Oh goodness, there is pretty much no way I could detail everything I listen to outside of several essays, but I can provide a short list of some of my favorite albums and artists from the last few years in no meaningful order.

• Daft Punk’s entire catalog
• “The Seer” and “To Be Kind” by Swans
•  "A U R O R A" by Ben Frost
• “Obsidian” and “Ocean Death EP” by Baths
• “Strange Mercy” and St. Vincent’s self titled LP from earlier this year.
• “Say Yes to Love” by Perfect Pussy
• “Concrete Misery” by Sevendeaths
• “Same Trailer, Different Park” by Kasey Musgraves
• “Lavender Country” (which is from 1974, I know, but it was just reissued this year and it’s queer and great and fuck you)
• “It’s Album Time” by Todd Terje
• The first half of Bleacher’s “Strange Desire”
• “Ultraviolence” by Lana Del Rey
• “The Electric Lady” by Janelle Monae
• “Settle” by Disclosure
• “Tarot Sport” and “Slow Focus” by Fuck Buttons
• “Acid Rap” by Chance the Rapper
• “Channel Orange” by Frank Ocean
• The Joy Formidable’s live shows
• “Silence Yourself” by Savages
• “Cupid Deluxe” by Blood Orange
• The first half of “Yeesus” by Kanye West
• FKA Twigs (I am eagerly awaiting her debut LP next month)
• “Benji” by Sun Kil Moon
• “Sea When Absent” by A Sunny Day in Glasgow
• “The Bones of What You Believe” by Chvrches
• “Night Time, My Time” by Sky Ferreira 
• “Psychic” by Darkside
• Several of Jungle’s singles
• “Burn Your Fire For No Witness” by Angel Olsen
• “W H O K I L L” by tUnE-yArDs

Glad you enjoyed it, and thanks for not being a self-righteous prick this time around.

I like that idea, actually. The world needs more werepiglets.

Uh….sorry to say, but I do think that’s the end of that story. Still, I’m sure we’ll have plenty more versions of Eric to look forward to in the future.

Glad you enjoy them 🙂

Well, I did already do an extended sequence of that chat conversation, but I’ll keep the other ideas in mind for sure, thanks!

Now that I take a second look, he does appear possibly Latino? When I wrote it, I thought he was just a well tanned muscley white dude. That would make me definitely guilty of whitewashing (sorry, that’s shitty to do) but there was no racial TF intended there. And no, you aren’t being overly sensitive–but on the other hand, my stories are intended to disturb. This just wasn’t the way I’d intended to disturb people, so my apologies.

I’ll keep all of those ideas in mind, for sure. Thanks for the requests.

(response follows second part)

Well….yes, one book that influenced me a lot was “The Lathe of Heaven” by Ursula K. LeGuin, about a man whose dreams literally come true. Other than that, the examples are a bit more general, I suppose.

I loved episodes of shows I used to watch as a kid where characters were forced to turn evil–that always made me really excited for reasons I couldn’t quite explain. The idea that you could force someone to do something they would never do always fascinated, and the endings always disappointed me, when the hero would throw off the control and save the day. 

Stories and book with forced transformations were always of interest too, or where characters had to deal with transformations they couldn’t return from. Now that I think about it, various aspects of the “Animorphs” series that I read voraciously as a kid fill these two categories out quite well (mind control / corruption + transformation? Who would have thought that would fascinate me!) and I’m sure there are others.

Growing older, I’d often take opportunities to craft my own stories which would slip these themes in. I often Dungeon Mastered D&D games for friends, and would always find some excuse to thrall them, or polymorph them into hobgoblins (I did, in fact, jack off many times to the hobgoblin art in the Third Edition Monster Manual) or corrupt their alignment or what have you. Those are a few instances I suppose–I wouldn’t say they “influenced” what I like–that always seemed to run deeper than these things could touch, but those were certainly my outlets as a kid and teenager.