Fandom Island and Town

Stewart was here in the store, but he was distracted, set up in the back by the stage with his turntables and his laptop as he was working on a few things for Summer's party tomorrow. So, you know, he was technically working just not on store-specific stuff. He was generally trying to keep an eye on the door in case anyone interesting actually did come in or if he needed to look more productive on something else (for whom, even? He was the boss here, was he not?), but, for the most part, he seemed pretty engrossed in updating his sample catalogue and trying a few things here and there.

And honestly? If the entire day passed by where he was just so wrapped up in his music that he didn't even notice, without interruptions, and actually being productive and creative all at once? That was honestly a really good day for him.

Groovy Tunes is open!

Stewart had come up with the intention of getting some actual work done that day, mostly some organizing of the CDs and records, but then that all sort of went out the window when his playlist started leaning heavily into some HANABIE..

So now there was headbanging and dance breaks and an urge to cause chaos rather than order. So now all the CDs and records were going to be all mixed up, which he felt would be a more interesting experience for anyone actually looking for something specific, and, hey! It might give Charlie something to do or whatever next Tuesday. See? Wasn't that an important part of being a boss? Giving people bullshit tasks to do that were mostly unnecessary or self-created? See? He could pretend he was in this for more than just dicking around in a music shop after all! Thanks, HANABIE.!

Groovy Tunes is open!

After talking with Charlie on Tuesday about Thor and his lightning, Stewart had gotten...ideas, and so in preparation for this month's Open Mic Night, he was doing a lot of work around the stage that day. Anyone coming into the shop needing assistance or wanting to buy something might need to wait for him to come down from the ladder as he was putting up clouds and lights over the stage, and dripping down other lights. And even once the visuals were in place, there was hooking it up to his rig where he could get the lights to either flash based on what was playing from the speakers or sort of set it up on a different kind of control during his set.

It wasn't quite what he envisioned. In the broad light of day, it definitely looked a little DIY high school theater, but maybe once it was time for the show and the lights were down, it would look dope as hell.

Guess time would tell. He just hoped he had enough time after setting it up to actually work on his set. He'd been weirdly busy this week and hadn't dedicated as much time to it as he usually would have.

Groovy Tunes is open!

Reason #186 why Stewart should probably not be running a legitimate business: getting into comment arguments on the internet, especially on the Yelp reviews.

But in his defense, this particular commenter was asking for it by coming specifically for Stewart's performances at the Open Mic nights, and he was working on attacking that one specific reviewer from several different vitriolic accounts and various VPNs instead of doing...you know...actual constructive work that day.

He would argue that this was far more important, anyway.

Groovy Tunes is open!

Stewart emerged from the basement of Groovy Tunes bleary-eyed and disoriented. How long he'd actually been down there was anyone's guess, and it might not even be the fault of substance abuse, but perhaps some sort of interdimentional time anomaly. A real Fandom Island/Bermuda Triangle sort of situation.

It could have been.

But it probably wasn't.

Either way, though, he seemed to be grasping around for clarity and existence again, staring at the computer to make sense of shop business stuff while blaring some German metalcore.

Groovy Tunes is open!

Everything had started put just fine. Stewart was actually doing administrative work regarding the store, with a good mix of some nu-metal and metal core driving his productivity, but then, out of nowhere, the music stopped abruptly and what started playing, although he didn't recognize it at the time, was the entire works of James Joyce, read in an incredibly dry Irish brogue.

He wasn't really sure, at first, if it was just the stereo or possibly the drugs.

He really hoped it was the former, otherwise he'd have just spend an entire half day after that recording dead air to mix and sample later.

Groovy Tunes is open!

Last week had been a week of an atrocious imbalance between the high (singular) and the lows (multitude), and so Stewart dealt with it the same way he did most things: drugs and video games. And so when the alert he'd set of his phone to remind him that it was Thursday because it became increasingly more difficult to remember to bother being a part of society as a whole, he emerged from the basement a little bleary eyes and hissing at the light coming through the window, which reminded him to contact someone about some good blinds or shutters for the place.

But it also meant that he wasn't really sure if the stereo really was pumping out 8- and 16-bit dance versions of popular songs or he had way too much Super Italian Plumber burned into his brain right now.

He might have been staring at some of the speakers and wondering if he hit them hard enough, coins or mushrooms might come out of them.

