February's list has music, articles, podcasts, and games.

Articles

• Abolition: Notes on a Normie Shitstorm

  People who aren’t revolted by the idea of abolishing capitalism, discovering their hard limits, utter the safe word: ‘weirdos’. They do not feel obliged to engage very deeply with the problem, or even to acknowledge that there is a problem... Even the absurd over-reaction to publicity for a work of feminist literature reflects a niche and subcultural obsession. Conservative, because their reactions imply that no idea should be published or publicised save that which the dominant culture has already made acceptable, or which they themselves happen to find inoffensive.

• Avoid Web Forums
• Google Search is Dying
• Jacques Vallee Still Doesn't Know What UFOs Are
• Patricia Lockwood Has Always Sounded This Way
• The Unreasonable Math of Type 1 Diabetes
  • This stood out to me as a type one diabetic recently thinking about the ways treatment for the disease is so difficult and how it forces its way into every part of our lives without us even knowing it. The article lays out how much treatment varies from person-to-person, how healthcare providers can't tell patients or their families the best way to do things, because no such universal rules exist.

Games

• Elden Ring
  • From's latest has taken up a lot of my free time. A great in a long line of greats. Time will tell where it ends up for me -- hard to top Bloodborne or the intricacies of Sekiro, but Elden Ring is different enough from the rest of the series that it is worth evaluating it on its own terms.
• Final Fantasy XIV
  • My trip to level cap continues, having just finished up the second most recent expansion. A lovable cast, sentimental, and a highpoint in video game writing. Not particularly quippy, characters have developed substantially over the expansions, and the community remains pretty pleasant overall.
• Final Fantasy XV
  • Still at the beginning of this one, having started just before Elden Ring came out.

Music

• Cloakroom - Dissoluton Wave
  • Goes great with Hum's recent and fantastic Inlet. This album is gorgeous. I first listened to it around the time of the West Elm Caleb drama online and found myself feeling very sour about culture because of this contrast. I felt (feel?) like there's this beautiful piece of art, sincere and lovely, that will go unnoticed as the most obnoxious people in the world are stalking and threatening each other because a boy was rude after dates. Actually, it's not that it will go unnoticed. It's that if one of these TikTok tools heard it, it would be lost on them. Any sort of art is. I don't need them to like what I like, but I need them to like something. Please! They're philistines. They have nothing going on up there. How much I like this album made me actively frustrated by ugly, frivolous culture. But, I hope that's a feeling everyone has at some point or another with something they like.
• Wovenhand - Silver Sash
  • More brilliant heavy, fuzzy, Jesus-y country from this guy.
• sun is poison - i thought i left you in eden
  • Good hooks and throwbacks to the best parts of the '10s midwest emo revival (Dowsing in particular).

Podcasts

• Joan Didion, Conservative
  • Fantastic interview with Buckley's biographer Sam Tanenhaus about the life and views of Joan Didion, as well as her (usually unremarked on) conservative personality. I must have listened to this three or four times. While I find aspects of her personality offputting, I heard this in the wake of my Cloakroom experience and found myself relating maybe a little too much to her elitist, snobby self. The fact that she saw the Reagans, whom she despised as tacky morons, and Goldwater, a guy she loved, as so different fascinates me. It's a distinction few would make on a meaningful level (though obviously correct), and fewer still would let alter their voting habits. I don't care for her elevation of subjective talent over all else or her bootstraps conservative personality or her obsession with exposing cheap hypocrisy, but I can't deny that I relate to a fourth bad thing about her: thinking an awful lot of people have poor, boring interior lives and no taste. I'm not sure she would agree, but it's not about what a person likes so much as they like something, that something beyond family and friends, religion, politics is meaningful to them. Basically, have a fuckin' hobby.