january 2022

Woah hey, did I write something this month? (One sentence in, and I’ve already re-captured the tone I used to do all these in, while simultaneously rolling my eyes as hard as I can at it.) Two of my resolutions for 2022 were to keep better track of the media that I consumed, and to actually sit down and do some writing about some of it. Let’s get to it.

Ranged Touch
Ranged Touch is a podcast network that I’ve been following for a while - I got into them through “Just King Things,” their ongoing podcast covering the works of Stephen King in publication order, and then really got into them with their Baldur’s Gate show “Mages and Murderdads” and their Homestuck analysis pod “Homestuck Made This World.” I recently moved, and spent most of my time packing and carrying boxes listening to their excellent monthly Patreon podcast, and I really just don’t have enough positive things to say about the whole thing. Ranged Touch is a fantastic network of podcasts that fills the void in my heart that Idle Thumbs left - there is truly nothing better than listening to a few friends making incredibly inside jokes while talking about things I am too dumb to understand, whether it’s DND computer games from the 90s, the webcomic Homestuck, the academic field of Game Studies, or Magic the Gathering. Unfortunately, I am exactly dumb enough to understand the works of Stephen King.

Peacemaker
I think this show is better than all of the Marvel shows that came out in 2021. Part of that is that I’m a big James Gunn fan, but a larger part is that I think the material here is just so much more interesting and better written, and isn’t so concerned about advancing the state of the media universe it inhabits. Also, the soundtrack is perfect, and has made me want to be a glam metal guitarist. Outside of that, I think all the performances have been really good - especially John Cena, who proves once again that he can knock comedy out of the park, while also sticking the landing on some of the more emotional stuff. Freddie Stroma, the actor who plays Vigilante, is an absolute delight - and I cannot wait to see him in more stuff. I’ve mentioned to Jarrod a few times that this feels like a different more modern take on the Joss Whedon nerd TV dramas that defined fan culture in the early 2000s - not sure if I’ve got that take fully baked yet, but I might come back to it once the show wraps. Two thumbs up till then!

Licorice Pizza
I saw this movie near the beginning of the month, and felt really strongly about it while I was watching it and immediately after - but writing about it now a lot of that passion has kinda faded. I think this is a really good movie - and like a really cute romantic comedy/drama about characters that I loved and related to, that has some depth and complications to it, but I don’t think it’ll stick with me the same way some other films of this genre have. I’d love to see it again, because it was just such a joy to watch - both leads have this sort of magnetism to them, and seeing them in both dramatic and mundane scenes, running into each other’s arms again and again and again while the music swelled - to me, that’s the absolute best that movies can be. Who knows, I may have re-convinced myself that I love this movie!

Scream (2022)
On the other hand, I have not been able to stop thinking about this movie since I saw it, and I don’t even think it’s very good. I came late to the Scream franchise, but thought it was extremely fun and smart, even 30ish years later. Scream (2022) felt like it hurt itself by trying to be all of the things the original was, and also all of the things we now understand it to be. It felt like a good movie and a bad one thrown into a blender, mixed up, and then poured out - a funny film and a serious one, a “meta” take and a conventional one - polar opposites slammed together and then parceled out; and the mishmash tone was super weird. It starts out promisingly enough, re-doing the Drew Barrymore sequence from the original, while kinda poking fun at the fact that a lot of people trip over themselves to label popular horror movies as “arty” and “smart,” rather than just good pieces of scary popcorn cinema. Unfortunately, after that I thought the “meta” discussions completely fell apart as they shifted to being about remakes and fan expectations surrounding them. I thought most of the characters were sketchy at best, and most of the kills were wholly uninteresting. The motivation of the killer was good while it was being revealed, and then immediately felt tacky as they continued to monologue. There’s one reveal near the end of this film that I realized was coming a few minutes before it happened, and I think the fact that it could do that is maybe the smartest part of the whole movie. I’m disappointed that this movie was not as good as it could have been, while simultaneously fascinated by the ways in which it was bad. You should watch it.

