Approx 5 minute read:

🏢 The biggest J’s store in the world

📖 Did everything but Fall Off

🕹 Parent gamers

🤖 Welp, he is back.

Alright I just got back from playing frisbee golf (highly recommend). We were talking about shows happening soon in Toronto and Limp Bizkit came up.

They’re not coming to Toronto but to London, Ontario (2 hours from here). If you live in Toronto the logistics of going to the show are janky. You basically have to find a place to stay over night and ain’t nothing else really going on in London, Ontario.

So in lieu of knowing I’m NOT going to this show, here’s a playlist with everything you’d hear. A lil change from the usual hip hop vibe even though Limp Bizkit was signed to Cash Money Records for a brief period and put out a song with Lil Wayne.

The more you know 💫

(Also this is a great playlist to work out to)

Did you know J Cole published his first magazine in July?

And it’s actually pretty decent!

It feels like forever ago when I ordered this thing given it took them a good 3 weeks just to pack the thing and get it ready for shipping. But shipping nonsense aside, it was worth the wait.

The cover, the pages, the print job, they definitely spent a pretty penny on ensuring this feels like a premium product. And it makes sense given it was like $40? I can’t even remember now but it wasn’t no $7.99 XXL mag.

From the jump, the publisher and creative director, Felton Brown, states that “The Fall-Off was built on finding the middle ground, a space where generations, ideas, and influences can exist in conversation. [This] is not for preserving moments or chasing trends…”

As you flip through the pages you realize this. The stories and features don’t feel like a traditional magazine. In fact, it almost feels like a hiphop year book. Like, this is our view on the world, look what we built and look what our friends did.

There’s ample photos of J Cole during the process of creating The Fall Off album. Some of them give off Stetson Man type vibes lol.

You get a ton of articles and interviews from the likes of Lauryn Hill, Lil Yachty, Larry June, GloRilla, amongst a flurry of other notable hiphop figures.

It’s not like you’re reading Rolling Stone where there’s a bias or corporate undertone - this truly does feel like you’re reading your high school’s year book.

If you’re a Cole fan - which obviously you are if you have this magazine - then you’ll really appreciate the sections on how The Fall Off was created, both from the interview timmhotep aku does with Cole and Paul Cantor’s article on the making of The Fall Off featuring all the BTS stories with the album’s producers.

Technically the zine is tied to the album’s rollout and can be purchased at tour stops (highly recommend this over a t-shirt).

I actually wouldn’t mind if this came out quarterly, almost like a curated update on what’s going on from the perspective of Dreamville.

Definitely worth it if you can get your hands on a copy.

Remember when all that you ever heard was video games are rotting your brain?

Man…if I kept playing Street Fighter 2 at the level I played it at between 10 and 16ish years old, I would’ve went pro. You can’t talk to me about Sagat.

Given a lot of us millennials are in this perpetual time warp where we forget how old we are, what year it is, and how mature we should actually be acting and dressing, gaming is very much still a thing in our lives - even when a lot of us are now parents.

When you’ve got kids, video games instantly become refreshed seeing them through your kid’s eyes.

Passing Mario Odyssey became a family game night in my house. Playing Overcooked has become a family team effort - which, if you’ve ever played the game, can easily turn into a full on argument in the living room lol.

The stats that stood out to me were around families. Partly because I’m a dad but also partly because I grew up in a house where although we played a lot of video games, my parents thought I was just rotting my brain.

I think we’ve all realized that video games aren’t as bad as everyone thought they were back in the Mortal Kombat and Doom days. Which makes sense given the parents playing with their kids these days are the kids back then that grew up with Mortal Kombat and Doom.

This one is pretty interesting and I agree with it. I get the merits that can come from being a social media user - I’ve seen my kids become pretty decent video editors (and I guess dancers lol) because of social media but we all know how fuct up that world can be for kids.

I think gaming is become the new thing we pass down to our kids. The Mario’s, the Pikachu’s, heck even the Final Fight’s (my kids love that game), they all become cultural artifacts that continue to live on, the same way our parents might’ve told us about a band or a movie back in the day.

Moral of the story: video games ain’t brain rot. Unless you’re Okan Kaya and you just set the world record for longest video game marathon at 135 hours.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day turns 35 this year and in celebration of defeating robots its anniversary, the film has been re-released into theatres in remastered 4K, 3D, and film formats for purists who want the original 1991 aesthetic.

In an age where AI surrounds us every turn we take, a 1991 film about robots taking over is exactly what we need right now…right?

Terminator 2: Judgement Day is one of those rare sequels that truly make you wonder which one was better: the first one or the second one. Because the first Terminator was so so so good.