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?
Social media is dead. The internet is a tire fire. The group chats have gone quiet. What are these new ancillary minutes for, exactly?
- Upping the meditation timer from 10 to 15 minutes like a champ
- Pinch-and-zooming old photo prints
- Figuring out where your local library is, and then picking one that’s a bit further away
- Cataloguing the action figures, their weapons, and their overall state of readiness (for what? who can say)
- Re-reading Buffy the Vampire Slayer comics (season 9, specifically)
- Dusting off recipes that you never tried 20 years ago (due to cowardice)
- Managing those recipes easily (due to skill)
- Re-watching Star Trek Prodigy Season 2 on blu-ray
- Half push-ups
- Reading on the couch, arm flung over head, ideally for longer than it takes to lose track of time
- Goodbye “Everything Shower“; hello “Everything TheraGun”
- Extended Editions
- Egg sandwiches
- Battlestar Galactica
- Trying to reconstruct our grandmother’s Ciambella recipe through trial and error, basically from taste-memory (she died in 1996)
- Watching the snow fall, and fall, and fall
- Killing our darlings
- Eating a lot of cake
- Playing Echoes of Wisdom
- Doffing the AirPods and just walking in silence
- Doffing, generally
- Expelling mucus
- Watching stuff from the Letterboxd Watchlist as soon as the availability notification drops
- Concentrating
- Condensing
- Limiting
- Google drive: clean as a whistle
- Tabs: closed
- That reading list?: organized as fuck
- Playing with tape
- Napping, which is one of the Five Greatnesses
- Unsubscribing
- Re-prioritizing
- Writing
- Re-writing
- Clipping and saving
- Getting out the Pirates of the Caribbean figures (not all of them, obviously)
- Reading British travel guides from 1984, i.e. the ones that still feature “telex numbers”
- Clotting our own cream
- Writing D&D campaigns
- Stoptimizing
- Spring cleaning
- Writing out the longest possible version of our name; and then concentrating, condensing, limiting
- Not even noticing Daylight Savings Time
- Building all the old Lego and then designing elaborate wall-mounted mooring plates
- Defining queerness, and then defining it again
- Considering empire
- Having breakthroughs
- Writing short stories
- Watching the rain fall, and fall, and fall
- 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)
