This week, we did something a little different — we built our own tier list website just so we could rank 80s sitcoms without fighting pop-ups and autoplay ads. Totally normal behavior.

But here’s the twist: we’re not ranking them based on how “important” they were at the time. We’re asking a much more dangerous question:

Would we actually rewatch this in 2026?

That framework leads to some very strong opinions.

🏆 The S-Tier Is Earned

A handful of shows prove they’re more than nostalgia. The writing still lands. The characters still feel alive. The cultural relevance hasn’t completely evaporated.

We talk about why certain series:

• Hold up surprisingly well
• Feel sharper now than they did then
• Or still manage to feel relevant without being preachy

There’s one in particular that we both immediately elevate without debate.

🚫 The Hall of Shame

There’s one show we don’t even rank.

We talk about:

• When “separating the art from the artist” stops being possible
• How cultural legacy changes over time
• And why historical importance doesn’t automatically equal rewatchability

It’s a sobering but necessary conversation.

🤔 The Middle Tier Dilemmas

This is where things get interesting.

We wrestle with:

• Working-class representation vs. caricature
• “Very Special Episode” overload
• Sitcom dads getting infinite second chances while sitcom moms don’t
• When a breakout character slowly destroys their own show

We also revisit the strange cultural phenomenon of:

• Every sitcom family in the 80s somehow living in a house they absolutely could not afford.

🔻 The Ones That Don’t Survive Rewatch

Some shows are huge in memory… and rough in reality.

We talk about:

• Nostalgia for actors vs. nostalgia for writing
• How certain catchphrases aged like milk
• Boomer sentimentality as a genre
• And why some “beloved” shows just don’t work outside their original era

🎧 What Else We’ve Been Into

Before the tier list chaos:

• Eden talks about a wildly violent light novel series featuring a sociopathic child adventurer who refuses to follow the script of her own destiny.
• Peter shares recent music discoveries, a disappointing Tool take, and why The Dark Forest might require an emotional recovery period.
• There’s also a brief detour into why everyone in Cheers looks 20 years older than we do right now.

🖥️ Bonus: DIY Internet Energy

Peter casually mentions:

• Taking a screenshot of a tier list site
• Feeding it to Claude
• Coding a cleaner version
• And deploying it live via GitHub Pages

Because apparently that’s what we do now.

In our 100th real episode, we did something intentionally unserious: we gave ourselves 15 seconds at a time to talk about things we love. What started as a goofy structural constraint quickly turned into a revealing conversation about taste, memory, comfort, obsession, and why certain art, habits, and rituals stick with us. Along the way, we touched on music, books, games, food, family, creative work, and the quiet joy of finding things that feel like home — especially in a world that’s been exhausting lately. It's a bit messy, but it's also genuinely us.

Episode Notes

• This episode marks our 100th regular, full-length episode, so instead of a standard format, we leaned into something playful and deliberately constrained: 100 things we like, 15 seconds at a time.
• A recurring theme is comfort versus depth: comfort movies, comfort albums, comfort routines — but also art that challenges us, wrecks us emotionally, or reshapes how we think.
• We talked about taste as biography — how the things we love are often tied to specific eras of our lives, relationships, or moments of becoming.
• There’s a strong undercurrent of making space for joy without justification, whether that’s bad movies, heavy music, silly rituals, or deeply personal creative practices.
• The episode also works as a quiet statement about community — family, friends, partners, collaborators — and how shared enthusiasm keeps us connected.

Shows to check out:
Devo-teas
Generations

This week, we wandered through a grab-bag of games, music, and reading before settling into a long-overdue cultural reckoning with This Is Spinal Tap. We talked Sonic games and cursed Sonic-sonas, gacha updates that somehow turn into cyberpunk motorbike fantasies, cheerful amnesia manga, extreme metal singles that absolutely rip, and a handful of games that ranged from surprisingly delightful to instantly forgettable. But the heart of the episode was finally sitting down with Spinal Tap itself—an enormously influential mockumentary that, forty years on, felt quieter, subtler, and stranger than its reputation. We landed somewhere between “mid” and “actually pretty good,” unpacking where it still works, where it shows its age, and why its legacy looms so much larger than the movie itself.

