2023 media log

overview

here's a little summary of this year's media logs.
click through the side navigation to see each month's log!

by type:

total:

books:

short stories:

articles:

comics:

podcasts:

tv shows:

films:

live performances:

games:

interactive fiction:

by genre:

horror:

sci-fi:

comedy:

literary:

fantasy:

romance:

memoir:

nonfiction:

favorites:

january:

how to sell a haunted house - grady hendrix

february:

twilight mirage, friends @ the table

march:

she is a haunting by trang thanh tran & tell me i'm worthless by alison rumfitt

april:

yellowjackets

may:

dead silence by s.a. barnes

june:

childhood homes by qrowscant

july:

our wives under the sea by julia armfield

august:

a guest in the house by emily carroll & from here to eternity by caitlin doughty

september:

bottoms (dir. emma seligman)

october:

last to leave the room by caitlin starling

january

  • 02 yiddish on the internet - tsvi sadan
    article nonfiction, jewish
  • 05-18 we won't be here tomorrow - margaret killjoy
    short story collection horror, lgbt, leftist
  • 13-19 mapping the interior - stephen graham jones
    short horror, ghosts
  • 20-23 how to sell a haunted house - grady hendrix
    book horror, ghosts
  • 30 alone, alone - jack johnston-glick
    short story horror, ghosts
    + part of the annual friends @ the table gift-giving event 'secret samol'! i'm totally astounded by the amount of effort that went into this story. it's so lovely (and i think you could definitely read it without knowing anything about friends @ the table, too!)
  • 30 ghosts (bbc) - season 4
    tv series comedy, ghosts


favorite:

how to sell a haunted house

february

  • 10 this is why - paramore
    album post-punk
    +fave song: 'you first'
  • 14 [finished] twilight mirage - friends @ the table
    podcast sci-fi, actual play
  • 19 gonacharov (firebrands hack) - shoulderfins
    ttrpg action
    +with t & k; character: juke scorcese
  • 26 i'm sorry did you say street magic - caro ascerion
    ttrpg worldbuilding, horror
    +with t & k; city: saint new
  • 27 the haunting of hill house - shirley jackson
    book, reread horror, houses
  • 28 ride the cyclone @ the arena in dc
    musical theatre ghosts
    +with e; liked way more than i expected to & enjoyed a lot more live than listening to the soundtrack. especially obsessed with jane doe, who seems to be character tailor made for me.


favorite:

twilight mirage

march

  • 01/30-02 [finished] nona the ninth - tamsyn muir
    book sci-fi
    + pacing wasn't the best but i adore nona and all her friends so very much. excited for alecto!!!
  • 08 writhe & a pretty place - emily carroll
    comic horror
    + i love when EC gets bloody & gross & meaty & horny.
  • 03-13 she is a haunting - trang thanh tran
    book horror, ghosts, houses, lgbt
  • 15-17 tell me i'm worthless - alison rumfitt
    book horror, houses, lgbt
    + absolutely brutal and raw book. mind the content warnings if you read it!
  • 19 bodies bodies bodies - dir. halina reisn
    film horror, comedy
  • 23 worked through some of my unread zine stash!!
    • night thoughts - sabii borno
      zine/minicomic horror, risograph
    • kōjō no tsuki - alexander rothman
      zine poetry
      + "i learn that every distance is a story, each story a lie, pointing elsewhere, vectoring outside of its own untruth. in this way communities are maps."
    • see me - e jackson
      minicomic memoir, risograph, lgbt


favorite:

she is a haunting & tell me i'm worthless

april

  • 04 [finished] the road to palisade - friends @ the table
    podcast sci-fi
  • 26 the southern book club's guide to slaying vampires - grady hendrix
    book horror
  • ongoing yellowjackets season 2
    tv horror


favorite:

yellowjackets

may

  • 03 escape velocity - snattacat
    code comic dystopian, sci-fi
    + really cool blend of twine game and comic!!! beautifully drawn, beautifully written, makes me want to create :^)
  • 10 dead silence - s.a. barnes
    book sci-fi, horror
    + finally some delicious haunted spaceships. for me!
  • 10-16 the unexpected joy of being in the middle of the woods
    experience
    + putting this here because i make the rules and i say it counts just as much as books i've read or movies i've seen.
    i got to go on a camping trip in alaska with a bunch of other people in my field of work and it was super cool! i've never done anything like that before, and am generally not an outdoorsy person at all. i got a little disposable camera for the trip and found it really nice to be detached from the internet (no cell signal or wifi at camp!) & have to be thoughtful about what i photographed, since i only had 27 pictures on the camera. i might post some of the pictures on here sometime!