Yellowjackets
So far, this is my favorite piece of media from 2022. I am more than a little concerned that they’ve apparently got 5 seasons of this show mapped out, but I’ll be along for the ride. I’ve jokingly made the hot take that this show is “what if LOST was good,” but on a more serious note, I think it does a lot of the same good mystery box + character investigation drama stuff, splitting between an absolutely horrifying “survival in the woods” plotline, and a positively conventional “prestige TV midlife crisis” plotine, somehow making both of them extremely compelling through the really truly good performances it delivers, and its seemingly unique decision to make Melanie Lynskey a lightly despicable character that you can’t help but root for, rather than one that you just feel sorry for. Good show, can’t wait to see where it goes.

Wordle
Love wordle. Hate the New York Times. Enough said.

Games of the Year - 2019

I’m sitting down to write the final “official” version of this list on Monday, December 30th, when I think it’s finally safe to say that I’m not going to play and finish any more games in this, the Year of Our Lord 2019. I might come back to this intro part later and try to preface it with stuff, but for now I’m just going to jump right into it!

9 - Spyro Reignited Trilogy: Spyro the Dragon

At some point in the year 2000 I went to Toys R Us with my grandpa and cousins and convinced them that we needed to buy a PlayStation 2 (with copies of Crash Bandicoot 3 and Tomba 2) instead of a Dreamcast because it was “the most advanced thing ever.” Papa’s plan to get my cousins to spend time at his house with the PlayStation did not pan out, and I never got to finish Crash 3. Years later, I did end up with the pile of PlayStation 1 games we bought that afternoon, so I impulse purchased a busted original model PlayStation and a copy of Spyro 1 from a now defunct comic book shop 5 minutes from my cousins’ house. (RIP Epikos - it’s actually probably good that you got replaced by a frozen yogurt place, or I’d be drowning in bad Batman comics.) That game was fun to play, but it was mega old and definitely showed its age. Finally, back in July, this problem was solved when remakes of all 3 PlayStation Spyro games came to the Switch. I’ve only played the first one right now and have almost 100% completed it, but I’m ready to say that it’s the best collectathon I’ve ever played. It’s a good, chill, low-risk time with all these little bite size levels to glide around in with podcasts in the background. The flight levels are just difficult enough to be exciting, and the third world - the ice one - was a perfect handful of platforming levels. Good game!

8 - SNES on Switch

Alright this one is definitely going to be shorter - it took Nintendo way too long to do this, and Donkey Kong Country 2 isn’t even in this thing yet. The world is cruel, but Mario World and Yoshi’s Island are both still incredible games. Eventually I will finish Super Metroid, and eventually, the good version of Wario’s Woods (the SNES one) will be on the Switch. Until then I will continue to play Kirby Superstar and the first 10 minutes of Star Fox 2.

7 - A Short Hike

Thinking about it now, this one kind of feels like Spyro? Good chill out game with good music and a fun gliding mechanic. The low-fi GameBoy look is really cool, the dialogue is really cute and fun, and it feels like an inspirational exploration platformer with the climbing from Breath of the Wild and the vibe and look of an Animal Crossing. Also, the sunhat you buy from the craft lady on the island is incredible. More sunhats in games in 2020!

6 - Myst/Riven

Near the end of 2018 I briefly dated a girl who was into the same dorky stuff I am. On one of our dates she mentioned that one of her favorite games was Riven (the sequel to Myst), and she had beaten it like a dozen times. I had not beaten Riven even once because it was too hard. When we stopped dating, I decided to deal with it by beating Riven, not to prove that I could too, but uh, because of some other completely unrelated reason that had nothing to do with me feeling bad for myself. For the month of January, I fell into what I have since dubbed “the puzzle hole.” I created a notebook of incomprehensible diagrams, maps, and scribbles, and when my friend Ryan came to visit me, he said he found me hunched over my computer, mumbling to myself with a wild look in my eyes. I think I genuinely scared him when I tried to explain how I’d decoded the game’s number system. Anyways, Riven is a really good game that goes in a completely different direction from its predecessor, Myst (which I sped through as a refresher right after I finished Riven). While Myst was basically a password protected PowerPoint presentation with clunky puzzles and cutting edge 90s computer generated graphics, Riven feels like a living, breathing world. It’s not really a game of puzzles in the way that Myst is (honestly, I think there’s only like one actual flat-out puzzle), it’s a game of learning how to navigate a place and its history. Additionally, I think this game still looks great, mostly because of its inspired, grandiose, “prehistory steampunk plus the medieval Catholic church” art direction. This game was like 6 discs when it came out in the 90s? It’s gorgeous and I love to look at it so much that I’ve got the Ghen shrine as my phone background. The last bit of this game has some sort of animal puzzle that’s actually pretty terrible and almost gave me an aneurysm, but the end itself made me get genuinely teary-eyed in a way we’ll revisit later. Here’s a quote from the epilogue to chew on until then:

“And now, I am at rest, understanding that in Books, and Ages, and life… the ending can never truly be written.”

5 - Sayonara Wild Hearts

Speaking of games that made me teary-eyed, Sayonara Wild Hearts is a magical playable animated music video for an Icelandic electric-neon-pop concept album about getting dumped so hard it breaks the universe. This game owns, not necessarily because of the game part, which I think is just passable, but because of the sheer spectacle of it all. Each track gives you just enough interaction to keep engaged in the ups and downs and side-to-sides as stuff on screen spins and flips and explodes into prismatic crystalline representations of realizing that maybe learning to love yourself is the first step to being able to love and be loved again. The vocal tracks are the standouts here, and the finale is just amazing. Watching the heroine get stripped of all her powers but the longboard she rode in on, and then using that to skate in and around each of the tarotic manifestations of each of her flaws and shortcomings - mmf. GOOD GAME.

4 - CONTROL

I haven’t finished CONTROL yet, but I have so enjoyed my time with it. The story is starting to lose me a little, but I can’t stop thinking about this game’s world and the things that populate it, and I know I’m not alone. Maybe it’s something about the completely broken post-truth internet conspiracy theory mood of the past couple years, but exploring the pitch of “What if the headquarters of a secret paranormal federal government bureau got possessed?” with incredibly tight 3rd person shooter action and really really good superpowers just hits in a way that feels fresh and exciting almost in opposition to a AAA space dominated by sequels. Everything in this game is a delight; flying up and over giant angular slabs of brutalist concrete architecture, flinging forklifts into walls, reading a bunch of supplemental documents about a haunted refrigerator - I love this game. In fact, I love this game so much that I upgraded my Xbox One S to an Xbox One X (what a naming scheme) to deal with CONTROL’s terrible console performance and load times at launch. Even though the bosses in this game are awful and the checkpoints are not great, everything else in it (especially those big fonts) is so good. I’m gonna finish this game soon, and then I’m gonna trick some of you into playing Anomaly with me, because that game seems extremely cool.

3 - Dicey Dungeons

What if a deck building game was a rainbow cartoon gameshow that let you throw a triple charged spike boomerang into a pile of slime before transforming into a bear? I will never understand Magic: The Gathering, but I will never forget accidentally not dumping my last roll into the vampire killer stake and then getting merc’d by Dracula. The stat effects in this game ALONE are a joy, and that’s saying something about stat effects! They usually suck! This game is just so well-designed, it’s a pick-up-and play readability miracle, with so much variation and depth, where each run is a new adventure. I love it. I love it! Also the music slaps and the art is so dang good. Oh my word, Dicey Dungeons.

2 - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare [2019] (Multiplayer Only)

