#but i just wanted to mess around with the fun vhs program i got

[frankenfran]

Sweet Valerian (スウィート・ヴァレリアン) Sweet Supplement (スウィート・サプリメント) – Kaori NAZUKA

[movedcoffee]

Scary Movie Night (Mike Wheeler x Reader)

Request:  Oml boo yes to stranger things! Could I request a Mike X Reader where the reader is a friend of Nancys and mike has a crush on her and she thinks it's adorable and asks him out or something and completely shocks everyone? Sorry if it's too much!

Author Note: My first Stranger Things story! I’m excited! Alright feedback is appreciated and Anonymous I hope this is good enough!

(Y/n) pulled her scarf a little tighter as she stepped out of her car. The October air easily chilling her and causing her to shudder. Her cheeks were already tinting red as she made her way to the front door of the Wheeler’s home.

(Y/n) (L/n) is a good friend of Nancy Wheeler. She’s only a year younger then her and was easily known as the sweetest girl in Hawkins. The two had met when she chose to take Chemistry unlike other people her age. The two hit it off almost immediately considering they both carried more about their grades then guys. Atleast that was true at the time…

Anyways the young girl was at the Wheeler residence for one reason. Earlier that week the two discussed a horror movie marathon. They both agreed on a day, so here (Y/n) was with a bag full of VHS tapes.

She nervously rapped on the door. The leaves on the trees rustling as another gust of wind picked up sending goosebumps across her skin. “Nancy!” She called out praying the girl wouldn’t take too long to open the door. She truly wished she had brought a jacket now that she was out an about.

Light shone across the yard as the front door swung open. (Y/n) could hear the drone of tbe television in the background and feel the warmth seeping out the door. “Look (Y/n)-”

(Y/n) darted into the house making Nancy roll her eyes at the young girl’s antics. She shut the door and turned around noticing that (Y/n) was shivering slightly. The young girl smiled sheepishly as she rubbed her arms to return some warmth. “Sorry Nancy… It was just really cold…”

Nancy smiled slightly leading (Y/n) to the couch. She shuddered slightly considering (Y/n)’s skin was ice cold. “It’s alright… But didn’t you get my message?”

(Y/n) plopped down on the couch nearly sighing at the warmth the couch provided. Her eyes scanning the room for a moment before realizing what Nancy asked. “Message?” Her eyebrows furrowed as she frowned slightly. “What message?”

Nancy laughed sitting beside (Y/n). “I called your house and told your mother we would probably have to change movie night. Mike brought his friends over so I have to babysit.”

As if on cue the sound of several feet came from the basement stairs. (Y/n) looked over just in time to see the group practically stumble out the basement door.

“Dude that was so awesome! Will I can’t believe you rolled a fourteen again!” Dustin.

“I can’t believe Mike tried to trick us again!” Lucas.

“He almost got us though!” Will.

“It was a great campaign though guys! We finished before we hit ten hours!” Mike.

Heat rose to (Y/n)’s cheeks as the dark haired boy smiled at his friends. They all vanished into the kitchen making the oldest Wheeler sigh.

“They just won’t go to bed… So we can’t watch any good scary movies…” (Y/n) chuckled slightly catching Nancy off guard.

"Don't worry Nancy I brought a bunch of VHS tapes I'm sure we can find one that isn't too scary," She stated moving to the floor. She dumped the contents of her bag out and several tapes scattered across the floor.

The scuffle in the kitchen grew quiet as the two girls sat on the floor searching through the tapes. (Y/n) was to busy looking through each tape to notice the group of boys nervously peeking into the living room. Nancy noticed though and rolled her eyes slightly noticing Mike's eyes on her friend.

The group quickly ducked back into the kitchen. Mike's cheeks burning in embarrassment considering his sister saw. "What do you think they're up to?"

Lucas rolled his eyes and opened a pizza box. "Who cares Mike. It's probably something girly." Lucas stated grabbing a slice of pizza from the box.

Dustin grabbed a slice as well and took a bite out of it. "I think this was supposed to be a scary movie night," Dustin chimed in. The group studied him curiously making him shrug. "She argued with your mom about some scary movie night. I think they were gonna watch some rated R stuff."

Will shifted nervously now eyeing the living room. "You don't think Mrs. Wheeler would let them watch that stuff with us here.... Right?"

Mike shook his head. "No Mom wouldn't. I guess (Y/n) came over anyways."

Meanwhile Nancy and (Y/n) were still trying to find a good movie that wasn't considered too scary. (Y/n) ran her thumb across one tape that her parents suggested they bring. ("In case Mike wants to join in.") "Hey Nancy what about this one?" She asked showing the title to her.

Nancy chuckled slightly taking the tape from (Y/n). "God you really want to watch this?" She teased. "It'll just attract the dorks."

(Y/n) blushed slightly and smiled sheepishly. "Come on it's a good movie!" She took the tape back. She bit her lip as butterflies finally took flight in her stomach. Their wings grazing against her sides as they fluttered about. "Besides it won't hurt to have them watch it."

(Y/n) stood up as Nancy let out a laugh. "Seriously (Y/n)?" When the girl nodded the oldest wheeler sighed. "Alright alright but bring me a slice of pizza while your at it."

(Y/n) chuckled slightly. “Alright I’ll be back.” Her footsteps were silent as she made the way to the kitchen. She was humming quietly and was nearly in the doorway when she began to hear the boys’ conversation. 

“Mike I can’t believe you still have a crush on (Y/n)!” Lucas’s voice made the girl freeze. Her eyes widened slightly as she leaned against the wall. Her thoughts already spiraling in confusion. That didn’t seem right... (Y/n) had come to terms long ago that Mike wouldn’t ever like her. So why was the universe out to harm her more?

“What are you talking about?” Mike’s voice seemed to echo in the hall as (Y/n) took a few hesitant steps forward. Her heart was hammering against her rib cage as she pressed herself against the wall. She knew eavesdropping was wrong, but she couldn’t help. Her mind was practically numb as if she was programmed to act this way.

“Aww come on Mike it’s obvious!” Will’s voice was muffled as if his mouth was full. She could hear the other boys snicker as a sigh escaped Mike. (Y/n)’s face was burning as an uneasy feeling bubbled in her chest.

“Okay So I do, but she’ll never like me back. We all know that.” (Y/n)’s knuckles turned white as her grip on the tape tightened. She swore her legs were quivering, but she wasn’t sure why.

“Yea... Sorry Mike....”

(Y/n) peeked her head in catching the whole group off guard. “Hey guys.” (Y/n) mentally cursed as her voice rose nervously. The group of boys jumped a look of panic crossing their faces.

“Hey (Y/n) um what’s up?” Mike asked nervously. His eyes flickering towards the others as if they knew if she heard his confession or not. 

There was electricity coursing through the air as the two studied the other for a moment. The other boys glanced amongst each other noticing the odd shift in the air. (Y/n) quickly shook her head a nervous grin breaking out on her face.

“Well me and Nancy are about to watch Ghostbusters... Do you guys wanna join us?” She asked cautiously. Her cheeks burned with embarrassment as her eyes fell to the ground.

“That sounds fun! Right guys?” Mike turned to the others who all grinned slightly. 

“Yea it sounds fun,” Will said quietly.

“Awesome I call dibs on popcorn!” Dustin stated already searching the cabinets for a popcorn bag.

Lucas shrugged a small smile forming on his face. “Yea... Thanks.”

(Y/n) grinned trying to ignore the fact that she was now overwhelmed with butterflies. “Cool!” The young girl turned to leave but stopped. Her heart was hammering so hard (Y/n) thought for a moment it was trying to escape. She turned around a pinkish hue spreading across her cheeks.  “Hey Mike... How about tomorrow me and you hit up the arcade?”

The shock seemed to electrify the air. The other boys were practically gaping at (Y/n). Mike’s face was slowly becoming crimson as he eyed her curiously. “A-as in a date?” He asked cautiously. he couldn’t be taking this right. (Y/n) would never ask him out on a date...

(Y/n) bit her bottom lip nervously as her eyes flickered to the floor. “Well yea what else would I mean?” 

Mike’s whole face was red now and it reached to the tip of his ears. “O-Of course! I mean um that sounds g-great,” Mike was a stuttering mess. The others were now frozen in shock.

(Y/n) chuckled a big grin spreading across her face. “Great!” With that the older girl vanished from the kitchen leaving the group to think over what just happened. It took a few moments but once they all got a hold of themselves Dustin was the first to speak.

“Mike... Teach me your ways.”

[finsterhund]

My phone died right when I was supposed to have a phone call with my psychiatrist and I'm pretty upset about it. Admittedly I forgot exactly what time it was so I didn't charge it in time.

I am also getting stuffed dogs arriving, but not the one who got lost :( I got the replacement though.

I also bought one of the dogs I had growing up brand new and they are so much smaller than I remember. I am a big boy with big strong hands now.

It's really really weird. It is also what happened when I got the squeaky steak. I can't get over how small it is now. I do not have an understanding of my own size or strength. I get introduced to things I last saw when I was younger and freak out.

I wish I could find more people to draw Cayden with Spot. I have one commission on the way but I want so more lol wish I wasn't so shy finding artists online to commission. It's so much easier at cons.

Also wishing that there was more to do. My friend is STILL borrowing my PSVR so I can't play any more Paper Beast. Which is extremely frustrating.

I've been mostly doing mild exercise, things on the internet, and eating icepops and junk food. Napping a lot but always tired. The chronic illness life I guess.

I took a gamble recently too. Someone was apparently selling a really rare copy of HoD and said it came with a mousepad but didn't have any photos of it. When I asked they weren't helpful. I don't know why they'd say "Heart of Darkness includes mousepad" if it wasn't a HoD mousepad. So worst case scenario I get a rare copy of the game in poor condition, best case scenario I get it in good condition and with the rare coveted mousepad that I've been thirsting over for nearly 5 years.

