Culture Consumption: July 2026

Books

Ephemera: A Memoir by Briana Loewinsohn is a lovely graphic memoir about growing up with a mother who was constantly disappearing. It’s not entirely clear the nature of her mother’s mental illness, but the effect is palpable. Loewinsohn does have a brother, who makes an appearance here and there. However, most of the memoir presents her in isolation, wandering the fields and woods around their home. It’s beautiful, but there’s a soft loneliness present in every panel. Many of the pages are without text, expressing the silent solitude in which she grew up — and as she grows older the longing that continues on as she tries to understand why her mother faded away from them even when she was around. Such a beautiful and sad memoir.

I’m a sucker for stories that blend devilry and rock ‘n roll, and Evil in Me by Brom hit the vibes exactly. Ruby Tucker is stuck in her small down due to her past mistakes, her dysfunctional family, and the falling out she had with her best friend and bandmate, who left her to go play rock in Atlanta. While helping an elderly friend go through his religious relics, she stumbles across a ring with a terrible curse. Before she knows it, Ruby has been possessed by a demon hoping to free herself from the pits of hell through bloodshed and revenge, and Ruby has to figure out how to save her soul, or else be damned forever.

I had a lot of fun with this one. While the opening couple of chapters were a bit of a struggle for me, I’m glad I stuck with the story. Ruby is a great character who makes some interesting friends and enemies along the way.

Books Finished This Month:

1. Evil in Me by Brom

2. Ephemera: A Memoir by Briana Loewinsohn

3. The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherine M. Valente

Total Books for the Year: 20

Still in Progress:

The Workshop Survival Guide: How to design and teach educational workshops that work every time by Rob Fitzpatrick and Devin Hunt, The End of the World as We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand, edited by Christopher Golden and Brian Keene, and Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu.

Short Stories & Poetry

A selection of works I recently read in journals and online publications, with a few lines from the text shared here.

Dark Fantasy: “Three Faces of a Beheading” by Arkady Martine (Uncanny Magazine):

Poem: “The World To Come” by Jennifer Hudak (Strange Horizons):

Poem: "Moonlight and Moonshine" by Shantell Powell (The Temz Review):

Poem: “Gently, Gently” by Bert Meyers (Get Lit):

Movies

I put on Project Hail Mary (2026) while I was sick one week, and I really enjoyed it (as much as I could in my feverish state). The sun is fading due to an unknown cause, and humanity needs to send a team out to a distant planet in the hopes of finding a solution to the problem. Grace (Ryan Gosling) wakes up on a spaceship in a distant solar system with no memories of how he got there and has to piece together what happened to him and how to save Earth from its dying sun.

Fortunately, he meets an alien creature, who partners with him to find a solution, because his sun is dying, too. Rocky (puppetted and voiced by James Ortiz), the alien, is such a great character — and an amazing combination of practical and digital effects. And their dynamic together was just so fun.

I’m probably going to have to watch this again sometime soon, however, because I was so terribly ill while watching it that I’m pretty sure I missed some key moments here and there. But that’s not a problem, because it’s a great movie.

Television

I finally watched Severance, and I was blown away by this strange, impactful story about the severance technology, developed by Lumon Industries, which severs a person’s consciousness into two parts — the part that exists within the office (innies) and the part that exists outside in the world (outies). Neither have any knowledge of what the other does.

The central character is Mark Scott (Mark S inside Lumon). At first, he is the only character who we get to see existing both inside and outside Lumon. Outie Mark is grieving the loss of his wife. He believes that severance allows him to escape his grief for eight hours out of the day. Innie Mark S starts off mostly content with his lot, but faces a new challenge, when he’s suddenly promoted and a new employee, Helly R, refuses to accept being trapped as a severed consciousness. Both sides of Mark begin to dredge up Lumon’s dark secrets and find ways to rebel against the company that employs them.

The show explores so many interesting philosophical questions. What makes a person a person? Do the innies count as their own persons and should they have rights to exist as people? Or do the outies have rights to their bodies, since they were there first?

I won’t say much else, but this show is wild. It keeps revealing new layers to Lumon (which is more of a cult than a corporation), which grows increasingly strange and horrifying. Every new reveal dredges up new questions, but in such a way that I trust that the writers know the deep layers of this world and these characters. I feel confident that they know where they’re going with this story, and I can’t wait for season three.

Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, created by Haley Z. Boston, is a tense horror show about Rachel (Camila Morrone), a woman getting married to her fiancee, Nicky (Adam DiMarco), at his family’s estate cabin in the wintery woods. The house is far more opulent than Rachel expected and the family is an odd bunch, with unsettling and suspicious behaviors. From the start, Rachel feels like something bad is going to happen. Nicky assures her that it’s just anxiety — but we as the audience already know from the bloody opening, he’s very, very wrong. Something very bad is indeed going to happen.

I struggled a bit with the first two episodes, which presented a red herring situation. Although it revealed some of the family dynamics and created some conflict between the family and Rachel, it didn’t really feel necessary to the story. The most interesting aspects of the story revealed themselves in Episode 3, when the cause of the terrible thing to come is revealed, which drew me completely in to the story.

Parts I love about the story is how it examines love and fate and explores the concepts of how real events become twisted through trauma and retelling to become legend. On the other hand, I didn’t dig the first few episodes, and there were a few off narrative choices that didn’t seem to come of anything. But even so, I enjoyed this show, and I rather liked the ending. Good for her.

Games

I replayed Control (Remedy Entertainment), my favorite game from 2024, for a video game club discussion and in preparation for the release of Control: Resonant in just over a month. And now I can say that I loved the game all over again, so much so I Platinumed the game.

I love Jessie’s as a character and the way she does from being an isolated outcast to the head of the Federal Bureau of Control (FBC) and all its associated weirdness. She begins as a reluctant hero, mostly there to just find her brother. But overtime, she makes connections and grows into her role as a leader, claiming her own power in the Ashtray Maze (one of the best game sequences I’ve ever played) and discovering the secrets of this strange world.

I’m also such a fan of the Oldest House itself. This shifting building is strange and impossible, and I love the brutalist architecture style blended with the mundane aspects of cubical-style offices. The bland and bizarre is just such a fun combination, making for some interesting office culture within the FBC.

All I have left to play (and 100%) is the AWE DLC, which is the most frightening section of the game, since it’s inspired by Alan Wake and the Darkness. I’ll probably finish it in the next month.

I returned to God of War: Ragnarök (Santa Monica Studio) and played a few more hours. I’m still enjoying the game, but dropped the difficulty down to “Story” mode, because I keep forgetting the controls. I just want to leisurely enjoy the story and world.

Browser Games

Print Gallery of an Artist (Daniel Linssen) is a mind-bending platforming game, based on fractal spirals. Each level spirals in on itself and the player can see multiple versions of their character at the little gold coins they need to collect to open the door and progress. Getting through levels involved constantly shifting between which version of your character you’re focused on, while often keeping track of other elements on the screen. I’m not great at platformers, but was able to get through a handful of levels before the mind-bendy aspects combined with enemies overwhelmed me. I highly recommend this one, though, for those who love platforming in games — because it’s visually stunning.

Under a Star Called Sun (Cecile Richard) is a lovely little adventure game about a journey into space and the loneliness of knowing that you’re never going to be able to return home. As the character goes through their routines on the ship, they remember their connection to the person they left behind and reflect on the ways their memories seem to be fragmenting over time. It’s such an incredibly impactful experience for such a short game.

Death Spiral (kindanice) is roguelike with single-button gameplay. The cursor spirals around in a circle and the player just clicks at the right time to take an action. Clicking on white sections allow the player to attack, while clicking on a red section dodges an attach from the enemy. After defeating a set of three enemies, you return to a shop to recover health or buy upgrades. I’m not very good at playing this game (since I’m too prone to panicking), but I keep returning to it to try again and again. Super satisfying.

Playing Death Spiral lead me to another kindanice game, UFO Clicker. It’s is a simple clicker game about collecting enough humans, so that you can call the mothership. You start off with a single spaceship, clicking up 1-3 humans at a time. Once the players gathers up enough humans, they can implement upgrades to make progression faster. Takes about 15 minutes to play, but I ended up returning several times to see if I could get my run time down by trying different strategies.

That's it for me! What are you reading? Watching? Loving right now?

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