Episode Notes

What We’ve Been Into

• Games
  • Eden dives into Sonic Forces, embracing the chaos of creating a cursed Sonic-sona (a dog with a grapple gun).
  • A return to Wuthering Waves with the 3.0 update: underground cyberpunk cities, summonable motorcycles, and Sega crossover bike liveries.
  • Peter spends real time with the Playdate handheld and unexpectedly loves Dig Dig Dino—dogs, dinosaurs, and eldritch horror.
  • Mixed feelings on Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy: clunky combat, nonstop chatter, and controller prompts that can’t decide what console they’re on.
  • Dispatch lands as enjoyable but oddly forgettable—pure popcorn gaming that evaporates once it’s done.
• Reading
  • Cheerful Amnesia delivers wholesome, funny yuri romance built on anime-logic memory loss.
  • A shout-out to Adachi and Shimamura short stories, still reigning supreme.
  • Peter continues through The Dark Forest, the second book in Remembrance of Earth’s Past, digging into Wallfacers, Wallbreakers, and long-term cosmic dread.
• Music
  • New doom EP from The Eternal—short, tight, and surprisingly restrained.
  • Reliance by Soen: less adventurous, more consistent, and maybe better for it.
  • Absolute hype for Archspire’s new single “Limb of Leviticus”—blisteringly fast with just enough groove to breathe.

Main Topic:

This Is Spinal Tap

• Prompted by renewed discussion of Rob Reiner and his legacy, we finally sat down with his directorial debut.
• Initial reaction: not nearly as laugh-out-loud funny as its reputation suggests.
• Over time, appreciation grew for:
  • Its subtlety and deadpan delivery.
  • The improvised dialogue paired with surprisingly tight plotting and long-payoff jokes.
  • Iconic moments (“these go to eleven,” the cocoon stage prop, mysteriously exploding drummers).
• Nigel Tufnel emerges as the emotional and comedic core, hinting at the future of Christopher Guest’s mockumentary career.
• We talked about how much of Spinal Tap’s impact comes from being first—laying the groundwork for an entire genre that others would later perfect.
• Final verdict: historically essential, quietly funny, better on reflection than on first watch—and a reminder that movies used to trust audiences more.

Big Picture Takeaways

• Cultural influence doesn’t always match immediate enjoyment.
• Subtlety and restraint are skills we’ve mostly lost in modern filmmaking.
• Maybe we should make smaller, cheaper movies again—and let weird ideas breathe.

This week, we kick off 2026 by talking about Ambrosia Sky, a short, atmospheric sci-fi game that quietly wrecked us more than we expected. What starts as a PowerWash-adjacent cleanup sim turns into a meditation on grief, abandonment, and the emotional cost of leaving home. We talk about why smaller, constrained games are thriving right now, how Ambrosia Sky uses limitation as a strength, and why finishing Act One left us with far more questions than answers — in the best possible way.

Episode Notes

• We open the first episode of 2026 in full post-holiday time confusion: strange schedules, too much work, and no reliable sense of what day it is.
• Eden talks about covering extra shifts at the comic shop, double-dipping PTO, and the unfortunate result of biking home in brutal weather and bruising their ribs.
• A digression on sleep rituals follows, including Peter’s famously corpse-like sleeping position and Eden’s highly specific side-switching requirements.
• With it being January 1st, we reflect on 2025 as a pop-culture year — broadly rough, but not without meaningful discoveries.
• We note a shared shift toward shorter, more focused media, especially in games.

