I feel like you would enjoy vaporwave!

This feeling is rooted in literally nothing substantive or evidence-based, and yet it rudely and stubbornly continues to exist in spite of my best attempts to extinguish it.

I am not sure what vapor wave is! I thought it was a pseudo ironic meme that I did not understand, but now am being told that it is existing songs slowed down with the vocals garbled, but I think there must be more to it than that or else it would not be worth talking about. Are there some specific tracks that you were thinking of?

Vaporwave is pretty hit and miss as a genre. The bits and pieces that make up vaporwave varies from artist to artist. Lots of artists rely too much on the source material and some artists make something entirely new from music samples. if you like gamey songs and relaxing lo-fi beats you'll probably like 'Haircuts for Men'.
( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPxLTD9gbh4 ) ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcAHWhVTjOk )
You should explore what YouTube has to offer but don't be put-off my any one particular song or artist. Vaporwave is an -excuse the word- aesthetic, not necessarily a genre. The focus is on 80s synth and sampling. Lots of said samples are voice clips and lyrical sections and i don't personally care for lyrics myself.

I do like some of the sounds, but definitely prefer it if somebody is building with those sounds rather than editing. There is a quality to some tunes that I do enjoy, such as the "acrylic" stage music from the video game Plok https://youtu.be/snd_g2IsUpo that I do not know how to describe, but I associate it with comfortable state of mind that I think I had in another era but that may not actually have existed.

Oh, if you like Plok, then i recommend an artist that goes by 'Colugo'. VERY experimental. Even if you don't like a certain song in a album, try the rest of the track list. There's some excellent tunes and they're unlike anything else you'll ever have heard. He used a lot of experimental sounds and samples like scratches and muffles sounds that will make you think your speaker cones are torn. Don't worry though, it's all a part of the unique beautiful music.

( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcpIMrzCr6s&list=PLHjmYagDcLqNjIP3RxVhrl3p5ZE5vd_aj )

i recommend 'Music for People', 'Hello Yellow Fellow' and 'Dance Party'. There are a few singles and Eps out there but they are impossible to find. if you're familiar with SomethingAwful(dot)com, this music may sound familiar. That's where i found him. i miss those days. Sorry, my "boomer" is showing.

Thank you for the links! That and some others in there make me think more of Beyond Oasis, whose music could be called "experimental," than Plok, whose music is remarkably polished for a 16 bit console game. Until it gets to the Hanna Barbera sound effects which then sound more like Earthworm Jim. I could definitely do without the speaker tearing noises early on. I hear what sound like Commander Keen sound effects in "This Is the Perfect Time for Arts and Crafts" that came on eventually, though I do not feel like they contribute to the composition, but other parts of it work.
I often feel like I am older than most people in the world. I know what something awful is or was but I did not partake of it. I am aware that the "all your base are belong to us" zero wing music mix came from there or was popular there first. I have listened to that willingly a few times so I don't mean to seem like I hate all mixes or edits, but I generally need to also like what they are mixing.
I did not see "dance party" or a specific track called "music for people" on that list and the titles are not helpful when searching!

Most of Colugo's work has disappeared from the internet. (the YT uploads are fairly new though) i don't know where to find the rest of his EPs and "bonus tracks". They were posted on SomethingAwfulForums back in the early 00s.

It runs a gamut from 'look I just slowed down some 90s music and added some sfx of coke cans being cracked open aren't I ironic???' to people building their own material and instruments from scratch, which tend to have a chippier/MIDI feel to them. Some more in the latter camp that come to mind would be Eyeliner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tYpkyy7Ogs , or Windows96: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9zZ4Gj75xs , or a lot of the albums Vektroid has put out under various aliases like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjbZyXod3mc . They do as a rule tend to be short-form little stings rather than super-developed affairs, so if you're looking for depth, momentum and narrative intensity there's not too much of that around in the genre. With rare exception being something like Blank Banshee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojmk5tSj0sE , with BB0 being the closest thing the genre has ever come to a concept album (also the best album ever to come out of the genre, just my IMO though) . For the bulk of vaporwave, it is better not even to focus on the music and rather just put on a youtube mix and let the haze envelop you. It's a mood given sonic form. Many of the songs have slowed-down vocals, but they are often chopped and screwed to the point of unintelligibility.

