Fortress Party 2025 - Stonechella

 Welcome to Stone-Chella, the Stonehenge music festival.

First, a tour of the empty room, with three stone monoliths and a lot of plastic plants. 

The walls were covered with druidic show posters.

During the party, there were several live acts:

• Hrafnkel Beowulf (Josh Siegel)
• Cerebrospinal Druid (Brent Stansfield)
• Glunmar the Firewolfmuncher (Jeff Kleiner)
• Hey Solscticer (Forrest Heijkal) 
• Sister Andy and the Solstice Jive Jammers (Andaiye Spencer)

And after the midnight performance of Cigareets, it devolved into a karaoke stage, as usual. 

Fortress Party 2025 - Popemon, Clave-Con, and The Vatican

The pervasive theme throughout the party was Clave Con, the Conclave Convention. 

We designed and printed a pack of customized Fortress Party Popemon Cards, and gave one to each guest on arrival. There was a unique card for each Pope from the first Pope, St. Peter, through Pope Leo XIV (Officially Pope 267, but if you count antipope's and contested popes, he's #299), and they were distributed chronologically. 

Based on Fortress attendance in prior years, there was a chance that 299 Popemon cards wouldn't be enough for every guest to get one, so we also made some future popes. 

Each Popémon card included scores between three and nine in each of four attributes: Holiness, Miracles, Wisdom, and Legacy. A host (in this case, Lauren) explained that high scores would help them in their battle against other Popes to be Supreme Pontiff in the Popémon Arena. 

Individuals could boost their Pope's ability scores by succeeding at challenge stations throughout the party. For instance, anyone who ate a chip with each of Hot Ones Season 26 Hot Sauces could scan a QR code to upgrade their Legacy score to 10. 

The other three challenges were in the basement, which was entirely dedicated to different parts of Vatican City. First, guests were greeted by a captain of the Swiss Guard. 

Pope Leo held synods, encyclicals, and catecheses in his chambers. I actually don't know what any of those mean, so we just leaned into his Chicago pride. 

The video on the TV was a 20 minute loop of Chicago sports teams fails. The room was also full of various Chicago paraphernalia, like Garret's popcorn and a bottle of Malort. 

In the next room, there was a confession booth, where guests would write one of their sins on a dry erase board. These were photographed and pinned to the wall as the evening wore on. 

The Confessor was behind a closed door, so he could only be seen between the cracks of the wall or from above. 

The next area was the Sistine Chapel, complete with stained glass windows, and a child angel making gang signs. 

We had a keg of "Canon Lager," and 100 little Communion Cups, each with a wafer and a dash of grape juice. 

This was also where guests could try St. Simon's Holiness Challenge, which was a custom game of Simon on a pipe organ. If you correctly played back seven random notes in a row, you would get a QR code to upgrade your holiness to 10. 

Around the corner was the Domino Dominoes challenge. There were 12 Popes printed on giant dominoes, and guests had to solve puzzles by connecting them end-to-end. Doing so gave a code to open a box, where a QR code to upgrade the Wisdom attribute to 10. 

The Tiber River was a 24 foot long waterway, complete with remote control kayaks, two devil ducks, and one Pope John Paul II duck. 

At the end of this hall, we had the final challenge. Three Connections games tied loosely to the Vatican, Popes, or Latin. Give them a try, and see if you can figure out the three digit code to open the box and upgrade your Miracles score to 10!

• Connections 1
• Connections 2
• Connections 3

Finally, guests could proceed to the Popemon Arena, where you could put all of these attributes to good use. Guests would scan their badge, and their Pope's picture would appear in one of these two boxes. Then they would battle, Street Fighter-style. The ability scores correlated with their Pope's hit points, attack damage, defense, etc. 

We recorded some original music and sound effects for this game, most of which was Malcolm shouting Latin phrases with a falsetto Italian accent. 

When one Pope won, smoke would come out of the chimney on the desk, and it would show the leaderboard and how many challenges each Pope had completed.

 

Fortress Party 2025 Retrospective

Dear Friends,

The Hard Taco song for January is called, "May It Ever Increase." which is also my wish for a wonderful New Year of plenty for you and yours. 

By you and yours, I don't mean you and your family. The word yours refers to me, as in "who is going to have a great 2026? Yours truly."

I also mean the word yours to indicate that you are going to get a well-deserved comeuppance, as in "you'll get yours in 2026."

And since it's January, it's time for our annual Fortress Party Retrospective. Here's the walkthrough visit, hosted by a most bemused Scarlett. 

And here's the room-by-room breakdown:

• Popémon, Clave-Con, and Vatican City
• Fort Montreal 1701
• Vault of Midnight
• Stone-chella
• Midwest Max: Rural Road

With warmest regards,

Me and mine

We Will Break You

Dear Friends,

There is credible evidence that the U.S. has used "music torture" at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp as a form of psychological coercion. The practice includes blasting songs, often heavy metal or children's music, to disorient and intimidate detainees. 

