Weekend Catch Up

Greetings and salutations friends! How is it June already? It felt like it was just January a few moments ago. I swear time isn't real sometimes. This month is a dual month: gay wrath and Indigenous history month, which makes for an angry, messy and hopeful time (I hope). It's also the end of the school year for the kidlets, and the Solstice too which is a beginning of sorts. June is a weird month for me, it feels like it's month of rebirth in things end quite suddenly, at the same things also starting erratically. There's an uneasiness, an unsteadiness for me because I feel both aspects of I want to start already but also I want to just catch my breath for once.

I hope it hasn't been too hot where you are gentle reader, especially since it's the start of actual summer later this month. I hope we miss the week long heat domes of past years, and weeks of Silent Hill-esque forest fire smoke.

I'm also hoping for a gentle June for all of us.

What I've Been Watching

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

I feel like I should have probably watched Monarch and the Kong movies before seeing this Godzilla offering but those are past regrets. It was eh, the score was pretty snazzy, the hollow Earth rendering was beautiful (and sterile) and it was a monster fighting monster movie. Expectations were low, and most were met. The two biggest places I lost some kind of immersion was realizing there is still functioning air travel existing in this universe where literal Titans (monsters) can snatch you out of the sky, and also the economy is still keeping on. Who and why would insurance still exist?-Especially medical insurance and all of the background radiation from the Titans (or Godzilla) existing in heavily populated areas.

Anyways, it's beautifully rendered, well scored, and the monsters did fight.

Thousandaires

The premise for this seems neat, and I am incredibly eager to see what chaos ensues. There's so much that could go wrong (or right) in this not quite game show especially with the Dropout cast.

What I've Been Reading

There is also something quite poetic about Potter’s obsession with fungi — in her later children’s books, she bridged real life and fantasy by transmuting the animals and plants she observed in nature into whimsical characters and stories, and mushrooms have long symbolized this very transmutation, perhaps most prominently in Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, which first captured the popular imagination the year Potter was born.

Name a more iconic duo than Beatrix Potter and her botanical drawings?-Beatrix Potter and her fungi collection! I cannot believe how good her paintings of mushrooms are, I knew that her other botanical drawings (and paintings) are used to identify plants but I was unaware of her devotion to the mysterious mushroom. Maria Popova over at the Marginalian did an exquisite piece on this.

News of Milan’s suspension came at the worst possible time for anybody who wanted her to go away quickly and quietly: In the liminal period of the holidays, people absolutely had the time to protest on Twitter, and the community absolutely erupted.

An oldie but goodie by Kelly Faircloth over at Jezebel about the Romance Writers of America(RWA) drama that happened just before the pandemic. The RWA is going bankrupt and it has been a wild story all the way down. I've come around to how I view romance writers (I've worked on my own internalized misogyny, plus actually read some writers that fit my preferences more) especially since I've changed my relationship to reading for fun. I can't believe how this went down. This is the best primer for what happened I've come across yet, and there is some delightful mess in all of this.

Which is fine. I mean, right, yeah, I’ve trained to write books, with words, and my ideal state is actually hiding in the darkness like an eyeless cave squirrel but if they say I gotta get on the AI-gobbling Tokstagrams and do a little dance or be a fun comedian and also learn video editing to make movies, then, sure, yes, I’m going to do that, because I am informed that the alternative is to — *checks notes* — starve.

This would be hilarious if it wasn't true, and everyday I feel like we get closer to being thrown into the creative woodchipper.

I was never built to go home, I tell the creature of light. I was never meant to go home. Perhaps you do not understand, since if you have lived forever, everywhere is your home. And anyway if I did, they would not send me back out. I would never fly again. I know it.

Premee Mohamed's beautifully complicated short story Not Lost (Never Lost) is from the perspective of Voyager 1 and their travels through the universe. I love how Premee anthropomorphizes the little spacecraft in making them a reflection of what is important to humans and how it interacts with other entities it encounters.

June Wrath Comic Picks!

Motherlover has pretty much ended. It was so, so good and such great late bloomer/late discovery into queerness by a stay at home mom. There's still the epilogue left, so there's the possibility to binge it before the last little bit is uploaded.

Another week, another two updates for Keeping Time an ongoing series set during the mid 2000s about grief and I guess not quite exes, not quite friends anymore Denver and Daniel. I really love Kody's worldbuilding especially since it feels like a mid 2000s Chicago, and I really like their art style.

Small Mammal Update

The sun has returned and ever the faithful disciple Potema has begun her warm season practices. She is a solar powered Saluki, so she becomes stronger and more magically power during this season (she also shares many of her landscaping opinions with us quite extensively). While she faithfully celebrates the Sun with many many long naps in the middle of the yard, it is also a dangerous season for her. Since we've moved into the haunted Da[e]dalus Manor, misfortune has cast a cloud over fair Potema during the months of above zero double digit temperatures and up until the first snow falls. We hope she has an uneventful passage of time this year.

What I've Been Working

A whole lot of school. Who would have thought a grad seminar would be so much reading and analysis. I wrote about Field of Dreams and how Ray is an Oath of Redemption paladin, to which not enough people applauded.

Also making so more little changes here.