6-10 May 2024: Watched a ton of video essays in my backlog while finishing one of those diamond dot paintings:
I particularly enjoyed the video on imperialism in children's cartoons! Admittedly, the specifics have left my mind (that's what happens when you watch it at 5:00am), so I'll be watching it again soon, but I will be keeping it in mind as I start work on my Voltron "shrine" and during my rewatch of The Dragon Prince for writing purposes later this month.
29 April 2024: Started reading Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey. Because political intrigue fantasy novel with BDSM is exactly what I need to relax after finals. I'm only like 150 pages in, but this vaguely seems like it could possibly appeal to people who like A Song of Ice and Fire. Will possibly try to expand on that thought after I finish (ignore that I've only read A Game of Thrones).
17 April 2024: Started and finished reading How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagmatsu. I ended up using it for my literature and medicine class' final paper, but it wasn't a super interesting book to me. Some of the stories, like "Speak, Fetch, Say I Love You" stood out in their exploration of technology and grief, but at the same time, so many of the stories didn't fully explore elements that I wanted to know more about... I think the nature of the way capitalism exploits grief for profit in the novel could've offered so much more than it did, feeling more like a background prop than anything else. I think Nagamatsu was trying to focus on human relationships more than that side of it, but still T_T
sometime mid-April: Finished Beloved. I enjoy Morrison's writing, and am salty that my paper had to be so short and limited in scope—there's a lot of talk about in relation to gender and horror in the novel and I barely got to scratch the surface in studying it.
20 March 2024: Started playing Stardew Valley! I was a big Story of Seasons kid, so I'm excited to be playing another game of that style finally. Though, I'm not sure I'm going to get much done for the rest of the break.
18 March 2024: Started reading Beloved by Toni Morrison. I'm actually going to be writing a final paper about it in a class on speculative fiction, which isn't actually as weird as it sounds: while certain people may throw hissy fits about noting that "literary fiction" can follow conventions of "genre fiction," Beloved has many of the traits associated with the horror genre (the first one that comes to mind for most, I imagine, being the ghost and what she represents).