Groovy Tunes is open!

Stewart was having a terrible week. It all started when he woke up on Sunday, and all he could think about was Gae sex. Gae sex filled him up inside. After Gae sex, there was practically no other sex. Gae sex was different than all other sex he'd had. Gae sex was the best of all sex, and he missed it. Gae sex had been a personal awakening, it made him feel something deep, deep inside him....It was like his whole life was meaningless before he started Gae sex. Gae sex made him feel pride. It made him feel like He-Man. It was life-changing. Earth-shattering Gae sex.

Why must he be tortured with these reflections? Of sex with his ex...girlfriend, who was named Gae.

(This joke worked so much better in a audio medium).

But there had been whispers of Gae asking about him over New Years, hadn't there? So he went back to Letterkenny to see if he could reconnect with that mind-altering Gae sex once more, only to find her elusive and avoidant and as unreachable as ever.

After abject failure, then, in successfully obtaining Gae sex, or even just a Gae kiss or chaste Gae handholding, Stewart returned to the island yesterday feeling defeated. He felt like all he wanted to do was drown his sorrows at the bar, but it was Summer's night, and he couldn't deal with that additional rejection (he didn't remember about there being another bar until far, far too late). And so he skulked down to the basement of Groovy Tunes to numb himself in his more traditional way, and didn't emerge until very late in the morning, wincing at the brightness coming through the window, and not feeling much better about any of it.

He thought maybe he'd poke at some work to try and feel better, but he was mostly just making a pile of terrible CDs to smash later. Until his phone buzzed, and he felt a surge of hope fluttering in his miserable chest. "Gae?" he asked hopefully to the universe as he all but lunged for his phone on the counter.

There was a wave of disappointment to see that it wasn't her, and then a tilt of his head as he processed what it was instead.

"Navaan," he said, with a faint smirk for the intrigue of possibilities. It wouldn't be be Gae sex. Nothing would ever be Gae sex. But...he certainly wasn't about to let that go unanswered.

Groovy Tunes is open!

(For now).

When Stewart came into the shop that day, it was from the basement, blesry-eyed and hnbathed, because he'd discovered that there was apparently a whole ass apartment down there, and he'd been busy converting it into a little video gaming haven.

He was honestly considering relocating down there entirely. After all, he'd always been much more of a basement dweller, it was practically his natural habitat, and he still hadn't quite been able to get the constant smell of sake and sweat out of his current place.

Anyway, he was up in the store now, picking at a modicum of things to work on there, and it was entirely Argentum's fault that the stereo was pumping out Moby and his 90s electronica ilk today.

Groovy Tunes is open!

Stewart liked this job because, for the most part, he didn't really have to actually do much. It had really just been an easy excuse for listening to and playing around with music and equipment all day. But every so often, something would happen to remind him that it wasn't all just relaxing and remixes.

Like trying to figure out what they were going to do with a shipment of literally thousands of teeny tiny harmonicas.

He squinted at them suspiciously for a good long while before something hit him, and, after a quick jaunt over to the T&C for supplies (mostly super glue), he hunched over them spread over the counter and got to work on what could only be secreted as some sort of super-mini-harmonica harmonica monolith.

Groovy Tunes is open!

Stewart had been bracing himself for an onslaught of bullshit Christmas music when he went into the store that day...the usual repetition of the Song That Shall Not Be Named, of course, but other saccharine sweet and persistently poppy and overtly overplayed staples, as well.

So when he came in to find the stereo pumping out A Very Metal Christmas, he was...suspicious. Reluctant to trust it. But he also didn't want to look at gift powerhouse in the mouth, and so he was cautiously willing to embrace it.

"That's better," he asserted, lifting his chin importantly, and went to get started on some work.


Groovy Tunes is open!

Stewart didn't bother with getting out much these days, outside of his classes and his work at Groovy Tunes, but, sometimes, a person realized that they had to occasionally venture out to a store not to dance in front of it, but to actually buy things like sustinence and supplies. He would have put it off until tomorrow when he knew Summer would be working, but one forlorn look into his mostly empty refrigerator told him it shouldn't wait.

Of course, it did end up having to wait once Stewart stepped outside and heard all the birds singing a familiar tune. And with various birds singing it, it presented some very interesting and unique presenations of the song that immediately caught his ear for remixing and...