First of all, yes, I have only played the multiplayer mode in this game. I’ve heard almost no good things about the co-op spec-ops mode, and although I might get around to the campaign eventually, it is nowhere near even the middle of my to-play list. So - bearing in mind that I haven’t even touched 2 of the 3 modes of this game, it feels kind of wild that the Modern Warfare reboot is my second favorite game of this year. I wrote briefly about how much fun I was having with it right after launch, and that fun has only continued to grow since then. Growing up, the closest I got to owning a Call of Duty game was the Wii version of Goldeneye (which honestly had some pretty good maps), but I spent a couple of early high school sleepovers playing splitscreen Modern Warfare 1 or 2 and Black Ops at friends’ houses. Aside from the agonizing time spent watching some friends slowly and meticulously build loadouts (I’m looking at you Gabi Garcia), I have really good memories of those games. When I bought an Xbox in late 2015, I picked up Black Ops III to play with a couple friends, and enjoyed it for a bit, but couldn’t recapture that magic, and spent most of my time going 0 and 20 in that weird future version of NukeTown. In the lead-up to this game, there was a lot of talk on gaming podcasts about how serious and groundbreaking the campaign was going to be, and that seemed kind of interesting, and I started thinking, “Well, I’ve got a pile of GameStop gift cards that I gotta use before that place goes under…” so I rolled the dice and pre-ordered it. When the game finally came out, I was working late nights prepping for an audit at work, and absolutely did not want anything to do with a stressful, morally grey action movie campaign, so I begrudgingly decided to dip my toes into the multiplayer, and was hooked. After two years of trudging through slower, more methodical battle royale games where I always felt like I was dragging my team down, Modern Warfare’s lightweight, consequence-free, frenetic deathmatches felt like a breath of fresh air. Honestly, in terms of enjoyment, the fact that I can kind of hold my own in Kill Confirmed and Domination comes second to just how good it feels to play that game. Every weapon feels slick and sharp and solid and immediately easy to grasp, which again, refreshing in comparison to a game like Fortnite, where none of the guns never felt quite heavy(?) enough, and I could never keep track of which one was currently on top of the meta. Honestly, nothing against that game, I think the way it constantly shifts and transforms to stay fresh is amazing, and I’ve had a ton of fun playing it, but I think my time with Fortnite has drawn to a close, and that’s ok - because the crossplay revolution that it ushered in continues with Modern Warfare. Even though online multiplayer “walled gardens” are (and always have been) completely arbitrary, there is something magical about how easy it is to jump into lobbies with PC, PlayStation, and Xbox friends all at the same time. Now that I’m kind of out in Tennessee by myself, video games have been essential to me keeping up with some of my friends on both coasts, and it’s honestly a relief to be able to do it with a game that I absolutely love on in the background. That this game makes it so easy for me to continue to cultivate lifelong friendships might be why I’ve got it at spot number 2 - but also, Shoot House is an incredible map, and a few weeks ago they ran a mode called Cranked where you got faster every time you killed someone and then your heart exploded after 30 seconds! Perfect video game.

1 - Outer Wilds

When I went to go see Inside Out with Carter Ware a few summers ago, I jokingly told him that if he cried, I would not drive him home. 90 minutes later, the two of us were sobbing, and something inside me broke. Since then, almost anything even slightly emotional will make me cry. Sad banjo music while walking through the tunnel under the Atlanta airport? A single solitary tear rolls down my cheek. A warm starry night sitting next to my friends around a campfire? My eyes are watery and blurry as I hold back tears with a really funny looking frowny face. That one Apple Music commercial with the airpods and the dancing? I am a snotty mess. I say all of that to explain my earlier mentioned reactions to Riven and Sayonara Wild Hearts, and to preface me saying that the ending of Outer Wilds made me weep in an entirely new way. I’ll get to the how and the why of that reaction a little later (because it is kind of spoiler-y), and start with my explanation of why I love this game, my pitch on why you should play it, and my argument that this game is the true successor to Riven.

In Outer Wilds, you play as an alien from the small, woodsy, Pacific Northwest planet of Timber Hearth. You are the newest astronaut of the Outer Wilds, the planet’s Sierras Club-esque team of space explorers - currently spread out throughout the solar system, each equipped with a handmade instrument, all playing different parts of the same song from back on Timber Hearth. You wake up by a campfire, with your friend roasting marshmallows, reminding you that today is finally the day that you’ll make your first trip to space. You make your way around the town as folksy banjo music plays, talking to the 10 or 12 other people who live there - all of them excited for you, all of them rooting for you to make the planet of Timber Hearth proud with whatever it is you discover. As you make your way to the observatory tower to pick up the launch codes for the shuttle, a newly discovered relic from a precursor civilization - a statue - opens its eyes and links itself to you. Everyone is confused, but they wish you a safe trip, and watch as you take off. Minutes later, you die as the sun goes supernova.

