#ilcb

reading spent this afternoon finishing @finnlongman's the wolf and his king (excuse the tag!) and feeling so fulfilled and gratified by everything they chose to do with that retelling. i know and have taught the original marie de france lai a few times now, so a lot of my experience of reading was spent wondering 'okay but when is that going to happen? how are we going to do xyz??' and then being relieved with the way it turned out. i was so on edge for it to end...some other way, but then it ended like it does, which felt like a gift. lovely stuff. i spent the end of last week and some of saturday at the Big medievalist conference, and this was the cherry on top of an overall fulfilling week--i'm really pleased and proud to be around the people i am, who are doing and making and writing the beautiful things that they are.

also outside this afternoon i got to start chad harbach's the art of fielding, which will earn its own post when i've finished it and can place it alongside the other baseball novel i'm reading rn, but this is a note to say that at least the first five chapters have lived up to my loyalty in toting this hardcover book around for years looking for the right time to actually read it-- i laughed out loud with delight multiple times, like, at least four.

listening several new album drops that i'm excited about, the most recent being MUNA, but the most long-standing of the recent albums on repeat is of course florence + the machine.

obsessed with buzzkiller primarily for the melody and the lyrics, obsessed with old religion primarily for the bass line and the chorus. i only play certain albums and tracks on repeat, it's not typical for me (i found this out with the spotify anniversary data that let me know i'd listened to 30k individual songs since 2011, and none of them more than 100 times in total), so the fact that i have not moved on from these two is the height of complimentary.

watching i posted about this in the jh discord a while ago, but it's been a good few weeks of thoroughly enjoying my solo tv-watching endeavors (as opposed to the social tv which is mostly how i've been watching things this year). once i figured out that we did, in fact, have netflix access again, i started and very quickly finished the first season of how to get to heaven from belfast, thanks to the rec from @thehibernatinglentil and @yogurtforever. is it weird to say that one of my favorite parts of this show was its colors? the saturation, the way people were dressed and made-up, their title sequence-- extremely cool and good, as befits the premise. laughed out loud, figured a few things out along the way but also didn't guess everything correctly, i was moved, i was briefly scared, i had some questions, i'm intrigued for season two. loved the array of strange and out of control and imperfect and wonderful women in this show, almost as much as the accents. i saw a headline that said there weren't enough laughs, to which i would argue that there were the right amount for the story they were trying to tell, which yes, is darker than derry girls (and this was also a surprise to me at first). but you try and tell me robin and dara didn't make you cackle like, every other line.

playing i've made it to day fifty-something in blue prince, and have solved (as in, decoded) one of the big basic puzzles, figured out the parlor room and billiard room games, unlocked the orchard, the west path and outdoor room, and the gem mining, and made it down into the cliffside via the gas valve elevator thing. i seem to have missed some really really basic things? i have only managed to make one thing in the workshop so far...i need to get more creative with my items, or look up some item combos, though i'm proud of the way i did put together how to make and where to use the burning glass on my own. i've chatted a little with @blue--period about our triumphs and frustrations, and have begun taking offline notes to save @un-serial-writer's notifications (and so that i could draw lol).

shout out to the root cellar, a particular fave right now. opposite of a shout out to the gallery, where i am one out of four for the puzzles currently.

i will also note here for posterity that i made it past the silksong boss (the fourth chorus, please don't laugh) that had had me stuck for the past three months!

making did some fairly aggressive mending on a pair of old navy pants a few weeks ago, and they are newly ready for summer which makes life so much easier! removed a good few inches off of both legs, used this material as patches for the classic inner-thigh holes, bing bang boom.

cross-stitch progress report:

reading part of the reason i stalled out on these posts last year was that i had Many Book Thoughts and couldn't organize them / prioritize them / decide how to talk about what i had been reading constructively. i'm deciding not to worry about that right now! storygraph goal set at 50 books again this year, joined various challenges et cetera et cetera, but the first books i finished in 2026 were absolutely fluff. hello rachel reid. fascinating combination of 'this is better than i expected' and '...well okay. sure.'

listening to both of these as audiobooks was a Choice born of necessity, but i once i got over the narrator's chosen tone of sultry delivery, I didn't end up hating it (and when the audiobok for gamechanger was intolerable, iykyk, i ended up really mourning that). listened to a lot of tough guy on a plane, which given ryan's flying anxiety was a real trip. but i really genuinely liked tough guy, i liked ryan a lot and it made me really proud of toronto's gay village. anyone who has been following this blog this past few weeks can infer my general feelings on hr.

