It’s easy for the changing of the leaves to pass me by without notice, given how much time I spend bopping around the most urban parts of Manhattan. Luckily, I was able to get out to the NY Botanical Garden the other day to take in the fall colors before all the leaves abandon their posts and turn to mulch.

And of course, this seasonal phenomenon heralds the arrival of my favorite season: winter. I can’t wait to sink into oversized sweaters and drink copious amounts of hot chocolate and visit the Bryant Park winter village. If the universe deigns to take mercy on me, we might even get snow!

What I’ve Been Playing:

Earlier this month, a friend passed me a ticket for a fundraiser/playtest for Memory Bucket, a game being developed by SAADA (South Asian American Digital Archive). Memory Bucket is a cooperative storytelling game where players are encouraged to share stories from different points in their lives. Guided prompts offer both a jumping off point for the storyteller and questions that other players can ask to uncover further details.

Inspired by SAADA’s First Days project, Memory Bucket taps into a fear that I think is shared by a lot of children of immigrants: how many stories, and how much connection to your heritage, will die with your parents because you don’t have the shared language to unlock them? I, at least, joke all the time about how my father is a black box of a human being, who drops insane tidbits of lore only when the universe is in a state of syzygy. My mother is slightly more forthcoming, but there’s plenty I don’t know about her either.

While playing Memory Bucket, I was struck by how deeply the game is informed by immigrant experiences, despite its surface-level simplicity. The prompts are carefully crafted, designed to evoke emotions along with memories—instead of asking for stories outright, they ask for scents, feelings, routines. More than that, these prompts lower the stakes for having these conversations; they give you the words to use so you don’t have to fumble around for them yourself.

Memory Bucket just completed a successful Kickstarter campaign, so it should enter development soon and will likely be available for purchase in 2026.

Stay up to date about Memory Bucket on their Kickstarter page

What I’ve Been Reading:

The Fortunes of Jaded Women

by Carolyn Huynh

⭐⭐⭐⭐

As is the case with about 30% of the books I read, I snagged this book from my local Little Free Library last year (before construction shut it down for a year and counting… I’m not bitter, who said that?). The blurb on the back speaks of estranged Vietnamese women, multi-generational curses, and “healing together as a family”, so I expected some kind of poignant litfic, maybe in the vein of R.F. Kuang, about generational trauma and the wounds we inherit from our mothers.

Instead I got an extremely unserious, somewhat absurd literary soap opera about 16 women who are just trying (albeit not always successfully) their best. Over-the-top family squabbles and romantic entanglements are interspersed with surprisingly hard-hitting moments that cut to the core of what it means to be an immigrant, and a daughter, and a mother, and a woman.

Sure, this book is a little messy—not just in terms of the family drama but also in terms of narrative construction—but it also delivers multiple generations of Vietnamese experience with pure love and raw authenticity. Definitely a Little Free Library win.

Buy it on Bookshop for $17.99 (or ask for my copy and I’ll mail it to you for free)

Where I’ve Been:

I recently visited Big Bend National Park in Texas with my family. Our visit coincided nearly perfectly with the peak of the Orionid meteor shower, so you can imagine how excited I was to get out under one of the darkest skies in the US for the event—especially after my foray into upstate New York for the Perseids yielded a total meteor view count of 3.

Big Bend itself was…tremendously fine. There were some cool cacti, and some fun buttes, and 1 very large quetzalcoatlus skeleton model at the Fossil Discovery Center, but mostly there was dirt and dust and heat. More than the park itself, the highlight of the trip was the evening that my sister and I slowly coaxed a campfire into existence (with the judicious help of multiple firestarters and a full bag of potato chips when we realized we didn’t have enough kindling), kept it going through a surprise rainshower, and then roasted corn and potatoes and s’mores over it for dinner. It truly felt like something right out of the Boxcar Children books, if you’ll permit the deep cut.

And of course I made sure to bundle up and stare up at the sky for a few hours. Would you believe that until 3 months ago, I could only identify 3 or 4 constellations consistently? I’ve started making a concerted effort to expand my constellation knowledge, though, and this was a great opportunity to test myself while I waited for Orionids to shoot across the sky. (The verdict: I’m getting better at finding Aries, but Gemini eludes me.)

Final meteor count: 16! A success by all possible metrics.

“If the moon were only 1 pixel” is an accurately scaled map of the solar system on the size of 1 pixel per Earth moon. However much scrolling you think you’ll have to do, I promise you’ll have to scroll at least twice as far. Despite knowing on an intellectual level just how vast space is, I wasn’t expecting so much of this map to be…well, empty space.

This is one of the rare experiences that I think works better on a phone, as it’s easier to scroll with your finger than a mouse. Regardless of the device you use, though, this definitely puts the scale of our reality into perspective.

Visit 1pixelmoon.com

December 12 @ 8pm: GVCS presents: Voices of the Soul

📍 Church of Our Lady of Pompeii, 25 Carmine Street, NYC

🎫 $28 online; $30 at the door

📝 My choir’s winter concert is fast approaching! We’ll be performing a wide selection of pieces from living NYC composers, as well as pieces by Britten, Guastavino, and Debussy.