As I continue building Scroll Stopper Club, there’s a fear sitting quietly in the back of my mind.

It isn’t that AI is going to write better songs than people.

It isn’t that musicians are going to disappear.

It’s something much more personal.

I’m afraid I’ll accidentally induct an AI band into the Scroll Stopper Club.

That might sound dramatic.

But it would shake the foundation of everything I’m trying to build.

Over the years, I’ve noticed something about myself.

I keep finding artists early.

Die Spitz.

KatzPascale.

Angine De Poitrine.

Mei Semones.

When I first stumbled across Mei Semones, she was playing tiny rooms. Now she’s opening arena shows for Vulfpeck.

I don’t say that because I think I have some magical ability to predict the future.

I don’t.

What I’ve learned is something much simpler.

When a song stops my scroll… I’ve learned to trust that feeling.

Not because I’m always right.

But because every time I’ve ignored that feeling, I’ve wondered if I just missed the next great artist.

That’s why Scroll Stopper Club exists.

Every episode begins the same way.

A song stops my scroll.

Then the investigation begins.

Why this song?

What grabbed me?

What is this artist doing that I haven’t heard before?

And maybe most importantly…

Is there really something here?

If the answer is yes, I don’t just want to share the song.

I want to understand it.

Because I think every great artist has something to teach the rest of us about making better art.

Lately, though, that investigation has become more complicated.

There have been several songs that stopped my scroll.

The hooks were catchy.

The production was polished.

Everything sounded… right.

Then I started looking for the band.

And something felt off.

I don’t know for certain whether these artists were AI-generated, and I’m not interested in accusing anyone of something I can’t prove.

But I’ve started noticing patterns.

The musicians are almost impossibly attractive.

Every video looks expensive.

The catalog grows at an unbelievable pace.

Every song sounds professionally finished.

But I never see them simply being musicians.

No rehearsal clips.

No phone videos.

No messing around between takes.

No trying to figure out a chorus.

No tiny club dates.

No upcoming shows.

The music exists.

The musicians… almost don’t.

Maybe there’s an explanation for every one of those things.

Maybe they’re just private people.

Maybe they’re new.

Maybe I’m completely wrong.

But the fact that I even have to ask the question tells me something has changed.

My investigations started with one question:

Why did this song stop my scroll?

Now there’s a second one.

Who’s behind it?

That bothers me more than I expected.

Because I’m not trying to discover the best algorithm.

I’m trying to discover the next great artist.

Those aren’t necessarily the same thing.

Ironically, I think AI is teaching me to appreciate something I used to overlook.

The rough demo.

The rehearsal.

The songwriter forgetting the second verse.

The guitarist searching for the right chord.

The little imperfections that remind you there are actual people behind the music.

Maybe that’s what authenticity is becoming.

Not perfection.

Evidence.

Evidence that another human being made this.

So if you’re an independent artist, here’s my advice.

Don’t hide the process.

Show us the first draft.

Show us the demo.

Show us the rehearsal.

Show us the mistakes.

Because the polished version tells me what you’ve made.

The messy version tells me who you are.

And in a world where machines can imitate almost anything…

That humanity may become the thing that stops my scroll.

P.S. This fear unexpectedly led me to one of the most interesting investigations I’ve worked on for Scroll Stopper Club. You’ll see what I mean in the next episode.

I’m going to Chicago.

Not to escape.

To investigate.

For years, discovering new music felt like an adventure. Before algorithms knew my taste. Before playlists predicted what I’d like next. Before social media decided what deserved my attention.

You’d hear about a band from a friend. Flip through records at a local shop. Take a chance on an opening act. Sometimes you’d spend money on an album that turned out to be terrible. Sometimes you’d discover your new favorite band.

Either way, the discovery belonged to you.

Today? I can discover a band while sitting on the toilet.

That’s convenient.

I’m not convinced it’s better.

Don’t get me wrong. The internet has introduced me to artists I never would have found otherwise. Scroll Stopper Club wouldn’t even exist without it. But somewhere along the way, I stopped wandering.

So this trip isn’t really an experiment.

It’s a return.

The truth is, this whole idea started somewhere completely unexpected.

In the shower.

I was thinking about something I try not to think about very often.

My own mortality.

I found myself asking a question:

When I die, what will I wish I’d done more of?

The answer wasn’t “make more money.”

It wasn’t “buy more stuff.”

It was simple.

Travel.

But not travel just to say I’d been somewhere.

I want to travel because every city has its own music scene.

I’ve spent years discovering bands from New York and Philadelphia. Now I want to know what I’m missing.

What’s happening in Chicago?

Los Angeles?

Seattle?

Austin?

Who are the bands that everyone in those cities knows… but the rest of us haven’t discovered yet?

