An Important Anime Sickos Announcement

Hello Sicko fans.

If you are a dedicated listener you know that for a long time Joe has been struggling with chronic pain due to a hip impingement and labral tear. Basically his shit is so fucked up and it hurts all the time, and the only solution is a lot of physical therapy, which does not really solve the day-to-day pain issue.

If you have experienced chronic pain, especially pain that can peak unexpectedly and without warning, you know that it makes it extremely hard to plan things. When you hurt all over, the kind of extended mental focus that was once effortless can become a huge energy drain. Unfortunately that's sort of where we're at right now. Joe has a lot on his plate and his family and career are obviously always going to take priority over this show, and we have to be honest and recognize that he's currently in a place where he simply does not have the capability to do Sickos stuff. He's at the point where trying to play through the pain is only going to hurt him more.

We always talk about how the point of Anime Sickos is to be fun for us, and all our decisions are meant to keep it fun. Right now for Joe it has become a stressor that either makes him guilty about having to cancel recordings, or else eats up critical focus that is better spent elsewhere. I go into this detail just so you understand this is not a decision we make lightly, and one that has full support from both of us.

So, what does that mean for the show? First, I'm going to take some time off, probably a week or two. Then we are going to come back with a selection of guest co-hosts similar to when Joe was out on paternity podcast leave. After a month or two of that, we'll see where we're at. The show WILL go on—it won't be the same without Joe, but I also don't want to stop doing it! And Joe is not quitting—when he is stronger and has more focus/stamina he will return. We just don't know when that will be, so until then we'll make do.

I am probably going to keep the Tom's Record Club show going on the Patreon. I totally understand if some patrons want to cancel their pledges or if listeners are not as interested in the show now. Joe is like the funniest guy who ever lived and is much funnier than me. The thing that makes this show so special is the dynamic between the two of us. I totally understand if a version of Anime Sickos without that dynamic doesn't appeal to you. But I will keep da fire going regardless.

I thank every Sicko fan who sticks with us. Please send your love and support to Joe da God. He deserves the best and is instead beset by fucking terrors and torments and it's not fair. If you want to throw Joe a few bucks directly you can go to https://ko-fi.com/joeandersonm.

Behold: an Anime Sickos Video Game

Time Force X: Mission of Lennon is now available for free!

Hello Sicko fans. I am proud to announce the release of our first non-demo video game, the hilarious text-based comedy adventure game Time Force X: Mission of Lennon.

You play as a Time Cop sent to the past to prevent John Lennon’s assassination. There are tons of branching paths to go down, influenced by your choice to prioritize being a genius or being a moron, culminating in one of 20 different endings.

I am so proud of this game. It is so dumb and so funny. It is free to play but don’t hesitate to donate if you are so inclined, lol.

Tom Reviews Games 'n Books

Just some yapping

Hey folks,

No major Anime Sickos news to report. We’re still grinding out pearls for you. I have a few things I wanted to briefly talk about in a way that was too basic for an episode, and too involved for a post, so, here you go.

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Da Gaming Corner

A dumber man would say China is supplanting the West due to DeepSeek, or Elon Musk deleting the entirety of American soft power over the weekend, or some third thing. However, I am the clear-eyed genius who sees the truth. Real heads know that China is the dominant world culture on account of they are now making 2D Metroidvanias that slit throats.

I just played Nine Sols folks and this shit is off the chain.

In Nine Sols, you do a big boss fight against Eigong. The remainder of the game (~20 hours or so) is tutorial and story context for the fight with Eigong.

Ok, not exactly. You are one of ten Sols and you want to kill the other nine. Everyone is kitty cat people and it’s all gorgeously hand-drawn. It looks good as hell, the music is good, fun story, etc etc. Whatever. The point is the Eigong fight.

You might assume that since the game sounds like it has “Souls” in the name that it is a soulslike. Kind of! It’s Sekiro basically. You gotta parry—when you do, you build up Qi which you can spend by dashing past an enemy and putting an explosive talisman on them which goes kaboom. This is useful both because it does damage at baseline but also pays off an enemy’s internal damage (ie, temporary damage that will slowly recover if you let it).

I feel like I’m spinning my wheels describing the mechanics and rules and stuff because this is all sort of secondary to the point of the game, which is the fight against Eigong. The other reason Nine Sols is like Sekiro is that Eigong and Isshin (Sekiro’s final boss) are the same. If you have heard me talk about Sekiro you know that comparing a boss fight to Isshin is probably as high of praise as I’m capable of giving.

Both bosses are hard, like insanely hard. They take that joke I always do—“If I was a video game boss, I would simply use my greatest moves and never stop”—and do it for real. To beat them took numerous play sessions of exclusively repeated failed attempts. And yet—when I won, I knew that I would never lose to them again.