favorite:

dead silence

june

  • 03 sir babygirl @ the brooklyn museum
    concert pop
    + went with s & one of s's friends. fave songs: cover of paramore's 'all i wanted' & new song 'final girl'. got really good tacos afterwards.
  • 04 an unauthorized fan treatise - lauren james
    web serial murder mystery
  • 05 station eleven - emily st john mandel
    book post-apocalyptic
    + borrowed from g. i think i may have enjoyed this more in pre-pandemic times, but i still liked it, and really like the general concept of people still making art after the end of the world.
  • 06 grey house - levi holloway
    play horror
    + the first horror play on broadway! went with s & g. we were in the front row at a weird angle so i think we missed some things, but it was really cool - a lot of big swings, and some of them missed, but the ones that hit really hit. i really hope it's a success and that people take it as a sign to make more horror theatre.
  • 08 [started] you're wrong about
    podcast nonfiction
    + recommended by s. started with the one where jamie loftus explains beanie babies and it was wonderful, so i'm adding this to my podcasts rotation immediately.
  • 09 a certain hunger - chelsea summer
    book thriller
    + recommended by s with the description "hannibal if hannibal was about a milf".
  • 10 childhood homes - qrowscant
    interactive fiction horror
    + !!! i love how this story pushes the boundaries of what you can do with a twine game. (it's incredible that this is the creator's first attempt at twine!!! it looks so good!) i also always adore the intertwining of childhood homes with the memory of bad parents & how those two things become inseperable, and this explores that so beautifully!!!
  • 12 [finished] taskmaster - season 13
    tv show comedy
  • 16 head over heels - jeff whitty & james magruder
    musical comedy
    + went with my mom to see a production at a local outdoor theater. had no idea what to expect aside from that it's one of s.'s favorite shows, but it was super fun!
  • 20 what moves the dead - t kingfisher
    book horror
    + a really fun take on the house of usher. i wish it was longer & that it dove into the characters more - i wanted so badly to know more about the relationships between alex and the ushers, but they never quite felt tangible since the book was so short! still very cool, though, and i loved the mexican gothic-esque mushroom horror (and that the author acknowledged mexican gothic in the endnotes!)
  • 21 [finished] taskmaster - season 12
    tv show comedy
  • 24 taskmaster - champion of champions 1
    tv show comedy


favorite:

childhood homes

july

  • 02 jaws - dir. steven spielberg
    film horror
    + a thing you need to understand about me is that i don't usually get properly scared by horror content. i used to, but at some point the rest of the world got scary enough that the fictional stuff doesn't bother me all that much, anymore, generally. now. with that out of the way. at one point during jaws i was jumpscared so badly that i leapt a foot into the air and splashed my entire drink on my face. my hair smells like raspberry seltzer and the person next to me leaned over after the movie and asked if it was my first time seeing it because it was very fun to watch my reactions.
  • 06 spook: science tackles the afterlife - mary roach
    book nonfiction
    + i really wanted to like this book, and at points i did, but the jokes and the casual voice were just not my thing. i'm not a scientist by any means, but i am super curious about scientific stuff, especially in this vein of research — buthalf the time, as soon as something really interesting was brought up, roach declared it too complicated to bother understanding and glossed over it, which frustrated me. if you handed me a version of this book with none of the jokes and 300% more in-depth research on, say, the offhandedly-mentioned quantum psychicist approach to ghost studies, i think i would like that a lot better.