i am also putting in the time on a couple of project reads which i will report on in due course!

watching anyone who has been following this blog this past few weeks can infer that a lot of my watching activity this month has been heated rivalry. but! i have also been doing my due diligence into the precursors, i.e. other crave productions worked on by jacob tierney and prominently featuring hockey players-- which means finally putting in the time to watch shoresy and letterkenny.

i've known about letterkenny for years now, it's hard to move to ontario and not, but i'm glad i waited to watch it until living here long enough to Get It more. the release order is letterkenny, shoresy, and then heated rivalry, which is the exact opposite order in which i watched them, but viewing in reverse order made it so funny to see the shared DNA, to recognize repeated lines and repeated shots (yes there are repeated shots and it is so funny coming from hr to recognize the Iconic Shower Scene establishing butt shot in fucking letterkenny). anyway. thank god for can con.

Rolling Stone on Letterkenny, 2018:

This is a strange, simple, delightful show that kept surprising me throughout the two seasons available on Hulu. (Another three have premiered in Canada.) It’s spectacularly filthy (there’s a running gag where the hicks struggle to figure out whether one or more of their neighbors could have molested an ostrich) but also capable of startling sweetness towards all of its cartoonish characters (even the unapologetically kinky Pastor Glen, played with full gusto by Jacob Tierney).

Globe and Mail on Shoresy, 2022:

In the spirit of Letterkenny, the humour is funny, mad, droll, childish and spiky. Full of salty Canadian vernacular, it soars. There are more visual jokes than you might find in the average episode of Letterkenny, but the flavour is the familiar tone of boldly irreverent, and it is sometimes slashing satire with more puns than you can count. ... Shoresy, played by Keeso, joins the Sudbury Bulldogs of the Northern Ontario Senior Hockey Organization on a quest to never lose again. (Jared Keeso is executive producer, writer, star and creator and Jacob Tierney is executive producer and director) Shoresy simultaneously mocks and adores everything about hockey. It takes a wonderfully wacky approach to the game that overwhelms us at this time every year.

Plane movie and family viewing over the Dec '25 - Jan '26 holidays, a list for posterity:

Best in Show (2000) (unfinished)

Sinners (2025)

The Holdovers (2023) (unfinished)

Stand By Me (1986)

When Harry Met Sally (1989)

Sully (2016)

An Affair to Remember (1957)

Sleepless in Seattle (1993)

Wicked: For Good (2025)

Wake Up Dead Man (2025)

BBC Historic Farm series: Secrets of the Castle (2014) (eps 1-3)

listening i've been leaning into mitski's back catalogue. as i was explaining in a group chat not long ago, i've liked a lot of the big mitski songs for a long time, i'm not a monster, but i don't have a good sense of the deeper cuts, and i don't have my own personal faves that aren't everyone else's. i was introduced to mitski in 2014? 15? when a friend made me a playlist featuring 'strawberry blond,' which i tried not to read too much into at the time (as a defense mechanism), so that's the go-to.

playing housemate over the holidays obtained a nearly-new steam deck, so we have been taking turns with it and i can finally play silksong in something like the intended manner (my aged laptop keyboard + track pad was. not ideal). just this past sunday i locked fully in and got past the bell beast. there are few things in this world that approach the heightened consciousness (for me) of listening to an audiobook i'm halfway tuned out of, in a flow state, beating a hollow knight boss. so far silksong is promising much of the same, though i did die so so so much in the process. the audiobook is integral to the not getting frustrated and rage-quitting.

making made myself birthday cupcakes! arranged for a friend and myself to host a joint birthday paint night and brought home the painting!

reading just finished a reread of garth nix's sabriel, just in time for spooky season. this book fucked me up as a young reader, it was my first real brush with feeling drawn to something that also frightened me, i was mesmerized and also horrified, and i wanted to reread it now after a few decades to see what i might feel now. i was-- unsurprisingly, but interesting to me-- not as scared now, but i find that useful as a way of gauging how my tolerance for mounting tension / suspense / creeping horror has improved. i am even more fascinated by the magic system and the world-building as i was then. i have moved on eagerly to lirael and am now appreciating how different the two protagonists actually are (they were interchangeable, opportunities for projection, when i was 12), and how the second book adds this whole fun new dimension of the clayr and their glacier to the existing world. i may try to finish the main trilogy by halloween? and then my challenge will be to reread clariel, the prequel which disappointed me grievously in my later teens as having (i thought then) dumbed down the prose excessively, and see if i really think the tone is that different.

