I love Destroyer, a weird indie band that always threatened to become somewhat popular but never did, fronted by a strange, awkward man who write obtuse, poetic lyrics that he sings in his weird, idiosyncratic voice. Over their 30 year career, Destroyer has put out countless classic songs, none of which have gotten the love they deserve, and none of which sound like the kind of music a band named “Destroyer” would put out.

My goal is to convert some of you freaks into Destroyer fans and do my part to right this wrong. Hopefully Riley is one of them, but it will be pretty funny if he isn’t, so that’s a win-win scenario.

The first episode, covering Destroyer’s ill-advised debut album We’ll Build Them a Golden Bridge, is out now, available on all podcast platforms (as far as I know—let me know if this is not true) and at this RSS feed.

Please check this out, I think this turned out extremely fun and I am so looking forward to the journey through Destroyer’s oeuvre. If you like it, PLEASE PLEASE consider throwing us a signal boost, recommending it to your friends, following dddddpodcast on Bluesky, or giving us a 5-star review on your preferred podcast platform.

That is all for now. Be well homies

But I return today with the intention to revive this newsletter’s original purpose and share thoughts and observations I feel are worth sharing yet are unsuited to the podcast format. The catalyst is that yesterday I at last finished reading the gargantuan novel Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany. erica dreisbach recommended this book to me in, no joke, February 2020—it took me nearly six years but I did it (just kidding—it only took around fifteen days to read once I actually started it). Given its themes it is eye-rollingly on the nose to immediately use “the writing process” as the method by which to process it. What can I say. Sometimes the obvious thing is the correct thing.

Before getting into the more granular discussion of the book and its themes, I feel like I must give some background and disclaimers for those who aren’t familiar with the it. Dhalgren is an 800-page brick of a book which contains no plot and is resolutely opposed to presenting the reader with concrete meaning. That said, it’s really not as difficult as it’s sometimes made out to be: for perhaps 99% of its pages, the actual sentence-to-sentence prose is not confusing to read. There are almost always events occurring that the book’s language does not attempt to obfuscate or abstract. Characters have dialogue with each other that makes sense and is formatted with quotation marks and dialogue tags (stuff like “Kid said,” “Lanya said”, etc). If you have any experience reading “experimental literature” you may have breathed huge sighs of relief at the above. Truly, I was expecting the process of getting from page to page to be much more laborious than it was.

However, this does not change the fact that Dhalgren is one of the all-time abandoned-midway-through books, and for good reason! Bring up Dhalgren and you will hear numerous folks explain about how they tried to read it but just couldn’t make it through, or if they did, how it was a brutal slog done out of grim obligation. When I mentioned the book on Bluesky, what do you know, that’s the response I got. One of the many things that went through my head after finishing is how hilarious it is that the book somehow is a huge best-seller. I struggle to think of a book that would generate more net frustration when read by a million people than Dhalgren. This book is constantly doing weird, reader-unfriendly things, and it does them for a very long time. If you get to the end with the hope that it will stop doing this, that it will give you the tools to “solve the puzzle,” so to speak, you are fucked (I also would argue you really misread the book if you even dimly suspect this, but I will get to that later).

As much as I am about to praise my experience with Dhalgren, it is clear that if you feel an urge to give up while reading: do it. Maybe press on for a bit and see if you rally, but truly: trust yourself! If you aren’t into what it’s doing, it’s not going to change or get better! To read this shit under duress or obligation is to drive yourself insane (bad way) instead of the book’s intended result (drive yourself insane [good way]).

I mentioned before that the book has no plot, but I guess a more accurate way to put it would be: the book is full of events, interesting events heavy with meaning, none of which have a clean, decodable connection to each other. Our nameless protagonist is “The Kid,” or “Kid,” or “Kydd,” or “Kidd,” depending on who’s talking. He is an amnesiac, formerly institutionalized man of indeterminate age and ethnicity. Put some big underlines over the word “indeterminate,” that’ll be coming up a lot.

The book follows him as he travels to and lives in the fictional American city Bellona. Bellona, to be brief, is fucked. It sits in ruin, phones and radios don’t work, it has no way to communicate with the outside world (in Bellona it seems unreal that there is an outside world), it is almost empty of people (it is estimated only around 1000 people live there), most buildings sit abandoned, the air is forever smoky from the eternal fires that burn the city without consuming it, time does not follow a straight line. As I say: fucked.

There is presumably an event which caused Bellona to be this way, but no one knows for sure what it was, and maybe it hasn’t happened yet, or maybe it’s more accurate to say it’s going to keep happening. There is no need to do anything in Bellona (people find food by looting abandoned stores, which day after day present fully-stocked shelves. People find shelter by walking into a house and going this is my house now), so people generally just mill around and drink and talk and have sex and take naps and walk here and there.

To return to a previous point: I cannot understand the people (and there are many! Look at reviews and writing on Dhalgren and you will find these people) who finished the book furious that nothing was resolved. On one hand, they are right! It is never made clear why the book is named Dhalgren. It is never made clear why Bellona is like this. It is never made clear who the Kid is or whether anything he did was important. The strange contradictions that cover every facet of life, existence, and identity in Bellona are never resolved, never even understood as something that could approach resolution. The book’s ending, famously, mirrors its beginning almost completely, concluding with the first half of the truncated sentence the book begins with.

But on the other hand, I do not know how you can read even forty pages of this and not already know that this is not a book concerned with explanations or resolutions. YouTube dude HBomberguy articulates a similar realization players are meant to have early in the video game Pathologic: “you [aren’t] playing a game where you have to eat food to survive. You [are] playing a game about starving.”

Dhalgren is a book about the elusiveness of meaning, it is a book about life being a chaotic series of warped symbols impossible to ever decode in a way that satisfies. The Kid is literally chained up with prisms, mirrors, and lenses, three things that subtly distort reality. It is inconceivable for this book to pay off its plot. It is impossible for it to give the backstory and lore about How It All Got Like This. If it did, the book would be ridiculous. It still is pretty ridiculous. But you know what I mean: if you could explain Bellona it wouldn’t be Bellona.

“When I was in the hospital—” remembering, I smiled- “I used to have a friend who’d say: ‘When you’re paranoid, everything makes sense.’ But that’s not quite it. It’s that all sorts of things you know don’t relate suddenly have the air of things that do. Everything you look at seems just an inch away from its place in a perfectly clear pattern.” Once more I looked at her leg. “Only you never know which inch to move...”

But OK: what’s good about a stupidly long book where nothing makes any sense and nothing ties together? Excellent question, and in deliciously appropriate fashion, one without answers that will satisfy most people (hence my advice to just abandon da book without guilt if you feel the need).

Consider American life now: does it not feel like the world is a ruin of something that was never real? Are we not living in the aftermath of a slow cataclysm that we can’t point to, like there is no one moment when it happened, but it has been happening, will keep happening? Is it not so that any vestiges of society left to us seem like half-remembered habits clung to out of inertia, obligation, fear? Doesn’t the specter of racial hatred stay woven into every crazy-making indignity we are meant to live through? Are we not trapped in a world where the inevitability of random violence hangs over all of us and we are constantly made to bear witness to horrific portents we can do nothing about? Don’t you feel as though reality is increasingly becoming an irrelevant concept, something worn out and thrown away, a hazy, ill-practiced relic? Funny how this was written fifty years ago and is still so timely. Seems like we’ve been living the same feelings, the same events, stuck. Almost like we are in Bellona or some shit.

Of course, observing “uhhh, duhhh, the way the book is, is like da way life is” does not in itself prove the value of the work. More so because it, like any sum-up of Dhalgren, is inadequate and overly simplistic. There are many ways that this shit is insanely dated. There are a number of things that are the book’s own with no parallel to reality. Even the things that map onto real-life feelings do not do so one-to-one. It is almost like they are seen through a mirror, prism, or perhaps lens. I am about to take a roundabout path to my next point, though again I feel like it’s appropriate given the subject matter.

I made a joke about Joe asking me “is Dhalgren good” and then I smugly responded “to ask if it’s good is to ask the wrong question.” This is a great gag obviously but it’s not like it took some great insight for me to get there. So much of this book is about writing. Not the result of writing (ie, the text) but the process of it. Therefore, it feels reductive as a reader to judge the text and not judge the process. Let’s back up: The Kid eventually becomes a central figure in Bellona, but as he notes several times it is through no action of his own. All the roles he finds himself in are ones that he passively took on by accident, his reputation a consequence of others using him as a symbol representing whatever they need represented. Pretty much the only thing he actively chooses to do in the whole book (besides “ball,” having sex is always “balling.” I said a lot of this was dated) is to write.

Like many things about Dhalgren, two contradicting things are simultaneously true: The Kid’s poems—the writing he most cares about, the kind that matters, the work we actually see him doing in the text—are never shown. We don’t read a word of his writing. But also: the only thing we read is his writing. This is also explained by two things. One is that the Kid is Samuel Delany. I also mean two things by this: one, every character in any book is, in some ways, their author. They only exist because they were in that person to begin with. Two, uh, The Kid like literally is him. In one of the book’s most haunting scenes, Kid finds a mirror and sees someone else looking back at him. The guy described is fuckin Delany.

The other reason I say “the only thing we read is his writing” requires some background. Early in the story, the Kid is given a notebook. All the pages on the right have already been filled in, so the Kid only writes on the blank half. The final section of the book is explicitly presented as the contents of Kid’s notebook. (At least initially, it is more accurately an annotated edition of a corrected transcript of his notebook. This kind of tiresome shit is why I say it’s best to drop this book without hesitation if you aren’t feeling it). There are some obvious stylistic choices that make the notebookiness of this section obvious—the scenes start in media res, and don’t seem to be in any specific order, plus there are totally unrelated sidebars in a different font running up the sides of some pages. But these flourishes aside, you quickly come to understand that uh, this shit is written exactly the same as the rest of the book. Has this been his notebook the whole time? Throughout, there have been moments where the Kid is struck by the strangeness of what is happening to him and the next paragraph switches from third person to first person narration, as “I” speaks in extremely flowery poetic language about what has happened and how he feels. The last chapter makes it clear—those first-person paragraphs are him writing down some raw material for a poem later.

