#003: Studio Notes/The Finer Things, January & February 2023

Hey y’all! It’s your favorite dork, back at it again. I’ve just finished up the final touches on Issue 1 of Our Lady Maven at long last, and I’ve finally got time for a bit of a breather to write a bit about what I’ve been working on, what I’ve been reading when I have a second to sit down and read, what I’ve been listening to in the studio, what I’ve been playing in my wee small hours of the morning before I pass out for the day, and (for those few of you who are curious for reasons other than wondering “what the fuck is wrong with her”) what I’ve been smoking.

I don’t know if this will be a regular column, but I fully intend to make it one if I can. I started doing this blog thing to talk about things that aren’t exactly “marketable” “content” to begin with and to give a bit of context as to my thought process as I go through my craft, so I can’t think of a better idea for a regular feature. I tend to align with the school of thought that holds that “death of the author” is most often misused as a cop-out by milquetoast moderates who don’t want to interrogate or even bother thinking about the moral implications of continuing to uphold the “merits” of middling fiction written by maladapted mooncalves (looking at you, Harry Potter fans), much less the lives and contexts of somewhat more morally ambiguous (and usually queer, non-white, or other marginalized) creators who spend their lives crafting much more complex or fucked-up narratives.

I’m also of the school of thought that holds that the spirit of a creative work is inseparable from the context it resides in, which very much includes the thoughts, times and places the creator was working through at the time. Quite frankly, on a personal level I’ve found that the things I’ve been up to outside of putting pen to paper drastically influence my thoughts and way of being while I’m working on any given piece, and while a good portion of those things tend towards the negative a good bit of what I’ve been reading, listening to, playing through, and observing works its way in as well.

If you’re still here, and are cool with kickin’ back for a bit and listen to me ramble about shit I find cool…you’re in luck, ‘cuz this is what this column’s gonna be. Oh, and if you read through this and have some records, games, books, or movies for me to check out, email me at sarah (at) sarahallenreed (dot) com and hit me with those recs. I always love hearing from all of you.

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WHAT I’VE BEEN WORKING ON

Our Lady Maven has occupied the majority (if not the entirety) of my mindshare for the past few months, and at some point I fully intend to do a full write-up on it. It’s been a labor of love from myself and Em that’s been multiple years in the making, and now that it’s finally out the door I can honestly say I’m more than content with the end result.

(Oh, and if you wanna pick up a copy, head on over to the webstore Em put together and go snag one, and if you haven’t read the series yet but would like to, I’ve got a little teaser right here on the site)

I’ve also finally been sitting down to finish up the re-drafting and re-working of my graphic novel BARREN, which I received a grant for thanks to the magnificent Annie Koyama last year. It’s been a bit of a slog, to be honest. The best thing about re-working a script you wrote years ago is that you realize that younger you had a lot of great ideas but fucked a lot of shit up. From the looks like I have some reading to do to get some shit right, grounded, and believable before sitting down to rework the script. Don’t worry–it’ll be worth the wait. I’m damn good at what I do.

With that stated, there’s been at least one thing I’ve been working on in between bouts of inks and moments of rest and recovery that has been a unique challenge. If you follow me on Github, you probably haven’t noticed much in the way of new things updated, but you’ve most likely seen the little green code commit thingy get the occasional ping. I’ve got a secret project that Autumn ████████ and I have been working on, and it’s in a format of storytelling that I’ve toyed around with but never made a dedicated effort to do anything with. It’ll be a good minute before I have anything to show for my labors here, but for now I’ll let the screenshot to the left here speak for itself.

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WHAT I’VE BEEN LISTENING TO

If there’s one little section here on this column you’ll always see, it’s this one. I literally don’t stop listening to music. I have a flip phone and don’t bother with social media these days save having Instagram for work, but I keep my old smartphone around with a pair of wireless Audio Technica noise-cancelling over-the-ears every time I leave the house so I can keep the jams going, and given the fact that I work from home through the night and sleep during the day I’m shocked my neighbors don’t complain nearly as much as they have the right to.

