Product, Place & Show Reviews: Jan. 2023
From That 90s Show, Trigun Stampede, and Onimai; to the cars, hotels, vacuums, and vapes; to the fast food, restaurant meals, and beer that I consumed in January.
When I was putting together the list of things to review in this post, I realized that the number of products which I casually engage with in the span of a month is kind of staggering. I wanted to stick to things which I experienced for the first time this month, or which were completely new (I sought some of these out) in January 2023 with this list. If I reviewed every single thing I used all month (nailclippers, toothbrushes, smoking apparatuses, every day appliances, dishes, etc.) it would quickly get monotonous; I’m not going to tell you that the mediocre plates I used were mediocre, because who gives a shit?
The point of this exercise is more so to comment on products, places and shows which I think it’s possible that you might engage with as well; if I think you might end up in these places and need advice on what to do, or might seek to purchase a hand vacuum and need to know if it’s worth getting the cheapest one (it’s not).
I’m not going to review, for instance, every single unique beer that I drank this month, because I drink something different almost every other day—but I will review things that I returned to, or which I have enough experience with as of this month to recommend.
Depending on whether this seems like a posting style I should keep up going forward, I may bump these up to weekly or bi-weekly posts just to better track all of the stuff that I want to review in a month. In the future I may be more or less thorough, depending on how fun it ends up being to have written the rest of this post. I will not be covering films, music, or video games in this post, as each of those topics will have (or already has) its own post.
2021 Nissan Versa
I started 2023 in the passenger’s seat of a royal blue Nissan Versa on the way from my parents’ house in Huntington Beach back to our hotel in Westminster, during the worst rainstorm that most Southern Californians have ever experienced.
We rented this car for a month when the engine in Bird’s 2010 Prius started rattling, and we were needed for a job that would take us all the way across the US—to work in Texas, California, and New Mexico (in that order). This car was our home base for that entire time—we were expensed hotels for much of the trip but, considering the extreme length of some of the drives we had to make and very short time frames we were left with to complete them, we also slept in the car in short bursts at rest areas and kept a combination of the belongings we were travelling with and an ever-shifting volume of work materials inside of it with us.
Overall, the driving experience with this car was excellent. I spent hours and hours going from 80-100 with no struggle—it felt like the car was encouraging me to go faster, and I had to keep myself from indulging it too much. In particular, the six-hour drive I made from Sacramento to Los Angeles was a speed-demon dream, and probably the last time I will ever drive that fast for that long through that terrain.
As meat-and-potatoes four-door sedans go, the Versa is such a smooth experience that the couple of niggling problems really stand out. Apple carplay had pretty frequent and distracting glitches, which would require turning the audio system off and on a few times, or even sometimes restarting the car entirely to fix; which is very distracting even with a passenger there to try and manage the issues. The technical glitches were by far the biggest problem with the car which would keep me from wanting to buy one as opposed to something with a more trustworthy system (especially as someone who uses the integration of phone and car technology heavily).
I appreciated the sensors that the car uses to warn you about anything in your blind spots. It takes a lot of the second-guessing out of passing people on the interstate. These can be annoying, though, when you’re parking and the sensor starts going off when you still have plenty of leeway—especially because the car will auto-break if it thinks you’re about to hit something (and sometimes you really aren’t). You can de-activate the auto-break and the sounds the sensors make, and I’m sure many will.
Besides that, my biggest complaint is a common one to cars with standard trunks: that the door has these huge metal hinges which plunge down into the space of the trunk and are hard to account for when organizing the space. If you try and close the door, and one of those hinges plunges into something fragile, it’s going to break (or worse yet, if it hits something sturdier than itself, then the hinge itself is going to break).
These complaints are reasons that I wouldn’t own a Versa for a permanent car, and would expect the value of this vehicle to depreciate harder in the future as compared to comparable cars. That said, none of those complaints are so brutal as to consider the driving experience as a negative one overall, or prevent me from renting or driving one of these cars in the future if they were the only thing available. For a cheap and plain car, it was a sporty, whippy drive, and felt sturdy and reliable in the way that you hope for from a Japanese car. Nissan is known for the longevity of their engines, and taking the one we used from forty- to fifty-thousand miles in the span of a month without changing the oil didn’t have any noticeable effect on the car’s performance in the short-term.
I’ve probably driven less-than-ten comparable cars in my lifetime (and this is the first time I’ve reviewed a car ever) so it’s hard for me to determine a baseline for scoring my experience with this car. It was one of the more-fun cars to drive that I’ve had control of, and I felt confident taking it the speed limit through rainstorms (though I was terrified in the sudden snow that hit in Northern Arizona, and left me following in the tracks of semis doing 45 for twenty miles). I got very frustrated with the technology and with the trunk a few times, and so on balance I would consider it an 8/10 experience; but should I find myself more able to give a measured score to the car in the future, I will return to the subject.
Quality Inn & Suites Westminster Seal Beach (Westminster, CA)
We stayed at this hotel for a whole week, starting on December 30th—and on the 31st, Bird financed an Asus ROG laptop (I will review this when it’s paid off), and so had very little desire to leave the hotel and brave the California drivers’ reaction to the rain to spend more money in one of the most expensive cities in America. I took most of New Year’s Day to work off a mild hangover by writing a lot here on Substack while laid up on the hotel bed.
