Winter is Coming. Nothing (will be) the Same.

I don't think you're fully appreciating what is about to happen here. If you do, then you are free to go home. If not, prepare to be filled in. Drake is about to retake the winter with his upcoming album, Nothing Was the Same--scheduled for release this Tuesday. And personally, I cannot wait.

Just as Jay-Z has held down the summer (a typical time for unbridled fun, living only for the moment, and a reacquaintance with irresponsibility), Drake is establishing himself as rap's Jack Frost, giving us music for that cold, harsh season of imposed solitude. 

Perhaps it is for these reasons that you still may not fucks with Drake. You'd prefer to listen to the consistently upbeat (by comparison) musical stylings of a Jay-Z, or a 2 Chainz, or a Lil Wayne (all of whom Drizzy has collaborated with...decent evidence of his versatility and talent I'd say--at the risk of excessive cosigning)--individuals who, respectively:

 -rap about having so much dominion over the genre to really have any worries

-are not shy about their penchant for molly and weed, and pine only sarcastically about loving bad bitches and liking to fuck

OR

-literally have a song entitled "I Ain't Got No Worries"

But alas, you poor, summer-born child. Like he did in early 2009 with So Far Gone (before the release of which I had failed to look past what I knew about Degrassi's "Jimmy" and realize the truth), and again in late 2011 with an ambivert's anthem in the form of Take Care, Drake has returned to remind you that life is not some big party.

If you live roughly anywhere above the 38th Parallel (as a vast, though possibly underrepresented set of rap fans do), your life is (more likely than not) more like this:

...than it is like this:

To put it another way, fans of his music appreciate the bravery in Drake's admission that the environment of The North (read: Toronto) leaves him more inclined to feel like this:

...than to feel like this:

Those of us who live in climates that are almost inhospitably cold for most of the year have to live different lifestyles than the scenes of L.A., Miami, and Hot-lanta that recent rap-canon has placed at the fore of general consciousness. It's been a nice September, August, and July (not as much June though). Like most every year, we enjoyed the short-lived luxury of bee-lining it out of work/class/internship/whatever, right to the bar that has the best tuesday, and just playing it by ear for the rest of the night. Everyone's going everywhere, and everywhere something's going on.

But now it's back to regular business. Forget weekday activities. Forget where you're going out. Now, it won't take much to talk you out of going out at all. On a given winter's night, your friends with girlfriends will invariably be with their girlfriends. You can't blame them. For at this time of year, when it comes to satisfactorily occupying your free time, one must always go with the safe bet.

Your safe bet will involve briefly doing rock-paper-scissors with your remaining friends/roommates to determine who will have to put on their layers, and run across the snow-covered street to the liquor store to get the Jack Daniels for a shoulder-shruggingly exciting night in. Summer's would-be empassioned campaigns to go to So-And-So's "party," has been reduced to an armchair concession of a mere rumor that So-And-So is "might be having people over"--at which point the decision is made unanimously that it would be too much trouble to go...even if the facts could be better confirmed.

By the time the mounted iPod has gotten to the "Lord Knows" track, the conversation has naturally turned to whether So-And-So is still with Whatsherface. And after a beat in the discussion, your friends ask you why it didn't work out with Whatsherface's friend, Ol' Girl... because "she seemed really into you, bro." Then you all lapse into your own anecdote about how ambiguously you left things with Kate, or Lizzy, or whatever unsettlingly cliche woman's name applies at the time. 

It's not a glamorous way to spend the majority of your year. Maybe it's not even an ideal way. But it's real... and Drake is there with you in the background, getting the highlight stories of your blase lifestyle to rhyme.

The man told you his junior and senior albums "will only get meaner." Get thou ready for 11th grade.

click here to check out the Drizzy interview containing some of the ideas this post echoes:

https://soundcloud.com/drakeonsmash/drk1

"You made it a hot line. I made it a hot SONG."

I made a meme. The image is, of course, not mine. As in no, I did not find a Star Wars DVD play on my laptop, freeze it at this spot, make a screenshot of it somehow. I just rifle through Google Images like er'body else. It was, however, my idea to write those words over this image I found via Google on who-remembers-what-specific-site.net. So does that make the whole thing mine altogether? To me, intellectual property is a very confusing issue--as confusing as it is touchy.

I'm totally late to the whole blogging game. I've played around with this site, tumblr, and whatever else.  I can't tell if people's blogs are a serious thing ("with this blog, I will spread awareness about the disappearing wetlands, and showcase my work as a wildlife photographer!") or they're just kinda trollin ("here's a bunch of shit my friends might think is cool.") Me? I'm more of the latter, but wouldn't mind being the former either. What snags me up is the pressure I feel to take one approach or the other.

When I was in 5th grade, I created what I called an "offline website" dedicated to Dragonball Z. I was inspired by my friend Danny who showed me his Mega Man website. All I remember it being was a random scanned image of Mega Man he found perusing Netscape (similar to the one below, found on fightersgeneration.com ),

that he spent days carefully cropping on his stepdad's Adobe photoshop. He had me over his house one day to show me the finished product (imagine this image pasted over an outer space background and a lens flare effect just behind Mega Man's head...it was awesome). His page was offline for two reasons: the first being because his parents explained some very confusing and possibly expensive process to have a website published, which in retrospect was likely just a cop-out preying on the reality of the second reason--that's that was as far as Danny's expertise went on the matter.

In any case, the awesomeness of what he had created inspired me to make my own webpage about DBZ (nowadays, such things are called "fanpages") using Netscape PageMaker (or whatever it was called). The computer it was on, of course, has long since died and been tossed. However, these were some awesome features I remember about it:

-Color scheme was red lettering on a black background (duh, I was 11.)

-Still Image and Animated GIF sections categorized by character and complete with thumbnails.

-Various pages you navigated to had were headed by various GIFs I thought were cool, the coolest of which was on the homepage and looked something like this one:

Aside from the fact that it could not actually be accessed via the Internet (then known formally as the "information superhighway"), my website was pretty fuckin' sweet. And all it was was cool things I found around the internet. I loved doing it!

As middle school and high school rolled around, I had to put my nerdy tendencies on a shelf to do things like play sports, awkwardly crave any and all interaction with the opposite sex, and overall begin cultivating the personality of a reasonably normal adult...which is sadly something you just can't do if you're rushing to make it home before 4 everyday to catch your favorite imported action cartoon. And over time I kind of forgot that I loved all this nerdy stuff.

But basically when I tried to get reacquainted with the ol' computer screen after some years, the atmosphere seemed to get real touchy about giving proper credit for pictures.

Granted a lot of this might just be in my head because I majored in the humanities in college, and I've been molded into a soldier of academic honesty. But hey but if an image isn't mine, I'm not pretending it is. Just still allow me to enjoy it being on my blog. And I am going to voluntarily spare myself the hassle of consistently citing everything properly...please and thank you.

And maybe I could've saved a lot of time just saying that "I do not claim ownership to any of this unless I say otherwise." But I guess I just wanted to reminisce with you guys, and welcome myself back to the world of internet trolling. It's been too long.