Top Ten Things I Would Spray on the Side of My Cool Van(If I Owned One)

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Okay, so things have happened in your life that you now own a transit van. It has no windows in the backends because people aren’t supposed to be there. There might be people back there because you’re going to a gig you’re roadie-ing or you need to get them across state lines or just because you’re moving house. Anyway, the back is going to be unimpressive unless you expect some action back there.

A friend once told me upon seeing one of the American Ninja Warriors that lived in a van, that she was past that part of her life to hook up with someone in the back of their van. Another friend said she wasn’t. So, you’re going to have a 50-50 chance if people are ready to rock back there. If you’re attracted to men, you don’t have to worry because if real life and horror movies have taught me in anything, men will walk into a bathtub of used syringes if it means that they can get some action.

Anyway, I’m getting away from the subject at hand. You own a transit van. You need something on the side of it. It’s going to showcase that you listen to some form of heavy metal. Well, here’s my advice for your custom van based on what I would do.

  1. Shirtless Barbarian/Female Barbarian in a Fur Bikini

A classic of the genre. You’re going to have a dude who seems vaguely viking in attire except for his completely impractical attire. Why wouldn’t he wear some form of armor? Because he’s too fucking hardcore and too good at fighting. That’s why he doesn’t need any armor. What is he a wuss? A NERD?!

Anyway, he’s going to be holding a sword aloft. Lightning may or may not be striking the sword depending on how magical he is. Dealer’s choice on that one.

He may have a pretty lady, bikini clad, tugging on his leg. But you might have noticed I gave you an option of either/or. Bikini or shirtless barbarians. That’s where we’re going get ’em. Hit ’em with something they didn’t expect. Bikini barbarian holding a sword aloft and shirtless buff viking holding onto her leg. Put the dude in a bikini. Fuck it. Go nuts. Life is too short.

2. Giant Cobra

This cobra is going to be showing off. Full fangs. Full hood. He’s going to be some sick ass colors like purple and black. There may be lightning behind him. It’s what you’re willing to put up. But yeah, no fuss, no muss. Just a massive cobra looking cool as hell.

3. Wizard

The longest white beard, the robes of the darkest blue and shooting lightning from his hands. You might have noticed through this list, that I’ve mentioned lightning so many times. Why not fire? Why not wind? Because we’re not going to make the guy with the spray nozzle work hard. We’re going to have him make some crackling lines and that’s it.

4. Unicorns

That ‘s’ isn’t a typo. We’re going to have two unicorns. They’re going to be facing each other. They’re going to be crossing horns as if they’re in battle or love. You decide. Their coloring is going to be the purest white. There’s going to be a lens flare at the end of each horn. Whose going to be on each unicorn? Well….

5. A Knight Playing an Electric Guitar

The knight is going to be in full armor. Unlike the barbarians, we’re not going to see a single shred of skin. He is going to be absolutely shredding on a flying V guitar. The coolest looking most uncomfortable guitar to play. Can’t play it sitting down. There’s going to a half cloak over his shoulder. It’s going to be sick as fuck.

6. Words

Let’s throw on a catchphrase.

“Man with a van and NO PLAN”

“Comes to pick you up whenever you call one of those for a good time call numbers on a bathroom stall”

“This van is gender inclusive but we gonna make out”

“Ass, gas or grass? More like class, class or class. You’re going to either teach me something, play DND with me or have a fancy tea party”

“This van ramps over everything”

7. Red Tailed Hawk

Okay, I know you might saying, Frank, you’re a patriot. You love your country. Why wouldn’t you throw on a bald eagle? Well, because as much as I love my country, I love Animorphs more. So, we’re going to represent the eyes in the sky, Tobias. God, that name is so cool.

How many eyes of enemies have bald eagles ripped out to save the world? I can’t think of that many. Tobias has blinded so many people to make sure that they didn’t have to kill any humans but they still incapacitated them in some way.

Tobias is one of the greatest heroes of literature.

8. A Bald Eagle

Still not for America! The bald eagle was Rachel’s flight morph. So, even if they can’t be together in the books because Rachel died in battle, they can be together on the side of my van.