Nothing's really happened with the forums. Only three of us so far and everybody's been busy. I'm thinking of adding more resources there. Wish the fandom was more active but I get that its heyday is done and pillars like Lillium and Shynox are gone :( The closest I think that we could come to a resurgence is if more of my friends get actively involved. Which I wouldn't want to force if they didn't want to.

I keep thinking about my dogs, how much I miss them, how I could have gone to be with Jack and Zippy if my mom wouldn't have lied.

I want a dog in my life so badly. The neighbors dogs have been barking a lot lately and I often turn off the fan to listen to them. They help me nap in the afternoon. My dogs never barked very often so I don't really have nostalgia for barking itself but I think it's just the comfort of knowing that they're there.

All of my Spots have been either rigid or small so I'm hoping to find a stuffed dog that looks like Spot that is significantly larger for sale soon. Also one that's more beat up so I don't feel bad about dragging them everywhere (like Outside Tiny is to regular Fishy Tiny)

I am thinking about getting a small tent that I can set up in my bedroom so I can have a camp out since I know the chances of us going camping for real are very unlikely.

I wish that I lived in a normal house with a basement so I could have a space to mess around in the basement and have an air mattress and the tent there and stuff. I will consider myself to be living the good life if I ever have a basement with an air mattress and that's where I keep my CRT TV and my games and stuff. I visited my one cousin ONCE and I fell in love with their fancy middle-class house 😭 the fictional house that Cayden lives has its basement entirely based on that one. (And his bedroom is based on the bedroom I slept in at my grandparents house that has since been torn down 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭). It comes back to me in my dreams. I remember the kids of my mom's family all coming together there and we played with stuffed animals and watched movies and rolled around on the airmattress and stuff. They had a "computer room" and my older cousin showed me how to do simple animations with a program that I cannot remember that was likely on an apple OS

Fishy also said that a boxframe would make my mattress more comfortable so I will be getting one hopefully soon.

I still think about how I wanted to have a party for Spot with all my friends being invited over and I'm so sad that was cancelled. At least I got photos on my birthday of Spot with a hat and the Andy cake.

I keep wanting to write but struggle to find the motivation again. Fishy is the one who gives me incredible feedback on my writing but he's working super duper hard right now and he's busy.

I don't want to post HoDcore style stories on more actively tread websites because I don't want the wrong sorts of people enjoying them otherwise I'd upload to dA or something.

Paper Beast is coming to PC officially on July 24th but my current computer is 32bit so I can't play it :( very frustrating. I'm still excited though. There's going to be new content. More incentive to get off my lazy butt and build my new PC I've been incapable of saving up enough money to buy the graphics card for for the past three years.

I also wish I could find someone to draw the basement and the bedroom and then of course to draw the designs based on them for Cayden. They are so vivid in my mind.

I suck at drawing interiors so I know if just struggle to do so. I wish there were photos.

Also my other two cousins' house was absolutely amazing and I miss that house too. It was a single story with lots and lots of space and room to run around. It had TWO living rooms and the secondary living room had big big windows and plenty of sun. It also had those floor vents that we would hide things in because that was fun. They had a copy of the Seventh Brother on VHS and I would insist on watching it as much as possible.

I guess the layout of that house is the basis for the rest of Cayden's house. I've been to these places so few times but yet they're such a source of nostalgia, meanwhile the house I spent most of my childhood in is the near constant setting of my nightmares and the Spot house is almost entirely repressed.

The house before the Spot house I remember fondly but I was extremely young at the time. It had bright green carpet, little lizards climbed on the downstairs windows when it rained, and I had a little play tent.

I can almost remember enough of the Spot house to remember why I was so upset when we moved out of it. It was also one story with a very nice back garden and fruit trees in the front. I think I mostly miss Spot though. Not so much the place itself.

It's about time for me to go to bed but my mind wants to wander to places that don't exist anymore, at least not in their current form.

A sad quiet night I guess. Would have been nice to talk to my psychiatrist.

I wish I had the negatives of the Spot photos so I could digitize them.

If there are multiverses, many different possible universes I guess there's one where my grandparents raised me and Spot, and one where the Heart of Darkness movie happened, and one where everything turned out better. There's no sense in thinking about this but I like to imagine things.

Hopefully something unexpected will happen tomorrow.

[lynchgirl90]

How #TwinPeaks inspired #Lost and #TheLeftovers

Damon Lindelof tells EW why ‘The Leftovers’ would not be possible without David Lynch’s classic series

JEFF JENSEN@EWDOCJENSEN

Let us be first to remind you for the millionth time that Twin Peaks, the short-lived sensation created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, inspired much of the television that has obsessed us over the past 20 years. To name just a few that hold the cult classic’s peculiar dark spark: Chris Carter’s The X-Files, David Chase’s The Sopranos, Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men, Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad, Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal, Damon Lindelof’s The Leftovers, Sam Esmail’s Mr. Robot, and Donald Glover’s Atlanta. Since Twin Peaks also shaped modern TV tastes and watching — capturing the imagination for serialized mystery, supernatural fantasy, and cool irony; setting an early standard for internet-based conversation and theorizing — we can say Twin Peaks even influenced you. Especially if you’re a person of a certain age.

Of course, Twin Peaks doesn’t completely explain the vibrant state of TV. The radical transformation of the media business — the emergence of demo-driven networks that turned cult TV into a business plan — deserves more credit. There’s probably no X-Files without a network like Fox. There’s certainly no Buffy The Vampire Slayer without The WB. In his essential book The Revolution Was Televised, critic Alan Sepinwall identifies a critical turning point when TV went next level: 1997, when HBO, seeking to ramp up original programming, empowered the likes of Tom Fontana and David Chase — veteran scribes frustrated by the limits of broadcast TV — to pursue bolder vision with decidedly adult storytelling. The buzzy nerve of Oz and even more so The Sopranos spurred broadcast competitors to take more chances and basic cable to get into the game, and now, here we are, with “television” streaming out of every media orifice possible. That, kids, is from where TV babies come, in a terribly reductive nutshell.

Twin Peaks contains a version of this creation myth in its DNA, too. In 1989, ABC, looking for new hits, took a chance on a risky marriage with an avant-garde filmmaker (Lynch) and an accomplished TV writer (Frost) who wanted to make a splash by reinventing the prime-time soap with sophisticated edge and ostentatious quirkiness. Think of Twin Peaks as a kinky bridal dress: something old, something new, something borrowed, something Blue Velvet. The relationship didn’t last long. ABC ditched Twin Peaks after a year, the fast fade partly due to a broadcast network in flux that really had no clue how to manage Team Lynch or the wild, weird, FrankenGenre creature they had made. Yet can’t you see Twin Peaks thriving in today’s mediaverse? Maybe, say, on Showtime?

Mark Frost certainly could. In 2012, the Twin Peaks co-creator beheld the exciting things happening in TV and thought, I want to do that, too. He had the perfect creative vehicle for it, too, one with something TV networks love: a recognizable and marketable brand name. But he couldn’t do it alone. Wouldn’t dream of it, either. So Frost called Lynch and put forth a proposal: How about making more Twin Peaks?

Lynch had convinced himself over the years that there was no interest in Twin Peaks. “I felt that the thing had drifted away,” says Lynch, “so part of me kind of shut down about the possibility of going back.” He was wrong. Twin Peaks actually lingered like a ghost, and it was slowly gaining power. Twin Peaks was steeped in the creative fabric of television, as evidenced by many series. There were people who identified as Twin Peaks fans — cultists who could read about Twin Peaks forever and ever in books, websites, and fanzines like the legendary Wrapped In Plastic, plus many more who considered the show a generational marker. Twin Peaks was also starting to make new fans via DVD (the complete series wasn’t available on disc until 2007) and streaming services like Netflix.

Frost presented Lynch with several arguments for reviving Twin Peaks right here, right now. They had a story to tell — Twin Peaks ended with several unresolved cliffhangers — and their infamously bonkers series finale included a curious, memorable line that offered an irresistible hook. “I’ll see you again in 25 years,” the specter of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) tells FBI agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan). “Meanwhile…” And then she struck a pose and froze, as if a statue, or suddenly frozen in time. Frost — confident, ambitious, and maybe a little competitive — also argued that they had a chance to make some bold art, without compromise, in a new TV universe that allowed for greater creative freedom than existed 22 years earlier.

“What I saw was that the TV landscape had shifted dramatically and people were obviously hungry for storytelling that has broken out of the box over the last 10 years,” says Frost. “I felt it was time to take a kind of evolutionary leap forward and that we should be a part of that. David readily agreed. But we went in knowing we couldn’t just do what we did in the past — we’ve got to raise the bar. So that was our admonition to ourselves. This is a chance to keep pace with that evolving landscape, to contribute something new, to move the ball forward even more. And we had some unfinished business.”

And so it goes that the return of the show that inspired today’s TV was inspired by the products of its own legacy. Fun Fact! Lynch doesn’t watch much TV, but he cites Mad Men and Breaking Bad as two shows of recent times that he loved. Their hotly anticipated contribution to our Peak TV moment — an 18-hour limited series described by Lynch as an 18-part feature film — premieres on Showtime on May 21.

We recently asked several leading TV producers to share how Twin Peaks influenced them. Over the next couple weeks, we’ll be sharing with you EW’s conversations with them. We begin with Damon Lindelof, who co-created Lost with J.J. Abrams and The Leftovers with Tom Perrotta, now airing its final season on HBO.

