[Hi gang! I don’t wanna run a whole friggin’ website anymore, all I ever wanted was to make with the fake lies, yelling, and jokes that aren’t worth the legwork for the people, to be a simple blogger. To that end, you can now find me over at The Naming Way courtesy of the truly excellent Pika, alongside such Dudes of Quality as Jason and Brenden! It’s The Bageler will stay up until my subscription runs out next year and I’ll continue to cross-post until then; thank you all for reading, and I hope to see you over at my new pad!]
Here’s what-all I enjoyed this month!
Listenin’
- Our American Cousin: The saddest, best, most charming song about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln you’ll ever hear! I can’t guarantee much, but that feels like a safe bet.
- Sexy Train: The Northern Boys are perhaps most virally well-know for Party Time, which my mate Isaac correctly characterizes as an ‘upsetting bop’.
- Such A Loser: There’s a lot in The Book of the Sub-Genius that I think about frequently, but one of my favorites (and one of the most mysterious) is a strangely out-of-character quote from J.R. “Bob” Dobbs, the man who once beat God in a farting-contest, who said: “If I can’t whup it, I’ll go DOWN“. This is a song for all of us, on the days when we just can’t whup it, to remind us not that better days are coming (though they are), but that failure is part of what makes us great.
- Sunday Morning Put-On: The new record from my favorite individual-person musician! Andrew Bird returns to his jazz roots (in this case like, crooner-jazz); I’m not knowledgeable on the genre to have an opinion, but I like a few of the tracks (You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To , Django, and I Fall In Love Too Easily) enough to add them to the Master Liked List, and that’s about it, really.
Readin’
- Becoming Fluent: How Cognitive Science Can Help Adults Learn A Foreign Language: A book about how to think about thinking about language! Surpisingly it is very readable and funnier than one would understandably assume, and is simply chocka with practical advice for when DuoLingo can only take you so far. Here’s an example of what makes it great: “There is, in fact, a word to describe foreign language learners who speak with an accent and choose for themselves the words, phrases, and pragmatic devices through which they express their own unique personality, even though this leaves their speech somewhat “foreign-sounding.” They are called charming.”
- Cibola Burn – The Expanse Book 4: We’ve had new planets for TEN FRIGGIN’ MINUTES and there’s already been a murder, THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS, HOMO SAPIENS
- Dawn of X, Vol. 11: So here’s the thing about Cypher, I’m fairly certain he’s the kind of guy that, despite his mutant power being automatic understanding of any language in any medium, would still have a DuoLingo just to be that jackass who’s in the #1 league-spot with a 16,000 EXP lead. Meanwhile, examinations of genetic sociopathy, To Russia With Love, and the mantle of Captain Britain is doing what its namesake country does best: violently colonize everything it can reach without consent.
- Dawn of X, Vol. 12: All I know about this volume so far is that there’s a Warwolf named Amazing Baby, and cousin that’s all you need to know either.
- Something Is Killing The Children, Vol. 7: Now listen, I don’t claim to be an expert on these oscurotypes and duplicitypes and eurotypes or the people who hunt them, but I feel PRETTY SAFE IN ASSUMING that the lady with the whip and the red eyes and the blindfold is bad news, mainly because she’s currently killing more people than the monsters her House was founded to hunt.
Playin’
- Animal Well: A game that tells you nothing but gives you all the tools you need, so you feel like a GENIUS when you figure out you can ride the frisbee or do endless bubble-hops if you time it just right and take some kind of focus-enhancing stimulant first.
- Cassette Beasts: A tremendously cool Pokémon-like with a vaporwave aesthetic that doesn’t stray from formula (capture monstros, make monstros fight, repeat) but iterates on it in some novel and surprisingly complex ways. For example, using a Fire-type attack on a Plastic-type monstro melts the plastic and turns the Plastic monstro into a Poison-type for a set number of turns; there are a million suble combinations of this on levels way more granular than Pokémon ever addressed, and any two monstros can briefly be fused into something like 2,500 unique third critters. Couple that with the fact that the game-world itself has a lot more to do than just fight monsters, and you can sign me up for this Columbia House.
- Final Fantasy XIV: There isn’t fishing in this game, sometimes this game is fishing and it’s incredible. Also presently maining Summoner, and convinced my mate William to do a free trial, for whom he created a Roegadyn that he named, and I swear to every God I am not making this up, Beastmode Shrek.
- Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Oh okay so apparently the ‘3’ refers to the length of the intro-cutscene-sequence; possibly in hours, possibly in Presidential administrations. That’s not a complaint, that’s the JRPG bullshit I’m here for and this game knows it and has been up since daybreak cookin’ up a whole buffet.
Watchin’
- The First Omen: The only thing more surprising than a new Omen movie after almost twenty years is that it absolutely rules, not in a “HA what is this stupid incredible bullshit” way but in an objectively very good movie way; the pacing, performances, and visuals are outstanding, and against every reasonable expectation I found myself hoping they make more, not to goof on but because I want to know how this creative team would handle a famously-middling franchise that’s never lived up to its ideas.
- Michael Clayton: Oh hey look it’s an extremely good, original legal/conspiracy thriller that nobody rented from me at Blockbuster when it came out because it’s got a terrible name! In no particular order: Tilda Swinton, George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson; a terrible secret a company might well do anything to protect, an explosion, three horses in the last place you’d expect them, Shiva the God of Death¹, and the book Michael’s son won’t shut up about that might be the key to all of it.
- My Name Is Earl: This show has an extremely powerful dirtbag joie de vivre that’s prevented me watching it for a VERY long time, but I am a big fan of stories about garbage humans trying to become better people, so I decided to finally give it a shot and I am so glad I did. The piece-of-shit energy persists throughout, that wasn’t an unfair assumption, but it is extremely smart, funny, and sneakily very sweet when you least expect it while still embracing its American Trashbag identity.
- Presumed Innocent (2024): Or, The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Donnie Darko: Attorney At Law. Only two episode are out so far but the entire cast are swinging at the top of their games and taking most of those swings at Peter Sarsgaard, so we are on board.
Na-na-na-na
Na-na-NA-na
Hey-ey-ey
July,
—C.W.
¹ Shiva’s nature and role as an individual deity and in the larger pan-Hindu environment is way more complicated than that, this is what the movie says, don’t @ me