oh hey
so. it’s been awhile, yeah? sorry about that.
there have been some big changes and little changes in my life, as I’m sure there have been in yours. I’ve been out of book retail for a year now. wild! I’m a grad student. I own 3 pairs of black overalls (in 3 different fabrics) and 1 cordless Dyson vacuum.
this newsletter will likely be undergoing some changes as I figure out how I want it to work from here on out. one change which you might have noticed—it’s no longer a TinyLetter! I’ve moved to Substack. It’s new to me, so let me know if you have any issues and we’ll work through them together.
one thing which will NOT be changing in this newsletter is:
dog thing
thoughts
i spend a lot of time thinking about the intersection of old tech and new. i’m an older millennial so i came of age along with the internet. when i was a kid, having a private phone conversation meant pulling the corded phone in my parents’ bedroom into their closet and huddling amidst my mom’s sweaters. we got a proper beige IBM computer in the early 90s and i would drag a huge armchair up to it and perch on the edge of it, rest my feet on the dial-up modem (it was warm), and boot up Math Blaster! or Word Rescue. and then a decade later i had a blue dell laptop and a livejournal. i had a walkman, a discman, and an ipod, in sequence. now it’s just my phone. it’s the future, everything’s sleek and multi-purpose and i just want all my new tech to look like old tech.
i’ve been reading the lord peter wimsey mysteries. i started on the series a couple years ago, making my way through the audiobooks my library had. i ran out of audiobooks around the time i ran out of interest in 1930s mysteries, right after reading Strong Poison. Strong Poison is the book where harriet vane shows up, lord peter’s great love, so i knew i’d circle back to them. and i have. i was hunting for a copy of the Murder Must Advertise audiobook read by Ian Carmichael. Carmichael played wimsey on the bbc once and recorded all of the books, but for some reason (the reason has turned out to be extremely dated language, to put it euphemistically) that one was missing. a friend took pity on my plight and passed along an mp3 of the entire book which had in turn been passed to them. the mp3 was ripped from the cassettes and every 30 minutes or so, a voice told me i’d reached the end of the side. it was delightful every time.
partially this fondness for old tech is nostalgic. the tactile satisfaction of the sound my mechanical keyboard makes, the force with which i have to press the keys. you just don’t get the same level of satisfaction stabbing a touch screen as you do forcefully pressing the “eject” button on a cassette player. the older i get, the more i like having a sense that objects are going to last, that they have parts and gears which are simple and reliable. i got a new car last summer, and it has a fully touchscreen dash. i look on it with suspicion and think longingly of dials.
mixed media
obviously i have some catching up to do, so this is going to be sort of a best of 2020 list. in future, hopefully i will have less than a year’s worth of interests to recommend. for now, just some good titles.
good reads: Piranesi by Susanna Clark, How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell, Sword Dance by A.J. Demas, Network Effect by Martha Wells, A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden. this is a VERY small sample of the great things i read over the last year, if you’d like a much longer romance-centric list of recs, i posted one here.
good fics: By the Still Waters by Anonymous (DA2), In Better Light by cosmogyral & sunsmasher (Ace Attorney), on this night, and in this light by astrid_fischer (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), even in another time by theroyalsavage (The Magnus Archives), The Same Thing, Self Aware by cosmogyral (fic) and blotthis (pod) (Ace Attorney)
good music: Fetch the Bolt Cutters, Fiona Apple; 1930-1941, Mary Lou Williams; Encanto Tropical, Monsieur Periné; Almadura, iLe
good podcasts: The Magnus Archives, Welcome to Night Vale, You’re Wrong About
good tv views: What We Do in the Shadows, The Mandalorian, Star Trek Discovery, Carmen Sandiego, Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, The Haunting of Bly Manor, Lupin
good film views: Design for Living, Holiday, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, The Old Guard, Monsoon, Palm Springs, Emma
good games: Hades, Dragon Age 2, Animal Crossing New Horizons
Lastly
i read this good article about cybernetic prosthetics and how they’re really more for abled people’s comfort level than of actual use to disabled people. i recommend it.
also check out the logo my friend Aïcha Barry created for me! she has a newsletter about her process in creating a graphic novel, which you can subscribe to here.
