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Side Story: A new podcast from the Friends at the Table folks about video games. The list of people who could get me to add another video game podcast to the pile at this point is short, but Austin Walker is at the top. It’s great to have him back on that beat regularly after years of sporadic guest appearances during the post-Waypoint era. And I’ve really enjoyed the rest of the cast as well! This is already a favorite listen just three episodes in. It might even finally pull me into the mainline Friends at the Table show.

Luminescent Creatures World Tour: If money were no object, I would travel to see every Ichiko Aoba concert like a Deadhead; as it is I still go to as many as I can manage, which will be seven by the end of the year. In addition to the typical one-woman shows, some dates on this tour feature a string quintet and piano to support the more densely-arranged songs (“Luciférine,” say). I think I still prefer the former type—in particular, there’s more variety in the setlists when she doesn’t have to restrict herself to songs the ensemble has learned—but both have been a lot of fun.

Summer of Soul: A music documentary about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, an event that I admit I had no idea about. It features a fun mix of archival footage (which sat undiscovered for decades!) and present-day interviews with participants and attendees. Seeing everyone’s faces light up as they relive lost moments from their youth is really something else. And, of course, there are the performances themselves: Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, B.B. King, Sly and the Family Stone, and on and on. Great stuff.

The New York Game: A history of baseball and New York City, starting with the sport’s murky origins and ending in 1945, written by Kevin Baker. This was a feel-good pick to get myself in the mood for Opening Day, and it worked—it’s chock full of rollicking old-timey baseball lore, often starring players with improbable names—but its more sober retellings of New York history are worthwhile as well. The concluding “bibliographical essay” suggests that Baker is planning a second volume, which is good news—not just because I enjoyed this first one, but also because its abrupt end comes before so many important New York baseball moments: Robinson breaking the color line, the Dodgers and Giants going west, the ’69 Mets, and so on.

Thank You Very Much: A documentary about comedian provocateur Andy Kaufman. I enjoyed it, though I would bet its appeal is U-shaped: those who only have a passing familiarity with Kaufman (like me) will learn a lot, and hardcore fans will be attracted by fresh interview segments and never-before-seen archival footage, but folks somewhere in the middle will find it a bit cloying. It also can’t resist attempting to be tidy. Trying to pin down “the real person” with a documentary is fraught in the best of circumstances, but with a personality as diffuse as Kaufman’s it feels like an exercise in futility. (I’m not convinced we can attribute his career to the time when his parents did not explain his grandfather’s death when he was a child, for instance.) But I did still enjoy it!

Luminescent Creatures: This is Ichiko Aoba’s latest album, just released today—though I was very lucky and got a copy in November due to a clerical error on Bandcamp. It’s incredible stuff. The prior album, Windswept Adan, was something of a sea change for Aoba; after years of records minimalist arrangements, often just single-tracked guitar and vocals, the sonic landscape suddenly bloomed with strings and flutes and chimes. Luminescent Creatures occupies a broadly similar space, though it expands in both directions—there are more old-school stripped-down guitar-and-vocals tracks, but also some even more ambitious arrangements. (In reductive video game terms, maybe it’s the Tears of the Kingdom to Adan’s Breath of the Wild.) I haven’t stopped listening for months, and I can’t wait to see it performed live this spring.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak II: To be honest, 25+ hours in I think this is one of the weaker games in the series. Splitting the party, while understandable, means the plot moves at a snail’s pace even by Trails standards. Situating a large chunk of the combat in another procedurally-generated Reverie Corridor-esque dungeon makes it feel like busywork, and prevents the world from really cohering into anything. And the story is really spinning its wheels—after collecting seven out of eight MacGuffins in the first game, the last one is revealed to have been split into pieces to drive the plot here in the second game. (Maybe the last piece will itself split into pieces, after Zeno’s paradox.) All that said, a mediocre Trails is still a game of the year candidate for me, and I’m enjoying myself despite everything.

Natural Magic: This is an ambitious and multivalent book. It’s primarily an interleaved biography of both Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin, analyzing their lives and work and illuminating various subtle and oblique connections between them. At the same time, it traces nineteenth-century science’s evolving relationship to art, nature, aesthetics, and gender, complicating common modern-day understandings of who its two subjects really were. I was as impressed by the scope of the project as I was by the project itself. Recommended if you like basically any form of nonfiction!

Hello Kitty Island Adventure: Recently freed from its mobile prison and released on Switch and Steam, this is essentially an Animal Crossing-style game in a Sanrio wrapper. It reminds me most of Pocket Camp specifically—and emulates that game’s grind more than I’d like—but thanks to its Apple Arcade heritage it’s at least blessedly free of microtranscations. I’ll likely never disappear into one of these as with New Horizons during the height of the pandemic, but I’m happy to dip into one now and then on the side—at least until Animal Crossing inevitably comes roaring back on the Switch 2.

The Cat Returns: It probably doesn’t take an especially trenchant analysis to figure out why I might be retreating into simple, comfortable fare at the moment, but it’s doing the job. Not much to say about this one specifically, but it was a fun watch! I even thought the English dub was well done. Even though I’ve really enjoyed the dozen or so Studio Ghibli films I’ve seen, I watch so few movies overall that it’s still taking me forever to work through the rest. I expect I might pick off a couple more over the coming months, though I’ll probably continue to sidestep, say, Grave of the Fireflies for now.

Infinity Nikki: An elevator pitch for Infinity Nikki might be: a Genshin Impact-style open-world game with a focus on fashion and platforming. I was unprepared for how much it would hook me! It gradually reveals itself to have an interminable endgame grind, and it doesn’t approach the polish of something like Genshin yet—I’ve rarely seen a game with such frequent hotfixes—but I’ve been having a great time so far despite everything. If you’re not susceptible to predatory gacha mechanics, give it a whirl.

Dragon Quest XI: I finally caved and bought a Steam Deck, and for some reason this is the game I was most excited to play on it. I had played through nearly half of Dragon Quest XI on the PS4 years ago, tried a fresh start on PC once that fizzled out, and then restarted it again this month with the benefit of my new portable option. Turns out I can still get into a bog-standard turn-based RPG with no trouble! I’m really curious what’ll happen with the next iteration—there are vanishingly few series that still play this way.

Casual Viewing: This essay by Will Tavlin is the best thing I read all month. It’s about the rise of Netflix and the subsequent dissolution of its artistic ambitions, so its focus is film and television—though it’s easy to find parallels with any medium you’d care to name. Reading it gave me one of those anxious twinges as I thought about how rotten the entire creative sphere feels today, its stability and vitality endangered by its utter dependence on giant tech companies. Increasingly, the threat feels existential.