Listen I’m so basic. Here’s the facts: I’m a 30s year old white boy who sounds like me and has dark hair and a podcast. Now I’d like to say “I’m not like other boys” but in so many ways I am exactly like all other boys. The reason I need to say this is because you have to understand it’s impossible for me to be objective about what I’m about to say. I want you to begin to understand how biased I am in favor of this. And when I say “this” I of course mean Ed Stasium’s new mix of the classic Replacements album “Tim” included on the recently released Tim: Let it Bleed Edition.
I read the Replacements biography Trouble Boys last year (I think I wrote it up in this newsletter too!) and one of the most depressing things about it was that the Replacements really did have all the ingredients for absolute mega-stardom—the talent, the hype, the backing, the image, the songs, the charisma—but consistently fucked it up and wasted all their shots either on purpose or through bad luck.
One instance of the latter is how their major label debut Tim was mixed wrong on purpose as a joke. Well, maybe not, but the band absolutely despised the mix and publicly disparaged the producer (they loved to publicly disparage people and make them vow to never work with them again). I won’t debate whether they were right or wrong to do that, but one thing’s for sure—the record sounds like utter shit. I mean the songs are incredible. It’s probably their best record. But the bass and drums are barely there (in the 80s every producer said, “I will never allow an audible drum or bass in my work”), the guitars are muddy and limp, the vocals muted and distant. Overall it sounds like a record afraid of bothering someone for being too loud—you see why the band hated this mix. They loved being bothering people and being too loud..
I shit on the original mix of Tim so I can make it clear by contrast how eye-popping the new mix is. It is not hyperbole to call it revelatory. It sounds like for decades Tim has been under a big weighted blanket and just now someone was like “whoa is this blanket supposed to be here? Lemme just lift that...”
Turns out there was an actual band playing these songs all along. Turns out Kiss Me on the Bus has instruments on it and isn’t like a skiffle song like In The Summertime where it’s all just guys rubbing on washboards. I don’t know if I can explain in words how different and improved these songs all sound. Lemme just drop a link. You can actually hear the bass in Swingin Party!!
Imagine hearing Tommy Stinson lay that bass track down and being like “wow, what a hot sound!! *turns a bunch of dials to zero* Gotta make sure you can’t hear that shit at all.” Every second of this new mix leaves your jaw on the floor as you realize what a botch job the original was.
This shit is insane. These are real songs now! Obviously the classic songs (Bastards of Young, Left of the Dial, Little Mascara, Swingin Party, Here Comes a Regular) are shot to new heights of greatness, but perhaps more astonishing is that now the crappy rockers Dose of Thunder and Lay it Down Clown actually don’t suck anymore!
At this point, the Replacements had clearly evolved musically to the point that big, loud rockers were behind them, and when they did include one on a record it felt like a perfunctory chore (which renders them suckass—a big loud rocker can’t sound like you’re bored playing it). Dose of Thunder and Lay it Down Clown always sounded so wimpy and pointless, you had to be some kind of monk not to instantly skip them. Well, turns out, if you actually make it so you can hear the guitars instead of making the whole song sound like an overcompressed ball of lint, they’re pretty OK! I mean they’re still the worst tracks on the record—we’re not working miracles here.
Normally I don’t really care about remasters because I am too dumb to tell what’s different and also it confuses me about what version of the record I should actually be listening to. This is different—this is not a small change, and listening to this version is NOT optional. The original mix of Tim belongs in the fucking garbage. Delete it from the world. Make it lost media. There remains no reason on earth to ever play it again. The Let it Bleed edition is a gift far beyond what we deserve on this blood prison of an Earth. This isn’t a thing that happens. The Replacements never “catch a break,” not even 40 years after the fact. And yet here it is.
It feels like Tim never actually got released until now. Since 1985 all we had was a crappy bootleg where a guy with a tape machine recorded someone playing this version in the next room over. Now, we finally have the real thing. One of the best albums of the 80s and it was released in 2023. Wow! The Replacements are one of the bands of all time! I exhort you with my strongest ardor: You gotta check this out!