Of course it’s never that simple: if half the notebook was already written when he got it, who wrote the other half? Him? Someone else? Did the events described in the completed half happen already, or was it written knowing what would happen? Time works funny in Bellona... Case in point: the few details of the cataclysm that may have Done This to Bellona occur, again, near the end of the book. One of the possible catalysts of the fall was the rape of the white June Richards by the black George Harrison—except was it a rape? Black male sexuality, of which George’s is fetishized to the point of deification in Bellona, has a long American history of being instantly assumed predatory, violent, and dangerous, especially when directed at a white woman. And yet, there’s an equally long history of that kind of sexuality being beguiling, enticing, desirable. Throughout the book, June is desperately searching for George, never explaining why, never quite able to find him (this is telling, as the main way to get around in Bellona is to just sort of drift and understand you will get where you are meant to go). Why is she so obsessed with him—does she remember having had sex with him before? Yes? No? Maybe she just isn’t talking about it? Or maybe it hasn’t happened yet? Was it rape? Some people sure want it to be. We have only the Bellona Times’s account to claim it is, and we learn their reporting is not exactly accurate. Early in the book, a second moon rises in the night sky, terrifying everyone—it is taken as a fact that the second moon is named George. No discussion needed. Later, an enormous sun, hundreds of times larger than the real sun, rises over Bellona dominating almost all of the sky. No one dares to say its name but we all know it’s June.

Man what does this shit all mean? I don’t think there’s an answer. Like everything it’s all a contradiction. June is both her father’s innocent sunshine girl and a woman entranced by the terrifying power of her own desire. But I’m getting off topic (again, I feel I am allowed to here). I was talking about writing.

Over and over the Kid asks anyone who will hear if they think his poems are good. Eventually a collection is printed and becomes the toast of Bellona (mostly because there are no other books). He keeps asking, is this shit good? Do you like this? Everyone dodges the question or refuses to answer. His poetry mentor, Ernest Newboy, after giving a big speech about how the poet wields his art like a shield which is first a mirror, then a prism, then a lens, makes it clear: whether or not they’re good is irrelevant. Kid, the author, is interesting, compelling, special, and the poems are a window into his psyche. What they make possible is more valuable than their craftsmanship. Kid doesn’t really like this answer because he wants to get told he’s good.

I personally have had a strange relationship with these kinds of prose-poetry type works. I think here of Calvino’s Invisible Cities or Gibran’s The Prophet. I can’t tell, in the moment, if I am reading something beautiful and meaningful, or something hollow and pompous, a shallow piece of faux profundity. Why do I do this? Why can’t I decide for myself? Why do I care? It’s scary that my perception can invert so easily. I fear an imagined encounter with some hypothetical hater who comes at me with a better articulated argument than mine, making me feel like a fool for falling for something so obviously fraudulent. This is a major reason why I have always struggled to connect with poetry, and perhaps the most prominent delivery vector for this feeling has been how pathetically phony I feel when I attempt to write with any level of poetic abstraction.

Every time I’ve tried to write poetically (not even “write a poem!”) I feel like a liar, and whatever “poetic” language I can muster feels so transparently fake that I can hope for nothing more than a reader stupid enough to let its flimsy tricks somehow fool them, a success doomed to crumble as it is only a matter of time before a savvier reader comes along and sees through it. I am such a stranger to the poetic mode of expression that I can’t even imagine how it could not feel like a lie. Like, buddy…I don’t talk like that! Using words like that IS fake, it IS a put-on!

There are two moments in Dhalgren that spoke to this feeling I’ve long struggled with in a way I have not encountered in other works.

The first is the only time anyone answers the Kid about whether they like his poems. (sure, some of the members of his gang technically do answer, saying oh yeah they’re great Kid, but he knows they didn’t read them.) At a party to celebrate the publication of the Kid’s book, an acquaintance of his, assured that Kid wants his honest opinion, says this:

Well, the language is extremely artificial. There’s no relation, or even tension, between it and any sort of real speech. Most of the poems are pompous and over-emotional—I’m sure you were sincere about every one of them. But sincerity by itself, without skill, usually just results in mawkishness. The lack of emotional focus makes subjects that could have been interesting into Grand Guignol melodrama. They end up coming off pretty banal. The method’s cliche, and often, so is the diction. And they’re dull...Kid, most of the people here think you’re seventeen or eighteen! That, along with the poor man’s Hell’s Angel bit, and all the gossip about the various kinky things you get into—people are just here for the show. As far as most of them are concerned, [Kid’s book] is like a performance by a talking dog. They find it so cunning that he speaks at all, they couldn’t care less what he actually said.

The next is from the annotations on Kid’s notebook near the book’s end. For some context: Delany has turns of phrase he employs very often—as mentioned, “balling,” and characters are always “sucking their teeth.” The annotation goes thusly:

Also, “Rose...a brown fist up beside her chin...” and a few pages later, “Fist against his chin, Stevie...” suggests the first draft of a fabulist who, having found the sharp descript for one invented character, forgets he has already used it and sticks it to a second.

Because they are, at surface, self-deprecating comments on the book itself, many Dhalgren haters online cite these bits as though they are insufferably smug tongue-in-cheek winks at its own crappiness, breaking the fourth wall to laugh at the reader for slogging through the shitty book. To me this is a monumental over-simplification that makes them miss the point in a mondo way. Plus, these sections occur very late into the book, so if you are primed to not like them, you should have stopped reading by then! No, Delany’s not making fun of you, the reader, for saying this—he is giving space to what was surely going through his mind every time he sat down to write Dhalgren. I know this because, again, your characters are you—what they say is, in some way, what you feel. This is Delany articulating his fear, a fear I know well, that maybe you don’t fucking know how to do this, maybe everyone who likes your writing is an idiot who’s humoring you, and the day will soon come that someone smart will notice all those things you don’t like about yourself and everyone will know how truly wretched you are.

Everything in this book is two contradicting things that cannot co-exist. Thus, both you, and I think even Delany, can never be fully convinced that this book, with all its ambition and strangeness, isn’t some big fraud, an emperor with no clothes, a stupid overlong piece of doggerel. This goes for all art, really. The version that is a puerile waste of time has been there in your hands all along. It’s as real as the version that’s a masterpiece. Every piece of art has its haters, and the hater’s experience of revulsion is equally as real as the fan’s experience of joy. Both versions, contradictory as they are, exist together at all times. It’s all about how you take it—and how do you take it? As the Kid writes, rewrites, revises his poems, so much is made of words, their power, the process of writing.

Words are, in a lot of ways, our only method of communicating our inner selves, our feelings, our souls. Yet they are so vague, so strange, they work so obliquely and imprecisely, containing multiple meanings that every person perceives differently. I have said many times on Tom’s Record Club that every human mind stands on the opposite edge of a vast sea we will never cross. Our only tools (well, at least the Kid’s only tools) are words, these subtle symbols whose meaning, ever shifting, can never be fully comprehended, that can only be experienced as filtered through the mirror/prism/lens of another human mind. Words, words: they’re all we have to go on.

If Dollar doesn’t stop pestering Copperhead, then Copperhead will kill him. If Dollar stops pestering Copperhead, then Copperhead will let him alone. If Copperhead is going to kill Dollar, then Dollar will not have stopped pestering Copperhead. If Copperhead lets Dollar alone, then Dollar will have stopped pestering Copperhead. Which of the above is true? The one with the fewest words, of course. But that’s faulty logic. Why? Three times blessed is the Lord of Divine Words, the God of Thieves, the Master of the Underworld, dual sexed in character, double dealing in nature, yet one through all diffraction.

Who knows if anything’s going to come of this (I guess probably no) but I think Dhalgren’s most impressive achievement is making me, for maybe the first time, want to write poetry. Every previous time I’ve tried has been due to an assignment or some self-imposed “well I gotta do this if I want to be a literature boy” thing. Which I guess is also an assignment.

What I write doesn’t seem to be...true. I mean I can model so little of what it’s about. Life is a very terrible thing, mostly, with points of wonder and beauty. Most of what makes it terrible, though, is simply that there’s so much of it, blaring in through the five senses. In my loft, alone, in the middle of the night, it comes blaring in. So I work at culling enough from it to construct moments of order. I haven’t been given enough tools. I’m a crazy man. I haven’t been given enough life. I’m a crazy man in this crazed city. When the problem is anything as complicated as one word spoken between two people, both suspecting they understand it...When you touch your own stomach with your own hand and try to determine who is feeling who...When three people put their hands over my knee, each breathing at a different rate, the heartbeat in the heel of the thumb of one jarring with the pulse in the artery edging the bony cap, and one of them is me—what in me can order gets exhausted before it all.

That bit is so good. The below is as well

The falsification of this journal: First off, it doesn’t reflect my daily life. Most of what happens hour by hour here is quiet and dull. We sit most of the time, watching the dull sky slipping. Frankly, that is too stupid to write about. When something really involving, violent, or important happens, it occupies too much of my time, my physical energy, and my thought for me to be able to write about. I can think of four things that have happened in the nest I would like to have described when they occurred, but they so completed themselves in the happening that even to refer to them seems superfluous.

What is down, then, is a chronicle of incidents with a potential for wholeness they did not have when they occurred; a false picture, again, because they show neither the general spread of life’s fabric, nor the most significant pattern points.

To show one is too boring and the other too difficult. That is probably why (as I use up more and more paper trying to return the feeling I had when I thought I was writing poems) I am not a poet...anymore? The poems perhaps hint it to someone else, but for me they are dry as the last leaves dropping from the burned trees on Brisbane. They are moments when I had the intensity to see, and the energy to build, some careful analog that completed the seeing.

They stuck at me for two weeks? For three?

I don’t really know if they occurred. That would take another such burst. All I have been left is the exhausting habit of trying to tack up the slack in my life in words.

All of which is a long way of saying, this is a pretty fascinating book. It probably could have stood to be 600 pages. I’d say get it out of the library and see what you think, but do not hesitate to return it early.

Oh, also: so much of this book is Kid and his girlfriend having explicit group sex with a 15-year-old. Apparently Delany had sex with adults when he was 15 and is committed to the belief that he liked it and it wasn’t a problem. It’s uhh, well, not fun to read. Just a warning.

OK bye bye

ADDITIONAL OBSERVATIONS:

As much as the book “doesn’t resolve” (and it doesn’t), it’s shockingly conventional in that everything it says it’s going to do, it does. Early on, someone tells Kid a big list of all the points of interest in Bellona and all the major people who live there. Rest assured, he goes to every single place and meets every single person.

