If you told me that an experimental album where every song was based on one of the Balatro jokers would end up as one of my favorites this year, I’d never believe you. And yet, here we are.

It’s weird. There’s a wild blend of genres and sounds and ideas in here, but it works! What’s real fun here is seeing how the visuals and mechanics of each joker is interpreted as a song, eventually culminating in Baseball Card sampling the rest of the album— in line with it scaling off of other jokers in the game.

It’s a good listen I’ve been on since it came out earlier this year, having come out during my homeless stint. It was one of those small joys that helped keep me going during a rough time!

A fantastic artist I got into earlier this year, who rapidly rose the ranks of my favies. Hydraa blends DNB and hip hop into a delicious auditory smoothie, with emphasis on the smooth. His work is full of high energy bops that make my brain do funny flips, it’s music that interfaces really nicely with the ADHD brain and helps me get things done.

Give his work a go! I’d rec starting with either Cadence Storm or Groove Rush.

SPINE is really cool! It’s a solo TTRPG where you take the role of a researcher who’s gotten this very book from a distant relative. It’s a strange tome, full of excerpts— news articles, essays, poems— about immortality. Here’s the catch: as you read the book, it begins to draw you in.

The only way out is to deface it. It’s a game of balance, can you figure out the meaning of its contents before you succumb to insanity?

It’s a game that you can only play with a physical copy, by nature. But a cool element here is that it’s a living document, once you’ve played it, you can pass it on to someone else. There’s enough to play a few more times even after it’s been defaced!

In this way, the game tells two stories; the one printed in ink, and the one written on its pages through tears, marks, folds, and burns.

I’ve only been able to thumb through a bit since I literally got my copy yesterday, but I’m very excited to play this! I had some lovely conversation with the author about the concept of “book play” (I’d toyed a lil with it when I did the failed Tearable Tome KS) while he was working on it, which got me really interested to see the final product! He also wrote a great essay on the subject alongside SPINE’s release.

Since this one’s harder to look up: you can find SPINE here.

Interested in a commission? Contact me!