I believe that is why Hard Taco's 35th album, Toxic Productivity Bonus, is not dropping today!

You see, I submitted it to my distributor last week, and as of this writing, it is still undergoing inspection. What is there to inspect? As you can plainly see, the walleyed marionette on the album cover is wearing pants. And his hand is on the C button, a letter specifically chosen because it does not appear in any controversial words. 

So what is this gauntlet through which they must run this poor album?

A man of logic can arrive at only one conclusion: the delay allows the Homeland Security Military Commission Authority more time to screen the album for potential music-torture tracks.  

Which of these songs is most likely to destabilize the psyche of a political detainee? Perhaps it is "Septuagenarian," the new song for December. Catchy little tune, absolutely. But blast it at 90-100 dB under a soup of blinding floodlights (not included), and I'd like to think that your average Joe Enemy Combatant would break and confess to at least one act of terrorism.  

An admittedly less plausible explanation for the delay is that the music distributor holds a draconian (or at least overly-stringent) definition of *7-14 business days.* I submitted the files a week ago, only to learn that there are apparently no business days in the last week of November. 

November 25 - National Play with Dad Day

November 26 - National Jukebox Day

November 27 - Thanksgiving. (Also National Craft Jerky Day)

November 28 - National Flossing Day

If folks at the distribution company truly honor these holidays, they were far too busy roughhousing with their fathers and cleaning between their teeth to release my album, 

Regardless, the album drop is coming soon, so check your favorite streaming service daily for Toxic Productivity Bonus. And when it finally appears, you can form your own 100-dB focus group and let me know which track is most humanity-shattering!

With warmest regards,

Zach

Time Travel: A Cautionary Tale

Dear Friends, 

Malcolm is smitten with theoretical astrophysics and takes it upon himself to educate anyone who will listen about black holes. I find it quite charming, at least until he drops the word "space-time." Because that's just taking unrelated concepts (space and time) and pretending that the intervening hyphen turns them into a single concept. I guess that's what makes it theoretical physics. Standard high-school physics teachers would never try to attribute observed phenomena to vacuum-topography-chaos-velocity or friction-adjacent-parallax-bureaucracy. 

The Hard Taco song for December, "Inverse Chinese Finger Trap," showcases just how little I actually learned from those conversations. 

What I was really hoping to learn is whether black holes prove that (A) time travel is possible, and (B) I could use one to go back and prevent my dog from chewing the eyes off my most precious stuffed animal, Opus. 

As a child, I related deeply to this little penguin's optimism, hopeless naïveté, and body-dysmorphic disorder. We even posed together in my high-school senior portrait. 

A boy and his penguin. A penguin and his boy. 

This delighted the folks at Worzella Photography; up to that point, no teenage boy had ever chosen a pose other than their standard three offerings.  

Approved Teenage-Boy Portrait Poses: 

(A) Scowling While Leaning Against a Brick Wall,

(B) Scowling While Sitting in the Wheel-well of a Monster Truck, 

(C) Scowling While Trying to Break Out of Minimum-Security Prison. 

Worzella Photography was so proud of the Opus picture that they featured it in their brochure the following year, along with the only other creative photo they had: Girl Scowling While Leaning on the Ruins of an Enemy Shrine.

Anyway, I would appreciate it if a black hole would take me back to 2023 so I could counsel myself to keep Opus on a high shelf so that Ozo the Labradoodle wouldn't rip the poor penguin's eyes out. 

Unfortunately, knowing my 2023 self, I would insist that 2025 Me say nothing. "The consequences could be disastrous," I would warn my future self, "Telling me to put Opus on a higher shelf (or why) could cause a chain reaction that could unravel the very fabric of the space-time continuum and destroy the entire universe!" 

So, I would take matters into my own hands, safely tuck Opus into a closed drawer, and return to the present, only to discover that Ozo the Labradoodle had instead ripped the noses off my other two precious stuffed animals, Winnie the Pooh and Fievel. 

With warmest regards,

Zach

Happy Birthday Greek Tragedy

Dear Friends,

This month's Hard Taco song, "Giant Friendly Waves," is a sweet, nostalgic lullaby, sung from a child to his toy boats.

Happy Big 2-5-0-0!

Ancient Greek Tragedy is reaching an important milestone this year. Persians, the earliest surviving play by Aeschylus (525-456 BCE), is turning 2500. Persians was the first play to feature two characters talking to each other. Without it, we'd probably be stuck watching garbage like Romeo and Chorus, Butch Cassidy and Chorus, or Bill and Chorus's Excellent Adventure. 

If Aeschylus was the Father of Greek Tragedy, Sophocles (497-406 BCE) was the Other Father of Greek Tragedy. 

If you've got a problem with this, get your narrow-minded ass out of Athens.