The Rat Utopia Experiment is a perfect example.

They’re building something really exciting in Los Angeles. Because of where they are in their career—and because they’re still so young—there’s a good chance they won’t be touring the East Coast anytime soon.

If I want to experience what they’re creating… I have to go to them.

And that’s when it clicked.

Maybe Scroll Stopper Club shouldn’t wait for music to come to me.

Maybe it’s time for me to go where the music is.

That’s how these Field Reports were born.

I’m flying to Chicago because I want to spend a few days saying yes to curiosity again.

I’m going to wander through record stores, browse bookstore shelves, walk neighborhoods with no destination, see bands I’ve never heard of, and spend one day at Riot Fest.

Maybe I’ll discover tomorrow’s favorite band.

Maybe I won’t.

That’s not really the point.

The point is to put myself back into a world where discovery requires showing up.

Over the past few months, something unexpected has happened. Scroll Stopper Club has stopped being a YouTube channel where I review music.

It’s becoming a place where I investigate creativity.

Why did this song stop my scroll?

Can atmosphere survive outside the recording?

How do you recognize a great song before it’s finished?

Those questions can’t always be answered from behind a screen.

Some questions can only be answered by showing up.

So that’s what I’m doing.

This is the first in what I hope becomes a long series of Field Reports.

Not reviews.

Investigations.

I’ll come home with stories.

Observations.

Questions.

Evidence.

And if I’m lucky…

I’ll hear a band that makes me write three words in my notebook.

There’s something here.

Can KatzPascale create an atmosphere so vivid that it survives outside the recording?

Back in March of 2026 I inducted KatzPascale’s song GBTC into the Scroll Stopper Club.

In that episode, I described the music as film noir.

Whiskey.

Cigarette smoke.

Late-night conversations.

A soundtrack for a world that only exists after midnight.

But recordings can lie.

Production can create an illusion that disappears the moment musicians step onto a stage.

So I came to New York with one question.

Could KatzPascale create that same atmosphere in a room full of strangers?

That was the investigation.

I wasn’t trying to decide whether KatzPascale was good live. I already suspected they would be. I wanted to know whether the atmosphere I heard through my headphones actually existed… or whether my imagination had filled in the blanks.

Le Poisson Rouge turned out to be the perfect laboratory.

Small tables.

People close enough to become part of the performance instead of simply watching it.

I ended up sharing a table with a 17-year-old from Queens. We discovered KatzPascale the same way—through Instagram. Somehow, the algorithm had delivered the same music to two people nearly forty years apart in age, and on this night, it delivered us to the same table.

It’s one of my favorite things about going to concerts alone.

You never really go alone.

The evening began with DJ Carmen Elektra. Or more accurately… the evening began with music. That distinction turned out to matter. When the lights first dimmed, the room naturally became quiet. Everyone expected someone to walk onto the stage.

No one did.

The music continued, but the stage stayed empty. The show was advertised as featuring special guests DJ Melody English and DJ Carmen Elektra, yet without anyone visible performing, it never quite felt like the show had begun.

That’s when I noticed something interesting. As the minutes passed, conversations slowly returned. People weren’t being disrespectful—they were responding to what they were seeing. Or, more accurately, what they weren’t seeing. Without someone visibly creating the music, it gradually stopped feeling like a performance and started feeling like a loud radio playing in the background.

By around 8:30, I think most of the room—including me—was ready for whatever came next. Without realizing it, the DJ had become the control group for my experiment.

When KatzPascale walked on stage, the room changed instantly. Conversations stopped.

People leaned forward. Some simply stared. The audience wasn’t just quiet. They were in a trance

Throughout the performance something fascinating kept happening.

Applause would arrive a second or two late.

Not because people weren’t impressed. Because nobody wanted to be the first person to break whatever spell had settled over the room.

I’ve experienced silence at concerts before.

This wasn’t silence.

It was surrender.

Somewhere around the third song, I stopped taking mental notes and simply let the music happen. That’s usually a good sign.

Then came the moment that completely confirmed my hypothesis. Near the end of the set, KatzPascale announced they had one song left.

The room collectively gasped.

Not metaphorically.

Actually gasped.

It was immediately followed by disappointed groans.

I’ve heard audiences cheer for encores. I’ve heard people yell “One more!”

This wasn’t that.

It sounded like people realizing they had to leave a dream before they were ready.

After the show I had one question left. “How much of tonight was improvised?”

I wanted to know: was everything carefully rehearsed, or were they making it up as they went?

Jenna Pascale smiled and said it was a mixture of both. Some sections are carefully planned. Others are improvised.

That suddenly explained something I’d been watching all night. I wasn’t just watching two musicians.

I was watching two best friends.

