ash rocketship

totally top 3: july 2019

July is over already. July! I know time gets faster as you get older because of like, relativity, but SHEESH, 2019 is just blasting by. I’m not ready for 2020. I didn’t even like typing that. Yikes.

Spider-Man: Far From Home was SO MUCH more fun than I expected it to be and also had a decent plot and satisfying emotional payoff and also Jake Gyllenhaal is… so beautiful. It’s UPSETTING, honestly. Gosh. The teenaged characters in this are also just really charming across the board and I like that they act like idiots and talk like idiots because that’s what being a teenager is like! (But you know, like if human speech had an editor, right? So it’s never TOO real because that would be… unbelievably boring. Same as adults, obviously.) The adult presence is also great (Marissa Tomei and Martin Starr in particular. And JB Smoove popping into scenes to be hilarious was also great.) and I got very emotional during Happy and Peter’s conversation on the jet. Every time I watch a Marvel movie, I assume it’ll be the one that finally makes me lose interest, but they keep being fun and easy to watch, so I just keep coming back.

Stranger Things (SPOILERS!) season three was so, so fun and satisfying and I cried,,, so much, Jesus. I cried. SO MUCH!! I cried… more than I could have ever anticipated!!! I cried at Alexei! I cried at Billy! I cried at Hopper! I cried at the entire three months later sequence!!!!!!! I just cried! I CRIED SO MUCH!!!!!!!!! It was so fun and so stressful and so funny and charming and I wanted Robin to be a lesbian SO BAD and then SHE FUCKIN’ WAS!!!!!!!!!!! And watching Joe Keery’s beautiful, talented face work through the emotions of that admission fuckin’ ruled!!!!! All of these kids are just, so much better at acting than I will ever be at… literally anything. It was also really exciting and gory and gross, which is great, and just. “It’s not my fault you don’t like girls.” !!!! MAN!! What a freakin’ EXPERIENCE!! We loved this so much that we started re-watching the series from the beginning and we almost never do that! (Sorry for all the exclamation marks and incoherency, but it’s not like you didn’t know who you were dealing with here.)

I had no freaking idea that I was going to L-O-V-E Tuca & Bertie so much. I love the theme song; I love the characters; I love the animation; I love the fucking weird-ass parameters of the universe; I love the theme song; I love the phenomenal interstitials between scenes; I love Birdie; I love Tuca; I love Speckle; I love that it’s gross and that it feels effortlessly weird; I love the theme song!! It is so fun and so funny and so wonderfully reflective of ride-or-die friendship. Also, I did NOT expect my marriage to be extremely represented on tv by heterosexual bird people, but 2019 is truly wild that way. (That argument about Speckle needing it to be his turn to freak out… HOO BOY.) This’ll be one I revisit for sure and Netflix is dumb as hell for not ordering a second season.

And five to look forward to…

scary stories to tell in the dark katie henry, let's call it a doomsday slipknot, we are not your kind james brandon, ziggy, stardust, and me where'd you go, bernadette

some stuff i read: july 2019

Here are some things I read this month that weren’t a waste of time!

I just caught up on a couple months of Cake for Breakfast and Mia Mercado is funnier and more charming than all of the funny people you already follow.

Did Blowing into Nintendo Cartridges or the Game Console Actually Do Anything?

Who’s Afraid of Kathleen Hale?

A Frog, a Banjo, and an Indelible Message: Making “The Rainbow Connection”

Did I ever tell you guys how bad I was at Red Dead Redemption

If I Made $4 a Word, This Article Would Be Worth $10,000

Hideous Men

E. Jean Carroll’s Accusation Against Donald Trump, and the Raising, and Lowering, of the Bar

Viral and Loving It: The Thoroughly Modern Comedy of Demi Adejuyigbe

What Happened To The Bygone Pastime Of Quoting Movies To Each Other?

How to Draw a Horse

How I’ve Learned to Cope With Depression as a Queer Person

Listen, the only people who enjoy looking at vacation photos are the people who took them

People Tell Us How QAnon Destroyed Their Relationships

‘Let’s blow up this black music!’: The ugliness and unrest of 1979’s Disco Demolition Night

The Real Problem With Making Two Trips To Carry All Of My Groceries In The House

you don't have to finish that thing

Today, I removed a TV show that I have not finished from the “To Watch” list I keep in my Wunderlist app.

It felt… good. It felt… free. It felt… transcendental.