And while some of the ironic potshots in the genre are pretty facile and miss the mark, some artists do a good job of lampooning the absurdity of late-stage-capital 90s party culture by copying the commercialized video and audio from that era and distorting it into a mockery of itself, like a funhouse mirror. One either finds this treatment deep and compelling or utterly facile, depending on the relationship they have with the global capital engine.

thank you for all the suggestions! all i look for specifically is music that sounds good to me, though I am not necessarily lacking for it.
the vektroid collection seems most in accordance with my tastes and tolerances. It reminds me of some of the midis that come with sound cards, and also leisure suit larry 3's music specifically. I only don't like how watery some of the instruments are, as if they are deliberately trying to sound like a low-bit rate audio.
lampoon and mockery definitely aren't what I like in music! Those only have value to me in limited doses, or part of a dedicated audio-visual work, since I seek audio accompaniment to what I am doing, or to block out what somebody else is doing.
I am especially disinterested when a culture that I have found tiresome recently is making a mockery of something that I might have found tiresome less recently or possibly even of comfort at some point. the stuff i hated about the 1990s has mostly continued unabated.

I have never met anyone who likes the music I like, and vice-versa.

I probably have, but they likely have the same sort of social conditioning to not bother trying to talk about it as I do. I do know one person  techno. who was able to suggest non-video game music that I have liked, but it definitely wasn't anything I had heard of, apart from some of the individual composers in the band Cube.

"Not bother talking about it" is a good observation.

People I've met who DO talk about music seem to always be into really lame bands and/or stuff I've never heard of.

People who boast about their "good taste" in music are oblivious buffoons. Amidst my university attempt I came to be wary of art class teachers who would impose their music during painting or drawing sessions. One of them had a particularly annoying album of Cole Porter covers and conspicuous applause breaks that I heard too many times because I did not have a consistent portable music device at that time. In another class one teacher who professed to be worldly about the ways of pleasant sounds asked students to write down what sort of music they liked so to aid in creating a functional environment. Somehow that led to me being exposed to the complete Owl City album and several others that I already had to endure several years before. Based on my own input, a bunch of Japanese composers, she suggested I on my own time listen to Deerhoof, which turned out to be a typical annoying American rock band that happened to have a lead singer of Japanese descent. Obviously I shouldn't have expected anyone to know who those were but people don't like to admit that they don't know and will instead try to drown what I know with what they know.

Deerhoof is far from typical American rock! It's noise rock, quite abrasive and not for everyone, you have to have simultaneous appreciations for both screechy little girl vocals and clattering atonal guitar thrashing. Which is a tall order, but if one can fill it, they have a lot to offer. I actually think many of their songs are 'anthemic' in a way that puts them closer to video game music than most other rock acts. There's certainly nothing Japanese about them though, other than the screechy little girl singer.

Hope I'm not drowning you!

that was possibly ten years ago by this point! i doubt i listened to more than four songs before giving up on the suggestion. I only recall the band itself being specifically suggested and i was left to find and listen to something. i don't know if it was typical of american bands as a whole but it was typical of bands that i encountered music from and didn't want to hear more of. words like noise, abrasive, screechy and atonal suggest that future attempts by me would fail like the first! But plainly enough people like what they are producing to make it a satisfying enterprise for the musicians and whatnot involved.

I compensate by having good feelings about at least a little of every kind of music.

Also I feel like a lot of people enjoy a wide range of video game music now! The question for you is if it's from games that came out in the last 10 or 20 years.

It is from whatever I want to listen to. I still like what I liked in 1998, 2004, and 2012. I gradually add to it because there are a lot of prolific composers who made the sort of material I like to hear, and the further removed it is from the present the less it reminds me of things I do not want to think about unless I absolutely have to.
I think any type of music that fulfills my basic criteria, having a discernible non irritating melody, not being a mere vessel for words to be sung over and not trying to be depressing could potentially be pleasant to me, though I still may be bothered if I hear too much of the same sort of thing in succession. I do not like hearing the same lead instrument and the same lead singer on every track.

I am still not entirely sure what fortnight IS apart from two weeks long but at the time I knew yet less than I do now. I didn't understand why my vague allusion to "video game music" meant I must certainly be speaking of a specific component of a specific product.

I've had more or less this exact conversation more times than I care to admit.

I do like Dungeon Synth a lot, at least; Kobold sounds pretty much like video game music (it DOES use heavy chiptune as an instrument). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hEyfHg6rm0

Thank you for the suggestion! Yes I can hear a bit of that. I was trying to think of what one of those tracks reminded me of, it was https://youtu.be/B5IKe_GpigQ the dungeon music from Sword of Vermillion. I never finished that game! Or even got close. And plenty of the music I have collected is from video games I have never played at all. Sometimes it works better outside of games anyway, since it can be played to its full length without being interrupted but also doesn't go on forever when an area must be lingered in for a prolonged period.

Oh, Lord, Sword of Vermillion. There's a game I never played for longer than a few minutes, just because it happened to be on the PSP Genesis Collection. That said, the composition for this track shines through even despite the less-than-stellar instrumentation.