Lindelof’s tale of Twin Peaks fandom takes us back to a time when TV watching was a family time activity, not a solitary, everyone-on-their-own-screen free-for-all. His very personal testimonial also shows how Twin Peaks was part of larger moment in which David Lynch was virtually atmospheric — beginning with his neo-noir masterpiece Blue Velvet in 1986 and including the hyper-pop nihilism of Wild at Heart, released at the apex of the Twin Peaks phenomenon — and saturated the public imagination. Here, Lindelof reveals how Twin Peaks influenced Lost, how Twin Peaks informed his approach to surrealism in The Leftovers, and how the legacy of Twin Peaks nearly cost Lost its legendary monster.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: When did you first watch Twin Peaks? DAMON LINDELOF: When it first aired. I watched it at my dad’s place. It was on his radar; he was very excited about Twin Peaks because of David Lynch. We had seen Eraserhead together, and I had loved it, and I remember him saying, “The guy who made Eraserhead has a new TV show and I think it’s going to be very good.” So we watched the pilot together, and once it was over, we watched it again, because he had recorded it.

This evolved into a ritual. Because I was with my dad every other week, there were some weeks I would watch it by myself, but the weeks I was with him, we would watch two episodes: that week’s new episode and the previous week’s episode again on VHS. He would do live commentary and we began to formulate theories. This was my first experience, in the pre-internet era, of theorizing about TV.

So you liked Twin Peaks. I loved Twin Peaks.

What did you love about it? The mystery. The music. The pacing. It was also my first exposure to soap operas. There was just this complex web of affairs that was delicious. Within the first couple of episodes of Twin Peaks, you understood that James and Laura had been together, but James and Donna were actually sort of secretly in love with each other. Laura was also dating Bobby, but he was also seeing Shelly, but Shelly was two-timing her abusive husband, Leo, who also had something going on with Laura and was dealing drugs to Bobby. Meanwhile, Josie Packard is having a secret affair with Sheriff Truman, except she’s also involved with Benjamin Horne, who was married, but also having an affair with Pete’s wife and Josie’s rival, Catherine, and also apparently messed around with Laura. The sexual intrigue was bonkers! And for me, a kid, it was new and exciting, particularly as it related to Laura, this teenage girl who was mixed up in some really bad, traumatic, dark stuff. That was really interesting and felt very fresh at the time.

And then there Agent Cooper. What an amazing character. His entrance in that pilot is a classic TV moment. I loved his quirkiness. He had these obsessions with coffee and pastry. The fact that he seemed to really be enjoying having just a grand old time investigating Laura’s rather horrific murder was provocative and entertaining.

The show had this very distinctive sense of humor. Deadpan and odd. The Log Lady! People remember her as weird, but I just thought she was really funny. And Ben and Jerry Horne, the brothers, their names are funny because of the ice cream, of course, but that scene where those two guys are eating these huge sandwiches and relishing the sensual experience of eating those huge sandwiches — just the fundamental bizarreness of it was hilarious.

One other thing that I loved about Twin Peaks was that it was scary. Cooper’s dream at the end of the third episode, when he’s in the old age makeup and we see Laura and The Man From The Other Place talking backwards — that creeped me out. I slept with the lights on after that episode.

I go on and on like this, because one of the ways that Twin Peaks impacted me was that it showed me that a TV show can be so many things at once — funny, scary, strange, sexy, melodramatic. It was the definition of unique. I had never seen anything like it, before or since. And then — when did Wild at Heart come out?

August of 1990, between the first and second seasons of Twin Peaks. I loved Wild at Heart. It was just so gonzo. Looking back on it, I can’t say I became a fan of David Lynch because of Twin Peaks. I was just a fan of Twin Peaks. But after Wild at Heart, I was just all the way in on Lynch. By the way, this is not to take anything away from Mark Frost, who is a big part of Twin Peaks. But again, my dad turned me on to the show particularly because of Lynch, and then with everything that followed, including Wild at Heart, it became about Lynch, and everything that came with him. The music! That Angelo Badalamenti score! I played the Twin Peaks soundtrack all the time when I was a junior in high school. I didn’t own many CDs — I had to buy them with my own money, and they were expensive — but I owned that one.

What did you make of the supernatural aspect? It became more important to the storytelling as the series progressed. We came to find out that Twin Peaks was a hotspot of uncanny and spectral activity because it was located near a portal into a mystical realm, not unlike the Hellmouth in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or, of course, The Island on Lost. Did you enjoy that part of the show? That was interesting to watch unfold. From the start, you had Cooper’s dreams and you had his fascination with Tibet and a kind of mysticism that he associated with Tibet. That scene in the third episode of season 1, where he’s winnowing down a list of suspects through an intuitive process that involves throwing rocks at a bottle — that was funny and quirky, but it also suggested the supernatural, and obviously, the show became more and more supernatural as it went on.

But I didn’t see it coming. As my father and I were theorizing about Laura Palmer’s murderer, a supernatural possibility was not part of our speculations! But then we move into season 2, and you get the introduction of The Giant, and you have Major Briggs revealing that he’s been monitoring extraterrestrial communications in episode 2. Here, the show is openly declaring that everything is up for grabs. And I do remember loving that and being very excited by that stuff. But I experienced it as an escalation. The show didn’t start supernatural. It became progressively so.

When the show declared this supernatural aspect in season 2, a lot of people I knew who loved the show bailed. They wanted a naturalistic explanation. It reminds me that 25 years ago, TV was rather cool toward sci-fi/fantasy, although it was about to warm up to it. That want for a naturalistic explanation might have had something to do with the fact that Twin Peaks intersected with another trend of the time, serial killer pop. I don’t know exactly when The Silence of the Lambs came out, but my memory of it is that it came out before or during Twin Peaks. [The film version of The Silence of the Lambs starring Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins was released Feb. 14, 1991, during the middle of the second season of Twin Peaks. The novel by Thomas Harris was published in 1988.] When you watch the pilot of Twin Peaks, you immediately think it’s a serial killer story because of the clues and how they’re found, like when Agent Cooper knows how to examine Laura Palmer’s fingernails and look for these pieces of paper the killer has been leaving behind with his victims. So I can understand why an audience expected a naturalist resolution, because serial killer stories resolve naturalistically.

How did you feel about the way Twin Peaks ended? During the second season, I remember feeling at times, “This is not the show I fell in love with.” And then something would happen that would make me fall in love with it all over again. There was a storyline where Donna resumes Laura’s Meals on Wheels job and she comes into contact with this weirdo who grows orchids and is in possession of Laura’s secret diary. And I remember not liking that. But then Lynch would show up playing [FBI regional director] Gordon Cole, and I’d love that, or David Duchovny would show up playing DEA agent Denise Bryson, and I’d be like, “This is the greatest thing ever!”

Still, I was alternately in and out. The turning point came after all the big reveals with Laura’s murder, that it was Leland who was responsible for killing Laura, that he was inhabited by this evil spirit named BOB. Now, what is the show? Now, what’s the mystery we’re supposed to solve? It never quite locked into anything new that was as compelling as Laura Palmer.

By the time the show ended, my father and I were no longer watching it together, and it didn’t feel like it was appointment TV. I was still watching, but I wasn’t loving it… and then we got the series 2 finale. Wow. The sequence in The Red Room. Cooper getting possessed by BOB. Ending on him looking in the mirror and ramming his face into it. I remember thinking, ‘This is going to be cool! I’m back in!’ And then the show was canceled.

Did you see the prequel movie? Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me? Yeah. That was a year later, right?

Right, summer of 1992. I remember kinda liking the movie and still considering myself a Twin Peaks fan, but also sort of resigning myself to the fact that there wasn’t going to be any more Twin Peaks that resolved those cliffhangers and being kind of bummed about that. Still, I only had positive feelings about Twin Peaks. Even in college, in the mid-’90s, when my friends and I would talk about our favorite TV shows, Twin Peaks was always on our lists, even though it was only on for a brief time and even though it disappointed.

Why is that? Because it was a cultural moment for people, and especially for kids of that era. We were the age of Bobby and James, Laura and Donna and Maddy. Even though they were all clearly played by actors in their 20s, there was an identification with them. The perception was, even if the show strayed from the path and went off the rails a little bit, Twin Peaks was cool, and it was a shared, zeitgeisty thing. But more importantly, in our pretentious NYU film school heads, Twin Peaks was important because it was “cinema.” It was an auteur-driven story in a way a lot of TV wasn’t, but was about to be. And, of course, it felt like cinema because it was Lynch, and we were all obsessed with Lynch in film school.

Did Twin Peaks influence your storytelling? I’m thinking specifically of the phenomenal “International Assassin” episode of The Leftovers, in which Kevin enters a surreal realm that might be pure imagination, might be some kind afterlife, or might be something else altogether. There is no Leftovers without Twin Peaks, full stop. That said, when we tried to “do” Lynch — for example, Kevin’s dreams in season 1, where dogs are growling in mailboxes — we fell way short of the mark. It wasn’t until we embraced the absurd — like Patti pooping in a paper bag and labeling it “Neil,” or Nora simulating sex with a life-sized replica of a salesman while he watched, both aroused and disturbed — that we realized we were finally scraping the essence of Twin Peaks: weird and disturbing and spiritual all rolled into one. And yes, of course, the episode “International Assassin.” No way does that happen in a world where Twin Peaks never aired.

And Lost would never have happened if Twin Peaks hadn’t occurred, either. First off, the idea of mystery as the central premise of a television show came from Twin Peaks. Up until Twin Peaks, at least through my lens, a mystery show was, like, Murder, She Wrote. A procedural. Every episode, there’s a mystery, it gets solved. But the idea of a serialized mystery show, taking place over many, many episodes, was completely and totally revolutionary.

Now, there are downsides with mystery. You’re playing with fire. The minute you resolve the mystery, the show is over. Twin Peaks became a cautionary tale for that. Whether it’s true or not, fair or not, the perception is that once they revealed who killed Laura Palmer, there was no reason to watch the show anymore. I don’t agree with that premise, but I do think if you’re going to do a long-form mystery show, you have to have a plan for what to do once you resolve the central mystery. And the answer has to be, there just has to be multiple, multiple, multiple mysteries, so every time you knock one off, there’s still two unresolved ones in its wake, and you see how long you can play that game. This can become even more complex when the mysteries of your show are supernatural in nature or just plain weird. Which brings me to a story about Lost.