After the show, while talking to Jenna, she joked that sometimes she’ll look over at Sammi and worry she’d burst out laughing—the way close friends do at exactly the wrong moment.

That tiny confession explained everything.

The music never felt mechanical.

It felt lived in.

The rehearsed moments gave them somewhere to stand.

The improvised sections gave them somewhere to wander.

Maybe that’s why every performance feels different—not because they’re trying to reinvent the music every night…

but because they’re leaving room for surprise.

And surprise only works when you trust the person standing next to you.

You can hear that trust.

One thing I’ve realized since starting Scroll Stopper Club is that recordings tell you what a band sounds like.

Live shows tell you who they are.

Sometimes those are the same thing.

Sometimes they aren’t.

KatzPascale passed the test.

The mysterious atmosphere I heard through my headphones wasn’t something created in the studio.

The recording wasn’t creating the atmosphere.

It was documenting it.

CASE STATUS

☑ Hypothesis Confirmed

Findings

KatzPascale doesn’t simply perform songs.

They transform the room.

I’ve spent years thinking about atmosphere as something that happens after the music is finished. Production. Reverb. Lighting. Smoke machines. But KatzPascale reminded me that atmosphere isn’t something you add. It’s something you earn. It comes from trust, restraint, and leaving enough space for the audience to step inside the music. That’s a lesson I don’t think only musicians can use. I think every creative person can.

Some questions can only be answered by showing up.

New Question

How many other artists am I only half understanding because I’ve never seen them live?

The first video was uploaded to YouTube sixteen years ago.

A seven-year-old girl sitting behind a drum kit, playing a Hannah Montana song.

From that moment on, the internet watched three sisters learn to play music, perform, write songs, record albums, and tour the world. Millions of people literally watched them grow up.

Today, The Warning has over a million subscribers on YouTube and one of the most devoted fanbases in rock.

You would think I would have been one of the people watching that journey.

I wasn’t.

I didn’t even know who The Warning were until I released my recent Scroll Stopper Club episode on Ellen Alaverdyan, the child bass prodigy many of us have also watched grow up on YouTube.

The video has done incredibly well, and my comment section filled up with people saying the same thing:

“You need to check out The Warning.”

So I did.

And here is where I may lose some of you.

I think The Warning’s music is boring.

The songs don’t move me emotionally. The recordings feel overproduced. I’ve heard bands make this kind of music before, and I don’t hear anything that makes me stop what I’m doing and think, Wait… what was that?

That doesn’t mean they’re bad musicians.

They’re obviously talented.

It means something different.

It means they didn’t stop my scroll.

Which immediately made me ask another question.

If we had never watched these sisters grow up online—if they released this exact music today with no sixteen-year YouTube history behind it—would they be as popular?

I honestly don’t think so.

And I don’t mean that as an insult.

I think it’s one of the most fascinating things the internet has ever created.

People didn’t simply discover a band.

They watched children become adults.

They celebrated birthdays, milestones, victories, disappointments, and everything in between. Somewhere along the way, the audience stopped following the music and started following the people.

It became less like discovering a new band…

…and more like watching the latest season of a television show you’ve been invested in for years.

That’s powerful.

It’s also incredibly rare.

It’s a good gig if you can get it.

Imagine building an audience before you’ve made your defining artistic statement. By the time your albums arrive, millions of people already care about what happens next.

That’s exactly what I saw happening in my comment section.

People weren’t just recommending songs.

They were introducing me to people they felt like they knew.

The reason why Ellen ended up in Scroll Stopper Club and The Warning didn’t was not because Ellen grew up on YouTube, but because 13 Town stopped my scroll.

If Ellen had released a song that didn’t move me, she wouldn’t have been inducted either.

Scroll Stopper Club has never been about biographies.

It has never been about fanbases.

It has never been about technical ability.

It’s about one thing.

A song.

One moment.

One question I can’t stop thinking about.

Now, could The Warning eventually end up in the club?

Absolutely.

Artists change.

Sometimes dramatically.

They’re still young, and I hope they continue taking risks. Maybe one day they’ll release a song that completely blindsides me.

I would love that.

Because this isn’t about defending my opinion.

It’s about following my curiosity wherever it leads.

They may be wonderful people.

I have no reason to think otherwise.

And this isn’t a judgment of who they are.

I don’t know them.

Many of their fans feel like they do, and that’s exactly what makes this phenomenon so interesting.

YouTube didn’t just give us another way to discover music.

It gave us a way to grow up alongside the people making it.

Sometimes that relationship becomes part of the art itself.

Whether that’s a good thing or not…

…I’m still investigating.

So now I’m curious.

Is there an artist you love partly because you’ve watched their journey?

Or…

Do you think the music should always stand on its own?

