          1. Daniel says:

            Thanks. More Sadistic Metal Reviews are ready too.

      2. #blesst are the sick says:

        What is Brett Stevens’ current relationship to this site? Valued commentor? Owner? Webmaster?

        1. Editor Emeritus.

  2. Dualist says:

    Yes, I’d definitely be interested to hear how the music creation software works. What does it allow you to do?

    1. Gabe Kagan says:

      Crash course on Tracker2D, DMU edition:
      When you open up the program, it gives you a 2D field to draw on. The pitches and instruments you choose determine what color you get, and there are a couple of tools for performing various drawing operations. You have up to 8 musicians (“bugs”) which move around on the field and play sounds every time they pass over a colored tile; you can use special tiles to tell them where to go.

      That duplicates a lot of the information in the program’s documentation, but it should help you get started. I don’t want to flood this site with my own personal projects too much, but still.

  3. MP says:

    David brought some amazing content to the site and will be missed, but it’s appropriate that he left on a high note with his AtG TRITSIO analysis.

    Best of luck to you with the site–it’s one of my favorites.

  4. upset hesher says:

    but WHY did david have to go? run out of steam already? or was it the accusation he was trolling with his articles? PLEASE CUMBACK DAVID :'(

  5. Richard Sullivan says:

    I’m sure I’m not the only one curious about this, so I must ask: why does this site’s contributors never stay here long? Is there a quota of articles that must written that they cannot satisfy? Do they become disillusioned with the site’s vision and/or lost interest? Or is Prozak too much of an ANUS to work with? First Cory Van Der Pol disappeared, then David Rosales, and not to mention a bunch of others. I wouldn’t be surprised if this new guy is gone in a manner of months, too (no offense).

    1. I’m sure I’m not the only one curious about this, so I must ask: why does this site’s contributors never stay here long?

      Because it’s work, and people come to the internet to “have fun.”

  6. Scott says:

    Yo Gabe, what’s a good web framework to learn for a programmer who hasn’t done a lot outside of Java? There are a lot of choices (Rails, Django, a pile of Javascript ones, etc) and not a whole lot of consensus on which ones are worth learning.

    1. Gabe Kagan says:

      I’d say that you should pick up basic knowledge of as many popular frameworks as possible. Rails complements knowledge of Ruby, and Django complements knowledge of Python, and so forth, but the underlying Model-View-Controller/Presenter/Viewmodel/Goat/etc. ideas that they share are ultimately more important than specific implementations, and if you need to work with one in particular, you can always boost your knowledge. AngularJS and Rails seem to be the most popular in my experience, though.

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