🎮 Why We Played

Ambrosia Sky

• We wanted something short, contained, and emotionally grounded.
• The “PowerWash Simulator with a story” pitch undersells what the game actually does.
• We appreciated the decision to release this explicitly as Act One, rather than early access.

🌌 Setting & Premise

• You play as Dalia, a “Scarab” who cleans exofungus and reclaims bodies for the Ambrosia Project.
• She returns to the asteroid colony she fled 15 years earlier — built inside a dead Leviathan.
• The colony is effectively empty; the story unfolds through terminals, logs, and environmental details.
• There are no live conversations, reinforcing isolation and loss.

🧠 Themes

• Grief, abandonment, and the emotional cost of leaving home.
• Labor as mourning: cleaning and reclamation as acts of reckoning.
• Unresolved relationships, especially between Dahlia and Maeve.
• Absence as a storytelling tool.

🛠️ Gameplay & Structure

• Core loop centers on spraying substances to remove fungal growth.
• Light Metroidvania structure with optional backtracking.
• Grappling hook works well, with occasional jank.
• Specialized sprays exist but feel lightly used.
• Puzzles focus on power routing and environmental access.
• The game benefits from being short; it would not sustain a longer runtime.

🎧 Atmosphere

• Strong, understated soundtrack that reinforces loneliness.
• Art direction does heavy emotional lifting despite a small budget.
• Exterior space sequences are a standout moment.
• The game consistently favors mood over exposition.

⚠️ Act One Ending

• The story ends abruptly and deliberately, offering few answers.
• Maeve is alive, but clearly changed.
• Major concepts — the Ambrosia Project, the Leviathan — remain unexplained.
• We found the ambiguity compelling rather than frustrating.

🧾 Closing Thoughts

• We’re glad we stuck with the game past early hesitation.
• The Act-based release feels honest and respectful of the player.
• Both of us plan to play the remaining acts at launch.
• Ambrosia Sky is a strong example of how small games can carry real emotional weight.

This week we keep things intentionally low-effort and high-chaos by drafting the Billboard year-end #1 songs from 1980 through 1999. We each build a ten-song playlist from a shared pool, knowing that once a song is picked, it’s gone forever. Along the way we uncover timeless masterpieces, generational blind spots, slow-dance trauma, and more than a few baffling chart decisions. By the end, it’s less about “best songs of all time” and more about what pop culture we survived — and what it says about the decades that made us.

Cold Open & Life Updates

• Eden survives Iowa weather whiplash, including snowmelt, wind advisories, and dogs who refuse to come inside.
• We check in on end-of-year fatigue, weddings on the horizon, and the general desire to just get to January.

What We’ve Been Checking Out

• Eden scores a surprise manga haul via Reddit, including:
  • Kase-san and… — a quiet, funny, wholesome romance that desperately wants its characters to communicate.
  • Chainsmoker Cat — gross, chaotic, and deeply committed to depicting the world’s worst anthropomorphic cat girl.
• Continued time in Where Winds Meet, including discovering that joining the “hot evil people” sect requires in-game marriage… followed by divorce.
• Peter continues slowly working through The Three-Body Problem and Gödel, Escher, Bach.
• A brief dive into habit-building via the new Atomic Habits workbook.
• Music check-in includes Archspire’s new single “Carrion Ladder” and the eternal joy of Apple Music Replay actually getting things right.
• Gaming includes Ball Pit, Megabonk, and the looming temptation of finally committing to Baldur’s Gate 3.

The Main Event: Billboard #1 Draft (1980–1999)

• We draft songs snake-style, locking each other out as we go.
• Early rounds are stacked with undeniable classics:
  • Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You”
  • Prince’s “When Doves Cry”
  • Blondie’s “Call Me”
  • Cher’s “Believe”
• George Michael emerges as an ’80s powerhouse with multiple entries.
• The generational divide shows up fast:
  • Peter leans heavily ’80s.
  • Eden lives firmly in the ’90s (for better and worse).
• We acknowledge slow-dance staples that were emotionally formative whether we liked them or not.
• The middle rounds reveal just how strange pop history can be when viewed year-by-year.
• By the later picks, we’re openly throwing ourselves on grenades:
  • The Macarena is drafted out of mercy.
  • Multiple songs are chosen purely because something has to be.
• We question how certain cultural touchstones (My Heart Will Go On, Aaliyah, Bone Thugs) somehow missed the top spot in their years.

