Pop culture round-up!
I just found out we're going back to Blue Cross for our health insurance next year. So if the consensus is that my gallbladder needs to come out, I'm going to try to wait until January, unless the doctor says it's urgent. I hate the insurance we have now. Like, I'm in the Aetna PPO, but I'm not insured with Aetna, but something called Trustmark, which somehow administers all of the different insurance policies we're offered through work--the medical, dental, vision, long- and short-term disability, etc. It's confusing and not actually helpful and certainly doesn't save anyone money.
I had an Egg McMuffin for breakfast and only got a faint twinge of pain, so I'm hoping it stays at a background level for now. If it starts hurting as bad as it did on Sunday and Monday with any sort of regularity, I'm not sure I'll be able to white-knuckle my way through that for another 2 months.
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Books:
Just Like Home, Sarah Gailey
The things she wanted were never within reach. Her father’s knowledge and her mother’s love, friendship and romance and a decent job that would stick, the thing beneath her bed and the thing that clung to the underside of her brain like a spider. She could not summon any of it.
This was a pretty good spooky season read, a weird and unconventional haunted house story that had a twist I genuinely did not see coming.
Things in Jars, Jess Kidd
Change is always drawing near. Innovation waits like an offstage actor, primed and ready in the wings, biting its lip and grinning.
I've never read anything by Kidd, but a critic once called her "Gabriel García Márquez meets The Pogues". This was a sort of Lovecraftian/Gothic horror novel, but with more humor than those genres usually have. I'd definitely read more of her work.
A Dangerous Business, Jane Smiley
Perhaps this had always been true, too-dread faded away as she proceeded, step by step, toward the very thing she dreaded.
I liked this story, which was about sex workers in 1850s California trying to find out who's murdering young women, but it felt kind of thin and ended sort of abruptly. It almost felt more like a rough draft of a book.
Number Go Up, Zeke Faux; Easy Money, Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman
Then there were the programmers, who were so caught up with their clever ideas about new things to do inside the crypto world that they never paused to think about whether the technology did anything useful.
I'm putting these together because they're both about cryptocurrency with a specific focus on FTX/Sam Bankman-Fried (the quote is from Number Go Up). They're both good, but I'd have to give the edge to Number Go Up, because it's written in a sort of gonzo journalism style that is very funny.
Although there's also just something inherently funny about Ben McKenzie writing a crypto skeptic book, probably because it makes me think of this classic moment from The OC:
You know how I know cryptocurrency is a scam? Because it's been around for going on 30 years (as a concept if not an actuality, anyway), and still no one has been able to come up with anything you can actually do with it. I can't walk into my grocery store and pay for food with it, or use it at the gas pump, or pay my phone bill or Netflix subscription with it. Uh, I could buy drugs on the dark web with it, I guess. Or pay the grifters who are always texting threats to hack my phone and release my "nudes" (LMAO).
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Teevee:
I hadn't thought of the term "Eurotrash" in years until I saw this Netflix series.
Tick tock, it's cult o'clock!
New season of For All Mankind! Class warfare on Mars!! Joel Kinnaman's old age makeup looks pretty bad!
I had an Egg McMuffin for breakfast and only got a faint twinge of pain, so I'm hoping it stays at a background level for now. If it starts hurting as bad as it did on Sunday and Monday with any sort of regularity, I'm not sure I'll be able to white-knuckle my way through that for another 2 months.
~~~~~~~~~~
Books:
Just Like Home, Sarah Gailey
The things she wanted were never within reach. Her father’s knowledge and her mother’s love, friendship and romance and a decent job that would stick, the thing beneath her bed and the thing that clung to the underside of her brain like a spider. She could not summon any of it.
This was a pretty good spooky season read, a weird and unconventional haunted house story that had a twist I genuinely did not see coming.
Things in Jars, Jess Kidd
Change is always drawing near. Innovation waits like an offstage actor, primed and ready in the wings, biting its lip and grinning.
I've never read anything by Kidd, but a critic once called her "Gabriel García Márquez meets The Pogues". This was a sort of Lovecraftian/Gothic horror novel, but with more humor than those genres usually have. I'd definitely read more of her work.
A Dangerous Business, Jane Smiley
Perhaps this had always been true, too-dread faded away as she proceeded, step by step, toward the very thing she dreaded.
I liked this story, which was about sex workers in 1850s California trying to find out who's murdering young women, but it felt kind of thin and ended sort of abruptly. It almost felt more like a rough draft of a book.
Number Go Up, Zeke Faux; Easy Money, Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman
Then there were the programmers, who were so caught up with their clever ideas about new things to do inside the crypto world that they never paused to think about whether the technology did anything useful.
I'm putting these together because they're both about cryptocurrency with a specific focus on FTX/Sam Bankman-Fried (the quote is from Number Go Up). They're both good, but I'd have to give the edge to Number Go Up, because it's written in a sort of gonzo journalism style that is very funny.
Although there's also just something inherently funny about Ben McKenzie writing a crypto skeptic book, probably because it makes me think of this classic moment from The OC:
You know how I know cryptocurrency is a scam? Because it's been around for going on 30 years (as a concept if not an actuality, anyway), and still no one has been able to come up with anything you can actually do with it. I can't walk into my grocery store and pay for food with it, or use it at the gas pump, or pay my phone bill or Netflix subscription with it. Uh, I could buy drugs on the dark web with it, I guess. Or pay the grifters who are always texting threats to hack my phone and release my "nudes" (LMAO).
~~~~~~~~~~
Teevee:
I hadn't thought of the term "Eurotrash" in years until I saw this Netflix series.
Click to viewTick tock, it's cult o'clock!
New season of For All Mankind! Class warfare on Mars!! Joel Kinnaman's old age makeup looks pretty bad!