Today marks Tuesday, October 14th, 2025. It’s pretty much the first rain of the school year, since I don’t really count the one at the beginning because I wasn’t there that day. I woke up at 3:32 AM because I had a dream where I stuck my hand into a vat of… what seemed like ink(?), and woke up extremely nauseous. I lay in bed until it was 4:30 AM, where I heard my mom wake up.
My room was frigid whenever I woke up at that stupidly early hour, but thankfully, I ended up going back to sleep. I woke up again at my normal time of 6 AM, since I live an hour away from school. Mid getting dressed, I hear my mom call out, “Percy! We have to leave early!” Since I didn’t wanna communicate with her from my room to the kitchen, which was a long way away, I got my hoodie and the things I needed for the day.
Running out of the house, the cold as heck air hits my face, wakes me up. I wanted it to be sweater weather, not full-on parka weather. I hope it rains again where it isn’t stupidly cold.
Over the Garden Wall is a 2014 animated series released on Cartoon Network. It’s usually correlated with fall due to its themes of autumn, taking place on Halloween, and its overall homey theme, as if you’re watching the show sitting next to a warm campfire.
The show tells the story of two half-brothers, Wirt and Greg, who travel through a mysterious forest, just trying to find their way home, despite not knowing how they’ve made it into the forest in the first place. The show is hand-drawn through every episode, and has beautiful visuals, well-done animation, and amazing storytelling throughout the short 10 episode mini-series.
I personally connect with the series due to my own experiences. The first time I watched it was when I had to evacuate my house due to the Mountain Fire in Camarillo, burning up to 19,900 acres of land, and making it to my property. We evacuated, and my younger brother William and I decided to finish watching the show because we had watched it a few days earlier.
I’ll spare you the ending and any other spoilers, but the show really changed me in a way I can’t physically put into words. I recommend that if you like dark animation (or just animated shows in general) or a good soundtrack with amazing worldbuilding to go along with it, you should watch it. Or if you just like the vibe of fall. I recommend that everyone watch it.
Word goes around via news or fan mail that your favorite artist is going on tour. Dreading getting tickets due to pricing, you open Ticketmaster and see diabolical resale tickets priced at about a billion dollars for a single ticket. Not really caring in the present tense on how much your bank account is, you decide to buy the tickets..
And be put into a waiting line of 300 others.
You’d most likely groan in this unfortunate situation, coming to the realization (if you hadn’t before) that your favorite band isn’t that… underground anymore. That’s what happened to me this weekend.
My Chemical Romance announced the other leg of the Long Live The Black Parade tour last Friday, where they’re playing in a bunch of different countries, cities, and continents. Having already seen this tour whenever they announced just North America, I begged my parents to go, despite having seen them at Dodger Stadium and at the Las Vegas Festival Grounds.
Knowing that the other superfans were gonna scalp the tickets like men in their 30s buying Pokémon cards (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, look it up, it’s very.. interesting to say the least), and people buying the tickets for a (somewhat) reasonable price and then selling them for thrice the price, I was cooked via ticket prices, and seats were a whole other story.
A day story short later, after convincing my mom, I finally got the tickets for me, my mom, and my brother to see MCR. Maybe, this will end my now three-year hyperfixation? Maybe it won’t. All I know is that I’m gonna see them again in October…
Whenever you’re a writer, you probably have a crap ton of Google Docs lying around. Since the app lacks a sorting device, I had to create an entire Google sheet and copy and paste each Google Doc into it. The lengthy process made me realize that I have a lot, and I mean a LOT of Google Docs that fit into each category.
I have a category for the novel I’m currently writing, Beyond the Graves, where the progress is currently on and off due to school and a busy schedule. I also have my Dungeons and Dragons-based world, The Fall of The Helm (labeled TFoTH for short), where I usually write more worldbuilding and the history of the world in that area.
Compared to both BTG and TFoTH, my Concepts tab has 14 Docs, filled with just, well, concepts.
After making this sheet, I realized one thing. I can’t stick to one story, no matter how hard I try. Sure, I’ve been working on BTG for over a year, but I’ve made other stories and concepts in the meantime.
Sure, J.R.R. Tolkien took 17 years to write The Lord of the Rings, but with a tiny novel such as mine? I need to get on to it.