And then, you’re back at the campfire, waking up to your friend roasting marshmallows and everyone wishing you a safe trip. Somehow, you’ve been caught in a time loop by that statue, and it’s up to you to take the tools that you’ve been given - a jetpack, a camera drone, a radio, and a brand new translator tool for deciphering writing from those precursors, the Nomai - and explore the completely simulated 5 planet solar system. You fly around in your tiny spaceship, making your way to each of the planets, talking to the astronauts about points of interest, exploring Nomai ruins, and playing around with the natural phenomena and bits of abandoned technology that you find there. A mix of folksy music and synths accompany your journey as you do everything you can to solve the mystery of the time loop and the supernova. Every 22 minutes (or sooner if you die) the sun will explode, and you’ll be back on Timber Hearth, ready to go again. Each time you learn something new, it will be added to your ship’s computer - which functions as a sort of red yarn and thumbtacks rumor board. And honestly, that’s about it - Outer Wilds is kind of weird as a video game, because there’s no powers to unlock, no upgrades to purchase, no additional wrinkles that get added after a couple hours of gameplay. Much like Riven, this is a game of places and histories. Everything is open to you from the start, and the only thing that changes as you play is what you know - about the solar system, about the Nomai, about the loop, and about the supernova that always ends each 22 minute loop.

Time loops aren’t a new thing in video games, but in every other looping game I’ve played, they come with a sense of dread and urgency - they’re a hassle, and for the most part they don’t add to the experience in any way other than acting as a powerful narrative framing. Not the case in Outer Wilds, where instead of feeling limiting, the time loop feels freeing - giving you a way to experiment without fear of failure. There will always be another loop, so you can try to land on that busted space station, or fly into that black hole, or see what happens if you try to skip your ship around the sun’s powerful fiery orbit. This does mean that the opening of the game can be a bit aimless, but a little poking reveals dozens of threads to pull at and follow, all of them the perfect length to be focused in on and tackled in a single loop. My game of the year in 2018 was Return of the Obra Dinn, because it made me feel like a detective. In much the same way, Outer Wilds made me feel like an explorer. It got its hooks in me in a way that only a few games ever have. And up until I finished it on Saturday night, I thought that was going to be the end of the story for Outer Wilds - just another game on a list of games that I loved and then forgot about. Wow was I wrong.

How do we wrap our heads around the ultimate shape and size and impact of our place in the world? Can we? In either the second or the third Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy book, one of the characters, Zaphod, gets put inside something called the “Total Perspective Vortex,” which is designed to zoom out, and give the person inside a true sense of how miniscule their place in the universe actually is, driving them insane. Of course, the thing backfires, and Zaphod instead concludes that this thing has shown him what he always knew - that he is the center of the universe. In a completely un-narcissistic way, I’ve always kind of related to this bit, because try as I might, I can’t grasp that sense of my own spatial or temporal smallness when I look up into the stars, and that has always made me feel bad. Video games feel kind of like the worst version of this thing that feels like a sin, because the worlds of games almost always do just revolve around you in a way that’s rarely acknowledged, and is pretty much never critiqued. I think that’s why it feels so crazy that Outer Wilds decides to just swing for the fences and tell a story that is ultimately about the briefness of human experience in the face of time on the cosmic scale. Even crazier is that it manages to do so without falling into hopelessness or nihilism. This is a game about coming to terms with inevitability, but not being defeated by it. Outer Wilds feels like something special that can only come out of the kind of crummy circumstances we’re living in right now, and it begs to be experienced - if Riven posits that the ending might not be written, Outer Wilds instead states that it actually for sure is, but still demands that we write our own stories in the interim.

So, as the year (and the decade) draw to a close, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. That’s it for now, I’m so glad I finally sat down and wrote this, so until whatever comes next, stay safe, and keep finding stories to experience and enjoy.

Matt Out!

I Listened to The Suburbs Again and it’s Still Good

I’ve had to spend more time than usual at work this week to take care of a big software project, which in the end has boiled down to a few days of getting to work before the sun came up, and leaving after it went down. The full moon just kinda followed me all the way to the office on Monday, and that was the first day that it felt like the weather realized what was going on and snapped into the appropriate temperature zone. The biscuit truck guy was wearing a fleece instead of a Hawaiian shirt, and it kind of felt like time to retire the bubblegum summer pop and punk playlist I’d been listening to since May.