I’d love to hear where you land.

I had a ticket to see Panic Shack at PhilaMOCA in Philadelphia, but I spent a good chunk of the evening staring at my ceiling,…

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But let me back up.

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I grew up in MAGA country before MAGA had merch. Back when it didn’t need a slogan because it was just the air. White-bread suburbia. Perfect lawns. Flags on porches. And a dead silence around anything that challenged the story. I was surrounded by white people and systematically trained—quietly, casually, relentlessly—to fear everyone else.

No one said the words out loud. That’s how you know it was real. There was a code. You didn’t say, “Black people go there.” You said, “I don’t go to Sesame Place. They bus them in.” Everyone knew exactly who “they” were. If a Black person walked down my street, it wasn’t curiosity—it was panic. Why were they here? They didn’t belong. And if they didn’t belong, the only explanation was crime. That was the logic. That was the lesson.

I was fed statistics like weapons—13% of the population, 37% of the prison system—stripped of history, stripped of context, presented as proof that the fear was justified. I heard a Philadelphia police officer say Black people “live like animals.” No one gasped. No one pushed back. It landed like a weather report. Just information. This was how African Americans were discussed. Every other minority got their own folder of warnings, stereotypes, and horror stories. The message was always the same: us versus them. And “us” was under siege.

I wasn’t raised with guns, but growing up in Pennsylvania I was absolutely gun-adjacent. Friends had rifles. We all had BB guns. Guns were normal. Fear was normal. Being gay was the worst thing you could be called. Worse than stupid. Worse than cruel. And everyone—everyone—was trying to take something from you. Your job. Your neighborhood. Your country. Fear wasn’t an accident. It was the soundtrack.

This is how you make a MAGA voter.

So when people ask how someone raised inside that system ends up on the far left, they act like it’s a mystery. It’s not.

I did the work.

I asked questions. Not the safe ones. Not the whisper-it-in-the-basement questions white people ask each other. I asked the ones you’re not supposed to ask—out loud—to the people who actually live with the consequences. At Sears, I once asked a Black coworker why there needed to be a Black Entertainment Network. “We don’t have a White Entertainment Network.” He laughed in my face. I deserved it. Then he explained, patiently, that almost every channel already was the White Entertainment Network. He pointed out that we even had Country Music Television—white identity with a fiddle—long before Beyoncé ever released Cowboy Carter.

When it came to LGBTQ people, I was clueless and cruel in the way ignorance always is. In college there was a group—I think it was called the Open Door Club—and even though friends supported it, I treated it like something shameful. I casually used the F-slur in a song I wrote. Didn’t blink. Didn’t care. My brother had to sing those words in public. I only felt shame years later. It took my sister telling me the word was offensive for it to even register. I honestly thought it just meant “gay.” And even then, I still believed gay was wrong—religion, culture, and nonstop homophobia drilling it into my head.

Work blew the whole thing apart. Suddenly I was surrounded by people who didn’t look like me, didn’t live like me, and didn’t have the luxury of ignorance. I kept asking stupid questions. Those led to more questions. Then books. Then more books. Then history. Then the unavoidable truth: racism in America isn’t a glitch. It’s the operating system. Designed. Maintained. Enforced around white supremacist ideas.

These weren’t theories anymore. These were my friends. I heard their stories. I saw the damage up close. This isn’t about being “soft.” You don’t radicalize left by being fragile. You radicalize left by seeing the truth and refusing to unsee it. And even then, the programming never fully leaves. That fear still hums in the background. That bias still whispers. Fighting it is labor. Constant labor. Labor MAGA people refuse to do. They call that strength. It’s not. It’s cowardice.

Here’s what really makes people uncomfortable: as a white man, I never had to change. I could have stayed exactly where I was. I could have kept believing Black people were criminals, gay people were sinners, Muslims were evil. And my life would’ve been fine. Better than fine.

I remember thinking Rodney King deserved what happened to him if he broke the law. In my white suburban brain, cops were heroes. You comply, you live. End of story. I didn’t know what police were doing. The Black community knew. I didn’t—because I didn’t have to. Until I chose to learn.

If I hadn’t, I’d be MAGA. Easily. Effortlessly. I’d be saying Renée Good and Alex Pretti “crossed a line.” I’d be saying ICE is just doing its job. If someone gets hurt—or killed—that’s on them. I wouldn’t care about deportations. I wouldn’t care if citizens got swept up. They wouldn’t be coming for me. Minneapolis could burn to the ground tomorrow and my life wouldn’t change one inch. Every immigrant could be deported and in that alternate universe I’d probably think America was finally “fixed.”

Nothing Trump does hurts me as a white, heterosexual, Christian man. Nothing. (Don’t tell them I’m an atheist.)

That’s the point.