Big Takeaways

• Billboard #1 does not mean “best song.”
• The ’80s age better than the ’90s in pop memory (and fashion).
• Nostalgia is selective, and pop charts are cruel.
• Drafting music is a great way to discover what you genuinely love — and what you merely survived.

This week, we come in hot — starting with wuxia vibes, holiday chaos, and cursed Christmas remixes of “September” — before diving into music stats, Taskmaster binges, Eden’s Wuxia/Baihe adventures, and Peter’s latest reading spree (including Gödel, Escher, Bach). Eventually, we embark on the Most Important Cultural Work of Our Time: a fast-food and fast-casual tier list. Along the way, we crown unexpected champions, bury some long-held myths (looking directly at you, In-N-Out), and declare Waffle House the beating heart of American civilization. It’s unhinged, joyful, occasionally shameful, and fully definitive.

Opening Shenanigans

• Eden opens with an incredible wuxia monologue introducing Beauty’s Blade, the Baihe novel they’ve been reading.
• Peter tries (and fails) to match the energy.
• Thanksgiving recaps: delayed flights, Target wandering, and the absolute war crime that is “Do You Remember…the 21st Night of December” playing over store speakers.

Life Updates & Media

• End-of-year malaise, work overload, and winter dread.
• Apple Music Replay breakdowns:
  • Peter: another year, another Slow Forever domination.
  • Eden: a deeply chaotic top-albums list featuring Rebecca Black, Japanese jazz fusion, KPM library music, and Tron: Legacy.
• Taskmaster binges continue.
• Peter’s current reading includes Three-Body Problem and the 900-page Gödel, Escher, Bach.
• Eden is deep into Where Winds Meet (“What if Assassin’s Creed but Wuxia and optionally an MMO?”), and fully living in Jianghu.
• Manga corner: Kaiju Girl Caramelise is adorable and unhinged in equal measure.

🎖️

The Great Fast-Food Tier List

Certified THE BEST

• Domino’s – the undisputed king of delivery pizza.
• Five Guys – elite burgers, elite fries, elite price tag.
• Portillo’s – Italian beef nirvana.
• Schlotzky’s – elevated to divinity thanks to Peter and Alyssa’s first date.
• Taco Bell – delicious, shameful, transcendent.
• Waffle House – an American institution and FEMA-indexed miracle.

Strong Contenders (B-Tier)

• Dairy Queen – chicken strip baskets, Texas toast, and blizzards: a holy trinity.
• Long John Silver’s – Eden’s forbidden love.
• McDonald’s – the fries that define civilization.
• Panda Express – orange chicken supremacy.
• Skyline Chili – Eden-approved, Cassie-reviled.
• Wendy’s – consistently solid.
• White Castle – cheesy sliders hit just right.

Perfectly Fine (C-Tier)

Places we’d go to with zero enthusiasm and zero complaint:

A&W, Bojangles, Burger King, Carl’s Jr./Hardee’s, Firehouse Subs, Jersey Mike’s, Jimmy John’s (fast only), KFC, Little Caesars, Noodles & Co., Panera, Quiznos, Whataburger, Wienerschnitzel.

Ehhh (D-Tier)

Arby’s wet paper towel meat, Culver’s overrated custard, Del Taco’s value plays, Denny’s at 2am, Papa John’s overpriced cardboard, Pizza Hut nostalgia only, Popeye’s here-but-not-here, Qdoba mid-Mex, Sbarro mall sadness, Sonic for drinks only.

