Weekly Reader

Sacrilege also fully embraced the Discharge "d-beat" sound (although it wasn't referred to by that name yet), which no one in New York was playing, and only a handful of American bands (almost all in California) were playing at all at that time. Besides Discharge, influences included other English bands like Disorder and Chaos UK, Scandinavian bands like Anti-Cimex and Appendix, but very few American influences (such as Crucifix). Sacrilege also kept their lyrics serious, leaving behind the sometimes humorous and bad taste songs that Hellbent had occasionally played, as well as the more fun-oriented covers. Although other bands of the time in the New York area had extreme looks (Misfits, Genocide), or anarchist or left wing lyrics (Reagan Youth, False Prophets), no one had combined the extreme punk look, serious political lyrics, and d-beat European punk sound previously in New York. With Clay and Tim being NYC newcomers, the band were considered oddities by some, although Vic also being in Reagan Youth and Adam's past with Murphy's Law and Agnostic Front kept them from being complete outsiders.

It’s not fair to judge a writer by her juvenilia. But, as she developed into a keenly self-aware writer, the habit of bigotry persisted in her letters—in jokes, asides, and a steady use of the word “nigger.” For half a century, the particulars have been held close by executors, smoothed over by editors, and justified by exegetes, as if to save O’Connor from herself. Unlike, say, the struggle over Philip Larkin, whose coarse, chauvinistic letters are at odds with his lapidary poetry, it’s not about protecting the work from the author; it’s about protecting an author who is now as beloved as her stories.

What does that look like? For starters, more marginalized people need to be brought into promotions across the board. Not just as performers, but as bookers, producers, announcers, and so on. Promoters and fans need to come to terms on a real, actionable code of conduct and accept that whatever minor losses there are at the gate due to that code will be worth it for a safer, less hostile working environment for marginalized performers, and a better time for fans. Promoters and wrestlers need to listen and act of their own volition when someone in the industry is outed, and not just when it comes to future bookings. If an abuser’s work is in your video archive, remove them. When the commentary on women’s matches makes your performers uncomfortable, re-record and re-release them. When you’re booking someone new to your promotion, don’t just do it based on a GIF or a match, do some research, make sure their reputation is good, and move forward in good faith. This is difficult work, but it is necessary if wrestling is to survive as a form of entertainment and a kind of labor. A better professional wrestling is possible—I wouldn’t have dedicated so much of my life to it if that wasn’t the case. How bad do we want it? What are we willing to do to get there? Those are the questions. I hope we’re able to answer them together.

Since 2001 the terrorist has come to be imagined almost exclusively as Muslim or Arab. This confusingly ill-defined minority has been made the domestic subject of the War on Terror and is subject to its devices, including indefinite detention, the No Fly List, extraordinary rendition, and extrajudicial killing. For example, in 2011, President Barack Obama ordered a targeted drone strike to kill sixteen-year-old Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen from birth, while he was in Yemen. Leading up to this act of preemptive state violence, the teenager was not charged with—nor even suspected of—having committed or supported any acts of terrorism. But his father, Anwar Al-Awlaki, was charged with providing material support to terrorists and killed two weeks earlier in a targeted drone strike. The young Al-Awlaki was the second (his father the first) extrajudicial killing of a U.S. citizen via drone strike. Violence against children is common practice in the house that counterterrorism built: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was also a creation of the post-9/11 Department of Homeland Security, and so the migrant children being abused and dying in U.S. custody today are also victims of the furious rush of resources and energy into fighting terrorism.

These fellow enthusiasts would forever remain invisible; all I ever had was a near-complete save file assuring me that someone else out there cared about Secret of Mana, Breath of Fire 2, Final Fantasy 6, and other classic RPGs that my peers knew little about. Their names ranged from mundane "BEN's" and "JOE's" to whatever curse words were filthy enough to spell out with five or six letters. "FUCKER," wherever you are, I appreciated your Dragon Warrior 3 save file and I hope you're doing well.