You can’t win by cheesing, getting lucky, tanking a few mistakes, or any means other than Being Able To Win—so once you’ve done it, you will always do it. If you are Able To Win, you will win. There is no gimmick with either boss. They are not doing anything you haven’t seen before. They’re just doing it faster, harder, and better. The only thing you are being asked to do is have answers to everything in their toolkit—and you couldn’t have reached them if you didn’t utilize those answers against earlier bosses. If you don’t have the answer you die. Simple as that. Just do it—that’s all.

I can understand why this might not appeal to some but to me—a guy who loves Doing Things the Proper Way (when you want to learn an instrument everyone’s like “just mess around and have fun!” No asshole. Show me how to do scales)—it is supreme. Eigong is the best boss dude. She has mixups!! She’ll follow up a move with the same attack like 80% of the time, and the remaining 20%, she does a different thing that requires an insanely different response. It’s so good.

Anyway, play Nine Sols. Fun game!

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Da Book Corner

On the recommendation of mystery-loving friends I read The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton.

This is Groundhog Day shit. Our protagonist wakes up with no memory in some random guy’s body. He’s at a moldering 1920s English manor house for a big party. Everyone there knows the guy who’s body he is in, but he is like oh fuck I am panicking, who am I, what is this, oh no, help me. He learns he is supposed to solve the murder of the host’s daughter, Evelyn Hardcastle, who is killed at 11pm, and he will have eight tries to do it, each try with a different host body.

Here’s where it gets cool: obviously he makes zero progress on day one as most of his time is spent weeping and going like, this can’t be real, ohhhh, I’m so fucked up. Day two begins and he’s in a new body—and he sees the guy from day one going “ohhh, I have no memory, ohhh I’m so fucked up.” That’s right—all that shit he did day one is also happening at the same time. I know what you’re thinking: does that mean that all the things his host bodies are doing on days 3-8 are also always happening every time? Yes bitch, yes. There are a couple of really hilarious Bill and Ted type moments where the guy is like “OK, remember to find this info out and write it down and put the note in this book” and then he opens the book and a note is there. You’re always wondering if side characters doing odd things are keys to solving the murder or previews of what the protag will be doing later.

Books like this live and die by the strength of their little clockwork mechanisms and this one has clearly been worked over for years (it’s Turton’s debut after all), so it hums like a dream. I don’t know if a reader is able to like, solve the mystery ahead of the reveal (I never try in these stories) but I didn’t ever feel like anything was cheap or dumb. One inexplicable misstep—one of the protag’s hosts is exceptionally clever (he takes on part of the host’s personality and abilities so dumb hosts don’t notice shit and vice versa) but physically limited, creating an interesting tension where intellectually he has incredible momentum but finds it hard to actually get to the places he needs to go. Sounds good, right? Well the host’s disability is that he is morbidly obese and the protag is constantly going on and on about how disgusting it is and how awful he feels to have to be such a foul whale, etc etc. Not necessary! Feels bad to read!

Where this book falters hard and really smacks of First Novel Syndrome is when it looks directly at the camera and explains what the time loop actually is, who set it up, why the protagonist is put in it, what happens if he solves the case, etc. This shit is so half-baked it’s insulting. Any reader who picks up this book is doing so because the premise is unique and enticing. Do not stop the momentum dead to have some bland exposition character go “by the way, allow me to render this cool premise extremely mundane and boring by explaining it. Many parts of my explanation are stupid beyond belief, but don’t worry, they won’t be expanded on.” I’m not reading this going “but WHY is there this loop,” I know why: because it’s a unique premise that makes me want to read the book.

I have also read his newest book, The Last Murder at the End of the World. This one does a way better job integrating the explanation of the premise into the story itself—it’s done in drips and drabs from the beginning rather than in a big dump at the end, and uncovered facts about the premise do double-duty as relevant clues to the murder itself.

The premise is thus: it is post-apocalypse. One island on earth has been spared from a deadly worldwide nanobot cloud due to a barrier built and maintained by three pre-apocalypse scientists. There are roughly 100 living villagers on the island who idolize the scientists and live a peaceful, idyllic life of cooperation and love. Then one day they all wake up with no memory of the previous night to find that one of the scientists has been killed. Her death has rendered the barrier non-functional, and the apocalypse cloud will engulf the island in a little over four days...unless they can solve the murder first…

Sounds pretty cool to me. And it is pretty cool! But despite not having a huge sour note like Hardcastle, the central puzzle is not quite at the same level. What it does do is lead me to conclude that what Turton needs to be doing is writing for video games.

