Goodbye July
My month in media
Family of origin
I sincerely apologize for a) linking to The Bad Place and b) referencing this Chris Fleming clip in this newsletter four times now, but I just need to quote this section:
In 2014, I was home visiting my family for, like, the holidays, and I was talking to my mom. I was trying to be open about how I was feeling incredibly anxious, and I was incredibly depressed, and I was just really going through it. And then I went upstairs.
And fifteen minutes later my mom called up, and she was like, “Chris? Are you feeling better?”
Anyway, I was visiting my family this week and I told my mother that I had started physical therapy for a problem I’ve had with my foot for almost four years now.
Later that day she said, “So are the physical therapy exercises helping? Does your foot feel better?”
I said, “Well. It’s been three days.”
Family of choice
My husband and daughter (G) drove me home from my mother’s and when I got in the car, G said, “Mama, what was that band you were playing on the way to Grandma’s?”
I said, “The Illuminati Hotties!”
My husband said, “So G, the name of the band is funny because the Illuminati are…”
“I know who the Illuminati are, Dad.”
I said, “Of course you do,” as he said, “Wait, you know who the Illuminati are?”
Then my husband and I bickered over how well-known the Illuminati were until our child, a human created from our combined DNA,1 cut in with, “I guess some people don’t know who the illuminati are. But if you’ve spent, like, fifteen minutes on the internet you do.”
Boldly, etc.
Husband and I stole his father’s Paramount+ login and are catching up on the newer Star Trek Properties. We started with Lower Decks (A+, highly recommended) and moved on to Strange New Worlds.2
SNW is a very traditional ST series, in that it’s formulaic, ham-fisted, and anachronistic in ways both comforting and thought-provoking. It’s competent, which sounds like damning with faint praise, but after a few decades of hit-or-miss “gritty” Star Trek, some good old fashioned tropes and moralizing are extremely welcome.
I especially appreciate that the (many!) women and POC in the main cast have been fleshed out in ways that make them interesting and distinct from each other. I thought Nurse Chapel would be my favorite, and while I do appreciate the deepening of her character versus TOS, it turns out my heart belongs to La’an Noonien Singh. La’an, the Enterprise’s chief of security, is blunt, stoic, traumatized, and still somehow super cute? IDK, man. I just love me an angry girlie.
And while I’m finding Chapel’s romance with Spock to be a waste of time and plot, I am all in on La’an’s (probably) doomed flirtation with young Jim Kirk. But my least favorite romance has to be Captain Pike and Captain Batel, a character the writers care about so little that they haven’t bothered to give her a first name3. I’m not sure Pike knows what it is, to be honest.
Obviously you can tell that I’m more interested in the interpersonal stuff than, like, the boldly going, but that’s okay: my husband pays enough attention to the plot for both of us. He loves to pause an episode and tell me about a call-back to something that happened in TNG, or when a music cue from TOS is being reused, or how a Klingon drink that’s mentioned in passing is really popular on DS9…
I mostly nod along and wonder why, if they have the money for all this alien makeup, they can’t get Chapel a better wig.
Where I am
I don’t really want to deactivate4 my Twitter, but it’s looking increasingly clear that I’ll have to. I’m going to try to wait until everyone who wants to re-follow me has made it to Bluesky, where I am posted up as daisyrazor@bsky.social. I have already made a pledge to be hornier on main there than I was on Twitter, if that is any sort of incentive for you to follow.
Speaking of horny, have a Sexy Bad Breakup list I created for a character instead of, you know, actually writing:
Bear break
Otis, the Old King, Fat Bear Emeritus, and Patron Bear of Joint Pain and Unexplained Aches, has appeared at Alaska’s Brooks Falls. Otis is in his late 20s, which is “explaining what a mimeograph machine was” age in bear years.
Did I cry a little bit when I saw that Otis had returned? None of your business.5 But Otis is living proof that it’s better to show up late than to not show up at all, and that working smarter not harder is a viable and successful long-term strategy. Let’s all be like Otis this week and wait for the (metaphorical) salmon to come to us instead of (metaphorically) chasing after them.
Family of Choice, pt. 2
Last weekend, I saw my best friend in person for the first time in eight years. We cooked, shopped, ate, and caught up, and then I gave her my Hyperfixation Pitch for Måneskin (the band that has somehow6 had a stranglehold on me for the past two years), their friends and family, and all of their various romances and scandals. I’m considering writing the whole thing out for you guys, but here is a typically unhinged excerpt:
“Bidet and Ziggy are their cats, and there’s a popsicle in the photo because she was doing sponcon for Magnum bars.”
“Oh, of course.”
Let’s finish things up with some pretty pictures of them7:
and, holy shit, is it obvious
He wanted to watch Picard S3, but I overruled him in favor of Hot People In Space.
after FOUR appearances!
my brain wanted me to write “discontinue”
I totally did.
It’s because they’re hot, young, and doing fun sexy things. I enjoy living vicariously through them.
The band, not the cats. Sorry.