Quality Inn on Westminster Boulevard has its ups and downs. Our boss who booked us the hotel apparently didn’t like it because of their limited breakfast—which I assume is mostly a problem with the presence of sausage instead of bacon, since otherwise it wasn’t an especially abnormal breakfast spread. We started most mornings with waffles from the waffle-maker, sausage patties or links, jellied toast, yogurt, bananas, orange and apple juice, muffins, and syrup. (We usually made too many waffles and I ended up eating them all day.)
There were a couple of major flaws with this hotel for our purposes: it had a fridge, but no microwave or stove, and thus no real way to cook in the room—which is rough, especially on a limited food budget, and with someone who loves to cook, and with an addiction to Bo Burnham’s Microwave Popcorn song. We ended up using our limited budget usually to eat just once after work and occasionally went out to spoil ourselves. The free shampoo and conditioner provided were of very poor quality, although I had no complaints about the bathroom or shower otherwise.
By far the biggest issue with the hotel’s layout is how a lot of it is outside—and since it happened to be raining most of the time we were there, the uncovered bits of walkway on the staircases down from the third floor became very wet and dangerous. Bird fell and busted his ass badly on the stairs going at totally normal speed on the way out one time, and there were various obstructions to our umbrella on the way to the car. On that note, this hotel and its lot are smack in the heart of the city and not exactly protected—and I saw some strange, very illicit-looking activity happening in the parking lot a couple of times.
In most contexts, I think the hotel is gorgeous enough to offset some of the problems I had with it. Typically, it only rains about 30 days out of the year in Southern California (mostly in the Winter time)—and the open layout of the hotel with its huge palm trees certainly looks like more of a tropical escape than you’d think if you stepped outside the hotel for one second. I got some incredibly-choice sun photos to start off my year of sun-posting with while standing on the balcony right outside my room. This hotel is also nearby to Disney World—and we could tell from their attire that some of the families staying there were in town to visit the park.
All in all, I can’t say that I had a negative visit to this hotel—but I also wouldn’t ask to be put up here again. Being in the heart of Westminster is the biggest draw, as there is tons of good food and convenient shopping centers immediately flanking you. We used the Home Depot and the CVS right nearby a few times, and I had wanted to see all of the movies available at the movie theater just next to the hotel, but couldn’t pull Bird off of the laptop and thru the rain to go there. (Instead, I started my Movie Megathread with the first Puss In Boots film that night.) Westminster is dense, tho, and is just one city in the 88-city megastructure that is Los Angeles—and so there are plenty of options when it comes to staying somewhere next to a bunch of cool shit, in order to work all through the LA metro.
Like with the Versa, I haven’t reviewed enough hotel rooms to give a really measured score; although at least I’ve stayed in more than enough of them to know how I feel about this one in comparison to the baseline hotel experience. In that mind, I’d give this one a solid 6/10. It could’ve been a seven if they installed rain protection on the stairs, removed the pointless sidewalk pergola that’s in the way of umbrellas, and added a microwave.
Stone’s Buenaveza Salt & Lime Lager
Bird and I are burgeoning beer geeks who visit breweries and trying new brews on the regular—so if we actually go back to a particular beer, it has to be something really special. On that note, I think we drank about eight cases of Buenaveza in the three weeks we spent in California during our business trip.
Buenaveza is in a league of its own as American lager beers go. Nothing else is even remotely close. It’s possibly the best-tasting beer on the market, and unquestionably the best-tasting beer with less than six-percent alcohol content. It’s like the Golden Monkey of low-alcohol beers—infinitely drinkable. (It’s a lot easier to moderate how drunk you want to be with the Buenaveza, though.)
It’s a crime that Buenaveza hasn’t gone global yet—especially since there’s nowhere to buy it here in Corbin, KY. Stone’s breweries in Richmond, VA and Carlsbad, CA are both very much worth visiting if you happen to be in the area and love beer; they sell huge growlers at low prices, and you can get like a 32oz. can of Buenaveza for like $7.
I give this beer a 10/10. I can’t name another beer that I’m sure I prefer to this one.
POV: Logan Paul Steals Your Wallet
Meat Canyon is one of the most deservedly-popular animators active on YouTube now, combining a MAD-like approach to famous people caricature with a uniquely disturbing horror twist. He’s very good at taking the darkest aspect of a personality and ratcheting up the twisted evil at the heart of that to a supernaturally horrific level. His specialty is really just uncomfortable interactions—and this whole video is one of those. It’s in a first-person perspective, and yet you never get to speak—Logan is always ahead of you, and charismatically threatening you to give him everything you’ve got, one item at a time. It’s a play on the drama surrounding his crypto scam which has a whole expose about it—but that’s just the context for why now was the time to drop this interpretation of Paul’s character holistically. 8/10
Birrieria Guadalajara (Stanton, CA)
We went to this restaurant five times while we stayed in Westminster. Birria is slow-cooked beef braised in adobe spices, and it’s fantastic. Lots of places are dedicated to it specifically in Southern California, and this chain is all over the place with a menu consisting almost entirely of different birria-delivery forms.
