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It’s April! It’s halfway through April! Did you know that? Isn’t that crazy? I understand why time seems to go faster as we get older and also why most of us are living with a newly skewed sense of time, but it’ll still never stop shocking me tbqh.
Anyway! Some stuff I’ve been liking!
Crystal’s always encouraging me to buy and play any video game that I seem even vaguely interested in because I don’t really like them at all, but she thinks it’s a thing that can like, be unlocked in me, so when I said Pokopia seemed interesting, she bought it for me immediately and, like most games, I played it for a little bit and then basically got bored, but I do have fun while I’m doing it! I think! Mostly I do some stuff and then suddenly shake my head and go, “What the hell am I even doing,” and save and quit as though I’ve loaned someone else my body for an hour or so and took a vaguely unsatisfying nap.
That said, Crystal’s having a great time playing it and I do like that my little Ditto guy is wearing a sailor suit and in general that’s enough for me to consider something a win.
Mostly while she’s been playing Pokopia, I’ve been reading the Dungeon Crawler Carl books. A month ago I didn’t know what they were and three weeks ago I was calling it Dungeon Master Steve and now they’re my absolute favorite way to be spending my time. Like the Captive Prince series did for me a handful+ of years ago, they have become a nice escape from my incredibly stressful real life (Selling a house! HVAC out in our car! Furnace died in our house! Unexpected vet visit! Health issues for me! Work problems for everyone! Beloved cousin had a heart attack! Everyone is okay — KNOCK ON WOOD — but good lord!) and are generally a good time! They’re too long and I know they’re only going to get longer, but what can you do? This is simply the cost of reading something in a genre where everyone thinks they’re Brandon Sanderson and doesn’t realize that most of us don’t want to read Brandon Sanderson at all.
TV wise we’ve successfully watched two episodes of The Pitt and enjoyed them, a handful of season two Abbot Elementary eps to mixed success — one of the episodes (with the juice and the bathrooms?) agitated us both so much we ended up yelling at our coworker about it lmao — and most of Masters of the Air for the third or fourth time. Look! Sometimes life is hard and what you have to do is rewatch something pretty depressing about World War II to get by, I don’t make the rules.
We donated to Bridge of Solidarity, Liberation Twin Cities, and the Center for Victims of Torture.
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 is always open.
I hope you’re doing well wherever you are. Love you!
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.
I was just going to start rambling about how I listened to the Decemberists’ entire discography again and had a good time and then I realized I hadn’t copied and pasted the header in this post so I went to do that only to discover that I already talked about re-listening to the Decemberists… Cruelties of fate.
I was also going to talk about how I listened to a bunch of Bad Religion but then I typed a sentence and went… Where did I already type this? And it turns out it was tumblr (yes, tumblr still exists, yes there are people still using it, yes we’re having a great time thanks) where I got tagged in a meme and wrote about what I had been listening to, so let’s cheat the system and share that!
stuff i was listening to the week of february 6th:
(i heard the cover first and i think it’s really interesting to hear them back to back, how little he had to change to make it from the man’s perspective and how unsettling they both are for different reasons, i love covers and i love when they’re in conversation with each other!!)
- melissa etheridge, “like the way i do” (incredibleeeee of the time styling in that video lmao – also my sister gave me a melissa etheridge album for christmas when i was like 10 and later on we were both like, ohhhhh yeah lmaooo)
- wheatus, “love is a mutt from hell” (WHEATUS IS DEEPLY UNDERRATED!!!! even “teenage dirtbag” doesn’t get the credit it deserves!!!!! me and one guy on reddit get it)
- bad religion, “21st century digital boy” (as a born and bred southern californian i am legally obliged to like bad religion but i also just like them normal-style, in many ways it is country music for people who grew up eating in-n-out bc it was cheap – this song was extremely prescient and then it seemed out of touch and now it’s gone back around again)
in general i have been listening to my february playlist and also your crystals cleansing and chardonnay aunt’s favorites because the weather is alternating between miserable and tricking me with false spring
I finished listening to You Should Be So Lucky by Cat Sebastian which I thought was delightful. I feel like I’ve read a lot of books this year, but I think I’ve just been consistent enough about reading every day (at least 15 minutes at a time, at least twice a day!) that it seems like I’m blowing through things but I’m really not. Which is fine! But confusing.
We’ve been spending most of our time working to get the guest bedroom/rest of the house in order for our friends who are coming to visit at the end of the month so most of my brain energy has been there. I did use our George Foreman grill the other night and remembered how much I love it. I survived college on the original version 20+ years ago and it continues to work exactly the way you need it too with little change except the one I have now is bigger. The infomercials had it right sometimes!
And also I guess if you too are in the Twin Cities, I highly recommend The Clapping Monkey coffee in (as our house search birthed, “I don’t want to live in damn honky
”) Fridley. By far the best iced mocha I’ve had in god knows how long and some great grilled cheeses also!
Okay, I guess that’s it? We haven’t made our donations yet this month, but I think we’ll probably donate to some more mutual aid groups and I hope you’ll find some close to you or in a vulnerable area and do that too!
