Disco Elysium helped me understand addiction from an addicts point of view. Had personal experience with addiction from the loved ones perspective, could not get beyond my own feelings.

Specifically the phone call scene. It is so depressingly desperate in a realistic way. It could not have been written unless someone knew firsthand how those calls go.

It helped me look beyond myself and think of the daily hell that is a recovering addicts life. Directly helped me with my grief.

Such a beautifully written game.

Watching The Matrix in theaters in highschool. I genuinely thought I was in the Matrix myself and almost got hit by a car walking out the theatre. I wonder sometimes what would have happened if that car hit me.

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. It seemed like such a silly concept and my read started as comical curiosity and ended with a profound change in how I saw the world.

The Long Walk. I read it as a teenager and now I regularly think about it on long walks.

“A Scanner Darkly”, the novel.

I’m a former addict, 17 years clean. That book made me remember people I hadn’t thought of in years, made me re-evaluate who I had been, who I was, who I had around me. Even years later, when I’ve felt so close to breaking, that book came to mind. Did I want to lose myself again? To be unrecognizable to my own self and everyone around me? To go back to trying to hide this demon eating away at me with whispers of feeling whole again? Could I pay that price again, could I take wondering what happened to another “friend”, of looking up and knowing they weren’t waking up?

Requim for a Dream, too. Found them both around the same time, haven’t been the same person since.

Bridge to Terabithia was pretty profound for me, my first time dealing with that

When I was a teen and my music taste was really developing in earnest, I played Guitar Hero World Tour. So many songs in that game lodged themselves in my already rock-leaning taste and really pushed me further.

Trapped Under Ice by Metallica got me into old trash, and cemented Ride the Lightning as my favorite Metallica album. Pull Me Under by Dream Theater and Parabola by Tool gateway’d me into prog and helped give me a respect for technicality in music and motivated me to play more difficult music later in life. Lazy Eye by Silversun Pickups got me into shoegaze. Assassin was my first Muse song and got me hard into that band.

Some Might Say introduced me to Oasis, Scream Aim Fire by Bullet for my Valentine pushed me into thrash as well, but when I discovered they were also a hybrid of metalcore that would later help get me into metalcore once I was nearing the end of high school and I got over my prejudice about metalcore being “all 0 notes with yelling guys”.

And that game also really cemented me in learning the bass guitar, which I still enjoy very much to this day and has allowed me to meet some of the best people in my life through playing shows and being in bands. I have my dad to thank for planting the seeds of hard rock and playing an instrument, but Guitar Hero World Tour acted as a gateway to so much more musical development for me.

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“Dune” by David Lynch (1984)

This movie made me fall in love with Production Design in movies! I’ve been hopeless about it ever since.

Catcher in the Rye.

It really gives a view of the internal monologue of depression.

Books Fiction, Slaughterhouse-five by Kurt Vonnegut. I first read it in high school and even then it hit very hard. I had friends going off to war at the time and it was a very different perspective than the pro-war media I had been immersed in to that point. I’ve read it every couple of years since and find more I love about it every time.

Non fiction, The Future Is Disabled by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. It’s a beautiful piece that felt less like a book and more like a conversation with a friend. It helped me imagine what a world centered on care could be like.

Movies Gaza Fights for Freedom. It’s a few years old now but extremely relevant, a documentary about the 2018/19 peaceful protest in Gaza and Israeli response. It was horrifying to watch and realize many things, and the horrors in it pale compared to the last few weeks. I think about it a lot right now.

Warrior Cats. Because I was 13 and extremely impressionable and that just happened to be the thing that was around at the time

The Power of One. I don’t really know how to express how the book had an impact on my life, but it circles back to me fairly regularly. Even 20+ years later.

Dances with Wolves. Really changed how I view other cultures and my own.

Edith Eger, The Choice. I was really depressed at the time and didn’t want to read about the Holocaust. Although it was gruesome at some points, it really touched me how much she’s made of her life and how positive her message still is.