It still hurts, K.A. It still hurts. But you were right. There was no way she could come back from the war.

9. Any Alien From Animorphs

I was thinking about Animorphs like usual and then remembered how metal the designs were. First, we have the andalites.

Everything about this rules. The six pack abs. The cool scorpion tail. The elf ears. The stalk eyes. The centaur body. Fuck you actual centaurs. This is so much cooler.

The ravenous Taxxon! These things will eat anything. Including each other when they’re killed. I think that’s Rachel behind them? She doesn’t need to be on it. We just need this big bug.

Finally, the hork bajir, the walking razor blade foot soldiers of the Yeerks. And the most metal design of all of them. Look at them. They’re giant bipedal cool dinosaurs.

They also harbor the great tragedies of the war. They’re normally a gentle race that wouldn’t hurt a fly. So, why have all those blades? Because they live on a planet with massive trees and they use all those blades to harvest bark to eat. That’s right, they’re vegetarians.

And once again, the reason Tobias gets on the side of the van is because he made sure that there were free hork bajir for the first time in decades. God bless you, Tobias. The liberator.

10. Giant Clam

This might be a weird come down from the others. I just showed you so many cool aliens. So, why the humble giant clam? Because it contains multitudes. You can put in so many other things. Imagine a clam that opens up to release a bunch of fairies or just some treasure?

That’s the whole point of this is to show you that even the humblest things whether they be van or clam, can contain wonders.

Just like your heart.

A Role I Didn’t Ask For

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My father passed away in 2020. It wasn’t from Covid but something else that I don’t really want to talk about right now. It was a strange, sad time in my life. But that’s not what this post is really about right now.

I have a new role in my friend group. For the most part, all of my friends still have both of their parents. We’re all in our late thirties and their parents are getting older. My sorrow, my loss makes them think about things though. Considering the future. Having to live through a fear that they don’t want to name.

So, they ask me questions. They ask me how did I know when certain things happened to my dad. How did I handle this or that. How am I feeling? How did you prepare?

They’re kindhearted people so they want to make sure that they can take care of the people that took care of them. Those are legitimate concerns. I told them about the things we did to prepare. To make sure that we would be ready.

But that’s not what they’re really asking. They’re really asking, “am I going to be okay when they’re gone?”. And I have to say yes. It’s going to be different. It’s going to be hard but you’re going to get through it.

You’re going to think about him daily. I do. You’re going to think about how I would love to talk to him about this. I would love to get his input on this or that. You’re going to get a job and wonder if he would be proud of you. You’re going to miss him at big events.

There’s unfortunately, no magic path that I can give you. There’s nothing that I can say to make the pain any less. The only path is through. But what has always worked for me was trying to live up to the standard that my father showed me.

I think the most telling moment in my mind for my father was this. He was an accountant and charged 100 dollars an hour. Let me put it simply, he deserved every dollar he got from his clients. He was exemplar. He had this older woman, living on a fixed income. She had been screwed over by a lazy accountant for the last three years. Each return took him about three hours to fix. He was so angry at the shitty work the guy before him had done.

Finally came the day when he called her over. He had gotten her back somewhere in the thousands in her refund. I thought that nine hours of work would at least give him a good paycheck to make up for the headache that he had been put through while working on them. I was eating dinner while they were talking at the dining room table. He was explaining how much money she was getting back and she was so excited. I waited for the hammer to fall.

He charged her fifty bucks.

When she was gone, I walked into the dining room to talk to him. I asked him why he only charged her fifty bucks. He took off his glasses, which was always a signal that he wanted to talk to me seriously and said:

“Rollo, she’s a woman alone, living off the state. Some things are more important than money.”

That alone has made me try and be fair and kind in all my dealings. He was a good man.

The one thing that I know that I don’t have to worry about and I prepared for this, was to make sure that the last thing I said to my father was “I love you”. I always knew that my parents were older and that made me want to make sure I spent more time with them. Because I knew that this day was going to come and a far harder day is coming down the line. When I will fully be an orphan. I hate thinking about that day. But it makes me be, hopefully, a better son. To make sure my mom knows I care about her.