In that version of my life, I’d be flying Trump flags and wearing a MAGA hat proudly—because everything I was taught growing up was whispered. Trump didn’t invent the hatred. He just gave it a microphone and told people they were brave for using it.

What still breaks my brain is this: I was raised on Indiana Jones and punk rock. Both were crystal clear about one thing—Nazis are bad. Full stop. And yet here we are, watching January 6 rioters throw Nazi salutes, pardoned by Trump, and suddenly we’re pretending that line was never there.

I was naïve to think my upbringing wasn’t already soaked in Nazi logic. I didn’t even touch the antisemitism that floated around like background noise when I was a kid. Today, people feel safe being Nazis in public. And if you resist them, you’re the problem.

Most people never escape the world I grew up in. They stay in white bubbles. They don’t question. They don’t read. They don’t listen. And they don’t change.

People love to quote Niemöller, but they miss the point. That poem assumes a villain who comes from the outside. MAGA is the villain. MAGA is the “they.” Why would they speak out? They’re building the country they want. You can’t scare them with “you’re next.” They’re not next. Everyone else is.

So you can’t educate them. You can’t shame them. You can’t scare them into empathy. What’s left?

Outnumbering them. And that’s where the dread sets in. Protests feel symbolic. The actions that matter—voting, organizing, relentless pressure—barely happen. There have to be more of us. Right? So how did we end up here? Are we not showing up? Or are there just more of them than we’re willing to admit?

That’s what scares me.

I’m grateful I escaped that alternate universe. Even though it would be easier not to care. Even though I could sit back and let it all collapse without my life changing much at all.

If it comes down to it, I’d rather die protecting the people I love than live comfortably inside a MAGA America.

Take it easy,

James

“What I love most about rivers is / You can’t step in the same river twice / The water’s always changing, always flowing.” — Just Around the Riverbend, Pocahontas

People like to romanticize change. Growth. Becoming. But rivers don’t just flow gently forward—they flood, they carve things away until nothing recognizable is left.

There’s a quote that’s followed me for years:

Standing water is dangerous. But so is water that never stops moving.

Some people never change. Same haircut, same stories, same opinions locked in amber. They call it being “true to themselves,” but it looks more like fear. I used to smoke, but I never thought of it as who I was. It was an addiction I wanted to beat. I did. But I know people who’ve wrapped their identity around it so tightly that quitting would mean cracking themselves open. Easier to keep destroying yourself than to give up the identity built around it.

Other people can’t stop changing. Always reinventing, always sanding themselves down, chasing some better version that never arrives. Most of us end up somewhere in the middle—reshaped not by choice, but by erosion. Life happens. The river doesn’t ask permission.

An old photo came up on Facebook the other day. Early twenties. I stared at it and felt nothing. That guy is dead. I remember being him, but I don’t recognize him. I remember that version of me thinking how far I’d come since eighteen, how different I already was. Now I see the pattern: every version of me was convinced it was the true self, and every one was wrong.

I’m not the man I was ten years ago. I’m not even sure I like the man I am now. Will I like whoever comes next? I don’t know. Some of this change comes from learning, from trying to be better. But some of it feels involuntary. My brain is changing. My emotions are mutating. My reactions feel unfamiliar. I didn’t sign off on any of this. I’m just watching it happen from inside the current.

Losing my job sped all of this up. Any major life event bends the river—sometimes sharply, sometimes violently—splitting it into unfamiliar branches. When that happens, you lose track of who you are. You hope to drift into some calm lake of awareness where you can drop anchor and rest for a while.

Identity is an anchor in the chaos of life. When you lose it—or don’t know where it is—you’re adrift in a sea of unknowns. It’s terrifying.

I’ve had too much time alone with my thoughts. That’s how you poison a well. So I’ve turned to music—listening, playing, standing in packed rooms where nobody knows me and nobody cares. Music doesn’t ask me to explain myself. It just fills the space so the silence doesn’t kill me.

I started a YouTube channel focused on new music. It wasn’t a strategy. It just happened. I like discovering bands that haven’t been frozen in time yet. I never need to hear “Stairway to Heaven” or “Hotel California” again. That music is finished. I’m more interested in things that still feel unresolved.

I think this channel is me trying to convince myself I’m still moving. Still alive. Trying to write the next chapter in a world that feels increasingly hostile and indifferent.

Am I the river? Or am I just debris in it—bouncing off rocks, pulled under, occasionally breaking the surface long enough to breathe?

I don’t know.

What I do know is this: I don’t know who I am anymore. I don’t know who I’m becoming. And I’m not sure I’m going to like that guy when he finally washes up.

And for no reason except that this blog has used a river analogy, here is The River by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard.

