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October 2026 media

• The Silmarillion: I’ve been following along with Shelved by Genre’s Tolkien unit all year, which has been pretty breezy overall; this is not my first reread of The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, so I knew what to expect there. I’d never made it through The Silmarillion before, though, and were it not for the podcast I suspect I would have abandoned it again. There are islands of good stuff in here, but they sit in a sea of duller material that might be better suited to an appendix. I’m glad I stuck it out, and it was fun to see ideas which were developed further in the main novels—the greed elicited by the Silmarils echoed by the One Ring, for instance, or Lúthien’s embrace of mortality presaging Arwen’s—but I think any revisiting I do will be more selective.

• Yellow Submarine: I had last seen bits of this movie while working on The Beatles: Rock Band more than fifteen years ago, but I’d never seen the entire thing. One gets the sense that the Beatles had some disdain for these sorts of projects, at least at the time; they don’t even voice their own characters here, and only make one brief appearance at the end in begrudging fulfillment of a contract. But maybe that distance is what gave the animators the freedom to go completely off the deep end. If you’re mainly familiar with Yellow Submarine through the illustrations, you’ll be surprised at how deeply strange it is in motion—it feels like no one is on-model for more than a couple of frames at a time. It’s “trippy” in a more fundamental way than that word usually intimates.

September 2026 media

Two of my most anticipated games of the year launched on the same day!

• Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave: This might be the first Switch 2 exclusive that’s solidly connected with me, after only receiving glancing blows from the likes of Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza. There are so many systems here that it’s easy to succumb to choice paralysis, and players with a completionist bent may chafe at how thin and repetitive some of the weekly tasks can be (even more than its predecessor Three Houses, in my opinion). Luckily for me, those foibles align well enough with my gaming temperament that I’ve been having a great time regardless. I still have dozens of hours ahead of me, though…

• Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter: I suspect the same temperament that makes Fortune’s Weave a good fit also explains my affinity for the Trails games. This is another remake of a game I’ve played twice before, but that hasn’t dampened my enthusiasm; I’m still excited every time I advance the plot and get my fresh batch of largely inconsequential NPC dialogue. And I’m especially glad that publisher GungHo took the criticisms on board and aligned their localization choices more closely with the XSEED and NISA releases. The only reason I haven’t completely rinsed this one yet is because I’ve given priority to Fire Emblem.

August 2026 media

• Genshin Impact version 7.0: The initial goal in Genshin’s story was to visit each of the world’s seven nations; with this patch, we’ve arrived at the seventh. There is no chance that the game will end anytime soon given its continued success, but it does feel as though the story is reaching a climax. Perhaps this version, or the next, will resemble Destiny 2’s The Final Shape in retrospect: a satisfying enough narrative conclusion to provide an offramp for long-time players.

• Hobonichi Techo 2027 Preview Forest: I’ve filled out a page of a Hobonichi planner every day for more than a decade now, and watching the new crop of covers and accessories roll in is still one of my favorite August traditions. Despite the increasing push towards big-name brand crossovers—this year features Hello Kitty, One Piece, and Moomin, among others—they’ve so far managed to evade the cynicism I feel towards similar trends in, say, Magic: The Gathering or Fortnite.

• Arsenic and Old Lace: Working through more classics! Luckily filling in gaps in the film canon is not as terrifying a prospect as with a longer-form medium like video games, even if those gaps are numerous. The only Capra I’d seen before now was It’s a Wonderful Life so I don’t have enough context for any far-reaching claims, but this was a good one. Cary Grant’s hapless overwhelm was great, but it was Josephine Hull and Jean Adair as the Brewster sisters who really killed it, so to speak.

July 2026 media

• Tokyo Xanadu: I’m continuing my Falcom run from last month by replaying this oddball in preparation for its sequel, Kyoto Xanadu. On paper it seems like a marriage of Falcom’s strengths; in practice the combat is not quite Ys-quality and the narrative not quite Trails-quality, and it’s all held back by a surprisingly mediocre localization. The bones are still good, but I suspect it’s for the best that Kyoto Xanadu is attempting something significantly different; Ys and Trails have already converged enough that there may not be room between them for a game like this.

• Fargo: Yes, the original Coen brothers film from 1996, not the television show! I hadn’t seen it since catching bits and pieces on TV as a kid, so all I had were hazy memories of specific scenes. (The wood chipper scene is admittedly hard to forget.) Turns out it’s still good! Macy and McDormand are both tremendous, there’s a steady stream of Coen-brand jokes and other slapstick nonsense, and it’s fun to bask in the accents and the “Minnesota nice” vibes. I’m not surprised that they wanted to do more with the setting, even years later and with different characters; it feels like a rich vein.

June 2026 media

• The month of Ys: I’ve been gradually picking through my backlog of unplayed or unfinished titles from Nihon Falcom’s Ys series, and this month I got into a groove and hammered through four games in a row (!) to complete the set. Based on my rough sense of fandom preferences I think I’m lower on The Oath in Felghana and higher on The Ark of Napishtim than average. All have their sharp edges, and none of them reach the heights of my favorite Trails games, but I’ve broadly had a good time. I’ve actually rolled straight into replaying Ys VIII, still my favorite in the series (perhaps because it’s the most Trails-like), so maybe the month of Ys is on its way to becoming the summer of Ys.

• Will There Ever Be Another You: Man, no one writes like Patricia Lockwood. Following on from 2021’s already enigmatic No One Is Talking About This, an autofictional account of internet poisoning and grief, this sequel is even harder to pin down. I suppose you’d say it’s broadly about long COVID: the protagonist becomes ill in the opening scenes, and the structure of the book begins to unravel almost immediately. From then on, you’re in brain fog territory: confusion, murky insights, borderline incoherence. (“I wrote it insane and edited it sane,” Lockwood said in a New Yorker profile last year.) The effect is like catching glimpses of an oil painting through the dangling bits of its torn canvas.