So, what are we doing with all this free time?

Social media is dead. The internet is a tire fire. The group chats have gone quiet. What are these new ancillary minutes for, exactly?

1. Upping the meditation timer from 10 to 15 minutes like a champ
2. Pinch-and-zooming old photo prints
3. Figuring out where your local library is, and then picking one that’s a bit further away
4. Cataloguing the action figures, their weapons, and their overall state of readiness (for what? who can say)
5. Re-reading Buffy the Vampire Slayer comics (season 9, specifically)
6. Dusting off recipes that you never tried 20 years ago (due to cowardice)
7. Managing those recipes easily (due to skill)
8. Re-watching Star Trek Prodigy Season 2 on blu-ray
9. Half push-ups
10. Reading on the couch, arm flung over head, ideally for longer than it takes to lose track of time
11. Goodbye “Everything Shower“; hello “Everything TheraGun”
12. Extended Editions
13. Egg sandwiches
14. Battlestar Galactica
15. Trying to reconstruct our grandmother’s Ciambella recipe through trial and error, basically from taste-memory (she died in 1996)
16. Watching the snow fall, and fall, and fall
17. Killing our darlings
18. Eating a lot of cake
19. Playing Echoes of Wisdom
20. Doffing the AirPods and just walking in silence
21. Doffing, generally
22. Expelling mucus
23. Watching stuff from the Letterboxd Watchlist as soon as the availability notification drops
24. Concentrating
25. Condensing
26. Limiting
27. Google drive: clean as a whistle
28. Tabs: closed
29. That reading list?: organized as fuck
30. Playing with tape
31. Napping, which is one of the Five Greatnesses
32. Unsubscribing
33. Re-prioritizing
34. Writing
35. Re-writing
36. Clipping and saving
37. Getting out the Pirates of the Caribbean figures (not all of them, obviously)
38. Reading British travel guides from 1984, i.e. the ones that still feature “telex numbers”
39. Clotting our own cream
40. Writing D&D campaigns
41. Stoptimizing
42. Spring cleaning
43. Writing out the longest possible version of our name; and then concentrating, condensing, limiting
44. Not even noticing Daylight Savings Time
45. Building all the old Lego and then designing elaborate wall-mounted mooring plates
46. Defining queerness, and then defining it again
47. Considering empire
48. Having breakthroughs
49. Writing short stories
50. Watching the rain fall, and fall, and fall
51. Hanging out with the best people.

Speaking of

• Speaking of free time, this is a great write-up of an episode of LOST (as it happens, a personal favourite) because when I started reading it I was like, man, I gotta watch LOST again! and by the time I was done reading it I was pretty sure I will never watch LOST again. LOST is just too god damned exhausting. (The Reframe)
• Speaking of Star Trek: Prodigy, the Master Replicas announcement had me double back and buy the Prodigy action figures from Playmates. (Giant Green Space Hand)
• Speaking of libertarian morons (I wasn’t, but it’s never far), I definitely want to read this book, not just because it has libertarian morons, but because it also has libertarian bears. (The New Republic)
• Reading the debut novel of a trans writer I already adore sure has the capacity to make me feel like a total fucking fraud in fourteen dimensions at once. Anyway, Woodworking is terrific! (Emily St. James)
• Speaking of feeling like a total fucking fraud, I saw Scaachi Koul talk about her new book at the Central Reference Library this week and she was perfect and outrageous and so glittery. I need to get out more.
• I saw about an hour and change of The Clock when I was at the Tate in 2018. This piece by B.C. Wallin nicely excavates the crevices. (Bright Wall / Dark Room)
• “How Do Aliens ‘Do It’?” Admittedly, I haven’t playtested this yet. But damn, it sounds fun. (Kieron Gillen)
• Speaking of things I haven’t playtested, but are definitely on my desktop right now waiting to be pored over, Realis, by AMCA castmember Austin Walker. This, too, sounds fun.
• And finally, some brief, wise words about what criticism is, isn’t, and could be, which just happen to be co-authored by many of my ranking favourite critics of the mo’. (NY Mag)