It’d be a long, long list if I were to type out everything that’s held my interest over the past couple months, but here’s a short list of records I’ve had blasting on mocp over the past bit.

DEAN MARTIN - LIKE NEVER BEFORE

If there is one travesty in this world, it is that it is nearly impossible to legally (or illegally, for that matter) track down Dino’s back catalogue in DRM-free form. I don’t have Spotify or any streaming services, and I adamantly refuse to pay for anything of the sort aside from the occasional Bandcamp purchase. With those restrictions in play, the only place I’ve found to track down the Rat Pack’s most quintessentially Italian member is what I have to assume is his estate’s official Youtube channel.

And thank god for that, because for as much of a Sinatra fangirl as I am Ol’ Blue Eyes is in a perpetual dead fuckin’ heat for “favorite Rat Pack member” with Dino. I absolutely love his old records, and highly recommend this one, “Amore”, and “My Woman, My Woman, My Wife” if you need more crooners in your life.

Recommended tracks: I Ran All The Way Home, ‘Til I Find You

AROVANE - ATOL SCRAP

I do love me some IDM. I often credit the genre for being the reason I got into making music in the first place, and this album–originally released all the way back in 2000–was absolutely on the list of “reasons I started”. Between this record, Plaid’s Not For Threes and a few select Aphex Twin and Outlier Recordings pics, there’s definitely a playlist worth of records I’ve been listening to for the past ten years plus that I put on whenever I really need comfort food to buckle down and focus to.

Recommended tracks: Just listen to the whole thing all the way through. It’s an atmospheric IDM album, that’s what you’re supposed to do.

COMBICHRIST - WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?

Yeah, I know this one’s a bit out of place on this graphic next to Dino and Bill Evans. I also contain multitudes, so you’re going to have to roll with it.

I first heard this record thanks to some goth kids I went to high school with before I got kicked out, and I’ve very occasionally used it in the same way investment bankers use amphetamines; i.e., if I need a kick in the ass and a wakeup call, downing an energy drink and blasting Andy LaPlegua screaming about how you’re a piece of shit and he’s going to kick your ass definitely helps, but it’s not something I’d turn to unless I absolutely fuckin’ have to.

I’ll be the first to admit a good bit of the lyrics didn’t exactly age well at best or are morally abhorrent at worst (see also the weirdly fascist-allusions-for-the-sake-of-muh-edge on “Fuck That Shit”, a track I always end up skipping), but then again 99% of industrial-adjacent acts from the 2000s and early 2010s find themselves in the same boat. (Looking at you, Mindless Self Indulgence.) I’d recommend a skip if that’s not something you’re willing to tolerate.

Recommended tracks: Get Your Body Beat, Deathbed, Electrohead

BILL EVANS TRIO - PORTRAIT IN JAZZ

Bill Evans at his finest. Back before The Jazz Program was structured in the “listening party” format it is now, I used to have a monthly feature I called the “Artist Spotlight”, which basically was the current show format on the first Tuesday of every month. (The remaining shows were mixes of whatever I wanted to throw on that week, with no real theme to them). For the last few months of 2022, I decided to just embrace the sadness I always feel during the holidays and took up the October, November, and December slots with the records I always listen to when I’m miserable and need to sob it out. Bill Evans was the second choice of the three¹ and if memory serves, Portrait In Jazz was the first record on the docket.

Bill’s catalogue isn’t just a depression listen for me, however–it’s chock full of the finest piano jazz records ever produced in the Western hemisphere. (Japan definitely gives us multiple runs for our money, but we’ll get to that when I get around to gushing about Ryo Fukui.) This album’s version of “What Is This Thing Called Love?” is one of my favorite versions of the standard by a country mile.