Whatever my patron was named, my routine was to get as far into my rented RPG as possible before my time was up. When the deadline loomed, I'd latch onto the hero of the first save file and eliminate the Mana Beast, Dark Gaia, or whomever else I was up against. It was a good strategy that served me well. Yes, I could re-rent an RPG and try to power through it myself, but that wasn't always possible since my brothers and I took turns renting games from week to week. My older brother gravitated toward hockey and basketball games. He didn't care if I had the Mana Beast on the ropes and needed just a little more time to polish it off.

Weekly Reader

A person without health insurance can still catch the coronavirus, infect others, and get dangerously or fatally sick, without knowing that they are supposed to be able to go to the doctor about that for free: The Department of Health and Human Services reported last week that it has paid out far fewer claims for Covid-19 testing and treatment for the uninsured than it expected. Everything about the health care system is complicated, hostile, and potentially ruinous for people without health insurance, so it’s not surprising if a lot of people couldn’t shake that experience off within a matter of weeks and months. It’s true that our health care system was not designed to handle a pandemic, but it would be more accurate to say that our system was not designed to provide health care to people en masse, whether that is regular checkups or chemotherapy.

But Debs directed his critique of Christian churches not at their faith in the Gospels, but their failure to follow them. We don’t have to wonder how Debs would reconcile his affection for Jesus’ message with the so-called prosperity Gospel embraced explicitly, and more often implicitly, by so many affluent Christians today. “(T)he dead Christ was metamorphosed from the master revolutionist who was ignominiously slain, a martyr to his class, into the pious abstraction, the harmless theological divinity who died that John Pierpont Morgan could ‘be washed in the blood of the lamb,’” Debs wrote.

LF: To me, this is a feature, not a bug. Bill Maher has been joking about “pedophile island” on television for 20 years; I spoke with someone recently who claimed that everyone on the Upper East Side in society circles referred to Jeffrey’s townhouse as “the veal farm” (a particularly gruesome nickname). However, I think that this is actually typical of these kinds of stories. Part of the fact that it was out in the open, at least partially, is what allowed it to go on for so long.

People get up in arms and say, “I can’t believe people didn’t say anything.” Who was going to say something? Donald Trump? Bill Clinton? Come on now. This is fundamentally not how power works. You cannot appeal to some unnamed, fantastical authority. This is the case with everything: you cannot appeal to an authority when the authority itself is implicated and indeed incentivized to keep this crime — whether it is this specifically or, as we talk about on the podcast, more generally — going. This is what power exerting power looks like.

Inside Out was considered little more than a side project for Zack de la Rocha (yes, of Rage against the Machine), and Rob Haworth, the two guitarists in the Orange County-based Hard Stance. When they opened a show consisting of local bands in the fall of 1988, Hard Stance drummer Alex Barreto was impressed with the way de la Rocha took naturally to being a frontman, after years of being strapped to a guitar. “There was something really sincere in his eyes when he was singing,” Barreto says. “I was really intrigued by that.” Barreto managed to steal the role of Inside Out’s drummer away from Half Off’s Vadim Rubin, and hounded de la Rocha to pursue the band further. But de la Rocha was afraid that giving more attention to Inside Out would cause rifts within Hard Stance. “Hard Stance was his baby, and everyone else in that band had been friends since middle school,” says Barreto. “I was just this outsider who replaced the original drummer. But it was clear to me that Inside Out should happen.”

Episode 69: Phantasy Star III

In our nicest episode yet, it's time to discuss Phantasy Star III, a problematic game that is super ambitious but doesn't really hold up to it's lofty ambitions.

Instead of a Patreon, consider donating to our Extra Life charity drive. We are raising money for Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. We raised $335 in 2019. So far in 2020 we have raised $105.

On Thursday nights around 7pm I stream old and new games until around 9pm. Check out my Twitch page for more information and a tentative schedule.

We are also on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and Stitcher. You can also download episodes from the Internet Archive.

You can view our game ranking list here.

In our nicest episode yet, it's time to discuss Phantasy Star III, a problematic game that is super ambitious but doesn't really hold up to it's lofty ambitions. Instead of a Patreon, consider donating to our Extra Life charity drive. We are raising money for Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.