Hello folks!
Tom has returned home from “visiting da in-laws in Spain.” I gotta say, international travel is scary and fucked! I would not recommend it! Spain is full of British people constantly honking out big wet breaths! It is extremely fortunate that I did not catch that bad virus!
But now that both Sickos are back at home base, we are eager to brew up some exciting new slop for you all. Finally gonna book some new guestos…gonna make some DUMB episodes…maybe gonna do some brainstorming on a new Secret Project? Who’s to say… whatever ends up happening, it is sure to kick ass (as you know, the Sickos cannot miss).
Catchin’ Up with Em Haverty
Tom Becomes “Da Piano Sicko”
Lately I’ve been learning to play piano. I haven’t kept it a secret, but neither have I been talking much about it. In general I don’t feel a need to share stuff I’m doing that isn’t explicitly “performance” so as a result it’s been a very solitary endeavor so far. Because of this I feel like it might be a good idea to talk about it with you all. If you think that sounds boring feel free to skip this part.
So anyway, I have spent years frustrated at the fact that I don’t know how to do anything. I can’t draw, I’m not athletic, I can’t act, I can’t code, I’m not handy, I’m OK at cooking but that’s it, etc etc. The world teems with exciting and wonderful skills one can use to enrich their life and I know none of them. This frustration compounds when I remember how as a child I was given the incredible privilege of years of free (to me) music instruction, all of which I treated with something between indifference and disdain.
I took a few years of piano as a child (I think from ages 7-8ish?) and then three years of flute in the school band. At no point did I ever appreciate the instruments or the music I was playing nor did I ever accrue any kind of actual musical ability. I treated it as homework in that I did the minimum to not get yelled at and did not spare it one extra thought. It doesn’t help that kids in music programs are exclusively taught to play shit like “Cape Spear March,” just top to bottom trash tier parade music written by mustache freaks that is scientifically impossible for a child to enjoy.
Eventually my frustration grew to a point where I decided it was time to act. In February 2021 I purchased an electric piano and an instructional book recommended by music sicko and genius Chuck Rios. Since then I have played it every single day.
I decided to go with piano because, I gotta be real with you here, other instruments are too hard. This is not to say piano is easy (it’s extremely not), but I tried to learn guitar in college (of course) and I don’t know if you know about this, but you gotta push little strings down very hard (hurts) in order to play that thing. Sometimes you don’t push down hard enough or your fat fingers accidentally touch another string. Also there are six strings which is too many (only five fingers).
With piano if I want to play a C I just do it. Piano is just buttons. Electric pianos really drive this point home. It’s a big custom controller. Playing piano is gaming. I remember when they were trying to gussy up the Rock Band video game and added like “pro mode” which was supposed to make the gameplay more like playing real instruments. They added a keyboard accessory for this mode and the gameplay for it was to literally play piano from the song for real. Face facts folks--the piano is gaming. It’s DDR for your hands.
The book I started out with was baby’s first piano book for idiots. I breezed through most of this on shockingly well-preserved muscle memory from my childhood lessons. Only at the end did it exceed what I learned as a kid and force me to actually learn.
Turns out sometimes they make your left hand play different stuff from your right hand? Also sometimes each hand has to play stuff in different rhythms. I gotta say this is unearned decadence on the part of all music. It would be much easier for me if all songs were both hands playing the same four quarter notes every measure.
As I said before, I have practiced every single day since I got the piano, a fact I am very proud of. Some days I can only manage 10-15 minutes, but it still counts. I’m not good—I’m years away from good—but even after these few months I can see real, significant improvement. I can play pieces that seemed impossible only a few weeks ago. When I play, every once in a while it actually sounds like real music. I have since gotten more advanced self-teaching books and occasionally I’ll pick up an old one and revisit the pieces, and wowee does it ever feel good to open to a song that took me literal weeks to get semi-competent at and just fly through it like nothing.
Brain-wise, it is astonishing what a positive effect this has had. Whenever I would normally be sort of sitting in a malaise, I can go over to the piano and plink away for a bit. When a piece is intimidatingly difficult I can just focus on how it’s fun to press buttons. And honestly it helps make time feel real again.
