One of Everything: July

This month I had New Haven pizza for the first time, that was pretty good. They don’t add cheese except a little on the top and do a Neapolitan-style char on the bottom. I also enjoyed going to Book Trader, a used bookstore cafe, and sitting outside with my iced tea (I almost got heat exhaustion because it was so humid so don’t do that!)

Comic

Processing: 100 Comics That Got Me Through It

I’ve been trying to buy fewer clothes by drawing outfits I want to wear instead. It’s not going well. It’s not just that I am failing to remember to draw the outfits, but drawing something involves focusing on it and thinking about it. I’m not sure that’s helping me get over anything more quickly.

This is what I thought about when I read Processing, which incidentally has drawings of many cute outfits. What was that quote about a woman being an “open wound?” (That sounds kind of sexist now that I remember it.) Of course I can’t tell anyone how to process their emotions. I read Lindsay Adler’s essay “Self Sells” recently which deals with that question. I also can’t assume that a finished comic equals raw emotions, even if it’s implying that it does. Nevertheless, I preferred the non-text spreads, especially the two-pagers, which imply a lot of the same emotions/challenges without going through them in words. Also, I want the apple shirt.

The Summer Hikaru Died

I read a lot of manga this month. The one I read the most is this horror manga about a kid who dies in the mountains and comes back as *something else*. I was surprised, pleasantly, that I could handle this and even a few scary panels didn’t keep me from reading the first 3 volumes. I don’t know that I’ll be watching the anime though. About summer in the country and best friends. Also everyone says “y’all."

Game

Wind Waker

Breath of the Wild is just Wind Waker: my locked forum post with 1,000 comments.

This is my new second-favorite Zelda game after Twilight Princess. The facial animations are just so charming, and it gave me a lot of nostalgia for the first Zelda I ever played, Phantom Hourglass. (A weird choice, I borrowed it from my neighbor and got scared by the stealth sections.) If you’re concerned about the Triforce search part, it’s not even an issue if you do it throughout the game, which is what the game is suggesting you do, I think.

Weird Solitaire

I will be writing about this in my August column, but I disliked playing this but also respected it. 30 versions of solitaire that are actually logic puzzles, pick-up stix, or monster slaying mini-games. By the creator of Baba is You. If you like solitaire you might enjoy it.

Book

Wild Geese

It took me a year to finish this book, and it’s only 230 pages covering 3 days. But as I was finishing it I read this paragraph I liked:

Work is all the same. I could say that to her, tell her how every job, every nicer, academic posting, increasingly every hobby, is simply a means by which interchangeable people compress themselves into the fixed identities of elsewhere profit.

This is a first book and although I lost steam with it a few times, the parts that were good were quite good. She does a lot of difficult things well; writing about only 3 days, for instance. But for every one of those, there’s a line like “that’s why bodies get smaller as they age; they’re less bloated with the theoretical.” I really think with some more editing, this book could have been great; as it is, it was alright.

Idlewild

I like books that take place in one place. I also like books about New York, so Idlewild, which is about a high school on 12th street, had an advantage from the start. It avoids a problem Wild Geese (and honestly many, many books I’ve read the past few years) have which is having to tie together a depressing story and resolve it in a satisfying way. The two choices seem to be 1) happy ending and 2) equivocating on how life has ups and downs, what’s good may be bad, etc.— just avoiding actually ending the book. I won’t spoil the ending but Idlewild leans into all its plot beats, the happy and sad, and as a result comes across as a really confident first book.

Also the author is a CUNY graduate yay!

Movie

Hot Fuzz

I still think cornettos are gross but this movie was pretty good.

Nausicaä

I checked this one off my Ghibli list. While the story wasn’t too special, I found the animation disturbing and surprisingly emotional at different points. It was interesting seeing an “older” animated movie where you can see the stops between frames, and also incredible what they accomplished with the technology at the time.

Favorite Thing I Wrote

My brave and frankly groundbreaking column about why games don’t feel like mainstream culture and what can be done about it.

Favorite Thing I Read

My Couples Retreat With 3 AI Chatbots and the People who Love Them by Sam Apple.