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 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!