Tom’s Book Corner
So I mentioned this before—I thought the library was broken or pranking me on account of I’d ask to have a book transferred to my local branch and then nothing would happen. Turns out what I did was I wrote down my email address wrong when I got my library card so I didn’t get any notifications. Well, I fixed that and now I can do the library. Folks the library is such a goddamn racket. You get the books for free. It’s torrenting but woke. Torrenting is also woke but you understand.
PALE FIRE by Vladimir Nabokov
How did I be a mid-20s guy who read Infinite Jest on the train and I didn’t know about Pale Fire? There’s gotta be some kinda breakdown in the annoying art boy pipeline—this shit is so choice for annoying art boys.
Infinite Jest rules because it’s a knotty piece of meta-fiction with an exploded structure that makes the act of reading it a fun little puzzle game that you can—easily, in fact—lose. We English majors love this shit.
Thus, imagine my astonishment that none of my annoying peers ever told me about Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov. Infinite Jest has so much Pale Fire DNA in it it’s nuts. Much like IJ, it is a knotty piece of meta-fiction. Like IJ, it has an exploded structure that makes the act of reading it into a little puzzle game. Like IJ, it feels like a big reason why it was written at all is so the author could simply go fucking nutty demonstrating their total mastery of prose style like some insufferable Guitar Center guy doing a thirty-minute solo (non-derogatory). Unlike IJ, it is 300 pages and you can just read it in one go instead of flipping back and forth all the time.
The book is presented as a non-fiction work as it exists in the novel’s world, as though it was not a novel but instead a publication of the late poet John Shade’s last poem Pale Fire, with a foreword and commentary by his friend and colleague Dr. Charles Kinbote. Of course, both these characters are fictional, and as Kinbote slowly reveals as we work through the book, he is profoundly deranged.
As Kinbote shares anecdotes of his life teaching at the same Appalachian college as Shade, we get little glimpses of how his conception of his relationships with his colleagues vary wildly from how they likely actually were—his deep friendship with Shade, presented as the reason he and only he could edit and publish his friend’s final poem, seems more like obsessive stalking than friendship. Also he doesn’t really even like Shade’s poem very much, despite hyperbolically praising Shade’s genius at every opportunity. This is mostly because the poem is an autobiographical look back at Shade’s life and his lingering preoccupation with the afterlife, and what Kinbote wanted it to be about was the epic story of his exile from Zembla, the country where he lived his early life as King Charles the Beloved before fleeing revolutionaries. Zembla’s fuckin’, not real folks. This guy’s nutty.
There are so many angles and facets to this work that I’m not going to bother trying to get into very many of them other than to say—if you are an annoying guy who loves this kind of shit, you really ought to give this a shot. I never read Lolita but have heard how Nabokov’s prose is so gorgeous and folks it’s true. This is a real treat with a lot of nuance to play with.
One thing I really love is how you’re led to think that this Kinbote guy is a fruitcake, and the way Shade’s last work was basically stolen from him and published surrounded by 250 pages of a madman rambling about his “beloved Zembla” is a truly devastating fate for this great poet. However—and this is just my reading—Shade’s poem is basically fine? It didn’t blow my mind and its adherence to a very old-fashioned form (heroic rhyming couplets all the way through) felt stale and held the poem down.
Meanwhile, Kinbote’s commentary, nutty as it is, is written by Vladimir Nabokov and thus is lush and beautiful, far more unique and lovely to read than the poem itself. Sure this guy is a dangerous nutcase narcissist stalker, but you have to grant he has a better writers’ mind than the target of his obsession who he so exalts as a literary titan whose light he is lucky to have shine on his face. It skews the whole thing on a weird angle. Much to consider. I liked it a lot!
BOYS WEEKEND by Mattie Lubchansky
This one was a graphic novel. *Italian chef voice* Oh baby! Dis one’s good!
I’m not going to get into much detail because this is a fairly simple work (non-derogatory). A newly out trans woman goes to the Vegas bachelor party of their old best friend, but the friend and the rest of his groomsmen do not seem to be able to parse that the protag is no longer a man despite, you know, the obvious. Also, it’s actually set like 40 years in the future so the world is worse and more fucked up, and it’s not Vegas, it’s an artificial island that is Worse Vegas. Also there’s a cult. Hijinks ensue.
