LA WEEKLY’S CANNABIS GIFT GUIDE 2023 It’s time to buy some presents for the pot enthusiast in your life. It can be tricky. A lot of people have been gifted boof by well-intended people over the years. “Maybe Billy wants grass,” they reasonably thought. They just didn’t have a metric for quality in their heart. …
LA WEEKLY’S CANNABIS GIFT GUIDE 2023
It’s time to buy some presents for the pot enthusiast in your life.
It can be tricky. A lot of people have been gifted boof by well-intended people over the years.
“Maybe Billy wants grass,” they reasonably thought. They just didn’t have a metric for quality in their heart.
Fear not, this list has something for everyone. Be it a Christmas-themed chocolate bar for grandma or American-made glass for your baby wook you can’t get to move out of the basement. Here are some great options for Christmas 2022.
Kiva Tree Bark
Courtesy of Kiva
While its grave is the holiday champion, Kiva’s tree bark is nothing to scoff at. It’s a fantastic Christmas-themed edible the whole gang can enjoy. The chunks of peppermint also make it one of the least weedy tasting edibles since the peppermint is going to dominate your palate. And the regular strength is just what you need for the holiday cannabis newbies getting in the mix.
Courtesy of AFM Glass
Alien Flower Monkey Glass Quartz Bangers
We try our best to highlight great American-made affordable quartz when we get the opportunity. Only adding to the fun is the fact that Alien Money Glass is made in Los Angeles. We’re going to do a full write-up on them in the not-too-distant future but wanted to make sure quartz was on your radar, so you could scoop some for the dabber in your life.
Lonnwikk Hemp Yoyo
Hemp wicks are nothing new, but the idea of adding them to a yoyo certainly is. We were gifted a Lonnwikk at MJ Biz Con in Las Vegas. It was certainly one of the more unique products we saw during our week on the strip for the cannabis industry’s mega show. The purpose of the hemp wick is to prevent the butane in the lighter from impacting the flavor of the terpene profile.
Sacred Fruits Mystical Micros
As we noted in our coverage of the first Phase One trials around the benefits of LSD microdosing, microdosing psychedelics is all the rage these days. And it’s generally a lot more popular with psilocybin here in California given the level of access we have to quality mushrooms and the products made from them. The team at the very popular Sacred Fruits brand has blessed the world with a fantastic dosing format with their musical micros. One pill will give you a microdose that will promote a bit of extra mental clarity, three to five pills will have you feeling hyper connected to the galaxy, and once you get past five pills you’re starting to dabble in full sensory hallucinations. Pretty awesome.
Masonic Seed Co
The pride of Compton wants LA Weekly readers to get some steals and deals this holiday season on its popular seeds lines. If you enter “LAWeeky” into the discount code at checkout, you’ll get a whopping 50% off. The only deal this isn’t compatible with is Clutch’s 50,000 Acre Bundle.
It’s that time of year when we ask our favorite cannabis brands and people what they’re most excited to grow this year.
The early stress tests are done for the season and folks are getting ready to put their new winning phenos into full blast. While this happens all the time indoors, the work outdoor cultivators do in March and April will help set the standard for the quality they’ll be chopping down when Croptober hits.
Here is what people told us when we asked them what they are hyped on. Here is what they told us:
Fidels
Fidel in the garden. Courtesy of Fidels.
Runtz x Jealousy, multiple banger phenos hunted, now being scaled up to the masses. The cool thing about this project is that it’s not bread by me, it’s bread by Julio aka @nineweeksharvest. Julio and I had a Genuine conversation. He’s an amazing breeder and pure soul! He blessed me with Runtz X Jealousy.
We hunted over 60 beans and had many selections that look, smell and smoke phenomenal. I’m excited to share these selections with the masses and have them scaled up properly.
Masonic
Oh man, Karma Genetics, The great gardener, Barbara bud hybrids, and some of the stuff I’ve chucked along the way. I already went down a lot of the landrace rabbit hole.
Rez from DNA Genetics
I’m hyped about the ’93 Octane crosses. Super heavy gas. I’m looking for that borderline rancid, super offensive-pungent, baby Shit level funk.
Capulator
Diamond Lungs Co-Op grow. 70 pheno hunters, 888 beans. Also, Vintage Sunset Cheese, Gas and Cheese, and Caps Frozen Oranges. I’m on a hot one right now.
Ryan from Doja Pak
So basically, Duke of Erb and I started with a strawberry diesel from Res Dog, pollinated it with a Northern Lights male selected a male and pollinated an OG18 Pheno that we hunted from DNA. That cross was named 18 Coffins.
We worked the line through the generations and hit the Gelato 33 from the Bakery with pollen from an F318 coffins male. That cross was called Strawberry Gelato. The female keeper was put into production and then the male we collected pollen and dusted the original Zkittlez. This cross was named Strawberry Zkillato. Planta grows this cut currently.
The SZ Male pollinated a LCG/Runtz and then we selected multiple keepers; Planta runs 1 and Dave from Preferred Gardens runs another. We again selected a male and hit our whole lineup. Those are the crosses I’m selling and selecting now.
Anna from CAM
Things I’m running that are new. Grape Gas, Lemon Cherry Gelato x Permanent Marker, Animal cookies x Z, Devil driver (Melonade x sundae driver ), Pure Kush and Rozay.
Erin from Royal Key Organics
Gelapop, Velvet, Candy Walls hash, new seeds and new potential from Equilibrium Genetics.
Drew from Green Dawg
Green weed 2023! D1 is my biggest recent push. I’m not disclosing genetics officially, but it’s the closest thing I’ve had to a real Sour Diesel/Dubb flavor profile in a decade. It’s an anti-candy. We hunted her from seed. Everything else was hay except her. I think she’s special and is going to do numbers this year.
Sour Wavez
Surefire and I have something special coming up, haven’t named it… RS11 x sherbanger F1 male. Besides that, some stuff I bred: Gelloz (gelatti x OZX), Betrayal (Zkittelz x OZX), Real Ricky Bobby (Xeno x OZX), Chess not checkers (Pink Z x OZX), Sidepiece (Pure Kush x OZX).
Besides that I’m growing Sherbanger (Boston roots), Sour diesel (karma bx2), I have four different OGs, Permanent marker via Doja pak, Zazul (Archive), Detroit runtz (Tiki) and from Mendoja the Larry Z and Cherry pie x OZK .
Kevin Jodrey
I’m hyped about the older cultivar revival Purple city coming out with ssh kali mist hybrids.
Cypher going to weave the red Lebanese x puck into his work. On the east coast you have the piff haze crew going hard in that direction.
You got Sjoerd Brooks lighting up in lake county and has the haze valley nursery coming online. Equatorials modified for our area but still retaining the traits that made them legendary. No one young ever got to smoke them and Brooks is a bad motherfucker.
It’s not so much a specific plant as a feel. Herb from an era where the quality of the effect was what drove the sale more so than the amount of hype. You see the work being woven into a lot as well.
The stores are losing so much ground to the trap because they live and die off of the distribution model. That model is a safe bet. Purple color only. Over 26% only. That leaves about 30 plants that every nursery in the state sells and forces every grower to compete with each other for shelf space. Customers are bored.
I’m flying to Jamaica tomorrow to document Charles Scott’s operation for a company I’m helping to build in Massachusetts. A lifetime of equatorials being sifted for what will work best in today’s world. I’m stoked because the crop is outdoors full sun organic and at 18′ latitude, so we can see what they look like in their natural environment.
Those selections will be sifted indoors and released in a market where that kind of effect is desired and needed.
Fieldz from Zkittlez
Braindropz, gelonoidz, wapanga, NYZ., zyrup. All of our own gear of coarse.
Champelli
Stuff that is smoking and is killer. I have a few OG back crosses. I’m excited about bringing back that real gas for body smoke mostly green weed, but I also have a few different candy Z crosses that are neither overly zee or overly candy leaning basically their own thing New flavors I like it when stuff comes out and it’s not leaning too heavy on one thing or relying on one Terp it’s always Pass when they get together become friends and decide to have a new expression of flavor. That’s the most exciting part creating something you could actually call newish.
The Village – Symbiotic Genetics
We are really excited about the Gassy Taffy line collab with Grow Low Key. There is a Grease Bucket x Gassy Taffy pheno that is extremely promising, very gassy. We are calling it Benzina, which is gas in Italian. Also the Amarelo x Gassy Taffy I’m really excited about and that’s going to be called Ego Death. Also the Candied Bananas which is Z2 x Banana Punch, Z2 is Zkittles bag seed.
Mike from Fig Farms
The flowers I’m most excited about right now are in-house crosses that recently graduated to production. The next two that will be released are crosses to Figment pollen, both are outstanding.
The first cross, Kush Mint Cookies x Figment #5, has an overwhelming Original Cookies terp presence that really pulls at the olfactory memory. The second cross, Blue Face x Figment #7, has an undeniable exotic Fig Farms look with a complex gas profile that we can’t wait to share. You are going to continue to see a lot of Fig crosses coming from us in 2023. The pollen and the winning female plants that we’ve been collecting and testing are like colors on a painter’s palette. Our palette’s range is deep, and we are using our palette to create the next generation of classics.
We headed north to the redwoods for the latest installment of the original cannabis-friendly music festival, Northern Nights.
The festival’s geography plays a significant role in its place in the history of cannabis progress. The venue, Cook’s Campground, sits in the heart of the Emerald Triangle stretching across the county line separating Mendocino and Humboldt. In addition to all the fine local cannabis, attendees spend their weekend enjoying up-and-coming EDM acts across numerous stages, and floating on the river.
This past weekend we got the chance to sit down with many of Northern Nights’ co-founders as they celebrated the festival’s 10th anniversary, including Andrew Blap, Peter Huson, Matty “Worldfamous” Roberts and Emily Wilson.
The festival has long been associated with legal cannabis sales after hosting the state’s first at music festival in the wake of Prop 64’s implementation. Following Northern Nights’ lead, major festivals around the country jumped on board with the idea, including EDC Las Vegas and Dirtybird Campout. In past years, those sales were confined to specific areas — last year even featuring two stageside dispensaries and a main cannabis activation area. This year the entire cannabis footprint was integrated into the heart of the festival, a short walk from the mainstage under the shade of the region’s massive trees.