Stewart rerouted toward Groovy Tunes, to grab a few things, and then he headed to the park after picking up some lunch as well, and there, he found a good spot near a tree to settle down with his food and a bunch of recording equipment. He'd move around the island to get different birds' interpretations of the hoilday classic, of course, but, by the end of it, he hoped to have a lot of really good versions that he could sample from, because how many DJs were putting out tracks with birds singing 'Carol of the Bells' on it? Not many, he imagined! So he felt he really needed to get on that.

Not like he had anything better to do today, anyway.

[[ open park is open, though usual Sunday sp applies~ ]]

It had taken Stewart a remarkably swift amount of time to understand exactly why, when he came into the store that day, the stereo was playing only Carly Rae Jepsen, and he didn't want to talk about it, and if anyone asked, he was going to insist he had no idea except that maybe, clearly, obviously, it was all just to torture him.

Just please ignore when he eventually pulled out his mixing equipment to start working on a few new tracks.

With his headphones firmly on and ready to switch over to some Slayer tracks if anyone actually came in and asked about that.

Ahem.

Groovy Tunes is open!

Inspired quite a bit by his sudden and impromptu stop into Turtle & Canary that day, Stewart felt the need to stake a claim out in front of the Kwik Stop for some dancing to keep metal moving him. He supposed he could be doing something more productive (like working at the store or actually going to class that morning), but he was a man truly moved by his passion for dance, and when that passion called, you answered.

It felt like it had been a while, anyway, since he graced the front of the Kwik Stop with his mad skillz. It hadn't, in a general sense, but, you know, since he was definitely still doing this all the time, but in a certain way, it definitely had been a while.

[[open~ standard sp potential applies.]]

Stewart didn't usually bother with coming into the store on a Monday, but not only did he have a whole mess of new records from the trip to Quebec to work with (yes, yes, Groovy Tunes was a music store with its own records, he did realize the certain irony in all this), but there was also something else he'd been think about that, now with the trip over, he was actually feeling a little inspired to get moving on. And so he was also working on posters.

The biggest one of which would be nestled in the window of the store for all passersby to witness, but there would also be smaller flyers and cards plastered up around town and on public billboards and what have you to spread the word maybe just a little further. They each had their own style and charm, in sort of an 90s indie zine flair with the impression of cut-out letters and a good garage band grunginess, but the message on all of them was generally the same gist:

NEW @ ~GrOOvY tUnEs~

OPEN MIC NIGHTS
Display your talents(?) at your
Charming Local Music Store

First Thursdays of Every Month
Starting November 7th

Contact Stewart (555-STRT) for
questions. comments. concerns.

He'd like to think it wasn't the worst idea in the world. He'd like to think that, if anything, his intrepid fellow Canadian musician and employee would be interested, too. He was trying not to think about him being the only one to want to take advantage of it, or of going through no one showing up again like the last time he tried holding something like this to scratch those creative...well, scratches.

Groovy Tunes is open!

Stewart was, at last, experiencing his first day at work where the stereo system in the store decided to take on a mind of its own. It had started simply enough; he had been in a bit of a mood for some Mother Mother today. A little Hayloft. Some Nobody Escapes. Verbatim (of course)...

But right around the time he'd be expecting Arms Tonight to pop off, the music would....switch. To something else. At some point, some Danzig. Some Pink Floyd. Even some Tracy Bonham.

It was right around the time that his attempts to get back on track, only to have it go into Boys II Men, he started to realize what was going on and let out an exasperated groan and a roll of his eyes.

"Fine!" he said. To the stereo. Because that was his life now. "I'll call my mom, okay?"

He couldn't believe a piece of stereo equipment was judging him for not actually telling his actual parent about Parents Weekend.

Groovy Tunes is open!

It wasn't that Stewart needed an excuse to start flinging up dark and spooky decorations all over the place; it did track somewhat with his general aesthetic and no one would exactly be surprised if he were to declare that every day was like All Hallow's Eve for him, but he had to admit that it was still nice to be able to lean so heavily into it after what was a truly manic spree the other day through the Spirit Halloween that popped up in the woods recently. And so today was going to be all about decorating the place and maybe doing some rearranging for some things that had been on his mind lately that he was still sort of waffling over, but, slowly and surely, he was inching his way toward.