Every so often, an artist goes into an art block. Doesn’t know what to draw, doesn’t know what to write, doesn’t know how to play music, doesn’t know how to create. You try writing? It’s not good enough to draft, so you delete it. You try drawing? The head shape looks like a potato. You try playing music? The tabs are too fast, and you want to smash your instrument.
I, unfortunately, felt like this from the start of August to just a few days ago. Being influenced by comics such as The Umbrella Academy (before it was a show) and Deathwish, I felt like I needed to be like the artists, taking some of their aspects of art and putting them in my own. Coming back to just a few days ago, I spent the night with my uncle Dan and my aunt Julia.
They influence me in art and music in more ways than one, showing me songs that were prominent back when they were near my age and showing me their own art, on Dan’s side of things. They showed me Queens of the Stone Age, Gorillaz, White Zombie, and so much more.
Back to whenever I went to their place for the weekend. We were planning on playing Dungeons and Dragons, but that all went into a mess of just talking about music and our lives. Nonetheless, it was fun, and they gave me two new sketchbooks I could use to draw.
Coming home, I asked myself, “What should I draw?” I sat on it for a minute, deciding to doodle a bit. First one? Looked like a mutilated animal. Second? Yeah, now we were getting somewhere. I proceed to draw one of my Original Characters, Hal Smith (First name pronounced hall…), a character in the book I’ve been attempting to write for the past year.
Hal is one of my favorite tropes in all of media, labeled as ‘Haunting the Narrative’. That’s whenever a character in a show or a novel’s presence is absent or minimal, yet their actions, choices, and existence have a profound impact on the plot. Some examples of this are Pink Diamond in Steven Universe, Doug Rattman in the Portal franchise, Mark Heathcliff in The Mandela Catalog, Sauron in The Lord of the Rings, John Kramer in the Saw franchise, Caleb Wittebane in The Owl House, and so many more.
With this new motivation, I draw him and paste him in my new sketchbook, admiring the new piece of work in the book I had previously decorated. I’m working hard to get out of art block, but that’s what comes whenever you’re an artist.
The title of the blog is necessarily what this post is about. Even since the begging of time, music has been an influential part of societies, drawing people together and even bringing them apart, depending on how close minded the society was. Music and the tone of specific songs could influence a persons mood, add tone to a scene of a movie or a show, and tell stories. One could listen to the lyrics of a song and be so influenced they themselves write a song or a novel or, well, anything.
There’s different genres of music/artists that really stand out to me, consisting of the band’s motives and why they made a band. One example of music that really moves me is punk. Ska-Punk, personally is my favorite, with Choking Victim and Less than Jake being two entirely different sounding bands with different imagery being in the same genre.
Choking Victim, a ska-punk band that was formed in New York City, known for their politically charged lyrics and innovative way their music is played. Right after they recorded their first full-length LP, No Gods, No Managers in 1999, the band broke up, but still had enough recordings to make an album. With punk rock coming from English bands such as The Ramones in the 1970’s, there has been several different genres of punk to come with it, but Ska-Punk was mostly prominent from 1996 to 2000.
Less than Jake, on the other hand, is also Ska-Punk. Despite their horn driven rhythm and higher beat, they do still classify as a ska-punk band. Why? Because of social commentary and political comments. Less than Jake is a band from Gainesville, Florida, recording a whopping 36 albums.
Choking victim has more political commentary, such as the song Money. The song describes God giving money to the rich and to the government, but also giving it to the dead, with the lyrics of, “‘Cause after you have money, things are never quite the same.” And, “The money fueled this empire and our racist history. Although I’m forced to use it, the rules have all been set. But life is not worth living when your soul is in debt.” While Plastic Cup Politics talks about drinking, and discussing things (such as politics, henceforth the name) under the influence, which they may have not talked about whilst sober.
These songs both talk about things that a lot of people don’t want to talk about, but that’s the beauty of music: talking about things that nobody wants to talk about in a little song. Regardless of the genre of one’s band, they can discuss current events and people’s lives.
Choking Victim’s Squatta’s Paradise E.P. and Less Than Jake’s Hello Rockview
OVS Journalism Blog 