This week, we wandered through a grab-bag of games, music, and reading before settling into a long-overdue cultural reckoning with This Is Spinal Tap. We talked Sonic games and cursed Sonic-sonas, gacha updates that somehow turn into cyberpunk motorbike fantasies, cheerful amnesia manga, extreme metal singles that absolutely rip, and a handful of games that ranged from surprisingly delightful to instantly forgettable. But the heart of the episode was finally sitting down with Spinal Tap itself—an enormously influential mockumentary that, forty years on, felt quieter, subtler, and stranger than its reputation. We landed somewhere between “mid” and “actually pretty good,” unpacking where it still works, where it shows its age, and why its legacy looms so much larger than the movie itself.

Episode Notes

What We’ve Been Into

• Games
  • Eden dives into Sonic Forces, embracing the chaos of creating a cursed Sonic-sona (a dog with a grapple gun).
  • A return to Wuthering Waves with the 3.0 update: underground cyberpunk cities, summonable motorcycles, and Sega crossover bike liveries.
  • Peter spends real time with the Playdate handheld and unexpectedly loves Dig Dig Dino—dogs, dinosaurs, and eldritch horror.
  • Mixed feelings on Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy: clunky combat, nonstop chatter, and controller prompts that can’t decide what console they’re on.
  • Dispatch lands as enjoyable but oddly forgettable—pure popcorn gaming that evaporates once it’s done.
• Reading
  • Cheerful Amnesia delivers wholesome, funny yuri romance built on anime-logic memory loss.
  • A shout-out to Adachi and Shimamura short stories, still reigning supreme.
  • Peter continues through The Dark Forest, the second book in Remembrance of Earth’s Past, digging into Wallfacers, Wallbreakers, and long-term cosmic dread.
• Music
  • New doom EP from The Eternal—short, tight, and surprisingly restrained.
  • Reliance by Soen: less adventurous, more consistent, and maybe better for it.
  • Absolute hype for Archspire’s new single “Limb of Leviticus”—blisteringly fast with just enough groove to breathe.

Main Topic:

This Is Spinal Tap

• Prompted by renewed discussion of Rob Reiner and his legacy, we finally sat down with his directorial debut.
• Initial reaction: not nearly as laugh-out-loud funny as its reputation suggests.
• Over time, appreciation grew for:
  • Its subtlety and deadpan delivery.
  • The improvised dialogue paired with surprisingly tight plotting and long-payoff jokes.
  • Iconic moments (“these go to eleven,” the cocoon stage prop, mysteriously exploding drummers).
• Nigel Tufnel emerges as the emotional and comedic core, hinting at the future of Christopher Guest’s mockumentary career.
• We talked about how much of Spinal Tap’s impact comes from being first—laying the groundwork for an entire genre that others would later perfect.
• Final verdict: historically essential, quietly funny, better on reflection than on first watch—and a reminder that movies used to trust audiences more.

Big Picture Takeaways

• Cultural influence doesn’t always match immediate enjoyment.
• Subtlety and restraint are skills we’ve mostly lost in modern filmmaking.
• Maybe we should make smaller, cheaper movies again—and let weird ideas breathe.

This week, we kick off 2026 by talking about Ambrosia Sky, a short, atmospheric sci-fi game that quietly wrecked us more than we expected. What starts as a PowerWash-adjacent cleanup sim turns into a meditation on grief, abandonment, and the emotional cost of leaving home. We talk about why smaller, constrained games are thriving right now, how Ambrosia Sky uses limitation as a strength, and why finishing Act One left us with far more questions than answers — in the best possible way.

Episode Notes

• We open the first episode of 2026 in full post-holiday time confusion: strange schedules, too much work, and no reliable sense of what day it is.
• Eden talks about covering extra shifts at the comic shop, double-dipping PTO, and the unfortunate result of biking home in brutal weather and bruising their ribs.
• A digression on sleep rituals follows, including Peter’s famously corpse-like sleeping position and Eden’s highly specific side-switching requirements.
• With it being January 1st, we reflect on 2025 as a pop-culture year — broadly rough, but not without meaningful discoveries.
• We note a shared shift toward shorter, more focused media, especially in games.

🎮 Why We Played

Ambrosia Sky

• We wanted something short, contained, and emotionally grounded.
• The “PowerWash Simulator with a story” pitch undersells what the game actually does.
• We appreciated the decision to release this explicitly as Act One, rather than early access.