We asked the Northern Nights team what it was like pushing that further integration this year.
“I think the big thing in working in two counties is first and foremost the context of where you are putting things,” Huson told L.A. Weekly. “When it comes to the history of cannabis events here, it’s the local jurisdiction, you have to start there. Mendocino passed their ordinance and we could bring a couple of dispensaries into Mendo.”
Courtesy of @y.s.a
But there was a lot of separation between those dispensaries.
“And ultimately, I think the premise of boundaries, aka fencing, has been a big thing in terms of limiting the number of sales,” Huson said of the caged-in areas. “I think the different places that we were putting the dispensaries if you wanted to get them, for example, all the way out to the river, it’s a lot of overhead.”
A big part for the team was making sure those local sponsors from the cannabis industry felt right. Huson notes there have been a few folks in the space doing these events for a while, but the brands taking part fund the progress to prove what can be done.
Courtesy of @anthonysvendsen
Matty Roberts added pushing boundaries is in line with the general ethos of the festival over the years.
“We’re booking cutting-edge shit, which makes our lineups very eclectic. We pick all this cool music because we’re kind of in a sweet spot. We’re not a big event. We don’t have a ton of money behind us, so we have to get scrappy and find a lot of new stuff.”
Roberts laughed, noting people look at the old posters from over the decade and act like the performers back in the day were bigger, but they didn’t actually know who a lot of those now big-name acts were when Northern Nights booked them.
“Now you look back, our lineup from eight years ago looks like a $2 million lineup,” Roberts said.
Roberts spoke of coming from the Midwest where a stem on your shirt would land you in jail. He’s thrilled to help facilitate a good time for a younger generation that never has to know those horrors.
Emily Wilson went on to speak that filling the void that Reggae on The River left in the hills is an honor.
“But there is a lot of responsibility as well. That means, we have to do the due diligence in finding new and up-and-coming music, working with local cannabis businesses and producers who have been working in the community a long time and supporting it through these transitions.”
@y.s.a
Wilson argued sometimes that means bringing in both the little guys and the big guys. She said that is a responsibility you can see they take seriously across the festival with not just cannabis but local wineries and breweries, too.
“Every single facet that we can, and where we’re able, we want to support local and present the best that Northern California has to offer. We’ve got Humboldt Bay Oysters fresh from the docks,” Wilson said.
One of the things Wilson said she enjoys the most is those people that have stuck with them since year one. Through all the trials and tribulations of being a small independent festival and the learning curve that came with it, they kept coming back, and that meant a lot to her.
The actual cannabis section itself was really well done. As in years past, it provided a shady reprieve from the Northern California sun that hit 94 degrees Saturday in what felt like 1,000% humidity. One of my favorite parts of the festival was the morning sound bath in the cannabis zone. You would see people tiptoeing around all the people laid out, to get to the ATM for their weed money. Everyone was really respectful, but even then, the visual was hilarious.
This year’s switch to delivery was a good move. While it took five minutes longer, it allowed for the entire Northern Nights cannabis experience to be more streamlined than had there been fences everywhere to facilitate a temporary retail site.
The actual weed people were buying was no slouch. Some cannabis activations over the past couple of years have gotten a bit midsy. Sometimes you’d see these brands that can’t even get dispensary shelf space taking a lead at festivals — gross. Thankfully, Northern Nights did not have this problem. I would argue that The Lantz from Ridgeline Farms is the nicest weed for the price I’ve ever seen at any festival. Eighths were only $35! I bought seven over the weekend.
Hopefully, other festivals trying to get into the cannabis game will take note of how well Northern Nights did it.
We just wrapped up judging the preliminary round of the biggest Zalympix competition yet.
The 2023 installment of Greenwolf’s massive contest is bigger than ever in terms of entries this year, not just hype. Greenwolf opened up the competition to over 100 farmers for the next installment.
That’s a huge jump from the 16 we’d seen in the previous boxes to 109. Obviously, there was going to be a need to switch the format up a pinch given the scale of how big the contest is this year. Greenwolf’s solution? A preliminary round.
The Greenwolf team assembled a reputable squad to go whittle down the pack. It included past winners, famous growers, and other journalists. Everyone they selected was based on their faith in their palette and opinion on cannabis.
Getting the kit in two boxes.
I received my box on Feb. 8 and had through the 21st to finish the samples. I went into the last day with four left. That worked out to trying just over nine samples a day. I smoked every single entry in a backwood because they are kind of like a cheat code when you’re grading marijuana. If you can taste it through the woods, you know it’s the goods.
One thing about this contest was the fact it was refreshing to not have to pick a winner. We had to pick 27 things we thought had a shot in the final round. That’s a ton. If I knew something had to be in the box I just gave it all fives. Even if it wasn’t my favorite terps, I just couldn’t deny it a shot at the big show.
I ended up with 18 out of the 109 in that must-go-in-the-box category. These were fantastic representations of lots of different kinds of weed. There were certainly a ton of dessert terps across the field of entries, but dotted between the Gelatos and Lemon Cherries were both new and old flavors.
There were a ton of OGs. To be expected from a Los Angeles-based contest? Sure. But they were of varying qualities; some leaned on the pure fuel smell while others smelled more like Skywalker or Tahoe cut with a bit more pinene in them.
Most of the things I scored the highest were rockstar-level gas, which is weed that literally smells like there was some kind of accident at a gas station that needs to be reported. I wasn’t worried about color either when I was scoring. Don’t get me wrong, I wanted the stuff I was picking to be aesthetically pleasing, but a wild nose went a hundred times further in my opinion building than a couple of hints of purple.
A lot of people entered new gear they thought might be their golden ticket. I’ve regularly checked out the Compound lineup over the last few years as they were testing out new gear. I smelled a lot of notes from last year’s seed drops like Gastropop and Pave.
Jon Cappetta from High Times was among the others selected to make their way through the entries in search of the 27 he thought worthy.
“Sorting through almost 120 samples in two weeks is a feat for even the most seasoned veterans, but The Zalympix preliminaries were a great preview of the gear we can expect to see making headlines this year. It seems like ‘23 is going to be another year of candy gas, but I’m holding out hope for more unique flavor profiles,” Cappetta told L.A. Weekly.
We’re going to go deep into Zalympix for 4/20 this year. Keep an eye out.
THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: TEARS OF THE KINGDOM LIVES UP TO THE MASSIVE HYPE
Link’s latest adventures in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of The Kingdom (TOTK) are everything we were waiting for.
The game has proven a roaring international hit. One common phrase often seen across social media in the past two weeks since the launch is the idea that Breath of The Wild, Zelda’s previous foray on Nintendo’s Switch when the system launched, almost feels like a beta version of what we ended up with in TOTK. How wild is it to call a game that went on to sell 30 million copies since and win a ton of awards a beta test? But it honestly feels kind of accurate with how much TOTK built on the last version of Hyrule we visited six years ago.
The Legacy of Zelda Enthusiasm
There are few dates on the video game calendar that get circled with more enthusiasm than a new Zelda game. Since the first one dropped in 1987, its raving fan base has always wondered what would be next for the franchise that often served with Super Mario Brothers as a flagship game that showed off the capabilities of Nintendo’s hardware from generation to generation. Zelda’s creators Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka were a part of both famous franchises. While it doesn’t quite serve that role in the same fashion given Nintendo has now allowed many more developers to publish games for their hardware in the Switch era, Zelda still very much serves as the benchmark for how much fun you can have on the Switch.
Zelda has turned down the cartoon style from 20 years ago. But the current look and feel still have a very anime feel that looks a lot cleaner than Wind Walker released in 2002. But 2006’s Twilight Princess feels much more similar to what the game looks like today. The modern version feels a lot brighter and more fun, like the way the lava pops with bright red and orange bubbles.
Miyamoto explained some of the thought processes they had as Zelda continued to transition into the 3D format in the 2000s. He noted part of the reason they went for the cartoon look was it made it easier to show expression in the characters. He also wanted it to feel like you were playing a cartoon in 3D, they definitely aced that test.
Breath of The Wild provided a lot of the building blocks for this new sequel on the same generation of hardware six years later. In an interview with Game Informer, Miyamoto noted one of the big jumps as Zelda made the move to the Switch was the nature engine. Exploration has always been a significant backbone of the fun in the play-it-at-your-pace game where you can toss around chickens or make a speed run for the master sword.
“Adventuring and exploring nature is what makes the game,” Miyamoto told Game Informer when the game launched. “I had to relook at what dungeons look like for us and kind of take it out of the dungeon. We spent five years kind of working on that.”
Miyamoto admitted he himself likes the open-world aspect of players creating their own adventures across the storyline over the years but understands there are folks out there that like those deep storylines with a lot of backstories. He thinks this modern generation of Zelda games has done a good job balancing the two.
The Tears of The Kingdom Launch
Over the past few weeks, the world has now had a moment to dive into Hyrule. But the months and years leading up to this moment had a bit of mystery to them. Regardless, once the game hit shelves, it was on.
In just three days, it became the fastest-selling Zelda game of all time. Ten million units moved globally in that first 72 hours, 4 million of them here in North America. That makes it the fastest-selling Nintendo game ever on any system in North America according to Nintendo. A major achievement for the game’s creators.
“Many players are returning to Hyrule with all its new mysteries and possibilities, and with the record-breaking launch of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom for Nintendo Switch, we can’t wait to see what they’ll create in the game and the stories they’ll share next,” said Devon Pritchard, Nintendo of America’s executive vice president of sales, marketing and communications. “We’re grateful for all of our fans who’ve shown their passion for The Legend of Zelda over the years, and these sales numbers for the latest installment continue to show the strong momentum for both the franchise and Nintendo Switch this year.”
Reviews and Livestreams Pumped The Hype
One of the things that helped the massive launch was just how positive all the reviews were. It’s currently sitting at a 95 on Metacritic, the most noted aggregator of video game reviews by a mile. That score puts it as the 49th greatest game of all time per their review system. While 22 other games in history have scored a 95 on the site, TOTK ranks No. 1 one among those games that have scored a 95 since the website was founded over 20 years ago.