My memory might be faulty. I’m sure about some things in this story and less sure about others. But what I’m sure about is that, after J.J. and I wrote the treatment, ABC really only had two areas of concern. No. 1, which we have talked about ad nauseam before, was the idea that Jack, who would present as the main character, would die at the end of the pilot.

But the main area of concern was the idea that there was this monster on the island. In that meeting, present were Lloyd Braun and Susan Lyne, who were the co-presidents of ABC. Before I go on, let me just say, if Lloyd hadn’t been the president of ABC, there’d be no Lost, because he believed in this thing from the word go. It was his idea to do a plane crash on an island show, et cetera.

But I don’t think he wanted the monster. So in this meeting, he says, “I think this outline is dynamite, but I don’t think that there should be a monster in the pilot. If you guys want to work your way up to some of that weird stuff, it’s a conversation for another day. But definitely not in the pilot. It’s too weird. We don’t want to do a Twin Peaks.” I remember Lloyd very specifically saying, “I don’t want to do a Twin Peaks.”

This wasn’t good. All the things that J.J. and I were starting to get super-excited about were the weird things on the island. The monster is representative of the idea that if they’re just on a normal island, the show isn’t going to be very interesting. But if the island’s weird and supernatural and, more importantly, has a long history and mythology behind it — well, that was the stuff that was turning us on. If we had to take the monster out of the pilot, that would have meant that we’d have to take all the weird things that we had already been sort of talking about. So I was having this bad feeling in the meeting: “Oh, no, what’s going to happen now?”

And then J.J. jumped in and said some version of this: “It’s 2004. Twin Peaks has been off the air for 13 years and you’re still using it as a cautionary tale. But even if it is a cautionary tale, we should be so lucky if this show gets to be like Twin Peaks, because how many television shows get remembered the way Twin Peaks is remembered? Twin Peaks was amazing and maybe it didn’t end well, but we can learn from its mistakes. We should be so lucky to be compared to Twin Peaks! We should aspire to Twin Peaks!”

And Lloyd said, “Okay, do your monster.”

At this point in your working relationship with J.J., you had only known him —

A week!

Did you guys discuss Twin Peaks in your brainstorming? I don’t think so. We talked a lot about The Twilight Zone. We talked a lot about Dickens, in terms of how we would do coincidence and how that would be a big part of the show. But Twin Peaks influenced a lot of Lost. Easter eggs. Characters having secret motivations. A massive ensemble. These were not revolutionary ideas. Certainly not for soap opera. But when Lost came along, there weren’t really any shows on the air that were doing 14 series regulars. I think that the last time ABC had an hour-long drama with 14 series regulars was probably Twin Peaks.

I remember very specifically — although I don’t remember which season it was in — that we contemplated putting some Twin Peaks Easter eggs into Lost and then decided against it.

Why? I don’t know if you know this, Jeff, but back in the days of Lost, there were these people on the internet who were fervently theorizing about Lost to such an extent that, if you made, say, a, reference to The Black Lodge from Twin Peaks, just as a joke, the people who were analyzing the show beat by beat, would be like, “Is the Black Lodge on the island? Is it possible that Agent Cooper exists in the world of Lost?”

That would have been my greatest favorite thing ever. It would have.

What was thinking behind the idea? Why even make that joke? It could have been something like Sawyer making a pop culture wisecrack. Shannon would be walking out of the woods with some firewood and he’d say, “Hey there, Log Lady!” … My knee-jerk impulse memory is that it related to our awareness that the audience was trying to solve mysteries and that there would be some kind of wink-wink at that. Along the lines of, say, a character saying that trying to figure out where the polar bears come from is like trying to figure out who killed Laura Palmer. It was for the best we abandoned the idea. Lost making a reference to Twin Peaks as it related to the frustration of supernatural mystery? That’s radioactive. We couldn’t be that self-aware without eating a tremendous amount of s—. … But in all seriousness, you are literally playing with fire if you invoke Twin Peaks on a show like Lost. The shows shared similar issues, and in some ways now, similar legacies. Echoing what J.J. said in that first meeting with Lloyd, to be compared to Twin Peaks makes me very, very happy, whether the comparison is positive or negative.

I’ll tell you this much, though. We had three years to build up to our ending, and we got to do the ending that we wanted. Frost and Lynch did not get to do that. Now, they are. And that’s the other reason I’m super psyched for Twin Peaks coming back. I don’t know whether this is a season of Twin Peaks that will lead to more seasons of Twin Peaks, or whether it is the final chapter of Twin Peaks. Either way, I feel like it was a story that ended in media res, and now, the very same people who told the first chapters of that story are coming back to tell a new chapter. That’s exciting.

link (TP)

[ask-the-swapfell-crew]

Angry video game SF!sans (a transcript of a avgn episode with glitches)

*SF!sans inserts "Pac-Man" into the NES. He turns it on, but as soon as the title screen of "Pac-Man" shows up, it is messed up. SF!sans looks at it, and it cuts to several glitches like the messed up "Pac-Man" logo and the misspelling of Player into Playar. He takes out the game, blows into it several times, and inserts it back in, but sees yet another glitch, showing the ghosts names messed up. It even shows the words character and nickname misspelled. All of the nicknames seen are misspelled except for Pinky. SF!sans is surprised. It then cuts to a messed up "Pac-Man" level with a weird "Pac-Man" and weird ghosts, with one of the ghosts staying the same. SF!sans takes out the "​Pac-Man" game and throws it backwards. He then takes out another game, blows on it several times, and inserts it in into the NES. The title screen for "Super Team Games" shows up, but after a while, it suddenly glitches in some weird line style. The music also beeps. SF!sans is shocked.*

SF!sans: DON'T YOU JUST HATE IT WHEN THAT HAPPENS? YOU'LL BE PLAYING A GAME, AND THEN ALL OF A SUDDEN, IT STARTS GLITCHING UP! *SF!sans inserts "Metal Gear" into the NES, only to see the title screen messed up.*

SF!sans: OH, COME ON, METAL GEAR'S FUCKING UP NOW?

SF!sans: YOU BLOW IN THE GAME, *SF!sans blows into the game* JIGGLE IT AROUND, *SF!sans tries to use it with the toploader* USE DIFFERENT CONSOLES, BUT IT STILL DOESN'T WORK. *SF!sans tries to use it with the original NES.*

SF!sans: YOU KNOW WHEN THIS HAPPENS, THAT MEANS THAT THERE'S SOMETHING INSIDE YOUR GAME. SOMETHING THAT WANTS TO REDUCE THE GRAPHICS INTO A PIXELATED MISH-MASH OF GARBAGE. YOU'RE DEALING WITH...A ERROR.

*The Error SF!sans appears in front of a glitched image.*

Error SF!sans: *Laughing* GOOD DAY TO YOU, SANS, HOW ARE YOU? GOOD DAY SIR. AS YOU KNOW, I'M THE ERROR SF!SANS. AND, I'VE GOT GLITCHES IN ME BRITCHES FOR YOU, SANS! I'VE GOT- *starts speaking gibberish* *SF!sans gets furious.*

SF!sans: I'M GONNA LAY THE FUCK-SMACK ON YOU! YOU THINK I CAN'T STILL PLAY?

*The Error SF!sans appears again in another glitched image.*

Error SF!sans: WHICH WOULD SAY IT'S A GODDAMN LOAD HARD. ALL THE TONES, THE BROWNS, THE GREENS, IT'S JUST LIKE MOTHER NATURE. I LIKE TO BRING IT IN THE ROOM.

SF!sans: IT'S UGLY, LIKE YOUR MOM!

*The glitched image is so glitched that SF!sans dies. The Error SF!sans laughs.*

SF!sans: *angrily* You son-of-a-bitch!

*SF!sans takes out "Metal Gear", accompanied by the "Metal Gear" Game Over Music, and sees the Error SF!sans emerge from the cartridge.*

Error SF!sans: OH, TRY AND SWITCH THE GAME AS YOU MIGHT, BUT I CAN SWITCH ME GLITCHES TONIGHT!

*SF!sans throws the game, causing  Error SF!sans to fly to the left. SF!sans inserts "Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!", but when it gets to the "Mike is waiting for your challenge!" screen, it turns into a glitched mess. Mike Tyson's image turns into a brownie with Tyson's black face, and the background has changed to light blue. Mike Tyson's name is also messed up. SF!sans is surprised. The Error SF!sans appears in the glitched image.*

Error SF!sans: AND HERE WE HAVE PUNCH-OUT!! WITH IRON MIKE TYSON. I JUST IRONED OUT HIS FACE.

*The camera zooms in on Mike Tyson's ironed-out face.*

Error SF!sans: How do you like that? We'll call him Shit-Faced Mike Tyson.

SF!sans: You little fuck-nugget! Get out of my game!

*SF!sans takes out the game, and blows into it. But the Error SF!sans emerges from the cartridge again, this time with a broom. SF!sans is surprised.*

Error SF!sans: Oh, you've been throwing the dust out, I spent all day trying to get it in there! Well, if you're gonna blow it, why don't you blow me?

*SF!sans blows the Error SF!sans to the left and inserts the game back in, but as soon as the match starts, it turns into yet another mess of glitches. Mac and Mario have turned into white, and Bald Bull has turned into black. The background is also mixed with blue and black. SF!sans is pissed and shocked. The Error SF!sans appears in the glitched image.*

Error SF!sans: I shit all over it, with me glitches. *smiles*

*SF!sans is angry.*I SHIT ALL OVER IT, WITH ME GLITCHES.

SF!sans: I ALMOST WONDER IF ERRORS HAD A DEAL WITH GAME COMPANIES TO SELL YOU ALL KINDS OF CLEANING DEVICES THAT YOU DON'T NEED. I MEAN, WOULD YOU REALLY NEED THIS TO CLEAN OUT A GAME? IT'S JUST AS GOOD FOR CLEANING OUT YOUR ASS!