Many good gags in this and a painfully real portrayal of Business Boys who no doubt listen to Homework Podcasts. A quick read, very funny, big recco from me.
I AM NOT A WOLF by Dan Sheehan
Ayy I read Dan’s book! Dan is not allowed to describe this book in this way due to legal reasons, but I am! This a book in which you can choose your own adventure!
As a wolf, you must struggle to get to work, deal with bosses blaming you for things you didn’t do, annoying sales guys, office parties, and human dates. As I said on the show, the thing that makes the Not A Wolf twitter account have legs for more than a month or two is that there’s a point to it other than wolf jokes. Specifically, it’s about criticizing the ridiculousness of American society through a character removed enough from us that they are seeing it as brand new.
This kind of sounds like those terrible alien comics where they reword common occurrences with silly words, except unlike that guy Dan is not a toothless coward and has a Sicko’s rage against the deep evil that crushes us under its big boot.
The choose your own adventure structure I think really works here even beyond giving the book a hooky gimmick. Part of what’s so sick about Cog Life is that it is attractive. It does suck people in. Play the game and surrender your humanity and we will reward you! You will be rich and comfortable. All it costs is a bit of permanent emptiness. Is that so bad? The routes where you end up bought-in feel gross and sad but you understand how you got there. Similarly the ones where you end up leaving human society and/or murdering CEOs and sales guys have the same kind of visceral thrill as when Hitler gets shot so many times in Inglorious Basterds that he becomes hamburger. You gotta have both!
Like all CYOA books this is a quick read so I recommend getting your hands on this if you can. Lots of laugh out loud moments, and I had lots of moments where the text seemed to really resonate with a lot of core Sicko themes. There’s a lot of Cog Talk DNA in this. This is obviously a far, far better and richer work than most book versions of Twitter accounts, and I admire Dan for doing this rather than the infinitely easier cash-in he could have done instead.
THE SONG OF SHATTERED SANDS by Bradley P. Beaulieu
Specifically, I read the third one. Who cares what the title is. It was like “A Storm of Swords” or some shit.
This shit is slop for hogs (non-derogatory). A few years ago I told my wife, “I would love to read some truly terrible fantasy slop. But I do not want it to be medieval Europe.” She was like that’s nice dear. Then a few months later she got me the first book in this series for my birthday. What a lady.
So this shit is in desert world. There’s a big desert city-state Sharakhai that is ruled by the Seven Warlords of the Sea. Well not really but basically. There are 12 immortal kings each with badass titles (“The Reaping King,” “The King of Swords,” “The Honey-Tongued King,” etc) who were each given superpowers by the gods of the desert 400 years ago. They command an army of super-strong zombies who come out of da ground and can’t be killed. They’re bad guys, the kings.
The first of our three protags is Ceda, a badass pit fighter whose mom died trying to find a way to kill the kings. She wants to finish the job, which means unraveling the mystery of how the kings got their powers and what their weaknesses are—which turns out to be deeply intertwined with her and her mom’s true identities, and what the gods are actually up to.
The next is Emre, Ceda’s boyfriend, but they are always separated by circumstance so they’re rarely together. I don’t think the text would strictly agree that he is “her boyfriend” but he’s her boyfriend. He becomes a terrorist in Al-Qaeda.
The last is Ramahd, an envoy from a neighboring kingdom who is traveling with his country’s king and princess. His wife, the eldest princess, was killed by Al-Qaeda so he hates them (the terrorists are actually called “The Moonless Host” but this is more fun). He thinks Ceda is hot. He is off doing his own thing—the other princess he’s with (not his dead wife) is a blood mage who is always scheming and doing spells and shit. She’s cool.
It goes basically exactly as you’d imagine it would given the above setup. That is good to me. I want fantasy slop, and this is a yummy spoon of it. The first book got a lot of raves from major publications—as well it should have! It’s a fun and unique setting for the genre! Then the other books got like zero press/hype? I have to imagine the first book didn’t sell as expected and the publisher was like, if you want us to publish the rest of this series, you have to bang out a book a year or else we’re cutting you loose. And folks, he wrote the remaining five books in five years. It reads like it too!