There are even several moments that come close to an exposition dump, but in classic Dhalgren fashion they end up making you more confused than before. Two major ones:

1) Throughout, Kid has been encountering people who, like him, wear the optic chain, all of whom do not want to discuss how they got it. In times of great tension, Kid sees people’s eyes become fully red, which makes him fucking freak out and get scared. Well, much later he and a buddy find an old warehouse filled with dozens of spools of optic chain plus boxes and boxes labeled “eye-caps” full of red plastic half-spheres. It’s like oh. I guess that’s where those things come from. But also: what the fuck. Like what. Huh

2) One of the first things the Kid notes in the half-filled notebook is a list of names. Notably, first and last names of various major characters are sprinkled throughout—that is, there’s a “George So-and-so” and a “So-and-so Harrison” but no “George Harrison.” One name will jump out at you: William Dhalgren. Later, Kid meets a reporter for the Bellona Times named Bill. He later has a vision of a word repeating in his head: Dhalgren. The next time he sees Bill, he has a revelation, and is overcome by the ecstasy of memory as he realizes he knows what Bill’s last name is. Then, he forgets why he was so excited, forgets the name, and moves on. Again: huh. What. Why is the book named Dhalgren. Bill is not an important character. Or is he? Impossible to say!

Kid’s girlfriend Lanya plays the harmonica and at one point finds a tape machine she uses to lay down and layer a bunch of harmonica loops. Even in Bellona, poly people make electronic music.

I haven’t even touched on the whole mythology angle, mostly because I don’t know enough about it. But like: the first person the Kid meets in Bellona is a woman he has sex with and then she turns into a tree. First of all: what. Huh. Second, this is obviously the myth of Daphne, the woman who turned to a tree rather than get fucked by Apollo. But like, why is it the myth of Daphne? Why put that in here? Also, the Kid always only wears one shoe, a reference to the myth of Jason, of Argonauts fame. Once again: cool, but to what end? Those are the only two I recognized but apparently there are more reflections of myth in here. I say again “to what end” but we should all know by now, this book has no ends. Just crazy that there’s a whole other thick layer of metaphor and meaning slathered over this I didn’t engage with at all.

2025 was probably the hardest year of our lives. Both me and Joe began the year unemployed and end it the same way. It is insanely depressing in a way that saps the creative impulse out of you and renders your brain less interesting and less thoughtful. Being funny or insightful has never been harder and more draining.

Some may ask, why not take this golden opportunity to use this free time to get serious about Anime Sickos, maybe do some dedicated networking, maybe do twice-weekly episodes, maybe beef up the Patreon offering? Well, the answer is the other reason 2025 was probably the hardest year of our lives: Joe’s chronic pain escalated to a point where he could no longer handle regular recording, leaving me to steer the ship alone during the Anime Sickos Weird Era, where we would recruit guest co-hosts to fill Joe’s seat, with Joe himself returning whenever possible.

Here’s the facts folks: I can’t do this alone. Joe has a comedic mind so different and yet so complementary to my own. He’s funny in a way I can’t even dream of being. Together we are capable of so much more than what I am capable of on my own. Our guest co-Sickos were, without exception, excellent, but doing one great episode with a guest cannot replicate the creative momentum of making long-term plans with the funniest guy you know, with whom you have built a rapport and understanding over hundreds of hours. My dream is to end the Anime Sickos Weird Era and return gloriously to the Anime Sickos Classic Experience. Joe has been feeling better lately—one must hope it becomes a trend.

That said: despite all the bullshit we have had to deal with, all of which was unearned because honestly we are such wonderful and kind sexy boys who deserve the best, 2025 is a year I can really be proud of. We did some of, in my opinion, our best work. Our numbers in 2024 were a gut punch that made me worry that the show was in total free-fall—well I can say that we are no longer in free fall. (Also, a friend with knowledge of the larger podcast industry informed us that most shows saw a similar precipitous fall in 2024 due to a change in how Apple reported metrics, so the bad 2024 was actually not our fault and we’re perfect).

N.B. Anime Sickos Episode 241 releases the day this is published and will not be included in the data despite being a 2025 episode technically.

So without further ado, let us behold some stats together. Join me, won’t you?

2025 Numbies

Let’s start with the first and most basic metric: how many downloads did we get in 2025?

First of all: oh man this line looks dire. Trending down, plus that absolutely miserable July. In our defense, we only put out two episodes in July due to the difficulty of spinning up the Anime Sickos Weird Era (plus I had to take a few weeks to decide if I even wanted to do the show without Joe).

This is a slight drop from last year’s total of 68,693 downloads and a pretty major drop from 2023’s total of 88,600 and 2022’s 83,385. This seems pretty bad, especially as our numbers should passively inflate year-over-year as our back catalogue grows. Well, I must once again point to a sticky little culprit known as “not releasing enough episodes.” Behold the number of Sickos episodes released every year:

As you can see, we managed our fewest releases ever in 2025. I made such a to-do in the 2024 review like “ohhh I’m so sorry for this.” No longer—as soon as the Weird Era began I was like sorry folks this shit is biweekly now. If and when Joe feels ready to try for weekly episodes again, we will consider that, but for now there is simply no way I am going to be able to reach out to a guest host, spin out an episode concept with them, coordinate recording, and edit an episode every week.

Let us attempt some cope: of the 65,936 downloads in 2025, episodes released in 2025 earned 38,999 (or 60%) of them. Thus the average 2025-released episode earned 1258 downloads. If we had put out 41 episodes, as we did in 2023, we can assume we would have had roughly 78,516 downloads in 2025. That would have been nice! But cope can only go so far: we did not do that. Oh well.

So, what were 2025’s top performers?

Now these truly are some great episodes. 223: The Sickos Present the Unified Theory of Chilling and Hanging, 221: Corpse Brain 2 - Corpse World, and 227: Posting Sucks Now are all, to my ears, total all-timers where we are as wise as any human has ever been, and are essential listening to understanding the modern world. Two game-mechanic-ranking episodes crack the top ten, a frankly enormous shock to me! Of course, the episode where Josh Boerman and Dylan both joined us to rank immersive sim and fighting game mechanics sits at the top, as it should. Ed Zitron’s Guesto Mode episode obviously has to be on there, and rounding out the top ten are three episodes of me and Joe complaining. This is really the snapshot of where Anime Sickos is at in 2025 imo.

An interesting note is that no Anime Sickos Weird Era episodes appear on the top ten (Posting Sucks Now is technically a Weird Era episode, with Cohen Edenfield filling in for Joe, but we had the outline for that episode locked in and ready to go right before Joe had to take his hiatus, so it’s at least 50% Normal Era-coded). There’s an obvious explanation: The Weird Era began in July, so those episodes have less time in 2025 to accrue downloads. But my guess? The people yearn for Joe da Sicko.

How are we doing worldwide in 2025? Well you’ll never believe it: we do our best in English-speaking countries!

Nothing too shocking here, but we’ve included it before so here it is again this year.

And because I like to hurt myself, let’s see how Sicko Shock 2 did in 2025. Here are all the downloads the miniseries received this year:

Owie!! Youch!!! I hurt myself!!! These are low!!!

That said: this is the first year where the curve makes any sense. In every previous year, episode six somehow got more downloads than episodes four or five, which suggested there exists a contingent of listeners who put on the ensemble-led episode six despite having never met two of the five main characters. This year though, episode six had the fewest downloads, as reason would suggest. Reason must prevail imo

All-Time Numbies

Let’s behold the All-Time downloads for Anime Sickos Podcast:

Unlike 2024, the line is not trending obviously downward in a concerning way—we have stabilized. Let’s break it down year-by-year to see it a little more clearly. (I took this next screenshot after the above, and we have 12 more downloads in it. Forgive me)

Do I miss the thrills of the Big Dick King Zone? Yes, obviously I do, we all do, but I am proud of our weird era and our resilience within it.

Speaking of all-time, here are the top ten episodes of Anime Sickos by total download count:

Fun fact: this is the same list of all-time episodes as in 2023 and 2024! The order isn’t exactly the same (episode 61 overtook episode 103 this year, for example) but it’s the same ten! I cannot argue really: these are ten fucking bangers. I wish some latter-day episodes were in there too but that’s just how the chips fall. I say “latter-day” but these days even a 2023 episode would feel like an alien artifact created by people who existed thousands of years ago.

Here is how the all-timers did in 2025 only.

A bit worse than they did last year…maybe this means some more recent episodes have a chance to overtake in 2026? I hope so! Here are the top candidates to pull it off: the best-performing episodes in 2025 that were not released in 2025.

Now these are some good ones…I wouldn’t mind if any of these showed up on the top ten list one day. I think the Deadwood Episode, out of all of these, has the most potential. Deadwood is just so strong.

Because I like hurting myself, I figured it would be fun to not only show you the all-time top episodes, but the all-time worst-performing Anime Sickos episodes. I have excluded episodes released in 2025 (they haven’t been out long enough) and Guesto episodes (a lot of our Guestos are not public figures. We had them on for fun, not for clout, thus it feels cruel to single them out for not generating clout).

Behold: The Bottom 20!

Oh fuck!!!! YOWEEE!!!! I hurt myself!!! What is Sicko Shock 2 doing down there?? Are you saying our episode on Stella had minor appeal? Are you saying the sketch episodes and Fruit Tournament were flops?? This doesn’t make any sense…

Just goes to show: we peaked in 2022!

A fun wrinkle—210: The Sickos Go Dad Mode and 204: The Sickos Rank Some More Game Mechanics on a Tier List appear both on the all-time bottom 20 and in the top back catalogue performers of 2025. Wonder what that means!

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 1,518 downloads. In 2024, only four episodes released that year exceeded that average. This year, with fewer total episodes released, we had six exceed the average. That’s 19% of new episodes performing above replacement, as opposed to 11% in 2024. Progress!

Weird Era

Of our 31 episodes released this year (I am excluding “An Important Anime Sickos Announcement”), eleven of them (35.4% of all episodes) have been part of “The Anime Sickos Weird Era,” here defined as an episode where Joe does not appear.

The average Weird episode has 1075 downloads, while the average normal 2025 episode has 1430. Again: the people yearn for Joe.

Since Joe began his hiatus, he has been back four times. This means that since the Weird Era began in July, 26.6% of Anime Sickos Episodes have actually not been weird.

Miscellaneous

Let’s see what type of episodes we did in 2025, sorted by most common type:

To be clear, “Anime” here refers to 222: The Police Squad Episode, 230: Anime 102, 231: The Walk Hard Episode, 232: The Sickos Enter the Fourth Dimension, 235: The Tatami Galaxy Episode, and 237: The One Piece Episode - Part 2. This is frankly the most shocking thing I have ever seen on any of these year-in-reviews. I am honestly blown away by this. Never in our history has it been accurate to call us an anime podcast, but this year it is tied for our most common topic. Even if you define anime normally (that is, excluding non-Japanese media and live-action media), we did three anime episodes, just under 10% of the year’s output. I don’t know who I am anymore.