watching the most recent thing i watched, period? continuing gilmore girls rewatch with housemate G. (we've arrived in season seven, and i am now solely enjoying these if i'm playing a computer game or something at the same time. there are moments / single lines that still work for me, but the overall arc of the show is. you know.) the most recent thing i watched that is new or that i haven't talked about here yet? i think it might have been the vampire diaries, which i watched with @pep-squad-lizzie and @hematiterings a few weeks ago? which i will say, though not something i have sought out to watch on my own, did make for a very enjoyable viewing experience. i'm captivated mainly by watching it as, like, a time capsule and an anthropological study. what were we doing on tv in 2009, and why does it feel so familiar (i was there, gandalf) and so surprising at the same time (i was not paying attention). i feel this way about gilmore girls too, i hasten to add. but as someone who watched a lot of buffy at one point, but otherwise has stayed mostly out of the vampire media glut of the last two decades, i never know what to expect in this show. also why is young kirk from strange new worlds there.

listening i am gradually making the switch from spotify to tidal, as my student spotify is going to run out and also let's never give their ceo any more money if we can help it. tidal has immediately had better sound quality (not something i thought i wanted, but wow), and the interface for the phone app is very easy if you're used to spotify. i've moved over most of my playlists and am training the algorithm, which has been fascinating for the way it...actually incorporates old tracks that match my listening profile, if they're the best fit, rather than seeming to bury or ignore back catalogue / previous favorites in favor of the newest releases? wild. this is the first thing i think i have discovered using tidal's 'my mix' or whatever they call it, but i'm sure it will not be the last.

playing moar stardewwwww. i have purchased silksong but am saving it for a post-dissertation rainy day. i also had to make space on my hard drive so. one game at a time apparently. just married leah AT LAST random internet pic below but our wedding was beautiful it was spring and there were cherry blossoms and i was wearing earmuffs because i hadn't uhhh changed outfits or remembered that it was tomorrow.

making i finished the repair (such as it is) on my throw rug, and it has taken up a new location in my bedroom, where it will hopefully survive a little better and undergo less traffic / spills / etc than it did in the kitchen! pics to follow spot the big repaired patch

reading i find that i like having one long-term project read going which i can chip away at while alternating with lighter/faster/escapism/fantasy romps etc. i had two or three different candidates for 'project book' this spring and part of the problem has been that they're all libby holds, so i keep only getting so far with one before it's gone again (!) but i've made decent progress on this one: after getting started with the audio book of a different translation, my hold on the new katz translation of the brothers karamazov (many thanks to @witcheryen for the rec!) finally came in. loving the footnotes! i'm fifty-three-ish percent through and The Thing Just Happened which i will not describe because it is, notably, not described in the text (and also i managed to get this far in life without knowing What Happens, i guess i hadn't read a blurb or summary even a little? and i'm glad of it actually, it added to the sense of mounting suspense), but now we have a lot of book left to get through and i am Concerned about what happens next. i'm not at all sure what to make of the various personalities, including the titular family, but i want good things to happen for alyosha.

Now for the fun stuff. the opposite of a project read is something i dash through almost too quickly, excited to see what happens next at the expense of sometimes savoring every detail. for better or for worse, that's what happened with becky chambers' a psalm for the wildbuilt, which i got as an audiobook and devoured this weekend-- i started listening as i left the house to run errands, and then walked around my city neighborhood in an increasing daze of pleased wonder, buying cat food with only half my attention as i thought about listening for crickets, and making tea for anyone who might need an hour's break, and why having a Good Life can still leave you feeling tired when you wake up in the morning. once again, i didn't really know what to expect from this book-- i went into it thinking it was going to be one thing (i'd had the premise of the robots in the wild explained to me) but Sibling Dex and their character, storyline, and indeed the human society aspects of the world building were a total surprise. and a total gift. i had not expected...optimistic scifi. if anything, i had expected melancholy, or vaguely instructive scifi, based on what i thought i'd heard about it. i didn't expect, but it turns out i desperately needed, to meet splendid speckled mosscap.