Enjoy,
James

Being unemployed has given me more time to create, which sounds great in theory. In reality, it means I’m drawing little cartoons for my videos, practicing guitar and bass constantly, and spending a lot of time staring at my own work thinking, this is trash. I’ve been playing music for most of my life—over forty years. It’s the one thing I actually know how to be good at. And because of that, I never get discouraged with music. I know exactly what it takes: you play the same damn thing a thousand times. Then you play it a thousand more. You repeat it so much a reasonable person would quit and take up hiking.

The difference is, I’ve seen what’s on the other side of that kind of repetition. I’ve lived it. I know the ugly part works if you stick with it.

That doesn’t mean repetition is perfect. I recently realized I’ve been holding a guitar pick wrong my entire life. It never mattered for the music I was playing, but now that I’m teaching myself faster, shreddier stuff, it suddenly does. I looked it up and—surprise—I’ve built a bad habit that now needs to be unlearned. That’s the risk of doing anything the same way for decades. Luckily, this one’s an easy fix. You just hold the pick correctly and move on. Still annoying, but fixable.

That kind of calm confidence does not come naturally to me in other creative areas.

Drawing, for example. I haven’t put anywhere near the hours into it that I have into music, and I get discouraged fast when what’s on the page doesn’t match what’s in my head. Intellectually, I know it’s the same deal: do it a thousand times, then a thousand more. Emotionally, my brain starts yelling that I’m running out of time. I worry about forming bad habits that won’t be as easy to fix as a guitar pick grip. I’m older now. I’m impatient. I want to be good now. I don’t have another forty years to sort this out—unless my long-shot plan of becoming a cyborg really comes together.

That’s when I have to let my musician brain sit down and have a talk with whatever other brain is panicking. I have to accept where I am, keep improving with the time I have, and trust that the same ugly process that works in music works everywhere else too.

Which brings me to making videos for YouTube.

I’ve been making videos almost as long as I’ve been making music, but unlike a bass guitar—which hasn’t fundamentally changed since I first picked one up at twelve—the tools for video have mutated nonstop. As a kid, my friends and I shot Super 8 film. Then tape. I went to school for film and worked with 16mm, cutting it the old-fashioned way. Then computers showed up and flipped everything. Now AI is rolling in, and whether that’s good or bad, it’s easily the biggest shift since sound was introduced.

I’m not here to debate AI. My point is that while the rules of visual storytelling stay mostly the same, the tools change so fast it’s exhausting just trying to keep up. It takes me hours—hours—to make a three-minute video. The whole time I’m questioning everything: Is this right? Is this any good? How do I even do this part? Let me Google that. Again. It’s chaotic. It’s inefficient. It’s ugly.

But that’s the process.

So now I’m trying to simplify the goal. Make three minutes of something I’m proud of using the tools I have today. Then make the next video just a little bit better. That’s it. That’s the whole job.

You trust the process. Even when it looks bad. Especially when it looks bad. Because the process is ugly—and that’s how you know it’s working.

Take it easy,

James

Friday night I went into New York City to see Susanna Hoffs at LPR in Greenwich Village. If you’re young—or have lived under a rock your entire life—Susanna Hoffs was a member of the 1980s hit band The Bangles. Manic Monday, In Your Room, Walk Like an Egyptian, Eternal Flame, Hazy Shade of Winter—these songs were unavoidable on ’80…

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Me? I’m a weirdo. No tattoos. Not what makes me weird. I’m weird because I speak the truth, I can’t stomach bullshit, I don’t fit in, and I hunt for the strange in the world—friends, art, music, the stranger the better. But authenticity is expensive. My humor causes chaos. My honesty ends friendships. My insistence on being myself? It breeds loneliness.

All my life I wanted to create. To live by creating. Authenticity wasn’t optional—it was survival. In the ’80s, being called a “poser” in a music circle was a death sentence. Fake musicians, camera-ready but talent-light, you didn’t want that label.

In the real world, though? Most people are posers. They show up at jobs they tolerate, pretend to love them, follow rules that make no sense, hide their thoughts, swallow their originality. It makes me physically sick. But it works. You get a nice midlife resume and a quiet life of mediocrity.

Or, you can just be yourself and end up at 55 with a resume that reads like chaos. A little of everything, nothing linear, a life littered with craters from refusing to play along. Following the rules would’ve made things easier. But no—you had to do you. And you wait, thinking someday being yourself will pay off.

Spoiler: maybe it won’t. “Just be yourself” is a stupid poster, like that cat dangling from a branch: hang in there. We know the cat is going to fall. Humans? We don’t land on our feet. We break. We bleed. We get one fragile life to figure out this absurd world.

No lesson here. Just a warning: be yourself… if yourself doesn’t wreck things for everyone else. But if you’re weird, like me… strap in and proceed with caution.