We are lucky enough to have a nice stable of great detective games these days—Return of the Obra Dinn, The Roottrees are Dead, The Outer Wilds, The Case of the Golden Idol, Paradise Killer, etc—where you solve a mystery while constrained by the strict limits of video game mechanics. Hey, you know who does mysteries constrained by a weird premise? My man Stuart Turton. And you don’t need to explain why you’re constrained in a video game—the explanation is, it’s a video game dumbass! This is the UI you got, OK? Get to work.

If he was able to apply his high-concept-mystery mind to a video game he would be freed from the shackles of “I have to explain why this is all happening” and allow the central puzzle shine on its own terms. Will he see this? Likely no. If he does, will he drop his successful career as a novelist to make a game that sells, at best, like 40,000 copies? Definitely no. But I will always be wistfully sighing, thinking of the wonderful Obra Dinnlike he would write if he would only embrace the medium he was always meant for...

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Da Greep Corner

I saw Geordie Greep live a while ago. I think Greep’s solo record and the three albums by his old band Black Midi are pretty good but not truly great. I went mostly because it wasn’t too expensive and I find his name insanely funny. I thought his live show was way better than the records, but that’s not what this is about.

I bring this all up because before I went I stopped by Joe’s house since it was on the way and I told him about Greep and as we discussed, we discovered something I have to get in front of Greep’s people:

Dude you have to play a cover of Radiohead Creep but you say Greep. Like you don’t even have to do the whole thing. Just one chorus. Can you imagine how hard all the non-binary nerds would pop when you do the big ska-kronk chords and go “but I’m a Greep!” You could leave the stage for a nap and come back and they’d still be speaking in tongues. It would take you like two minutes to learn the song.

Anime Sickos Podcast Year in Review 2024!

Data! Charts! Graphs!

Hello Sicko fans. It’s time for our annual year in review, where I show you the numbies behind the podcast for geniuses. As ever: we are wildly non-notable. We are like ten orders of magnitude away from deserving a Wikipedia article, and we can prove it!

Last year, I was big time depressed creatively. Sicko Shock 2 was a flop (numbers-wise only, to be clear), I was really struggling to come up with new ideas for the show, and when I did the year in review and saw the numbies, I could only conclude that we are In Decline, which fucked me up big time. I got into a mood of like, what’s the point? We’re past the peak. It’s only going to get worse. Why not just end the show?

This year, I’m big time depressed but not about Anime Sickos, but about being unemployed. I actually feel extremely good about Anime Sickos. As you may have seen on Bluesky, I posted all of our “2024 bangers” which ended up being almost every episode we did. I think our 2024, in terms of quality, excitement, and verve, was above reproach.

And good thing I do, because our numbers fucking suck. Folks we are crashing and burning so hard lol.

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2024 Numbies

OK, that’s not true, I’m exaggerating for comic effect. But the aforementioned “Decline” has not reversed.

Let’s start with the basics: how many downloads did we get in 2024?

As you can see, the line trends down. September is an outlier as we only put out one episode that month due to me going to “Gay Paris” and then to visit my in-laws for two weeks. But even so: in 2023 we had 88,600 downloads and in 2022 we had 83,385. That’s a 22% decrease from last year! Oh no! What could be the reason? Well, I got one idea. Here’s how many episodes we have released per year:

You may have noticed that 2024 has the lowest number since 2019 (where we were biweekly and only active for 3 months), and that the number is much lower than 52, the number you would expect for a weekly podcast.

Of 2024’s 68,693 downloads, 41,283 of them come from episodes released this year, for an average of 1180 per 2024-released episode. If we had put out 41 episodes like last year, we would then be looking at an estimated 75,773 downloads in 2024, which would be a 14% decrease from last year. Wait, we still would have declined?! Hm, that’s not good.

Last year, I mentioned we were going to try harder next year to have fewer Sicko Breaks. Well, oops. The renewed focus and more intentional creative process we adopted definitely paid off big time, but turns out “life” is “hard,” and Joe has a baby boy and chronic pain to deal with besides. There’s only so much you can do. Overall, I’m not too pressed about this. We did what we were capable of—I wish we were capable of more, but I also wish I had a million dollars. What I wish is immaterial. What matters is we did good work.

So, of those meager 35, which were our top ten episodes of 2024?

