9 Things That Made My Life Better Last Quarter (Oct.-Dec. 2024)
Totally squeaking in while these three months are still technically last quarter! Above all, said months were busy, but these little bits of fun and coolness helped make them less stressful.
a New York Times digital subscription
The New York Times offered first-time subscribers a full year for only $20, so I figured I’d give it a shot. I like perusing their product reviews on Wirecutter, and I also like reading a wide variety of opinions, especially those that are different enough from mine that I can understand why others disagree with me, but not so much different that they are a gauntlet of bad-faith, dehumanizing dog-whistles. Mostly, though, I’ve been enjoying the Spelling Bee and Strands games.
Lateral with Tom Scott (podcast)
I love lateral thinking puzzles, but nobody around me does, so I have to content myself with listening to other people solve them on podcasts.* In this version, YouTuber Tom Scott invites three guests (usually other educational YouTubers/content creators) to take turns solving, uh, lateral thinking puzzles.
Occasionally, I’m annoyed when a puzzle exoticizes or is mistaken about something I know well (e.g., Jewish practices, beer-league ice hockey), but most often, I enjoy the banter and the brain-twisting and, yes, the moments when I feel like a genius because the puzzle’s solution relates to a obscure knowledge I happen to hold.
Agatha All Along (Disney+ miniseries, 2024) (… and on this list with a hefty dose of side-eye)
Agatha All Along (a sequel to the MCU TV series WandaVision) hooked me from the start and then let me down in the finale. Nevertheless, I still had a great time watching it with Husband as our little weekly date night, and I can’t get truly angry at something that gave me Patti LuPone’s tour-de-force performance in E7 (I can definitely write a critical blog entry about it, though.)
13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim by Vanillaware (video game, 2019)
This is one wild game. It’s so wild that many reviews start with “I can’t tell you much about this game without spoiling it,” and they are correct. The most I can say is that it’s half visual novel and half top-down RTS, but the latter is ho-hum, and the former is what makes it worthwhile. There are 13 (yes!) protagonists, and the plot starts at “outlandish” and gets weirder from there.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Nintendo Switch game, 2023)
… yes, again.
I let my playthrough lapse for several months once I’d conquered the dungeons and had nothing left to do in the main plotline but aim for the final boss. But the siren song of Hyrule and its non-story-relevant tasks called me back. It was somehow refreshing to tackle a series of low-stakes quests that had finite ends and clear success conditions. I filled out my map of the Depths, beat every shrine, and then found myself absurdly overpowered when I finally decided to beat the game. It was calming and fun at a time when I needed that.
The StoryGraph (app and website)
As you’ve maybe gathered from other posts, social media isn’t my jam. For a while, this gave me a reading-life quandary: I wanted to learn about new books, keep a to-read list, and record the books I read, but I hated Goodreads’s social-network-forward approach, where the first thing you see when you open the app or site is what your friends have been posting, and the first thing you notice when you click on a book is what other people think about it.
It’s kind of a bonus that the alternative I learned about, StoryGraph, isn’t only more suited to someone with my priorities but is also more ethically made and run (and not, you know, the product of a giant corporation trying to sell stuff to its users and sell its users’ data/attention however they legally can).
StoryGraph also has some cooler functionality, like being able to give part-stars and look for books based on how other users have tagged their pace/mood/etc. It can be a teeny bit slower to load sometimes, but I have patience when it gets me quality like this! The only major change I wish they’d make is the ability to give a one-time payment or donation instead of subscribing. I don’t want the paid features or the recurring bill, but I’d be happy to support the devs.
Husband and I are one year “behind,” so we did the 2023 EXIT Advent calendar, actually on a daily basis this time. We enjoyed little puzzle dates and also raising an eyebrow at the increasingly, uh, creative storyline. A couple puzzles sent us to the hint booklet, though part of that was having extremely limited time and patience after taking care of a baby all day. (And one of the two was from knowing what we were meant to do but not being physically able to do it.)
Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell (MG fantasy book, 2023)
This sweet fantasy is about a lot of things, but mostly the steadfast friendship between a girl from the secret islands where mythical creatures live and a boy from our own world who gives his all to help her stop said creatures from dying out. The writing is lyrical, and the plot doesn’t shield its young protagonists from tough emotional moments. It’s a story that will leave you remembering how it made you feel, with side characters who seem to have their own full lives outside the protagonists’ experience.
the end of semester
I mean, a little vacation is always nice, of course, but I appreciated the end of this semester more than any other because I was working the equivalent of 130%-140% a full-time contract. Professionally, it was a good choice, but it wasn’t a sustainable one. Thankfully, I don’t have to sustain it, but, boy, did I need the holiday break to decompress and recharge more than I have in years past.
* Plural, because the now-ended Futility Closet also featured a lateral thinking puzzle at the end of most episodes.