Take it easy,

James

For a long time, people came to me with their questions, their tech drama, their “which iPhone should I buy?” moments. I taught Apple products every day. And honestly? I wanted to see Apple take responsibility for the rising anxiety and depression tied to the devices we all carry. Especially for younger people. There was (and still is) such a massive need for real education around tech addiction. But the truth is simple: these devices are designed to keep you hooked. You don’t fix the thing that makes you money.

So here I am, asking not only “Who am I?” but “Who do I want to be next?” Job hunting forces you to imagine yourself in roles you haven’t stepped into yet, while also remembering you’re not defined by any of those roles—no matter how much you feel pressured to convince interviewers otherwise.

That’s why, if you’re going to anchor your identity to anything, let it be your own work. And even that gets messy when it grows. Look at Dan Harris—the journalist who had a panic attack on live TV, discovered meditation, and co-founded the 10% Happier app. When he split from the company, it shook him to his core. Or Steve Jobs—booted from the very company he built. Luckily he came back and saved Apple once…but he’s not here to save them from themselves now.

So how do you protect yourself? I think the trick is tying your identity to your values, not your job. If I know I’m a creative person at my core, then I’ll bring that creativity to any job—whether I’m hired for it, doing my own thing, or in between gigs entirely. Losing a job doesn’t take your values away. You’re still you.

Because let’s be honest: corporations love to tell you you’re “family,” that you “matter,” that they “care.” It’s all marketing. If they were truly a family, if they were truly empathetic or enlightened, forgiveness and humanity wouldn’t be conditional. But corporations don’t have empathy. They have profit margins.

So this holiday season, try not to get crushed by the chaos. Give yourself the gift of figuring out your core values. Write them down. Keep them close. In those hard moments—job loss, change, uncertainty—they’re the anchor that reminds you who you actually are.

Take it easy,

James

Before Alice was having tea with the Mad Hatter, Sir John Tenniel was skewering the politics of Victorian England with his satirical drawings in Punch magazine.

Although Tenniel had formal art training, he wasn’t a fan of how it was taught—so he taught himself. He was rumored to have a photographic memory and preferred to draw entirely from memory. Remarkably, he did all of this after losing the sight in one eye from a fencing accident in his youth, though he rarely mentioned it. It wasn’t long before he landed a job at Punch magazine, which you can think of as the internet of the Victorian era. His sharp, often biting cartoons gained widespread recognition and helped shape public opinion for decades.

What I found fascinating while learning about Tenniel is the evolution of the word cartoon. Originally, it referred to a preliminary sketch on paper—coming from the Italian cartone, meaning “paper.” But it wasn’t until Tenniel and Punch (and the satirical drawings of Victorian England) that the word took on its now-humorous meaning. By the 20th century, the term expanded again to include animation.

Although Tenniel is best known today as the illustrator for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, it’s important to remember that he was already famous in his own time as the lead political cartoonist for Punch—essentially the visual voice of 19th-century satire. Over his fifty years at Punch, he produced more than 2,000 cartoons.

That’s why, when Lewis Carroll was told his own drawings for Alice weren’t up to snuff, he was advised to hire a professional. Carroll, being an avid Punch reader, immediately thought of Tenniel.

My research shows that Tenniel found Carroll to be… well, a bit of a nuisance. Carroll had something to say about nearly every drawing Tenniel produced—except for Humpty Dumpty, for some reason. The constant revisions drove Tenniel nuts. One argument even centered on Alice’s hair color: Carroll wanted brown, Tenniel insisted on blonde. We all know who won that one. It’s safe to say Tenniel defined the visual identity of Alice in Wonderland as we know it.

The art process for Alice was meticulous. Tenniel began with rough sketches, refined them, then traced and transferred the final design onto a wood block, where he redrew it carefully. From there, it went to the engravers—the Brothers Dalziel. Their company, which employed a team of artisans, would cut Tenniel’s lines into the wood block. It was an incredibly tedious process. Once completed, the wood was used as a master to create electrotype plates—metal copies used for printing. (Fun fact: those original wood blocks were thought lost to time until they were rediscovered in a bank vault in 1985.)

In 1893, Tenniel became the first cartoonist ever to be knighted. And while I think modern knighthood is a little silly, it’s still nice to see a cartoonist get that level of recognition. Tenniel’s work on Alice continues to be printed today, and his legacy at Punch runs deep—it’s in the DNA of modern satire and political cartoons. Maybe even in the DNA of Bud, Nick, and Joe.

If you enjoyed learning about John Tenniel, please subscribe. I’ll be sharing more stories about cartoonists and illustrators from history—because honestly, I just love learning about them.

