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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.
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!
Recently we went back to the city in which we lived previous to this new one and while sitting in the office at my job eating lunch with my dog and my coworker, the delivery guy came in. I held the dog up closer to him so he would know he was contained and the guy reached out while looking to make sure it was okay and Bruno sniffed and licked his hand while my coworker signed for the package and we all said goodbye and have a nice day and what have you. And then the delivery guy came back, maybe a minute later, back through the chill between his truck and our office and said, “Does your dog like treats?” and I said, “Of course,” and I held him up again so that he could take a chunk of treat from this guy. It had obviously been torn to be more siza appropriate and Bruno took it with the polite gentleness we have tried to train into him and I said thank you so much and the delivery guy left again and I was so struck by how sweet it was that I teared up. To take that extra time out of your day — in a job where any sign of what corporate deems inefficiency is punished — to be kind to my tiny little dog. To come all the way back. To carry treats because you see dogs on your route. I believe that kindness is inherent to humanity in many ways, but to make it action takes effort. What a lovely thing to witness.
Other good stuff:
– Smelling woodsmoke/campfire outside my living room windows on a chilly night because Minnesotans love their firepits
– The sound of a distant plane passing overhead
– Driving to one of the less developed areas around the cities on a Friday night and seeing lines of planes in every direction either preparing to land or taking off to parts unknown
– The absolutely unreal show of fall color we got for our first couple weeks
Okay! Not a bad month, I must admit! I donated to a local teen health clinic and RAINN. As always, please let me know if you have a charity you’d like to share: ashrocketship [at] gmail.
Not only is the world as it is at the moment, but personally it has been a complicated, stressful couple of months and it’s about to get more stressful, so I’ve been trying my best to stop scrolling and enjoy things when I can to mixed success.
I’ve been trying to not spend all my time on my phone partially for obvious reasons and partially because I am literally fighting a repeptitive motion injury in my wrist from scrolling for [redacted reason to be revealed later maybe] and it hurts, so I have been doodling in one of these KingArt sketchbooks. I’m not an artist and I’m not using a medium more complex than Sharpies, but the paper has a pleasant enough texture and it fits in my bag with my Moleskin journal and Leuchtturm planner without screwing up the careful balance of garbage I carry with me at all times. And they were cheap!
The only book I’ve finished so far is Pokko and the Drum by Matthew Forsythe, which I do highly recommend! Such a fun story and such sweet illustrations. We’ve been watching Murderbot, which is not as good as the books (Adaptations rarely are! Life sucks!) but is really fun on its own.
My coworker got us some blind boxes to open together–it’s funny that this has become a big trend again when they were so big in the late 00s (We have a pretty big collection of Vinylmation from Disneyland from that era!) and I wonder if it’s like… a comfort in uncertainty kind of thing–and that’s been extremely fun and now I will always have a cute little Space Molly reminder of it!
What else… Oh we tried the Tate’s Bake Shop chocolate chip cookies and those are pretty bomb. I really like the Walmart brand bettergoods creamy oat milk (especially with Frosted Flakes) which is a nice find. We also recently housed a package of the Keebler original EL Fudge cookies which were bomb. (Lots of sweets in our house right now… Stress? What’s that?!) Crystal used Biotone starter fertilizer to plant all her annual containers this year and they look fantastic, so I highly recommend that too, which feels weird at the end of a bunch of food, but whatever.
Okay, that’s it! This month we made donations to CHIRLA, Jail Support LA, Clue Justice, and eSims for Gaza and I hope you’ll join us if you’re able! If you have any particular charity you’d like to recommend, shoot me an email: ashrocketship[at]gmail, please!
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