*He takes out the game.*

SF!sans: I'LL SHOW YOU HOW TO CLEAN THESE FUCKERS OUT. GET YOURSELF A Q-TIP...

*Error SF!sans is surprised.*

Error SF!sans: OH! NOT THE Q-TIP!

SF!sans: ...PUT A LITTLE CLEANING SOLUTION AT THE END LIKE THAT. YOU DON'T WANT TOO MUCH, YOU DON'T WANT TOO MUCH MOISTURE IN THE GAME.

*Error SF!sans is scared of the Q-Tip.*

Error SF!sans: KEEP THE Q-TIP AWAY! KEEP IT AWAY!

SF!sans: AND, ERROR SF!SANS, BE GONE!

*SF!sans throws the game, but  Error SF!sans lands on the floor.*

Error SF!sans: OH! YOU'RE A REAL ASSHOLE! I'LL BE BACK!

SF!sans: *sarcastically* YEAH. *normally* OF COURSE, SOME GLITCHES CAN HAPPEN BECAUSE OF PROGRAMMING ERRORS, AND CAN BE TRIGGERED ON COMMAND. SO FOR THOSE WHO WANT TO BE A ERROR SF!SANS YOURSELF, HERE'S A TRICK YOU CAN TRY AT HOME.

*Cut to "Mega Man 2."*

SF!sans: IN MEGA MAN 2, GO TO THE AIR MAN STAGE. MAKE SURE YOU'RE EQUIPPED WITH ITEM #1. NOW IT'S TIME TO FIGHT AIR MAN. BUT INSTEAD, LET'S SURPRISE THE FUCK OUT OF HIM. USE ITEM 1 TO TOUCH THE DOOR, AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS.

*Mega Man touches the door, and the camera then pans to the left to see a glitched up image.*

SF!sans: WOW. HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED WHAT IT WOULD LOOK LIKE IF THE AIR MAN STAGE AND DR. WILY STAGE, PART 2 GOT THROWN TOGETHER IN A BLENDER?

SF!sans: SPEAKING OF MEGA MAN, I HAD A UNIQUE EXPERIENCE WITH THE 5TH GAME. IT HAPPENED A LONG TIME AGO, AND I DOUBT IT WILL EVER HAPPEN AGAIN. FORTUNATELY, I HAVE THE EVIDENCE RECORDED ON A VHS TAPE.

SF!sans: IT WAS A LONG NIGHT AND I WAS HELL-BENT ON FINISHING THE GAME. I MADE IT TO ONE OF THE FINAL BOSSES. UNDER NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES, I SHOULD'VE BEEN ABLE TO SEE THE GIANT PIECES THAT FLY OUT FROM THE ROBOT'S BODY, AND BEEN ABLE TO USE THEM AS PLATFORMS. BUT THE ERROR  WAS PLAYING DIRTY THAT NIGHT. HE KNEW I MADE IT FAR, AND THAT THERE WAS NO CONTINUE CODE FOR THIS LATE IN THE GAME.

SF!sans: THIS WAS MY FIRST TIME TRYING TO BEAT MEGA MAN V. SO, IMAGINE MY CONFUSION WHEN I KEPT GETTING STRUCK BY INVISIBLE OBJECTS. THE PLATFORMS WERE INVISIBLE. BUT THEY APPEARED TO BE STATIONARY ON THE ROBOT. JUST AN ILLUSION. GRAPHICAL DUMMIES MEANT TO FOOL ME AND TO SABOTAGE MY ENTIRE NIGHT'S EFFORT.

SF!sans: MY ONLY OPTION WAS TO RESET THE GAME, BUT I COULDN'T ACCEPT THAT, SO I PUSHED ON. I KEPT JUMPING AT THE AIR BLINDLY. 9 TIMES OUT OF 10, I'D GET HIT. FINALLY, AFTER MUCH PATIENCE, I GOT THE INVISIBLE PATTERN DOWN AND WAS ABLE TO DESTROY THE BOSS. AND THAT WAS A GREAT MOMENT IN GAMING HISTORY.

Error SF!sans: THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE! I NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE IT!

SF!sans: I SHOULD GET A GOLD MEDAL.

SF!sans: Sometimes, games can be unpredictable. Cheetahmen II is a prime example where the whole game is a glitch.

SF!sans: AS ALREADY DESCRIBED IN MY CHEETAHMEN REVIEW, AFTER YOU BEAT THE 4TH LEVEL BOSS, YOU GET STUCK IN LIMBO, SO THERE'S NO WAY TO PLAY THE LAST TWO LEVELS, UNLESS BY A FREAK ACCIDENT. IF A BLUE MOON OCCURS ON FRIDAY THE 13TH AND ALL THE PLANETS ALIGN, THE GAME WILL ACTUALLY START UP ON THE MISSING LEVELS. THE FRUSTRATING PART IS THAT NOW I HAVE NO CHOICE TO PLAY IT. IT'S NOT LIKE THAT THIS IS GONNA HAPPEN AGAIN.

SF!sans: SO IT'S LIKE I GOTTA SIT MY ASS DOWN AND PLAY THE TWO HARDEST TO FIND, MOST MYSTERIOUS LEVELS IN VIDEO GAME HISTORY, IN WHAT'S ALREADY ONE OF THE RAREST GAMES IN EXISTENCE. HAR. WHAT A PRIVILEGE. OH, AND GUESS WHAT, IT SUCKS. YEAH. JUST LIKE THE REST OF THE GAME. BOTH LEVELS ARE CALLED LEVEL 3, SO THAT'S 4 LEVEL 3'S IN TOTAL.

SF!sans: THE FINAL BOSS JUST RUNS BACK AND FORTH, YOU STAND THERE, HIT HIM 'TILL HE'S DEAD, AND AFTER THAT, WHAT HAPPENS? YOU GUESSED IT. NOW, IF I EVER HAVE TO TALK ABOUT ACTION 52 AND CHEETAHMEN AGAIN, I'M GONNA STAPLE MY FUCKING PELVIS  TO THE CEILING.

SF!sans: DOUBLE DRAGON WAS A GAME I PLAYED SO MUCH, I USED TO FIND WEIRD THINGS ALL THE TIME. IF YOU TOUCH THE WALL ON THE FIRST LEVEL, YOU CAN BECOME A HUMAN ELEVATOR. AND IF YOU BRING THE WHIP UP THERE, YOU CAN DO THIS.

*As Billy unleashes the whip, he falls down backwards.*

SF!sans: CALL THEM GLITCHES OR EASTER EGGS, WHETHER INTENTIONAL OR NOT, SOMETIMES THEY CAN BE HELPFUL. DON'T FEEL LIKE FIGHTING THE BOSS AT THE END OF STAGE 2? WELL, DON'T. JUST WALK AWAY. HE DOESN'T EVEN TRY TO FOLLOW YOU AS IF SAYING, "FINE, YOU FUCKING PUSSY!"

SF!sans: TIRED OF FIGHTING THOSE BIG MUSCLE MEN? JUST CLIMB THE WALL. HE'S LIKE, "OH, FUCK THAT! I AIN'T GOING UP THERE!"

*Cut to "Super Mario Bros."*

SF!sans: PROBABLY THE MOST FAMOUS OF ALL VIDEO GAME SECRETS IS THE WARP ZONE IN SUPER MARIO BROS. IT FIRST CAME AS MILD AMUSEMENT WHEN GAMERS FOUND YOU CAN BREAK THE BLOCKS ALL THE WAY UP ON THE CEILING. THEN THE MOMENT OF DISCOVERY CAME WHEN YOU FOUND OUT YOU CAN ACTUALLY GET ABOVE THE CEILING.

SF!sans: WASN'T THAT HILARIOUS TO SEE MARIO RUNNING IN FRONT OF THE SCOREBOARD? BUT THAT WAS ONLY THE BEGINNING. IF YOU WENT PAST THE EXIT, YOU ENDED UP IN A WARP ZONE WHERE YOU CAN SKIP TO DIFFERENT WORLDS. BUT THEN, SOMEBODY WHO HAD WAY TOO MUCH TIME ON THEIR HANDS FOUND OUT THAT IF YOU BREAK SOME OF THE BLOCKS AND PERFORM A VERY SPECIFIC JUMP, YOU CAN ACTUALLY SLIDE THROUGH THE WALL.

SF!sans: THIS STILL TAKES YOU TO THE WARP ZONE JUST THE SAME, UNLESS YOU DON'T WALK TOO FAR. IF YOU JUMP INTO THE FIRST PIPE RIGHT AWAY, IT TAKES YOU TO WORLD -1. WELL, IT'S JUST AN UNDERWATER WORLD THAT REPEATS IN AN ENDLESS LOOP. THERE'S ALSO AN INTERESTING THING KNOWN AS THE DOUBLE DEATH. IF YOU DIE ON A HAMMER BROTHER, TRY PAUSING AND UNPAUSING.

*The death music starts and then repeats.*

SF!sans: LET'S CHECK OUT MARIO 2.  THIS GAME IS SO MUCH FUN. LIFTING ENEMIES OVER YOUR HEAD AND SLAMMING THEM INTO ONE ANOTHER? SO COOL. *grunts* FUCK 'EM UP!

*Toad throws a Tweeter and throws a Shy Guy on top of the first enemy. The Shy Guy hits the Tweeter, and they both fly up and off the screen.*

SF!sans: WHOA! WHAT HAPPENED? LET'S TRY THAT AGAIN.

*Toad does the same thing again, although Toad throws Shy Guy first and Tweeter second, but this time he jumps on top of the Tweeter and Shy Guy, and Toad dies once he touches the top edge of the screen.*

SF!sans: OH!

SF!sans: I LOVE THESE POW BLOCKS. THEY WIPE OUT ALL LIVING CREATURES IN SIGHT. THERE'S THAT CLASSIC TRICK WHERE YOU GO IN THAT LITTLE DARK WORLD, YOU PICK ONE UP, AND WAIT FOR TIME TO RUN OUT. AND NOW, YOU HAVE TWICE THE POW. IT'S DOOMSDAY FOR THIS PLACE.