First is our eulogy to da GOAT, Akira Toriyama. If the death of someone of his caliber is what it takes to make a top-tier podcast episode, may we be mid-tier forever. We have two great guestos with Crawfish Comic and Josh Boerman making the list. Really glad to see Crawfish Comic getting love, again I cannot overstate how funny their work is. We have 2024’s only classic posting episode at #2, and 189: The Sickos Complain about AI, where I truly “go off,” at number 4. I am happy to report that 182: The Sickos Become Literature Geniuses, an ep I’m especially proud of where I become a Moby Dick guy, is sitting pretty at #6. The remainder are notably all from January and February—not saying these eps are bad, but I feel like we put out better stuff in 2024 that suffered from not having 11-12 months to accrue downloads.

I also got to wondering: what were our top-performing back catalogue episodes in 2024? So I filtered to show the number of downloads in 2024 on episodes released in 2019-2023. Behold:

First is the McHenries guest ep from when Joe was on paternity Sicko leave. 514 downloads! Not bad! I chalk it up to the appeal of the McHenries (considerable) and the ever-present call of the Void. 59: The Sickos Become Stupid Babies is a classic that it does not surprise me to see folks revisiting. It is an elemental facet of modern life. Episode 1, naturally. 170: Obama is Gay With Tucker’s Friend—I no joke do not remember a single thing about this one. 173: The Sickos Design Final Fantasy 17, our Octopath Traveler 2 episode is a big time banger and I still think they should make FFXVII a pixel art game! 174: The Sickos Defeat Death is the erica dreisbach guest ep from when Joe was on paternity Sicko leave and I imagine it’s here for the same reasons as the McHenry ep. Shocked to see a Sicko Shock 2 episode here but happy regardless. Then of course we wrap it up with three all-time evergreen classics.

What did I learn from this? Uhh, not much! Story of my life lol. Seeing part 1 of Sicko Shock 2 in there did get me wondering, how did Sicko Shock 2 as a whole fare in 2024?

Huh. Not great, I guess! But it’s not nothing. I’ll take it. Still cannot understand why parts 4 and 5 see a dip that reverses itself on part 6. I understand linear dropoff as it goes on, as every ep presents another opportunity for the listener to get distracted and not continue, but why would you listen to part 6 after skipping 4 and 5? You won’t get it! Ahh, well. My hoped-for long tail seems not to be. 4 and 5 still don’t have 1,000 total downloads yet. What can you do but soldier on.

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All-Time Numbies

We’ve been looking at 2024-only numbers so far. Let’s take a wider look. To start, here are our all-time downloads:

As you can see, the line is trending down, but zoomed out like this it doesn’t really concern me much. Let’s see this broken down year by year, though.

Last year we named 2023 “The Decent Zone” as numbers were still good but our trend of growth was definitely over. This year? I’m going with the classic “???”. Not sure where we’re at, really. Is this dip due to fewer episodes released? The decline of Twitter? Inevitable shedding of listeners without enough new listeners to replace them? I can’t say. It feels like the show is in a transitional period but I don’t know from what to what. I think maybe I only think this because I, myself, am in a transitional period (unemployment). All I know is I don’t feel confident enough to come to any conclusions about this—but I do know this trend is odd. Hence, “???”

Speaking of All Time, here are our all-time top episodes:

Fun fact: this is the exact same all-time top ten episodes from 2023. A few positions swapped but it’s the same ten episodes. I can’t be shocked—each of these is a true classic banger. But the face that the most recent one was released in June 2022 gives me pause. Oh well.

Here’s how the All-Time Top Ten did in 2024 only:

Huh! Turns out not crazily different from Sicko Shock 2 (aside from the top 4, which were also on 2024’s top ten back catalogue performers). Maybe I was too mopey about the numbies on SS2.

So, given our total all-time downloads and total released episodes, we can calculate the downloads of the average Anime Sickos episode, and it is 1,429. Now here is a collar-tugger of a factoid—only four episodes released in 2024 met or exceeded this count. Whuh oh!!

Gonna have to just chalk it up to the fact that like 4/5 of our catalogue has had many years to run up the numbers, but man! I would have liked this list to have been longer.

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Da Guesto Report

Last year, we apologized for only having six guestos and promised we’d have more in 2024. Well, uh, check out our guestos-per-year:

Yeah we did six again. Whoops. In our defense, something about our show defies logic, namely the logic that having guests allows for crossover marketing that will increase your audience. Our guesto eps do not move the needle for us as a rule. The average downloads for a guesto episode is 1328, which is 101 downloads lower than the overall average. I can’t explain it, because our guests are exclusively delightful and fascinating people and we have a great time talking to them! Go figure!

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Some more random stats:

Per Medley’s request I calculated the combined runtime of all released Anime Sickos episodes, and it is: 10 days, 23 hours, 37 minutes, and 33 seconds. If you have listened to our whole back catalogue, it’s basically like I slept on your couch for a month.

