blast-o-rama.

issue 070 • 2023-01-08

music and gaming and nerds, oh my

Hello and Happy Sunday, dear reader!

I write you today a little later than I intended, as I found myself once again on the convention trail, performing with Super Art Fight as a part of the 2023 edition of Super MAGfest, the music and gaming festival which has so kindly hosted us for ages now.

It was a really great, really fun show, with a packed audience, and generally, speaking as a live performer: it’s nice to be getting closer to normal with live shows. It certainly helps when it’s in an environment as welcoming as the MAGfest crowd, and it was underlined with the shockingly good policing — self and other wise — of mask wearing and general wellness. If I can point to anything that says “the kids are alright”, though the “kids” are maybe ten years younger than me, it was this weekend.

fifteen? try one-hundred and thirty-three

While I will refrain from digging too much into the fray of the Kevin McCarthy Speaker vote — frankly, there are smarter people than I to do so — I did this week find myself wanting to investigate what the longest voting period was for the Speaker of the House.

From Oren Oppenheim, ABC News:

The House can conduct no other business until a speaker is chosen. But the current limbo is nowhere near the longest-ever speaker vote, which occurred in 1855 and 1856.

The record for most rounds of votes, according to the Office of the Historian of the House, is the 34th Congress, when Rep. Nathaniel Prentice Banks of Massachusetts was only elected speaker after 133 rounds and some two months of voting.

See? That’s low by 115 rounds. What was that fight over, anyway?

Because of conflict over slavery and immigration, according to the office, the political atmosphere was tense and more than 20 people tried to become speaker.

…oh.

from across the web

Some reads I enjoyed these last few weeks:

• How Bootsy Collins Impostors Pulled Off the Ultimate Music Biz Scam - Rolling Stone
• Secrets of the Christmas Tree Trade - Curbed
• What Is ‘Avatar: The Way of Water’ Like on Shrooms? - Rolling Stone
• How millennials’ “epic bacon” humor became cringe - Vox
• The Cult of Restaurant Dining - The Take Out
• Tired, Filthy, and Overworked: Inside Amazon’s Holiday Rush - Wired
• We’re drowning in old books. But getting rid of them is heartbreaking. - The Washington Post
• Confronting Music’s Mental Health Crisis - Pitchfork
• The Eerie, Influential Afterlife of ‘Ecco the Dolphin’ - The Ringer
• Why ‘Glass Onion’ Is Angrier Than ‘Knives Out’ - The Atlantic
• All I want is one productivity app that can handle everything - The Verge
• Can a Video Game Be Prestige TV? - The New Yorker
• The Reign of the Part-Time Twitch Streamer - Wired
• Three Generations of Blue’s Clues Hosts Are Still Cool With Being Your Best Friend - Vanity Fair
• In 2022, cozy games went from niche to video game fixture - The Verge
• Is Channel 5 The Future of News? - Esquire
• Mastodon—and the pros and cons of moving beyond Big Tech gatekeepers - Ars Technica
• The Alt-Right Manipulated My Comic. Then A.I. Claimed It. - The New York Times
• Clear, the TSA line-skipping company, is a pox on America’s airports - Slate
• The Hidden Cost of Cheap TVs - The Atlantic
• Fans Search for Coveted Film Merch—Five Decades After a Movie’s Release - WSJ
• How The Last of Us Plans to Bring the Zombie Genre Back to Life – The Hollywood Reporter
• How Dave Bautista Made Himself A Movie Star - GQ
• Hell on Two Wheels, Until the E-Bike’s Battery Runs Out - The New Yorker
• Crying: My radical plan to get rid of my worst tendency in 2023 - Slate
• We were all fans of Ken Block - The Verge
• ‘Waffle House Wendy’ Is Viral Hero to Food Service Workers - Rolling Stone

thanks for reading.

See, give me a few weeks, and you get an extra long edition of across the web. Really some gems in there. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Have an awesome week.

-Marty