Hello and welcome back. This is Issue 20 of “a bit of bird words” and the sun is truly such a relief. Spring is here and I cannot wait to go outside again.

Why haven’t I been going outside, you may wonder. That will be answered very shortly. This might be an indication that I didn’t write this introduction before writing the rest of this email.

What did I do this month?

I’ve been sick nearly the entire month unfortunately. It’s made it kind of hard to think and kind of hard to want to do things.

I played a few game demos this month, one for Denshattack!! and one for the new Tomodachi Life. Denshattack!! has a pretty high skill floor and it was a bit hard to remember all the button presses for things, but it’s got a lot of style and has a very snappy reset when you literally go off the rails. Definitely one to pick up when it releases in June.

I don’t really know what to say about Tomodachi Life except to say Miis truly are deranged and the demo was a nice vertical slice of how wild they can be. I didn’t expect to laugh as much as I did while playing. I will get the full game when it comes out…this month!

(I did beat Pokémon Sapphire again also, but I’m not technically done with it yet. Got a few ribbon things to do.)

Books-wise, I finally finished the last book a colleague recommended to me, The Black Company, and read through Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom in very short order. I wouldn’t recommend any of them and in fact probably should have DNF’d The Black Company, but I think I couldn’t bear to give up on a recommendation.

Piranesi, though. Now that’s a book. It’s quite short—I read all of it in a single sitting, two hours ago from when I’m writing this in fact—and it struck me as a very beautiful book, very careful in the way it unveils its mystery to the reader, and when the truth of things crashes upon the narrator, it crashes upon the reader, too.

I would say more, but I think it would be dangerously close to spoiling this work, and as I said, it’s quite short. But I’m thinking a lot about reflection and refraction, light and water and air, The and The Other, and all the ways these things tie into the work. Definitely the highlight of my month.

What else?

I’m watching a lot of Dimension 20 mostly and trying to keep my head together. Being ill sometimes seems like a blessing—all this sudden free time—but my brain feels sluggish, unwilling to participate in the things that could be nice uses of that time.

Really, it’s turned my mind toward what actually could be a better use of my time. Everything is still nebulous thoughts and ideas, and in accordance with a previous email, I’m not telling you squat! I’m just deep in thought about what I could do to feel a bit less like I’m being shaved away on a microplane.

Maybe some of that is the illness though. Who’s to say. Not me, I guess.

Oh, but there is good news! I picked up a very nice pair of binoculars and amazingly got my old DSLR to work, so maybe my birdwatching will have some neat photos in the future. I’ll just give props to Nikon for developing a camera battery charger that works in both the US and in Europe, only requiring a very simple cable change. I’ve missed my dedicated camera.

Do I have something to recommend this month? I think it’s “wash your hands”. And don’t trust anything you touch in the wider world. I fully watched a guy sneeze into his hand and then pick up a grocery basket. But I don’t need to recommend to you to not be that guy; I think you’ve got that part figured out already.

See you next month.