Zeph's Bookish Rambles

Things that I've been reading/watching/listening to lately and have too much to say for a mastodon post but too little to say to talk about them on their own blog post.

Do Revenge

I listened to the Netflix suggestion immediately for a change, and I'm glad I did. This was so much fun and just a little cringe at times but overall very worth it.

Camila Mendes and Maya Hawke are both incredible and their characters are horrifically delightful and I want all the best for these awful, awful people. Also Sarah Michelle Gellar is in this and she's just GAH. I don't even have words, I just love her so much.

The cringe is mostly the way “woke” words are used, but I think even that is more because it's overlapping with other things I've seen recently. I love She-Hulk and I thought The Craft: Legacy was great, seeing girl-centric with all the focus on relationships and personal power makes me really happy. And the occasional nod to real-world patriarchal bullshit is nice and cathartic. But at a certain point it just feels obligatory and hollow and takes too much focus away from the feminine joy and power I want to see.

In this movie it's only ever used ironically. The cishet white boy villain uses performative wokeness as a weapon, the Latina main character only ever mentions that she's a woman of color (her words) when she's reminding people how bad it looks for them to target her. It's really gross. And I can't tell if it's supposed to be gross or if someone thought we needed this. Or whether it's supposed to be that they're handling it badly or that the writers think this is what social justice looks like.

Or maybe it's just what they think teenagers look like, regardless of what they're doing. It does have a general vibe of teens being awful because learning compassion takes time and experience and trauma, so maybe misusing this language is more of the same. I don't know, I don't get it, but I still really like the movie and it's only ever a few moments at a time.

Definitely worth a watch, and if you do let me know what you think please.

Cobra Kai

I can't anymore and that makes me sad.

I watched the first episode of the new season and I've liked this show a lot but it just keeps trying to ramp up the stakes and drama and I really need some fluff. Why can't it just be a fun show about kids learning karate and being friends?

Bloodthirst Hearts

This is a podcast/radio drama about a group of former close friends at a convention where there is also an actual embodiment of the monster from the series they're celebrating. I'm only a few episodes in but I love it so far. Friendship, fandom, and monsters! Yay!

Hocus Pocus Tarot

Does this count as media? Whatever, it's related to a movie, I'm counting it.

It's such a cute deck. But more than that, it's a really good deck and useful for thinking and learning about tarot. What drew me to tarot in the first place was the idea that all these archetypes match so well to so many stories, that we all go through these cycles and live these symbols over and over again. That made sense for the majors but I had difficulty with the minor arcana until someone explained to me that each of the suits is also telling their own story that you can follow from card to card.

And that sounds great but can be hard to see when you're just looking at individual cars, especially pip cards without a clear scene illustrating the ideas they represent. I worried about that with this deck since it is a pip deck, but I didn't need to worry.

I do recommend reading through the entire guide book before starting to play with the deck. All of the cards are shown in the book, so you can read the descriptions and follow the story they tell and then on each page look at the card next to its description to get an idea of why it was chosen and make that connection with the card.

It turns out that even if you're just looking at a number of candles, the candles are drawn differently on each card, you can see shadows or note the style and bring to mind what that represents in the larger story. I haven't needed to check the book since that first reading, and I think this is my new go-to recommendation for someone who wants to get started reading tarot.

What else am I doing?

I've kept up the daily tarot draw. Working from home makes this habit a lot easier to build since I don't have to depend on getting up early setting aside time for it. I just keep the deck at my work desk so while I'm waiting for my computer to boot up I can shuffle yesterday's card back into it and draw the new one. I display it right between my monitors so I'm looking at it all day long and it's working really well so far.

I also started a journaling practice so at the end of the day I can reflect on the card and what I think I need to learn from it. For awhile I'd been considering this but was trying to decide if I should start a new blog for it even though that caused some anxiety.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that doing very personal journaling online is actually terrible for me and probably part of why I'd abandoned various spiritual practices in the past decade or so. So now I'm journaling offline again, still with a computer because writing by hand hurts my hands and also results in entries I can't read, but just for myself. Much better solution.

I'm reading actual books again, too, just slowly. After watching a documentary about tree communication networks (“Intelligent Trees,” absolutely worth a watch) and being completely fascinated, I found a couple of books on the subject and I'm super excited about them. Suzanne Simard's “Finding the Mother Tree” is first and I'm not very far in it yet, but I'm enjoying it and expect to keep reading.

I've also been listening to Kiki's Delivery Service when I need a narrative to follow to keep my mind focused at work. That hasn't been so much of a problem lately so it's going slow, I've still got about an hour left in the book after several months. But I do want to save it for when I need it since I know it works so well, so that might take awhile.

Any thoughts or recommendations? Let me know!