10 Things: Brendan J

All Brendan's suggestions for what to read, do, try, listen to, play, think about, and cracker.

Hello Out There!

I have a special treat for you today, and I am not exaggerating. At long last, after fantasizing about such a thing for literal years, I have for you a 10 Things post from the inimitable Brendan J: a real-life friend who sometimes hangs out in the comments section of this newsletter.

Brendan will not brag about himself, which is annoying, but he makes this, and this, and co-makes this. Here’s a gorgeous essay he wrote last year that I have sent to pretty much everyone I know, including you. He just won’t brag about anything he does, which is annoying but also indicitive of what a quietly brilliant and kind person he is.

This is an incredible 10 Things, because each of Brendan’s things is, like, multiple things. It’s a 100 Things of a 10 Things. You’ll see. Let’s not ado. I’m leaving the full thing above the paywall; you all deserve it all!

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Hi friends and Erins. My name is Brendan. I’m in the comments here a lot and I am also married to the wonderful Kat of YADAGEJ fame. I was going to start this guest post with a very circumspect reference to the fact that I have learned to enjoy substances that are legal in Illinois, as I make my way through middle age, but then Sophie told that story about the weed gummy so I guess I can be more direct about my habits.

But this list isn’t actually about those habits! It’s just about my own interests with regard to chill stuff to do, on evenings when I am trying to turn down the background volume of my own anxieties.¹ Sophie is good at reminding us that we are all animals; animals need and dgeserve space for recovery and comfort outside the bounds of our daily stresses. However you might seek such comfort in your own mind and body, here are some things I can recommend for indulgence while you do so.

This newsletter might get cut off by your mail client because I made it too long. You have to click through and read all of them anyway, because I put the one I am most passionate about at the end! Plus a photo of my cute dog also.

1. PLAY: A creative journaling game.

About six years ago, for reasons you can probably imagine, the genre often called “journaling RPGs” exploded as many people looked for things to do by themselves and away from a screen. But not all of the things in that vein are role-playing games, not all of them involve journaling (though they do help some people practice), and not all of them are for a single player! I The one thing that they largely have in common is that, by following a series of prompts and choices, you end up with a unique physical record of your creative play.

The game that really popularized this kind of thing is my friend Tim’s Thousand Year Old Vampire. It sounds like a horror story about an ancient, accursed creature, and like What We Do in the Shadows, it kiiind of is. But it’s also very much about the human relationship with our own memories, and how we cling to or lose them as we age. And it’s a gorgeous book in its own right, meant for you to alter, mark up, and customize in a way all your own. (Tim has many other games, including an archaeology journal game called… Thousand Year Old Campfire.)

Despite TYOV offering the potential for a chilling record of bloodthirst, most of its successors have moved closer to a “cozy” aesthetic—more like Stardew Valley or Kiki’s Delivery Service in their presentation. Koriko: A Magical Year pays a pretty clear homage in its title, and Apothecaria and Apawthecaria both delve into witchcraft as well. If you’re more interested in a library mystery, you could try Song of the Scryptwyrm, or if you’d rather make a record with thread than pens, you could try the sewing game (!) called A Mending.

But the first game of this sort that I ever tried was my friend Tony’s How to Host a Dungeon. In it you follow the ages of a subterranean cave system as it is carved out by magma and water, inhabited by monsters, carved out by dwarves and wizards, and plundered by adventurers. I’m especially fond of it because while you can enjoy it alone, it also works great as a cooperative exercise with a big sheet of butcher paper and the imagination of a young person in your life.

2. EAT: Crumble.

I hold two truths in my heart: food is meant to be a source of pleasure and joyful sustenance, not shame or guilt; and also, my late-night sweet tooth and my long-term health are at odds with one another. The treats from the corner convenience store are a sometimes food. But if I have a fruit crumble ready to bake or stashed in the fridge, I know my middle-aged body will be a little happier with me. Here is my recipe, which I’m pretty sure I got from my friend Holly.

• 1/2 cup oats

• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour

• 1/2 cup brown sugar

• 1/4 cup butter equivalent (half a stick, cold)

• 1 Tbsp of cinnamon/allspice/nutmeg/all three

• 1/4 tsp baking soda

• 1/4 tsp salt

• Some fruit

Heat your oven to 350° and grease an 8”x8” baking dish. Slice up enough fruit to fill it most of the way—you might want two or three Granny Smith apples, or a few red pears, or a bowl of sour cherries, or a mix of blackberries and strawberries, or any combination of the above. Then mix all the other ingredients together in a medium bowl, using your hands to work the butter into the flour and oats until the whole mixture is pretty evenly crumb-y.

Sometimes, if the fruit is very juicy, I’ll mix a little extra flour into it as well. Or if the fruit doesn’t have much tartness on its own, I’ll add a tablespoon of lemon juice. Maybe you want to mix your baking spices partly into the crumble topping and partly into the fruit. Go for it. This is not the kind of baking recipe that needs you to follow the steps exactly.

Put the topping on the fruit and bake for 35 minutes. Let cool for ten minutes before you eat!