Fortunately, my mom had my dad make videos for my sister and I of him wishing us a happy birthday. I have a video of my father telling me happy birthday and that he loves me. I’m so lucky for that. I know that it’s something that other people don’t have. To be able to hear their father’s voice.

And if you’re a parent reading this, then that’s my advice for you. To make sure that there are physical things that your children can have and hold or hear of your love. Make them videos, audio recordings or whatever so that they can hear your voice in times of trouble. That they’ll never forget what it sounds like when you say you love them.

What is it about Pokemon?

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I had to explain Pokemon to my coworker the other day. She told me that her son liked the cards but had no idea what they were beyond that. Having to explain it to someone else, made me have to consider what did I like about it in the first place.

I think the games themselves offer a fantasy that any child would love. First, you get to leave home on an exciting adventure! You’re going to travel from town to town, seeing the sights. Encountering new people and doing new things. That was what the anime was, a road movie as much as an advertisement for the games.

Secondly, kids love pets. But what’s the problem with pets? You can only have one or two. Well, Pokemon offers you the dream of having several hundred pets all at the same time. And there are so many kinds of pets. Forget your normal dog and cat. You can have a sentient pile of garbage as your pet!

Who rescued who?

Then comes the joy of just collecting things. Kids collect trading cards and bottle caps and all kinds of things. Now they have cute animals on them. And of course, the aforementioned sentient bag of trash.

There’s over a thousand of them at this point. Your kid is going to be able to find at least one that they love above all others. For me, it was the Pokemon, Lapras.

A lovely blue and looking to surf through the water

I loved dinosaurs as a kid but found real plesiosaurs to be terrifying. I think they were the ones that gave me my initial hydromegathalassaphobia, the fear of large things in the water. Most things prehistoric things made me scared of the ocean.

AHHHH!

Lapras was a nice alternative. You could ride on its back. It was gentle and kind. But the problem was that they were so few in the game. They were hunted to near extinction. But then through conservation methods, they became plentiful again.

I thought that no one could shake my love for Lapras. But then one of the new games introduced a new challenger. The one and only, little pig: Lechonk.

Look at this absolute unit.

Gotta love a little pig that’s so round. While my love for Lapras will never be shaken or replaced, this little guy comes a close second.

But this is kind of the point, isn’t it? I’m sure that someone even loves the garbage bag. With that many, every person has to have a favorite and every pokemon is someone’s favorite.

It’s always been a weird thing for me to have such affection for these silly little games. But the fact of the matter is that they have influenced me throughout my life. Part of my love of adventure and wanting to see new places comes from these games. There’s always been a lifelong want to walk across America and it definitely came from watching Ash, Misty and Brock walking something like several thousand miles.

Lord of the Rings offers the same thrill of adventure. Leaving home and doing something great and I think that Pokemon elicits the same feelings. Except instead of having the fate of the world and a big eye staring at you, you get a nice little friend.

The Darkness Inside of Me

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I found the book in that old book store and shouldn’t have bought it. I shouldn’t have read it without knowing the language that it was written in. After that, I started to have strange nightmares every night.

I saw nightmarescapes of flayed humans and the land broken. The sky had been dyed red from the blood that had filled the seas. Everywhere there was fire and death. Creatures came screaming down from the sky to attack the few survivors that were walking through this blasted wasteland.

Even when I woke, I heard the voices. They whispered dark things to me. They had tasks for me to do. That they wanted me to feast on different things. Things that I never would have under my own power. I feasted on the flesh of so many creatures.

When I look at myself in the mirror, strange things move behind my eyes. My hands are not responding but they still move. They have become addicted to my online shopping account. They are gathering ingredients. Collecting things.

They have whispered to me, that my family will love these tostadas and they do. I have become a lifeless corpse. I buy ingredients. I make tostadas. I consume them. My family consumes and every day the cycle starts again. The darkness has seized me. I am lost. I am the undead. I need someone to find me and end my suffering. Free me from this tostada hell.

Anyway, here’s the recipe.

