Guys, the trailer for Baby Driver is out.
Baby Driver, guys.
Guys… Baby Driver.
That means we actually get a new Edgar Wright movie soon.
I really needed this.
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fight, and… tie. [a month of happy.]
I know I already included the Sounders, but this stolen road point when the team had been down 2-0 after 80 minutes is too good to skip.
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chance the rapper. [a month of happy.]
Chance the Rapper — aka Lil Chano from 79th, aka Chancellor Johnathan Bennett — may just be the epitome of the ‘month of happy’ converted into human form.
I mean, has anyone seen any definitive scientific proof that Chance the Rapper isn’t happiness personified?
The guy is fucking delightful.
A self-proclaimed man-child, he is infectiously joyful. I have to assume he’s that guy at the party who gets everyone dancing and smiling, but without being annoying about it.
Seriously, what’s not to love. He gives away all of his music, donated $1 million to Chicago Public Schools because politicians were being dicks about it, regularly talks adoringly in interviews about his dad and his daughter, and loves Kanye while also revealing that the stuff ‘Ye says in private is even crazier than what he says in public, which is hilarious.
I love Chance the Rapper. Everyone should. I genuinely think he may become president someday.
Exhibit A, just watch one of his adorable Kit Kat commericals.
Exhibit B, his awesome single-take music video for Sunday Candy, a song about his grandma.
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descender. [a month of happy.]
Did you enjoy Westworld? Firefly? Battlestar Galactica? Logan? Then Descender is right for you. Hell, even if you didn’t enjoy any of those things, you should still check out Descender.
In the distant future, a technologically advanced civilization of humans and aliens relies heavily on the existence of artificially intelligent androids.
Planet sized robots called Harvesters appear mysteriously and launch a devastating attack on humanity before disappearing just as mysteriously.
As humans are wont to do, the response is the attempted and ongoing genocide of all artificial life from the universe.
Nearly a decade later, Tim-21 reawakens. A young companion android, Tim-21 wakes up alone on an abandoned mining colony with no idea what happened. He sets off with his robot dog Bandit and a collection of untrustworthy allies to find his human brother, Andy.
Descender is a story teeming with energy and life, full of aliens, bounty hunters, android rebels, a cult of human-robot hybrids and all sorts of SF fun. A little bit of a western, a large bit of a space opera, and every bit enjoyable.
Like all the best SF, the series touches on big concepts, including the nature of life, social structures, war, prejudice, morality, and self-awareness, just to name a few.
I love everything about this series: the story, the worldbuilding, the way it arranges familiar tropes and conventions in an exciting way.
My absolute favorite thing is Dustin Nguyen’s watercolor illustrations. The book is beautiful, and his style is so singular within the comics and graphic novels I’ve read. As a relative novice to the current comics scene, there aren’t too many comic artists who have captured my attention so strongly that I will start finding their work — regardless of what it is — to read it. Nguyen is immediately one of those artists for me.
Sony bought the rights last year, so look for a film, a series, or both on the horizon.
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mitski. [a month of happy.]
Of all the things and people I plan to include this month, none are more appropriate for International Women’s Day than Mitski.
Simply put, she is amazing.
I listened to her quite a lot last year, and my love only continues to grow.
As I previously wrote about Puberty 2: “Her album about struggling to find identity and happiness in the midst of profound anxiety, angst and depression obviously means very different things for her than it does for me, and yet she created this perfect sonic expression of that struggle that feels true to me.”
She’s my favorite songwriter right now. Her lyrics are strong and vulnerable, full of all the paradoxical juxtapositions that roil inside our hearts. Her songs are confident and fearful, hard and soft, tough and anxious. The work is rich with emotional depth, the kind that is so particular to her that it somehow impossibly feels particular to me, too.
Just the lyrics would be enough, but then she combines it with this remarkable sound, which is so full of strength and rage and tenderness and desperation.
I think the reason for the living death or sleepwalking I experience much of the time is that I try to uncomplicate myself, try to be only one or two things. I try to be simple and easy. Mitski reminds me to be all of the things. Her music helps me give myself that mental permission to explode in all of the different directions in which my heart pulls me.
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simon stålenhag. [a month of happy.]
Yesterday, my friend Josué tipped me off to artist Simon Stålenhag, because that’s what friends do.
Stålenhag’s work is amazing.
He paints beautiful landscapes of 1980’s Sweden, but with science-fiction elements scattered throughout. The result is an epically scaled SF world that feels tangible because of the detail and depth of each piece. Every painting I’ve seen feels like a frozen moment from a real world.
The work is so believable, partly because of how casually the imagined SF elements are combined with the commonplace scenery and familiar 80’s artifacts.
I found myself scrolling through image after image, immersed in these dispatches from a dystopian post-war version of our planet. The work is expansive, sending the imagination running wild. I want to know more, dive deeper into each painting. I wish I could research the history of this world that never was.
You should check out all of his work. Buy it and share it and whatnot: Simon Stålenhag.
Also, apparently they just crowdfunded a book-based RPG set in the world Stålenhag has created, Tales from the Loop.
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raphael. [a month of happy.]
Raphael. The first onscreen representation I saw as a little kid about what it meant to be angry all the time — and kind of an asshole — and still be part of a family.
I love you Raph, always and forever.
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shades of magic. [a month of happy.]
If you’re looking for something fun to read, I highly recommend this trilogy.
I warn you, every time you sit down and start reading you might lose the next few hours of your life jumping around between Londons with Kell and Lila. Good writing, immensely fun world building, thrilling story, and believable and interesting characters make these are the sorts of books that grab you and don’t let go until you run out of pages. Although, once you do run out of pages you’ll just wish there were more pages.
I’m on my way through the third book now. Its release Feb. 21st was too tempting for me and I broke a self-imposed book buying hiatus. It was a great decision! Shut up, you have a book buying problem.
The only bad news about these books is that apparently Gerard Butler just came on to produce the adaptation after Sony won a bidding war for the adaptation rights. That certainly dampens any excitement I might have had about seeing these characters travel from the page to the screen.
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scarves up. [a month of happy.]
Two parts happy, one big part sad.
Happy: The MLS Cup Champion Sounders take the field today to begin their title defense. It’s regular season MLS time!
Happy: Now that the Sounders won the MLS Cup I can argue that the Supporters’ Shield winner is the real champion of a given season without sounding like a bitter homer.
Sad: I’m away from Seattle as the Sounders season begins. From season tickets to nearly 3000 miles away is a sad trade.
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icheckmovies. [a month of happy.]
There are very few things in this world that make me happier than movies.
When you take movies and add in lists and achievement trophies to the mix you have a tailor made obsession machine for me. That’s what they do at iCheckMovies
iCheckMovies is a film nerd’s dream. An aggregation of list after list of history’s greatest and most important films according to various websites, critics, publications, film groups, and sundry.
It’s a great way to fill in blind spots and omissions in film knowledge, gleefully charge down rabbit holes of genres and subgenres, or even just decide what to watch next.
The first thing I do whenever I watch a new movie is head over and check it off. It’s super fun and I highly recommend it.
If you love movies and you don’t have iCheckMovies, you should remedy that and start checking movies immediately. If you do have it and we aren’t friends yet, you should find me and let us join movie nerd forces.
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