We once again had six guestos and they all ruled (Merritt K, Dono, Dan Sheehan, Josh Watkins, Patrick Cosmos, and Ed Zitron). It was a joy and honor to yammer with all of them. This is the third year in a row we have had only six guestos. This is not on purpose! I think this is just our natural rhythm. To be fair, guest episodes are our fourth most popular type based on average downloads, so I guess it’s true what they say: networking doesn’t work. The people emphatically prefer Complaining.

Another fun thing is how we constantly want to make this a podcast about eating food despite the audience saying NO loud and clear. Too bad. We are not going to stop!

Oh yeah, I made a game!

I almost never remember that I wrote, programmed, and released a video game in March. Remember that? It’s Time Force X: Mission of Lennon, with art by Tom McHenry. This shit is so funny.

When you see the numbies, you will understand why I forgot that I did this: it basically only translated into two weeks of anything.

That said, it did end up being played 4,376 times. That’s a lot of people I forced to read my Van Der Graaf Generator jokes, and for that it was worth it. But I don’t think this is my new career.

Tom’s Record Club

This year, I adapted my Record Club (join the Anime Sickos Discord to be a part) into a Patreon-exclusive bonus show! I don’t have many numbers to show, as they are going to be very obviously limited by the Patreon paywall, and the one free episode we released was the year’s worst performing episode by far.

But I mention this because I personally am so proud of these. We have released seventeen of these on the Patreon and doing them has exposed me to so much great new music and forced me to engage with my own favorites more closely, and has led to countless fascinating conversations I feel very lucky to have had. In a year where I have had very, very few wins I am grateful to have this series to be proud of and look forward to.

Da Joe Update

Straight from da king himself:

Da Famous Conclusion

2025 was hard, and sad, and weird, but I am proud of what we did in it, and I know that without Anime Sickos my life would be so, so much worse. I am infinitely grateful for the opportunity to have this creative outlet, and to have anyone care about it.

I look forward to another year yapping both with Joe (hopefully on a very regular basis) along with our beloved and growing crew of Sicko Homies. This is a special show, I think. Obviously I am biased but I hope we can be a source of chaotic creativity, stupid jokes, and catharsis for people in the future.

Also, I really want to get a job. If anyone wants me to edit their podcast my rates are reasonable.

I hope you too have a lovely 2026, and that It Happens.

Your friend,
Tom the Anime Sicko.

After watching this, anyone would be saying “wow, I can’t wait for more Genius Night! When’s the next show?” Great question. Next show is Monday, October 20th at 7pm at Cafe Mustache in Chicago!

This one will be hosted by Josh Watkins and feature BOTH ANIME SICKOS (Tom and Joe!) plus Josh Boerman, Donovan Eyre, Lynda Cortez, and Sadie Lancrete. This lineup has got me buzzing for real and it should be doing the same for you. I sure hope to see you there!

Meanwhile: is there a good free alternative to Substack? I hate this evil site, but alternative charges a fee that becomes trivial with their more equitable revenue sharing, but that hits a snag when your newsletter is and always will be non-monetized like ours! Whatever.

-Da Sickos

Our old live show, The Skewer, ruled in a world-historical way. But I didn’t have the juice to do another current events show in Trump 2 era. So we have pivoted: where the Skewer asked performers “write about something that happened in the past month,” Genius Night asks “write something that makes the listener more of a genius.”

Do you understand the implications here? This show is going to make your brain insanely powerful dude. You are going to learn powerful psychic abilities and unlock many skill points. Also, it offers the writers more creative wiggle room. But the most important thing is that it’s like a free PhD but no homework.

Structurally the show is very similar to the Skewer: four essays (at least one accompanied with a slideshow) and a debate (we are going to experiment with new formats for this part!). If you loved the Skewer, rest easy that you will love this.

We got a lineup of unbelievable geniuses who will make your brain so powerful that it will emit a visible glow:

TOM McHENRY
SARA McHENRY
MIKE MIGDALL
DEVON PRICE
erica dreisbach
JOSH WATKINS
and KEVIN JOHNSON doing the news quiz from the Skewer, unchanged (we cannot leave the news entirely behind...)

And of course, it will be hosted by "Da guy from the Skewer": me, Tom Harrison.

The second Genius Night will be Monday, October 20. Providing those two shows go well, we’ll get a recurring date. So if you can, please come out and help make Genius Night as fun and special as The Skewer was! If you’re not in Chicago, it’s OK: we’ll record it!

Your pal,
-Tom

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.

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.

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!

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...

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

“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

If you are in Chicago, we urge and demand you attend THE SKEWER, a live news satire show produced by Tom Harrison and erica dreisbach, next Monday, November 4th at 7pm at Cafe Mustache.

This lineup fucking slaps. Obviously you have me and Joe. Then you have all-time sicko guests like Devon Price, Tom McHenry, and Sara McHenry. Rounding it out is Josh Watkins, one of the best and funniest writers I know, and the voice actor for the vile “Todd Kill” in our audio drama Sicko Shock 2.

This is going to be so fun and we need you there to make the vibe immaculate. Please do not miss it or else I am going to cry.

If you’re not in town, we will be recording it for later release, but if you are in town, do not let this information mislead you into thinking you can skip this. You cannot skip it!

See you there! We love you!

-Da Sickos

Look at this great design from Brandon B. It kicks big ass and embodies the four pillars of modern misery in a way that rules. You will love to wear this great shirt.

Head over to animesickos.com/store to get yours today (note: I say “get it today” but it won’t ship til the pre-order period is over and then they gotta get printed and packaged up. You get it).

After four years of COVID-induced hiatus, the legendary and respected-by-everyone Chicago comedy institution THE SKEWER is making its triumphant return. Will it be permanent? We’ll see. In the meantime, this show on Monday, November 4th at 7pm at Cafe Mustache (2313 N Milwaukee Ave, Chicago IL) promises to be the best show of all time.

Look at this lineup—this is like one of those fake music festival posters people make when they fantasize about what if they could see their favorite bands all playing at once, except it’s real, and they’re my friends.

we got
DEVON PRICE
JOE ANDERSON (da Sicko)
TOM McHENRY
SARA McHENRY
erica dreisbach
JOSH WATKINS
and KEVIN JOHNSON with da news quiz
hosted by ME, TOM HARRISON (da Sicko) of course.

If you will be in Chicago at this time, I urge and demand that you be there. I am so excited to revive this great show. LIVE COMEDY IS BACK BABY

Behold the process that cultivates the podcast for geniuses

Tom Yammers about Annoying Music He’s Into

So previously I wrote in this newsletter about my decision to become a Jazz Guy. I think learning piano myself is why I made this choice. Jazz is the music nobody likes, it sucks ass, and is only fun for the people playing it. This is why you can only like it if you play an instrument. “But Tom don’t you suck as piano” yes but it counts. Even my basic experience is enough to open my understanding of what is so cool about jazz, even as it is objectively repellent to all wifes.

But I’m not here to discuss jazz. I’ve done that already. I’m here because this stupid shit I’ve done has caused me to fall unmoored down da slippery slope and I am now a big time fiend for Annoying Guy Music of all stripes. 

What do I mean by Annoying Guy Music? Hmm. Maybe this is a good way to describe it. If you listen to Anime Sickos, statistically speaking you’re trans. Sorry if this is the first time you’re learning this but better to know sooner than later. Anyway, you might be like “haha, I get it—we’re SO obnoxious about Chappel Roan and Charli XCX, do you mean like that?” Folks, no. This is like a baby to an Annoying Guy. An enjoyer of Annoying Guy Music would respond “uh, I don’t really listen to pop singers...they’re just not that interesting to me...kinda bland...glad you’re having fun though...”

The inflection point was my becoming nutso for King Crimson, one of the most annoying bands of all time. You get into jazz, you start saying “I sure love when the time signature changes and da band goes on big long improvisations” and then you’re fucked. You’re in the crosshairs and you listen to something like Larks Tongues in Aspic and you will never again have a non-putrid aux cord.

King Crimson does like triple damage because if you are an Annoying Guy you find it necessary to “do the reading” for all the music you listen to, and doing this for KC means you are going to learn a lot of Robert Fripp Facts. Fripp is perhaps the most annoying man of all time and every time I learn a Fripp fact a wave of smug self-satisfaction pulses through me as I can feel myself becoming more annoying. Example: I read how Fripp’s guitar part on the song “Fracture” is considered by guitarists to be one of the most difficult parts ever recorded. I did a big double take at this since at that point I had only listened to it once and I didn’t recall any ripping solos or anything on that track that struck me as particularly flashy and notable. Turns out the part they’re talking about—that apparently only a handful of guitarists on Earth are capable of playing—is an uninterrupted stretch of plinky-dinky lil sixteenth notes played extremely softly in the background for like four minutes. God! Even just describing that gave me such a surge of Annoying euphoria.

King Crimson of course leads to prog, the most annoying genre in the universe. We’re talking songs over ten minutes with fuckin flutes and oboes with lyrics about wizards. We got albums where the cover is a big cartoon tongue lickin an ass from a band that is NOT sexy or cheeky or funky AT ALL

We got French bands where they sing in a made up language where every word has like six umlauts on it. The Bill Bruford facts alone would make your blood run cold (with how tiresome they are). This is such a treasure trove for annoying guys—every album is a new world of shit no one likes for me to wallow around in.

What I’m truly nuts over right now is the music of Knower/Louis Cole. This is extra Annoying because Cole (and his band, Knower) are active right now and thus the Annoyingness is much fresher than these 50-year-old prog and jazz records.

So Knower is a sort of funk/jazz/electronic band where the only two official members are Genevieve Artadi (lead vocals) and then Louis Cole on drums. I say there are two members but the truth is all the songs (at least on the newer stuff I’m obsessed with) have a bunch of their musician friends playing on them. Because their buds are all jazz guys or jazz-adjacent they obviously are the best in the universe at their instruments. So Cole writes these fucking killer electro-funk tracks and then gives his buddies breaks in them to rip insane solos—this is so Annoying Guy I stg—and the funniest thing is he barely lets himself show off on drums, he just lays the foundation (which makes it hit super hard when he does let himself rip).

Another annoying thing is Cole is super DIY about production/gear. His music sounds lo-fi (I don’t mean like for studying. I mean literally low fidelity) because he does not give a shit about spending big money on production/recording/mastering etc. Case in point: the latest Knower album Knower Forever was recorded live in Some Guy’s House. You can tell because they also filmed it all and it’s on Youtube.