watching along with the rest of the world, conclave, i guess. caught up on conclave a few weeks ago, again with @witcheryen (!), and then turned around and immediately watched it again with my housemate to watch him watch it. great flick, not what i was expecting at all based on the first five-ten minutes at least. spoilers for conclave i guess: it's not a murder mystery! the mystery of how the previous pope died isn't a mystery that needs to be solved. apparently. it also went by much faster, i thought they'd be in there for weeks, i thought we were in for a looong haul. big fan of what it actually is and what it actually said, though. i also am constitutionally unable to join in with everyone on here having wild conclave fandom fun, but i'm glad you are all having a nice time, carry on and god bless. check out this rad alternative poster i found by @mrtheodorepeng.

listening this is the category where i got stuck when drafting this post, because i feel like i've been cycling through several good things lately but without truly wanting to analyze / talk about any of them in quite the depth i ordinarily would here. woke up a few days ago already humming eliza rickman's cover of 'riches and wonders', which is a mountain goats track originally but which i have been enamoured by in this new guise. noteworthy: the strings richly chugging along with this very satisfying edge, her voice soaring in the third phrase of each verse, and the lines:

I am healthy, I am whole, but I have poor impulse control. and I want to go home. but I am home.

regularly return to angie mcmachon's 'serotonin' for all the obvious reasons. noteworthy: the subtle drums + bass in the background, leading to this gorgeous slow build, and the lines 'lost my sense of being an ocean' and 'to find my sistine chapel ceiling,' which both caught me off guard and hooked me to listen to this song again. and again. apparently it's in heartstopper??

oh yeah and i saw lucy dacus live last weekend with @cerebralsilhouettes ! pictures to follow

playing @spoonierbard and partner sat me down and coaxed / lightly coached / patiently enjoyed me playing through the first half-ish of undertale, more than a full decade after my cousin first bought it for me on steam. having been on tumblr for most of that time, i have picked up a thing or two, but it's funny to me the things that i didn't know or that the cultural osmosis didn't prepare me for at all! enjoyed this guy:

making started some seeds. they're all from at least 2020, and i'm not taking especially good care of them, so we'll see if anything results. the garden bed-bed (raised bed cobbled together during lockdown out of the assorted scraps of an ikea bed frame abandoned by a former roommate) needs some tlc before anything can be planted in it, e.g. there's a tree growing up through the middle of it that i'll need to dissuade, but at least i'll be mostly around this summer and able to do more active gardening than i did last year, hopefully.

reading pleasantly surprised this week by the first hundred pages or so of lev grossman's the bright sword, which is an arthurian novel that manages to do something creative and original (at least in the dialogue) while also clearly clearly being informed by / engaged with / delighted by the tropes and canon. palomides likens the round table to a zero, in the days of its post-grail quest decline, and someone else asks "what the fuck is a zero?" 10/10 joke. lovely. excited to see where this one goes, i think. also continued listening to the memory of souls audiobook while fighting for my life in hollow knight (see below), and to dip in and out of kaikeyi, which i must say i have a new appreciation for now that i think i understand what story it's retelling. i have so far not been spoiled for classic piece of ancient literature the ramayana, but there's enough foreshadowing in the book itself that i am assuming everything goes very very wrong sometime soon. the dialogue and honestly protagonist's narration here not as much to my liking, but i'm curious.

listening many a podcast, tom scott's lateral, qi's no such thing as a fish, just wrapped up the first season of friends at the table (autumn in hieron), dimension 20 (crown of candy), the adventure zone (currently abnimals). musically, shout-out to tumblr user calliopeprelude for this post which alerted me to the new lucy dacus singles, music video, and forthcoming album, which happens to drop on my self-imposed dissertation deadline-- so that countdown in spotify has a cool double-meaning!

watching discovered over christmas break that i've been sleeping on only murders in the building, so i'm enjoying that as a solo watch when i can. love the tone of this show. love the podcast in-jokes (you may be able to tell that i am, while not a true-crime fan, a real podcast aficionado. as they say), love the flavor of new york which is somehow both today and yesteryear, love the three main cast and especially love that it is willing to get surreal! and atmospheric! while also being imo extremely 'cozy' murder, in a way that you usually have to go to the bbc for.

