hey jupiter
somewhere down past roosterspur farm
04 Apr, 2025
another day on Roosterspur Farm
In April of 2024, I decided to start a new farm in Stardew Valley, after years of not having played the game at all. I named this new farm ‘Roosterspur Farm’, after the Tori Amos song “Roosterspur Bridge.” If you’ve read my Animal Crossing zine you’ll already know that I named my town “Helena” after the My Chemical Romance song, so I guess you could say there’s some sort of theme happening here. Although honestly I think it’s more likely that I’m just notoriously bad at naming things - in my writing and in my gaming it is truly my least favourite part of the process. So names just tend to come from whatever it is I am thinking about at the time.
somewhere down past roosterspur bridge
When I started playing Stardew Valley again, I was thinking a lot about the Tori Amos album American Doll Posse. Released in 2007, it was the first Tori CD I bought at the time it was released, and I listened to the shit out of it. Tbh I could probably write a whole zine’s worth of words about this album, but I’ll try and save that for a future Tori Amos zine, maybe. But I would like to include a few relevant things for context; American Doll Posse is a concept album, which Tori wrote from the perspectives of five different characters or “Dolls”; Santa, Clyde, Isabel, Pip and Tori. Each character is Tori, but they are also themselves, with their own distinct personalities, constructed not only through the songs on the album, but by the different outfits and wigs that Tori wore for the album cover and art, and during the subsequent American Doll Posse World Tour. I was obsessed with this tour, it being my first chance to see her live since discovering her music a few years prior, but also because of all the lore surrounding it - for the first half of each show, no one knew which “doll” they were going to get. Speculation ran rampant through all corners of the online Tori community - I distinctly remember spending hours on 2007 YouTube watching terrible digital camera footage of these shows in preparation, trying to track which doll had appeared where and guess who we might get. I’d also totally forgotten about, until I found them on the American Doll Posse wiki-page, the secret blogs that Tori had also written for each doll, and then hid around the internet for fans to find. Tori has always been a world builder, but this album really felt like she had stepped it up a notch.