God the keyboard solo on this one is just so fuckin crunchy and funky. Love it

Here’s the thing though: he’s not just a drummer (hateful and illegal to be good at multiple things). He is also an extremely good singer. Check out the falsetto in this shit:

In this one he does that stupid Biz Markie shit when you physically tap your throat and somehow it sounds incredible (around 2:22)

And here’s another thing that fucking sucks: so Knower rules in large part because Cole’s bassist friends are sick beyond belief and lay down the funkiest lines of all time. One of the singles off Cole’s most recent solo album is this 7-minute song where he makes you wait 3 minutes for the chorus (insane. Insane. The levels of Annoying required to do this are unthinkable). The drums are like baby basic the whole time and like never change up—the reason is this song is composed to be a big container which holds The Bass which is the star of the show. Insanely funky lines, lots of rhythmic and melodic variation, it’s really the bass in the spotlight all the way through. This makes sense—if I had friends who could play bass like that I too would write a song that exists solely for them to show off.

Except, no. He’s playing bass himself in this one.

Oh also he’s in Clown Core which is a real Annoying Idiot’s band.

Also his upcoming album was recorded live with an orchestra. He has released three preview tracks where the songs are pretty similar to his normal material just with the strings and brass filling out the sound & makin it all lush. Then he put out a fourth song that is just A Piece For Orchestra. No drums, no vocals, no keyboards, just like an original composition for strings and it’s gorgeous. Annoying x 1000.

I stg it’s a miracle I don’t have a taste for metal otherwise we’d really be in trouble. Trust me you do not want me to know about Tool. In short: Annoying Guy Music forever.

....oh shit I forgot to talk about jazz fusion! So here’s the thing about Tony Williams...

DoLF is a weird and unique sci-fi/fantasy thriller where big data is treated as the evil, occult artifact it always was (this is done both in the plot itself and also through the genius decision to have the entire show be a collage of in-universe diegetic recordings of the characters—sometimes made with their consent and awareness and other times very much not).

The pilot is complete and you can listen to it right now. A Kickstarter for season one launches on June 3rd and I really hope you chip in if you can. The pilot raises a ton of intriguing and spooky questions that I wanna know the answers to (I haven’t seen any scripts beyond the pilot so I know as much as a listener would)! This is a labor of love I am honored to contribute to and I hope you check it out. It’s good folks.

Trailer here!

Kickstarter here!

Tom watched I Saw The TV Glow

The best thing to do here is to go to someone else for your review of this movie. By this I do not mean that I was not capable of understanding it or enjoying it. I did both. I instead mean that this is not really my place to pontificate. I think the best way to illustrate what I mean is this: so many people report that this movie made them feel overwhelming emotion, keeping them at the point of tears for the entire runtime. My emotional response to this movie was, in full: “Good movie! Lol, I sure am glad I identify with media the appropriate amount.”

That said, I do find it extremely funny that when a director goes “I need to cast someone here who, with one line, can make the concept of masculinity and maleness be so distasteful that you puke to even consider it,” the answer is “oh duh, Connor O’Malley!”

Tom played 1000xResist

If you like narrative games, walking simulators, or visual novels, you must listen to me: run don’t walk to 1000xResist.

This is a game where every time I boot it up I say 1000xResist, 3000xBape. This is not the game’s fault, but I have to get it out of the way. 

1000xResist is a ten-hour story game—there are occasionally sprinkles of very light gameplay but you need to go in expecting a visual novel. The gameplay is not going to move the needle. Just go ahead and put that out of your mind so you can spend all your mental bandwidth on the shit that matters: da writing and da story!!!!!!

Short pitch: in Da Future, humanity has been totally wiped out due to a hyper-virulent virus brought to Earth by a race of alien invaders. Only one human, Iris, a Canadian teen, is immune, and more than that, is ageless and immortal for unexplained (for now) reasons. In a weird bunker, a society of her clones worships her as the goddess ALLMOTHER. You are Watcher, a clone whose job it is to Watch—specifically, to relive Iris’s memories. You know the Giver? You’re the Giver basically. Anyway, as you watch Iris’s memories you come to hate her so much you murder her. This is not a spoiler since you murdering her is the first thing that happens in the game and is in every trailer.

In order to be good, every sci-fi story has to have a bunch of proper nouns that no one ever explains and you just pick up by context clues as it goes. This is just the facts. It’s a magic trick for dogs if you get down to the nuts and bolts of it. It’s like “I am going to hold a blanket in front of this ball, and when I take it away, surely the ball will still be there.” But man every time I go “what da heck—what does Hekki Allmo mean” and then two hours later am like “Hair to hair, sister! Hekki Allmo :)” I simply go nuts like a dang ape. How was I to know there would be no ball when the blanket fell down.

This game whips major sack when you think it is just the story of how a clone in a clone society learned more about her god, became radicalized, and did a big deicide. And it is that, to be clear. There’s not like a twist that makes it not that. It’s just also so much more.

1000xResist reminded me of nothing so strongly as Xenogears. Think about it: Xenogears starts with an incomprehensible opening cutscene full of proper nouns that are not explained. You are given a setup you think the game is about. But over and over again, you get the rug pulled from under you as the scope and complexity of the story rockets lightyears past what you expected, while at the same time you gasp and realize that this is not some gratuitous twist but what the story always was, this is not out of nowhere, this context has been here the whole time and you didn’t even know it, all the inexplicable things you were baffled by earlier make sense, and you feel like you are in the presence of something really special, a story that is more than just a story. 1000xResist does this but unlike Xenogears they remembered to actually make the entire video game.

Without getting too into it, this game is also about the 2019 Hong Kong protests, generational trauma, motherhood, the pandemic, memory, communication, fascism and complicity, failure and hopelessness, resistance and revolution—I could go on but it’s already looking a lot like a list of random words. Trust me that behind each of these words is at least one scene that left me breathless.

1000xResist’s story is told extremely non-chronologically and I can’t praise enough how deft a touch this team has at drip-feeding you information at the perfect rate to to keep you constantly slightly disoriented and confused, but also constantly having aha moments where something clicks into place. We see Iris’s memories as a test subject with hazmat-suited scientists trying to reverse engineer her immunity. We see Iris’s parents in Hong Kong. We see Iris at the school dance where the aliens arrive and the world begins to die. We see the first Iris clones and the beginning of this fucked up society. We see—well to go much further would be to spoil some jaw-dropping developments.

Another thing to note is that if you are queer or part of the Asian diaspora I guarantee this game is going to hit extremely hard for you. I am white boy so I enjoyed those themes as “wow, what well-written themes, and so well integrated into the plot! Very interesting!” but someone for whom that is their lived experience? This game will simply go nutty.

Yknow these last few paragraphs have gotten very hifalutin. I cannot emphasize enough that purely as a sci-fi thriller story this shit is an enrapturing page-turner. You HAVE to see the next Iris memory. You HAVE to meet the next color-coded clone sister. You HAVE to find out why they say “Six to One” instead of goodbye. You HAVE to find out what happened to Jiao. It has so many interconnected themes that resonate so beautifully but it never stops being moment-to-moment engrossing on the surface level. This is a tough line to walk so I applaud the team in a big way.

If I had one criticism, and I do, it’s the the main hub world (the bunker where Iris and her clones all live) is so fucking confusing to get around. So many times I see exactly where I want to be and cannot figure out how the hell I get there. This game is, as I said, a visual novel in all but name. It is linear as hell (non-derogatory). I would be fine with a more linear hub world instead of it being a confusing ass knot. However we got an upside here too. As you wander aimlessly around over and over, you will be able to speak to all the NPC characters who always have new shit to say after every plot development. You really want to make sure you talk to everyone—trust me, it pays off. When a game’s writing is this good you want to make sure you read as much of it as possible.

God damn! I feel so hypocritical as I’m writing this since I am a proud Guy Who Doesn’t Think Spoilers Are Real but I don’t want to give too much away about this. There are so many scenes where I’m like WHOA! Are you telling me we’re going back to THIS time, and getting more context about THAT??? And then when I get the further context I go WHOOOAA, that explains everything, what a rich tapestry I am seeing now. I suppose I can say nothing other than that, if you are reading this, chances are good you understand who I am as an artist and critic and understand what I mean when I say that you really, really owe it to yourself to give this game a try. This is a game I’m jealous I didn’t write. This is a game that makes me feel like Sicko Shock 2 wasn’t enough.

In conclusion, 1000xResist, 3xBape.

2023 for the Anime Sickos was not the best, purely in terms of numbers. I don’t want to be a downer but unless some big developments are in store for us, the show is officially Past Its Peak and is now In Decline. I wish I could say this comes as a shock but for a while we’ve been pretty strained creatively. Joe’s awful job wrings almost every drop of productivity out of his brain and I’m just fuckin tapped out from having to think up topics and interesting observations and shit.

Oh well. We’ll keep recording these suckers anyway. I’m not too stressed—we’ve felt tapped out before and rallied, we can do it again.

TOTAL 2023 NUMBIES

This year we had 88,600 downloads.

Last year we had 83,385. That means we got 5215 more downloads this year, a 6.25% increase in the total. Now of course an increase is good. We like increases! But consider: the increase from 2021 to 2022 was 65%, and the increase from 2020 to 2021 was 227%. In terms of year-over-year growth I feel like we’ve hit the cap.

Since the show debuted on August 28, 2019, we’ve had 240,141 downloads total.

This means that 36.9% of our downloads came in 2023. That seems to make sense on its face—we’ve been going for three years and change, makes sense we’d do a third of our downloads in one of those years. But compare it to 2022—at the time, over half our lifetime downloads came in that year. Again—the time of rapid(ish) growth appears to be behind us.

So, how many episodes did we end up doing in 2023?

Taking them all together, we released 41 episodes—three more than last year. However, keep in mind that six of those were Sicko Shock 2 (we’ll cover that later), which you could argue is a totally separate beast from standard Anime Sickos. If we don’t count those, we only released 35 episodes. If you further don’t count episode 163: The Making of Sicko Shock 2, that’s just 34. This is a marked decrease from last year, where we released 38 episodes.

Consider: the average downloads per episode released in 2023 is 1250, significantly more than the average of 1063 for the episodes released in 2022. If we had released nine additional non-Sicko Shock 2 episodes, matching the 43 episodes we put out in 2021, it stands to reason we’d have 12,500 additional downloads this year. That would bring us to 101,100 downloads, which would kick big ass on account of being six digits. It probably would be even more since that average downloads per episode number is actually lower than it should be (we’ll cover that later). All of which is to say: as much as I mope, things aren’t that bad.

MONTH TO MONTH NUMBIES

Pardon the shittiness of this graph. I can’t figure out how to make Libsyn label all the months, on account of it is a bad website.