Recommended tracks: What Is This Thing Called Love?, Blue In Green

EDITORS - AN END HAS A START

I got introduced to Editors in two less-than-stellar ways. First, through enjoying the first half of their 2018 record Violence and then being utterly underwhelmed with the second half, and second, through being gobsmacked at the news of the permanent edition of experimental noise/electronic musician Blanck Mass to their lineup with the release of 2022’s album EBM. I still haven’t checked that record out and I’m not sure I want to. The idea of noisier, edgier screamy joints mixed in with sad-boy post-punk offshoots doesn’t resonate as well with those of us who remember Myspace. I still have occasional moments where I vaguely remember Breathe Carolina exists² and I throw up a little in my mouth.

Regardless of whatever they’re on these days, I’ve finally gotten around to listening to their first three records during the past few months in the studio, and to be quite frank I don’t think I’ve heard a record that’s hit a nerve quite like this one in a while. “The Weight Of The World” had the dubious honor of being one of the very few pieces of media that has made me tear up, and the rest of the album is as cacophonously cathartic as that track. When I wrote “Let The Waves Have Their Way” for online metal mag Sleeping Village about Interpol’s relation to the closure and comfort present in both black and post-black metal’s most violently soothing moments and the work of New York’s bleakest foursome, I honestly could have written about this record in a different universe where I shoplifted this record instead of Our Love To Admire. Turn it up and let it wash over you.

Recommended tracks: The Weight Of The World, When Anger Shows, Smokers Outside The Hospital Doors

MASSIVE ATTACK : MEZZANINE

If you need me to give this record an introduction, you either are so young that you missed an entire generation’s worth of influences or you’ve never gotten into trip-hop for reasons that are far beyond my understanding. Let me put it this way–there is a very good reason an extended cut of the first track is the menu music for cult classic Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines. The record reeks of smoked-out clubs, sinister motives, and the sensation of wrestling with your most sickening inner thoughts and losing miserably.

I’d say more, but experiencing this record will hasten your understanding of it far more than any words or clever writing I could give you. If you’ve never heard it, do yourself a favor–find a copy, plug it into your stereo, and go take a night drive at one in the morning. It’ll click for you. Given the fact that I’m a nocturnal neurotic who wakes up at four in the afternoon and don’t go to bed until six in the morning, this night beat record fits perfectly in my standard rotation.

Recommended tracks: Angel, Inertia Creeps, Risingson

PLACEBO - SLEEPING WITH GHOSTS

I’ll admit it–I’ve bounced off of this band for most of my life. Multiple important people in my life have sworn by this English twosome (looking at you, Penpen and Autumn) but I’ve never really found a decent entry point into their discography that meshes with my taste. That changed this past month, as I started diving back into snowboarding-arcade romp SSX 3 for the first time since I was a kid (we’ll get to that in the video games section) and found “The Bitter End” on the impeccibly curated soundtrack next. My collection contains more than a few discographies I’ve acquired for people I care for, so it didn’t take long for me to locate the record that track is found on and the whole thing became an immediate repeated spin.

I’ve actually been listening to this as I write this up. The whole thing careens past at a speed just over “out of control” when it’s not cozying up to your ear on tracks like “Something Rotten” and seductively slinking around with wa-wa pedals and barely whispered vocals that sound something out of the previously mentioned Massive Attack’s sonic vocabulary. There’s also more than a couple heartfelt tracks like “Special Needs” that honestly makes a teenage me–a fucked up kid that got lost in the system who ended up getting stuck with an IEP and a smorgasbord of psych meds I didn’t need instead of recieving any kind of help or being given any real chance for success–feel seen. Once you put the entire package together, it makes me wish it was summer again so I could go skateboarding and get lost in the music and the flow.

Recommended tracks: The Bitter End, Ashtray Girl, Something Rotten, Special Needs

THE MARS VOLTA - AMPUTECTURE

There’s always going to be some consistent themes in my listening habits, and “something something Omar Rodruigez-Lopez” is one of them. Best part about that is, I’m never going to run out of side projects of his to gush over. The man has never made a single bad record in his life, and I’m counting my personal least favorite of his (Bosnian Rainbows) in that. Even my least favorite project of his has its only studio album scoring at least a 7 out of 10 to me.³

With that stated, Amputecture was particularly formative to me as a musician and songwriter, and aside from two of his self-produced efforts (Xenophanes and Solar Gambling) and one other TMV record (Frances The Mute) this is probably the record I return most frequently to.