You know it’s bad out there. I know it’s bad out there. I’m incredibly proud and grateful and amazed by the bravery and good I have seen people do. I’m going to talk about some pop culture type shit now.
I re-listened to the entire Decemberists discography in order this week and it was deeply enjoyable. I’m probably a bigger fan of their later catalog and The Hazards of Love remains my favorite album, but there really aren’t any misses in the bunch.
I also listened to Yasmine Hamdan’s I remember I forget — loved it right away and four or five listens later I am only more enamored. (Shoutout to Tommy for the rec!) — and Gully Boys’ self-titled album also got a handful of listens this month and is a great time, though my biggest repeat by far is “Big Boobs (ft. Zora)” which is an absolute banger.
We’re still rewatching The West Wing and frankly the less said about it the better (though that won’t stop me from posting later babey!), but I am fascinated by how much North Dakota gets mentioned and I really wonder who on the staff has the connection/random attachment. Also who’s the hockey fan because I don’t think there’s any American show that’s ever referenced it so much.
We also finally watched episode six of Heated Rivalry which was fine! I think I was always going to be hard on the show because the book does so many things I love. I did think the family stuff turned out fine, but I will remain disappointed by the changes made to Shane’s mom’s character (and Scott Hunter’s backstory, but that’s not relevant here) and it made it all less impactful, though if I’d come in without having read the book I’m sure it would’ve been great.
Okay, I think that’s it! We’ve been throwing money at various local groups and food drives, so I am recommending mutual aid through Liberation Twin Cities today, if you can spare it. Thank you! I love you!
Everyone on the internet has been making these fun little graphics of their favorite things in 2025 and I was like, “Oh, fun!” and tried to do my own but between the horror that we’ve all accepted into our lives at the intersection of I-Guess-I-Have-to-Use-Canva and fuck-Adobe-I’m-not-paying-for-it-monthly and also feeling insanely fidgety and overstimulated I went, “Ah, fuck this,” and tapped out. Then I saw twelve people I think are actually kind of annoying do it, so also felt righteous in deciding to tap out. And then I was like, what the fuck am I doing, why don’t I just do this the way I used to? Words! That’s what I’m about! Thank god!
I watched a lot more stuff than I have in recent years in 2025 and I liked a lot of it, even though not all that much was super new to me. I liked the first episode of The Pitt but haven’t watched anymore because I don’t want to see All That while I’m eating which is when we’re usually watching something. We watched the first season of The Peacemaker which I was really shocked to enjoy as much as I did. We’ve watched five of six episodes of Heated Rivalry, which I’ve already mentioned enjoying. I liked the new Superman (enough to re-watch about half of it on cable when I ran into it at my parents’) and loved Biosphere and What’s Up, Doc? and felt very fondly toward the entire trilogy when I finally watched Lord of the Rings.
I read a decent amount — sixty books, seventeen of which were DNFs — and I really liked to flat out loved Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Atmosphere (the only book of hers I’ve read, likely to be the last because her plots don’t usually interest me) and Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea and Natalie Sue’s I Hope This Finds You Well and Rufi Thorpe’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles and Kate Folk’s Sky Daddy and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry, the last of which I listened to as an audiobook because I finally taught myself how to listen to them this year! Which also meant I was able to listen to and love the Beastie Boys Boook and to also reread both Heated Rivalry (for the third time) and A Deadly Education (for the second) which is particularly lovely because I’m not very good (or generally interested) in rereading things!
I did NOT listen to very much music this year which really pains me. I did make another year of monthly mixtapes (Every month since January 2020! Even amidst all the everything!) and so heard some new stuff in the process and I listened to a lot of the Beastie Boys as and after I read the book, which I do highly recommend, but the only albums I think I listened to in full more than once or twice were Doechii’s Alligator Bites Never Heal, Dev Lemons’ Surface Tension, and Dinosaur Pile-Up’s I’ve Felt Better, which I listened to a lot a lot.
As I have probably already detailed more than enough 2025 was one of the most stressful years of my life, but so far it’s also had the biggest payoff. I’ve never just picked up my life and moved to a new place on nothing but my own volition before and it was really, really hard and tiring and stressful and I had the worst indigestion of my life for basically six months, but I also got to realize how lucky I am to be able to do it at all and now I get to live in probably the second most beautiful place I’ve ever been (I’m sorry, nothing is ever beating California) where I keep meeting nice people and there are interesting things to do and I get to keep doing a job that I like and feel fulfilled doing.
  
In 2026 I want to keep taking care of myself and connect with more people and the world around me. I want to go to a museum a month! And go out in public! And see live music! And maybe even go outdoors where there are bugs and creatures and plants and water! I want to write! I want to partake of many wonderful things other people have created! I want to keep donating money and helping out where I can and in the grand tradition of picking a word of the year, I want to outlast. I want to outlast all my bad thoughts and ill health, mental and otherwise, I want to outlast the people who wish I were dead, I want to outlast my own suffering. I want to outlast my short attention span and my bad attitude. I want to stick it out!
HAPPY NEW YEAR!!
I hope your 2026 is full of hope and positive change and comfort and joy and laughter. I hope you have your needs met and exceeded. I hope you find ways to share your wonderful self with other people and to make things. I know you’re a good one and we need you around.
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