As you can see, the line is not trending up. Whoops. I can explain. In September and November we released 2 episodes each. And then in June and October and December we released 3 episodes each. Turns out in podcasting you’re supposed to release episodes.

Of course, you can clearly see that July is high as hell and our best month ever. This kicks ass but not as much as you think (we’ll cover that later).

Let’s look at the monthlies for the show’s entire run. You may recall that in 2021 we entered the “Sicko Zone” and then in 2022 entered the “Big Dick King Zone.” 2023, by these metrics, can only be called the “Decent Zone.” Not bad, but again: we’re trending downward, something which has not happened before. Case in point: in 2022 we did not have a single month with less than 7,000 downloads. In 2023 we had multiple (September, November, and December).

2023 RELEASES

In 2023 we released 35 normal Sickos episodes.

This means we took sixteen Sicko Breaks (the week of Sicko Shock 2 does not count as either a normal episode or a Sicko Break). Thus, we took a Sicko Break 30.7% of the time.

Now I will not apologize for taking Sicko Breaks—when we take them, it’s because we have to. But I do admit I feel concerned about how often we have to do this.

Six episodes featured a guest (including 162: GUESTO 2 GUESTO - Rayne and Medley feat. Jimble, which was exclusively guests), making up 17.1% of the year’s episodes. Last year we only had five guesto episodes and mourned how bad we had become at setting them up, pledging to do more in 2023. Well, we did do more. One more. The minimum amount of more—but still. We didn’t lie. If you reached out about being a guesto and have not gotten a response, it is because we are so sick with guilt about how bad we are at keeping a steady stream of guesto episodes and thus to respond would be to self-flagellate at length. I mean—when we take a ton of breaks it feels like we gotta come back with classic Sickos-only eps before we switch it up with a guest, so it falls by da wayside.

Oh actually! Wait! Seven episodes feature a guest! Jeff Stormer is a guest on 167: The Sickos Steal the Chrono Trigger - An Anime Sickos Adventure! However, he appears in a guest GM capacity rather than a classic “Guesto Mode Goer” so perhaps I was wise not to initially count this one.

Two episodes (5.7%) were about anime. This is the lowest this number has ever been. The episodes were 156: Guy Sword: Senior Operations Manager, which is about a manga idea that does not actually exist, and 159: The Sickos Manga Roundup Vol.2, which is about manga and comics, which are not actually anime. If you are specifically looking for instances where we talk, willingly, about animated television shows and/or movies that were produced in the country of Japan (i.e., “anime”) that shit simply did not happen in 2023 at all. Our name is the biggest lie of all time

2023’s TOP EPISODES

Behold the top episodes of 2023:

Unsurprisingly, all of them were released in 2023. We have two guesto mode eps with guests who are actually notable people (turns out Taylor Moore was right about that. Who knew!), both of which did great. 

Devon Price is also a notable person but his appearance was less a standard guesto ep and more a gawking look at a circus sideshow as he shared mind-boggling bits from Duchess Goldblatt’s ridiculous book.

The Sickos Talk Final Fantasy also proves putting a big IP in the title helps a lot (this does not work if the IP is Avatar 2, Barry, or Asteroid City).

The Sickos Ponder Total World Shittification is simply true and very wise, however Cory Doctorow also talked about “enshittification” this year too—I don’t think I knew about this before the episode, but it is possible I saw a headline and thought nothing of it but then it got incepted into my head. I sure hope it wasn’t that and was just multiple discovery. Well, we’re both right.

The DS is a Public Good is also just strictly true and Cory Doctorow did not write about this one.

The rest are all posting episodes. Folks, uh oh!!! I took Twitter and Bluesky off my phone for brain reasons (I was so furious at how difficult it was for me to read, play games, exercise, because I would be fiddling with my phone and then look up to find my day was gone, my life stolen, unrecoverable). Turns out the phone is so much better without that shit on it. Also, on my computer I have the plugin that doesn’t show me the algorithm feed but just the people I follow. So I see a lot less insane shit and do not feel the toilet’s siren call anymore. I will NOT be changing this. To do so would be self-harm. But this is gonna make posting episodes real hard to come by. This is one of the things I mean when I say I am a very different person than the Tom who started this show.

LET’S TALK ABOUT SICKO SHOCK 2

OK, the elephant in the room. We spent a year and many thousands of dollars producing a six-hour audio drama miniseries. Most of our effort this year went to this. All six episodes were put out in one week. Unsurprisingly this was our best week ever, with 4051 downloads.  

This also led that July to being our best month ever, with nearly 9,000 downloads.

However, as big as these numbies seem, not all is good news. I wish I could say this big spike was the result of Sicko Shock 2’s smashing success. No. This shit happened because we put out eight episodes in a month and that’s it.

The fact is, none of the episodes of Sicko Shock 2 even exceeded replacement level. Without exception every episode is well below our average downloads per episode. If you look at our top ten least-downloaded episodes of all time, well, there they are:

The placeholder is on there because Libsyn is a terrible website. The blacked-out episodes are guesto mode episodes with non-famous guests, I have redacted them since the episodes whip sack and don’t want to imply otherwise by including them on a negatively-coded list.

I think I really underestimated what a huge barrier to entry the miniseries format is—our last audio drama, The Tragical History of Modesty City, was a big hit. I thought that would happen again, but MORE so, because Sicko Shock 2 is like Modesty City—but MORE so!

Well, nope. I guess people have better things to do with their day than sit in a chair with headphones on for six hours. Maybe I should have foreseen that.

I also have to admit that perhaps our self-admitted shittiness at promotion and advertising is no longer an endearing, self-effacing, aw-shucks type of thing and actually a serious liability.

But despite all my whining, here’s the real truth: Sicko Shock 2 was a triumph. I moan about the numbers because I am a whiny freak who wants to have JRPG stats in real life. What matters is that it was an artistic success that achieved exactly what I wanted it to. I made the thing I saw in my head into a real show that was even better than I imagined it. It reached the people it needed to and resonated with them in a major way. I don’t regret a dang thing.

Well, I do regret that no one writes reviews of podcasts. It would improve my writing so much to have in-depth feedback on it, oh my god. Also: I want to say SS2 is critically acclaimed more than anything. God it would be so good. I want it so bad. “Tom Harrison, writer and director of the critically acclaimed miniseries Sicko Shock 2.” Doesn’t it sound so good? Doesn’t it feel right? But there are not any critics doing any acclaiming. Someone please write a review of Sicko Shock 2.

CONCLUSIONS

I don’t want this to sound like a bummer just because this was not a banner year for numbers. There are numerous reasons: one, we still did pretty good. Two, I think we both would admit the show was not as huge a priority for us this year as in other years. For me, most of my energy went to Sicko Shock 2. For Joe, it went to (you’ll never believe this) his pregnant wife (and eventually, his non-pregnant wife and infant son). And three, moaning about numbers is a move I want to avoid at all costs. It makes the people who did check the show out feel like, gosh, did I do something wrong? Did I not do enough? Are the Sickos mad at me? Etc etc. I never want to make anyone feel that way, especially the people who have given us so much support.

So why publish this? Why not just hide it all? Well, when we started doing these year in reviews, it was because we wanted to be as honest and open as possible with everyone because a lot of podcast stuff is obfuscated and vague. So we decided, keep it up. Also, it’s not like this should shock anyone. We were never gonna become celebs off of this.

So what’s next for the Sickos in 2024? When me and Joe discussed these numbies, we both agreed—it has felt a lot like Anime Sickos has been on a sort of autopilot for a while. Joe is so often run ragged by his job and his brain, and thus is limited in what he can do creatively a lot of the time. I often felt burnt out—I would often think, oh fuck do I have to come up with ANOTHER episode?? I can’t think of anything!!! I’m done!!! I’m tapped dry!!! No!!!

Therefore, we made the decision that if we want to have the show keep going (which we do) we are going to have to make it a priority to make time for us to have regular, collaborative creative meetings where we cook up random crap together. This is, and has always been, the key to Anime Sickos. When Joe and I start making piles of goofs, we eventually hit a point where the pile becomes so big that we notice, hey, these three goofs go together. Hey, they sort of suggest a theme. Hey, this theme lets us articulate something we both have been thinking. If we want a classic episode like that, we can’t just start at the end. We have to make time to get in da mud and make da mud pies.

Another reason we have to do this: I was getting to a point where I would resent it when Joe would send me a contextless goof. I would go, ugh, what am I supposed to do with this? Now I have to figure out some way to fit this in?? Bah! Needless to say—this is a bad way to be, and represents a breakdown of communication. Hence a renewed focus on collaboration for its own sake.

And while it’s still early days—I really think it’s paying off in a big way already. We got like numerous episode ideas cooking. I can’t remember the last time we had more than one episode idea at a given time. It feels very exciting again. I like it. I hope you will too.

Thank you all for supporting this odd, dumb project. We have an off-putting name that does not describe the show and often do things that are bad for the algorithm on purpose, but that’s what it takes for us to be the creative people we want to be. And it’s so nice to know people out there like it.

Anime Sickos Forever. Here’s to 2024. I can’t wait for episode 200.

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.

Let’s get some things out of the way first: One Piece is supposed to be a comic book. 

Oda did not decide to make One Piece a comic book because he lacked the means to create it in his intended form—no. It’s a comic book. Its pacing suits a comic book. Its strengths are magnified by being a comic book. It became a worldwide phenomenon because it’s a comic book. When you make it not be a comic book no more, it gets worse. Want proof? The dang anime!!

This doesn’t mean I think this adaptation is bad or misguided on principle—I just think, well, even if it’s as good as it can possibly be, it can’t avoid taking a pretty huge hit by making One Piece not be a comic book no more. Keep that in mind when I tell you this show is a solid 7/10. Maybe 8. Probably 7.

It is pretty much as good as I can imagine it being and way, way better than I expected. But brother, this shit is supposed to be a comic book.

Second, a lot of people have said “who is this for” as a way to dismiss or ridicule this adaptation. It’s my belief they don’t really ask this question literally—it’s more of a way to signify that they personally don’t want to watch it. The reason I think this is because the answer is so blindingly obvious: it’s for people who are repulsed by cartoons, comic books, or foreign things. Folks, there are so fucking many of those people.

You could use the above to further argue “bah, you see: this is a soulless endeavor, less an artistically pure project than a calculated marketing campaign.” Well, it definitely is a marketing campaign, but I can’t find it in my heart to get mad at it. Listen, I just put out a piece of art, Sicko Shock 2, I poured so much of myself into—it feels very close to the best work I am capable of, a piece of art I held nothing back from, and as a result it starts to feel indistinguishable from myself. When it got the response that, in retrospect, it was always going to get (80-60% of our audience listened to it and buzz died off in a week) I really struggled with that. It felt like a rejection of me, who I am, my life as a creator. I would have done anything to get it in front of more people, have even one more listener get something meaningful out of it.