Recommended tracks: Asilos Magdalena, Tetragrammaton

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WHAT I’VE BEEN PLAYING

I’ll be honest, I’m not exactly a big gamer, and a lot of that is due to life circumstance–most of my twenties was spent either without a consistent place to crash or living out of vehicles for months at a time, and it’s a bit hard to plug in a Playstation in a Corolla. I didn’t even own my first seventh-generation console until I bought an Xbox 360 at a Goodwill in late 2019 for half of what it was probably worth.⁴ I wasn’t allowed game consoles that were even remotely modern as a kid either, and so a lot of games that were formative storytelling experiences for a lot of my peers were things I never got to experience.

With that stated, working for a brief time at the electronics arbitrage desk at a recycling center during the pandemic (an experience that insipred “I Am Starting To Empathize With Bukowski”) enabled me to get a couple decently-powered (if ten years old at the time I bought them) machines at cost. One of those was a Dell all-in-one which I promptly slapped on top of an old box radio that I had gutted, installed a low-end Logitech speaker system into the box, and turned it into what I usually refer to as “The Jukebox”. It’s not what you’d called a beast, but as of late I’ve figured out how to get the poor thing to run a few decent emulators. I also somehow scraped together the cash in 2021 to snag myself a used 2DS XL, which I of course immediately rooted.

So, for a good year or so now, I’ve been making a point to try and re-visit a bunch of gaming stories that I never got to experience outside of Let’s Plays for the first time. Here’s a few of the ones I’ve been playing over the past couple months.

JAKE HUNTER: GHOST OF THE DUSK (3DS)

I love me some visual novels for the same reason I love me some detective fiction. I love a good noir-tinged romp, I adore a good mystery, and to be frank I’m a bit of a sucker for shite tropes. Snatcher is one of my favorite games of all time and is one of the reasons why I have an “Outer Heaven” flag on my wall.⁵

With that stated, I’ve been a huge fan of the Jake Hunter series ever since I discovered the first localization on the original DS, and was absolutely stoked when I found a copy of this volume of stories for the 3DS. Dripping with charm, interesting (and at times unbearably tropy) characters, and a bunch of relatively well-put together puzzles–with a few notable exceptions, including an infuriating moon-logic puzzle in the morgue in a later chapter of the first story in the collection), Ghost Of The Dusk is as much of a favorite waiting-room holdover as any old paperback I could stuff in my purse. Plus, the whole thing is chock full of references and allusions to other thriller/detective tropes, including the obligatory genre name-drops of works of Marlowe and other golden-era crime novelists and a few more obscure and occasionally region-specific ones. My personal favorite is what I have to assume is a direct allusion to the aforementioned SNATCHER, with Jake Hunter ordering a glass of “Napoleon” within the first few lines of Chapter One–a bottle of which is a key item in a specific puzzle in Kojima’s classic take on the detective adventure genre.

There’s a few amusing bumps in translation–including the strange “localization” choice to repaint all of the very clearly Yakuza members as Italian mobsters and somehow forgetting to change both their character models and the backgrounds of the environments you find them in, which are obviously textbook Yakuza regional offices to anyone who’s bothered playing the Sega series of the same name–but they honestly only add to the charm. That’s a good thing, seeing as tropey charm is this game’s bread and butter. Hell, the button you press to get a hint from the player character as to what to do or where to go next is literally the “smoke” button. You read that correctly. Press the L button (which is mapped to a literal graphic of a pack of smokes in the GUI) and Jake lights up a smoke (or doesn’t, if you’re in somewhere he deems he’d get in trouble for doing so) and tells you what to do next. Absolutely fantasic. 10/10. No notes. Every game should have this button.