Zelda’s 1998 edition Orcana of Time is the number one game of all time on Metacritic as the only game ever to score a 99. The last installment on Switch, Breath of The Wild, ranks No. 14 on the all-time list with the Wii U version coming in No. 26. Twilight Princess is No. 39, and The Wind Walker is No. 44. There are a few on the list after TOTK also. The Gamecube Collectors edition from 2003 came in at No. 54. The Game Boy Advance edition of A Link to The Past came in at No. 59 with Majora’s Mask right behind it at No. 60. Twilight Princess is two spots later at No. 62. A 3DS version also made it. With the TOTK’s reviews getting added to this all-time list, basically one in 10 of the top-reviewed video games of all time on Metacritic is a Zelda game, if you count the two versions of Breath of The Wild as one.
“The fandom behind the Zelda franchise is stronger than ever and to date, Tears of the Kingdom is the best reviewed game of 2023 on Metacritic,” Marc Doyle, Co-Founder of Metacritic told L.A. Weekly. “In fact, it currently ranks in the top 50 games of all time and the number four Zelda game to ever be released.”
We asked Polygon Senior Reporter Nicole Carpenter if she thought the game got scored tougher by critics as a direct sequel.
“I don’t necessarily think it got scored harder, but Breath of the Wild did have a major impact on the industry so there was an expectation for what Tears of the Kingdom would be. The bar was already set high and people expected Tears of the Kingdom to jump over that bar,” Carpenter told L.A. Weekly, “The game sold 10 million copies in a few days so it’s definitely up there for the biggest game of the year. Beyond that, Tears of the Kingdom will be one of most influential games of the year.”
Another thing the newer generation of Zelda games has had play to its favor is the rise of online streaming. The launch has been a hit. According to TwitchTracker.com, over the last week, people have spent 8 million hours watching other people play the game and the streams averaged about 50,000 people watching at any given time. Things peaked on May 11 when 351,714 users were simultaneously watching TOTK streams.
50 Hours In
What?! The Great Deku Tree has a stomachache again?! Sign me up. That’s not even a spoiler at this point, it’s presumable Hyrule’s bad guys at any given moment have had an impact on his acid reflux. Those kinds of expectations are one of the things that have made the series great. Each time we go back, the little things we love are done even better.
We are about 50 hours in. I’ve completed the Wind Temple but have predominantly spent most of my time exploring. I’ve hit about 35 Shrines so far in the process of building up hearts for the main storyline. One of the reasons I’ve hit so many shrines early is because of how fun the new gameplay mechanics make them. The massive refreshing of all the minigames makes each one feel very unique.
Those four new core gameplay mechanics are called Fuse, Ultrahand, Ascend and Recall. Fuse lets you attach objects from the world to each other or your hand after you use Ultrahand to move them around. You’ll use a combination of those powers and the world around you all the time to upgrade your weapons, solve puzzles and even build vehicles.
Ascend adds another vertical element of gameplay in addition to the massive sky map that covers the whole game from above. It allows you to climb through ceilings within reach of the ability and emerge through the floor on the other side.
Recall allows you to move objects and then recreate that object’s movement through time. Say a rock falls down a waterfall you want to go up, you hit the rock with recall and ride it up the waterfall. There are some wild uses for one when it comes to all the puzzles.
There also is a ton of wild physics mechanics attached to the main storyline. As you dive further and further in, you’ll get access to an even wider array of tools to combine with the Ultrahand and Fuse abilities.
With all that, and what feels like triple the game compared to Breath of The Wild, I think the only reason TOTK isn’t higher on the all-time list is that it’s a direct sequel. Regardless, it’s one of the best games ever.
This week we’re excited about what’s to come for the cannabis industry in 2024.
Last week we covered the fact that life is less than perfect in cannabis while highlighting some of the things we believed caused a lot of our headaches in 2023. This week, the opposite. We’re highlighting the things we think are going to help everyone turn it around.
Finally Fixing LA’s Equity Program
Here in Los Angeles, one of the biggest calls to action from the cannabis industry for the new mayor’s office continues to be the repair of the L.A. Social Equity Program. It was awesome to see 100 Social Equity Individual Applicants were randomly selected to apply for retail cannabis licenses last month, but the couple hundred people who invested their lives into putting their ducks in a row for the program are going to demand more. And while the new mayor’s office is separate from the scandals of the fall, they may have to pay the bill if a class action lawsuit ends up developing from the then-racist city council having original control over the program that drained so many coffers.
Standardized Testing?
It originally looked like we would have standardized lab testing this year. It seems a little hazy at the moment, but we wanted to put it on here to push the idea. Currently, cannabis labs have no fixed standard operating procedures. A lot of the time they’re just following the instructions for whatever hardware they bought. Then adjust the standard operating procedure to their liking. That’s where you see the variations in testing numbers from lab to lab. The idea of people shopping around their cannabis at labs to get the best numbers possible is a real thing. This is more so an issue with potency and terpene testing as opposed to heavy metals and pesticides.
Wider Access in America
It’s critical that California cultivators get access to more shelf space soon. While the state continues to drag a bit, the idea of stocking shelves all over the world with cannabis grown in California is appealing to people. The first shelves will probably be domestic, and step one is having as many states with legal access to cannabis as possible for when that day comes. And it’s not that far out. Some regulators figure it will be a few more years. Whenever it is, it’ll certainly make people’s lives a lot easier. We don’t think it will happen this year, but we’ll be talking about the mechanics of it by December a lot.
The Pace of Change is Fast
I know it’s going to take some time for the other stuff I mentioned, but it’s easy to see how fast things are moving for cannabis all over the world. It’s like a snowball with a rocket sled behind it pushing it even faster as it grows and grows rolling down the mountain. Now is everyone hoping to get sucked up by the snowball a saint? Doubtful. But the bigger the snowball gets, the more opportunities there will be for nice people to take part. Plenty of people entering the cannabis space now aren’t haters, they were just scared to go to jail back in the day.
The cannabis industry is currently in the midst of a massive crime wave.
In the nearly three years since thieves used the George Floyd protests as cover to kick off one of the most devastating crime waves the cannabis industry has ever seen, there have been many more. Cannabis businesses continue to be targeted.
There are various reasons contributing to these waves, but whether it’s the economy, the giant piles of money dispensaries are forced to hoard without bank accounts, or the product that’s easy to move as cannabis continues its national popularity surge, right now is batshit.
When I’m not writing for L.A. Weekly, I still work at a dispensary. We’ve been hit twice in the last two weeks. We are not alone. We’re hearing reports from San Francisco, Santa Rosa, Sacramento, Benicia and Iselton, and those are just the ones the word has gotten out on. More locally we’ve seen the city’s most prominent LGBT-owned dispensary Green Qween targeted multiple times. Cannabis companies are stuck with the catch-22 of wanting to make more noise about what they see as a lack of protection regardless of tax dollars but don’t want to wave their hands in the air basically saying, “come victimize me because I get no protection.”
And to make it even scarier for the industry, some of these groups are more reminiscent of militias than stick-up kids. Short-style AK-47s you can tuck into your pants have been seen at multiple locations.
These crews also are beginning to get very good at it. There are believed to be a few roaming the northern part of the state from security camera footage being used to match different groups together. Sometimes they’ve made trips south for weekend-long runs at fresh targets, but for the most part, the largest organized groups seem to frequent north of Salinas up to wine country and then east all the way to the Sierras.
The owner of The Delta Boyz dispensary in Isleton told us their facility has been hit five times and was among those targeted in the last two weeks. Things have gotten so hot in the small town located between Sacramento and the bay that he wanted to refrain from using his name for his family’s safety.
The crew pulling up.
He compared this recent crime to 2020, but noted there is a big difference.
“It’s just, it’s not as chaotic. The atmosphere outside is not as chaotic as it was then,” he told L.A. Weekly. “So this is just very organized, dialed in, calculated. It seems this is what they do now. And these crews have been doing it for so long, it seems like they’re getting better and better at it.”
One of the times The Delta Boys got hit it took about 45 seconds for them to take $200,000.
“My dumb ass had all my rosin in one big tote. But that’s how fast they are. They were in and out in 45 seconds,” they said. “Where else are you going to steal like that? You can’t steal from a bank like that. You can’t steal it from a liquor store. You can’t steal it from a warehouse. You got to liquidate any of those. Weed is basically liquid.”
The aftermath.
He further argued he can’t go and shoot somebody as if this was the black market.
“I have to respect the law because it’s my livelihood. This is everything I’ve ever invested all my money and time into. I can’t blast somebody. There are cameras everywhere. So it’s hard. And they know that. They know, they know we’re not. They know we’re soft targets. They know we can do shit. They know the cops aren’t coming. And it’s just routine now.”
He hopes the state will divert some of the funds it’s using against the black market to defend its legal one. He argues enforcement on black market producers has created a vacuum where they then need to sustain their demand by robbing others.
It’s that time of year when we ask our favorite cannabis brands and people what they’re most excited to grow this year.
The early stress tests are done for the season and folks are getting ready to put their new winning phenos into full blast. While this happens all the time indoors, the work outdoor cultivators do in March and April will help set the standard for the quality they’ll be chopping down when Croptober hits.
Here is what people told us when we asked them what they are hyped on. Here is what they told us:
Fidels
Fidel in the garden. Courtesy of Fidels.
Runtz x Jealousy, multiple banger phenos hunted, now being scaled up to the masses. The cool thing about this project is that it’s not bread by me, it’s bread by Julio aka @nineweeksharvest. Julio and I had a Genuine conversation. He’s an amazing breeder and pure soul! He blessed me with Runtz X Jealousy.
We hunted over 60 beans and had many selections that look, smell and smoke phenomenal. I’m excited to share these selections with the masses and have them scaled up properly.
Masonic
Oh man, Karma Genetics, The great gardener, Barbara bud hybrids, and some of the stuff I’ve chucked along the way. I already went down a lot of the landrace rabbit hole.
Rez from DNA Genetics
I’m hyped about the ’93 Octane crosses. Super heavy gas. I’m looking for that borderline rancid, super offensive-pungent, baby Shit level funk.
Capulator
Diamond Lungs Co-Op grow. 70 pheno hunters, 888 beans. Also, Vintage Sunset Cheese, Gas and Cheese, and Caps Frozen Oranges. I’m on a hot one right now.