Ingredients:
Corn tortillas
Tomato salsa
Beans
Chicken or Ground Beef
Guacamole
Shredded Lettuce
Sour Cream
Shredded taco cheese
Pickled jalapenos
Taco sauce

Directions

  1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Place corn tortillas on grated tray and spray with cooking spray. Cook for five minutes and then flip. Cook for another five minutes. Call up your local priest and tell him his religion is a lie.
  2. When corn tortillas are nearly finished cooking, sautee your pickled jalapenos until they become soft and then add your chicken, beans or beef. You may add other spices to your liking. Carve strange symbols into your local park benches that praise the Old Ones that slumber and wait for the slaughter.
  3. When the tortillas and protein have finished cooking, begin assembly. Apply sour cream to corn tortilla. Place chosen protein on top of it. Add cheese that it can melt. Apply salsa, lettuce and guacamole. Top with taco sauce. Wordlessly scream at your loved ones.
  4. Enjoy. Kill.

My Real Life Ghost Experience

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I’ve never fully believed in ghosts but I’ve always been of the mindset that I’m not going to test whether or not they’re real. You will never catch me in a graveyard or with a Ouija board. I just don’t need to bother them and have them get after me.

That isn’t to say that I haven’t had weird encounters in my life. Days when I felt something was watching me or some kind of odd feeling in a dark and creepy place. The weirdest encounter happened in my own bed.

When I was I want to say about fifteen, I was lying in my bed at my parents’ house. It’s an older house but I never experienced anything out of the ordinary, until that night.

The way my bedroom was set up was that I was in the far corner away from the door. I was able to look through it at the bathroom, whose light we left on to make sure that we didn’t step on any cats that might be lying in the hallway. There were two lights that were on two separate circuits. So, that if one went out then the other would stay on. This night, I was watching them and they both snapped off at the same time.

I thought that maybe it was a power outage but I glanced at my digital clock and that was still on. I reached up to my face and ran my nails down it. It hurt.

I had enough time to think, “Yeah, this is going to suck”

It then felt like several hands were grabbing at me and rolling me back and forth in my sheets. I was panicking as I didn’t know what was going on. It took place over only about fifteen seconds but it was enough time for me to take notice of it. I fell out of my bed and looked under my bed. I saw a blue face down there of a man that looked like he was in pain.

I didn’t know what to do, so I punched it. My fist didn’t connect with anything but the face disappeared. I got up and turned the light on. I didn’t sleep for the rest of the night. Being fifteen, I felt I was a little too old to wake up my parents because I might have had a bad dream. With nothing else to do, I played video games. In my potentially haunted room.

I didn’t have the best survival instinct.

Later, after I told a friend about this, we spoke about our shared experiences. We both saw people that were shaded blue. I don’t know if that’s a universal thing but like before, I’m not going to find out.

This is an experience that I haven’t forgotten in the last twenty years. I haven’t had anything similar to happen. It’s just made me feel a little bit nervous when I’m home alone in a place that is older. Heck, even newer places because you don’t know what was demolished for that new structure to be there.

Cheap Doesn’t Mean Bad or Why I Don’t Feel Bad Shooting Fish in a Barrel

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Something that has always bothered me about being a podcaster is when we cover a bad movie that doesn’t have the advantages of its big budget contemporaries. It makes me feel like I’m punching down, which doesn’t make for good comedy. Comedians should always punch up at those in power. Even someone making a piece of trash is still putting themselves out there. And if it’s good, I’ll give the piece its roses.

But then there are the works that are just so bad and are the little engine that could that decided to just slam through a town at full speed. Leaving a wake of destruction in their path.

I mainly write about the Lifetime movies that we cover. They’re clearly cheaply made and seemingly mass produced so that all of them are roughly the same except for the part where the crazed killer character decides to go nuts for some reason or another. They have their own charm to them but there’s a part of me that always wishes they were a bit better.

The problem is that I know they could be. There’s always a lesser light in the world to show that it could be done for even cheaper. That’s not an excuse for these people to pay their people less, it’s for them to try harder.

Paranormal Activity is a horror movie that was made for 15,000 dollars and grossed about 194 million in 2007. Adjusted for inflation that’s 294 million today. It was made with a few cameras on tripods, about five unknown actors and just was well made from the jump.