I put on some spookier sounds to start (Lord Huron, we’ll get there eventually), and then somehow ended up back on that old Echosmith song, “Cool Kids,” which flipped right into their only other big single, and then “Reflektor,” which, hang on, is that a cover of the title track from that Arcade Fire album? I popped it on to check, and sure enough, yeah, that’s this song. I let that album run for a bit, and enjoyed it way more than I did the only other time I listened to it - back in 2013; the two discs on loan from the Howard County library system while I drove to go watch the Super Bowl at Gabi Garcia’s house. It’s kind of weird that I have such a specific memory of an album that I found mostly forgettable? Either way, I think I appreciated it a little more now - it’s definitely going for something different from “The Suburbs,” more dancey, less morose, equally pretentious. But then, I did the thing I always do whenever I listen to a bit of Arcade Fire - I started up “The Suburbs” again to see if I liked those other new tracks anywhere near as much as I love these old familiar ones, and yeah, sure enough, at least for me, nothing will ever come close to this album.

I don’t really know what it is, but if I had to guess, I think I’d say it’s because it was like the first non-Christian, non-Beatles album I ever listened to? It was the beginning of high school, my dad showed us this really neat Chrome thing that was scored with “We Used To Wait,” and for some reason I decided that I needed to listen to the album the track came from, so I did the same thing I later did with “Reflektor” and put the album on hold at the library. When it finally came in, I skipped through most of the tracks to get to “We Used to Wait,” but the song right before, “Deep Blue,” just opened with these super haunting vocals and guitar sounds, so I stopped there, and fell in love. I listened to a few of the other tracks, mostly disjointed from each other, but somehow still decided that this album was now my new favorite thing ever. I remember being really excited and defensive when it won at the Grammys, trying to explain to someone in my class who cared about the Grammys that “actually” it was a really cool album and was way better than whatever Katy Perry and Lady Gaga and eminem had put out that year. (Honestly, looking at those other albums now - “Teenage Dream,” “Fame Monster,” and “Recovery” respectively - I’m shocked I didn’t get made fun of in high school, because those are great albums and I was just a sheltered dork who thought that the Kardashians were the crab aliens from Star Trek.) After that, I put the album on my iPod nano, and would listen to it the rare mornings that I’d go for a run or would have to shovel snow. It just kind of became a thing I was into, and I tried my best to get my friends to be into it too. (Shoutouts to Kyle Weigle for getting into it with me, and still remembering that “Deep Blue” is my favorite track on that album.)

Either way, I listen to “The Suburbs” now almost annually, and I’m just always kinda surprised by how many of those weird lyrics I know by heart, and how deeply I’ve internalized and related to this legitimately corny album about how like, “the suburbs are killing the heart of America, man.” I think it’s because the whole thing is just the right amount of sad and reflective (and pretentious), and all the melodies are just super catchy. Nothing goes on for too long, and each track has something different and interesting to focus on before wrapping back in on itself and ending with such a quiet, serious reprisal. Anyways, I think the thing about “The Suburbs” that’s most important to me is the ending message from “We Used to Wait,” about writing a letter, taking your true self, putting it on the page, making it real, and then getting back out there and putting the waiting to an end. I dunno man, I just think it’s neat.

Song and Verse

Music, a Show About Music, and a Movie with Meaningful Words

Usually when I’m writing my articles, I like to read them out loud to make sure that they feel and sound right. This week, I cannot do that because I blew out my voice screaming during Battle of the Bands and blew out my hearing standing too close to the speakers at Battle of the Bands. So, after I’ve probably permanently damaged my capacity for consuming media¹, it seems only appropriate to talk about the last pieces of music, film, and TV that I was able to enjoy. Let’s go!

