October media log
-Getting some bonus stuff crammed in just under the wire here bc I got some good juicy reading time on the way to idaho.
books/manga
Started reading Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 again for a book club time with Cassidy. I think it'd be nice to read it with more people too since it's such a communizing book, y'know? UPDATE: got phi to start it too :^)
read thru all of Girls Last Tour. Saw a really cute peice of art that i didn't know was fanart and posted it in the fairy circle chat only to be immediately informed of my un-knowledge (very funny). It was great! The cbz's I got were all fucked up though, the page order was way out of wack (like, kind of an "alphabetical number" situation where it doesn't understand that 3 should come after 2 and before 20, but actually also inconsistent and I'm pretty sure I was missing some pages), but! I think the kind of dying-light-at-the-very-end-of-the-world story worked together with my reading experience very nicely. Like sorting through a stack of papers I found on the floor of a friend's spare room after they've moved away.
Also started Jules Gil-Peterson's A Short History of Transmisogyny after listening to her fairly recent episode on Gender Reveal (which was insanely good and I highly recomend to anyone who has ever considered,, uh,, having a gender?) Classically it is still a peice of academic writing but it's much more direct than Histories of the Transgender child, so I'm enjoying it a lot more.
Read the section for the few days that are right now at the end of October from east wind melts the ice because i saw it on the shelf and remembered reading it back in late 2022 bc laurie told me about it and it was so beautiful then and was still so beautiful now. the chapter was about gingko leaves changing :^) other stuff too, but that stuck out bc there's a gingko outside our new apartment and i've been watching it change color
read through Abigail (j Hansel)'s poetry collection HERE // AFTER from 2019 in the early morning because it was there next to laurie's copy of threshold while the cassette i burned of Dragon In The New Warm Mountain I Believe In You played and i just fucking bawled. just cried so deep and open. let it run through me.
Thumbed through The Four Agreements because it was on the headboard of the bed i'm sleeping on rn and it was a pretty nice skim. 1) Use your words deliberately, 2) the second one, 3) Don't make assumptions, and 4) Do your best!
blogs n' websites
Two brilliant (as always) blog posts from Shel Raphen: Cohost Eulogy & Retrospective (big learning and big emotions!) and On Content Warnings, which was super informative and gave me a lot to chew on not only with how i currently have content warnings implemented for fieldling but also generally with how i control the flow of potentially hard-to-digest information.
Hey remember how I kinda made a Cohost Wake happen? I was hoping to get my own blog post put together about it but I kinda need to iron out all the css for image formatting first (because I've been taking a lot of photos with my digicam lately! Look forward to my next blog post: "Photography"!) and I've just been too busy to mess with it. Anyway, New Friend Evie was in attendance (for a total of 8 ppl!) and put together her own post using some of my photos and some other ppl's too! Please enjoy The Cohost Minnesota Wake. I sure as hell did!
movies & tv
Heartstopper season 3 came out at the start of the month and we blasted through S1&2 in preparation, then watching it when it came out!! perfect, perfect, so fun.
Also still plugging on through the Capaldi seasons of Doctor Who. This one (the third and last one) uh, isn't as good! Starting to feel that dwindling of quality... UPDATE: JUST KIDDING WE ARE SO BACK
On a whim we watched When Harry Met Sally, which I still think is a top tier romcom but is just so held back by being fundamentally, inescapably heterosexual.
Kind of similar, We've been putting on Sex and the City as semi-background noise. Late season 2 at time of writing, what a fucking show. UPDATE: we had to stop watching... it just got too rancid...
We've been kinda messy w/ it, and watched Where the Wild Things Are and I actually honestly didn't enjoy it very much. Like, I am normally someone who extends a lot of kindness to things but this one just fell flat.
Another whim: Heathers, a first time watch for both of us. I kinda... didn't like this one either! I was really expecting to like it a lot more but it was just kind of a bummer. I can see after reading the wikipedia page how it is clearly an important movie tho, so respect for that i guess.
and then, the night of my arrival in moscow we started season 34 of survivor! wow, survivor... eatin so good :^) and then on the 30th we watched the most recent ep of season 47 LIVE! what a fucking rush
games
Absolute dream come true; I was hanging out with Ellie and showed them Omori (because they asked what games I'd been playing lately) and they said "oh haha that really looks like Earthbound" and then I told them about how I got the Earthbound photo Hobonichi Techo Weeks for next year but how I'd have to finally buckle down and play the damn game because I didn't want to be a poser and they were like "well have you decided how you're gonna play it..?" and before I could form a full answer they said "what about on GBA? I've got a bootleg copy, you could borrow my DS!" and just dug it out and plopped it in my hand and I played through to buzz buzz dying. Incredible! So hyped! UPDATE: so it turns out this copy is tragically aflicted with "being in a certain lineage of the earthbound translation that never got fucking finished apparently but still got distributed on a bunch of bootleg combo Mother 1 + 2 carts" and it's actually unplayable for me :( sad.. but! I think I'll just go ahead and play thru mother 1 instead and then if all goes according to plan, earthbound in the new year :)
Also yeah, working through Omori still.
Finally played through Paper Girl Chain.... fucking hell. No one can hit me like bagenzo and fotocopiadora i tell ya what. This is actually a moment of finding my voice for this blog bc if I were on cohost I think I'd be a bit more direct about why this hit so hard for me right now... funny how cohost was arguably more public and visible and easier to access but bc this is hosted inside my website it has to be like.. more "work safe"?? idk.. Maybe I'll just say the day i started playing it was inside a moment of very deeply feeling my kinship and relationship to cats... No, it's that it hit while i'm still recovering from getting diagnosed with ANXIETY when i was trying to get diagnosed with ADHD (but going into the appt honestly scared I was gonna get diagnosed with bipolar or borderline..)(and listen, olivia has anxiety, my dad has anxiety, i know what anxiety is like and i am extremely confident that this is NOT the disorder at the root of my dysfunction and i had an ADHD diagnosis as a kid and was on meds and already know what it feels like and how it effects me a little bit!, so after spending weeks just totally emotionally and psychicly blown out from this i got a referral from my pcp to two places to get re-tested and it's probably going to be like a 5 month process MAYBE to arrive again at this moment of receiving results... but anyway, now i'm also all stupid shaken up about acknowledging and dealing with the ways that anxiety is showing up as a coping mechanism because it stirs up this new extremely deep feeling of invalidation and misunderstoodness... I don't fucking know, that's not even talking about the game itself! It is extremely beautifully done; immaculate, masterfully crafted. And that's without even touching the "girls" of it all! The VNs by these two are so striking and inscrutable, very much like how poetry feels for me in its refusal to be reduced. All I can do is marvel. It makes me sad, I think. I'd like to have someone I know play it so I can replay it and have someone to talk with about it.
whew, that's it for october! actually proofwrapping this the night of the 30th because i know I'm not going to be in a state to publish it tomorrow night :P the veil's gonna be too thin!!