Absolutely Not (F-Tier)

• Chick-fil-A (for reasons both ethical and culinary)
• Chipotle (poop-from-a-butt energy)
• In-N-Out (the most overrated chain in America; fries taste like unwashed ass)
• IHOP (international house of poop)
• Stake & Shake (weird political tallow energy)
• Subway (fell from grace when they stopped cutting the V in the bread)
• Wingstop (wings overrated; nuggets forever)

Closing Thoughts

• We discover we are not fast-food people…except for when we are.

This week, we finally dive into the cultural behemoth that is K-Pop Demon Hunters—six months late and fully confused. We talk through how this extremely catchy, hyper-animated, wildly popular kids’ movie managed to conquer 2025, even though it’s… fine? We break down what works (the faces, the music, that glorious fat tiger), what doesn’t (the pacing, the unearned romance, the baffling reconciliation), and why we’re still not convinced it deserves the cultural chokehold it has. Plus, we catch up on everything we’ve been checking out lately—from doom metal to City Pop to WOJIA novels—and wonder how we went from Spider-Verse to this.

Episode Notes

• We kick things off with hard root beer, ingredient confusion, and the audacity of “beer, sugar, caramel color” as an ingredients list.
• Thanksgiving rant: we complain about Christmas invading everything earlier each year, praise gratitude as a practice, and call out the consumerist creep of “Black November.”
• Eden shares the saga of the family WhatsApp gratitude initiative and why performative gratefulness ain’t it.
• New Year’s resolutions? Terrible. A system designed to fail—except for gyms and planner companies.

What We’ve Been Up To

Eden

• Not much… exhaustion + scrolling + arguing with Reddit.
• Reading more Magical Revolution of the Reincarnated Princess and the Genius Young Lady.
• Secretly going full Wuxia-pilled but not ready to talk yet.
• Deep in digital accessibility at work (contrast ratios forever).
• Listening almost exclusively to City Pop to summon 80s vibes.

Peter

• Heavy music roundup:
  • Shores of Null / Convocation split.
  • A Sun of the Dying – Throne of Ashes.
  • The Reticent – Please (mental-illness-theme concept album).
  • 1914 – Viribus Unitis, a blackened death metal concept album about WWI.
  • Bell Witch & Aerial Ruin – Stygian Bough Vol. 2, the lightest album of the three (which says something).
• Finished all seven Murderbot books and reflects on the genuinely human core beneath the action.
• Game updates:
  • PowerWash Simulator 2 — massive improvements, more forgiving completion, soap freedom.
  • Ball Pit (Ball×Pit) — breakout + roguelike + city builder; surprisingly great, Devolver-approved.

🎤 Main Event: K-Pop Demon Hunters

Initial Reaction

• We both expected very little.
• It was… more fun than expected, but nowhere near deserving the cultural omnipresence it has.
• Every song starts, and we both go: “Oh shit, that’s from this movie?!”

What We Liked

• The animation: hyper-expressive faces, Sony flair, Spider-Verse DNA.
• The music: genuinely catchy, culturally unavoidable.
• The creatures: the fat tiger + the crow with the tiny hat = peak cinema.
• The fights: lively weapon-specific choreography.
• Bright, colorful aesthetic in a world obsessed with desaturated grimdark.

What Didn’t Work

• Pacing is viciously fast (95 minutes, no room to breathe).
• The Rumi–Ginu romance is unearned.
• The group breakup & reconciliation happens with whiplash speed.
• Entire subplots (Celine, Rumi’s origin) feel missing — likely sequel fodder.
• The climax ultimately hinges on the boy saving the girl, which undercuts the “girl group as heroes” core.

Why Is It So Popular?

We genuinely don’t know, but we explore possibilities:

• The Frozen effect: young girls finally seeing themselves as the heroes.
• K-pop’s massive global footprint and built-in fandom infrastructure.
• Ubiquitous, TikTok-optimized songs.
• A kids’ movie that’s actually watchable for adults (a miracle compared to Shimmer & Shine).
• The novelty of a musical-action hybrid that doesn’t completely suck.