It feels like my life is shooting by while I stumble around trying to catch up. Most days feel very similar and it’s easy to not notice as a month, two months, a year goes by. But when I play piano, every day I am extremely aware of the small steps forward I’m making. The progress is slow but it’s real. Every day I get a little bit better. Every day the long path before me becomes clearer as I realize how far I still have to go. That’s so fuckin cool! This is exactly the type of gaming I love: I’m presented with a very simple yet extremely deep moveset and I am asked to fail repeatedly until I am able to complete a challenge with absolute precision. Piano is Sekiro.
Anyway, just thought it’d be fun to talk about since it takes up a lot of my thought, effort, and time lately. Thank you for reading! This has been a real point of pride for me lately and I wanted to open up about it.
Clarification re: Joe’s Mesh
Since I got inguinal hernia surgery, people have been DMing me and saying shit like “I'm going to kick you in the mesh” and “I can't wait to do critical damage to you, cyborg boy.”
On the Posting Wastes ep I was quite clear that I can use the surgical mesh as a crowd control ability. Everyone fails to realize the mesh abilities are off global cool down. I can weave it in-between attacks no problem. No one stands a chance Fohhhhhh, I can do that shit while blocking.
Joe Removes his Brain Limiters
Some dumb shit I love in anime is when a character gets a flood of insight during a fight and a single realization causes them to level up big time and do critical damage with their kicks. Here's the thing, though: Japanese cartoons aren't real and every day I thank the non-Catholic Lord for that. You can't level up suddenly because you thought of a novel combination of words for the first time.
Or so I fucking thought!
A few months ago Tom sent me a link to an Eric Andre interview where he quotes show writer Tommy Blacha talking about the Doc Chicken sketch: “When you overthink, you over-stink.” My brain started dinging like crazy because all my various skill XP bars were maxing out instantly. Overthinking is overstinking.
Sometimes for work I have to dig for information about a past project, often without a clear goal (I do this because it is my job, not because I am a pervert). This is a vile rhetorical situation for a few reasons:
this person never knows who the fuck I am
I don't know what the fuck I actually want yet
I have to ask direct, specific questions that don't reveal I'm clueless
why are we even here
Prime conditions for overstinking territory until I purged myself of complexity: it is unkind to to consider email a form of communication because it wrongly infuses the concept with humanity. Email is a little box you pack in cog details and ship. FedEx for bullet points. That's it. Same goes for MS Teams, Jira, all the awful apps. Even my phone is just a box that calls me about car warranty extensions 6x a day.
Since moving out of Hell Tower, mental illness has been my biggest barrier to stability. The current struggle is juggling side effects of different meds while still eating enough to keep the meds working. Basically it fucking blows because everything I have to do that day (including eating future meals!) hinges on this awful morning ritual.
Every morning I wake up and feed two howling maniac cats and attempt to eat breakfast. I start to think about various side effects and how they might worsen throughout the day if I don’t eat enough right now. Plus, if I feel like shit I won't be able to do things I promised to do, an additional source of anxiety. And all this to do a computer job! Naturally, this makes me want to eat less. Overstinking.
Not anymore. Now I live by a simple axiom: force breakfast or The Devil gets a huge boner.
Tom played Rhythm Doctor
The other day I was hankering for a game where I get to press buttons at the right time and searched “rhythm” on Steam. On a whim I decided to pick up Rhythm Doctor. You’ll notice the title doesn’t really make a lot of sense nor does it sound appealing at all. Why is it about doctors. Why do doctors need rhythm. Doctors do not play music. Confusing all around.
The conceit of the game is that you are an intern connected to the hospital over WiFi and the only thing you are capable of doing is pressing a single button that activates a defibrillator. This whole concept is extremely flimsy because you keep on getting told that you are curing “viruses” but I don’t think there is any virus that is cured by defibrillating the same patient 100 times in a row.
