cassiedotink/content/week-notes/037.md

title	url	date	tags	draft	cover	summary
(WN37)	week-notes/37	2025-11-16	week-notes	true

Doing

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.

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.¹ 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.²

Watching

Joe and I watched Cunk on Earth after I saw some silly screenshots of it on tumblr.

Playing

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.³ 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.

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1. 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. ↩︎

2. They hated Pet which I'm not sure I've forgiven them for. ↩︎

3. 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. ↩︎