i just think they're neat!

playing

i have mentioned before (i think) that i've made it to the white palace in hollow knight, which is a real lesson in humility rn. did i mention i finished pentiment at last? i had saved it for the end of the semester, after literally teaching a course on medieval books, and it seemed super fitting to be playing it during the christmas break since the ending chapter is conducted in winter, and there's a big christmas feast to bring the town together at the end. the garlands of greenery and cookies and special spiced drinks? what symmetry. i had. some thoughts about the resolution to the mystery, some of which have to do with the representation of medieval faith in modern media, but overall three big thumbs up and much love to everyone who put so much into this game.

and i love that they found a way to work in this song, which is another one of those details that resonated. [link to the game's version of in dulce jubilo, the christmas carol]

making

fallow week. mulling over ideas for a creative outing to celebrate my b-day? they're all expensive or badly timed or i don't love the image, but i haven't given up on finding one of those paint night things that might be fun. i've also meal prepped decently this week and last.

reading ann patchett's the dutch house was the first book i finished of 2025! read it in paperback for the first two thirds, then let tom hanks read me the last bit in the audiobook which was a treat. then this morning, while awake far too early (for the first and presumably only time this year), colson whitehead's the underground railroad. over break, finished and surprised myself by quite enjoying freya marske's swordcrossed (after all of the random research i've been having to do into the east anglian wool and textile trade in the 13th-15th centuries, i was hype for the Plot bits of this one almost more than the romance. also loved the worldbuilding, the guilds and their gods?? excuse me?) these authors have one thing in common, and it is that i like how they construct and string together a sentence. a single combination of two to three words, in any of their hands, will knock me flat! wishing i had examples to share here.

listening several playlists on repeat for work background and profit. shoutout though to julie odell's autumn eve (2022) which was a recent spot of fy recommendation and it is filling a very good niche where i don't have to pay too too much attention to the lyrics but it still energizes me. i have no track recommendations because i'm only listening to it en bloc.

also over the past monthish i did really fall hard and fast for epic: the musical, which energizes and delights me. i keep thinking that surely this time i'll have gotten used to it, but no. athena's arc + songs make me extremely emotional (it's her voice but like also). but i can't keep listening to it because the lyrics capture my attention and suck me in too much.

watching several things on the rotation right now, but last night i came home and pulled up an episode of psych. still working on the first watch through, i don't remember if i've brought it to the commonplace book yet but i think i probably have? this is in contrast to the gilmore girls rewatch i'm doing with my housemate, where i've seen it all and he's the one catching up. also this week we are resuming household Shōgun fINALLY YAAY we left on such a CLIFFHANGER (if you know you know)

playing i'm in the white palace in hollow knight! despite not having actually beaten the hollow knight yet. having fun in the meat grinder instead, if by 'fun' you mean consulting youtube tutorials. also, did you know you can get spiritfarer on your phone as a mobile game through nootflix?? the interface is a little weird-- i have only been able to jump down to the wandering merchant once, accidentally, and otherwise have splashed around in front and past and behind him, forever-- but now that i have a slightly better handle on the touchscreen controls it's very fluid and makes a lot of sense. i cannot play for very long at once (phone heats up) which is good because i can't get too absorbed in this game.

making i'll get back to you. on this one. made a huge diy marblerun puzzle with my dad over christmas (it was his present from me, which he had forgotten he'd asked for) and i caught the building things bug again bad. maybe now it's time to commit to the diy tiny room!

reading since i skipped doing one of these last week, both of my reading picks tonight are actually from a little while ago. both were so, so compelling, but for different reasons. one an award-winning piece of twentieth-century canadian literature set in 1970s india, the other a scandalous semi-autobiographical account of drinking, dating, and divorce in roaring twenties new york.

i think that drew me into both of these first was their dialogue-- both authors are so good at writing distinctly unique, distinctly not-what-i-usually-hear character dialogue, without it sounding at all affected. i got the feeling that both authors were working from life, describing societies they knew inside and out, and had observed intimately. so much detail about the, like, material and sensory details of these two different settings-- what everyone wore out to dinner in the twenties, and what they were eating and drinking; what shopping for a chicken or going to the doctor was like in mid-seventies bombay, what school was like, how people were discussing the government... beyond that, these two feel so dissimilar that comparing them is going to do a disservice to both. though i guess both have, at different points in their histories, been the subject of some scandal. listening shout out to my 'for you' playlist last week, which was one hit after another-- but opened with this, and introduced me to rachel chinouriri! whose sound i really like. that first slow build up to the guitar bursting in? got my attention immediately. the lyrics to this one are, admittedly, wild to be singing while trying to write job apps, but it's melancholy in enough of an upbeat way that it almost feels calming?