Ryan from Doja Pak
So basically, Duke of Erb and I started with a strawberry diesel from Res Dog, pollinated it with a Northern Lights male selected a male and pollinated an OG18 Pheno that we hunted from DNA. That cross was named 18 Coffins.
We worked the line through the generations and hit the Gelato 33 from the Bakery with pollen from an F318 coffins male. That cross was called Strawberry Gelato. The female keeper was put into production and then the male we collected pollen and dusted the original Zkittlez. This cross was named Strawberry Zkillato. Planta grows this cut currently.
The SZ Male pollinated a LCG/Runtz and then we selected multiple keepers; Planta runs 1 and Dave from Preferred Gardens runs another. We again selected a male and hit our whole lineup. Those are the crosses I’m selling and selecting now.
Anna from CAM
Things I’m running that are new. Grape Gas, Lemon Cherry Gelato x Permanent Marker, Animal cookies x Z, Devil driver (Melonade x sundae driver ), Pure Kush and Rozay.
Erin from Royal Key Organics
Gelapop, Velvet, Candy Walls hash, new seeds and new potential from Equilibrium Genetics.
Drew from Green Dawg
Green weed 2023! D1 is my biggest recent push. I’m not disclosing genetics officially, but it’s the closest thing I’ve had to a real Sour Diesel/Dubb flavor profile in a decade. It’s an anti-candy. We hunted her from seed. Everything else was hay except her. I think she’s special and is going to do numbers this year.
Sour Wavez
Surefire and I have something special coming up, haven’t named it… RS11 x sherbanger F1 male. Besides that, some stuff I bred: Gelloz (gelatti x OZX), Betrayal (Zkittelz x OZX), Real Ricky Bobby (Xeno x OZX), Chess not checkers (Pink Z x OZX), Sidepiece (Pure Kush x OZX).
Besides that I’m growing Sherbanger (Boston roots), Sour diesel (karma bx2), I have four different OGs, Permanent marker via Doja pak, Zazul (Archive), Detroit runtz (Tiki) and from Mendoja the Larry Z and Cherry pie x OZK .
Kevin Jodrey
I’m hyped about the older cultivar revival Purple city coming out with ssh kali mist hybrids.
Cypher going to weave the red Lebanese x puck into his work. On the east coast you have the piff haze crew going hard in that direction.
You got Sjoerd Brooks lighting up in lake county and has the haze valley nursery coming online. Equatorials modified for our area but still retaining the traits that made them legendary. No one young ever got to smoke them and Brooks is a bad motherfucker.
It’s not so much a specific plant as a feel. Herb from an era where the quality of the effect was what drove the sale more so than the amount of hype. You see the work being woven into a lot as well.
The stores are losing so much ground to the trap because they live and die off of the distribution model. That model is a safe bet. Purple color only. Over 26% only. That leaves about 30 plants that every nursery in the state sells and forces every grower to compete with each other for shelf space. Customers are bored.
I’m flying to Jamaica tomorrow to document Charles Scott’s operation for a company I’m helping to build in Massachusetts. A lifetime of equatorials being sifted for what will work best in today’s world. I’m stoked because the crop is outdoors full sun organic and at 18′ latitude, so we can see what they look like in their natural environment.
Those selections will be sifted indoors and released in a market where that kind of effect is desired and needed.
Fieldz from Zkittlez
Braindropz, gelonoidz, wapanga, NYZ., zyrup. All of our own gear of coarse.
Champelli
Stuff that is smoking and is killer. I have a few OG back crosses. I’m excited about bringing back that real gas for body smoke mostly green weed, but I also have a few different candy Z crosses that are neither overly zee or overly candy leaning basically their own thing New flavors I like it when stuff comes out and it’s not leaning too heavy on one thing or relying on one Terp it’s always Pass when they get together become friends and decide to have a new expression of flavor. That’s the most exciting part creating something you could actually call newish.
The Village – Symbiotic Genetics
We are really excited about the Gassy Taffy line collab with Grow Low Key. There is a Grease Bucket x Gassy Taffy pheno that is extremely promising, very gassy. We are calling it Benzina, which is gas in Italian. Also the Amarelo x Gassy Taffy I’m really excited about and that’s going to be called Ego Death. Also the Candied Bananas which is Z2 x Banana Punch, Z2 is Zkittles bag seed.
Mike from Fig Farms
The flowers I’m most excited about right now are in-house crosses that recently graduated to production. The next two that will be released are crosses to Figment pollen, both are outstanding.
The first cross, Kush Mint Cookies x Figment #5, has an overwhelming Original Cookies terp presence that really pulls at the olfactory memory. The second cross, Blue Face x Figment #7, has an undeniable exotic Fig Farms look with a complex gas profile that we can’t wait to share. You are going to continue to see a lot of Fig crosses coming from us in 2023. The pollen and the winning female plants that we’ve been collecting and testing are like colors on a painter’s palette. Our palette’s range is deep, and we are using our palette to create the next generation of classics.
We headed north to the redwoods for the latest installment of the original cannabis-friendly music festival, Northern Nights.
The festival’s geography plays a significant role in its place in the history of cannabis progress. The venue, Cook’s Campground, sits in the heart of the Emerald Triangle stretching across the county line separating Mendocino and Humboldt. In addition to all the fine local cannabis, attendees spend their weekend enjoying up-and-coming EDM acts across numerous stages, and floating on the river.
This past weekend we got the chance to sit down with many of Northern Nights’ co-founders as they celebrated the festival’s 10th anniversary, including Andrew Blap, Peter Huson, Matty “Worldfamous” Roberts and Emily Wilson.
The festival has long been associated with legal cannabis sales after hosting the state’s first at music festival in the wake of Prop 64’s implementation. Following Northern Nights’ lead, major festivals around the country jumped on board with the idea, including EDC Las Vegas and Dirtybird Campout. In past years, those sales were confined to specific areas — last year even featuring two stageside dispensaries and a main cannabis activation area. This year the entire cannabis footprint was integrated into the heart of the festival, a short walk from the mainstage under the shade of the region’s massive trees.
We asked the Northern Nights team what it was like pushing that further integration this year.
“I think the big thing in working in two counties is first and foremost the context of where you are putting things,” Huson told L.A. Weekly. “When it comes to the history of cannabis events here, it’s the local jurisdiction, you have to start there. Mendocino passed their ordinance and we could bring a couple of dispensaries into Mendo.”
Courtesy of @y.s.a
But there was a lot of separation between those dispensaries.
“And ultimately, I think the premise of boundaries, aka fencing, has been a big thing in terms of limiting the number of sales,” Huson said of the caged-in areas. “I think the different places that we were putting the dispensaries if you wanted to get them, for example, all the way out to the river, it’s a lot of overhead.”
A big part for the team was making sure those local sponsors from the cannabis industry felt right. Huson notes there have been a few folks in the space doing these events for a while, but the brands taking part fund the progress to prove what can be done.
Courtesy of @anthonysvendsen
Matty Roberts added pushing boundaries is in line with the general ethos of the festival over the years.
“We’re booking cutting-edge shit, which makes our lineups very eclectic. We pick all this cool music because we’re kind of in a sweet spot. We’re not a big event. We don’t have a ton of money behind us, so we have to get scrappy and find a lot of new stuff.”
Roberts laughed, noting people look at the old posters from over the decade and act like the performers back in the day were bigger, but they didn’t actually know who a lot of those now big-name acts were when Northern Nights booked them.
“Now you look back, our lineup from eight years ago looks like a $2 million lineup,” Roberts said.
Roberts spoke of coming from the Midwest where a stem on your shirt would land you in jail. He’s thrilled to help facilitate a good time for a younger generation that never has to know those horrors.
Emily Wilson went on to speak that filling the void that Reggae on The River left in the hills is an honor.
“But there is a lot of responsibility as well. That means, we have to do the due diligence in finding new and up-and-coming music, working with local cannabis businesses and producers who have been working in the community a long time and supporting it through these transitions.”
@y.s.a
Wilson argued sometimes that means bringing in both the little guys and the big guys. She said that is a responsibility you can see they take seriously across the festival with not just cannabis but local wineries and breweries, too.
“Every single facet that we can, and where we’re able, we want to support local and present the best that Northern California has to offer. We’ve got Humboldt Bay Oysters fresh from the docks,” Wilson said.
One of the things Wilson said she enjoys the most is those people that have stuck with them since year one. Through all the trials and tribulations of being a small independent festival and the learning curve that came with it, they kept coming back, and that meant a lot to her.
The actual cannabis section itself was really well done. As in years past, it provided a shady reprieve from the Northern California sun that hit 94 degrees Saturday in what felt like 1,000% humidity. One of my favorite parts of the festival was the morning sound bath in the cannabis zone. You would see people tiptoeing around all the people laid out, to get to the ATM for their weed money. Everyone was really respectful, but even then, the visual was hilarious.
This year’s switch to delivery was a good move. While it took five minutes longer, it allowed for the entire Northern Nights cannabis experience to be more streamlined than had there been fences everywhere to facilitate a temporary retail site.
The actual weed people were buying was no slouch. Some cannabis activations over the past couple of years have gotten a bit midsy. Sometimes you’d see these brands that can’t even get dispensary shelf space taking a lead at festivals — gross. Thankfully, Northern Nights did not have this problem. I would argue that The Lantz from Ridgeline Farms is the nicest weed for the price I’ve ever seen at any festival. Eighths were only $35! I bought seven over the weekend.
Hopefully, other festivals trying to get into the cannabis game will take note of how well Northern Nights did it.
We just wrapped up judging the preliminary round of the biggest Zalympix competition yet.
The 2023 installment of Greenwolf’s massive contest is bigger than ever in terms of entries this year, not just hype. Greenwolf opened up the competition to over 100 farmers for the next installment.
That’s a huge jump from the 16 we’d seen in the previous boxes to 109. Obviously, there was going to be a need to switch the format up a pinch given the scale of how big the contest is this year. Greenwolf’s solution? A preliminary round.
The Greenwolf team assembled a reputable squad to go whittle down the pack. It included past winners, famous growers, and other journalists. Everyone they selected was based on their faith in their palette and opinion on cannabis.
Getting the kit in two boxes.
I received my box on Feb. 8 and had through the 21st to finish the samples. I went into the last day with four left. That worked out to trying just over nine samples a day. I smoked every single entry in a backwood because they are kind of like a cheat code when you’re grading marijuana. If you can taste it through the woods, you know it’s the goods.