*Toad throws the POW into the ground, and the log carries Toad up and the log disappears*

SF!sans: OH, NO! IT CHANGES GRAVITY!

*Toad falls to his death*

SF!sans: THE DESTRUCTIVE FORCE OF THE POW BLOCK IS SO INTENSE, THE REST OF THE GAME CAN'T HANDLE IT. TURTLE SHELLS AND DIFFERENT OBJECTS FLY ALL OVER THE PLACE.

*Toad throws the POW block and Toad tries to lift the Bob-Omb, but it disappears because of the POW block.*

SF!sans: WHAT HAPPENED? WHERE'D THE BOB-OMB GO? IT, LIKE, DROPPED THROUGH THE FLOOR. HMMM, I WONDER WHERE THAT BOB-OMB WENT?

*Toad enters the room and once inside, he gets killed by the explosion caused by the Bob-Omb*

SF!sans: AGH! BOB-OMB, BOB-OMB!

SF!sans: YOU KNOW THAT ANNOYING PHANTO FUCKER? THAT FACE THAT CHASES YOU AROUND WHENEVER YOU GET THE KEY? DON'T YOU HATE THAT THING? HAVEN'T YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KILL IT? WELL, HERE'S HOW. YOU COLLECT EXACTLY FOUR CHERRIES, AND FOUR VEGETABLES. GET THE KEY, LET THE BASTARD CHASE YOU SOMEWHERE WHERE YOU CAN GET A TIME STOPPER.

SF!sans: NOW, GET ONE MORE CHERRY TO MAKE THE STAR APPEAR. AND HURRY UP. TIME'S RUNNING OUT!

*Toad gets the star, and eventually kills the Phanto*

SF!sans: UNGH! YE-HEAH! GOT HIM! FINALLY KILLED THAT ASS-FACE!

SF!sans: MOVING ON TO MARIO 3. YEAH, MIGHT AS WELL. ERROR SF!SANS USUALLY STAYS AWAY FROM THIS ONE. YEAH, IT'S A LITTLE TOO CROWDED WITH DEMONIC POSSESSIONS. BUT, NEVERTHELESS, IT HAS A SHARE GLITCHES THAT YOU CAN PERFORM FOR YOURSELF, LIKE SAND DIVING, AND AIR WALKING.

SF!sans: AS FOR SUPER MARIO WORLD, THERE'S A NEAT TRICK HERE TOO. GO TO CHOCOLATE ISLAND 3, GET TO THE GOAL. INSTEAD OF JUMPING UP LIKE NORMAL, YOU RELEASE YOSHI IN MID-AIR. THE SCREEN IS STILL FIXATED ON WHERE YOSHI WAS, AND YOU CAN ONLY SEE MARIO'S LEGS. BUT THAT'S ONLY THE BEGINNING.

*the colors became negative for the world*

SF!sans: WOW. THE STABILITY OF ALL THE COLORS IN THIS WORLD DEPEND ON MARIO AND YOSHI MAKING THAT JUMP CORRECTLY.

SF!sans: FOR SOME REASON, GAMERS ENJOY FINDING THESE KIND OF GLITCHES. MAYBE IT'S BECAUSE WE TAKE PRIDE IN FINDING FLAWS THAT THE PROGRAMMERS OVERLOOKED. OR, MAYBE IT'S JUST BECAUSE, WE LIKE PLAYING OUTSIDE THE RULES TO GO EXPLORING.

SF!sans: WELL, FOR THE BOLDEST OF EXPLORERS, THERE'S MOUNTAIN KING ON THE ATARI 2600. GETTING TIRED OF THE SAME OLD PLATFORMS AND LADDERS? WOULDN'T YOU LIKE TO GO TO A WHOLE NEW HIGHER LEVEL OF GAMEPLAY? LITERALLY? BY PERFORMING A VERY SPECIFIC JUMP, YOU CAN LAUNCH THE CHARACTER HIGHER THAN USUAL. THEN, YOU HAVE TO LAND ON A VERY SPECIFIC SPOT. IF YOU'RE ONE PIXEL OFF, IT DOESN'T WORK. AND SOMETIMES, IT DOESN'T WORK ANYWAY.

SF!sans: YOU HAVE TO KEEP HOLDING THE JOYSTICK IN THE DIRECTION YOU'RE JUMPING, AND RELEASE IT AT THE PRECISE MOMENT.

SF!sans: NOW, WELCOME TO GLITCH HEAVEN. A VAST WORLD WITHOUT LOGIC. A PLACE OF NOT ONLY OF SIGHT AND SOUND, BUT OF MIND.

*the "Twilight Zone" theme plays as the camera zooms in on the character*

SF!sans: BY PLAYING WITH ALL THE SWITCHES ON THE ATARI CONSOLE, YOU CAN CAUSE THE LAYOUT TO CHANGE. YOU CAN ALSO PLUG DIFFERENT CONTROLLERS INTO THE SECOND PORT LIKE THE PADDLES, OR EVEN THE KEYPAD.

SF!sans: YOU CAN EVEN TRY THE COLECOVISION CONTROLLER, OR SEGA GENESIS. IT'S LIKE A MAD SCIENTIST EXPERIMENT.

SF!sans: I TRIED FOR HOURS, AND I STILL HAVEN'T BEEN ABLE TO FIND EVERYTHING. THERE'S BEEN REPORTS OF THE SCREEN FLICKERING, THE CHARACTER CHANGING SIZE, AND STRANGE UNKNOWN OBJECTS.

SF!sans: WILL YOU BE THE NEXT ADVENTURER TO DISCOVER THE UNEXPLORED SECRETS OF GLITCH HEAVEN?

*the character puts his arms up in an "I don't know" kind of way.*

SF!sans: FROM THE OLD DAYS OF GAMING UNTIL THE NEW, IT SEEMS LIKE GAME GLITCHES WILL ALWAYS BE AROUND.

SF!sans: IN ZELDA: TWILIGHT PRINCESS ON WII, I WAS JUMPING AROUND WHEN, SOMEHOW, I GOT STUCK IN A ROOF. UNFORTUNATELY, I DIDN'T HAVE IT RECORDED IN THE ACT, BUT I SURE DID TRY TO RECREATE IT: IT COULDN'T BE DONE.

SF!sans: LET'S PLAY ROCKY ON THE PS2.

*Error SF!sans enters, and laughs evilly*

SF!sans: NOT YOU AGAIN!

*Cut to the match, where the audience has turns into transforming squares.*

SF!sans: WHAT HAPPENED TO THE AUDIENCE?!

Error SF!sans: WELL, YOU SURE PACKED QUITE A CROWD TONIGHT, SANS! YOU SURE DID! STANDING-ROOM ONLY, FULL HOUSE OF GLITCHES! *IMITATES BOXING MATCH RING* IN THIS CORNER, WE HAVE, WEIGHING IN AT ZERO POUNDS AND ZERO OUNCES, NOTHING! IN THIS CORNER, WE'VE GOT MUCH OF THE SAME: NOTHING!

SF!sans: NO...

Error SF!sans: CAN YOU HEAR THAT?

*The line, "Next up is a fight" repeats.*

Error SF!sans: WHAT'S THAT SOUND? HUH? HMM? IT'S A SOUND OF A GLITCH. YOUR GLITCH. ENJOY IT.

*SF!sans keeps hearing the line "Next up is a fight" repeat, until he resets the PS2*

Error SF!sans: NO. NO USE RESETTING. NOT GONNA DO A THING.

SF!sans: YEAH, FUCK YOU. IT'S WORKING NOW.

*As the announcer introduces Spider Rico, he collapses to the floor.*

SF!sans: WHAT WAS THAT?

Error SF!sans: I PUT HIM TO THE FLOOR! THAT'S A GOOD ONE. GOOD ONE, ERROR SF!SANS!

Announcer: ...from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Rocky Balboa!

*Rocky also collapses, only to find his body messed up after he collapses. SF!sans is shocked. Cut to various Rocky boxers collapsing to the floor.*

Error SF!sans: OH, YEAH! I'M GLITCHING! GET DOWN, YOU BAD SELF! GET DOWN! GET DOWN! GET DOWN! WHOO!

SF!sans: WOW, I'VE NEVER SEEN A GAME THIS FUCKED UP.

*SF!sans cleans the game, as we see the Error SF!sans in the disc.*

Error SF!sans: NOT GONNA WORK. NOT GONNA WORK. WHAT TIME IS IT? NOT-GONNA-WORK-O'CLOCK.

*Cut to Rocky with his eyes popped out and a weird mouth.*

Error SF!sans: IN THIS CORNER, WE HAVE BUG-EYED BALBOA!

SF!sans: WHAT HAPPENED TO HIS MOUTH?

Error SF!sans: HIS EYES ARE POPPING OUT! *cut to Spider Rico with his jaw missing* AND IN THAT CORNER, WE'VE GOT SPIDER RICO, WITH NO JAW!

SF!sans: THEY'RE LIKE ZOMBIES. WHAT IS THIS? ROCKY: THE UNDEAD EDITION? YOU ARE REALLY ONE SICK FUCK, YOU KNOW THAT? I'M GONNA TRY CLUBBER LANG.

Error SF!sans: OH, CLUBBER LANG! THAT COULD BE A GOOD ONE. LET'S SEE WHAT ELSE I GOT UP MY SLEEVES. OH, I'M NOT WEARING ANY, BUT FOR MY FINAL SHOWSTOPPER, FEAST YOUR EYES ON THIS!

*Cut to Clubber Lang, in a tall, glitched version. His shoe and boxing gloves are on top of his head and he is walking on one leg. The Error SF!sans laughs, while SF!sans is shocked and drops his controller*

SF!sans: *shocked* IT'S A CLUBBER-FUCK!

*The Error SF!sans folds his hands and shakes them in a celebratory fashion*

Crowd: *Chanting* Clubber! Clubber! Clubber!