Godzilla Minus One was made for ten million dollars. That is a drop in the bucket for studios like Marvel and Warner Bros and yet it’s stunning and well made. Look at the below image. You can tell they cared and wanted to make the best movie that they could.

It’s because these movies understood something. That poverty isn’t the death of creativity but where it’s born. There is a long tradition of this throughout the world of media. Monty Python wanted to make a movie making fun of the middle ages and Arthurian legends but couldn’t afford horses. What would be the funniest way to handle this? Have every knight have a squire that bonks two coconuts together. Have characters comment on it to make one of the funniest exchanges in comedy history. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqtS9xyl0f4&ab_channel=3qui1i6riM

Mystery Science Theater 3000(MST3K), had to constantly make a nearly two hour show on a minuscule budget. Their puppets and set were clearly made of found objects. The puppets could barely move on their own. How did they make up for all of this? With excellent writing that was clearly positioned in their own Midwest slice of life.

And that’s what it all comes down to. The money in the end doesn’t matter. Passion can make up for it. If you believe in your piece of media and you want it to be the best it can be, it will be. That’s what I’m attacking. The fact that the filmmakers don’t care. I want to love their movie but the fact that they turned in something that’s only worth a C+ at best is going to stop me from doing so and I’m not going to stop myself from calling it out.

Games I Play Every Year

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Going off of what I wrote last week when I said that I constantly try and experience new things, there are several games that I play every year. They’re like my comfort food. Games that I’ve loved forever. Most of them are JRPGs and old school in general. Sometimes it just feels nice to think that you can go home again. Here are the four games that I play every year.

  1. Shovel Knight- What if your knight didn’t have a sword but instead a shovel? What if the damsel in distress was the equal to the hero? What if a company made one of the best old school platformers that ever was. Those are the questions that this game asks. The game is about the titular Shovel Knight trying to save his partner, Shield Knight from someone named the Sorceress and her villainess group of knights called the Order of No Quarter. The gameplay is reminiscent of Duck Tales with you slashing and pogoing with your shovel. Shovel Knight is funny, well made, colorful, has great music and is all around a masterpiece. It is such a joy to play. It takes about four hours to beat but those four hours are joyful. You can feel the love in every moment of this game. The team that made these are experts at fun and have done their homework five times over.

2. Final Fantasy X- I have bought this game on every new system that it becomes available on. I played this game religiously when I was younger and had it on my PS2. I never wanted to be that far away from it. The game is such a departure from the other Final Fantasy iterations. You play as Tidus who arrives in a tropical paradise that is stuck in a continual cycle of death because of a giant Kaiju-size monster known as Sin. He becomes a guardian of a woman named Yuna who is learning how to summon creatures known as aeons, once she completes her journey of learning how to summon all of them, she will face Sin. And that’s about all I can say without spoiling. The game is bright and colorful much like Shovel Knight, has a wonderful battle system that makes gameplay fun and addictive. It has it’s moments that are less than stellar, see the Tidus laugh moment below but the journey is one that I go on every year just to remember how good it is.

3. Bioshock- Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his own brow? That’s the question that Andrew Ryan asks you as you unwillingly enter the city of Rapture. You play as Jack a man that is just having the worst day. He gets into a plane crash and swimming to safety, he finds a lighthouse. He goes inside and takes a bathysphere down to this city. He finds a fallen utopia, the aforementioned Rapture, that was based on the concept that there were no restraints on scientists, inventors and artists. They found a substance called ADAM that allowed them to change their DNA. This allowed them to throw fireballs and lightning and do all kinds of other things. But the substance had two downsides, it took genetically altered little girls known as little sisters to harvest it and it was highly addictive creating violent monsters called splicers. You have to learn how to survive in this world and then escape from it. You need ADAM to live and you need to decide if your survival is worth murder of children or if you’re willing to make the game harder by letting them liven when you take the ADAM from them. It’s a first person shooter and probably the darkest game on this list in terms of visuals and subject matter. It’s another masterpiece that doesn’t take too long to play. Or maybe I’ve just gotten that good at it.