Final Thoughts

• We’re glad we watched it—mostly to understand why our nieces and the entire world dressed as Rumi for Halloween.
• It’s fun, cute, fast, and catchy.
• But it’s also feather-light and will evaporate from our brains shortly after recording.
• Definitely not staying on the Plex server.

This week on The Middle of Culture, we close out our dive into Transformers with Transformers One, last year’s animated prequel that tells the origin story of Optimus and Megatron. We rave about how shockingly good it is—beautiful animation, heartfelt storytelling, and voice performances that actually make you care about robots punching each other. Along the way, we talk about Sanderson’s declining prose, the “YA-ification” of modern fiction, the decline of mass-market paperbacks, and why we’ll always have a soft spot for dumb robot movies done well.

Episode Notes

Opening Banter

• Peter returns from travel (Boise and Napa), happy to be home.
• Eden vents about a rough week and hostile engineers during digital accessibility training, complete with an on-campus shooting alert mid-meeting.
• Peter describes an incredible dinner at Bistro Jeanty in Napa (truffle deviled eggs, beef bourguignon, and chocolate croissant bread pudding).

Books & Reading

• Peter finishes Murder Your Employer by Rupert Holmes (yes, the “Piña Colada Song” guy)—a darkly funny and satisfying story about the McMaster’s School of Homicide.
• Reads Artificial Condition, the second Murderbot novella, and starts Write Your Novel from the Middle.
• Discussion on how story structure midpoints define theme and cohesion.
• Critique of Brandon Sanderson’s Wind and Truth: great worldbuilding, but noticeably weaker prose since losing his longtime editor.
• Eden speculates that the issue might extend to the whole fantasy industry—less editing, more aesthetic consumerism, and the death of the mass-market paperback.
• Broader talk on the “dumbing down” of fiction and the rise of YA and “New Adult” markets catering to comfort rather than challenge.

Music & Games Corner

• Peter dives into rediscovering Psychotic Waltz, Psychonaut, and Oramet—bands that balance progressive creativity with restraint.
• New release highlight: PowerWash Simulator 2.
• Eden tests two disappointing gacha games (Duet Night Abyss and Resonance Solstice) and finally uninstalls all HoyoVerse titles.
• Back to Final Fantasy XIV, excited about the new patch allowing full cross-class glamours.

Main Feature – Transformers One (2024)

• Both agree: it’s the best Transformers movie ever made—heartfelt, gorgeously animated, and genuinely emotional.
• Plot rundown: Orion Pax (Optimus) and D16 (Megatron) rise from the oppressed underclass of “Cogless” robots, uncover Sentinel Prime’s corruption, and witness the birth of Autobot vs. Decepticon ideology.
• Core theme: friendship, betrayal, and revolution—the tragedy of two friends who believe in justice but choose different paths.
• Voice acting highlights:
  • Brian Tyree Henry’s nuanced Megatron is phenomenal.
  • John Hamm nails the duplicitous Sentinel Prime.
  • Scarlett Johansson and Chris Hemsworth have real chemistry, even if Hemsworth is the weakest link.
  • Laurence Fishburne brings gravitas as Alpha Trion.
  • Keegan-Michael Key’s Bumblebee is purposefully annoying but fits the tone.
• Praise for the movie’s subtle callbacks to the 1986 film (“You don’t have the touch or the power”), strong emotional beats, and sense of earned tragedy.
• Both lament how poorly it performed at the box office—“we are part of the problem”—and hope it gets a sequel.
• Brief detour comparing the animated film’s depth to the shallow chaos of the Michael Bay series.

Closing Thoughts

• Transformers One feels like the first time the franchise truly understood its own heart.
• Recommendation: watch it—it’s smart, emotional, and fun as hell.