Book three is like 600 pages and so little stuff happens in it. The pacing is all over the place, it’s so lumpy. A good editor and a few more drafts could easily cut this book to half its length. But I can’t hate for two reasons: as mentioned, he probably did not have the luxury of time to get the book into its best possible shape, and two, this shit is slop. The pages go down like nothing. The prose itself never tries anything fancy. 300 pages, 600 pages, in the end it’s the same. Did the magic kings have superpowers and be evil? Did Ceda kill one or two of them? Did some crazy magic happen? Were there descriptions of the sand boats that travel the sand sea on polished wooden skis? If yes (and the answer is yes) then this hoggy is happy. I am taking a break now but you better believe I plan to read books 4-6 of this. I bet there are gonna be kings in it.
Tom Played Sea of Stars
I played Sea of Stars, a retro-inspired RPG. It advertises itself as being inspired by Chrono Trigger, so I checked it out.
The good: The combat system is really fun. It has Mario RPG style timed button presses for all the moves. There’s an engaging economy of use-it-or-lose-it resources that you generate in every battle, so you have to think about how to balance creating the resources and spending them to their fullest in each encounter.
When enemies are about to do a super move, they display a series of damage types above their head along with a timer indicating how many turns until they attack. Hit them with those types before the move goes off and the move is canceled—this is a super tricky little mini-puzzle as you try to figure out the most efficient way to deal those damage types before the deadline.
It feels great to just steal a boss’s turn from them, and it’s especially rewarding because doing this is the fastest way to charge your combo meter—which is how you do double and triple techs, which, like in Chrono Trigger, kick ass.
Potions and items are replaced with food you make yourself, and you can only carry ten meals, so you have to decide what items you want to carry rather than just having 9000 potions like most RPGs.
Some of the puzzles are fun. There are some cool side missions. The pixel art is stunning—really gorgeous. Bosses especially are a treat to see. There is a shapeshifting party member you meet late in the game who looks absolutely amazing, the creativity on display in their animations is always so joyful.
Sad to say, this section is already over.
The bad: Folks, when people make a game like this, they say “it’s like Chrono Trigger” because they know it’ll move units. The next time a game like this comes out? Well…let’s just say no one’s going to be saying “it’s like Sea of Stars.”
This is a beautiful looking game with a really good JRPG combat system shackled down by a lame story in a store-brand universe. This game is longer than Chrono Trigger and yet it feels like less happens, you learn less about the characters, and plot developments still somehow feel rushed.
I’m going to spoil a twist near the beginning. I do this because I do not respect it. When this happened, I knew the game had immediately dropped at least 2 points (out of ten) in my final estimation.
So your main characters are two kids who grow up in this weird town where you aren’t allowed to leave (suspicious!). The town is dedicated to supporting the Solstice Warriors, an order of magic knights with sun or moon magic. The two kids love the two adult Solstice Warriors, who get to leave and defeat monsters and save people. They are the kids’ heroes. Eventually they are allowed to go to Solstice Warrior school. You (the player) notice what the kids don’t: how come they’re the only two students? There’s tons of beds and desks but they’re the only ones using them. The adult Solstice Warriors are always nice to you, but to the side they mutter about “oh god, it hurts to see them have to live THIS life...if only they knew the TRUTH...I wish I could SAVE THEM from this...”
I immediately go: We got a Madoka Magica situation folks. The monsters are like corrupted innocents or something, or maybe when a Solstice Warrior gets old they BECOME a monster, or maybe the Solstice Warriors are evil or a cult or something. When they get out of the village they’re gonna find out some key part of their upbringing was a lie and be scandalized by the truth. I think, OK! This could be fun.
Turns out: no. Everything you are told about the Solstice Warriors was totally true. They are so good and there’s no gray area. They are the only ones who can kill “Dwellers,” monsters made by The Fleshmancer, a guy who sucks ass. The Dwellers are totally evil and it’s morally correct to kill them. There’s no reveal.