A Related Thrift Store Find

While working on my short story, Malice in Wonderland, I found the centennial edition of Alice in Wonderland at the thrift store. These include Tenniel’s 92 drawings for Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. It is one of my cherished book possessions.

Take it easy,

James

Trump has called Portland a warzone; he claims it’s burning to the ground.

Spoiler: it’s not.

A quick fact check shows his “the city is on fire!” routine is nothing but theatrics. Do your own digging, but I’m sure you’ll land where I did—he’s trying to paint the left, and protesters in general, as violent extremists. Some folks think he’s inching toward using the Insurrection Act. Who knows.

What is clear is that we all need to stay sharp—do the homework, question the noise, and keep our critical thinking tuned up.

That kind of political exaggeration inspired my latest Bud, Nick, and Joe comic. In it, Bud’s dressed for war. Nick’s confused—because they’re just going to the bookstore. Bud can’t believe Nick hasn’t heard: according to the president, Portland’s a combat zone!

Then they see three people across the street dressed in inflatable frog costumes, leading to Nick’s (hopefully) funny punchline.

If you’ve caught the footage, you know what I’m talking about. It started with one person and turned into an entire army of inflatable animals at the protests—mocking the “warzone” narrative. And honestly? It’s brilliant. I laughed out loud.

It reminded me of that perfect John Lennon quote:

When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you – pull your beard, flick your face – to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don’t know how to handle is non-violence and humor.

I recently saw a video of inflatable animals—including a unicorn—marching in lockstep behind a MAGA guy. It’s so silly, I have to laugh.

That’s the kind of protest spirit we need more of—non-violence, humor, and a little creative chaos. If Bud, Nick, and Joe can deliver even a sliver of that, I’m doing my job.

Oh, and Joe? He’s not in this comic… or is he? Maybe he’s one of the protesters in costume—or maybe he’s already inside Powell’s Books (a bucket-list stop for me).

My Thrift Store Find

Today’s find: an opium pipe. Yep, at a thrift store. You don’t see that every day.

After a little Googling, I’m not even sure it’s legal to sell—depends on how you label it. Opium pipe? Water pipe? “Decorative conversation piece”? Who knows.

It looks like jade, it’s got some heft, and it definitely doesn’t feel cheap. I’ll get it appraised and report back once I know its age and material.

Stay tuned.

Take it easy,

James

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It was the early ’90s. Sea Isle City, New Jersey. 3:00 AM.

Sean, Joe, and I decided to take our six-pack of Killian’s Irish Red down to the beach and drink until sunrise. We were already flying high, but it was a manageable drunk—the kind that makes you feel like everything is right in the world. My future felt wide open, and I was celebrating life with good friends. We were young, away from the real world, and I was in a band with real potential. I was writing songs nonstop. Sitting there on the sand in the middle of the night, just talking—it felt perfect.

Then Joe decided to go into the ocean. It didn’t matter that the fog was so thick we could barely see in front of us. It also didn’t matter that Joe was in no condition to swim. Sean and I waved him off and went back to our Killian’s. A little sand got on the bottles, but I drank mine anyway. Only the first sip had that crunch. After that, it went down smooth. I don’t remember what Sean and I talked about—probably life, or one of those “I love you, man” conversations that became a Bud Light commercial later that decade.

What I do remember is that mid-sentence, Sean held up a finger—the universal “hold on a sec”—turned his head, puked in the sand, and then went right back to talking as if nothing had happened. I wasn’t even concerned. That’s just what you did back then: you drank, you puked, you kept drinking.

An hour or so later, we realized Joe hadn’t come back. We didn’t panic or even call out. We just looked at the water and wondered where he was. Not long after, he came staggering out of the fog—soaked, out of breath, and grinning. “The waves were great,” he said. We sat together and watched the sunrise before heading back to the beach house. (You can read more about that place here.)

This whole thing became a cartoon idea I’d been sitting on for a while. I wanted to draw it the way it still exists in my mind. Most memories aren’t movies—they’re snapshots. Unless it’s something monumental, like Kennedy’s assassination or 9/11, we remember in flashes. These three panels are my flashes: the beer on the beach, Sean puking, and Joe emerging from the sea.

I didn’t want dialogue or exposition in the comic. This post is the explanation. Maybe the strip wouldn’t make sense without it. Perhaps that makes it a failure. But I drew exactly what I wanted, and that makes it a success to me.

It’s also the first time I’ve used ink washes to create shades of gray. I might do more like this.

That’s all I got.

Take it easy,

James

Discovering new music in the mid-’90s wasn’t something that happened without substantial effort. You hunted. You stalked sound the way crate-diggers stalk obscure vinyl—through static, mixtapes, and chance.

For me, the chase often started with WPRB Princeton, the college radio stati…

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