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bansheebeat 4ec8e8bea7 vault backup: 2025-11-16 15:42:14
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title url date tags draft cover summary
hang up and run to me (WN37) week-notes/37 2025-11-16
week-notes
false https://cdn.cassie.ink/images/2025/wn/37.jpg

Doing

I'm doing better this week than last. I finally feel like I'm getting above water on my work, so I've been coming home at better times.1 Part of it is that I've accepted that my students this year are incredibly behind in their reading and writing skills and I have slowed my instruction way down as a result — not to "dumb it down" but to build good, strong foundations for them. I can't just pass the problem along to the next grade. This probably means that we're not going to get through the same amount of content as I usually do in an instructional year, but I'm lucky in that I teach a skills subject, not a content subject.2

I'm mostly on the upswing from being sick as well. On Friday, I got my flu and COVID shots (which I've been putting off3). My cough is still present but less frequent and severe. I'm hoping to be fully recovered by Thanksgiving, when I'll be thrust into the petri dish of Joe's unvaccinated family.

Socially, I met up with some friends (including one who moved far out of town) for drinks on Friday, and on Sunday, I restarted my Sunday running with my friend (we'd skipped the last week due to illness, and the week before that was a 5K we'd signed up for). I'm glad to have the Sunday run in particular — I know I feel better mentally when I'm getting outside and being active, and we use the run to debrief on work and go into our weeks with our burdens lightened.

Reading

I've started reading a few pages of Villette every morning while I eat breakfast. It's a slow way of getting through a hefty book, but it is at least some progress — and a habit I'm happy to establish as it replaces the doomscrolling that I usually do.

I re-read the first 50 pages or so of Pet by Akwaeke Emezi in preparation for my college class. I still love that book, but I was disappointed that most of my students seemed either confused by it or just didn't read it. I think the latter is more prevalent and probably feeds into the former: some of the concepts and plot events of the book probably are confusing when you're reading a summary online, but it was troubling to think a junior or senior in college doing an English Education degree program would struggle with a young adult text.

For my college class next week, we're covering Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. I first read the book nine years ago when I took the course as a student and remember liking it, but I didn't recall it in specific detail, so I decided to try listening to the audiobook while playing Pokemon. This was the first audiobook I'd listened to start to finish and I am proud to say that I have been right all these years: audiobooks are not for me. I zone out and miss things, and I don't get to do my silly little annotations. It was a quick way to blow through the book, and I definitely grasped the main swath of the plot, but reading is more than that for me.4 The book is probably even more relevant today than it was when it was first written in terms of the surveillance that happens through technology, the need for open online spaces, and the threat of fascism taking hold in America. I did find it cloying (though a necessity) that a solid chunk of the book was dedicated to explaining things like key pairs and Tor browsers. Doctorow does a good job of explaining these things in comprehensible terms for the average person, and of course the average reader would be lost without these explanations — I acknowledge I'm in the minority of readers of young adult fiction in understanding the basics of these things — but it did get exhausting. I'm curious to see how my Gen Z students will react to the book and whether it will help me on my road to forgiving them over Pet.

Watching

Joe and I watched Cunk on Earth after I saw some silly screenshots of it on tumblr. It was great! We also rewatched the back half of Fellowship of the Ring that we slept through a few weeks ago.

I'm still rewatching Orange is the New Black, primarily while I fold laundry, and am enjoying it. It's definitely a better show than Weeds, but I still don't feel compelled to watch every season like I did Weeds. I'm near the end of season two and might go into season three.

Playing

I've continued on with Legends ZA, but I'm still not super keen on it. I accepted that the game's main conceit was moving through the ZA Royale as compared to the Pokédex grind in Arceus, but then the game unceremoniously jumps you from Rank W (I think) to F in one swoop.

It feels like the game just can't commit to doing one thing well. There's some lightly parkour-style traversal, but it's bad; there's the Wild Areas, but the catching mechanics don't feel as fluid and satisfying as Arceus; the Rogue Mega Evolution battles are a fight with the controls and the camera; and the ZA Royale had novelty but is half-baked and shallow. The game wants you to use stealth, but you have few tools in your arsenal (gone are the berries and other distractions from Arceus) and the city isn't built with effective cover.

I also find most of the characters insufferable. Your core group in the game fits the typical Pokémon tropes: there's the airhead, the happy-go-lucky rival, and the mope. The script of the game reaches for modern slang but feels dated, and I just played through a bizarre sequence where a streamer's hologram held an in-person fan quiz convention and asked parasocial questions to obsessive fans.

It stinks to be so down on the game; when I saw positive reviews after release, I was happy that Pokémon seemed to be doing something right, but maybe I've outgrown modern Pokémon — or maybe it's just not for me anymore. I've considered going back to Arceus to wrap up the story, finish the Pokédex, and just feel what I loved so much about it again. Pokémon Lazarus Is out now too, so I'm thinking about giving that a shot.

Listening

I listened to Rainbow Kitten Surprise's newest album, bones. It's good but not great. For reference, I think RKS is basically a perfect album (except for "Run," which sucks); I really like Seven + Mary and How to: Friend, Love, Freefall; and while I think Love Hate Music Box needed an editor, I appreciate how it tries to move their sound in a new direction.5 bones feels like an attempt to rollback the pop-oriented Love Hate Music Box and return to the refined rock of How to and RKS, but it's missing the sparkle those two had. Instead, it feels like a band that's simply comfortable in a sound. That's not a bad thing, but it lacks the magic and sparkle of its two heaviest influences. "Hell Nah," "bones," and "Tropics" were the highlights for me, but none of them are even close to RKS and How to for me. They're songs I don't mind to have in the background, whereas I consciously return to songs like "Cold Love," "All's Well That Ends," and "Moody Orange" constantly.

I listened to NULL by NULL on Brendon Bigley's recommendation and found it borderline unlistenable. I don't mind noise punk (Perfect Pussy's "I" is an all-timer for me), but this absolutely did not hit. At least it was short.

I woke up Friday morning with Blondie's "Hanging on the Telephone" stuck in my head and therefore am listening to a lot of that.

Here's my top ten songs for this week:

  1. "Hanging on the Telephone" by Blondie
  2. "We Are All Accelerated Readers" by Los Campesinos! (repeat from last week)
  3. "up" by pigthe
  4. "celine" by shypig
    1. "Racing Gloves" by Plumtree
  6. "Wrestlemania VIII" by Martha
  7. "Wolfman" by The Front Bottoms
  8. "Van Goes" by Being Dead
  9. "Adult Acne Stigmata" by Los Campesinos!
  10. "Sadness" by Trust Fund

  1. still later than I'd like ↩︎

  2. many of my coworkers complain that they're not going to get through their content if they slow down. I realize that, in a subject like history, the expectation is that they cover a certain time period where presumably the next grade will pick up after — but I'm of the opinion that the skills are still what's important, not whether the class covers every battle in the civil war. ↩︎

  3. one year I had AWFUL body aches after and was out of order for two days, so now I look for a weekend where I have nothing else going on ↩︎

  4. I believe that audiobooks are reading and I know they work for some people. That's great! Anything that gets folks engaging with literature and that makes literature more accessible is wonderful. I'm really not trying to be elitist here: they're just not for me. ↩︎

  5. I'd have been happy with more of what they had been doing, of course, but I also appreciate a band that innovates and evolves. ↩︎