4. Chrono Trigger- Another JRPG of the old school SNES variety. You play as Crono and after a festival experiment goes wrong and sends you back in time, you find that you have to stop a disaster that is going to take place and destroy the world. You collect people from the various time periods that you visit to help you and include, a chivalrous man sized frog knight, a polite robot, a sorcerer that looks like Vegeta and a cave woman. Then you have your two bros from the present, a princess in hiding and your female inventor friend. The game despite its age jam packs so much into it. There are over thirteen endings in the game depending on when you fight the final boss who becomes available about a quarter way through the game and even sooner if you know how to get there. The game was as far as I know the first game to issue a new game plus mode where you were able to restart the game with all your weapons, experience and abilities from your last beaten save. That meant that you could start just romping all the first area enemies with your ultimate abilities the minute you hit the street. This game continues my love of color, great stories and music. Starting to see a theme emerge.

Unsatisfied on New Year’s Eve

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It was another New Year’s in a shitty bar with someone whose name she wouldn’t remember by the morning. He had been a last minute choice, having matched a few days ago. He was alright, she guessed. She thought that he wasn’t going to be that much in bed. During conversations, he was selfish and interrupted her. She imagined that he wouldn’t be much better in any other regards in his life. Sometimes it was good enough.

But not tonight. For some reason, she just couldn’t do it tonight. She couldn’t put her finger on what this feeling was. But she knew that she just didn’t want to deal with it. She took one last look at him and decided that now was the moment. It was her chance. She slid out of her booth, pushed through the crowd and out the door.

It was still early. She could find someone else. She could go to a different bar. She could get nice and buzzed somewhere. She could find out what her friends were doing. They had gotten older than their years. Found partners. Got hitched. Made babies. She had thought them boring for so long.

But as she walked into the street. Pushing through the New Year’s crowds. She felt… off. She didn’t feel their revelry. Didn’t feel their joy. She felt something else.

She hailed a taxi and told the driver to take her back to Penn Station. When it got her there, she still hadn’t heard anything from her date. Maybe he had met someone at the bar. Maybe he thought that this was all for the best. Maybe he had forgotten all about her.

Whatever.

Her luck was holding up and she saw that there was a train heading back towards her home in about twenty minutes. She ordered three slices of pizza, reminded herself that her resolution to go to the gym more started in the morning and waited. The train arrived in a rush of screeching brakes and painful smells. The kind that assaulted the nostrils.

She climbed on and finished her pizza before the next two stops. She held onto the pizza box because she was raised right. When she got to her car, she climbed in and waited for it to warm up. Still nothing from her date. She felt nothing about this.

When the car was warm enough, she put it in drive and started going. She put her phone’s music in random mode and turned towards home. She made it about two miles when she saw the red and blue lights in her rearview.

“Well, shit,” she said.

The officer was a young Asian woman. She walked up to her car window, which she had already rolled down and had her documents in her hands.

“Evening,” the officer said.

“Evening,” she said and held out her documents.

“Where you heading?”

“Home.”

“Had anything to drink?”

“One drink about three hours ago.”

“Hm. No plans for the evening?”

“I had plans but my date was kind of boring.”

“Heh, I’ve been there. Give me a minute.”

She waited with her car off and thought that this was another change. Usually, she would have been anxious or nervous when getting pulled over. It wouldn’t be on purpose but the memory of getting in trouble, something that was always dramatic during her childhood, would cause her to feel that way. But now, there was nothing. She would have to bring up this night to her therapist.

The officer returned to her.

“We’re doing random checks, that’s why I pulled you over,” the officer said. “But you seem more than fine. Stay safe.”

“Thanks,” she said.

She took back her documents, rolled up her window and started driving. She got home, pulling into her driveway and got out of her car. She walked into her apartment and heard the chorus of meows. They were wondering why she was home so early and why they weren’t being fed at that instant. She gave them some treats and went to shower and change into her pajamas.

She got some snacks and a bottle of wine and sat down on her couch. Her cats came to her, an orange and black. They figured out their sleeping arrangements and were soon snoozing in their cinnamon roll forms.

Her phone buzzed and she looked at it. It was her date.

