Happy 4/20 yall! Lick it, stick it and rip it for Columbine high school and Hitler’s birthday! 420 is the sex number after all!

YouTube Obsession

One of my dreams/goals in life has been to live near a baseball stadium and go to a bunch of games. As I’ve talked about before, I live just a couple bus stops away from Dodger Stadium. However, the tickets are often, even for the nosebleeds, too expensive to justify my spontaneous urges to go to games (I am an Aries after all).

My solution? Maybe spending $70 to see a game would be justifiable if I was a fan of the Dodgers. Like actually follow the team like I follow, the team of my birth; The Cincinnati Reds. It makes perfect sense; The Dodgers are in the National League (Yes I have League bias, the AL is trash, has always been trash, etc), they play the Reds twice a year anyway and as far as talent goes the Dodgers are easy to watch.

And, as shown above, the MLB has really put their whole pussy into making quality highlight reels for YouTube this season. Sure, they’ve had highlight videos before but they were always a day, two days or even weeks after the game at times. Now, if it’s a day game, a produced and edited highlight reel is out that night.

As a fan of the MLB that doesn’t have cable and will never have cable, I don’t want to buy a SportsNet or FOX Sports subscription for just one team. Not only that, I hate watching baseball on TV, I love going to games but put a game on TV and I’ll just go comatose. These highlight videos are an amazing option. And it’s about damn time the MLB has embraced the online audience. With these videos, ABS challenge system, hundreds of shirtless dudes taking over sections of stadiums and the pitch clock keeping things moving, it has never been a better time to be a fan of baseball.

Watching

I read the Expanse books back in 2014 and the last five books¹ as they released. I enjoyed them immensely and I hold them as high credits to the genre of “hard sci-fi.” Though the grounded science the books presented were a big interest for me, the speculative politics of space-age mankind was the major draw and my favorite theme of the series.

I was well aware of the Expanse Series that started releasing on SyFy in 2015 but never watched because I knew there were more books coming and who the fuck under 55 has cable. But hey, they’re all done now, so my partner and I have added The Expanse to our watch rotation.

The good thing about not having read the books since 2019 is that I have forgotten a lot of what happened so I’m really enjoying the first season. My distance from the books might also be helping with the jarring “that’s not how I pictured it” distaste that can come from watching a book adaptation. The first season definitely shows it’s budget. Considering it was eventually picked up by Amazon Prime I highly suspect that the production value will rise.

As for the themes of the books: To my recollection, they are doing the political story arcs justice. Which makes sense, the majority of the first book is mostly setting up the 3-way cold war, in intricate detail, long before ever introducing (SPOILERS) the alien protomolecule. This is good. The show is taking the time to set up the pressure cooker before it turns up the heat.

Will definitely watch the entire series so I’ll update with any…updates.

Reading

I can’t remember why I picked up Ceremonies by T.E.D. Klien a couple years ago but I finally got around to giving it a read. After finishing the book I’m really wondering why I haven't heard of Klien before. Ceremonies is a really fun book.

As a fan of folklore and world religions I love when a book can tie those themes into a single creepy clandestine horror narrative. Think along the lines of Alan Moore’s From Hell. The book also shares similarities to Ægypt from John Crowley; Hot summers in tight-knit rural farming communities where generations of familiarity and tradition are upset by an outsider who doesn’t belong. Considering my recent homesickness, I am really embracing the nostalgia of the life and the horror of these small places.

Far from the midtown New York City, the modern Sodom, in the New Jersey hinterlands lies a small community of Amish-adjacent farmers. Save for a few of the “spiritually sensitive”, the community is unaware of it’s deep relationship of the ancient evil that haunts their land. Yet, already there are gears in motion to awaken that evil, and great ceremonies in play to bring about the end of the world.

It’s well written, reads easily and though it doesn’t quite stick the landing, it is well worth going on the journey.

Other Notables

** “When asked if a video he posted that shows a strawberry getting impregnated by a group of chocolate bars is supposed to be like racial gangbang porn where a white woman has sex with a group of Black men, Chonco answers: “Exactly.””

** “Privilege shields us, it dirties us. And that’s why The White Lotus is really about what whiteness and money do to a person.”

**

1  While writing this I discovered that there is another book Leviathan Falls that came out in 2021. I guess I should read it? lol