SSX 3 (GAMECUBE)

I fuckin’ love extreme sports games. I can barely battle my way through a stairset on a skate deck (something that, for some reason, has never made me lose my love for longboarding) but I adore the freedom and arcade-iness of anything that puts a board or bike under you and lets you tear your way through a city with fun sound effects whenever you land a trick. THUGPRO has been an old favorite of mine since the days when I lived in my van, and I’d log on wherever I could track down a public Wifi network and skate a few hours away. I’ve played through nearly all of the rest of the Tony Hawk franchise as well and even (mostly successfully) stumbled my way through SKATE on the 360. With that in mind, it should be no surprise that I’m a huge fan of SSX3.

Very few sports games of this time period bothered with this kind of expansive world–hell, Tony Hawk’s Underground released literally seven days after this one–but SSX3 takes the interesting tracks and fun designs of Tricky and slams them all into three interconnected peaks. There’s no loading zones whatsoever–if you’ve unlocked all three peaks, you can literally snowboard from the top of Peak 3 at the very pinnacle of the mountain all the way to the bottom of Peak 1 at the base. Unlocking all three peaks, however, takes a good bit of progression. Thankfully, it’s (mostly) very fun progression.

While the controls can feel barely on rails at best and completely out of your control at worst, the game’s speed, intensity, and expansiveness leads to a very fun fuck-offable experience. A good portion of the controls are questionable at best (I had to remap the “reset” button, designed to put you back on the track if you fell off, away from the Y button on my controller and onto the Select button because I kept hitting the thing in the middle of races and screwing up my runs–something that’s mapped in that exact way on the PS2 controller that actually has a Select button for a very good reason) and the AI the computer controlled players have for race modes cheats like hell, but the entire experience is absolutely a blast. If that wasn’t enough, the game comes packed with one of the most entertaining soundtracks this side of the Burnout franchise. Placebo, Dan The Automator, Yellowcard, The Faint, Thrice, Chemical Brothers….the entire thing just blasts, and I have found myself staying up well past the sunrise just jamming along with The Bitter End or Jerk It Out while busting out tricks that shouldn’t be physically possible.

Sometimes all you need is vibes, man. And this game has ‘em in spades.

RESIDENT EVIL 4 (GAMECUBE/PS2)

I’m gonna be honest, I bounced right the fuck off this one. Supergreatfriend’s recent Lets Play of the Oculus port was one of my favorite fall-asleep-to Youtube playlists of the past year, and while I’ve tried various early titles from the series in the past I could not get past the clunkiness of the tank controls and my own blatant incompetence at handling them. So, when I figured out that Gamecube emulation worked on the Jukebox (albeit at a crawl for certain titles), I figured I’d give this one a shot. Turns out, the Gamecube emulator somehow figured out how to lag on, of all things, cutscenes. Reeeally need to get a better computer for the Jukebox.

Either way, the PS2 port ran fine, and….well, to be honest, as someone used to modern twin-stick controls, I could not get past the initial opening segment. I’ve heard that the PC port coupled with a couple mods allows for a bit more of a modern control setup, and I may try that, but as for now I’m still stuck on remembering that the right stick doesn’t directly control where the camera points in any manner that’s remotely permanent…and that the knife controls like the gun in first person, which means moving the stick upwards aims the knife upwards for some reason…and that you can’t move while using the knife…

…Yeah, I’m gonna have to get back to you on this one.

FANTASY LIFE (3DS)

This one surprised me. Best way I can describe it is “Animal Crossing meets an MMO without the online connection”, and while normally that wouldn’t be up my alley whatsoever this particular little “casual romp” has slowly been taking over my life for the past few weeks.

The premise is simple–you have twelve sets of jobs–cleverly called Lifes in game, complete with title-case L–ranging from typical fare like “mercenary” or “hunter” to left-field choices like “seamstress” or “cook” (which I of course picked). That might sound like there’s a few that are less fun to play, but even the latter titles find ways to be challenging. The “cook” job has you working in a restaurant making everything from standard omelettes at lower levels to monster meat recipes that require you to straight up slay dragons, drag their meat back to the restaurant, and cook it up, bringing a whole new meaning to “farm-to-table”.