*While the crowd is chanting "Clubber!", he falls to the floor and turns into a pile of glitches. Having had enough, SF!sans takes out the disc. He looks at it in anger. The Error SF!sans gives him a piercing stare.*

Error SF!sans: *Hums*

*SF!sans breaks the disc.*

SF!sans: *Sighs in relief* I NEED SOME MILK.

Error SF!sans: OH, YOU WANT TO PLAY DIRTY, DO YA? PING!

*The Error SF!sans turns his milk bottle into pixels.*

Error SF!sans: HOW DO YOU LIKE THAT? SIP ON AN ICE... COOL BOTTLE OF GLITCH. PING!

*The Error SF!sans turns his couch into a bunch of nonsense words.*

Error SF!sans:A NICE COMFY COUCH OF PIXELATED GLITCH! GLITCH! GLITCH! PING! *turns his ceiling into a wave like movement* Ping! *turns his arcade toys into pixelated words* GLITCH! *makes the DK toy's eyes big* GLITCH! *makes the head of the Mario toy huge with multiples coming out* GLITCH GLITCH GLITCH! PING. PING! *Makes his TV and NES collection disappear* PING! PING! GLITCH! GLITCH! GLITCH! GLITCH!  *turns his door into an eye, turns his room into one big glitch, and also SF!sans.*

(this entire fanfic was made just to showcase errorswapfell so enjoy it anyway errortale belongs to @loverofpiggies @askerrorsans )

[thelabyrinthoftime]

Mind The Gap

I wrote a little bit about how I started playing this game as a kid, but didn’t get to finish it until many years later. I first played it when I was 9 and played it occasionally for a year or so. It’s easy to get stuck in the game, especially when you’re a kid. I can remember making it to the other side of the mirror maze for the first time, and quickly realizing that I reached another dead end (a card key was required to advance), and I remember being trapped in the section of labyrinth that’s past the mountain road- it was a while before I found the helmet, and for a long time, I felt like I reached a hopeless dead end with the construction site. I never put the pieces together that the numbers on the wall corresponded to the tile puzzle in the movie lobby. Even then, I’m not sure if I could have figured it out.

Some time later. I’m thinking I quit playing it after I had seen all that I could see with my progress, I remember noticing some other kids playing the game and looking around at everything. It was fun to just “look”. Actually, it’s still fun to play the game just to look around, and I still hunt for images, usually in the form of close ups and weird angles, that I’ve never seen before, but back then, it was the mid 90s, and we all feel in an interesting Goldilocks zone. A few years older, and we would have been adults, and maybe the novelty of the game wouldn’t have been marked with so much heart pounding excitement. As a kid, the imagination does wonders to extend those 8 bit images on the screen. How I wish I could still get THAT excited and lost in my own made up world at the sight of some pretty images. Had we all been born a decade in the other direction, computer games- even computer technology in general, would be taken for granted and there would be no novelty from such a game.

 Anyway, they happened to look at something I never paid attention to- the door to the south was sealed with a large screw. My mind immediately connected it to the ACME screwdriver, and my jaw dropped.

I convinced them to let me take control of the game for a minute while I retrieved the screw driver from the other end of the Labyrinth. I remember the three of us being on the edge of our seats as we bravely opened the large metal door and stepped out on that dark city street:

And before we can venture too far out, we’re struck by lightning! I’m sure we jumped, but it was followed by:

And then it went to the Surreal Maze, a place so bizarre, the game was unable to map it.

It probably took a few days or longer to get past the maze, and I arrived at the Ziggurat, and found a way to open the doors on the sides of the steps up to the top, but when I got inside:

And the game wouldn’t let me continue because it was “too dark”. I reached another dead end, and years later, I found out that this was the kind of dead end that you can’t undo.

And this was as far as I got in the game, and shortly afterward, that was the last time I played that game as a kid.

IT DROVE ME NUTS! What was inside that Ziggurat?

I also wondered about that city street, and the red light that foreshadowed your inability to cross the street. Because of the illustrations on your map, it’s obvious that there’s no where to go, but as a kid, I believed there had to be a way to get into the garage, or enter one of the buildings on the side. I even waited patiently for the light to change color. I wondered about what was across the street, too.

And for a game that had such a WOW! factor for me, it haunted me. I no longer had access to the game past a certain point. I tried to set up a time to purchase that very copy of the game even though I didn’t have a computer, let alone a Mac, that I could play it with. I would be a little more content if I just had that orange and black disc, but it never panned out.

For the next nine years, I would have the occasional dream about what came after the Ziggurat. I’d dream about night time at Revolver Springs, I’d dream about that damn Subway, and that feeling that something strange was about to happen. I remember dreaming about an area where you free fall in that endless sky... which is probably closer to the scenes at the end of the game than I realized, minus the falling part, and I remember dreaming about fantastic two story library with a spiral stair case. I think I was under the impression this was the end of the Labyrinth.

In wanting to have that experience again, I’d think about scenes from my own life, and how it’d be framed on the game screen with the icons at the bottom:

Somewhere in time, I discovered Art Deco. My love for Art Deco is connected to this game. Anytime there’d be a TV show that’d use the stock music heard in the game, I’d stop whatever I was doing and listen. There was a local commercial that used a different cut of the “sad piano” music (pastoral colours). Nickelodeon had access to the same stock library. There was one of those news stories by Linda Ellerbee that used the track, and there’s a classic episode of SpongeBob Squarepats all (six or seven) Labyinrth Heads like myself remember- the Hall Monitor episode where Patrick- alone at night with a walkie-talkie going “WEE WOO... WEE WOO” (a bad police car siren imitation) while he thinks something horrible is stocking him down an empty street.

There was an episode of the show Dream On that used the track, too, but I know nothing about the show, or the episode, or what was going on or why it was used.

My taste in music was no doubt colored by the game as well. I love stock music.

Back to those “in between” years, the internet became a more common thing to see and mess with when I was in middle school, and I’d eventually find the game for sale on eBay, but I had no way to get it... and still no way to play it. HA!

Then in 1999, I found a walk through of the game. This is the very reason I am extremely stubborn about going online for help when I’m stuck in a game. For all the “haunting” the game did, I ruined the game by reading about what followed post-Ziggurat. I learned that you needed to flip the levers in the Museum, and then- MOST IMPORTANTLY, go into the mine room, close the door, and find the lantern hanging, which was required to continue into the innards of the Mayan Ziggurat.

So... fast forward six years later, it was still “heart pounding” to see all these new areas, to see what that gold key unlocked, to see the inside of the Ziggurat, and to see what was on the other side of that strange door in the Cretan Maze. There was certainly more to see, more to do, but it all felt hollow because I knew what to do. Even though I read that walk-through years ago, I committed it to memory.

My first PlayStation game I ever owned (and still have) is RPG MAKER. Great game, great to use as a title maker when making home videos on VHS, and it taught me a lot about game programming. My own game development never got close to completion, save for a really lousy “port” of The Labyrinth of Time I made- this being before I finally got the actual game. I wonder if I still have it on one of my old memory cards. I bet I do.

But... yeah... it was great to experience TLOT again, but it was, at the same time, hollow, because there was nothing left to do but get to the end of the game, there was no idle exploration, no head scratching, just an attempt at closure.

But the game itself isn’t what makes it so special. I’m surprised that fans of vaporwave haven’t discovered this game. As my father might say, they’d be all over it “like stink on shit”. THIS is definitely a game that has...

Ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ. . .

The ray traced images, the 80s stock music, even the fact it’s a forgotten game would just make their heads explode. I’ve always said the game is like an art gallery or museum. One scathing review of the game when it came out suggested that TLOT should have been stripped down to its images and sold as cut rate clip art. Rather than take it as something bad about the game, it should speak to the quality of the art... and the...

Ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ!

I know I shouldn’t expect Bradley W. Schenck to make Labyrinth 2, but... DAMN! I wish he’d revisit TLOT in some form. It doesn’t have to be a game, if he’s sworn off ever working on a video game ever again. Back when I had money, I would have paid a nice sum of money to get large prints of scenes from TLOT, and I would have bought an equally expensive poster frame to hang it up in, too.

Anything from the Surreal Maze would have been amazing, especially if they were lenticular holographic posters. I loved the colors and patterns in the Mirror Maze, the detective’s office... really, only the most mundane settings would fail to get my money, and they were few and far between- like I probably don’t want a poster of a cave wall, or the gray muck that was the passageway to King Minos’s tomb... but if that were it, I’d probably cough up a few bucks anyway. These days are different, though, as far as my money is concerned. If my situation improves, I need to check out some of the writing BWS is doing these days, which feels like an extension of the “retro futuristic” stuff we see in the game.

I wish I was more motivated. I’d love to learn how to make ray traced 3D images, and see if I can emulate the look and feel of the game. I’d love to learn how to code to the point of being able to create a TLOT style game with a similar engine. The game doesn’t seem that complicated, but it’s still beyond my puny abilities to make a game.

Nonetheless, it’s on my bucket list.

[popularkidstuff-blog]

A N T I H E R O

Max Robinson and I are very busy people. I’m mostly preoccupied with papers, deciphering Socrates, you know, fun stuff. While I’m off doing my college thing, Max has other things in store. Things that are mysterious, things that are secretive, things that might shock people, or things that might make you laugh. Whatever they may be, It’s refreshing and comforting to see someone who takes so much pride in their work. In between our messy lives, I got the chance to meet with Max over a Skype conversation. He recounted his day to me, about how he did sound monitoring for a comedy event called “Tinder Live” and saw Rick Astley all in one night. It was quite a contrast to my night of sipping an Arizona green tea and frantically finishing drafts of papers. The conversation carried on, with musings of stand up comedians we like, musicians we’ve played with, etc.  The most important part of this conversation was Max’s main project, A N T I H E R O.

