unfortunately, another week = another crashout. i have no heat tolerance and there was a fire nearby so i had to keep my windows shut for a day or two. i keep thinking that whatever depressive episode this is (though mind you, i have basically lifelong chronic depression, so any 'depressive episode' is just 'episode of my depression worsening considerably from its baseline'), it's over, but then it isn't over. i would like to apologise to david byrne, who made me feel extremely happy for two hours only for me to lie in bed on my phone for the entirety of the next day and then cry.
i'm not interested in hearing anything caroline calloway has to say, but after polyester covered her... uh... essay? thing? in their episode on our obsession with thinness in the age of glp-1s i found alright caroline calloway, i'll bite by katy allen and found this a much more productive read
i also read some reporting from the guardian about record numbers of arrests being made by ICE, which covers a concerning change in ICE tactics making it harder for volunteers to track and warn about their presence. this reporting was pretty bleak but i felt it was important to shine a light on this considering the new tactic seems to be trying to do this quietly and go under the radar. fuck ICE
the disturbing rise of ‘gooner’ assaults at dollar tree stores: ‘they find it funny to degrade women’ by andrew gumbel for the guardian. what, and i cannot stress this enough, the fuck is wrong with men.
frankenstein's gay creator: james whale, the queen of hollywood by matt baume. i knew very little of this so it was a fascinating watch and i was enraptured from start to finish. i heart learning new information
the worst team owner in fifa history: uday hussein part one and part two by behind the bastards
megumi yokota by casefile. the story wasn't what i expected, but ended up being particularly shocking as well as devastating. i cannot imagine the pain and suffering the yokota family must feel, especially being trapped in the torment of never fully knowing what happened 💔
this week, in a fit of depression-fueled doomscrolling, i became deeply deeply bored of scrolling through the same three social media apps on a loop and seeing nothing new but knew i could not tear myself away from my phone because i was in The Pit of Doom, and so i decided to play something that had been floating around my mind recently: yu-gi-oh.
not a good one, of course. heavens no! the good yu-gi-oh games (tragically few and far between, though i really wish they’d never stopped making games like the 5ds world championship ones because those slapped) are reserved for times when i am not in The Pit of Doom and can enjoy them. instead i opted for a particularly nostalgic throwback: yu-gi-oh gx: spirit caller. (i have vague memories of staying up later than usual when my mum was in the hospital, which happened with some regularity in my childhood, watching yu-gi-oh; as a child with an interest in boarding school and its dynamics, gx definitely sticks in my mind more than its predecessor, but i’m not sure if it’s because that was The New One at the time and so the one i saw more of).
is spirit caller good? well... it could be worse. it has a story, for one. sort of.
okay fine it’s not good. i got stuck in an immensely boring fifty round first duel and then the next day i was absolutely slaughtered by syrus truesdale’s autism-coded I Love Methods Of Transportation deck. the starter deck is an abomination and so criminally bad that i simply have no idea how my character ever made it to the elite dueling academy, not even to the Flop House.
still, i felt a hit of nostalgia as i traipse around the same five areas over and over looking for a duelist to beat me to smithereens while all the blue dorm people look down on me in disgust, and sometimes a bitch just wants to feel the heart of the cards.
(i also decided to start a playthrough of pokémon sun, and aside from my 3ds choosing this very time for the cover on the circle pad to come off, i am convinced that everybody is lying to me about pichu being encounterable. WHERE IS PICHU? WHERE IS PICHU? this is worse than trying to get that ralts in hoenn. wally has no idea how lucky he is.)
in terms of music, at some point i bought the entire bandcamp discography of louie zong and so i listened to it this week while reading to try and drown out the construction noises from next door. he's very prolific, so i sort of randomly picked out some albums, and i found myself enjoying more beats, birds, and wanderer