Tortas de Birria (the sandwich), including cheese, cilantro and onions on a soft, sweet roll—when dipped into the consommé (the soup the beef is cooked in, which you can order in small or large cups)—is one of the outright best sandwiches that I’ve ever had. Even though I loved everything I tried from here (which is most of the menu), once I had the sandwich, it was hard to go back. That’s also how I’d felt when I first tried the Ramen Birria, which is shockingly good for $11 ramen (tho the noodles are nothing impressive, as you’d expect). Everything here is huge, so it always feels worth the price—especially the $5 Quesabirria, which is loaded as something you’d pay almost twice as much for at a lot of Mexican restaurants.
The tacos and burritos were great, and even the consommé by itself with the beef in it was quite delicious. Everything comes with cilantro, lime, and onion (which is a flavor profile I can never get enough of), and they have three grades of hot sauce—mild, tolerable, and flat-out chili oil (which Bird kept adding to his consommé, and which I made the mistake of eating only once). Eating the huge meal we did in that image above (and washing it down with a lot of Buenaveza) left both of us with outrageous diarrhea and heartburn the whole next morning, so I don’t recommend eating anywhere near as much as we did between two people. They also sell horchata and jamaica drinks, which are both delicious and recommended. Overall a 9/10 place.
Ryobi ONE+ 18V Ion Battery Cordless Handheld Vacuum
We needed a convenient vacuum for our job and I practically begged Bird to spring another $20 for the Black-and-Decker—but it wasn’t obvious enough just how bad this thing was going to be just by looking at it or else I would’ve put my foot down.
This is, bar none, the worst vacuum I have ever used (which wasn’t broken in some way).
It’s obvious you’re expected to buy attachments for this thing as soon as you get sick of trying to pick up anything with the base model. The mouth is too goddamn small, and isn’t long enough for that to give it any convenient reach. It doesn’t have enough suction power to pick up even a small brick of Styrofoam that would fit through its hole—and the exhale vents on the sides will blown whatever you’re trying to pick up away from you if you angle the device wrongly for a millisecond.
The battery life is maybe ten minutes of active use—and it doesn’t charge that quickly. That battery is also unnecessarily heavy, and the whole device has an awkward weight balance that makes it tiring to hold right away. Also, the latch on the intake valve almost never closes all the way, so it’s very easy for things to fall right back out of it—and the way that it opens up for disposal makes it just as easy to spill the contents.
I can only imagine that this vacuum was designed to be deliberately awful; again, with the hopes of trapping you in the infrastructure of buying attachments to try and make it more workable because you don’t want to have to buy another whole vacuum. That’s exactly what we’ll be doing before we have to work with a vacuum again, because this one fucking BLOWS. (If only it sucked more.) 1/10.
Rodeo 39 (Stanton, CA)
Imagine an airport food court, except in which all of the restaurants are really good, and mostly represent Asian food from around the world with an upscale, SoCal twist. It’s slightly pricey, but worth it for the experience and the bustle—especially if you’re into uniquely Californian takes on world cuisine.
This place was recommended to me by Genki Jii-san on Twitter on the first, and we ended up visiting on both the second and third (since the third was Taco Tuesday and there were deals on tacos at the one Mexican place in the building, and also on drinks at the bar if you brought a receipt from there). On the first night, I had a Japanese-style katsu curry and a plum soda, while Bird had a burger from the one meat-centric American-style place. Each of the places we ordered from had an incredibly beautiful, very tiny Japanese woman running the register—and the quotient of very small, very attractive people was about as high as I’ve seen it anywhere on Earth.
I enjoyed the food and the experience, although for the price ($14) I know I could’ve gotten a higher-quality version of the same food somewhere else. The plum soda was generally kind-of weird, and the beers we had at the bar were all unique, but not necessarily impressive.
On the next night, we got a trio of street tacos—including a birria taco, which was quite delicious. I think the birria was actually of higher quality than at Birrieria Guadalajara, although the taco wasn’t as overall impressive as their tortas. We also got a really delicious ube-flavored horchata there, which didn’t really taste like horchata so much as ube milk-tea, but was still very good. We also picked up some kinda-expensive cane sugar drinks on the way out (which are like bubble tea but WAY sweeter, and kind of a bit much, but interesting nonetheless).
Rodeo 39 is recommended highly to weebs in the area; there’s a K-pop store, and also a place that sells cute shit and anime goods in the middle of the thing as well. The longest lines by far were at the pho place, and there was a lot of stuff that had my curiosity enough that I could easily see returning and trying something else. If I was only judging the food and drinks we had, I’d probably give it a 7/10—(and when I consider how hard it was to find parking the first night, I am tempted to give the whole experience the same score)—but I had enough fun here that it’s more like an 8.
West Coast Tap House and Eatery (Westminster Mall, CA)
I had almost forgotten about this place because we went here on a whim based on my desire to see Westminster Mall (where we ended up finding a vending machine full of all the Pokémon Game Boy and GBA games for $10 apiece) and because I got fairly drunk on our margarita flight here—which was overall very delicious (tahin rims on some great strawberry, cucumber, and melon drinks). I had a trio of tacos which all were very good, and Bird had a nice flatbread pizza. The calamari appetizer, even though it was so small we were wary at first, surprised us by being some of the best calamari we’d had ever had, and coming with awesome dipping sauces. It was overall an exceptional experience of what, on paper, sounded like much more average foods, and was not disappointing in spite of being a little bit pricey. 8/10.