Superorganism (Music)

“Superorganism” is the recently released debut album from UK-based band/collective Superorganism.² I stumbled onto the absolutely bizarre music video for one of their singles, “Everybody Wants to Be Famous” near the end of last quarter, and I’ve been eagerly awaiting this album ever since. “Superorganism” seems to have evolved from the weird, lo-fi, deep fried, memefied “aesthetic” corner of YouTube, but instead of being grating and obnoxious, like some of those things that spawned it, “Superorganism” is super-chill easy listening. The album sports a unique sound design, with tracks dropping in and out, samples looping at variable speeds, trippy guitars sliding up and down, and a bevy of sound effects acting as a kind of souped-up percussion section. The whole thing is anchored by lead singer Orono Noguchi’s drowsy, hypnotic vocals, and each track sports a catchy, karaoke-worthy chorus. “Superorganism” is a product that can only exist because of the internet, not just because it’s about the internet, but because it absorbs a specific part of the internet’s mindset, tone, and punchlines, and gives that collage a meaningful form. This album is the result of passionate people taking memes very, very seriously, and it’s a joy to listen to. Standout tracks are “Something For Your M.I.N.D.” and “Nobody Cares.” Superorganism will be playing in Portland right after finals, on the 22nd, so give the album a listen, and if you like it, be sure make it out to their show. I’m pretty sure these weird, wonderful digital hipsters are going to be around for a while.

Atlanta (TV)

Donald Glover is a prodigy. He’s involved in every facet of the media landscape, writing for “30 Rock,” starring in “Community,” rapping as Childish Gambino, and stealing the spotlight as Lando in the upcoming Han Solo film. On top of and maybe because of all of this, “Atlanta” is his magnum opus. Combining pieces of all Glover’s earlier work, “Atlanta” is an FX comedy that ostensibly chronicles the rise of Atlanta rapper Alfred “Paper Boi” Miles (played by Brian Tyree Henry) and his cousin/manager Earnest “Earn” Marks (played by Glover). I say ostensibly because this is how Glover has himself described the show, calling the comedic rapper storyline a “trojan horse” designed to get him a show on FX where he could tell whatever kinds of stories he wanted to. The horse definitely made it into the network, because “Atlanta” frequently and joyously tells all sorts of crazy stories. Rapidly oscillating between drama and comedy³, “Atlanta” takes on strained relationships, issues of race and incarceration, and the realities of the neverending hussle that Earn and his friends face. “Atlanta” is beautifully directed (mostly by music video director Hiro Murai), it’s got a phenomenal soundtrack, and the short, half-hour comedy format is the perfect length for its singularly punchy stories. The show tackles one issue an episode, and does so without staying around too long or getting preachy. Each episode features plenty of variety, with great performances from not only Glover and Henry, but also from Lakeith Stanfield and Zazie Beetz, who play Alfred’s conspiracy-theorist best friend Darius, and Earn’s pragmatic girlfriend Van respectively. The first season of “Atlanta” is streaming on Hulu, and the second season just started last week, making now the perfect time to hop on. Please enjoy this show!

Lady Bird (Film)

“Lady Bird” is the first film from writer/director Greta Gerwig, a coming of age story with familiar elements of family drama, children growing up to become their parents, and the end of high school leading into the beginning of college. What sets “Lady Bird” apart is its strong characterizations. The film is populated almost entirely with immediately recognizable caricatures: an overly-respectful/dorky Catholic theatre kid; a black-clad, heavily pierced vegan emo-couple; and a pseudo-philosophical “edgy” bad-boy rich kid. These figures spout line after line of quotable, quirky, almost Wes Anderson-esque dialogue that is clearly exaggerated, but at the same time feel like echoes of the sentiments and stories that I remember hearing all the time during high school. Somehow, “Lady Bird” is both ridiculous and real, and as the drama teacher in the film says, “it’s not important to be right, it’s important to be true.” The film certainly achieves this aim of being true, providing an extremely dense slice of life in Sacramento circa 2002. At its core, “Lady Bird” is pretty simple; there’s no villain, the conflict is straightforward, and the characters have clear motivations and arcs. Because of this, “Lady Bird” is able to focus on execution, and does so masterfully. This is a solid, meaningful film with a big heart, and you should watch it as soon as possible.⁴

Well, as always, that’s about all the time we’ve got for today. “A Wrinkle In Time” comes out this week, and it looks pretty neat, so maybe we’ll talk about that next week. If there’s something else you’d like me to cover, or if you have any questions, comments or concerns, shoot me an email. Thanks for reading, and have a great day!