One thing about this contest was the fact it was refreshing to not have to pick a winner. We had to pick 27 things we thought had a shot in the final round. That’s a ton. If I knew something had to be in the box I just gave it all fives. Even if it wasn’t my favorite terps, I just couldn’t deny it a shot at the big show.
I ended up with 18 out of the 109 in that must-go-in-the-box category. These were fantastic representations of lots of different kinds of weed. There were certainly a ton of dessert terps across the field of entries, but dotted between the Gelatos and Lemon Cherries were both new and old flavors.
There were a ton of OGs. To be expected from a Los Angeles-based contest? Sure. But they were of varying qualities; some leaned on the pure fuel smell while others smelled more like Skywalker or Tahoe cut with a bit more pinene in them.
Most of the things I scored the highest were rockstar-level gas, which is weed that literally smells like there was some kind of accident at a gas station that needs to be reported. I wasn’t worried about color either when I was scoring. Don’t get me wrong, I wanted the stuff I was picking to be aesthetically pleasing, but a wild nose went a hundred times further in my opinion building than a couple of hints of purple.
A lot of people entered new gear they thought might be their golden ticket. I’ve regularly checked out the Compound lineup over the last few years as they were testing out new gear. I smelled a lot of notes from last year’s seed drops like Gastropop and Pave.
Jon Cappetta from High Times was among the others selected to make their way through the entries in search of the 27 he thought worthy.
“Sorting through almost 120 samples in two weeks is a feat for even the most seasoned veterans, but The Zalympix preliminaries were a great preview of the gear we can expect to see making headlines this year. It seems like ‘23 is going to be another year of candy gas, but I’m holding out hope for more unique flavor profiles,” Cappetta told L.A. Weekly.
We’re going to go deep into Zalympix for 4/20 this year. Keep an eye out.
THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: TEARS OF THE KINGDOM LIVES UP TO THE MASSIVE HYPE
Link’s latest adventures in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of The Kingdom (TOTK) are everything we were waiting for.
The game has proven a roaring international hit. One common phrase often seen across social media in the past two weeks since the launch is the idea that Breath of The Wild, Zelda’s previous foray on Nintendo’s Switch when the system launched, almost feels like a beta version of what we ended up with in TOTK. How wild is it to call a game that went on to sell 30 million copies since and win a ton of awards a beta test? But it honestly feels kind of accurate with how much TOTK built on the last version of Hyrule we visited six years ago.
The Legacy of Zelda Enthusiasm
There are few dates on the video game calendar that get circled with more enthusiasm than a new Zelda game. Since the first one dropped in 1987, its raving fan base has always wondered what would be next for the franchise that often served with Super Mario Brothers as a flagship game that showed off the capabilities of Nintendo’s hardware from generation to generation. Zelda’s creators Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka were a part of both famous franchises. While it doesn’t quite serve that role in the same fashion given Nintendo has now allowed many more developers to publish games for their hardware in the Switch era, Zelda still very much serves as the benchmark for how much fun you can have on the Switch.
Zelda has turned down the cartoon style from 20 years ago. But the current look and feel still have a very anime feel that looks a lot cleaner than Wind Walker released in 2002. But 2006’s Twilight Princess feels much more similar to what the game looks like today. The modern version feels a lot brighter and more fun, like the way the lava pops with bright red and orange bubbles.
Miyamoto explained some of the thought processes they had as Zelda continued to transition into the 3D format in the 2000s. He noted part of the reason they went for the cartoon look was it made it easier to show expression in the characters. He also wanted it to feel like you were playing a cartoon in 3D, they definitely aced that test.
Breath of The Wild provided a lot of the building blocks for this new sequel on the same generation of hardware six years later. In an interview with Game Informer, Miyamoto noted one of the big jumps as Zelda made the move to the Switch was the nature engine. Exploration has always been a significant backbone of the fun in the play-it-at-your-pace game where you can toss around chickens or make a speed run for the master sword.
“Adventuring and exploring nature is what makes the game,” Miyamoto told Game Informer when the game launched. “I had to relook at what dungeons look like for us and kind of take it out of the dungeon. We spent five years kind of working on that.”
Miyamoto admitted he himself likes the open-world aspect of players creating their own adventures across the storyline over the years but understands there are folks out there that like those deep storylines with a lot of backstories. He thinks this modern generation of Zelda games has done a good job balancing the two.
The Tears of The Kingdom Launch
Over the past few weeks, the world has now had a moment to dive into Hyrule. But the months and years leading up to this moment had a bit of mystery to them. Regardless, once the game hit shelves, it was on.
In just three days, it became the fastest-selling Zelda game of all time. Ten million units moved globally in that first 72 hours, 4 million of them here in North America. That makes it the fastest-selling Nintendo game ever on any system in North America according to Nintendo. A major achievement for the game’s creators.
“Many players are returning to Hyrule with all its new mysteries and possibilities, and with the record-breaking launch of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom for Nintendo Switch, we can’t wait to see what they’ll create in the game and the stories they’ll share next,” said Devon Pritchard, Nintendo of America’s executive vice president of sales, marketing and communications. “We’re grateful for all of our fans who’ve shown their passion for The Legend of Zelda over the years, and these sales numbers for the latest installment continue to show the strong momentum for both the franchise and Nintendo Switch this year.”
Reviews and Livestreams Pumped The Hype
One of the things that helped the massive launch was just how positive all the reviews were. It’s currently sitting at a 95 on Metacritic, the most noted aggregator of video game reviews by a mile. That score puts it as the 49th greatest game of all time per their review system. While 22 other games in history have scored a 95 on the site, TOTK ranks No. 1 one among those games that have scored a 95 since the website was founded over 20 years ago.
Zelda’s 1998 edition Orcana of Time is the number one game of all time on Metacritic as the only game ever to score a 99. The last installment on Switch, Breath of The Wild, ranks No. 14 on the all-time list with the Wii U version coming in No. 26. Twilight Princess is No. 39, and The Wind Walker is No. 44. There are a few on the list after TOTK also. The Gamecube Collectors edition from 2003 came in at No. 54. The Game Boy Advance edition of A Link to The Past came in at No. 59 with Majora’s Mask right behind it at No. 60. Twilight Princess is two spots later at No. 62. A 3DS version also made it. With the TOTK’s reviews getting added to this all-time list, basically one in 10 of the top-reviewed video games of all time on Metacritic is a Zelda game, if you count the two versions of Breath of The Wild as one.
“The fandom behind the Zelda franchise is stronger than ever and to date, Tears of the Kingdom is the best reviewed game of 2023 on Metacritic,” Marc Doyle, Co-Founder of Metacritic told L.A. Weekly. “In fact, it currently ranks in the top 50 games of all time and the number four Zelda game to ever be released.”
We asked Polygon Senior Reporter Nicole Carpenter if she thought the game got scored tougher by critics as a direct sequel.
“I don’t necessarily think it got scored harder, but Breath of the Wild did have a major impact on the industry so there was an expectation for what Tears of the Kingdom would be. The bar was already set high and people expected Tears of the Kingdom to jump over that bar,” Carpenter told L.A. Weekly, “The game sold 10 million copies in a few days so it’s definitely up there for the biggest game of the year. Beyond that, Tears of the Kingdom will be one of most influential games of the year.”
Another thing the newer generation of Zelda games has had play to its favor is the rise of online streaming. The launch has been a hit. According to TwitchTracker.com, over the last week, people have spent 8 million hours watching other people play the game and the streams averaged about 50,000 people watching at any given time. Things peaked on May 11 when 351,714 users were simultaneously watching TOTK streams.
50 Hours In
What?! The Great Deku Tree has a stomachache again?! Sign me up. That’s not even a spoiler at this point, it’s presumable Hyrule’s bad guys at any given moment have had an impact on his acid reflux. Those kinds of expectations are one of the things that have made the series great. Each time we go back, the little things we love are done even better.
We are about 50 hours in. I’ve completed the Wind Temple but have predominantly spent most of my time exploring. I’ve hit about 35 Shrines so far in the process of building up hearts for the main storyline. One of the reasons I’ve hit so many shrines early is because of how fun the new gameplay mechanics make them. The massive refreshing of all the minigames makes each one feel very unique.
Those four new core gameplay mechanics are called Fuse, Ultrahand, Ascend and Recall. Fuse lets you attach objects from the world to each other or your hand after you use Ultrahand to move them around. You’ll use a combination of those powers and the world around you all the time to upgrade your weapons, solve puzzles and even build vehicles.
Ascend adds another vertical element of gameplay in addition to the massive sky map that covers the whole game from above. It allows you to climb through ceilings within reach of the ability and emerge through the floor on the other side.
Recall allows you to move objects and then recreate that object’s movement through time. Say a rock falls down a waterfall you want to go up, you hit the rock with recall and ride it up the waterfall. There are some wild uses for one when it comes to all the puzzles.
There also is a ton of wild physics mechanics attached to the main storyline. As you dive further and further in, you’ll get access to an even wider array of tools to combine with the Ultrahand and Fuse abilities.
With all that, and what feels like triple the game compared to Breath of The Wild, I think the only reason TOTK isn’t higher on the all-time list is that it’s a direct sequel. Regardless, it’s one of the best games ever.
This week we’re excited about what’s to come for the cannabis industry in 2024.
Last week we covered the fact that life is less than perfect in cannabis while highlighting some of the things we believed caused a lot of our headaches in 2023. This week, the opposite. We’re highlighting the things we think are going to help everyone turn it around.
Finally Fixing LA’s Equity Program
Here in Los Angeles, one of the biggest calls to action from the cannabis industry for the new mayor’s office continues to be the repair of the L.A. Social Equity Program. It was awesome to see 100 Social Equity Individual Applicants were randomly selected to apply for retail cannabis licenses last month, but the couple hundred people who invested their lives into putting their ducks in a row for the program are going to demand more. And while the new mayor’s office is separate from the scandals of the fall, they may have to pay the bill if a class action lawsuit ends up developing from the then-racist city council having original control over the program that drained so many coffers.
Standardized Testing?
