I hope all those who celebrates — be it as a strict religious observance, or a celebration honoring time spent with loved ones and the impending Spring — had a lovely Easter. Greek Orthodox Easter and Catholic Easter happened to fortuitously fall on the same Sunday, so we spent the day at our friend Brandon’s house with his family (he’s the one whose youngest son was the subject of my latest gallery entry!). He and his brother and dad spit roasted a whole lamb, and there was spanikopita, stuffed grape leaves, baba ganoush, meatballs, and of course, lots of Ouzo. It was a gorgeous day, and it was wonderful to watch our kids play together. Brandon used to live in the apartment below my parents, and his kids were really — along with his cousins — my son’s first friends, and vice versa. They’re an absolutely integral part of my son’s childhood, and it was nice to give them a fun day together.
Anyway, I’m on Spring break until next Monday, and I’m thrilled. So far this week, I’ve done two sketches and two junk journal spreads (not quite finished with them, but close), and I’m once again so, so happy to be making stuff for me.
Having time and space to create has certain buoyed me up, but beyond that:
1. Kylie Boggly’s YouTube Channel
I cannot explain to you how addicted I am to video essays and deep dives into the best of Lost Media and Internet mysteries. I love the concept behind things like r/RBI and r/tipofmytongue, but I just don’t have the time and patience to slog through those subreddits to find the “good” stuff. Thankfully, Kylie is happy to do so, and to bring to YouTube some of the best, both solved and unsolved, for her audience to enjoy. If you are a fan of lost media and internet sleuthing, I highly recommend her channel.
This is her latest video as of this writing, and it’s the one that hooked me:
2. The Antiquarian Imaginarium Sticker Book
So much of my last two spreads were inspired by this book, and I am utterly in love with it. What I really love is the (relatively) matte finish on the stickers, which is nice and very different from a lot of the other scrapbooking and junk journaling ephemera I buy, which tends toward glossy paper and vinyl. I am especially fond of the (sadly few) pages that are all monochromatically themed, it really helped carry several of the last several spreads.
Oh my God. Oh my God. I love the raw visceral feel of basically everything Gggrimes does — a lot of their work is NSFW (and is great… but NSFW, haha), but even their SFW stuff has that same feel to it, and I absolutely adore it. Gggrimes depicts folks from cross the racial and gender spectrums, as well as kinksters and folks of different body types, and I absolutely adore them. They have a ton of work, which is wonderful, but is also the only reason I don’t own anything of theirs yet; with a finite budget, I want to be very discerning about the pieces I buy. Which is hard, because I’m pretty sure I’d happily buy most of their portfolio.
4. Finding out there are “Psych” novels
I don’t know if y’all know how into the old USA TV show “Psych” I am, but oooh, I fucking am. And I literally today — as I was writing this — discovered that there are five novels based off the TV show, and if you think they aren’t going directly into my cart, well, I don’t know what to tell you. I haven’t dug enough to see if I can still buy them new or if it’s going to have to be second hand for me, but if I haven’t place an order for them by the end of the day, I will be shocked.
5. The upcoming Murderbot TV show
Ok… cautiously optimistic, but also just really interested in seeing how they handle this, since so much of the charm of the novels is in Murderbot’s internal monologue — from the trailer, it seems like they’ve retained that, which is great. I do like Skarsgard, so I’m not mad about that, and I’m very pleased with what I’ve seen of the rest of the cast as well. But we all know that book-to-TV adaptations re sometimes… eh. So I will reserve full judgement for sometimes afterwards… but that doesn’t stop me from being pretty pumped at the prospect right now.
Anyway, hope you all are doing well. Take care of yourselves, and each other.
All Your Crooked Heart 