Pho Hot (Glendale, CA)
Not too much to say about this place—it was good pho. We’d been to another place towards the end of December with slightly worse broth and slightly more beef, and I couldn’t tell you which one I preferred to eat at—but this one certainly had the more memorable name. We ate here after our last job in California before starting the long trek out-of-state on our way to Albuquerque. It was deeply refreshing as an after-work meal when I was very hungry, but it was hardly the best pho I’ve ever had (which was probably in Braintree, MA, still); and pho tends to fall on a gradient of ‘slightly worse than standard’ to ‘slightly better than standard;’ so really, as long as you hit ‘standard,’ you can still be recommended in my book—and this place hit that. 7/10.
Stiiizy (Barstow, CA)
I have been to a number of marijuana dispensaries around the US (including the first one on the East coast on opening day, as documented by various news sources where I was featured), and none has ever impressed me more than Stiiizy. That would’ve been true even if only for the fact that they have some deal which negates their need to charge you taxes on the weed (which usually jacks the cost up massively more than you’re expecting when buying from dispensaries). On top of that, they have first-timer deals and sales which we took advantage of to get a hell of a lot for the price.
Before weed was fully legal in California, Stiiizy was already making nicotine vapes—and so has continued to make vape machines and cartridges for their weed. We picked up some of the higher-powered ones, and while I think they’re still a little less hard-hitting than I might’ve preferred, they are nonetheless incredibly nice, and have a great metallic heft that makes them easy to keep track of and comfortable to hold. All of the stuff we got there hit nicely, and the woman running the counter was helpful and clearly very knowledgeable. If you’re going to buy weed in a place where Stiiizy is an available option, I can’t recommend another dispensary more highly. 9/10.
Sadie’s of New Mexico (Albuquerque, NM)
I reviewed this excellent restaurant already in my backer-exclusive post, A Day In Albuquerque; but since that’s paywalled, I’ll copy and paste that segment here:
We were recommended some restaurants by the locals, and thus found ourselves eating at the fantastic Sadie’s, which has existed long enough that our waitress in her thirties had been eating there since she was a kid. They have an incredible sweet honey syrup in a squeezer-bottle on the table, and serve actually-hot and very delicious salsa with their tortilla chips.
Many of the menu items were named after people running the store, and so I had Robert’s Special—which I can only describe as the New Mexico equivalent of a Rochesterian garbage plate.
This means two burger patties on a plate of house fries, onions and baked beans, smothered in cheese and mustard. This dish has about a billion variants in Rochester itself—but Sadie’s version is perfected, and better than pretty much anything I’ve had up North (helped by the fact that up in Roc they always blacken their patties for some reason, while down in the Southwest where beef is the main land occupant besides people, it is cooked correctly).
I would like to revisit this restaurant to give them the 10/10 I’m sure they deserve after knowing more of the menu, but for now I’ll give it a strong 9/10.
OK Cider (Oklahoma City, OK)
After our last job in Albuquerque, we pretty much made a beeline back to Kentucky (about 20 hours of driving), with stops at breweries in major cities and at rest areas along the way to relax a bit and have some naps. Our best and most-serious stop was in Oklahoma City at OK Cider—which convinced me very quickly of my love for this city. It’s a bar dedicated purely to the sale of dry cider, with a rotating, experimental menu of flavor integrations, a membership program, and a bunch of cool merch, as well as some hilarious regular customers and a very kind bartender.
We bought the $51 mega-flight of 16 4-ounce cider pours, which was extremely worthwhile if you love to taste different cider flavors. Bird and I agreed on which ones were the best (the coffee-based ones as well as the non-alcoholic cider), although some one of us favored and the other was uninterested in, and a few neither of us liked (I really liked half, loved maybe four). We had a great time hanging out here a couple of hours and holding in all that cider, left with merch, and will almost-certainly be back when we are in OKC again. Lovely place, 9/10 experience.
Braum’s (Oklahoma City, OK)
If you know, you know. Braum’s is to Oklahoma as In-n-Out is to California—except that I’d take Braum’s any day of the week over most other fast-food places, and over just about any other place that sells any kind of ice cream.
What I mean with the In-n-Out comparison (Wawa is also apt), is that Braum’s has not expanded any farther than what they can deliver to from their farms within a tiny window of freshness. In the places it exists, it is everywhere (there’s one right off of practically every exit of the sprawling Oklahoma City); but as soon as you leave the radius that stretches from OKC into Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas, the establishment disappears.
I am not the world’s biggest ice cream eater. I usually order vanilla cones, and I watched my brother consume a hell of a lot more of the stuff (in lots of more exciting flavors) than I did growing up. I became a fiend for Braum’s ice cream from the first time I tried it. This stuff just hits different—it’s so creamy, so rich and flavorful—and so fresh in a way that ice cream almost never noticeably is. All of that applies to their beef and cheese, too—and I think they have one of the best straightforward cheeseburgers that exists at its (very low) price point.
We went inside of one for the first time on this trip, to discover that it contains a miniature grocery store, in which they sell the beef and ice cream—and I can imagine going there basically all the time living in OKC. Even the employees seemed happy at the one we visited. Definitely a 9/10 fast food experience.
Bearded Iris Brewery (Nashville, TN)
Between Oklahoma City and Nashville, Tennessee, we only stopped briefly at the visitor’s center in Memphis near the Bass Pro Shops pyramid.