    (if you, person reading this, are equally intruiged by quantum physics in ghost research, may i recommend the paper Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come by karen barad? a lot of it went over my head, since, again, i'm not remotely a physicist, and don't even really have a surface-level understanding of quantum physics — but even so, i found it super interesting. here's a pdf.)

    there were a lot of really compelling bits, though, even if i wish there'd been more details. the research into electromagnetic effects on the human brain and whether those could either cause hallucinations that make people think they're seeing a ghost or make the brain more perceptive to actual ghosts that were already there was super interesting! i'd love to see what research has been added since this book came out in '05 — i might look into that on my own later, if i remember. i'd say i want a sequel to this that updates on the last two decades of study, but given the above paragraph, i might prefer just digging for the research by myself.

    it's also super possible that i would've enjoyed the tone more if i hadn't read it in the midst of a weird depressive episode. i have a copy of another of roach's books already, so we'll see if it vibes with me more whenever i get around to reading that one, i guess.

  • 17 graphic voodoo: comics, black bodies, and other grotesqueries - dr. yvonne chireau (a morbid anatomy online talk)
    lecture nonfiction, history
  • 22 horrific imaginations - david demchuk (an augur literary society talk/workshop)
    workshop horror
  • 24 liminal women and lover's leaps in myth and history - dr. kirsten ellen johnson (a morbid anatomy online talk)
    lecture nonfiction, history, folklore
  • 26 our wives under the sea - julia armfield
    book horror, literary, lgbt
    + hauntingly beautiful & beautifully haunting. left me desperately wanting more details on what leah actually saw down there & what was on leah's paper that juna gave miri at the end — i know sometimes details left unexplored are more striking, but i would've loved this book to be another 100 pages long. i wish the characters had spoken more — the whole book felt very deeply true to the brainfog grief brings with it, but i found myself wanting miri to lash out more or fall apart entirely, yknow? overall i loved it, though.

    a few favorite quotes:

    The deep sea is a haunted house: a plqce in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness. Unstill is the word Leah uses, tilting her head to the side as if in answer to some sound, though the evening is quiet — dry hum of the road outside the window and little to draw the ear besides.

    • I loved her hard and at a distance, which made it easier to do, experienced brief but powerful compulsions to hug her and almost never did.

    I remember the slip of the craft across the water, long metal nose and sculpted conning tower, the way it seemed to dip and slink, eel-like, white lights along its spine and finial. I watched it float, not bobbing, seeming less to sit upon the water than to hang within it,half-submerged and threatening to sink. I remember turning to the woman on my right and saying I wasn't sure a ship like that could possibly withstand the ocean's weight on top of it, that the crew would all be crushed, that we ought to speak to someone. [...] By the time I looked back there was nothing — bob of gulls upon an undisturbed surface, gentle sense of something pooling in my wrists as if my heart had momentarily stopped.

    Now the thing is, from everything I know and everything I have otherwise experienced, it seems unlikely that the ship could have gone down that quickly, and certainly not with such minimal disturbance on the top. But even so, this is what I remember and short of getting in contact with the other wives onboard the viewing deck that day, none of whose names I even recall, there is no way of checking this scenario for accuracy. What I remember, then, becomes what happened: Leah leaving like summer from the ocean, not by degrees but all at once.

    • I found an online group for women who liked to role-play that their husbands had gone to space. I'm not entirely sure how this came about, though I believe it was probably a byproduct of my fruitless search for a support group that really spoke to me. I spent several days moving through the message boards, reading conversations between women about their fantasy husbands, learning forum slang, not posting anything. MHIS [my husband in space] was a common acronym, as was BS [before space], EB [earthbound], and CBW [came back wrong].

    MHIS was such a loving partner, a typical post might run, a friend and helpmeet, a wonderful father, but ever since he came back things have been different, I wonder if he CBW.

    I see my mother in myself, though less in the sense of inherited features and more in the sense of an intruder poorly hidden behind a curtain. I see her impatience in the skin of my neck, her anger in the way my hands move. I see her when I press my tongue into the inside of my cheek with irritation yet refuse to do anything to make a situation better. I see her when I assume people are worse when they turn out to be.

