what I'm watching, what I'm reading

Happy post-american thanksgiving holiday break! I didn’t do any computer stuff over the break but I watched a lot of things so that’s what this post is all about!

What I’m Watching

Clue (1985)

I watched the original Jumanji and figured I’d follow it up with another boardgame related movie. This was my first time watching Clue and it was way funnier than I expected! If you want to read a lot more words about it check out this great oral history piece.

How to with John Wilson

This is on HBO and I don’t know the best way to describe it, but I think this quote from this review pretty much nails it:

More than anything “How To” is a tribute to New York’s double-edged ability to take you places you never wanted to go, among people you never asked to meet, for reasons you’ll never understand.

I’ve left my apartment maybe two dozen times since February and I’ve only left my immediate neighborhood a few times to go to the vet. Watching this show made me tangibly miss the small glimpses into other the lives of the other maniacs who live in this city. One time when I was riding the subway I smelled eggs and sure enough I look over and see a guy in a suit eating straight hardboiled eggs from a gallon ziplock back containing no less than a dozen hard boiled eggs. Where was he going? Why did he need the power of 12 hardboiled eggs? Whatever it was, I hope it went his way.

Fumble Dimension & Chart Party

I’ve watched more hours of videos about sports than I have actual sports. This is nothing against sports! I just never invested in becoming a fan of any particular teams or types of sport. It doesn’t matter—sporting provides such an excellent backdrop for storytelling that I’m an absolute sucker for it, even if I don’t watch the competitions the stories are based off!

How I stumbled into this particular wormhole of sports content was through Unraveled. Brian David Gilbert ahd a guest for the latest episode, Kofie from Fumble Dimension which reminded me of Breaking Madden when it was described, which makes sense because it’s supposed to, and Jon Bois is the co-host!

First: I love when people take the video games and use them as a framework to do weird shit. Monster Factory is another great example of this, and a lot of speedrunning falls into this category for me too.

Second: if you don’t give even one (1) single heck about sports or sports content, I still recommend reading the roster cuts for Breaking Madden, which are prompts for the best tweet-length short stories that Jon then goes off on tangets about. Here’s one that asks, “please tell me about the most awkward 30 seconds of your life”.

Oh also! Re-reading the Ryan Tannehill is banished to Tannehell one, there was an unexpected connection to How to With John Wilson:

Some of these features are under considered, and seem perpetually half-finished. They’re vestigial limbs that sprouted in, like, Madden 08, kind of useless but always there, hitchhiking into one release after another. They’re like scaffolding you walk under every day on the way to work; one day you look up and realize, “oh shit, this has been here for years.” Are they still working on something? Did they forget? It’s an unfinished artifact, fixed into permanence.

The second episode of How To is about scaffolding!

Anyway, once I finished all the Fumble Dimensions I just kept watching other Secret Base videos and now my brain has 90+ minutes of knowledge about athletes named Bob.

What I’m Reading

I also read some comics with my time off! Here are the comics I read.

Coda

Published by BOOM!, all three volumes are out now so you can read the whole thing in one go. I picked this up without knowing anyone on the creative team, but the art, in particular the colors, caught my eye. I enjoyed it! If anything I think it goes by a little too quick, there’s a whole world here that I want to know more about.

Gideon Falls, Volume 5

I used to have a routine where I’d walk down to Galaxy Collectibles on 5th Ave in Park Slope, pick up comics and then get bagels from Bagel Pub on 9th street. I’d have some books on my list specifically, but I’d also pick up at least one trade of something based on judging straight up by the cover and a quick flip through to see if the lettering was good, and the inside art was as good as the cover. Totally fine if it’s a different style, just that it catches me in the same way.

That’s how I picked up Descender a few years back–based solely on the strength of Dustin Nguyen’s art—and that’s how I found out about Jeff Lemire. I liked Descender a lot, but I also have a soft spot for space bullshit that reminds me of Mass Effect, so to make sure it wasn’t a fluke I checked out Sweet Tooth and hoo boy did that book make me have Feelings. From there I read Black Hammer, which is totally different from both Sweeth Tooth and Descender and I’m starting to realize just how good this jerk is at comics.

(I’m pretty sure he’s not a jerk!)

When I saw he was putting out a horror book I said “fuckin god dammit jeff” out loud to nobody and preordered the first trade. I haven’t been disappointed even a little bit, and I still get the trades the moment they come out.