Nashville is a good, if pretty average city, although nowhere near as inviting as OKC. We stopped for another brewery and this one turned out to be a very loosely laid-out sports bar, just barely roped-off from the place where the beer is brewed. They were blasting football, which most of the bar was excited about. The bartender basically didn’t know how to talk to us when he realized we didn’t know anything about sports.
We tried a number of beers, and some of them were quite good; we even took some six-packs home; but I didn’t enjoy the experience of being there too much, thanks to all the noise I couldn’t parse and not really feeling comfortable in the environment. I’d still give this like a 5-6/10 experience just for seeing a new brewery and getting some solid beers, but I would not go back here to hang out and drink.
Joyland (Nashville, TN)
This fast food restaurant fascinated us with its title and menu items. It’s a one-of-a-kind place from a guy who owns a few different restaurants in the city. A little expensive for fast food, but unbelievably good. I had a “joystick” (just chicken on a stick), which was the best-tasting fast-food chicken I can remember ever eating. Bird got the "Crustburger,” which he considered the “final form of the smashburger” and literally the best burger he’s ever had.
This is coming from someone who—for my money—makes the best burgers that I’ve ever had, and who has eaten plenty of great burgers all over America. This is very serious praise coming from Bird. He ate two of them in a row.
The only negative I can find is that their Joybeer is the most generic-tasting beer imaginable—but I could still see this place earning a 10 if I tried another menu item as good as those we had (Joystick is a returned limited-time item, and so it may not even be there next time). For now, a definite 9/10.
Kellog’s Pandora Flakes
After the Odinsleep we fell into upon making it back to Corbin, we retired the rental car (leaving us carless for the next three weeks (and also broke, since we don’t work again ‘til next month)); and were taken to the grocery store to buy what we needed to in order to bunker down for the rest of the month and play video games, watch movies, listen to music, and write blog posts.
I feel little need to run through everything that we picked up from Aldi and Wal-Mart that day, as I’m sure you’re plenty familiar—but there’s one (assumably) limited-time item which I have to highlight, as it took me by surprise both on-sight and on-taste: that being the Avatar 2: The Way of Water tie-in cereal, Kellog’s Pandora Flakes.
I haven’t seen the new Avatar yet, but I was excited by this cereal not only because of the snazzy box art with Tony the Tiger in a blue ascot, but also because it is blueberry flavored—which is my favorite flavor in snack foods and sweets, and uncommon to cereal (unless you add your own fresh blueberries). I was pleasantly surprised by the blueberry flavor and by the interesting texture of the blue orbs themselves. They look like Crunchberries (so that’s what you’re expecting), but they taste like they’ve been infused in some way with marshmallows (as they call the little sugar cubes in cereal).
The addition is subtle enough that it doesn’t bother someone like me who doesn’t enjoy straight marshmallows in cereal, and I think it creates a more-interesting flavor than a Crunchberry, that weirdly well-captures the “mysterious” feeling of Avatar’s world. Yeah, the cereal weirdly fucking works thematically. It’s by far my favorite version of Frosted Flakes I’ve had (an upper-mid-tier cereal imo), and good enough to probably stay my main cereal-of-choice while it’s in stores (tho it’s kinda pricey). 8.
The Cure: Curiosa, 4:13 Dream and Songs of a Lost World
I consumed a ridiculous amount of YouTube on top of everything else in mainstream media that I’ve talked about (or will talk about) on this blog—and most of it just isn’t really worth mentioning. I mostly watch all of the videos from channels that I am subscribed to—and while many of those are good, I’d prefer to make note of just the most standout or personally-meaningful videos that I watch for these posts.
In this case, we have the ending of a series a years in the making—Chris Ott’s complete perspective on the history of The Cure, by way of examining each album and the era of the band’s history which it sits at the center of, and the place that singer-songwriter Robert Smith was at emotionally at the time.
Chris Ott is my favorite music journalist, and one of my favorite people to hear speak in general. He is more eloquent unscripted than I am in writing and has a deep history in music journalism and very sure idea what he’s talking about—especially when it comes to his very favorite band and lifetime obsession, The Cure.
I am by no means a Cure aficionado—I had a phase with Disintegration only after Ott talked about it, and before that really just liked Killing An Arab from the hits collection my mom had (herself more of a Smiths fan). I had no idea how impactful or important they are until Chris started covering them from the start of their career in this podcast series released to YouTube—in the same style of the podcasts he used to make which were a huge inspiration on me (especially the “old-ass anime cast.”)
If you are interested in The Cure at all, or—like me—are interested to hear someone passionate relate the history of something they care about (and which has cultural importance directly over the kinds of things that I consume to this day), then I can’t recommend Chris Ott’s series highly enough.
That 90s Show
Most of the time that passed between our getting home from the cross-country trip and getting a new car is a blur of trolling through every new musical release of the year, catching up on 2022 films, writing about everything I did in the first week of 2023, and consuming content online as I normally would.
On the 19th, That 90s Show hit Netflix, and my first exposure to it was Former Network Executive Call Me Chato (whom I watch to know what’s on the cutting edge of old-fuck culture) confirming that he would’ve greenlit the show if it was pitched to him (in sort of a tacit recommendation).
I watched a good amount of That 70s Show in the mid-2000s and I am a 90s kid—and so when Bird threw the show on and thrust it in front of me, I hoped it would be watchable, and was pleasantly surprised.
