ON-LINE JOURNAL OF CHARLIE DANGO: YEAR 2001

December 31, 2001
Happy New Years Eve. I imagine a lot of people out there have plenty planned for this evening. I don't. My boys in Funky are playing at The Dugout tonight, but I don't know if I'm going to go see them or not. I really am not comfortable with spending my new years in a bar surrounded by drunken idiots. I would much rather enjoy a nice evening of....something. It's a wierd feeling celebrating the end of 2001 on a Monday. I guess that would help put this entire year into perspective though. My friend Tim told me about this position that they have open at Cass Communications in Virginia, IL. that I might want to check out. I need a job, so I guess I will, but I don't know what the outcome will be. If I end up getting that job, I might end up moving as well. I don't know. I still have to think about things quite a bit. Sariah came home with my gift from her father yesterday. It was a CD of the band Tomahawk and a 15 dollar gift certificate to Best Buy. I was happy. Still no gift from Aaron though. I imagine he is just going to blow it off like he does everything else. No big deal, I'm not really worth a gift anyway.

By now your probably saying to yourself: Hey, this news isn't even about anything other than Charlie's stupid life! You're absolutely right, my friend. I need to make a section where I can just go on and on about things and not clutter up the news section. But then again, this is my site.

December 29, 2001
Hello. Today I spent my day cold and alone. The heat wasn't even on today at our apartment, so the temperature dropped to somewhere below 50 degrees. It was so cold that I had to turn up the heatuer on our 30 gallon tank because the water was super cold when I got up today. Sariah was at a wedding of one of her Pizza Hut buddies all day today. I just watched old episodes of the Simpsons, ordered a pizza and laid on the couch under 3 blankets all day long. Gary (Sariah's father) is having Christmas at Ken and Angie's house tomorrow. I don't know if I am going to show up or not. I don't know about anything really.

December 28, 2001
I just checked Newgrounds.com and saw my Flash move The Sniper in the weekly top 20 as "A Holiday Gift 4 U". This is pretty cool to me since I've never really tried to get anywhere on Newgrounds before. It's an honor to have so many people appreciate my animation. I only wish I could make another that could carry as much emotion as The Sniper did. I'm working on one now that takes place in an office. It is going to be another relatively dreary one, but I'm going to try to animate it more than The Sniper. Plus, this new one won't involve violence and might actually make sense to everyone that watches it.

I just got done watching a clock-crew movie by MountainDewClock. Too manly clocks if you ask me. I liked it better when there was just 4 of them. If you are reading this and wondering what the hell I'm talking about, maybe you should go visit Newgrounds.com. It's a very entertaining site.

December 27, 2001
2 days after Christmas and I still haven't put my new program to use. It sucks living in an apartment. NothingI can do about that really except deal with it. The last songs I recorded I did here, but they were done with sampled drums and direct instruments. I didn't get to use any of my mics or anything. I don't want to repeat that method again. I would much rather get some of Sean's playing on tape. My last animation has run it's course on Newgrounds.com and acheived a fairly high score. I was hoping it would have went all the way to the top weekly slot, but it didn't. I guess that gives me something new to strive for in the coming weeks. I am in the process of developing some ideas that I have been having. The problem is that I start on something and then never finish it. Never fear, the good ideas are the ones that make it all the way to the end. My wife took a sample of our new aquarium water to get tested today. It's showing high amounts of amonia and the pH level is high. The way it's looking, we might have to wait a week or so before we can transfer our oscars into the new tank. You're probably wondering what I am talking about. I sometimes forget that the people who will be reading this might not know anything about me or my life. Visit the "Special" page if you would like to be brought up to speed on some things in my life. Until then, have fun.

December 26, 2001
Yes it is the day after Christmas. I got Sonic Foundry Vegas Audio 2.0 from my wife. I love her. We had a Christmas party at my sister-in-law's house yesterday for my wife's family. I was supposed to get a present from my brother-in-law from a gift exchange, but he didn't show up. We later found out that he and his girlfriend hadn't bought anything yet. I'm currently creating this website because I realized that I have no place on the internet to call home. Actually, I think I spread myself a little too thin. I've created so many websites and have put myself into all of them, but none of them encompass me as a person. I have a different Charlie Dango site up already, but It only discusses the music portion of my life. I figured that this site would better accompany my total artistic release. Actually, now that I look at it, this site might look a little familiar. I use the same font and font color for the Funky Circus Fleas site, which I maintain for them. (Was that a plug?) Well anyway, happy holidays to you all. Let's hope and pray that my future will be brighter than my past.

For a good laugh, keep reading...I just found this stuff hanging around on my old GeoCities site. It's the news section from my old website! Ha! I thought I would throw it up just for fun. As you can see, the posts were really short, so I decided to combine the entire year of 2001 (well, what I documented of it anyway) into one page. Enjoy!

October 27 , 2001
Yesterday was my birthday. I turned 25. Big deal. It just means that I'm getting older and more and more time is slipping away while I just sit here and do absolutely nothing. I haven't even recorded any new material since the last batch (small batch at that!). I've been supporting Funky Circus Fleas and am currrently in the process of recording a new CD for them. I figured that something like that would fill the void, but it hasn't. I'm thoroughly empty at this point. I tell ya what, if I was serious I would be writing some kick-ass songs right about now, but since I'm so loopy it would come out all funny. I can't even write a depressing song because it ends up being about beer or parades or something. No one can relate to anything I write so it's almost utterly pointless to continue.