It doesn’t matter at all what it was — I add like, everything to this list that sounds even remotely interesting when I see somebody talk about it — and it isn’t because I even think it’s “bad” or whatever (I don’t, actually. It’s good!) but just because I didn’t really want to watch anymore episodes. It just wasn’t a thing I needed to see through and for like, one of the first times in my entire dumb life I just… decided not to.

I have always been finicky about Finishing Things. (Well, watching/reading-type things. If only I could produce the same kind of energy for producing things instead of consuming them. The books I could finish writing! The screenplays! The chores!) I’ve only ever really given up on a book TWICE (Both of which were boring and pretty bad. One or the other… I stick those out constantly. I have been ”’reading”’ House of Leaves for fourteen years.) and I am constantly having the incredibly stupid thought, unbidden, that I have to take in an Entire Thing before I’m like, allowed to decide whether I liked it or not.

But the older I get, the more I realize that life is just TOO SHORT to finish every single thing I start. I have no idea how much time I get on this planet, why the hell do I keep wasting it on stuff that I’m not even that into?!

This feels like a real evolutionary moment for me. I can change! I can reclaim my time! And stop wasting it on things I don’t really care about!

And! I walked the talk and doused the stupid little burning need I had to tell everyone about how This Thing Was Just Not For Me because… Who cares? Lots of things aren’t for me! (That’s like, a product of being alive in a time where there is more content being created every day than in the one prior: not all of it can or should be made for everyone. That actually rules, knowing there is SO MUCH media being made, that like, you don’t have to care about kind of a lot of it at all. That’s awesome.)#

(It’s almost like… I can be the person I actually want to be? Sometimes? If I try? Sounds fake, but okay.)

So, in case you need it, I am here to tell you: You Do Not Have to Finish That Thing.

Whatever it is, no matter how good it is or how much you want to be part of the zeitgeist or which one of your amazing friends recommended it, you can just stop reading or watching or following it. And you don’t even have to tell anyone about it. Just Quietly Quit That Thing and On To The Next. Liberate yourself. Bask in that freedom. You deserve it.

#: I hope it is obvious that this doesn’t apply to, like, diversity and representation in media. We always need more and everyone should be able to see themselves in the media they watch. This is a Mob Movies Aren’t For Me, not Movies Should Be For Straight White Cis People Only thing. Fuck white people. Including me.

totally top 3: june 2019

Holy crap did I love Good Omens. I read the book in college (200…4? I think) and loved it and have spent the ensuing years recommending it to lots and lots of people. A solid adaptation FULL!! of all the queer angel-demon love I could have dreamed of. I will miss the internet obsessively fan re-casting the story every few years and I maintain that they CERTAINLY could have casted it less white-ly, but we liked it enough to almost immediately watch the entire thing a second time anyway. I thought the narrative and the dialogue did a good job pulling the funny charm from the book into a visual medium and I thought the visuals and placemaking and costuming were ultimately very cool. I also thought it did a nice job of breaking the book up into episodes, though I could have watched a thousand more minutes of Aziraphale and Crowley begrudgingly becoming friends. I will be haunted by “You go to too fast for me, Crowley” for the rest of my life and I will love it.

I didn’t know anything about Drew Magary’s The Hike before I bought it (I have probably made it clear that I don’t ever know anything about what I read before I read it and yet I cannot stop repeating myself.) and even if I had, I don’t think I could have accurately imagined the off-the-charts level of weirdness in here. The writing in this is really solid and, as previously mentioned, really reflective of the passage of time and changes in the narrator. Ben is a solid narrator, but the stars here are really the secondary characters and the general bizarre nature of the story. The willingness to lean in to the strangeness of the premise and follow through with it was really refreshing and reminded me a lot of Unicorn Store, actually, and I thought the ending was similarly satisfying.

We were able to squeeze a viewing of Rocketman into a quick trip to the cities in June and I am SO GLAD. It was so big and fun and moving — making it a big fantasy musical was brilliant and fun and so fitting for Elton John’s music — and I ended up crying like, five times which I hadn’t really expected?? Taron Egerton is so, so, sooooooo unbelievably good. He makes acting look like it’s just having feelings on camera, right there all over his beautiful face, and he really drags you through them with him in the most satisfying way. Also, I had no idea Jamie Bell was in this before he popped up on screen and I kind of yelped in the theater and terrified all of the middle-aged couples that were there with us. As always, a beautiful, talented bitch. The “Your Song” bit is so good — two extremely talented actors just meaningfully, facially emoting at each other over a song I already loved so much — and I’m just going to think about it forever and ever.