The plot of the show is that the main characters of the original are leaving their teen daughter with her grandparents in the old house, to basically live out the 90s version of the exact same lifestyle as the previous generation of teens did. Having the grandparents around playing the same characters massively grounds the show in its nostalgia—and the actors are pouring their hearts and souls into keeping those characters alive and well as we remember. It’s actually pretty amazing how much neither of them seems to have changed as people in the time since the old show (which I can say least about Mila Kunis. Wow, I didn’t see that coming, either).
The daughter is adorable; her friends are kind-of uneven in their likability, but growing on me as they get fleshed out with more focus in their own episodes as the show goes on and the actors figure out exactly what their roles are meant to contribute to the charisma of the group. It stays true to old-school TV tropes and doesn’t over-modernize (since it’s set in the 90s), but also presents the time period a little bit more rosily than I remember it. (All of the references are from the last three years of the 90s, too, so idk how much time the show intends to cover overall).
This is a show I could easily have imagined hating entirely. That 80s Show was an infamous bomb, and I am almost never excited about reboots or way-later sequels until they actually turn out good; and this one came out better than almost anything else that’s tried to bring back the old actors and repeat all the same formulas again. I don’t know if I’d watch infinite episodes of it (I’ve seen 4), or how long it can last in the Netflix ecosystem, but I think it’s shockingly watchable and not half-bad. 7/10.
The Wrigley (Corbin, KY)
Should you happen to find yourself in Corbin, Kentucky (perhaps to visit the Col. Sanders Museum at the Birthplace of KFC), instead of actually eating at KFC (ew), consider my favorite restaurant downtown: The Wrigley. It’s a queer-owned bar and restaurant with a hipster aesthetic and a membership system that assigns you a cool bespoke mug, and new special dishes and beers every week. Their head chef knows a lot of world food, and comes up with some interesting and inspired fusions.
The Wrigley has one of those small menus where it’s hard to go wrong with any of the choices—although I’ve often felt I should’ve sprung for one of the fancier things on there than whatever I ended up getting. Their burgers and chicken sandwiches, while very good, are not the best on-offer in the range of places I tend to go.
On a recent date with Bird, I ordered a chicken parmesan sandwich, and started eating too quickly, scalding my mouth. The food was delicious, but the whole experience was kind of tinged by the pain in the roof of my mouth, and made it hard to enjoy the breaded chicken in the sandwich. I also hadn’t really thought about the fact that I was ordering both a sandwich with marinara sauce on it and a tomato bisque soup—which was delicious, but also meant this was a tomato-extreme meal.
I’d still consider what I ate an 8/10 meal on the taste end; and the beers I had there were delicious as well (Bird had like 4 different cocktails and loved a couple), but I feel as though a better experience is hiding in that menu, and that the place really should deserve a 9. You have to order at the counter, though, which feels weird because you kinda have to stand behind people sitting at the bar or table to read the chalkboard menus, and that awkwardness keeps me feeling okay with the 8.
Trigun Stampede (eps 1-3)
I was a big fan of the original TV adaptation back in 2004, and I only ever read a couple of volumes of the manga—neither of which is very much like this adaptation beyond the broad strokes—which I think is a great thing. It probably could’ve been even more-different than essentially a retread of the plot and themes; but the Trigun lineage is kind of disjointed and weird. The old anime, while beloved, is just 26 episodes of mostly-filler adapting like 2 volumes of a manga which would continue another 20 years. Doing a sort of “FMA Brotherhood” adaptation has always made sense as an idea—and Trigun’s ability to cold-resurrect after a decade or so was proven last-decade, when the 2010s kicked off with essentially a fanservice filler movie for what was already then a twelve-year-old anime.
It made sense to change the story enough that people would know right away that it wasn’t going to tell the same story as the old show. Millie isn’t even in it so far—there’s a new older guy mentoring Meryl, and the two of them are journalists instead of insurance agents (which is less interesting, but makes more sense for why Meryl is so driven to her job—so on balance I don’t mind it).
Stampede opens with a backstory scene that doesn’t come until more than halfway into the old show, and gives Vash a totally different, much more modern design. I think he loses a little bit of the dorky charm he used to have, by looking actually-cool all the time instead of usually-dorky and sometimes-handsome, but he’s kind of a different character this time all-around.
I think Trigun is an interesting IP, in that the original show is both very good and full of cool ideas, but also hasn’t aged well in many ways. It takes a while to reveal any of its depth or that it has an overarching plot that’s going to make you feel something later, and probably wouldn’t have the big audience it eventually did if people weren’t catching onto the show all over the course of its weekly run on Adult Swim back in the day (which forced you all the way to the show’s end). I know that I could rewatch Trigun and probably enjoy it as a big nostalgia trip; but I also know it’s hard to get someone to watch it newly in 2023—especially if they aren’t exposed to anime from the time period.
Stampede really does feel like a “fresh, modern take” on Trigun, with a much-quicker pace, more instantly-heroic characters, and a way clearer central plot (with a huge villain reveal in just the third episode and some explosive gore to top it off).
It helps the CGi animation actually looks great. I hope I’m not the first to say it; I know a lot of people still hate to see CG in anime—especially nostalgia properties. I have been in love with CG anime for a while—and in recent years, some CG animation has been the most aesthetically-awesome stuff in the medium (Spider-Verse and Arcane from the West, Promare and Land of the Lustrous in anime).