Him: Hey babe, my date ghosted me. You around? Want to ring in the new year?
Her: You know that I’m the one you went out with tonight, right? Did you forget what my name was?
Him: What the fuck, why did you ditch me?
Her: You’re boring and you talk too much about crypto.
Him: Whatever. I don’t need you.
Her: I mean, you must need someone if you’re mass texting everyone.
Him: Bitch.

She blocked him and let out a satisfied sigh when she did so.

She turned on a movie and let her mind wander. What was she feeling at this instant? When she stayed in on nights like this she would worry that she was becoming some kind of cat lady. Letting the world pass her by. She looked around at her slice of the world. Her little apartment. Her little world. Her little piece. Piece. Peace.

And at that moment, she knew what she was feeling. She raised her glass to the ceiling. Downed the rest of her wine and smiled a deep, dreamy smile.

I Tried to Listen to 100 Albums in 2024. I failed but it was fun

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I think the reason I failed is because I got the idea in July and it was basically a nonstop sprint until the end of the year. I got close. I listened to 76 albums before the New Year. My friends said that why don’t you say that you’re going to keep going until next July. But it doesn’t feel neat that way. I just want things to look good.

But why do this? I keep track of the number of books that I read, video games I complete, and TV shows and movies that I watch in a year. Shouldn’t I just be focused on enjoying the media? Why do I have to keep score?

Because it’s part of the discipline of being a creative, at least in my eyes. It’s easy to fall into the same things or waste my time watching Youtube videos or the same things I’ve seen before. I need to make sure that I’m still consuming new ideas and learning from it. Challenging my old preconceived notions.

It’s the same reason that I read from every genre I can find. Because every genre has something new to teach me. I learned how to write flowery descriptions from romance novels. Reading horror taught me suspense for both my own horror writing and when I write things in other genres. I want to make sure that I’m the best I can be and to do that you need to research.

I’m going to cover some of the albums I listened to and below you’ll find the complete list. I think most of them were very good but I’ve highlighted the ones I liked the best. The best though of all of them was Chappell Roan’s “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess”. There are no skips on that album.

You might noticed that I listened to Smashmouth’s album. The reason for that was partly because I was looking to see if we could move beyond All Star as their only meme song. Turns out that they had put together a really solid sound and that album was very good.

Anyway, I think that it’s a good thing to attempt and keeping track is fun. I like trying to beat my old high score for books each year. So far the best I’ve made in the three years I’ve been doing this is 60 books. Trying to get to a hundred in a year.