ALL OF WHICH IS TO SAY: It is undeniable that Eiichiro Oda feels that way about One Piece about 10000 times more intensely. It is his ONLY published work and he has been working on it for his entire adult life. I understand very deeply how important it is for a work this important to have the reception you feel it deserves. To paraphrase Tor Client: it’s common sense that not everyone’s going to like something—but what if they all did?

All of which is to say: if I’m Oda, and I am told I have the opportunity to produce a huge commercial for my art baby that is laser-focused on the demos that historically have resisted it (ie, Americans, normies, dads, and jocks), I am going to say yes every single time. If you think this is crass or mercenary I just can’t agree with you.

OK, so: The Show Itself. How is it?

I mean, it’s fine. The stuff that happens in One Piece happens in it and that’s pretty good.

As suggested, the fact that it’s not a comic really hurts. One of One Piece’s best qualities is how goofy and silly it is. The world is serious, the threats are serious, the emotions are serious, but so much of the tone and look is silly Looney Tunes goofy gags. The show does as good a job as is possible to recreate this, but it just can’t do it right. It never could. No one could.

Case in point: when Usopp sees something scary his eyes are supposed to pop out and his tongue is supposed to shoot out three feet and be zig-zagging. When Usopp makes a funny face, basically, that is funny to me. Usopp in this show has a normal guy’s face and he does NOT do that.

So what we get is a weird sort of half-measure that works decently at its best and makes it feel like a baby show at its worst. In a comic book, when da goofy stuff hits you go haw haw, I love this, because you have been primed for it by looking at panels of funny cartoon guys on every page. In live action, when you are watching a piece of huge budget prestige TV and a goofy cartoon thing happens, you go hm... it feels like the tone is confused here.

A lot of the plot gets chopped down and rearranged to fit the needs of a TV show, and while I don’t prefer it to the original, it was done really well! I think the best edit was reducing Don Krieg to a cameo, he and his cronies ate up a lot of pages to basically say “these guys think they’re hot shit but they got washed out by the Grand Line,” which the show proves is something you can say in one minute.

Not all of it works though: a lot of big setpieces from the comic get scaled way down, often taking scenes that took place in multiple stages throughout a huge area and distilling it down to one scene in a single room. The fights in those rooms look pretty good, but they’re never allowed to get as creative and fun as the originals. Zoro also seems to become ride or die for Luffy off-screen? He and Nami do that “we’re NOT a crew” routine and then a few scenes later Zoro is like, oh shit by this part in the story I’m loyal. Better say “I’m loyal” and hope no one asks any follow-ups.

Similarly the big emotional beats just don’t hit for me. I imagine this may be different if they were new to you. But I can’t help but compare them to the original comic, in which the story is allowed to unfold at the proper pace. I get why this is! A TV show needs to be snappy and get a lot done in each episode. I couldn’t have done it any better. But I can’t overlook it: they are rushed, and they are lesser.

Enough moaning. Here’s the other truth: They cast this show really well, lol. Like the cast IS the Straw Hats. The kid who plays Luffy never wowed me with his acting but like. He’s Luffy! There is this hilarious video where the kid meets Oda and is like, Oda-san I am so glad to be entrusted with this role. I hope I can use my craft to do your story proud. And Oda just points to him and is like holy shit it is Luffy in real life.

Zoro is good, Nami is good, Usopp is REALLY good (you really buy that his dumbass lying and posturing is enjoyable to hear instead of annoying), and Sanji is like, REALLY REALLY good (huge brain move to have his womanizing not be lascivious and instead kind of pathetically charming). When the crew hangs out and chills, it feels like they’re really buds and that’s one thing you have to nail if you want something like this to work. Buggy is decent—there’s a bit too much Joker in there for my tastes, I wish he was a little more pompous, but I’m not mad about it. 

I could go on but it feels silly to. It’s not really a show, so why review it like a show? It’s a commercial for the comic book One Piece. How do I know? Because the comic’s going to keep going and this isn’t. Even if Netflix doesn’t cancel it, the fact is that you can draw a character the same age for as long as you want, but these actors are going to be in their 50s by the time they get to Marineford.

As a commercial, I think this is a triumph. It shows what One Piece is, why it’s great, and why you should like it, all in a format normies won’t be afraid of. This is going to get people reading the comic. It will. And that’s worth it.

STRAY OBSERVATIONS:

• I saw some people complaining about the fishman racism metaphor and I thought well, that’s probably a bit of an overreaction. That metaphor isn’t exactly nuanced but it’s well-intentioned, and you can’t blame Oda too much—nuance comes from life experience and no weekly mangaka has any of that! But uhh no I agree actually. The TV show correctly intuits that when working with a world as dense as One Piece’s, any place that can bear some exposition MUST have exposition. But this means that now Arlong constantly talks about how fishmen used to be slaves and now are second-class citizens that humans are racist toward. I cannot emphasize how bad a look it is to have the only character talking about the injustice of racism and slavery use it as an excuse to kill and oppress with impunity. Also, in the original Arlong doesn’t give a shit about racial politics! Arlong is a shithead washout idiot who doesn’t deserve to wear the insignia of the Sun Pirates!

• The boats are so badass. They wasted so much money on actually building all the boats in real life and uhhhh wowee they look great.

• I love that Garp wears his inexplicable doggy hood

• I also love that some guys just look like animals still

• They tease Smoker at the end—now how the hell are they gonna manage that. They already have cut way back on Luffy using his powers—he mostly has normal fights with one stretchy finisher. You can’t have Smoker fighting normally! He’s made of smoke!!!

• Why is everyone British? I mean I know why—it reads as “foreign but not scary” to Americans and also adds an air of legitimacy/authority. But like. Why is everyone British??

• Sanji never explains why he has a kicking-only fighting style! Plus, in his flashback, Zeff attacks him with his hands! No!! He learned the kicking style FROM Zeff! That’s why he’s Red Leg Zeff!!

• I love the physical transponder snail props

• Captain Kuro still sucks! Weakest part of the season, weakest part of the early comic. Can’t fix that guy, just a dud. Well, it’s only uphill from there.

Tom Played the Spider-Man game

I played the Spider-Man game on PC.

The reasons why:

1) After playing Chrono Cross for 40 hours I wanted a game with modern graphics just for the variety, and

2) I wanted to “swing around”

I’m sure some small part of Spider-Man’s success is due to the design of the suit, or the character, or the writing…but we all know the main reason Spider-Man has become an A-list superhero is because swinging around is the most funnest way to go around. All humans instinctively understand this. So I wanted to swing around.

This game was what finally got me to upgrade my RAM from two 4GB sticks I bought in 2011. Also I noticed I had them in the wrong slots too, lol, so they were extra bad. Basically any time I swung around really fast (the point of the game) or a cutscene started, the game went OH SHIT and dropped to 10-20 frames per second. When I put the new RAM in, it was a solid 60 without a hitch. So that’s nice. I was able to swing around with ease and pleasure.

And good thing too, because that’s pretty much the only good thing in this game! The combat is fine, but it wears out its welcome long before the game ends. You fight a jillion identical guys, folks. The open world Chore Checklist game design continues to suck ass. There are so many little chores all around that give you crappy tokens you can use to unlock shit that sucks. Folks: with very few exceptions, the alternate Spider-Man suits (the main reward and motivation to do the open world chores) all look way worse than the classic suit you get for free. 

Mary Jane’s hair is stupid. Look at that swoop.

There’s a part near the end where da Sinister Six goes nutty over the whole city (spoilers: there are villains in this shit). I was so hyped for this especially because this game’s version of Electro looks so scary and strong. He can fuggin fly and is made of lightning and can shoot lightning bolts with ease. I was like, oh boy, the boss fight with him is gonna be so fun. Turns out the way you defeat him is you shoot web at him until he goes “ugh! This is too much web!” then you punch him four times, and then you do that like five more times. During this fight, the Vulture is also flying around not really doing much of anything. This adds a fun tactical layer as you have to juggle the aforementioned Electro fight with the novel task of shooting web at the Vulture until he goes “ugh! This is too much web!” then you punch him four times, and then you do that like five more times.

Note that you beat two of the Sinister Six in one fight. Well you actually do that twice. Rhino and Scorpion are also beaten together. So the most exciting thing in the game (da villains are here!) is 2/3 completed by doing two crappy little boss fights where you web the guys until they go “ugh! This is too much web!”

Anyway, I still beat the game because swinging around is so goddamn fun. Obscene how much I can forgive if I get to “swing around.” Weeeeeeee

Tom Reviews Song of Kali

So I went to the big library downtown and wow!! The one in my neighborhood sucks major ass in comparison!! (why not request a transfer? Because my email was set up wrong and I never got notifications they ever happened so I assumed it didn’t work)

I saw they had a bunch of books by Dan Simmons who wrote Hyperion which I loved. I decided to get Song of Kali, his debut novel, since it is covered in praise about what a great horror story it is.

Folks! Wow!!! This book is racist as shit!!!!

I looked up “Song of kali insanely racist” and saw a million threads of shocked readers unable to believe this book is critically acclaimed. I saw one Reddit thread where a guy (you know the kind) was like “it’s a serious accusation to call something racist. You better be ready to back it up. Please provide the page numbers with racist material.” Now obviously this person should not be responded to, they are engaging in bad faith. However, the answer is page one motherfucker:

Song of Kali is about how Calcutta is a hellmouth to Evil World and every person in it is evil, or is rendered evil, and everything in it sucks and is awful on account of it’s infected by evil. The reason is that in Calcutta there is a cult of Kali worshippers (Kali is fully evil in this book, Temple of Doom style. This itself is racist) who do evil shit so that Kali gains power and spreads her evil over the city, which is why it is so humid and traffic is so bad.

The plot (I’m going to spoil it all on account of I do not respect it) is that a presumed-dead Indian poet is somehow writing again. They send a white asshole to do an article about him. Asshole brings his wife and daughter to Calcutta. They think Calcutta sucks ass and that the people are barely human—more simian than human, really. This is about when I googled “Song of Kali insanely racist.”

Turns out they brought the poet back to life using Kali’s magic so he could write an epic poem about Kali that would be published worldwide thereby increasing her sphere of influence. The guy is spookified and tries to get out of there but they kidnap and kill his baby daughter before he is able to. He and his wife do escape Calcutta, but the poems are published and are responsible for All War since 1970, apparently. Yes! You know how sometimes humans are greedy? That’s because of Kali. You know all war? You probably think war happened because of reasons. Like geopolitical factors or access to natural resources. No. That was actually because of Kali.