🌌 Setting & Premise

• You play as Dalia, a “Scarab” who cleans exofungus and reclaims bodies for the Ambrosia Project.
• She returns to the asteroid colony she fled 15 years earlier — built inside a dead Leviathan.
• The colony is effectively empty; the story unfolds through terminals, logs, and environmental details.
• There are no live conversations, reinforcing isolation and loss.

🧠 Themes

• Grief, abandonment, and the emotional cost of leaving home.
• Labor as mourning: cleaning and reclamation as acts of reckoning.
• Unresolved relationships, especially between Dahlia and Maeve.
• Absence as a storytelling tool.

🛠️ Gameplay & Structure

• Core loop centers on spraying substances to remove fungal growth.
• Light Metroidvania structure with optional backtracking.
• Grappling hook works well, with occasional jank.
• Specialized sprays exist but feel lightly used.
• Puzzles focus on power routing and environmental access.
• The game benefits from being short; it would not sustain a longer runtime.

🎧 Atmosphere

• Strong, understated soundtrack that reinforces loneliness.
• Art direction does heavy emotional lifting despite a small budget.
• Exterior space sequences are a standout moment.
• The game consistently favors mood over exposition.

⚠️ Act One Ending

• The story ends abruptly and deliberately, offering few answers.
• Maeve is alive, but clearly changed.
• Major concepts — the Ambrosia Project, the Leviathan — remain unexplained.
• We found the ambiguity compelling rather than frustrating.

🧾 Closing Thoughts

• We’re glad we stuck with the game past early hesitation.
• The Act-based release feels honest and respectful of the player.
• Both of us plan to play the remaining acts at launch.
• Ambrosia Sky is a strong example of how small games can carry real emotional weight.

This week we keep things intentionally low-effort and high-chaos by drafting the Billboard year-end #1 songs from 1980 through 1999. We each build a ten-song playlist from a shared pool, knowing that once a song is picked, it’s gone forever. Along the way we uncover timeless masterpieces, generational blind spots, slow-dance trauma, and more than a few baffling chart decisions. By the end, it’s less about “best songs of all time” and more about what pop culture we survived — and what it says about the decades that made us.

Cold Open & Life Updates

• Eden survives Iowa weather whiplash, including snowmelt, wind advisories, and dogs who refuse to come inside.
• We check in on end-of-year fatigue, weddings on the horizon, and the general desire to just get to January.

What We’ve Been Checking Out

• Eden scores a surprise manga haul via Reddit, including:
  • Kase-san and… — a quiet, funny, wholesome romance that desperately wants its characters to communicate.
  • Chainsmoker Cat — gross, chaotic, and deeply committed to depicting the world’s worst anthropomorphic cat girl.
• Continued time in Where Winds Meet, including discovering that joining the “hot evil people” sect requires in-game marriage… followed by divorce.
• Peter continues slowly working through The Three-Body Problem and Gödel, Escher, Bach.
• A brief dive into habit-building via the new Atomic Habits workbook.
• Music check-in includes Archspire’s new single “Carrion Ladder” and the eternal joy of Apple Music Replay actually getting things right.
• Gaming includes Ball Pit, Megabonk, and the looming temptation of finally committing to Baldur’s Gate 3.

The Main Event: Billboard #1 Draft (1980–1999)

• We draft songs snake-style, locking each other out as we go.
• Early rounds are stacked with undeniable classics:
  • Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You”
  • Prince’s “When Doves Cry”
  • Blondie’s “Call Me”
  • Cher’s “Believe”
• George Michael emerges as an ’80s powerhouse with multiple entries.
• The generational divide shows up fast:
  • Peter leans heavily ’80s.
  • Eden lives firmly in the ’90s (for better and worse).
• We acknowledge slow-dance staples that were emotionally formative whether we liked them or not.
• The middle rounds reveal just how strange pop history can be when viewed year-by-year.
• By the later picks, we’re openly throwing ourselves on grenades:
  • The Macarena is drafted out of mercy.
  • Multiple songs are chosen purely because something has to be.
• We question how certain cultural touchstones (My Heart Will Go On, Aaliyah, Bone Thugs) somehow missed the top spot in their years.

Big Takeaways

• Billboard #1 does not mean “best song.”
• The ’80s age better than the ’90s in pop memory (and fashion).
• Nostalgia is selective, and pop charts are cruel.
• Drafting music is a great way to discover what you genuinely love — and what you merely survived.