It originally looked like we would have standardized lab testing this year. It seems a little hazy at the moment, but we wanted to put it on here to push the idea. Currently, cannabis labs have no fixed standard operating procedures. A lot of the time they’re just following the instructions for whatever hardware they bought. Then adjust the standard operating procedure to their liking. That’s where you see the variations in testing numbers from lab to lab. The idea of people shopping around their cannabis at labs to get the best numbers possible is a real thing. This is more so an issue with potency and terpene testing as opposed to heavy metals and pesticides.
Wider Access in America
It’s critical that California cultivators get access to more shelf space soon. While the state continues to drag a bit, the idea of stocking shelves all over the world with cannabis grown in California is appealing to people. The first shelves will probably be domestic, and step one is having as many states with legal access to cannabis as possible for when that day comes. And it’s not that far out. Some regulators figure it will be a few more years. Whenever it is, it’ll certainly make people’s lives a lot easier. We don’t think it will happen this year, but we’ll be talking about the mechanics of it by December a lot.
The Pace of Change is Fast
I know it’s going to take some time for the other stuff I mentioned, but it’s easy to see how fast things are moving for cannabis all over the world. It’s like a snowball with a rocket sled behind it pushing it even faster as it grows and grows rolling down the mountain. Now is everyone hoping to get sucked up by the snowball a saint? Doubtful. But the bigger the snowball gets, the more opportunities there will be for nice people to take part. Plenty of people entering the cannabis space now aren’t haters, they were just scared to go to jail back in the day.
The cannabis industry is currently in the midst of a massive crime wave.
In the nearly three years since thieves used the George Floyd protests as cover to kick off one of the most devastating crime waves the cannabis industry has ever seen, there have been many more. Cannabis businesses continue to be targeted.
There are various reasons contributing to these waves, but whether it’s the economy, the giant piles of money dispensaries are forced to hoard without bank accounts, or the product that’s easy to move as cannabis continues its national popularity surge, right now is batshit.
When I’m not writing for L.A. Weekly, I still work at a dispensary. We’ve been hit twice in the last two weeks. We are not alone. We’re hearing reports from San Francisco, Santa Rosa, Sacramento, Benicia and Iselton, and those are just the ones the word has gotten out on. More locally we’ve seen the city’s most prominent LGBT-owned dispensary Green Qween targeted multiple times. Cannabis companies are stuck with the catch-22 of wanting to make more noise about what they see as a lack of protection regardless of tax dollars but don’t want to wave their hands in the air basically saying, “come victimize me because I get no protection.”
And to make it even scarier for the industry, some of these groups are more reminiscent of militias than stick-up kids. Short-style AK-47s you can tuck into your pants have been seen at multiple locations.
These crews also are beginning to get very good at it. There are believed to be a few roaming the northern part of the state from security camera footage being used to match different groups together. Sometimes they’ve made trips south for weekend-long runs at fresh targets, but for the most part, the largest organized groups seem to frequent north of Salinas up to wine country and then east all the way to the Sierras.
The owner of The Delta Boyz dispensary in Isleton told us their facility has been hit five times and was among those targeted in the last two weeks. Things have gotten so hot in the small town located between Sacramento and the bay that he wanted to refrain from using his name for his family’s safety.
The crew pulling up.
He compared this recent crime to 2020, but noted there is a big difference.
“It’s just, it’s not as chaotic. The atmosphere outside is not as chaotic as it was then,” he told L.A. Weekly. “So this is just very organized, dialed in, calculated. It seems this is what they do now. And these crews have been doing it for so long, it seems like they’re getting better and better at it.”
One of the times The Delta Boys got hit it took about 45 seconds for them to take $200,000.
“My dumb ass had all my rosin in one big tote. But that’s how fast they are. They were in and out in 45 seconds,” they said. “Where else are you going to steal like that? You can’t steal from a bank like that. You can’t steal it from a liquor store. You can’t steal it from a warehouse. You got to liquidate any of those. Weed is basically liquid.”
The aftermath.
He further argued he can’t go and shoot somebody as if this was the black market.
“I have to respect the law because it’s my livelihood. This is everything I’ve ever invested all my money and time into. I can’t blast somebody. There are cameras everywhere. So it’s hard. And they know that. They know, they know we’re not. They know we’re soft targets. They know we can do shit. They know the cops aren’t coming. And it’s just routine now.”
He hopes the state will divert some of the funds it’s using against the black market to defend its legal one. He argues enforcement on black market producers has created a vacuum where they then need to sustain their demand by robbing others.
It’s that time of year when we ask our favorite cannabis brands and people what they’re most excited to grow this year.
The early stress tests are done for the season and folks are getting ready to put their new winning phenos into full blast. While this happens all the time indoors, the work outdoor cultivators do in March and April will help set the standard for the quality they’ll be chopping down when Croptober hits.
Here is what people told us when we asked them what they are hyped on. Here is what they told us:
Fidels
Fidel in the garden. Courtesy of Fidels.
Runtz x Jealousy, multiple banger phenos hunted, now being scaled up to the masses. The cool thing about this project is that it’s not bread by me, it’s bread by Julio aka @nineweeksharvest. Julio and I had a Genuine conversation. He’s an amazing breeder and pure soul! He blessed me with Runtz X Jealousy.
We hunted over 60 beans and had many selections that look, smell and smoke phenomenal. I’m excited to share these selections with the masses and have them scaled up properly.
Masonic
Oh man, Karma Genetics, The great gardener, Barbara bud hybrids, and some of the stuff I’ve chucked along the way. I already went down a lot of the landrace rabbit hole.
Rez from DNA Genetics
I’m hyped about the ’93 Octane crosses. Super heavy gas. I’m looking for that borderline rancid, super offensive-pungent, baby Shit level funk.
Capulator
Diamond Lungs Co-Op grow. 70 pheno hunters, 888 beans. Also, Vintage Sunset Cheese, Gas and Cheese, and Caps Frozen Oranges. I’m on a hot one right now.
Ryan from Doja Pak
So basically, Duke of Erb and I started with a strawberry diesel from Res Dog, pollinated it with a Northern Lights male selected a male and pollinated an OG18 Pheno that we hunted from DNA. That cross was named 18 Coffins.
We worked the line through the generations and hit the Gelato 33 from the Bakery with pollen from an F318 coffins male. That cross was called Strawberry Gelato. The female keeper was put into production and then the male we collected pollen and dusted the original Zkittlez. This cross was named Strawberry Zkillato. Planta grows this cut currently.
The SZ Male pollinated a LCG/Runtz and then we selected multiple keepers; Planta runs 1 and Dave from Preferred Gardens runs another. We again selected a male and hit our whole lineup. Those are the crosses I’m selling and selecting now.
Anna from CAM
Things I’m running that are new. Grape Gas, Lemon Cherry Gelato x Permanent Marker, Animal cookies x Z, Devil driver (Melonade x sundae driver ), Pure Kush and Rozay.
Erin from Royal Key Organics
Gelapop, Velvet, Candy Walls hash, new seeds and new potential from Equilibrium Genetics.
Drew from Green Dawg
Green weed 2023! D1 is my biggest recent push. I’m not disclosing genetics officially, but it’s the closest thing I’ve had to a real Sour Diesel/Dubb flavor profile in a decade. It’s an anti-candy. We hunted her from seed. Everything else was hay except her. I think she’s special and is going to do numbers this year.
Sour Wavez
Surefire and I have something special coming up, haven’t named it… RS11 x sherbanger F1 male. Besides that, some stuff I bred: Gelloz (gelatti x OZX), Betrayal (Zkittelz x OZX), Real Ricky Bobby (Xeno x OZX), Chess not checkers (Pink Z x OZX), Sidepiece (Pure Kush x OZX).
Besides that I’m growing Sherbanger (Boston roots), Sour diesel (karma bx2), I have four different OGs, Permanent marker via Doja pak, Zazul (Archive), Detroit runtz (Tiki) and from Mendoja the Larry Z and Cherry pie x OZK .
Kevin Jodrey
I’m hyped about the older cultivar revival Purple city coming out with ssh kali mist hybrids.
Cypher going to weave the red Lebanese x puck into his work. On the east coast you have the piff haze crew going hard in that direction.
You got Sjoerd Brooks lighting up in lake county and has the haze valley nursery coming online. Equatorials modified for our area but still retaining the traits that made them legendary. No one young ever got to smoke them and Brooks is a bad motherfucker.
It’s not so much a specific plant as a feel. Herb from an era where the quality of the effect was what drove the sale more so than the amount of hype. You see the work being woven into a lot as well.
The stores are losing so much ground to the trap because they live and die off of the distribution model. That model is a safe bet. Purple color only. Over 26% only. That leaves about 30 plants that every nursery in the state sells and forces every grower to compete with each other for shelf space. Customers are bored.
I’m flying to Jamaica tomorrow to document Charles Scott’s operation for a company I’m helping to build in Massachusetts. A lifetime of equatorials being sifted for what will work best in today’s world. I’m stoked because the crop is outdoors full sun organic and at 18′ latitude, so we can see what they look like in their natural environment.
Those selections will be sifted indoors and released in a market where that kind of effect is desired and needed.
Fieldz from Zkittlez
Braindropz, gelonoidz, wapanga, NYZ., zyrup. All of our own gear of coarse.
Champelli
Stuff that is smoking and is killer. I have a few OG back crosses. I’m excited about bringing back that real gas for body smoke mostly green weed, but I also have a few different candy Z crosses that are neither overly zee or overly candy leaning basically their own thing New flavors I like it when stuff comes out and it’s not leaning too heavy on one thing or relying on one Terp it’s always Pass when they get together become friends and decide to have a new expression of flavor. That’s the most exciting part creating something you could actually call newish.
The Village – Symbiotic Genetics
We are really excited about the Gassy Taffy line collab with Grow Low Key. There is a Grease Bucket x Gassy Taffy pheno that is extremely promising, very gassy. We are calling it Benzina, which is gas in Italian. Also the Amarelo x Gassy Taffy I’m really excited about and that’s going to be called Ego Death. Also the Candied Bananas which is Z2 x Banana Punch, Z2 is Zkittles bag seed.
Mike from Fig Farms
The flowers I’m most excited about right now are in-house crosses that recently graduated to production. The next two that will be released are crosses to Figment pollen, both are outstanding.