    • I had brought a Welsh dresser from my mother's house, a wine rack, a large oval mirror. The latter was a mistake — it seemed to haunt me about the flat as I tried to find a suitable place to put it, appearing at times to reflect not me but my mother's empty house, as though on a time delay. I tapped the second knuckle of a finger lightly against the glass and it sounded like something knocking to be let in.

    • cw: body horror / eye horror I think about this now with a peculiarly glassy sensation, as though I might raise my hand to my face and find it made of some hardened material, as though my thoughts might turn out to be equally so. I am thinking about all of this when the sound machine abruptly shuts off in the next room adn Leah makes a soundhalfway between a cry and loud exhalation and I realize she is standing in the doorway to the hall, naked and still wet, and that one of her eyes is no longer an eye but a strange, semisolid globe that on closer inspection appears to be made up of pure water. When it bursts, it falls down her face like a yolk escaping a white and I put a hand over my mouth and noise as though anticipating a smell.
  • 27 barbie - dir. greta gerwig
    film comedy? i guess?
    + not 100% sure how i feel about this one. aesthetics and costumes were absolutely on point, but it felt sort of confused about its politics, in a way that was in-your-face enough that i couldn't just turn off the leftist part of my brain and have fun with it. this is a movie that's trying to say something but getting bogged down in the fact that it is, still, at its core, a toy commercial.

    that said, i do want every single one of barbie's outfits.

  • 29 a whole lot of board games:
    • telestrations
    • just one
    • ready set bet
    • captain sonar
    • phantom ink
    • beyond balderdash
    • coup

favorite:

our wives under the sea

august

  • 01 talk to me - dir. danny & michael philippou
    film horror
  • 11 class action park
    documentary nonfiction
  • 19 a guest in the house - emily carroll
    graphic novel horror
  • 25 from here to eternity - caitlin doughty
    book nonfiction
    + incredible book. this is the sort of thing i was hoping for when i read mary roach's spook — this book is earnest and curious and approaches all of its subjects with care and respect. it's such a fascinating look at funerary practices around the world!! i need to read her other books immediately.
  • 25 the ring (2002) - dir. gore verbinski
    film horror
    + watched with the local horror club. i'd like to watch the original japanese version and see how it compares, but based solely on this version i have... mixed thoughts on this movie. the horror was definitely good and scary, but between the three child characters we see (aidan, samara, and the doctor's grandson on the island) it feels like the movie (maybe unintentionally?) had some Things To Say about autistic kids that i wasn't super a fan of. i may be reading too much into it; i might write up a longer thing about my thoughts on that later.
  • 26 canvas - k theo stultz
    comic fantasy
  • 30 the unwanted guest - tamsyn muir
    short story sci-fi
  • 31 far distant - a liang chan
    short comic sci-fi

favorite:

a guest in the house & from here to eternity

september

  • 03 gutless - cecile richard
    interactive fiction horror
    +
    You poison your bloodstream with wine in a fruitless attempt to reclaim your body from Charybdis.

    You mistake its silence for intent, its function a proxy: you resent the ship for making you the way you are. A blood bag. You take another swig, and instants later you hear the ship's innards groan in what you can only interpret as pain.

    Good. Pain is a language you both speak well enough.

  • 15 the land is inhospitable and so are we - mitski
    album folk
    + fave song: i'm your man
  • 25 bottoms - dir. emma seligman
    film comedy, lgbt
    + absolute MASTERPIECE of cinema. the experience of being a teenage dyke but everything's heightened and exaggerated and camp. it's perfect.

favorite:

bottoms

october

  • 02 catherine house - elisabeth thomas
    book gothic horror
  • 03 ghostwatch (1992) - dir. lesley manning
    film horror, found footage
  • 09 started playing neopets again!
    game
  • 24 last to leave the room - caitlin starling
    book horror, suspense, lgbt
    + another absolute banger from caitlin starling queen of fucked up lesbian horror!!!
  • 24 I ATE THREE EGGS EVERY SINGLE MORNING FOR A WEEK - HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED - scott hines
    short story surreal horror
    + Hump Day! Why not spice up midweek, I figure, so I carefully laid poached eggs over a black bean salsa with a dollop of fat-free sour cream, for a quick south-of-the-border jaunt!