I don’t think this Trigun show is quite THAT impressive. It is very effective with its visuals and excels in the big, showy action sequences. Sometimes during dialog, there are weird moments in which the proverbial camera is placed at a wide angle on a room full of characters standing at different planes, in a way which I understand might make dramatic sense in a live-action film, but doesn’t click with the CG animation when characters are just a bit too-stiff to stand within a static frame for too long with their whole body visible. Little directing gripes aside, it’s a fun-to-watch show that I hope becomes emotionally investing and narratively intriguing as it goes. Right now, it’s a strong 7/10.
Onimai (eps 1-3)
I asked my YouTube subscribers about which currently-airing anime besides Trigun I should check out and potentially talk about on-stream sometime. As many people suggested Onimai as anything else combined—so I gave it a shot with Bird. I was surprised by how much he enjoyed the show—but then he’s almost never really watched a slice-of-life show, while I’ve seen practically all of them—and I don’t think this one is very different from much of what Doga Kobo or Kyoto Animation have been doing for almost two decades; except in that it makes text out of certain subtextual implications of the genre—especially as applied to people like me.
This show is just like, “hey, if you’ve covered your room in anime girls and won’t go outside, you’d probably be better off waking up in the body of a middle school girl tomorrow;” and then just fulfils that wish; which, depending on who you’re talking to in the audience, is probably either a curiosity or a full-on obsession.
I think I would’ve been completely in love with this show for most of my pre-transition life, because it’s pretty explicitly close to what I was fantasizing about in the period of time before I realized that I couldn’t actually grow up without just embracing myself as an ADULT woman.
Onimai is cute and innocent enough. People keep saying it’s “unfortunately full of fanservice” and stuff like that, but I don’t see it. There’s nudity and sexuality undercurrent in the interactions, but it’s not really explicit or portrayed in a titilating way. Obviously people will jack off to this, but that’s true of literally everything.
I think this show is more-so trying to be as frank about the circumstances of being an adult man that wakes up in a middle school girl’s body (at the doing of his mad scientist sister) and examine how life changes for that person as they see the world in another light, based on the way that they feel about their circumstances and are treated differently by other people. I think it’s pretty good young-adult feel-good comedy fiction about gender identity, with only whiffs of otaku stink, that a bona-fid otaku like me considers like eating mild salsa. Light 7/10 if I am being generous—though I don’t feel compelled to watch more of the show unless I hear that something really interesting happens later that people want me to see.
Mammoth Cave National Park (Kentucky)
At the start of this post, I mentioned where I had been at the start of 2023; but three hours prior to that, my family had been celebrating the New Year on a video call with my brothers who both live on the East Coast (three hours ahead by time zone)—and thus I had then made a resolution to visit a National Park every month in January.
I hadn’t predicted how long it would take for us to be able to acquire a new car (I might be ready to review that by the end of next month), and so by the time we did, we made haste to get it hike-ready and head to the nearby Mammoth Cave—which we’ve been curious about for half a year now—for at least a night.
We arrived at Houchin Ferry Campgrounds before anyone else at around 4PM (the ten spots were almost all full by 7PM) and got to hang out beside a calm river, and then start pitching our tent and cooking dinner.
While the campground was very pretty, it had only porta potties for bathrooms, and the campsites were not that far apart—which meant it didn’t stay quiet for very long when everyone started showing up. We anticipated rain from 6PM to 9AM, but got it in bursts only for maybe half of that—which at least was a fun thing to listen to in the tent. We had a great time, but more so because of what we brought (including one-another) than it being an especially worthwhile campground—especially since it’s totally secluded by a long road without any hiking trailheads nearby.
In the morning, we went to the entrance of the Salt Cave which had been discovered and become (for a while) the tomb of legendary cave explorer Floyd Collins—who had previously discovered a connection between the Crystal Cave that he owned and the rest of the Mammoth Cave tourist attraction, proving it the longest cave system known in the world. We then went to visit his family grave and the cute little old church openly accessible by that graveyard before heading up to the Visitor’s Center.
Mammoth Cave has a big Visitor’s Center and gift shop (where we picked up some stickers, Lego campers, a hat, and a cute keychain sack doll called Parker), and we got a personal talk with a passionate young park ranger going deeper into Floyd’s history (he had also seen the Internet Historian video which made Bird interested in this place and the story of Floyd; the most important detail it left out of that was Floyd’s loyal dog waiting at the entrance of the cave). Everyone working there seemed helpful, nice, and really into the caves.
We ended up taking a 2-hour tour of the Gothic Avenue section of the cave, which involved in-depth historical explanations mostly of all the weird stuff that tourists used to do and leave inside of the cave before the National Parks service took over and started a preservation effort of them in the state they’d reached as of 1941. Sections of the cave are totally coated in signatures that people burnt into the ceiling with candles (crazy patient), or full of rock piles where people paid a penny to pick up rocks (something the guides were supposed to be doing anyways) and pile them as high as they cared to, before signing them in the name of their origin state. It’s a cave full of stories; dramatically lit for good photo ops, and led by a charismatic ranger who did a good job corralling our huge tour group through the dark enclosure.
