March 30th - April 5th 2026

TV

• One Piece Live-Action | Season 2 - Sans one episode, I loved season 2. It’s wholesome and referential, and having watched a few hundred episodes of the anime, it feels incredible to feel that payoff in a fraction of the time. I was explaining this to my Dad, but the simplicity of the narrative, the dialogue, and the insane mismatched fidelity of sets and acting is a benefit imo. It feels nice to see something so ridiculous and over-produced with the spirit and heart of a low-production YouTube video.

Movies

• Forbidden Fruits | | 2026 - Perhaps the worst movie I have ever seen in my life. They somehow setup the Millenial joke of it all, and then failed to execute on being in on said joke. The pacing, dialogue, and genre all change multiple times at odd, jarring moments. Characters are inconsistent - at one point a bimbo and the next emotionally intelligent. At no point is this move interesting. At not point does it say or do anything worthy of paying attention to. It’s as if they changed directors every 30-40 minutes. The actresses were acting their asses off, to give credit where credit is due, and the setting//setup had so much potential. This was so unbelievably cringe with its foot in the door of “we are using these cringe motifs to tell a funny slasher film with something subversive about Millenial cringe needing to die,” but instead, somehow, Sheryly Sandberg’s and leans into Millenial cringe. It’s embarrassing to like this movie, and yet most Letterbox’d reviews are positive. The only good character is Cherry because she represents the source of women’s power - the sexual control of men - and is punished repeatedly for it. The director and writers had a chance to have this as the lesson of the film, but instead we get an out-of-tone slasher death. Man that woman has amazing style and a fat ass - RIP.
• Blade Runner | Ridley Scott | 1982 - This movie slaps. It’s uncomfortable and slow. It’s gritty and unnerving. You feel dirty and exposed. You are brought into an intimacy and darkness of this cyberpunk future, one in which every is mega-scaled, yet every interaction feels even more vulnerable and exposed. The establishing shots and world-building are garbage, but the monologues and characters and most of the dialogue are more than passable. I don’t think this does anything revolutionary to the genre but Harrison Ford with a slutty little gun does tend to do it for me.

Music

• SOULSOUP | Official HIGE DANdism - A friend posted this band on Insta and, well, something good and something new!
• Wonder | Courtney Barnett - Whole album worth a listen to. Cozy with enough grit to feel some texture the whole way through.
• Dopamine | Robyn - Marathon-coded realness <3
• Crosseyes Critters | King Tuff - Whole album slaps, it’s giving 2026 RUSH.

Podcasts

• The Video Games Of Woke 2 (With Michael Hobbes) - Truly hilarious and inciteful the whole way through. From GamerGate to Looksmaxxing, this podcast really digs into some vidyagame history and was so so so entertaining!
• Becca Voelcker, “Land Cinema in an Age of Extraction” | New Books in Film - A fascinating and well-spoken take on politics, aesthetics, and impacts of environmentally-oriented cinema. Idk I really like her voice and she does double-time to explain most concepts that would otherwise be inaccessible.

News/Essays

• Top 10 Destiny Waifu’s: The objective and totally non biased list. - I can’t express how perfect this list is and I needed to do my civic duty to share across my infinitesimal slice of the internet.
• What are you running for? One cannot survive on The Aesthetic alone - I absolutely adore this article and completely disagree with about 90% of it. I’m working on a sort of companion piece//response to this type of argument about Marathon, but I think this perspective should be shared. Ideally some game mode will release for casuals and PVE folks, and that won’t be for me. The tl;dr of what I will write is that Marathon requires you to be better at the game and the progression system (for all of its flaws this author points out) does force you to be better at the game. Marathon is about game sense. If you succeed in the contracts, you will become a higher game sense players and it will become more fun, but you have to put in the hours. It may be the live-service of it all, but people don’t get pissed when it’s Dark Souls and I want to dig into that.