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It’s too hot! Climate change is bad for so many reasons it’s nearly impossible to consider recounting them all and the damage it’s doing to this planet is nauseating, but also it! is! so! hot! I am also living through real humidity for the second time in my life (Shoutout to KCMO summer of 2011 from which I learned that it does not naturally cool down like 20-40 degrees at night everywhere and also it can be pouring rain and 98F at the same time. Who knew! People not from southern California probably!)
Anyway, you are probably also too hot wherever you are (Is the southern hemisphere’s winter unseasonably warm? Maybe you’re comfortable! I shouldn’t make so many assumptions, sorry!) and it’s boring to hear about so here’s some stuff I’ve liked recently!
Kevin Morby’s Little Wide Open which feels very much like an album meant to be enjoyed in the summer. I like “100,000
” and “Die Young” and “Dandelion” in particular. The whole thing makes me want to write stories about small towns and the last summer before something big changes and the way it feels to ride air waves with your hand out a car window.
Widowspeak’s Roses is also a winner and has a lot of that same summery energy with an almost Mazzy Star-esque flair in the delivery. I like the slow, twangy singsong of the titular “Roses,” and the sweet soaring of “If You Change,”
and the reverb-y guitar and waltzy drums of “Hourglass.”
I have also been obsessively listening to Timmy T’s 1991 hit, “One More Try,” which made an appearance in Snack Shack (which I’ll discuss shortly) and launched me through time and space in the way that only music can. A song I have probably not heard since I was seven years old and I was sitting on my couch singing every word as it played in the movie. An absolutely banger of a song with a perfect early 90s synth and a real classique talk break at the end. Also makes a great pairing with “Independent Love Song” from last month’s list.
Snack Shack was a fucking delight. It was of course nerfed a bit by the men who make movies getting confused about romance, but what a fun ride! I saw a lot of reviews complaining about the ending not meeting the rest of the movie’s energy/premise, but like… I don’t know, that’s kind of what growing up is like, man, and it sucks! But there are still people who make it suck less! Anyway, those fellas were revved to the red playing those youths and it was well worth the watch. And the soundtrack ripped.
I also watched and loved and wept at The Long Walk. I should’ve trusted this would be good because my friend Brenna loved it and there’s no one I generally trust more, but I don’t know, man! The premise is dumb! The premise was dumb as a book! But then you listen to a bunch of guys talking for 90 minutes and it’s like, well yeah of course that was incredible.
Apparently if I just watch movies about two guys talking to each other a lot, I have a great time? Who knew! (Me, I knew, I definitely knew. I spent my adolescence obsessively rewatching Kevin Smith movies. I know who I am even if I sometimes forget.)
Alright! Good stuff this month! Except for the heat, but we’ve already talked about that. Our donation money this month went to Gaza Soup Kitchen and likely will this month as well.
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. Love you!
We got a new car recently, a switch to electric because we’re driving more than we did before we moved and it felt both more polite (we do a lot of idling and I hate the noise and the waste) and more ecologically kind and also more economically kind (to ourselves) and it’s nice! It’s quiet! It’s zippy! it’s actually mostly more comfortable than our old car even though it’s smaller! (Something we also wanted, being back in a city again!) It’s a really fun teal color! Everything about the process was heinous and our dealership was awful, but! We persevered! New car! Also you can watch tv on the dashboard which seems like it should be more illegal than it is! (Must see car tv is not for me, the car is for music!!)
I’ve been listening to Humbird’s Right On a lot and I’m looking forward to her new release coming in September. I bought a bunch of music from Minnesota/Minnesota-affiliated musicians on the last Bandcamp Friday and this was one of those albums and it was a great choice. I am particularly digging “Child of Violence,” “Right On,” and “Cornfields and Roadkill,” but I do really like the whole album and listening to it as a whole!
I also got served Scarlet’s “Independent Love Song” on Spotify after I had listened to the album (You know how it just keeps feeding you songs after you finish something that have some Algorithmic Commonality or whatever? That.) amongst songs from a bunch of other artists I like and I remember adding it to my liked songs and listening to it a few more times and then, like usual, I forgot about it, but I keep seeing it at the top of my liked songs and listening to it and for the first one minute and eight seconds I’m like, ‘Okay, this is fine, but why do I remember liking this so much?’ and then 1:09 hits and I’m like, OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH HELL YEAH. And I somehow keep repeating this every couple days as though my brain just gets wiped clean between listening intervals. Magic! Also, upon searching for the lyrics because I’ve never understood one in my life, learned it’s very gay!