I filmed a considerable amount of what we did at Mammoth Cave, so there should be at least 2 videos to come from the experience later on the Picnic Adventure channel whenever I have time to edit and release them. Having spent only a day there, I couldn’t recommend Mammoth Cave highly enough. Being inside the cave is too unique and too awesome an experience—especially with all of the weird history behind it as a spot that’s been drawing tourism to the middle of nowhere for 200 years. I want to see way, way more of Mammoth Cave, and I would love to take the unguided tours of as much of it as they let me. Caves rule. 10/10 place.
Burger King “Mexican” Chicken Sandwich
As the end of the month drew near I became obsessed with finding out what all I could review which was timely to the current month. In particular, anything consumable—media, food, and drink—I wanted to know about—especially if it’s widespread and available to me where I live.
Turns out, tons of new shit hit fast food restaurants this month; a lot more than I was aiming to try since I don’t want to spend that much on what is usually mediocre food.
Having said that, I was still chomping at the bit to try SOME of the good-sounding new menu items—and there was a Burger King on the way back home (in Columbia, Kentucky). Bird got a quad BK Stacker (returning item) and eight mozarella sticks (which were excellent, and they gave us like 12), and I could get the “Mexican” Chicken Sandwich. (They were out of the “original chicken sandwich” buns, and so put it on a Whopper bun, which I think is probably for the better.)
Unsurprisingly, the sandwich did not in any way taste Mexican; but it was not bad. I like that BK’s crispy, thin patties don’t have any errant chunks—and have delicious breading. The sauce on here tastes like the cheese sauce that Taco Bell puts on things like their quesadilla, crossed with an aioli—and was pretty alright. There was a bunch of fried Jalapeno on there, but it had no spicy kick whatsoever, and instead was more like substitute fried onions or pickles—just meant to give more texture and a small amount of extra flavor to the sandwich. I enjoyed eating it, and I could see eating it again, but I couldn’t recommend it to anyone who didn’t already think they were going to like it anyways. 6/10.
BRYCE: Episode One
Loved this exactly as I expected to based on the trailers from the last few months. All of Brandon’s videos are manic, unhinged madness, with a cutting psychological (often psychosexual) edge, an unique take on pop culture events, and intricate lore that keeps building into something fuller as the years go on; never more so than in this deep-dive through the life story of one of his most lasting characters.
In spite of the over-the-top, outlandish dialog and frequently-fantastical presentation of events, Brandon (and Hilary Shepard, who plays Bryce’s mom and is often the main supporting cast in Brandon’s videos) throws himself into each character with such conviction and energy that he seems to completely become them—no matter how incomprehensible and bizarre their motivations. That he comes down from these breakneck performances into a very mild-seeming, reasonable person just leaves you wondering where it’s all coming from and just how far it has potential to go. I can’t name an internet creator whose trajectory I am more interested to watch unfold, as the years go on and his craft expands.
I realize this reads more like a review of Brandon Rogers than of Bryce, but it really is sort of like a mega-episode of the show that his content always has been—and even still is only the first part of a whole mini-series detailing the life of this character all the way from childhood to middle age. It’s presented like a goofy biopic (with the funniest takes possible on “period appropriate” ware and behavior). You’ve seen stories like this before, but never with this energy and sense of humor.
Wendy’s Italian Mozzarella Chicken Sandwich
I wonder if these fast food chains are trying to piss off ethnic groups on purpose by citing them as inspirations for these cultural hodgepodges. Anyways, this one was a disappointment as compared to the Burger King sandwich, especially considering that Wendy’s has some of my favorite fast food chicken sandwiches of all time (and the Pretzel Pub Chicken is back in rotation RIGHT NOW!!)
I am usually wary about getting anything with marinara sauce on it from anywhere that uses heat lamps on their food, because chances are it fucking sucks and tastes like thin tomato paste instead of marinara sauce; and this is one of those cases.
Bad sauce. Under that, there’s a whole-ass patty of fried mozzarella cheese. I think that thing by itself probably would’ve been pretty good—but the flavor doesn’t really coalesce with the chicken in the same way that melted cheese does on top of it with other sandwiches. (And it’s not even necessary on chicken sandwiches anyways).
You will notice in the picture that there also seems to be melted mozza directly on the chicken, too—but this just puts the whole thing way over-the-top on the cheesiness scale. It’s not even that it feels like eating too much cheese, but just that the sandwich tastes almost exclusively of mozzarella cheese on the whole. Just eat a cheese stick!!
I’m not going to say that I hated this sandwich, but there’s no way I’d get it again. The Wendy’s chicken sandwich is even more defined by its great toppings than I’d realized; and while the cheese brick is fine on its own, it doesn’t compliment their chicken. (Bird got the beef version and said it was okay, but still better than the chicken one when I let him try it). The marinara sauce is a huge letdown. 4/10.
And that’s everything I could remember from 2023 that I had something to write about! I expected to do a single paragraph for each of these—but once I got rolling, I had a lot more fun than I expected—so I hope that I can find time to continue this as a series. I know now that I don’t need to go overboard making month-specific things happen, either—clearly more than enough is reviewable in a month for me as-is.
In case you missed them (and they are indeed out yet), here is also:
My reviews of every film I watched in January.
My recommendations of all the music that I enjoyed in January.
My thoughts on the incredibly weird direction of music this month.
A summary of my day in Albequerque.
Thanks for continuing to read my blog in February!