The first cross, Kush Mint Cookies x Figment #5, has an overwhelming Original Cookies terp presence that really pulls at the olfactory memory. The second cross, Blue Face x Figment #7, has an undeniable exotic Fig Farms look with a complex gas profile that we can’t wait to share. You are going to continue to see a lot of Fig crosses coming from us in 2023. The pollen and the winning female plants that we’ve been collecting and testing are like colors on a painter’s palette. Our palette’s range is deep, and we are using our palette to create the next generation of classics.
We headed north to the redwoods for the latest installment of the original cannabis-friendly music festival, Northern Nights.
The festival’s geography plays a significant role in its place in the history of cannabis progress. The venue, Cook’s Campground, sits in the heart of the Emerald Triangle stretching across the county line separating Mendocino and Humboldt. In addition to all the fine local cannabis, attendees spend their weekend enjoying up-and-coming EDM acts across numerous stages, and floating on the river.
This past weekend we got the chance to sit down with many of Northern Nights’ co-founders as they celebrated the festival’s 10th anniversary, including Andrew Blap, Peter Huson, Matty “Worldfamous” Roberts and Emily Wilson.
The festival has long been associated with legal cannabis sales after hosting the state’s first at music festival in the wake of Prop 64’s implementation. Following Northern Nights’ lead, major festivals around the country jumped on board with the idea, including EDC Las Vegas and Dirtybird Campout. In past years, those sales were confined to specific areas — last year even featuring two stageside dispensaries and a main cannabis activation area. This year the entire cannabis footprint was integrated into the heart of the festival, a short walk from the mainstage under the shade of the region’s massive trees.
We asked the Northern Nights team what it was like pushing that further integration this year.
“I think the big thing in working in two counties is first and foremost the context of where you are putting things,” Huson told L.A. Weekly. “When it comes to the history of cannabis events here, it’s the local jurisdiction, you have to start there. Mendocino passed their ordinance and we could bring a couple of dispensaries into Mendo.”
Courtesy of @y.s.a
But there was a lot of separation between those dispensaries.
“And ultimately, I think the premise of boundaries, aka fencing, has been a big thing in terms of limiting the number of sales,” Huson said of the caged-in areas. “I think the different places that we were putting the dispensaries if you wanted to get them, for example, all the way out to the river, it’s a lot of overhead.”
A big part for the team was making sure those local sponsors from the cannabis industry felt right. Huson notes there have been a few folks in the space doing these events for a while, but the brands taking part fund the progress to prove what can be done.
Courtesy of @anthonysvendsen
Matty Roberts added pushing boundaries is in line with the general ethos of the festival over the years.
“We’re booking cutting-edge shit, which makes our lineups very eclectic. We pick all this cool music because we’re kind of in a sweet spot. We’re not a big event. We don’t have a ton of money behind us, so we have to get scrappy and find a lot of new stuff.”
Roberts laughed, noting people look at the old posters from over the decade and act like the performers back in the day were bigger, but they didn’t actually know who a lot of those now big-name acts were when Northern Nights booked them.
“Now you look back, our lineup from eight years ago looks like a $2 million lineup,” Roberts said.
Roberts spoke of coming from the Midwest where a stem on your shirt would land you in jail. He’s thrilled to help facilitate a good time for a younger generation that never has to know those horrors.
Emily Wilson went on to speak that filling the void that Reggae on The River left in the hills is an honor.
“But there is a lot of responsibility as well. That means, we have to do the due diligence in finding new and up-and-coming music, working with local cannabis businesses and producers who have been working in the community a long time and supporting it through these transitions.”
@y.s.a
Wilson argued sometimes that means bringing in both the little guys and the big guys. She said that is a responsibility you can see they take seriously across the festival with not just cannabis but local wineries and breweries, too.
“Every single facet that we can, and where we’re able, we want to support local and present the best that Northern California has to offer. We’ve got Humboldt Bay Oysters fresh from the docks,” Wilson said.
One of the things Wilson said she enjoys the most is those people that have stuck with them since year one. Through all the trials and tribulations of being a small independent festival and the learning curve that came with it, they kept coming back, and that meant a lot to her.
The actual cannabis section itself was really well done. As in years past, it provided a shady reprieve from the Northern California sun that hit 94 degrees Saturday in what felt like 1,000% humidity. One of my favorite parts of the festival was the morning sound bath in the cannabis zone. You would see people tiptoeing around all the people laid out, to get to the ATM for their weed money. Everyone was really respectful, but even then, the visual was hilarious.
This year’s switch to delivery was a good move. While it took five minutes longer, it allowed for the entire Northern Nights cannabis experience to be more streamlined than had there been fences everywhere to facilitate a temporary retail site.
The actual weed people were buying was no slouch. Some cannabis activations over the past couple of years have gotten a bit midsy. Sometimes you’d see these brands that can’t even get dispensary shelf space taking a lead at festivals — gross. Thankfully, Northern Nights did not have this problem. I would argue that The Lantz from Ridgeline Farms is the nicest weed for the price I’ve ever seen at any festival. Eighths were only $35! I bought seven over the weekend.
Hopefully, other festivals trying to get into the cannabis game will take note of how well Northern Nights did it.
We just wrapped up judging the preliminary round of the biggest Zalympix competition yet.
The 2023 installment of Greenwolf’s massive contest is bigger than ever in terms of entries this year, not just hype. Greenwolf opened up the competition to over 100 farmers for the next installment.
That’s a huge jump from the 16 we’d seen in the previous boxes to 109. Obviously, there was going to be a need to switch the format up a pinch given the scale of how big the contest is this year. Greenwolf’s solution? A preliminary round.
The Greenwolf team assembled a reputable squad to go whittle down the pack. It included past winners, famous growers, and other journalists. Everyone they selected was based on their faith in their palette and opinion on cannabis.
Getting the kit in two boxes.
I received my box on Feb. 8 and had through the 21st to finish the samples. I went into the last day with four left. That worked out to trying just over nine samples a day. I smoked every single entry in a backwood because they are kind of like a cheat code when you’re grading marijuana. If you can taste it through the woods, you know it’s the goods.
One thing about this contest was the fact it was refreshing to not have to pick a winner. We had to pick 27 things we thought had a shot in the final round. That’s a ton. If I knew something had to be in the box I just gave it all fives. Even if it wasn’t my favorite terps, I just couldn’t deny it a shot at the big show.
I ended up with 18 out of the 109 in that must-go-in-the-box category. These were fantastic representations of lots of different kinds of weed. There were certainly a ton of dessert terps across the field of entries, but dotted between the Gelatos and Lemon Cherries were both new and old flavors.
There were a ton of OGs. To be expected from a Los Angeles-based contest? Sure. But they were of varying qualities; some leaned on the pure fuel smell while others smelled more like Skywalker or Tahoe cut with a bit more pinene in them.
Most of the things I scored the highest were rockstar-level gas, which is weed that literally smells like there was some kind of accident at a gas station that needs to be reported. I wasn’t worried about color either when I was scoring. Don’t get me wrong, I wanted the stuff I was picking to be aesthetically pleasing, but a wild nose went a hundred times further in my opinion building than a couple of hints of purple.
A lot of people entered new gear they thought might be their golden ticket. I’ve regularly checked out the Compound lineup over the last few years as they were testing out new gear. I smelled a lot of notes from last year’s seed drops like Gastropop and Pave.
Jon Cappetta from High Times was among the others selected to make their way through the entries in search of the 27 he thought worthy.
“Sorting through almost 120 samples in two weeks is a feat for even the most seasoned veterans, but The Zalympix preliminaries were a great preview of the gear we can expect to see making headlines this year. It seems like ‘23 is going to be another year of candy gas, but I’m holding out hope for more unique flavor profiles,” Cappetta told L.A. Weekly.
We’re going to go deep into Zalympix for 4/20 this year. Keep an eye out.
THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: TEARS OF THE KINGDOM LIVES UP TO THE MASSIVE HYPE
Link’s latest adventures in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of The Kingdom (TOTK) are everything we were waiting for.
The game has proven a roaring international hit. One common phrase often seen across social media in the past two weeks since the launch is the idea that Breath of The Wild, Zelda’s previous foray on Nintendo’s Switch when the system launched, almost feels like a beta version of what we ended up with in TOTK. How wild is it to call a game that went on to sell 30 million copies since and win a ton of awards a beta test? But it honestly feels kind of accurate with how much TOTK built on the last version of Hyrule we visited six years ago.
The Legacy of Zelda Enthusiasm
There are few dates on the video game calendar that get circled with more enthusiasm than a new Zelda game. Since the first one dropped in 1987, its raving fan base has always wondered what would be next for the franchise that often served with Super Mario Brothers as a flagship game that showed off the capabilities of Nintendo’s hardware from generation to generation. Zelda’s creators Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka were a part of both famous franchises. While it doesn’t quite serve that role in the same fashion given Nintendo has now allowed many more developers to publish games for their hardware in the Switch era, Zelda still very much serves as the benchmark for how much fun you can have on the Switch.
Zelda has turned down the cartoon style from 20 years ago. But the current look and feel still have a very anime feel that looks a lot cleaner than Wind Walker released in 2002. But 2006’s Twilight Princess feels much more similar to what the game looks like today. The modern version feels a lot brighter and more fun, like the way the lava pops with bright red and orange bubbles.
Miyamoto explained some of the thought processes they had as Zelda continued to transition into the 3D format in the 2000s. He noted part of the reason they went for the cartoon look was it made it easier to show expression in the characters. He also wanted it to feel like you were playing a cartoon in 3D, they definitely aced that test.
Breath of The Wild provided a lot of the building blocks for this new sequel on the same generation of hardware six years later. In an interview with Game Informer, Miyamoto noted one of the big jumps as Zelda made the move to the Switch was the nature engine. Exploration has always been a significant backbone of the fun in the play-it-at-your-pace game where you can toss around chickens or make a speed run for the master sword.
“Adventuring and exploring nature is what makes the game,” Miyamoto told Game Informer when the game launched. “I had to relook at what dungeons look like for us and kind of take it out of the dungeon. We spent five years kind of working on that.”
Miyamoto admitted he himself likes the open-world aspect of players creating their own adventures across the storyline over the years but understands there are folks out there that like those deep storylines with a lot of backstories. He thinks this modern generation of Zelda games has done a good job balancing the two.