Sophocles moved the art-form forward even further by adding a controversial third player to the stage. You know that scene where Oedipus tries to break up a fight between his wife and his mom? Good luck staging that with just two actors!

Euripides (480-406 BCE) was the youngest of the great Athenian tragedians. He continued the trend by adding a fourth actor to the stage in his play Medea's Big Happy Family.  His works were characterized by emotional realism and strong, complex female characters, and served as the inspiration for the Schick Quattro, the first disposable razor with four blades. 

Inexplicably, Euripides's plays were not just written in Greek, but they were written entirely with Greek letters. Weird flex, but okay. Here is an excerpt from The Trojan Women:

Beta: Pi Delta. 

Delta: Rho Mu? Alpha Beta. 

Gamma/pi: Tau iota!

Obviously, it's hard to follow in the original Greek, but translating to English is as simple as changing one letter in each word.

Beth: Hi Delia.

Delia: Who, me? Aloha, Beth.

Mamma/Pa: Tax Iowa!

Using this same translation method, it is clear that in Electra, the main character's famous plea to Clytemnestra, "Upsilon Epsilon," actually translates to "Epsilon Upsilon." Suddenly, the Peloponnesian War makes perfect sense. 

With warmest regards,

Zach

College Common App Essay

Dear Friends,

This month’s Hard Taco song, “Fine Fine,” is a reimagining of our first date, though we changed all the circumstances and emotions of that encounter because reality was too embarrassing.

Speaking of revisionist history, I'm trying to help my son craft a winning Common App college essay. I know, I know... I shouldn't just write it for him. I should make him look up and replace a few of the adjectives with parent-approved synonyms. But this essay is such a winner, I can't, in good conscience, let him apply to college with even a single word changed.

From Puddles to Pillars: Six Legs, One Dream

When I was five, I rescued a ladybug from drowning in a vast puddle. That was the moment I realized I wanted to make the world a better place overall.

My mission trip to Mexico verified that this was not just a dream, but a passion, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “a strong and barely controllable emotion.” The diverse people I met in Cancun were among the poorest on earth. Many of them were elderly or injury-prone, but they were rich in other ways: culturally, spiritually, and in wisdom. I was part of a team that was instrumental in planning where to build a new well. Though our trip ended before we broke ground, we laid the PowerPoint foundations for a struggling community to acquire the freshest water that they had ever tasted. More importantly, we built bridges between two great cultures; Our lasting success could not be measured in pesos, not in cases of giardia prevented, but in smiles per hour. I write “we” instead of “I” because teamwork is instrumental to everything I value in my life. Or should I say, everything WE value in my life. 

Regardless, I will never forget how the proud people of Cancun accepted me as one of their own after only one transformative week. Ahora soy cancunense. They taught me more about inclusion and resilience than any textbook ever could. 

I was already primed for that lesson, because throughout my life, I faced more adversity than anyone can imagine, and found that each challenge made me stronger. In fifth grade, I twisted my ankle mere days before the biggest soccer game of my life. My parents’ jaws dropped in terror when the doctor gave us the news: it was a high ankle sprain, the kind that would leave me languishing on crutches for up to three straight weeks. I thought this was the end, but it was just the beginning. I was broken, but through resilience, I rebuilt myself stronger than ever. The next season, I was back on the field and had more assists than even I dreamed possible. 

Speaking of dreams, I live in a diverse, multicultural world made possible by the dream of one great woman. My grandmother was a Polish immigrant, who gave up everything to move across three oceans and start a new life. (She did not come the fastest way.) It is through her recipes that I discovered who I really am. At grandma’s house, I eat pierogi. At school, I eat pizza. I am both, but neither. The Oxford English dictionary defines “balance” as “an even distribution of weight,” and that is how I feel about this culinary duality. With my left foot, I put half my weight on my love of pierogi, which represent the strange and pungent traditions of my forebears, infused with love and wisdom. With my right foot, I plant the other half of my weight firmly on pizza, representing my open-mindedness about the world of today. With this balance, I heartily treasure modern elements like the latest video games without losing my connection to those who came before me and paved the road with sweat and scabs so my sister and I could have chances they always lacked. 

The last feature I think about when I consider my journey is how much I value originality. I don’t just think outside the box… I think outside the building where the box is stored. in fact, I don’t even acknowledge the box in the first place. When presented with a problem, I just approach it with intense creativity and turn the problem into an opportunity or even an asset. Examples available upon request. 

Sometimes, when I lie awake at night, I think back to that fateful afternoon when the other kids were playing tag, but I was rescuing a struggling ladybug from a puddle. How did it feel when I placed it gently on a nearby leaf? I guess I’ll never know, because the highest form of service is to not expect gratitude, or even wonder about it. But just as a ladybug has six legs, I have a strong foundation on the six pillars that hold me up: passion, service, resilience, balance, pierogi, and originality.