Max is a person of many talents, he has so many ideas that he wants to communicate to the world. I’ve known Max for about 7 or 8 years, so it’s no secret to me he has something up his sleeve. The idea is to get down to the main objective. In this great big world, what exactly is Max trying to accomplish? What is this mysterious character he’s created setting out to do?

The story of A N T I H E R O takes off from humble beginnings. Max’s childhood was a mobile one. He recounted to me the different places he’s lived , including Ohio, New Jersey, and Tennessee. After moving around numerous times due to his parents jobs, his family settled in Huntington, Maryland . I continued to ask him about school and his life in Maryland, which yielded some interesting responses. “ A ton of crazy shit happened in my early days.” Max said to me. “In the third grade, I was really sick, so I missed out on a lot of school.” Max attended catholic school at a young age, but claimed that the overall setting and practices of the institution were “too weird” for him. It felt way too organized and pedantic, even at a young age. As a result of this, he was mostly home schooled until middle school.After that, we talked about his high school days and how he started getting into music. Every artist has to start somewhere, and every beginning is different,(albeit some weirder than others.) I asked Max about his first musical endeavors. With a chuckle and an “oh man” he told me about his first project, modestly titled “Max the band” He described it dismissively, detailing how nothing really came of it. “My friend gave a cracked copy of FL studio(a popular music software), and it was basically just me messing with presets within the program. At the time, I thought it was awesome.” “Max the band” eventually turned into what would be known as “Justabit Majestic,” in which he started to release his music publicly. I remember listening to “Justabit Majestic” regularly back in the days of Myspace,(coincidentally how I met Max in the first place.) and reaching out to him. We became really good friends as we were creating similar styles of music and we had a lot in common.

After several years of putting numerous tracks online and playing local shows, Max eventually graduated from Calvert County High School and attended Middle Tennessee State University to study music business. The days attended at MTSU for Max were a pivotal moment in his life. He eventually abandoned the “Justabit Majestic” moniker and started releasing music under his first name, Maximilian. Between studying hard, and playing shows, Max was steadily creating music and building a name for himself in the Murfreesboro music scene. At one point, Max entered in two sweepstakes to open up for mainstream acts such as “Skrillex” and “Korn,” in which he won and opened for these artists. “It was a surreal experience.” he told me “I just came out on stage[for Korn] and I introduced myself as Justin Bieber; they booed my whole set.”. While that was an unexpected experience, Max didn’t regret it whatsoever. Eventually, Max started to gravitate away from the EDM scene, as he felt it started to become “disingenuous.”. His disillusionment began when he started to notice the oversaturation of artists and so-called “rave culture” that tainted the scene and focused on the imagery rather than the art itself. Along with this, he graduated from MTSU with his BA in music business and moved back to Maryland with his family.

At this point in his life, Max found himself self reflecting. He graduated from college, moved away from the Tennessee back to his parents, and started working some not-so-glamorous jobs,  including valet service. He eventually began working at a nightclub doing sound on late nights. In between all of this, Max felt a bit confused about his future for. I remember sometime at the beginning of 2015, I got back in touch with Max year and half hiatus. I was going through a pretty bad breakup and he was in his post-college slump, so it was nice to rekindle an old friendship. In between talking about the current state of our lives and other weird experiences, we started to talk about something we both loved, producing music. He started telling me about a friend he saw perform in Tennessee who utilized a Super Nintendo to produce some weird projections on-stage. Apparently, this is something called “VJ-ing”, and is very popular among the electronic music crowd. It’s essentially the same as DJing, but there’s a visual aspect that accompanies the auditory experience.The music performed by artist is typically synced visuals that one would associate it with. Max was inspired by this innovation of technology, and while he spoke of it briefly, I could tell he was motivated to create his own virtual soundscape. Fast forward to a year later, Max started performing regularly again, but there was something different about the image. He started posting links to new music he was producing on Facebook, along with weird visuals that seemed to accompany said music. Then out of the blue, there was a significant aesthetic change in which he donned a mask and started posting mysterious videos of himself. This is what would be the beginning of A N T I H E R O.

There are many words you can use to describe A N T I H E R O. At first glance, it seems mysterious, surreal, creepy, mystifying. Fortunately for Max, these are some of things he’s trying to accomplish as an artist. Max has many plans he’s concocting as A N T I H E R O that have yet to be unleashed onto the world. “I’m making my own dope Kool Aid, but I’m not letting anybody drink it yet.”, he jokingly described it. According to Max, A N T I H E R O started out immediately after he moved back with his parents. He found a collection of old VHS and cassette tapes and began incorporating them into his music. From there on, he started to experiment with video editing to develop visuals for his sets. As he worked on his craft, Max decided he needed a name for his artistic endeavors. “Initially I was trying to use the name of some company or start a lawsuit to get it popular,” Max told me, “I wanted to see how much of a big deal I could make something out of so little.” Unfortunately, Max didn’t stir up that kind of controversy, and decided to use an idea that he had in college. From then on, he decided A N T I H E R O was the personality he wanted to create.

The aesthetics and musical style of A N T I H E R O are an eclectic blend of sound and imagery that take listener on a journey to a different dimension. A lot of his music borrows elements of old school “boom bap” style hip hop, very much in the vein of notorious acts such as J Dilla and Flying Lotus. But what separates him from the bunch is the incorporation of a visual aspect. “I made a couple beats on a laptop here and there, and wrote a couple of raps.” Max explained, “But I didn’t want it to become a rap project, but I didn’t want it to become that.” Max then went on to tell me what changed the game was when he had access to different mediums, including VHS and old CRT TVs. Utilizing these resources, he repurposed these platforms and created this magnificent spectacle that he uses to create a sense of wonderment among his audience. Most of the shows that he plays usually contain him on stage, donning the signature A N T I H E R O mask and using his different set pieces to control the environment. He plans on turning his brand into more of a performance piece rather than something just strictly musical. Max told me of a time where there was some discrepancies between him and the promoter of a DIY venue. “Sometimes, if I don’t like the promoter, I’ll usually do things my own way. There are some people who get it, and some people don’t. There's supposed to be an element of irony or cheesiness to it that helps me get my point across.”. The irony of Max’s character is that hes essentially mocking these performers who take their alter persona way too seriously to the point where his character and performance borders on surrealism.  In our conversation, he went on to tell me that he released about seven beat tapes last year and has an album written that has yet to be released. A lot of his music is released via different mediums, including VHS tapes. The main idea is to carry them in excess and leave them in certain places for people to enjoy and hopefully become inspired. Funny enough, the last time Max visited me he gave me a free VHS of his music that I still have yet to listen to, mainly because I don’t have a VCR. You can also find some of his music online for free that he releases regularly. Theres an extreme emphasis on accessibility with Max’s music, as he wants people to enjoy and bond over his work. Max continues to release music and do freelance video work for different clients, as well as himself. Whats inspirational about A N T I H E R O is that it’s a reflection of Max’s personality and work ethic.

Further into the conversation, I asked Max what A N T I H E R O meant to him personally. While this question didn’t pose a concrete answer, the response I got satisfied what I was looking to learn. He started talking about how A N T I H E R O is essentially a “personal business endeavor.” Hes looking to remain completely independent as an artist, but at the same time, help conduct business and build a community. He wants to be able to help provide for the different artist’s he plays with and create a name for himself. I asked him if he would ever consider partnering with a label, to which he responded “Right now, I’m just associated with people. I don’t like labels that are exclusive because it feels like you’re signing your rights as an artist over. Labels are cool for getting clout, but I don’t want to do that right now.” An important thing Max also stated about his personal brand is that he’s trying to make it as personal as possible. For a fair majority of 2016, Max was traveling up and down the east coast trying to promote himself and perform his work wherever he could. “ I really don’t give a fuck about making an impression on the internet anymore. I’ll post a picture here and there and promote a show, but when it comes down to it, I’m elsewhere.” Max is looking to travel more and eventually play with bigger acts, but right now hes still trying to build more of a reputation and perform his character wherever he feels is necessary.

As we talked on and on about his work as an artist, Max and I began to enter a different territory within the conversation. I learned that the ideas of the  A N T I H E R O persona contained a little bit of philosophy within itself. Max started talking about the power of being an underground artist and how that influences others. The world we live in today is hectic, especially considering the current political climate. Max however is hopeful that we all can one day achieve some type of unity. He believes that there needs to be a “shift in lifestyle” and “maturity” in order for there to be some type of social change. These ideas that he holds are connected to A N T I H E R O as a whole. He wants to create a sense of collectivism with this character, and most importantly his art. “We are gonna be the generation that stirs up the racket. A lot of people have been singing the same songs, but I think that we are the people who finally heard it and are learning from it.” He proudly boasted to me.  In conjunction to this, I feel that the number one idea that Max wants people to walk away with is the importance of self fulfillment. “For a while I just wanted to do music strictly, but I slowly learned that you need to be able to support yourself as well.” While doing art is important and a way to learn about yourself, you need to be able to sustain yourself under the thriving economic climate. Max was out of work for a while doing A N T I H E R O, but eventually found a way to sustain himself monetarily.

Max and I joked some more about our current situations and started to wrap things up. Within the next coming weeks, I hadn’t heard from him in a little while. I’d check snapchat every now and again, and I would see him at some obscure location enjoying himself. Where Max goes, he is always having a good time in whatever he does. I feel like I learned a lot from Max in our discussion and he continues to inspire me as an artist. Thats what I love about his personality, its so inviting and encouraging. If I were to name someone who has helped me find my footing as a musician, I owe a lot of that to Max. We’ve both been keeping at this whole music thing together and we’ve both grown a lot. Thats the beauty of it; if you keep at something long enough, you eventually get better. It’s also important to hold onto the people that helped you along the way because everybody’s trying to “make their own special brand of Kool-Aid.” While I’m trying to get through school and get my career off the ground, Max is continuing to build a name for himself.  I know one day hes going to hit it big and find all the success in the world. Theres are plenty of tricks that Max has up his sleeves, he’s waiting for the right time to reveal the grand scheme.