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Date: January 13th, 2020.

Time of Writing: 8:00 PM.

Weather: Starting to cool back down to seasonal again.

Mood: Full.

Day Overview: Nothing new to report. And not in the ironic well actually I did loads of stuff and I'm just not telling you way. Everything notable that I did besides figuring out the deal with my medical bill today, is contained in the consumption section. A slow day spent entirely indoors. I woke up sort of early, but that's about the only remarkable thing. Tomorrow should be interesting, though, I'm meeting with another old friend of mine for the first time since the summer. I'll have a fun anecdote to share for tomorrow's post, too.

On My Mind: Not much. I had a nice meal for dinner tonight. Leftover pork tenderloin, some potato latkes, and chicken samosas. I don't keep kosher, and I never had, so if you try to bust my balls over me eating pork you aren't getting anywhere lmao. It was a nice filling dish paired with a couple episodes of Cowboy Bebop, mmm. A while ago I tried making a list of the ideal settings to listen to various albums in, but I think in retrospect that's way too broad. Pairing anime with food? Now that has the potential to take off, let me tell you.

Consumed:

• Star Wars Original Soundtrack composed by John Williams and performed by the London Symphony Orchestra: Amidst my discovery of the Spotify lightsaber easter egg and my perusal of several incomprehensible Wookieepedia articles I was forced to confront the reality that the soundtrack to the first Star Wars movie is not very adventurous on its own. The references to Stravinsky have been pointed out to me a bunch of times. I can't really fault the music for that, though, so much as the conditions in which it was produced. The tracks are somewhat oddly grouped. I don't think I'd pick any of these specific recordings to listen to because each one contains a lot of stuff on its own and it'd be much easier to just listen to a specific arrangement of a specific theme if I really wanted to come back to this material. Soundtracks weren't meant to be listened to without the accompanying film, or game, or whatever. But, this is enjoyable, in the same pre-eminent cultural sense that Romeo & Juliet is, I guess. If I could get away with merely nodding at this and moving on I would but I won't so I'll just give it a courtesy 7/10 and move on. Welcome to Jaret where the rating system is made up and the scores don't matter.
• Exile in Guyville by Liz Phair: A really quite good critique of, well, a lot of things, but primarily toxic masculinity and all of the things that entails, like male attitudes about women and the hypersexualization of women by men and all sorts of stuff like that. If I listened to this back when it came out I'm fairly certain that my mind would probably have been exploded out my ears? The message even for the time was not entirely new, but it was here, in this album, that it was precisely put and delivered with a raw simplicity and undeniably badass sarcastic swagger that is unmistakably Rock & Roll as fuck. I like the Galaxie 500 shout out on here more than I like most songs. I'm singing the album's praises a lot but there are a few things that hold me back from awarding this a seat in the pantheon of the 9/10's. It's got a really great second half, but the first is sort of bogged down by a few tracks that don't contribute much to the overall experience of the album. They feel sort of half-baked. Another criticism of mine is that, for all the lyrical strengths of the album, it feels like the actual music comes second a lot of the time. It's fairly by the numbers indie rock. Not much else was necessary as a backdrop for the truth that Liz Phair wanted to tell, but if I'm evaluating my enjoyment of this album, I must say that the actual music was occasionally lacking. But those are literally the only flaws. They're big ones, and they don't make me feel good about giving this an 8/10, but I feel like I must, because I don't like this album as strongly as I like my 9/10's, it's not clicking with me on that level, even though it almost did, it really almost did, and maybe it will click with more listens, but I'm sorry, I'm really sorry, it's an 8/10 for me. Trust me, I want to enjoy this more than I actually do.
• The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening HD developed by Grezzo, originally by Nintendo: I wanted to like this game a lot and at the start I really did! It has a very strong opening that puts Link in a very unfamiliar world relative to the Hyrule of his other outings, and up to around the second dungeon everything feels well paced! And then it doesn't get any more difficult. Like, seriously. The enemies don't get stronger, and Link does. The puzzles don't get that much harder, and the player gets used to them. The only difficulties that remain are navigation - which is fine until you get to the last item and realize that there are just some roadblocks you cannot move, thus denying the player true mastery over the world of the game - and patience. My patience was tested a lot while playing this. Maybe the absolute freedom of Breath of the Wild really revealed to me just how linear some of the other Zelda games can be. So the main content of this game is uninspired and downright tedious at times. But the sidequests? The absurdly long trading quest is actually pretty great and the reward was actually useful, dealing with the ghost that follows you around halfway through the game was interesting, and the Color Dungeon was cool even if it basically breaks the game with its reward. If the rest of the game was fleshed out as much as some of the side content, it'd be that much better. Like seriously, there's an entire Desert area that I only visited once in my playthrough. There's no dungeon there or anything, just a key to a dungeon somewhere else! Lots of missed potential, but I did have fun at points. Maybe the Oracle games are better or something. 5/10.
• The Archer by Alexandra Savior: The only reason I know about this album is because the artist cancelled an AMA on the Indieheads subreddit that a lot of people were looking forward to. I needed a song for... you'll see eventually, and it needed to be from a recent release, so I decided I'd check this one out to see if there was anything good here. Indeed there is! This album does a lot of neat things with regards to a very laidback, beachy tone, it's very slick and at times reminds me of Portishead. There's an incredibly cinematic tone to some of these tracks that you must know by now I cannot get nearly enough of. Sounds almost like a western movie at times, especially in the second half of the album. Oh, it is indeed similar to the latest Lana Del Rey album, but I sincerely hope that this album and Titanic Rising by Weyes Blood have put to rest any notion that Norman Fucking Rockwell! was groundbreaking or important because both of these albums do similar things and they do them SO MUCH BETTER. With this and I Disagree by Poppy, the Double Twenties are off to a pretty solid start, musically. In fact, I'd say that my enjoyment of both releases was somewhat similar, but I'd give this one the edge. They sit on opposite ends of the 8/10 spectrum. I'm a little cautious in the first few nascent days of these Double Twenties, because the last thing I want to do is overhype something I don't enjoy all that much, but if I'm still enjoying this a lot a few weeks from now it'll probably get bumped up. As for now, it has to be okay with the 8/10 it's going to get.

Produced: A surprising amount. Wrote a few hundred words for one thing, procrastinated on another but I might get that done after the post goes up. I wish I could get back into a quicker paced writing schedule but I'm on vacation in all regards so anything I do beyond the bare minimum is extra, to be quite honest. I've also added some Sad Cat Pictures to the Sad Cat Gallery. Please check it out when you get the chance! Shout out to Eggnegg.

Other Thoughts: Thank you for continuing to read my blog. For those of you who read my About Me section, you can expect to find a new addition to that page shortly with details about my upcoming radio show and where and when to listen to it! I'll probably post it as an announcement to the main page. Once again, thank you for reading!