Well, he'd get about half-way through decorating the place, before something happened and a minor injury that he made way too big a deal out of and anyone watching would think he was dying based on the reaction, put him in a sour mood and he was going to spend the rest of the day sulking in his chair while tending his grievous wound*.

Groovy Tunes is open!

__________________________________________________
*A string of cardboard bats now half-hanging off the ceiling had given him a papercut on the pad of his thumb. Even using his phone was practically torture now! TRAGIC.

Not only did Stewart actually come into work that Thursday, but he also came in earlier than anyone would probably ever reasonably expect from him, and he almost immediately went to work, setting up his laptop at the counter and spending the morning bent over it intently. More often than not, he also had his headphones on, too, and so there was a good chance that, even if he was right there, a customer might need to wait a moment before he realized they were there, in which case they'd get a little bit of a sneer as he lowered his headphones and actually helped them with whatever they were there for.

A bit later, though, he'd abandoned the counter to head to the back and the turntables, to start putting some of the things he had been working on into practice, again with that laser-focus of a man with a plan and a determination to actually bring it to fruition.

It was nice, actually.

He really did need to make the most of it while it lasted.

Groovy Tunes is open!

Stewart managed to bestir himself up enough to drag himself over to the store today, where he begrudgingly took care of the few things that had fallen on his shoulders as the de facto manager of this place, something that he'd spent a good deal of the morning complaining to himself about but, once he got in there, once he got started on it, actually maybe appreciated having clear goals and ways to accomplish them for a change and actually managed to get a lot of work done, which he was absolutely refusing to think about any deeper than that.

Which is why, once all that work was done, he abandoned the counter for the chair in the back of the store, thinking he needed to get a little bit more of a rise on it so that he could sort of lord over the place better. He considered dragging out some records and playing around on the tables, but once he stopped being productive, the urge just drained right out of him and just lounging around in his ennui sounded so much more appealing.

And squinting a little over the stereo making a hard turn from the band Ennui to the singer Enya, and trying to decide if he cared enough to actually get up and change it.

Groovy Tunes is open!

A certain lethargy had settled into Stewart that made it difficult for him to convince himself to bother with going into the store that day, but he had managed to do it. He wasn't expecting to get much work done, but, then again, when did he ever? He was mostly in a bit of a nostalgic mood, and planned to cycle through some old classics while just lounging in the old chair, his new skid throne, that he'd dragged into the performance space he'd cleared out. The early Marilyn Manson that left its mark. The Rammstein that then kicked it up further. The Slipknot that has always sustained...

Which might have been exactly what he'd have been doing if he'd just stayed at home, but at least now it at least had the guise of being a whisper of a productive member of actual society.

Groovy Tunes is Open!

Of course Stewart had seen the flyer for the concert tonight (and, he supposed, the subsequent wedding, but if he wasn't DJing himself, why would he care about weddings? He didn't even care about them when he was DJing, because that meant people like McMurray and Dickens constantly needling him about detestable chicken dances and deplorable boogies of a boot-scootin' variety), and of course that meant he had to look into this Envy Adams' music, and once he did that, play around with it a little, especially now that he did have his turn-tables set up toward the back of the store with the little performance space he'd been cultivating.

And he had to admit, this was...incredibly workable stuff, with a lot to play with and some good beats and riffs that felt pretty much designed to lend itself to remixing. And it wasn't a bad way to spend a day, really.

Sure, he should probably be doing things like working and running the store, but it's not like the place hadn't apparently been running itself just fine since the last person in charge here apparently left. And now it just also had better music.

Groovy Tunes is open!

Stewart had started out his day at Groovy Tunes with a fairly solid burst of productivity, blaring some ATARASHII GAKKO! as he returned to his mission of turning a section of the store toward the back, underneath the space-y sort of mural that gave the place more of that indie charm, into a good spot for live music. It was mostly just an excuse for him to get to hit the turntables in any sort of venue, really, even if it was him just playing to the shelves and the cash register, but maybe, just maybe, he could do something with live music in here on the regular, because why not?

But, with most things, especially when he was pursuing them without the support of his minions behind him, his interested started waning into lethargy, at some point, which meant that half the stuff had been moved and pushed around, and then he just dragged in an old armchair he'd found into the center of the space and plopped down onto it, where he just sort of planned to sit and space out and think about if he'd try to find something to do this weekend or just crush more video games.

Groovy Tunes is open!