Update

Hey everyone, just a few quick notes since I didn't have a very productive January here at Haptic Feedback

• My New Year was pretty fantastic for any number of reasons. For Christmas, I got an awesome new guitar amp and two new leather jackets that are all fantastic. I went to a good New Year's Eve party where I managed to not feel depressed because I realized that 2013 overall averaged out to being a year with plenty of emotional duress, but also a lot of professional progress. 
• I wrote this: http://www.objectivegamereviews.com/final-fantasy-vii-review/
• The Breadshots began recording our debut album, Love Each Other. I started the process by deciding on click track tempos and laying down scratch guitars so Dan, our drummer, can come in and start laying shit down.
• I haven't touched Dragon Quarter since early December, but I will return to it soon enough. I want to write a lot about that game.
• I might have mentioned this at some point since September, but my new "big essay" is a sexual reading of Kingdom Hearts that's still in drafting phases. I want to try and get it published (as in, get paid for it) but if nothing works out you can be sure and find it here. It's coming extremely slowly: I'm 10 pages in and I feel nowhere near finished, not to mention just like with "Free Will and Defiance" structuring this thing is an absolute fucking nightmare.
• I got a new job, but it hasn't started yet and I'm still waiting for key details to emerge.
• Late January to now has been nothing but bad news that's really brought me back down to earth.
• A little more than a week ago, a gunman opened fire at the mall in Columbia, MD killing two employees of the Zumies store before turning the gun on himself. I've worked two jobs at the mall and I shop there all the time, so the day the news broke was filled with all kinds of anxiety, but I'm glad to say my friends, coworkers, etc, were all safe. 
• A girl I used to consider a friend killed herself. She was still a student at the high school I graduated. I want to write more about this on it's own.
• To top it all off, I woke up yesterday to the news that Phillip Seymour Hoffman had died. It hit me hard: the man's been in more of my favorite movies than I can count. Pirate Radio, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, The Big Lebowski, the list goes on. In particular, his performance was the beating heart of Synecdoche, New York, which is one of the best movies I've ever seen.
• "Make this day like the night/Songs of darkness, words of light." No excuses. I'll be back to work soon, and I'll try another published review and another piece up here at Haptic Feedback.
• As always, thanks for listening.

- Austin C. Howe, Maryland, 2014