No point in trying to prove yourself to them Why question who you are from deep within? No matter what, your youth is gonna end My god it’s sinking in There’s no point in anything

the whole album goes down so smooth, and is rewarding repeat listens. i love her voice. i love how late i am to discovering her, since she's opening for sabrina carpenter now apparently.

watching no shogun time this week, but the gang and i sat down to experience the first episode of a new series, which i cannot stop thinking about. imagine like. australian broadchurch, but only one of the main characters and all the victims are actually in a bleak crime drama, and every other character is doing like parks & rec. also it's extremely gay. and rude. and funny. favorite characters are dulcie, and sven the guy who keeps asking who he can delegate stuff to. also dulcie's wife, who i'm so worried about the world crushing somehow, she seems too optimistic to survive undamaged!

playing did i mention finishing act ii of pentiment? now that @blue--period is playing it, i realized i wanted to get further and be able to discuss. i was devastated by the end of act i, but the end of act ii feels... bleak in a way i wasn't expecting, at all. i'm already planning a second play-through using my other save file, since i failed a bunch of checks in act ii (a few i think based on the background i had chosen, aggravating since it was helpful in other ways) and no spoilers, but in other ways, i failed by succeeding. saving act iii for now, since i have a busy next couple of weeks. much love to caspar, my best boy.

making fallow week. check back soon for experiments with medieval ink making, though!! i have sourced ingredients, and parchment scraps, from kind friends and colleagues who won't ask me to pay for them, and will shortly be (i hope) benefiting from someone else's paper-making budget. stay tuned.

reading getting so so close to the end of the blacktongue thief by christopher buehlman, and it’s not like I’m not enjoying it — I am, I am— but between the length of time I have to wait each time my libby hold expires, it’s been months and I’m eager to know how things end. i like the narrative voice, and the many details that smack of not medieval but early modern europe— it gives strong post-Thirty Years War vibes, to me. there’s a gruesomeness which seems not out of place, adds to the atmosphere, but also has prepared me for things to End Badly. but since i think this is the first book in a series, I don’t expect there to be any resolution yet.

watching finished season 2 of the bear. I genuinely loved that last episode, so much, the walk-in thing felt so appropriate and the fact that things did go wrong but not insurmountably, until that very last. fucking. minute. and of course it couldn’t have gone any other way but. i can’t decide if it feels too contrived.

listening started d20’s first season of misfits and magic today, to get ready for the new one! i am a little torn at the moment because i have said before that media that is explicitly, openly trying to do harry potter But Not, and Better usually annoys me (it’s almost always so smug), and i felt the stirrings of that here too, but i have a deep well of good will for aabria and everyone at the table, and i’m open to them using this foundation as a way to say something new.

playing dipped back in to Pentiment, which goes a lot faster when i’m just playing alone (but isn’t quiet as fun—clicking around trying to find clues when it’s just you feels like it drags a little more, especially when you’re moving around the map a lot). there’s a lot more game here than i thought, which is nice. pictured: local villagers in this act of the game enjoying a merry st john’s eve bonfire.

making a dear friend gave me an origami kit a little while ago, based on the idea of my artificer d&d character tinkering with it, so: crane. turns out focusing on something delicate and precise and non-screen based is good for my stress levels, who could have predicted. hoping this leads me down a slippery slope of actually using the many other delightful craft project materials i have either collected or been given.

working on many hours this week spent on getting my course set up, with website pages, the first few assignments, the first few weeks of readings, oh and leading the first class. I barely had slides and talking points ready for after we got through the syllabus, and i can tell that, as much as i don’t want this to be a lecture course, I’m going to feel like this deep insecurity unless i make slides every week. hopefully the library visits and field trips and hands on workshops and students leading discussion will help abate that somewhat, but i still need to find ways to plan out my talking points and exercises.