You might also like Mort Garson's The Unexplained, especially the title track. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHvK0mtxQBI

Oh yes I could listen to that again, sure, thank you once more! And apparently I have even heard music by him previously, I know I have heard "Plantasia" once or two times.
Hiroshi Kawaguchi composed a lot of Sega's 1980s arcade soundtracks, such as Outrun and of course the famous Dynamite Dux, and I don't think Sword of Vermillion has the same sort of passion in it (or maybe there was less time to figure out how to do it well), but I do like that bit.

Joke's on all the non-yellow things, plenty of videogame soundtracks, especially from Nippon, are classical or orchestral.

It definitely is not a music genre! It is simply a source. I do not understand genres. I may modify this to clarify "old" or "japanese" video game music on that first instance to see if it changes how people respond to this, even if in 2004 I would not have felt a need or have gotten the conversation far enough to be even that specific.

No, don't change! It's perfect, I am just making fun of people in real life.

Oh, and there IS such a thing as videogame music, it's just a sub-genre.

I already changed it! I realize that after 30+ years it has an ever wider variety of meanings; by this point it is essentially "music." I should at least attempt to clarify what it means in the context of this creature having a hard time being taken seriously for liking it.

dated a musician once that described the vg music i played as 'ice cream truck music'; whats wrong with ice cream?? none of it ever strongly caught his interest. even though a human wrote and programmed it, its played back by machines, not humans. someone like him that didnt grow up playing video games cant connect at all with chip music. couldnt persuade him, no matter how loud i blasted Alien Soldier. needlesstosayitdidntworkout

admittedly I cannot even tolerate much of Alien Soldier! It is within the elite group of soundtracks from composers whose music I ordinarily like that I have marked so that I do not try to listen to them again. It is difficult to say how much of that owes to the hardware. Listening to it now, I can hear it as like a bridge between Gunstar Heroes and Mischief Makers but the sounds still seem off, but even MM's relies too much on one lead instrument-noise, I think. I connect with harmony more so than I do with chips, though i will take them over boring unaccompanied acoustic guitars most days.

Alien Soldier's soundtrack isn't all that memorable, to be quite frank. The loud compositions do at least fit the game's hectic tone, at least. That said, it did have a neat little reprise of Seven Force for the part where they reuse that boss AGAIN (seriously, Seven Force is such a massive running gag in GH alone, then it shows up in AS and Gunstar Super Heroes). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8ONhxEIx-M

I get a lot of people thinking the Genesis sound hardware must just be inherently bad, but it really isn't when you know how to use it. Give Gauntlet IV's soundtrack a listen, especially March in the Dark, Sortie, and Transparent Obstacle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67fZSJKQfkQ

indeed I have Rocket Knight Adventures, Shining Force 2, Jewel Master and Dynamite Headdy's music presently in the abbreviated heap of it that I keep on my mobile machine so I can listen while driving an automobile
The system is good for audio when people know how to program for it and also aren't using something like GEMS but there is also a point on any of those systems where the developers might expect too much out of it. Dragon Questior 3 on the nes had, I think, good music for the system, but in part 4 Koichi Sugiyama came up with some bizarre compositions that might have worked with an orchestra, which he had previously arranged music for, but on the nes sounded, to me, dissonant and unfinished. I feel like I am hearing that sort of thing in Alien Soldier, At least that is the closest I can come to justifying it.
I am surprised I have not heard of Gauntlet iv previously since I have sought out work by Masaharu Iwata and Hitoshi Sakamoto for other systems. Thank you for the suggestion!

i guess i have a soft spot for the less-than-refined chaos of alien soldier. and admittedly have an inseparable association with it to the surprising fun i had with the game. sets the 68000 heart on fire.
also MM I love for the same reason as your criticism lol. To me it is NON tightening his idiosyncrasies down to, utmost catchiest motifs/themes, energetic yet graceful to follow... almost disco(1st level theme), almost prog never giving into any genre cliche. easily my biggest composer luv.

He certainly has range! The Bucky O'Choc arcade soundtrack is also chaotic but of a more refined nature and I can handle that one occasionally.
Yuzo Koshiro has a similar ability to do something I enjoy a great deal and follow it up with something I do not like at all but that appeals to a different audience, which is probably a good skill for keeping one's self employed in a creative field.

I love videogame music. I have no idea if we like the same videogame music, like whether or not Rob Hubbard or Chris Hülsbeck are names you care about, but I do love me some oldschool chiptune

I do have some tracks by them but have not pursued their work at length yet, since I never owned one of those computers, and the appearance of vgmrips.net a few years ago greatly expanded how much vintage Japanese stuff I had access to. But I only added "japanese" in here late after seeing the sort of replies the earlier version was getting! A decent bit of the music I gathered after 2004 was in fact from amiga or "demo scene" musicians.

This is me, you made a comic about me.

I am impressed by your finger-walking skills but am curious about what happened to your hair in 2012.