Other than that I’ve been listening to books (Chuck Klosterman’s Eating the Dinosaur earlier this month, now Neko Case’s memoir) while playing Pokopia way more than I really like to be playing video games, but it has been a Difficult time in many ways and doing stuff that doesn’t actively make me feel bad is sometimes the best I, and any of us, can do, so I’m trying not to be weird about it. It itches the same part of my brain that playing The Sims used to, but without the ‘just close enough to realistic’ element that sometimes made me spiral about all the wrong choices I had made/how much better my life could be if I was just doing everything differently. Doing my little Ditto world-making does not make me feel bad for being a relative failure in my real life.
Okay! This month I will be donating to some local funds for legal assistance and rent relief as well as Gaza Soup Kitchen, and Bull Press which makes and donates tabletop-style games for and to people who are incarcerated.
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. Love you!
Some stuff I have been enjoying lately!
The Dungeon Crawler Carl books are still holding relatively strong. I’m currently ~75% through number seven and having a medium good time. (They’re too long, like. Absolutely ridiculously too long and I don’t understand why or why that’s a convention of SFF in general, but I think we can try harder and do better. I think we can learn to believe in editing, in concision, in precision. You know? Don’t you believe in a better world?) But also they’re kind of zeitgeisty now and I find that, as always, annoying, so we’ll see how long I hold on. This book in particular (and the last one actually…) are full of exactly the kind of thing that makes video games and RPGs and SFF really boring to me, so here’s hoping the next one’s different!
I am learning as I become old and wise and learned that doing chores actually does improve my life, which seems obvious of course, but also I feel better when I do them. Isn’t that disgusting? Because I work from home now, I do my laundry during the day when I would have normally been taking breaks with my coworker and starting a load first thing when I come down to get settled feels like the most adult, accomplished thing I have ever done, and it is deeply humiliating, thank you for asking.
Now that we live in the land of 10,000 lakes, I have been wanting to get back in water and you would think with that particular notation attached that that would be a relatively easy goal, but despite there being a swim beach less than three miles away from me, the parks department really doesn’t want you to go anywhere near it until it’s too hot to want to be outside at a swim beach. Thankfully I found an indoor pool nearby that offers various pool-based classes and open swim hours and it’s been great! The class we’re taking is great and all the other participants are very sweet and it’s so close to our house it’s frankly a little outrageous. The pool water is 92 degrees fahrenheit which is, I’m sure, very good for your muscles, but is also anathema to me who is used to unheated outdoor pools and the Pacific Ocean. We persevere nonetheless! Being in the water is one of my favorite things in the world and maybe the only place my brain really turns off.
It is beautifully, gloriously green here in ways I have never experienced before. Of course I have been to some places that are green and California is no slouch of course (driving through the massive park near our house is like driving up the mountains when I was a kid except I get way less sick and there are a lot more people on bicycles) but after thirteen years in treeless, scrubby North Dakota I feel like some sort of lascivious plant pervert ogling the grasses and trees lushly blooming, the spring flowers (parks and planters and yards everywhere, right from the center of sprawling lawns! free and beautiful) and crabapples and cherry trees and serviceberries slathered heavy with blooms, the slower budding trees waiting their turn, the creeks and rivers and rippling, churning lakes, the sumac in the neighbor’s yard and the tulips peeling up from behind us, Lily of the Valley springing thick around the base of a tree we have to have removed soon lest it fall on our house ($20,000 into a house we’ve lived in for less than six months! What a kick in the teeth!) and peonies! Peonies everywhere around our property! And Solomon’s seal! And lovely purple phlox! The unfurling fiddleheads of ferns in our drainage garden! Everywhere green! Green everywhere!
Alright, that’s it! We recently donated to Women Against Military Madness, Open Book, and Liberation Twin Cities. As always, let me know if you’ve got donation suggestions! I hope your spring is also gloriously green and that you’re enjoying it!
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.
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