The twist is, the adult Solstice Warriors are evil. Why? Because this shit is too hard, man. This fighting stuff, I’m sick of it! I don’t like having to be the guy who goes and kills monsters. Now, this is legitimate! I can see this being an interesting plot element! Yusuke goes through this in Yu Yu Hakusho and that rules.
However! No! The way they act on this impulse is to (paraphrasing so I don’t have to explain lore) give an atom bomb of hell to the bad guy. They like straight up end the world. They give the bad guy the means to resurrect his most powerful monster (note that the trauma of defeating this monster, which included them seeing all their friends and mentors killed by it in the epic battle, was what made them hate being Solstice Warriors in the first place). The reason they decided to give the bad guy the hell bomb of killing was because the bad guy promised if they did, they would be given a place to chill and vibe where they would be safe. Take a guess if they got it or not.
When I saw this scene I was so pissed. This is idiot plot. They just decided to be morons for no reason just so there could be a twist. They cause massive world genocide because it’s too sad to have to risk your life fighting monsters. Just retire! Just don’t report back to the headmaster!! JUST LEAVE!!!!
Not that it matters—after one cutscene of generic red-sky terror, you realize that the only consequence is one crater in a town, and no one seems to have been killed, and the damage is repaired immediately. This is emblematic of two issues with this game: 1) story beats are rushed and rarely have proper follow-up, and 2) the tone of everything is so relentlessly Pollyanna positive!
Re: 1, here’s an example. In this game you find out there is a Cloud Kingdom in the sky. You go up and spend like two minutes there and basically get permission to go through a tollbooth. This kingdom and its people are never relevant again. In Chrono Trigger when you find the Sky Kingdom of Zeal, it becomes the cornerstone of the plot of both Trigger and Cross and touches every other event in the game. You may say it’s not fair to compare this game to CT. Well, tough.
Some other shit: You meet the Professor X to the Fleshmancer’s Magneto at one point and he joins your group. He’s fun. Near the end, he learns a scary fact and says he has to go home and research the implications of the scary fact. He leaves a brainless clone of himself to use in battle but it doesn’t talk. I was excited for the scene when he comes back and explains what he learned. He never comes back and explains what he learned.
You also hear talk of “ascension to Guardian Gods.” It’s spoken of in hushed tones, only half-mentioned, never explained, because the speakers don’t want to entertain the possibility it can happen. I was excited for the scene where this gets discussed openly. Well it does not happen. At the end your guys go wow, I feel it...I am so strong now...and then they turn to Guardian Gods. Well, OK!
It feels less like there’s a real story and a real world and more like a bunch of retro-JRPG fans just sticking in tropes they like without considering what those tropes are meant to do and how they affect the rest of the plot.
Re: 2, everyone in this game is so ready to instantly become your best friend if you go “I think you’re great!” I love positivity as much as the next guy but you have to have contrast here. The emotional texture of the world is so flat. Everyone’s so eager to be cheery and friendly. No!! This is like how the human brain goes nuts if the Matrix is too good. Where are the assholes?
The culprit is what is the de facto main character of the game, Garl, a guy I do not care about. Garl has two traits: he loves to cook and he goes “I think you’re great!” to everyone he meets and they immediately become his best friend.
I did not buy Garl as this world-uniting force of charisma and charm. If you want a character to be so magnetic the whole world becomes his buddy, you need way, way better writing than what this game can provide. It is nuts how much of this game is laser-focused on Garl. I’m sorry, he is not a compelling enough character to bear so many hours of story. And since his shallow one-note cheeriness spreads to everyone he meets, everyone else in the world becomes shallow and one-note too.
To be clear, I still beat the game and did all the side quests. The gameplay *is* fun, and the graphics are gorgeous. But when you come at the king you best not miss. You cannot advertise your game as inspired by Chrono Trigger if it absolutely crumbles under the comparison, and Sea of Stars does.
6/10.
That Ed Stasium mix is crazy. "Little Mascara" I think was the biggest revelation for me; I had no idea there was a solo at the end of that song! The album sounds alive in a way I never thought it would.