How nice to walk to my small town polling place in VA and see my neighbors all lined up, sheriff candidates chatting people up on the sidewalk, everyone ready to kick this administration in the dick.

Olly has the posters.

When COVID closed everything, I set my kindergartener loose in the world of Grand Theft Auto 5 with the non-violent “Family Friendly” mod. He’s 11 now and stayed up late last night reading The Outsiders.

Love it it when a punk band goes clean. This is ass shaking stuff.

I don’t even have to boycott this company because they don’t make anything I want.

A friend of mine shared issue 3 with me, and I read it cover to cover. Excellent gaming zine. Picking this one up now.

Safety aside, does anyone really need to spend more time staring at their phone? Cause that’s what people do when they use these systems.

I know a guy out here who drove for an hour to meet with a career advisor about maybe going into a nursing program. The advisor just put all his info into ChatGPT and asked what career would be good for him!

Chat Pile in Charlottesville tonight cold opened with “Why Do People Have to Sleep Outside?” and played a new song that I’m pretty sure was called “Fuck ICE.” Ferocious show.

Going back and forth with Spotify trying to take A Life Well Wasted off the platform, and they basically say I have to take my RSS feed down. Fucking clowns.

Fan culture is so weird. You prostrate yourself before an idol and get angry when it doesn’t work the holy miracle. Maybe MBV is just some dude.

Demanding that people just volunteer to pay more for games is so gamer coded. No other kind of brain produces these ideas.

I know people do this kind of stuff all the time now, but it’s just bad mental hygiene. The purpose is to drown out your inner life and all the feelings that go with it.

Electric Zine Maker (windows/Mac) is an adventure in itself - an art toy that's a fully functioning... Thing. A thing that lets you make zines. A zine maker. alienmelon.itch.io/electric-zin...

You could make a convincing game adaptation of The Brothers Karamasov as an Oblivion mod. The way the characters instantly spill their guts to Alyosha is so much like an overly familiar NPC. You’d have to replace combat with a mini game about investigating each character’s true intentions, though.

I read the new Ian McEwan book, What We Can Know, which is set in a post climate disaster future 100 years from now. It’s a clever bit of speculation mixed with tense family drama, and it also happens to coin a fitting name for our era: The Great Derangement.

Yes please. Love this Bloto record and interested in anything in the wheelhouse.

A banger I got from this excellent post. youtu.be/ClMtZkglrZ8?...

Imagine living through the era of Instagram pans and believing this. Please send me your cheugy Le Creuset.

What I don’t understand is if there’s money to be made in producing short stories, why not just hire a short story writer to write some? Where is this even going?

This new Agriculture album is a stunning listen. agriculturemusic.bandcamp.com/track/bodhid...

Been looking forward to this one for literally years.

Googling “how to join Antifa” over and over until someone kicks my door down

The thing that keeps pulling me into the new Geese record is the beautiful mess. Half the songs get run over by a train of freaked out percussion.

Saw Pile in DC, and it was cathartic. I am healed.

Don’t get caught up on the number. It’s all about holding on to the curious, playful parts of yourself for as long as possible. Old versions of yourself have already died. This one will too.

Falling down the Geese rabbit hole, and a friend just pointed out that the singer’s mom is a famous Brooklyn polyamory influencer.

I tried this game the other day, and I don’t know man… Games like this are Baby Einstein toys for grown ups. Look at the crazy visual shit! Numbers get big! Fanfare! Massive damage!

It’s peanut butter jelly time

I’ve been having a mysterious health issue for about a year that cleared up almost instantly when I got off the internet. I’m just going to pop in from time to time, mainly for new music and possible ALWW stories.

That’s a wrap! Thanks to everyone who turned up again for my extremely irregular show. I really appreciate having an audience for this work. Time to start collecting material for A Life Well Wasted 10.

People are saying

The weird thing about Big Thief losing their bass player is I feel like this is the first record of theirs where I really notice the bass lines.

September 11th, 2001. A shocked nation grieves as the World Trade Center is destroyed in the largest terrorist attack on American soil. Unsure of what else to do, GameFAQs user BoredGamer collects their thoughts and begins to work on a plain text walkthrough of Tail of the Sun

Can’t wait to see this in an Otter Box

9/9/99 was the only real event in gaming history. Everything else is a blur.

NGL: I had some hope that the kind of people who think game developers are part of a shadowy woke cabal might hear the new episode and understand the actual human beings involved. I DIDN’T imagine that they’d just pull quotes to pass around online and make up their own story. It’s very depressing.

Stay woke everybody

I feel like the Silksong-is-too-hard-discourse is driven by players who are trying to blast through the game. Relax! Take your time. There won’t be a new one for a decade.

Listening with a big stupid smile on my face youtu.be/iEv2ALKvgJc

One consequence of the new episode of ALWW: I’ve learned that the German word for “flop” is floppen, a word of pure delight.

Currently #9 in the leisure section of Apple Podcasts. That duck dynasty guy is kicking my ass.

I'm going to put aside the weird feeling of seeing a saint born after I was, but since we know the guy was big on halo 2 there are now people who in 2004-2005 got fragged by a saint on xbox live

Come listen to me yammer on about the new episode of A Life Well Wasted, the future of the show, and the other thing I’m working on.

Thanks to help from @bottlenecknyc.bsky.social, I was able to reduce the cost of posters shipped outside the US. The price for Canada is now $110. World is $125. I’ve already given partial refunds to those who bought one at the higher price. 4 days left to snag one! www.alifewellwasted.com

Grocery store fried chicken is always there for you, waiting around for the moment when you notice what a nice option they are, good for a hot lunch or cold from the fridge at midnight, chopped up and tossed in a salad, tucked away in a quesadilla. Truly a marvel of the American food system.

Digging into Silksong, and of course it’s beautiful, but it also SOUNDS so good. All those crunchy rocks and rosary beads rolling around, the voices, and the music.

Chris has been helping people get their music into the world for years. He helped me mix the last I Come to Shanghai record. His landlord is trying to put him out of business, and now he needs our help. gofund.me/59f47d47f