I think that the next time I write some songs, I am actually going to write a song. Lyrics and everything!! Just for kicks. Just to see if I can finish it.

October 13 , 2001
Well today is the day of the FCF/Skarred show at Easy Street in Jacksonville. I'm going, as will a lot of friends and whatnot. My computer contracted a really nasty virus last week and I had to reformat my hard drive. That is partially why it has taken so long to update the news page. Feeling really bummed lately. I used to make all of these websites with GoLive, but since I reformatted (and due to all the problems I had with it) I decided to try a new program called Dreamaweaver. I'm using it right now and I like it a lot. I'm also learning Photoshop, so I will start using that more often as well. That's it for now. I'll report back after the show tonight.

September 4, 2001
I'm falling into the pits of despair as my bills overrun me. Life sucks. I love being a musician and a songwriter, but it just pains me that I cannot at least make some sort of living doing this. Hell, today you can make a living sitting behind your computer and showing off your tits (if your a girl), but you can't make money from writing songs. Oh, I know that you can, but it's not like everyone may believe. Making it in the industry has nothing to do with the music anymore. I don't even want to make it. I just want to be able to live. Well enough of this inner dialog crap.

August 31, 2001
Not much going on really. Just updating everyone else's site. I haven't worked on any new songs lately. All I've been doing is working on a Flash cartoon that I was going to submit to newgrounds.com, but it is going to be a long, long, long time before any results can be seen. Other than that, nothing. Wait, actually there are a few things of interest. This site is officially one month old! (YEA!!) The other notable item is that my MP3.com site is finally up and running. You can check out my songs, or download them if you would like at http://www.mp3.com/charliedango Now that is it.

August 17, 2001
Just finished cleaning up the site and fixing some bugs that were really bothering me. Hopefully things will stay good and I won't have to do a lot of repair and maintenance work. I opted out of using the Flash chooser sidebar because I'm really sick of people dogging me over my use (abuse) of Flash. Plus, since I'm not to skilled at he fine art of HTML scripting, I cannot arrange a site to understand how to resize itself so that the flash sidepanel appears normal to all viewer. Oh well.

August 12, 2001
I've decided to combine all of the SMS music that I have been working on into one song. I don't want to spend forever working on video game music when I still have a lot of my own song's to work on. The site is up, but there are still some problems with it, so I have to send the updates to Tim so he can upload them. If only I was back online. Oh yeah, Funky never got to play that show because they didn't call to get the info about their show. Turns out it was an acoustic open mic night. More news as it develops.

August 5, 2001
I'm midway into work on Golvelius and Fantasy Zone. As far as the rest go, I'm really going to have to finish these two before I begin work on any others. Funky Circus Fleas will be playing a show at Viele's Planet August 8, 2001. If this news update reaches the net before the show, and you read it, you should go check them out. That's about it for now. I'll chime in later in the week when more interesting things begin to happen.

August 4, 2001
The website has been uploaded. Aside from a few glitches (like the jukebox counter not working properly) things went pretty well. I also uploaded the TMF site. I still have yet to upload any movie material, but that's a whole other issue dealt with on a whole other site. As for the Charlie Dango site, it is the only way to keep my sanity. I hate not having anything to do, so building websites is one way to express myself. I honestly don't know what I would do if I couldn't make websites. This addition to the news page won't be seen until it is uploaded, but it will be uploaded within a week or two. As for these constant everyday news updates, they will start to spread apart as time goes by. Since I'm in the middle of creating all of this, I have a lot to share. In about a month I should be through all the creative stuff so updates to the news page won't happen as consistantly.

August 3, 2001
I've just completed work on Alex Kidd in Miracle World and I've started working on Golvelius. I probably won't be able to finish it today or start anything else, but at least this is a start. I would have to say that learning some of these songs is harder than I had previously believed. Alex Kidd took nearly 5 or 6 hours of constant struggle. First I learned the bass line, then the melody. The hardest part was deciphering the harmony, but I was able to do that finally. Hopefully it will all work out okay in the end.

August 2, 2001
I've spent the past few days putting this webpage together. So far it has all worked out. I still need to fix the jukebox and add to the bio section, as well as all the other pages. I may take a break pretty soon though. It will definately be a couple of weeks before I can upload this site to the internet. Hopefully I will be getting back on-line very soon, but either way I have friends who are already on the internet. I can always take these files over to their computer. Time to get back to work.

July 31, 2001
Welcome to my website. Be sure to stop back by from time to time to catch all the new stuff that pops up. Right now I'm designing this website. It will be a while before I can upload it. Hopefully it will be decent enough to appeal to everyone. I use a lot of Macromedia Flash because I don't have any new web tools, plus I'm to the point now that I can optimize my Flash files to take up minimal space for easier download capability. Soon when broadband internet becomes the norm, it wont matter, but for right now I think this will work just fine.