Recently: 14 January

14 January 2023

How the cult of consumerism ushered in an era of badly made products.
No, you haven’t won a Yeti Cooler from Dick’s Sporting Goods. Email spam is just evolving.
Considering the premiere of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine thirty years later (spoiler: it’s pretty great).
Steven Soderbergh’s “Seen, Read” for 2022.
I love this video of Dave Bautista discussing the storytelling power of his tattoos. He expresses a lot of things that I think sometimes non-tattooed people can get hung up on: how tattoos don’t have to have life-and-death significance, how you accept and move on from mistakes, how everything is a work in progress. Also, why it’s usually a futile exercise to ask heavily tattooed people how many tattoos they have. Either, like Dave says, they more or less flow into each other, or the sizes are too disparate to compare. I have one tattoo that’s three inches round and one that takes up 2/3 of my back, how do I count those. Anyway. Tattoos = storytelling.

The lost art of convalescence.
“Well, I love this world — with all its joys and its vast goodness, its civility and complete and utter lack of it, its brilliance and its absurdity. I love it all, and the people in it, all of them. I feel nothing but deep gratitude to be a part of this whole cosmic mess. I have no time for negativity, cynicism or blame.” Nick Cave on how grief made him a person.

As a weird horror film enthusiast, I have a list of difficult-to-see films and Ghostwatch has been on that list for a long time. It’s been notoriously hard to get a hold of it in the US (unless you wanted to watch a copy on archive.org, which I didn’t). But it’s now streaming in the US on Tubi, and I highly recommended catching it.
The Menu was slight but fun. I guess. You can watch it. Why not.
In my ongoing quest to read the entire Paperbacks from Hell collection, I read Lisa Tuttle’s A Nest of Nightmares, a fantastic short story collection that immediately became an instant favorite of mine.
Round these parts we spin new Miss Margo Price albums as soon as they come out, which one did just yesterday.