Somehow, this game mixes a fairly light-hearted (and obscenely cleverly written) storyline with extremely nerve-hitting and far-reaching themes like grieving a lost parent, the meaning of family and belonging, and what it means to choose your own path in Life, be it with the title-case L in the context of the game or in reference to self-determination in life in general. I’m not exactly easily moved by media, but somehow this cute little game that lets you don a wok as a hat while you work in a restaurant with a cook named Alfredo and bonk monsters named things like “The Napdragon” upside the noggin with two princesses in tow somehow got to me.

Plus, like…look at this screenshot. It’s adorable. You could argue that I should have saved my Dosh (yes, that is the actual name for this game’s currency) for better weapons or something, but I had twenty grand and bought a cute lil’ log cabin with flowers and shit. It’s great. I invited my girlies over for tea and we’re gonna go out and go fishing in an active volcano later so I can catch some Lava Prawns and make this game’s equivalent of Cajun gumbo. Those are things you can do. You can also…like, do the story, I guess, save the world or whatever, but the beauty of this game is that it makes a point to remind you that there’s always time for tea, and I love that about it.

I suppose I’m enthralled with this game for the same reason that I decided to spend hours and devote server space to gushing about these records and obscure old games– sometimes you want a break from penning inordinately personal horror narratives or illustrating extraordinarily deep historical tales and the best cure for all that heavy is to spend a few hours fucking off and grinding dinosaurs for culinary ingredients in a maid outfit.

Life needs balance, whether it’s spelled with a capital L or not.

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WHAT I’VE BEEN SMOKING

Ah, pipe tobacco. Since I quit drinking this is the only vice I have left that I can be pretentious as all shit about.

…you know, I say that, but I drank bottom shelf bourbon straight or with no-cal sodie and I’ll be the first to admit that my taste in smokes is a bit lacking. Anyways, while I’m not going to even imply that I’m a connoisseur by any means, here’s my favorite three tins of the past couple months.

GURKHA RETRIBUTION

Spectacular English blend. I got this in a tin sampler of the Gurkha line, and to be honest this is the only one that impressed me. Heavy on the Turkish Orientals and Latakia, the blend has a fantastic woody room note and has a sizable heft to its hit without being overwhelming.

CASCADIA PIPE CO. VERTICAL LIMIT

Got this one in yet another sampler over the holidays, with an additional Cascadia tin, a pipe, and a cute lil’ tin campin’ mug and folding pocketknife.⁶ Out of the two, Vertical Limit is the one I remember most–nice and easy burning, heavy on the Burleys, and with a good amount of smoked Kentucky you can absolutely taste. I don’t normally go for these types of brick cuts–they literally included the knife in the sampler because you need something to cut these heavily pressed leaves with–but if I decide to pick a brick again over my usual preferred flake cuts I’ll probably go with this’n. Probably. There’s still three other offerings from Cascadia I have yet to try out.

4TH GENERATION 1931

Not gonna lie, this is my new go-to. The flake here feels just good to rub out onto your pipe-packing surface, the flavor is spot the fuck on and pairs gorgeously with my usual hefty method of preparing French press coffee the way I like⁷, and while this is mainly billed as a Burley blend you can absolutely taste and enjoy the Virginias in it and the subtle note of Cavendish just sends it into the stratosphere. I’ve already got more tins on order. With as much as is on my desk this year, Lord knows I’ll need it.

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WHAT’S NEXT

Not going to lie, I haven’t had much time to read as of late. Is this a good thing? Probably, given the fact that I’m about to be doing a whole shitton of reading when I start in on re-working the script for BARREN in between a few other projects and Our Lady Maven Issue 2. I mentioned this a bit in the start of this document, but as you can probably tell from the screenshot of my working file here…yeah, I’m gonna be drowning in a LOT of dry shit for a while.