The Tears of The Kingdom Launch
Over the past few weeks, the world has now had a moment to dive into Hyrule. But the months and years leading up to this moment had a bit of mystery to them. Regardless, once the game hit shelves, it was on.
In just three days, it became the fastest-selling Zelda game of all time. Ten million units moved globally in that first 72 hours, 4 million of them here in North America. That makes it the fastest-selling Nintendo game ever on any system in North America according to Nintendo. A major achievement for the game’s creators.
“Many players are returning to Hyrule with all its new mysteries and possibilities, and with the record-breaking launch of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom for Nintendo Switch, we can’t wait to see what they’ll create in the game and the stories they’ll share next,” said Devon Pritchard, Nintendo of America’s executive vice president of sales, marketing and communications. “We’re grateful for all of our fans who’ve shown their passion for The Legend of Zelda over the years, and these sales numbers for the latest installment continue to show the strong momentum for both the franchise and Nintendo Switch this year.”
Reviews and Livestreams Pumped The Hype
One of the things that helped the massive launch was just how positive all the reviews were. It’s currently sitting at a 95 on Metacritic, the most noted aggregator of video game reviews by a mile. That score puts it as the 49th greatest game of all time per their review system. While 22 other games in history have scored a 95 on the site, TOTK ranks No. 1 one among those games that have scored a 95 since the website was founded over 20 years ago.
Zelda’s 1998 edition Orcana of Time is the number one game of all time on Metacritic as the only game ever to score a 99. The last installment on Switch, Breath of The Wild, ranks No. 14 on the all-time list with the Wii U version coming in No. 26. Twilight Princess is No. 39, and The Wind Walker is No. 44. There are a few on the list after TOTK also. The Gamecube Collectors edition from 2003 came in at No. 54. The Game Boy Advance edition of A Link to The Past came in at No. 59 with Majora’s Mask right behind it at No. 60. Twilight Princess is two spots later at No. 62. A 3DS version also made it. With the TOTK’s reviews getting added to this all-time list, basically one in 10 of the top-reviewed video games of all time on Metacritic is a Zelda game, if you count the two versions of Breath of The Wild as one.
“The fandom behind the Zelda franchise is stronger than ever and to date, Tears of the Kingdom is the best reviewed game of 2023 on Metacritic,” Marc Doyle, Co-Founder of Metacritic told L.A. Weekly. “In fact, it currently ranks in the top 50 games of all time and the number four Zelda game to ever be released.”
We asked Polygon Senior Reporter Nicole Carpenter if she thought the game got scored tougher by critics as a direct sequel.
“I don’t necessarily think it got scored harder, but Breath of the Wild did have a major impact on the industry so there was an expectation for what Tears of the Kingdom would be. The bar was already set high and people expected Tears of the Kingdom to jump over that bar,” Carpenter told L.A. Weekly, “The game sold 10 million copies in a few days so it’s definitely up there for the biggest game of the year. Beyond that, Tears of the Kingdom will be one of most influential games of the year.”
Another thing the newer generation of Zelda games has had play to its favor is the rise of online streaming. The launch has been a hit. According to TwitchTracker.com, over the last week, people have spent 8 million hours watching other people play the game and the streams averaged about 50,000 people watching at any given time. Things peaked on May 11 when 351,714 users were simultaneously watching TOTK streams.
50 Hours In
What?! The Great Deku Tree has a stomachache again?! Sign me up. That’s not even a spoiler at this point, it’s presumable Hyrule’s bad guys at any given moment have had an impact on his acid reflux. Those kinds of expectations are one of the things that have made the series great. Each time we go back, the little things we love are done even better.
We are about 50 hours in. I’ve completed the Wind Temple but have predominantly spent most of my time exploring. I’ve hit about 35 Shrines so far in the process of building up hearts for the main storyline. One of the reasons I’ve hit so many shrines early is because of how fun the new gameplay mechanics make them. The massive refreshing of all the minigames makes each one feel very unique.
Those four new core gameplay mechanics are called Fuse, Ultrahand, Ascend and Recall. Fuse lets you attach objects from the world to each other or your hand after you use Ultrahand to move them around. You’ll use a combination of those powers and the world around you all the time to upgrade your weapons, solve puzzles and even build vehicles.
Ascend adds another vertical element of gameplay in addition to the massive sky map that covers the whole game from above. It allows you to climb through ceilings within reach of the ability and emerge through the floor on the other side.
Recall allows you to move objects and then recreate that object’s movement through time. Say a rock falls down a waterfall you want to go up, you hit the rock with recall and ride it up the waterfall. There are some wild uses for one when it comes to all the puzzles.
There also is a ton of wild physics mechanics attached to the main storyline. As you dive further and further in, you’ll get access to an even wider array of tools to combine with the Ultrahand and Fuse abilities.
With all that, and what feels like triple the game compared to Breath of The Wild, I think the only reason TOTK isn’t higher on the all-time list is that it’s a direct sequel. Regardless, it’s one of the best games ever.
This week we’re excited about what’s to come for the cannabis industry in 2024.
Last week we covered the fact that life is less than perfect in cannabis while highlighting some of the things we believed caused a lot of our headaches in 2023. This week, the opposite. We’re highlighting the things we think are going to help everyone turn it around.
Finally Fixing LA’s Equity Program
Here in Los Angeles, one of the biggest calls to action from the cannabis industry for the new mayor’s office continues to be the repair of the L.A. Social Equity Program. It was awesome to see 100 Social Equity Individual Applicants were randomly selected to apply for retail cannabis licenses last month, but the couple hundred people who invested their lives into putting their ducks in a row for the program are going to demand more. And while the new mayor’s office is separate from the scandals of the fall, they may have to pay the bill if a class action lawsuit ends up developing from the then-racist city council having original control over the program that drained so many coffers.
Standardized Testing?
It originally looked like we would have standardized lab testing this year. It seems a little hazy at the moment, but we wanted to put it on here to push the idea. Currently, cannabis labs have no fixed standard operating procedures. A lot of the time they’re just following the instructions for whatever hardware they bought. Then adjust the standard operating procedure to their liking. That’s where you see the variations in testing numbers from lab to lab. The idea of people shopping around their cannabis at labs to get the best numbers possible is a real thing. This is more so an issue with potency and terpene testing as opposed to heavy metals and pesticides.
Wider Access in America
It’s critical that California cultivators get access to more shelf space soon. While the state continues to drag a bit, the idea of stocking shelves all over the world with cannabis grown in California is appealing to people. The first shelves will probably be domestic, and step one is having as many states with legal access to cannabis as possible for when that day comes. And it’s not that far out. Some regulators figure it will be a few more years. Whenever it is, it’ll certainly make people’s lives a lot easier. We don’t think it will happen this year, but we’ll be talking about the mechanics of it by December a lot.
The Pace of Change is Fast
I know it’s going to take some time for the other stuff I mentioned, but it’s easy to see how fast things are moving for cannabis all over the world. It’s like a snowball with a rocket sled behind it pushing it even faster as it grows and grows rolling down the mountain. Now is everyone hoping to get sucked up by the snowball a saint? Doubtful. But the bigger the snowball gets, the more opportunities there will be for nice people to take part. Plenty of people entering the cannabis space now aren’t haters, they were just scared to go to jail back in the day.
The cannabis industry is currently in the midst of a massive crime wave.
In the nearly three years since thieves used the George Floyd protests as cover to kick off one of the most devastating crime waves the cannabis industry has ever seen, there have been many more. Cannabis businesses continue to be targeted.
There are various reasons contributing to these waves, but whether it’s the economy, the giant piles of money dispensaries are forced to hoard without bank accounts, or the product that’s easy to move as cannabis continues its national popularity surge, right now is batshit.
When I’m not writing for L.A. Weekly, I still work at a dispensary. We’ve been hit twice in the last two weeks. We are not alone. We’re hearing reports from San Francisco, Santa Rosa, Sacramento, Benicia and Iselton, and those are just the ones the word has gotten out on. More locally we’ve seen the city’s most prominent LGBT-owned dispensary Green Qween targeted multiple times. Cannabis companies are stuck with the catch-22 of wanting to make more noise about what they see as a lack of protection regardless of tax dollars but don’t want to wave their hands in the air basically saying, “come victimize me because I get no protection.”
And to make it even scarier for the industry, some of these groups are more reminiscent of militias than stick-up kids. Short-style AK-47s you can tuck into your pants have been seen at multiple locations.
These crews also are beginning to get very good at it. There are believed to be a few roaming the northern part of the state from security camera footage being used to match different groups together. Sometimes they’ve made trips south for weekend-long runs at fresh targets, but for the most part, the largest organized groups seem to frequent north of Salinas up to wine country and then east all the way to the Sierras.
The owner of The Delta Boyz dispensary in Isleton told us their facility has been hit five times and was among those targeted in the last two weeks. Things have gotten so hot in the small town located between Sacramento and the bay that he wanted to refrain from using his name for his family’s safety.
The crew pulling up.
He compared this recent crime to 2020, but noted there is a big difference.
“It’s just, it’s not as chaotic. The atmosphere outside is not as chaotic as it was then,” he told L.A. Weekly. “So this is just very organized, dialed in, calculated. It seems this is what they do now. And these crews have been doing it for so long, it seems like they’re getting better and better at it.”
One of the times The Delta Boys got hit it took about 45 seconds for them to take $200,000.
“My dumb ass had all my rosin in one big tote. But that’s how fast they are. They were in and out in 45 seconds,” they said. “Where else are you going to steal like that? You can’t steal from a bank like that. You can’t steal it from a liquor store. You can’t steal it from a warehouse. You got to liquidate any of those. Weed is basically liquid.”
The aftermath.
He further argued he can’t go and shoot somebody as if this was the black market.
“I have to respect the law because it’s my livelihood. This is everything I’ve ever invested all my money and time into. I can’t blast somebody. There are cameras everywhere. So it’s hard. And they know that. They know, they know we’re not. They know we’re soft targets. They know we can do shit. They know the cops aren’t coming. And it’s just routine now.”
He hopes the state will divert some of the funds it’s using against the black market to defend its legal one. He argues enforcement on black market producers has created a vacuum where they then need to sustain their demand by robbing others.