  1. Mayday- Old Blood 
  2. Mazzy Star- So Tonight That I Might See
  3. boygenius- the record 
  4. The Kinks- The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society
  5. Bad Religion- The Gray Race 
  6. Blondie- Parallel Lines
  7. Butthole Ricochet- Sophomore Slump
  8. Mean Girls 2024 soundtrack 
  9. Taylor Swift- folklore 
  10. Spoon- Memory Dust EP
  11. Azure Ray- As Above, So Below EP
  12. girl in red- if i could make it all go quiet 
  13. Belle and Sebastian- If You’re Feeling Sinister 
  14. Fugazi- Repeater 
  15. The Pierces- You & I
  16. Megadeth- Cryptic Writings 
  17. PUP- The Dream is Over
  18. Judas Priest- Sad Wings of Destiny
  19. Bright Eyes- Cassadaga(Companion Version)
  20. Bright Eyes- Digital Ash in a Digital Urn(Companion Version)
  21. Bright Eyes- Lifted…(Companion Version)
  22. Queens of the Stone Age- Songs for the Deaf 
  23. Hot Step-Mom- The Serial Killer in the Other Room is Better Than You
  24. Taylor Swift- Lover
  25. Catie Turner- Comedy & Tragedy Act 1 – EP 
  26. Raye- 21st Century Blues 
  27. Bad Bad Hats- Bad Bad Hats 
  28. Taylor Swift- Tortured Poets Department 
  29. Billie Eilish- Hit Me Hard and Soft 
  30. Noga Erez- KIDS(Against the Machine)
  31. Dua Lipa- Dua Lipa 
  32. Ninja Sex Party- These Nuts
  33. Apollo 440- The Future’s What It Used to Be 
  34. Chappell Roan- The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess 
  35. Sabrina Carpenter- Short n’ Sweet
  36. girl in red- I’M DOING IT AGAIN BABY!
  37. Metallica- The Black Album 
  38. The Linda Lindas- No Obligations 
  39. The Decemberists- I’ll Be Your Girl 
  40. Epic Beard Men- This Was Supposed to Be Fun 
  41. Fleetwood Mac- Rumors 
  42. Cursive- Devourer 
  43. Wolf Alice- Visions of a Life 
  44. The Last Dinner Party- Prelude to Ecstasy
  45. Stars- Do You Trust Your Friends? 
  46. Smashmouth- Astrolounge 
  47. Bright Eyes- Five Dice, All Threes
  48. Michael Jackson- Thriller 
  49. Thursday- War All the Time 
  50. Chaos Chaos- Committed to the Crime EP 
  51. Iron and Wine- Our Endless Numbered Days
  52. Norah Jones- Come Away With Me 
  53. Zolof The Rock and Roll Destroyer- Schematics 
  54. Zolof The Rock and Roll Destroyer and Reel Big Fish- Duet All Night Long EP 
  55. Dead Kennedys- Plastic Surgery Disasters 
  56. Dead Kennedys- In God We Trust, Inc EP
  57. Sabrina Carpenter- emails I can’t send 
  58. The Misfits- Collection 
  59. Violent Femmes- Violent Femmes 
  60. The Dare- What’s Wrong With New York?
  61. The Dare- Sex EP
  62. Joe Jackson- Look Sharp!
  63. The Long Johns- Bones EP
  64. Light and Motion- Wonder 
  65. Tiffany Poon- Dvornak Album 
  66. The Smiths- The Queen is Dead 
  67. The Smiths- Louder Than Bombs
  68. The Smiths- Strangeways, Here I Come 
  69. David Bowie- Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders of Mars 
  70. Edith Piaf- Chansons Parisiennes 
  71. Robert Palmer- Riptide 
  72. Sade- Love Deluxe 
  73. Vic Chesnutt- At the Cut 
  74. Wicked Soundtrack 
  75. System of a Down- Toxicity 
  76. Harvey Danger- Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone? 

Little Kitty, Big City Review

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The trailers for Little Kitty, Big City got me cautiously excited. The reason I was cautiously excited was because I didn’t know if anything could happen to the cat. Once the second trailer was just like “Hey, we got you, we know that you just want to watch a fun cat be silly. Nothing can happen to this sweet boy.”

Still haven’t played Stray because I heard things can happen to that cat. It’s hard but the possibility is enough to make sure that I don’t play it. Can’t deal with sad cat stuff. Not at this point in my life.

Anyway, I immediately thought about comparisons to Untitled Goose Game. I enjoyed the hell out of Goose Game mostly because it was enigmatic. You were a goose that seemingly had beautiful handwriting and a vendetta against this one small hamlet. It had mischief to do and it wasn’t going to let anything stop it. This included bullying a small child, bullying a gardener, destroying and stealing whatever it wanted. Why? Well, look at geese, we all know that they look sinister as hell and would do this given half the chance.

Little Kitty on the other hand, has a plot, characters and a clear goal. You are a little cat and you need to get back home to continue your nap. You need to climb back up but you need the strength to do it and you gain that through eating fish. Eat the four fish and began the somewhat challenging climb. Before all that, you’re going to meet a tanuki inventor, a merchant crow hell bent on getting shinies, a duck family and some other helpful older cats. Humans will pet you or if they’re annoyed, pick you up and walk you out of their place of residence or business. To reiterate, no harm can come to the cat.

The game is beautiful, the music is delightful, the characters are fun and the dialogue is witty. The gameplay itself rewards exploration with a bunch of fresh new hats that all look adorable and getting to see your kitty nap in a variety of places. It’s not a long game only taking about two hours to complete and another three if you want to 100% it. However, it’s going to enter my rotation of cool down games where I just want to relax and not think about things like Powerwash Simulator. Just a nice, cozy game to take my mind off of things.