May 2022 media
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Any Austin: A YouTube channel about video games. Austin’s offhanded and deadpan delivery belies a sharp eye for interesting details and undervalued craft. I especially recommend the “Unremarkable and odd things you never looked at” and “Skybox Appreciation” series, though all of the recent stuff has been fun (there are also years of older videos that I haven’t tried).
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The Summer Game: I picked this up after the recent passing of Roger Angell, the writer known for his New Yorker essays on baseball. The Summer Game is the first collection of those essays, covering several seasons in the 60s and early 70s. It’s really tremendous stuff, though I’d only recommend it to baseball fans—there’s a lot of play-by-play recounting that will be dull or incomprehensible to laypeople.
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The Orange Years: A light, breezy documentary about the rise of the children’s TV channel Nickelodeon. I was only a casual Nick fan growing up but was still hit with waves of nostalgia watching this—interviews with familiar faces, snippets of theme songs lodged deep in my brain, sense memories of the smell and feel of Gak. A window to your childhood, if you’re of a certain age.