    We heard the coasts were lost before the television signal cut for good. The fear in the announcers’ faces was human, but unbecoming of professionals, I thought. The skies had been a foreboding gray since daybreak, but the streaks of red that criss-crossed them now gave the impression of an oil painting. An oil painting of a bloodied hand dragged across a chalkboard. I took a picture. The local weatherman loves viewer-submitted photos of interesting clouds, I chuckled to myself.

  • 29 house / ハウス (1977) - dir. nobuhik o obayashi
    film horror
    +i've been meaning to watch house for a long time, and decided it would be a good movie to ring in my birthday with. it's so beautiful and surreal, and leaps back and forth between being dreamlike to the point of humor and nightmarish. every character thinks they're in a completely different genre of movie. also, i loved the girls' outfits — there's a super cute pinafore melody wears that i took approximately a billion screenshots of so i can try to recreate it once i'm a bit more confident in my sewing skills.

november

  • 08 witch hat atelier, vol 1 - kamome shirahama

    • 09 vol 2
    • 11 vol 3
    • 11 vol 4
    • 12 vol 5
    • 12 vol 6
    • 12 vol 7
    • 12 vol 8
    • 13 vol 9
    • 13 vol 10

    manga fantasy
    +i'd been meaning to read witch hat for a while, after seeing various pages from it online showcasing how absolutely stunning the art is. the friend i stayed with in boston for a few days had the full collection through vol 10, so i dared myself to read it all before i left. it was fantastic!! i'm so excited to read more, and i very much want to go back through and do some art studies of some of the panels — shirahama is an absolute master at what she does, and i feel like i could learn a ton through doing some studies. also very badly want to cosplay coco now — she's so adorable and i love the witch apprentices' outfits!!
  • 17 the devil's imago - cecile richards for domino club
    interactive fiction horror
    + A large hole had appeared in the fields where the statues were dug up.

    It was as if the ground had been pierced by a dagger, and its wound had stretched as it festered.

    A narrow yet perfectly cut stairway descended from the entrance, and you couldn't see further than six feet where the stairs met thick darkness. The irregular walls of this tunnel were covered in black mould.

  • 17 proximity - allison ford for domino club
    interactive fiction sci fi
  • 17 sssm: in the shadow of jupiter - candle for domino club
    interactive fiction sci fi
    +people will say they were touched by aliens or god, but here's what i think

    shuttle five passed further out than ever before. so far from earth, the cradle of humanity, so far from the warm of human connection

    when they passed into the shadow of jupiter they passed into the shadow of existence--out of sight, out of contact, out of reality itself

    call it god if you like. they touched, for a moment, the sacred state of unbeing and returned transformed in the image of their own desire, of humanity's desires projected onto them

    shuttle five was a message in a bottle, a plea for salvation from ourselves

  • 20 finally reading the shortbox comics fair 2021 comics that have been on my computer for a thousand years:

    • wormturn - rowan maccoll (shortbox comics fair 2021)
      comic horror
    • viscera - allissa chan (shortbox comics fair 2021)
      comic horror
      +
  • 22 the men who fought bigfoot and won - merritt k
    short story horror
    + Just then Randy started rocking his head back and forth and even lifted a finger up into the air like he was conducting an invisible orchestra to an unheard tune. Sasquatch is here, he whispered, and he’s making the most beautiful music I ever heard. Shut the hell up Randy, Billy said, bigfoot don’t make no music. He don’t have the human knack for creation bein’ an alien abomination and all.

december

  • 10 this delicious death - kayla cottingham
    book ya, horror, lgbt
  • 13 shortbox comics fair 2021 (catching up on my digital to-read pile at work)

    • harvest - joe sparrow
      comic sci-fi, post-apocalyptic
    • dead men's tales - kiku hughes
      comic horror
      + FASCINATING use of speech bubbles as tangible objects in this one
    • intertidal - steph bulante
      comic sci-fi, romance
      + making food for ur alien gf is the most important love language
    • love in space - niv sekar
      comic sci-fi
      +

      incredibly gorgeous art - sekar does so much with fairly limited lines, fluid alien shapes, and striking areas of solid black. i love the loose paneling & using overlapping repetitive elements to show motion/time rather than solid panels; it gives everything such a lovely dreamlike quality that really fits the story.

