I’ve been listening through Built to Spill’s discography since that was a band I just kind of missed entirely when they were of the cultural zeitgeist. You in Reverse makes me understand what made them such a big deal, but I’ve been enjoying the journey as a whole!

I rewatched Singin’ in the Rain while my friend and her daughter were in town and not only is it really a banger with so many incredibly funny and delightful bits — holding Lena Lamott’s voice reveal as long as they do is so perfect — I was also delighted to find out that kids also love old timey musicals! Adults would basically never get up and dance along with those characters with reckless enthusiasm! At least not without prior training.

We’ve been rewatching Masters of the Air because I guess when you don’t really want to take in anything new, you might as well pick an overall kind of hopeful but still ultimately depressing miniseries about WWII to rewatch. I know the internet has exhausted the concept of iPhone face with thinkpieces, but it really is such a useful metric for historical set pieces. Most of the faces in MOTA are solidly of the era — none better than Nate Mann and Matt Gavan — with really only Isabel May as an egregious misstep and that’s frankly pretty impressive with such a sizable cast.^*

I recently liked You Should Be So Lucky and After Hours at Dooryard Books by Cat Sebastian who continues to write solid, enjoyable queer historical romances. (I’m not done with her new contemporary one yet, but it’s not my favorite thing I’ve ever read, which is fine!) I also really liked Run for the Hills by Kevin Wilson but then immediately read a review that made me question my own literacy, so there’s that.

Technologically, I recently got a Kobo Clara B&W because I am trying to be on my phone less and I guess I convinced myself that if I had another ereader on rotation in order to juggle airplane-moded library books I would stop staring at my phone and while that hasn’t entirely happened, I do love the device! I picked it because it was well-reviewed and because I haven’t spent any money with Amazon since 2024 (and will continue not to!) but it is remarkably faster than my not-really-that-old Paperwhite and obscenely faster than my very, very old Oasis. Also the UI is better! And you don’t have to spend more money to not have ads! Which is an insane thing to have to feel good about!

More importantly though, in my quest to detach from my phone I have removed it from my bedside table to charge elsewhere, mostly to try to break myself of picking it up when I inevitably get up to pee in the middle of the night and less because I have trouble putting it down. And I’ve been successful! And sleeping better! And dreaming more! Probably because I am sleeping deeper, but I do think I’ll adopt some kind of conspiracy theory about cell signals causing brainwave interference. Just for fun. I still check it first thing in the morning, but I do think it’s guiding me toward fewer mindless pickups during the day too and that’s nice. I don’t think the phone is bad! My friends are in there! But I do like the feeling of being more ~intentional about it.

Okay, that’s it! This month we gave to some rent relief and mutual aid funds in the Twin Cities and I think this month we’ll be doing the same. I also donated to Buffalo’s Fire last year and it’s become one of my most read news sources, so I highly recommend it!

I hope you’re doing well wherever you are. As always let me know if you have somewhere you think I should donate or if you want to recommend me some pop culture or if you just have something you really need to say! ashrocketship [at] gmail, as always. Love you!

^*: While we were watching Lord of the Rings, I had to pause and go off on a probably too long diatribe about how I couldn’t stand looking at Karl Urban in it because he just looked like some guy in a wig, absolutely zero believable fantasy face on him, and Crystal was like, “It’s funny that you like him in Star Trek,” and I was like, “That’s because he has… That man has tricorder face, is what he has.” This is now our default usage of this concept.