Here we have our 2024 releases broken up by type, organized by most common type:

“Anime” here refers to the Deadwood Episode, the Severance Episode, and Long Live Akira Toriyama. “Cog” is an episode primarily about work. “Comedy” is an episode where we talk about comedy/jokes as a concept. One-Off are grab-bag type episodes (the Goblin Punks RPG one-shot, the 201st Episode Self-Snuck, and Oops All Sketches 2). “Tier List” are eps where we rank game mechanics. “Complaining” is an episode where we moan about capitalism and the world. And “Yammering” is an episode where we just hang out and cover a variety of topics as we chat.

As you can see, Yammering, the one requiring the least spin-up, is way in the lead with 22.8% of all 2024 episodes. Guesto episodes stun with a second-place finish, but that’s less due to us having very many (still only 17%) and more that we spread ourselves over a lot of topics this year.

Let’s take a look at this same chart, now ordered by average downloads per ep.

Well I don’t like that the most common type of episode does the worst. “Books” is an outlier I think since it is only one episode (the Moby Dick one). So I think what we can say with most confidence is that Anime Sickos does best when we are fucking complaining (which kicks ass).

Some may say, wow, your anime episodes are up there, maybe do more of those? No. That is inflated by the Toriyama R.I.P. episode, which, as stated, we would like to never have to do another one of. Removing that, the average anime episode had 984 downloads, which would be our worst-performing type by far.

Of course, this list ignores our most prominent type, the Sicko Break. Here are the percentages with 17 Sicko Breaks added in.

Hm. Concerning. Looking into this

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“Da Famous Conclusion”

Before I go any further: I’ve been doing a lot of “oh no! Bad numbies!” shit in this newsletter. I do not want to imply we do not have the solidest and most loyal listeners on the planet. We do, and you don’t need to go “ohh why is it like this, how could this happen, I am such a fan, I talk you up all the time”—trust us, we know you support us and appreciate it so much. I’m not sharing this to fish for compliments or sympathy. I’m sharing this because I have fucking trapped myself into a tradition of total transparency and I am doomed to continue reporting the facts.

The truth is, I think we’re doing fine given that this shit is our hobby. We, on purpose, do not allow Anime Sickos to introduce stress or resentment into our lives. If Sickos work would do that, we do not do the work—hence the Sicko Breaks. We value ourselves above the project. After all, this is the Sicko Mindset: it is good to passionately love the shit you love, but it’s also fucking stupid as shit and not worth more than you yourself. So while I am sad we are not rich and acclaimed, the fact is that in 2024 the only stats that matter are: am I proud of the work I did with my best friend, and did I have fun? That’s a Yes and an also Yes.

If we really wanted to prioritize growth and make this show Our Whole Deal we know what we would do—just copy the Worst of All Possible Worlds boys’ strategy, honestly. But those guys are on another level, hyper-committed to their work in a way I admire so much but am not equipped to replicate. For now, we’ll stick to the only growth strategy we’ve ever had: hoping for like one person a month to randomly stumble on the show through circumstances we can’t influence.

Oh well. Maybe Sicko Shock 2 will get optioned for an animated series this year and I’ll be laffin about this in 2025. Speaking of 2025: uh oh!! Hope we don’t all die!!!

See you next year,

Your pal
-Tom da Sicko

Introducing: Tom's Record Club

It's a second newsletter about music, if you think that's cool

Hello Sicko fans,

Tom here. Lately I have been wanting to write/talk about music more deliberately. However, it is not easy to do that in Anime Sickos podcast because you can’t put the music in the show. They yell at you and kill you if you do that. Also if you try to speak extemporaneously about music you sound like a dumbass. At least for me it has to be written.

Therefore, I am going to debut “Tom’s Record Club.” This will be a separate newsletter, to be found at tomsrecordclub.substack.com. I’m making it a separate thing because I realize not everyone who is subscribed to the Anime Sickos newsletter is going to want to receive a ton of emails about music.

Anyway, here’s how it will work. I will share an album for Da Club on Fridays (that’s the goal, at least). We will have one week to listen and discuss. “Discussion,” you say, “how will that work?” Well, for now I have made a Record Club channel in the Anime Sickos Discord.

After one week, I will publish an essay about that album on the Tom’s Record Club newsletter. I will include interesting takes from the discussion as well so it won’t just be my opinion. This essay will also name the Record Club’s next album. Ideally the albums would alternate between Tom-chosen and Club-chosen—how exactly I will pick who chooses is not yet determined. I’ll figure something out. The point is there will be a wide range of music on display.

I hope this sounds cool to you! Again the Record Club newsletter is here. The first album will be REM’s debut Murmur. I am who I am.