    • the convent of cats and stars - molly fairhurst
      comic surreal
      + extremely fun whimsical art :^)
    • sheep parade - mochipanko
      comic horror, fairy tale
      + i love the texture of the art in this!! the character designs are so charming, & being juxtaposed with the super cute main character makes all the horror elements all the more chilling.
  • 17 doctor who - the star beast
    tv special sci-fi
    + GOD i've missed doctor who being something that's fun to watch. the doctor and donna are literally the besties of all time and i'm going full grinning flappyhands giggling about their dynamic. dw is at its best when it's wholeheartedly unapologetically a lil bit cringey. also donna loves her daughter SO MUCH!!!! aaaaa!!!!
  • 19 doctor who - wild blue yonder
    tv special sci-fi, horror (?)
    + the weird eldritch body horror is so entirely my shit. also, david tennant and catherine tate are providing such insanely good acting in this that they carried the entire episode as the only actors present effortlessly, and i hadn't even realized they were the only ones in the episode until a friend pointed it out to me.
  • 21 bunny - mona awad
    book horror, literary
    + s. gave me this book for my birthday, and i finally got around to reading it while my work was dead pre-winter-break. absolutely bonkers novel. heathers meets frankenstein, sort of? sometimes you're so gay and lonely that you conjure a girl out of a swan. and sometimes you're so gay and lonely and repressed that you then conjure a boy with all of your hopes and desires embedded in him to fuck that swan-girl, because you can't do it yourself. insane book. i loved it.
  • 22 hanukkah on rye - dir. peter deluise
    film romance, comedy
    + watched with s.

    formulaic hallmark holiday romcom, but this time it's jewish! i'm not a big romcom person but i do enjoy jeremy jordan, but this movie was simply not good, no matter how you slice it. also, looking up the main actresshalfway through the movie to try to figure out what the fuck her accent was + seeing big ol' zionist propaganda posts right at the top of her instagram feed was a Yikes from me.

  • 22 round and round - dir. stacy n. harding
    film romance, comedy
    + watched with s.

    now THAT'S a hanukkah romcom! this movie has everything! time loops! vic michaelis (of dropout fame)! niche comic book references (paper girls shoutout my beloved)! plot-important ttrpg nerd behavior! the most realistic sibling dynamics i've seen onscreen in a while! the reveal that the entire family has done the time loop already made me SCREAM. i want to see the lesbian sister's time loop sooooo bad. i want fifty more of these movies just about various family members' time loops. i'll be honest i was a bit tipsy and still recovering from how much of a disappointment hanukkah on rye was while watching this, but i'd love to watch it again and fully absorb the whole thing. absolute delight start to finish.

  • 25 doctor who - the giggle
    tv special sci-fi, horror (?)
    + has doctor who always been so horror-adjacent??? i truly don't know, but this episode and wild blue yonder both felt so horror to me (in a way i adored). i love that this episode returned to the time-honored doctor who tradition of the villain getting a big dance number (the fucking spice girls! hello!!!). the glimpses at ncuti's 15th doctor were absolutely delightful and i cannot wait to see more of him, and the 14th doctor getting to go home with donna and be the weird uncle in her family was so sweet!!! i can't believe doctor who is this good again.
  • 26 doctor who - the church on ruby road
    tv special sci-fi
    + i won't be logging every regular episode, don't worry — i'm just logging the specials here, since they're basically movies. or something. anyways, 15th doctor continues to be delightful and i love ruby already! you put a weird girl who's in a band in front of me and i instantly become so very fond. excited to see where they take her character!!
  • 26 patricia wants to cuddle - samantha allen
    book horror
    + another rec from s. absolutely wild book — the dating competition drama was enough to have me fully 100% invested alone, and then you add a lesbian bigfoot cult to the mix and i want to legally marry this book. i also love when books have little in-between-chapter segments of letters or forum posts or social media, and this book used those soooo well!
  • 31 readme.txt - chelsea manning
    book memoir