January 2025 media
-
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.