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They Are Still Being Shaken This Morning: This is a goofy teen romance manga series with one of my favorite twists of all time: the point-of-view characters are not the two naive high schoolers crushing on each other, but three strangers who ride the same morning train as them and obsessively dissect their progress in the group chat. It’s an absolute delight and I’m so glad it was picked up for an official localization, which just began this month. I only wish they had done something a bit less literal with that title; maybe it sounds good in Japanese but it’s a whole lot of nothing in English, and I suspect a lot of potential fans will pass over it as a result.

Framing Nature: Gardens and Imagination: Another special exhibit at the MFA Boston, about gardens this time. In addition to seeing some of the usual MFA favorites in a new context—artists like Monet, Sargent, and Hokusai, who are well-represented in the collection—I enjoyed being surprised by some of this exhibit’s showstoppers, like the Qing dynasty landscape painting spread across a dozen hanging scrolls or the massive seventeen-foot Flemish tapestry. I’ve become much more of an art museum person over the past few years, and while I mostly enjoy revisiting favorite galleries and seeing the gradual tweaks over time, I’ve come to appreciate these temporary exhibits as well.

Xenoblade Chronicles X: This is the one Xenoblade I hadn’t touched yet, and I used the recent Switch 2 upgrade as an excuse to pull it out of the backlog. I’m dozens of hours in and still can’t quite decide how I feel about it! The evidence suggests I’m enjoying it well enough, but I can’t help but wish I liked it either more or less. If I liked it more, I’d feel better about the immense time commitment; if I liked it less, I might put it down in favor of something I’m not as ambivalent about. As it is, it’s just good enough for me to endure the joylessness of collecting n monster parts every so often. I may demote it to a back-burner game where I occasionally chip away at low-impact sidequests instead of the main thing I’m playing.

The Grand Budapest Hotel: Hey, you ever hear of this Wes Anderson guy? (I know, I’m late to the party here; I don’t watch a lot of movies.) What a ride! I’m almost afraid to make comparisons to other films for fear of sounding like that Boss Baby tweet, but it scratched a similar itch to O Brother, Where Art Thou? for me. I loved Fiennes as Gustave, and I could look at that hotel set forever. Great score from Alexandre Desplat as well. Will I be back for more? Sometimes I think “Maybe I’ll finally become a movie guy and watch through this director’s (or actor’s, or composer’s) filmography as an entry point,” and then I think “Well, I dunno; that’d take a long time,” and then I think “Wait a minute, I bet I spent more hours on video games this month than it would take to watch every movie that person has ever touched.”

The Legend of Heroes: Trails beyond the Horizon: We’ve enjoyed years of improbable wins in the overseas Trails fandom, from localizations of the niche spinoff titles to remakes with simultaneous worldwide release dates. Horizon, though, may represent the most improbable win of all: the international releases have somehow caught up to the Japanese ones. Nothing to sneeze at when we’ve been an entire decade behind at times! I’m loving the game itself, too—it’s an overindulgent mess but a wonderful one, like a sundae with too much hot fudge.

”The Lord of the Year” on Shelved by Genre: The literature podcast Shelved by Genre is talking through Tolkien for the entirety of 2026, from The Hobbit to The Silmarillion. It’s been a pleasure to read along thus far; the leisurely pace affords them time for taking long digressions or reading favorite passages aloud, and keeping up is a breeze. The premise of approaching the books as a “naive reader” is immediately stretched past the point of credulity, but I appreciate the approach—it’s refreshing to take the words at face value first and not lead with eyebrow-waggling allusions to what we know will come later.

The New Yorker at 100: A recent Netflix documentary made for the preeminent (or rather preëminent) magazine’s centennial. The New Yorker is a relic in many ways—some interviewees valiantly argue that it’s not entirely old-fashioned—though in a time of crumbling institutions and cynical brand cashouts that actually doesn’t seem so bad. I found myself envious of a world where a great reported piece John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” or Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” could drive the national conversation. Who could do that now? Hell, who else even employs this many fact-checkers and copyeditors anymore?

‌How a Game Lives: This coffee table book features transcripts of ten Jacob Geller video essays, thousands of words of annotations, and an afterward for each from a guest contributor. What a pleasure to experience these again in a new format! Something is definitely lost in translation without the usual audiovisual context, but Geller writes with enough clarity that it’s less than you might think. I also benefited from being forced to attend to the words on the page rather than half-watching a YouTube video while I eat a bowl of cereal or whatever. They’re worth devoting attention to!

Of Light and Air: Winslow Homer in Watercolor: This is the new special exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. I only knew a couple of Homer’s pieces from their appearance in the MFA’s regular galleries, and they never really spoke to me one way or the other—but after seeing the larger survey of his work here, I’m much higher on him. (I think it was a mix of getting more context on his work and learning that perhaps the paintings I was familiar with happened to be ones I liked less.) And hey, learning to love a new artist is exactly what I want from an exhibition!

‌A Mighty Wind: I like a Christopher Guest mockumentary, but I don’t know if this one has the juice. Maybe the folk music scene isn’t as ripe for parody as heavy metal or dog shows, as well-drawn as the featured acts are. Or maybe they just didn’t push the characters far enough: I found them almost too plausible, to the point that their foibles felt like affectations bolted on for laughs instead of believable extensions of their natures. I still enjoyed it, and the soundtrack is great, but I think it’s the weakest of the Guest films I’ve seen.