But who cares—I can suspend my disbelief, and the conceit is just a way to package the actual gameplay loop. Unlike other rhythm games where you have to match specific arrows or buttons as they scroll down, in Rhythm Doctor the only thing you ever do is hit the spacebar. And unlike other games where you are asked to press a button for every note, the entire game in Rhythm Doctor is “press the spacebar on every seventh beat” (there are some levels where you press spacebar every second beat but you get it).
It sounds like I’m about to absolutely slam this game. Weird flimsy “doctor” theme that doesn’t make sense? Only one button? Only one mechanic—hit the seventh beat? It must suck ass. Now here comes The Turn: it actually owns, like holy shit what a gem, this game is one of a kind and deserves your attention big time.
THREE REASONS RHYTHM DOCTOR WHIPS:
1) The Story
It seems weird to put a story in a rhythm game but they did it! Every level is ostensibly a different “patient” you have to treat, and the specifics of the rhythm you have to work with is woven into the fictional issues they’re all having. This is where the flimsiness of the “doctor” conceit is actually an asset—a defibrillator works on your heart, see, so instead of actually being sick everyone just has emotional problems. Couple that with really good original music that further emphasizes the emotional beats of the scene, and you have a game that makes you feel like the level is so much richer than just pressing a single button every seventh beat.
It also goes deep into how being a doctor is fucked—there are only two full-time doctors on call in the game’s hospital setting, and part of the story is how run ragged they are by the inhuman demands on their labor. At one point you see Dr. Paige visit a patient during a lull in one of the songs and her bedside manner is fucked because she simply has nothing in the tank. If only I could press a button on the seventh beat and fix her problems...
2) The Rhythms
For as baby-brain simple a gameplay loop as this, the game is stuffed with incredibly creative twists on it. Some peoples’ hearts “skip a beat,” omitting the audio/visual cue for specific beats.
Some people’s hearts beat in swing rhythm with pairs of beats going in long-short long-short patterns—and since you hit the seventh beat, that means you might be asked to hit the short beat OR the long beat on swung rhythms depending on if the measure started on a short or long beat—and you better believe they switch back and forth a lot!
Sometimes you have to treat multiple patients simultaneously, each with totally different heartbeat rhythms. Later into the game, multiple patients slide in and out of a level with terrifying frequency.
Some patients’ hearts beat as drum rolls and when the seventh beat hits you not only have to press the spacebar but hold it down for the length of the drum roll and let go just as it ends. Eventually this kind of beat is happening at the same time as a normal beat and it is *fucked*. And then just when you get the hang of it they add a third patient with a swung rhythm on top and you’re like OH FUCK
And yet despite it all it never feels impossible. At the end of the day it really is just one button so you can only mess up so much, and the game is generous with how many mistakes you’re allowed to make.
3) The Presentation
Now this shit is where the game goes from good to great. Rhythm Doctor’s gameplay UI is really basic for a rhythm game—unlike Guitar Hero or DDR where you have a big scrolling grid it is absolutely critical to stare at, Rhythm Doctor you can almost play with your eyes closed. The devs realized this and had the biggest brain idea ever: that means we can absolutely FUCK with the visuals!
I don’t want to spoil too much but this game gets nutty with zoom-ins, pans, visual transitions, glitches, distractions, et al. Here is the first boss—this isn’t too big a spoiler since you can get to him very quickly and he mostly is here to introduce the barebones basics of nutty presentation to you. As someone who beat the game I can tell you this is all pretty tame shit:
You may be wondering why I’m suddenly concerned with spoilers considering I famously do not give a shit about them and think they’re fake: well, Rhythm Doctor is different. It does stuff with its presentation I’ve never seen before and coming across them unprepared was such a treat. The second boss is one of the most breathtaking gaming experiences I’ve ever had. When I realized what the game was doing, I literally gasped. You have to experience it for yourself, I swear to god, it alone is worth the price of the game.
If this game has downsides, the main one is that it’s extremely short. It’s still in early access (but it’s been in development for like ten years? Hard to say) but as it is now, you can beat it in like an hour. Also, some levels will begin with a cutscene or have one in the middle while the song is in a lull—you unfortunately cannot skip these, ever, so if you want to replay a level a bunch to master it, get ready to sit through the same scene over and over.
Overall though, damn! This game whips.