Man! This book is so fucked! It’s not even scary!!! I kept reading thinking like, well, it’s insane how much Simmons hates Indian people, but maybe a cool spooky thing will happen. No! The only thing that happens is it’s revealed that Kali is responsible for All War, the dumbest thing ever!

A real fuckin stinker that should have stayed in the desk drawer. Dreck!

UPDATE: Did some digging and turns out Dan Simmons is just fully a far-right crank! He wrote a book where America decided to do socialism and it made the world into Hell World. You might think, wait, this doesn’t make sense. Why would socialism make things bad—he was very clear that all bad things come from Kali. Well what if I told you all the members of the Kali cult were communists.

Anyway, now everyone is addicted to a drug called “flashback” which makes you remember the 90s. Now, me, if I was writing this, it would be about a dystopian future where video games are too crappy and people take drugs to remember Chrono Trigger.

I am baffled that the guy who wrote Hyperion is such a shithead. This is I guess Orson Scott Card disease in action. Simmons doesn’t even have the excuse of being Mormon.

• Our audio editor Eric Garneau—for a while I thought this project was dead when Adam, editor for Modesty City, let us know the workload was not feasible for him at this point (totally understandable). What a miracle that we found a guy who not only had the chops to pull this off, but the willingness to actually do it! Working with Eric was an absolute dream.

• Casey Toney, not only for playing Stack Overflow to perfection, but for his unbelievable work doing the sound editing for scene five of episode 6 (you know the one—where Sherry and the Ganja Gang confronts Jordi and destroys the red lightning cocoon). I took a lot of care to make sure, during the writing process, that I didn’t ask for sound effects that would put a ton of strain on the editor—last time we did an audio drama, I wrote so fucking many scenes where a crowd reacted with a specific emotion. Turns out it is very hard to find sound effects for that without recording a real crowd. Anyway, the point is, this time I was trying hard to keep the SFX doable without too much trouble. Except for one scene—the time came to write the climax, the big confrontation, and I thought to myself, hm. One second actually—then I sent a message to Casey saying hey dude. Do you want to do audio for a scene in our new audio drama? He said hell yes. I went tight that rules. I then returned to the script confident that I could go absolutely nuts and ask for truly unreasonable sound effects, knowing that Casey would not only meet my expectations but exceed them. I was, of course, right.

• Chuck Rios for allowing me to write a story about a virtuosic artist fully confident that when the time comes to actually show her art, it will be as excellent as described in the fiction. The more I learn about music (still very little) the more I respect Chuck as a true genius. It’s one thing to consider his mind a black box that shoots music out using magic. It’s another to begin to understand the scope of the work he’s actually doing. Wow! Sherry’s character arc would not hit anywhere near as hard as it does if she was not a breathtaking artist...and she is! Thank you Chuck!

• Thanks also to Philip Saguil for actually playing Sherry’s solo piano pieces! Midi renditions of sheet music are fine (that’s what her song in episode 6 is, after all) but for a solo piano piece whose narrative function is a howl of pure emotion, you need an actual person playing. Chuck referred me to Philip who again just nailed it. I have nothing but awe, admiration, and respect for his talent.

• Geramie Causley and the entire team at Mystery Street Recording Company both for having a high quality professional studio we idiots were able to rent at reasonable rates, but also for getting into the story and laughing at the jokes. I can’t overstate what an absolute shock it was to make a guy laugh at his job and ask what was going to happen next in the plot. Really was an “oh shit...is this good?” moment

• Chelsea Harfoush for showing us how to do a casting call (it is insane how hard they are)

• Tom and Sara McHenry for listening to me moan about how I wasn’t sure if this project was doable, how it seemed too shaggy to pull off, etc, then offering useful suggestions that ultimately were directly responsible for making me write the script at all.

• Aleks M for providing a sharp critical eye on the script. One of my weaknesses as a writer is once I finish a draft, I find it insanely difficult to revise and change it. Not because I don’t want to, but because I know so intimately the reason why I made every decision & thus everything feels exactly in its place. It feels like there’s nothing TO change, it’s all just what it needs to be! Of course this is insane—every time I spend some time away from a piece and then reread it I go “oh shit this should be so different!”. Aleks gave much needed perspective and their feedback bore a ton of fruit that made this entire series so much better.

• The Sherry and the Ganja Gang cast (Bradley, Allie, Casey, Gwynn, and Lexi)! Holy shit did these fuckers kill it or what. I fell in love with these characters as I was writing them—they were my guys! What luck, then, that we were able to find the perfect actors to bring them to life. I can’t imagine them any other way.

• Dylan is Jordi. Folks Jordi is one of the characters of all time. We hate Jordi but also we love Jordi. And part of why I can’t stop writing this idiot kid is that I know that Dylan will say the lines in the funniest way in the universe every time. Folks he does. It’s so annoying how I do so much work trying to be a public comedy figure and Dylan just effortlessly bodies me with everything he says.

• The entire supporting cast was absolutely amazing—as tough as a public casting call was, it was so worth it to be able to find and work with real-ass voice actors. These people are so goddamn good at what they do. I felt so lucky to get to work with them! 

• Our extremely long list of cameo performers—I love knowing so many funny and creative people and I’m glad I was able to get so many of them to say a single dumb line.

• And finally, and most of all: thank you to Joe da Sicko. He was with me every step of the way through this entire process. From brainstorming, basic structure outlines, script reviews, casting, recording, editing, promotion—I was never on my own. Working with Joe, not just on this but in general, has made me so much funnier and better. He inspires me and makes me want to up my game. I like to think I am such a cool guy for making this series. But I could never come up with the shit shoes joke. Folks, Joe is supreme.

OK thank yous are covered. Now to reflections on the release.

I find myself tempted to bemoan the small reach Sicko Shock 2 has. It is easy to blame Twitter (the reason: it’s Twitter’s fault) and get upset that the series is not having the impact it deserves numbers-wise. I look at the downloads and I frown. The numbies are just bad, folks. There’s no other way to spin it. Turns out it is hard to get people to listen to stuff like this.

I look at other podcasts run by big account people and see how their reach eclipses ours exponentially and I feel like becoming furious and resentful. In these moments, I like to tell myself: Tom, da internet is fucked. There is no world, no scenario, where we have reach commensurate with our quality. It just fundamentally is not possible. It’s not something I have power over and it can’t change. What matters, then, is the impact it has on the people who are there for it. And from that perspective, Sicko Shock 2 has been more successful than I’d ever dared to hope.

The people love the guys so much! They get so sad when they’re hurt! Part of my philosophy when writing these audio dramas is that like—these are comedies, yes. I want to write funny stories. But I do not want the genre to be an excuse to be lazy or glib. There is a place for that kind of thing—Eagleheart is basically exactly that and I love it—but for these projects I am challenging myself to write the best fiction I possibly can. That means that while there are jokes it is not a joke. There are farcical elements but it is not farce. The characters may be funny but they are not trying to be. Not to toot our own horn too much, but me and Joe can come up with laugh lines like nothing. Those are cheap. My real goal is to tell a real story with real characters experiencing real emotions that has a strong subtextual message. I want a story with a reason to exist. I want a story that will make you feel something and come out of it exhilarated and changed. The jokes, who cares, I can just plug those in wherever, we’re covered for jokes.

When everyone in the stream wept for Sherry, I was over the moon. When everyone started saying unprovoked how much they loved Nate, I punched da air (Nate is such a high-wire act...he has to be kooky and weird and eccentric but also real, grounded, and warm. Ray was such a fucking miraculous actor to pull it off so well. Jordi’s “you talk like an asshole, Nate” line was a direct quote from my own self-conscious brain reading Nate’s lines and feeling anxious they were too reddit-tier “ah salutations good sir, mayhaps I shall pour thee a delectable caffeinated libation in the form of coffee”).

I do not hurt these characters out of cruelty or spite or sadism. The story’s whole point is that the society the characters live in is inherently violent and evil and must be destroyed at its roots—we must feel, deeply and painfully, how vicious and destructive it is. We, as listeners, must hate it on a visceral level. I’m glad this came across. I’m glad you loved the characters. I’m glad you felt a wave of dread when Jordi (the avatar of capitalism) came on-screen. I’m glad when the characters were brought to their lowest points it felt as though your heart was being torn out. I’m glad it felt unfair and needlessly punitive. That was all on purpose! This kind of shit is what happens to people in real life every day lol! 

One thing I am really glad seemed to pay off is Tor’s whole deal. So, we never say “trans” anywhere in the text but like...Tor wants to live as a cyber entity and feels dysphoria in their physical body. The metaphor is not subtle. 

I felt really nervous about writing a trans narrative as a white cishet guy. I was like, this is so not my place, this is not my story to tell, I’m gonna get cancelled for sure. Well, I knew I wasn’t gonna get cancelled. But I did worry that I was gonna hit a sour note, get it wrong, expose my ignorance, some such. You know, “the straights are at it again—uh stick to stories about professors getting divorced!” But there really wasn’t any other way to give Tor an emotional arc that was anywhere near as meaningful, and you can’t really eliminate the trans metaphor without changing pretty much everything about Tor’s character and story.

I just decided to write it like any of the other stories—don’t think about that shit, just be true to the character and write it with as much emotional honesty as possible. It didn’t feel like it was me trying to be topical or anything. It was just what Tor felt! It was the only thing they could feel! I’m so pleased to see that their journey seems to have resonated with people. I was scared it was going to be hollow somehow because after all, I am faking it! But hell, that’s fiction baby. And even if I personally do not experience dysphoria, Tor is still me. They’re all me! (ED: Todd Kill is not me)

Finally, I gotta say I truly cannot believe there has not yet been anyone furious at the ending. I guess I can chalk it up to it being really unlikely you’d get to the end of episode 6 if you are not familiar with and a fan of our whole deal. The thing is that we are the Anime Sickos, and it’s our story, and we’re the main guys. Lol. God, this whole thing is giving me a big head. I can’t believe every reaction I intended the audience to have actually happened. I can’t believe the scenes I hoped were emotionally resonant actually were. I can’t believe it all happened. I told Joe way back during production that after this comes out I am going to start saying I am one of the best comedy writers in the country. As a sort of like, positive thinking visualization thing. But shit. Am I really? Hard to know but right now I’m feeling very confident lol. Someone hire us to write for something already geez

Anyway, thank you all for being Sicko fans. Thank you for listening to Sicko Shock 2. This is the coolest and best thing I’ve ever done! Wow!! I’m glad it means something to someone out there!