With that stated, I’ve always got a couple dime-store numbers kicking around, and I’m always on the hunt for both quality reprints of noir classics and modern thriller fiction in paperback as well as more and more ridiculous pulp nonsense. I’ve had one of each flavor nestled nicely inside my purse for the past month, and while I haven’t left the house for a long enough time to get to sit down somewhere and read them, I’m very much looking forward to finishing both Chandler’s “The Little Sister” and whatever godforsaken nonsense “OMEGA” is supposed to be.

That phrasing may sound like I’m hate-reading the latter, but seriously, I fuckin’ love ridiculous bullshit like this. You’re talking to someone who will unironically argue that Escape From LA is better than Escape From New York if you get me drunk enough to be comfortable gushing about my passion for campy action flick dreck.⁸ I’m genuinely looking forward to finding out whether or not “dollar-store Snake Pliskin brandishing a tacticool anti-materiel rifle with the stand still up and a fucking phoropter strapped to his face” is as ridiculous as whatever’s in this book.

I’ve also got a hefty backlist as far as movies goes–maybe I’ll get to a few of ‘em next time.

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That’s all I got for now. I still have to do that write-up about Talkie Time, and while I hoped to be a bit more punctual with that one it’s looking like by the time I finish writing it I’ll probably end up tacking on our schedule for The Jazz Program for the month of March to the end of it. Months tend to go by fairly quickly when you’ve got ADHD, but February especially always seems to sneak up on me when I least expect it. Regardless, thanks as always for reading. You’re all amazing and don’t let anyone tell you that you’re not. Talk soon.

–SARAH

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Footnotes...

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1. If I recall correctly, Astrud Gilberto was November’s pick and Frank Sinatra’s “suicide albums”–namely, No One Cares, Only The Lonely, and Where Are You?–were played in December. ↩︎

2. While doing research for this post, I actually found out that Breathe Carolina hails from Denver…which honestly kind of explains quite a bit as to why living in Denver sucked so much ass. I don’t know how you gentrify Southern hip-hop but if anyone was going to do it it was gonna be some Denver kids. I also found out doing said research that one of the founding members has spent his past few years being obnoxious on social media and getting arrested for securities fraud…which, again, peak Denver. ↩︎

3. I will never acknowledge Nocturniquet’s existence and you can’t make me. That album NEVER HAPPENED, I tell you, and that fact has NOTHING TO DO with the fact that said nonexistant album is a two out of ten at best. ↩︎

4. They were selling it for fifteen dollars because it “didn’t have a hard drive”. It was also an Xbox 360 Slim model, which doesn’t have an external hard drive, a fact which I did not bother enlightening the clerk on. ↩︎

5. Yes, I know the buffalo-meat-serving nightclub in Snatcher is entirely different than the island-of-misfit-militiamen in MGSV or the severely-incompetently-staffed secret base in the MSX original. I also happen to know that Metal Gear Mk. II in MGS3 is a direct reference to the Metal Gear Mk. II player companion in Snatcher, right down to the chassis design, so maybe we should remind ourselves from time to time that they’re just some games and we should really just relax. ↩︎

6. I’mma be real with you here, I mainly bought it for the knife. I never say no to free knives. ↩︎

7. Put about a quarter cup of dark roast expresso beans, an eigth of a stick of cinnamon, and a half teaspoon of chicory into a grinder. Bring your kettle to a boil, toss in the bean and spice mix, put just enough water in to let the mix bloom, stir once counter-clockwise, and let rest for two minutes. Once those flavors have time to get to know each other, do a very slow pour clockwise against the glass of the French press, then let sit for five minutes. Stir three times counter-clockwise to remove a bit of the bite, let sit for five, and press down. Boom–an immaculate cup of heavy-duty brew. ↩︎

8. For the record, Escape From New York is the better made film and I know it. I just happen to adore campy action trash and to me Escape From L.A. is infinitely more fun. It’s a shame I don’t drink anymore. You’d get a much better explanation from Drunk Sarah. ↩︎