3. WATCH: Shinbangumi.

Sophie is a very musical person, and so I expect the audience reading this comprises many people with well-honed taste in songs. I’ve never been all that good at music myself, even as a listener! But I know what I like, and I really like the band Ginger Root.

One of the things I respect most in art is serious dedication to a high-concept premise. It’s the kind of thing often called “commitment to the bit,” but I’m not just talking about running a joke into the ground. For their last album, Ginger Root—which is to say, mostly its frontman Cameron Lew—expanded the city-pop playground of their hit “Loretta” into a full “music movie” realized entirely with VHS visuals, DIY sets and cardboard miniatures, and a goofy storyline that would have fit right into a 90s TV special. It’s only 45 minutes long and it’s really fun.²

Shinbangumi is great when you’re relaxing and in a mood to go along for a gentle ride. If you want something to put on and zone out to that doesn’t require you to follow a high concept at all, I recommend the perfectly synchronized anime music videos of Sunset Boy. Or if you like the digital-video look but want something more personal and reflective, try Chicago musician and vlogger CQ Lucius.

4. MAKE: Your own badge of honor.

Oh, and speaking of ancient formats… to those of us who took our first steps online in the twentieth century, a particular shape of tiny image—just 88 pixels wide by 31 high—may evoke dusty memories of dial-up noise, animated gifs, niche forums, and homemade amateur websites. In many ways that was an exclusionary, poorly accessible world, and I don’t mean to cast it as some lost utopia. But it had a charm to it, and the 88x31 button is a little way to remember that the web has always been what we choose to make it.

If you just want to browse through the amazing variety of things people have done with such a tiny format, there are all kinds of galleries out there preserving this kind of uniquely personal image—including old ones scraped from archived sites, but also new ones that are still being made today! You can do this pixel-by-pixel with any of the free sprite editing sites or apps out there, or use a tool built for this exact purpose by retro nerds like me.

What do you do with it when you’ve made your own badge? I don’t know, whatever you want. Stick it in your email signature. Turn it into a cross-stitch pattern. Start your own personal web page just like the old days, and just like millions of other people are still doing, right now. And then go explore this amazing visualization of all the sites still out there and linked together by this silly little happenstance of history.

☝🏻 This badge specifically is one I was motivated to make by the act of writing this newsletter. I have been stubbornly blogging for decades, but I really admire Sophie’s work here at YADAGEJ, and I love seeing the community that has grown around that work! So I decided to try imitation as well as flattery. If you enjoy the vibe of this guest post, you can subscribe to read more things like it at Kaijuville dot com.

5. LISTEN TO: StarDate.

My family listened to a lot of public radio on long car trips when I was young, and while I never got all that into Garrison Keillor, there were some weekend shows I really liked. Sunday mornings meant we got to listen to a Will Shortz puzzle, but right before it came the best two minutes on the airwaves: StarDate.

Yes, if you aren’t familiar with the program, it really is only two minutes long. There’s a little calming music with a five-note signature tune, and then a concise explanation of some cosmic phenomenon relevant to that evening’s sky. Then a sign-off, and you’re out. It’s almost too perfect to be real. I still love StarDate as a steady little reminder of the amazing things we have learned just by looking up, at length and in depth. No matter what we do to each other down here, the stars go on.

From 1991 to 2019, gentle space queen Sandy Wood was the voice of the show, recording over ten thousand episodes before she retired; she died five years later, at 76, which is not old enough.³ Her successor Billy Henry is doing a good job with her legacy, even if he will never replace her in my heart. If you don’t catch StarDate on a car radio yourself, you can listen to as many episodes as you want on stardate.org, or subscribe in a podcast app or RSS reader.

6. CRAFT: One card at a time.

Fifty years ago, musician Brian Eno and artist Peter Schmidt collaborated to make a deck of cards called Oblique Strategies: 126(ish) little fragments, intended to help with feelings of being creatively blocked by way of lateral-thinking suggestions. The actual text of the cards is easy enough to find online if you want to try them yourself.

I think about Oblique Strategies a lot, in part because a) it is a thought-provoking concept, and b) it is also just a thing where two guys made up their own very expensive version of tarot. Plus c) I have used some of the free web page versions of Oblique Strategies myself, but d) I don’t really believe in creative block. I just believe that, as Sophie has said, you have to kind of let things be bad sometimes. But card decks for jogging your brain are fun. Especially if you let them be kind of bad!

So I started making my own, using some cheap giveaway playing cards that my wife Kat got at a professional event. Every day or two, I take a blank label, or a few stickers, or an old magazine ad, or a rubber stamp, and I use a little white glue diluted with rubbing alcohol to stick it to one of those cards without thinking too much about it.

Are these cards going to be difficult to shuffle, since they’re not smooth anymore? Yes, especially once I start putting stuff on both sides. Are they going to last for long once the edges of things stuck to them start coming up? Nope. Will they help me with creative block? Maybe not! But I like that this project is doable in small chunks, and that it seems like a way to let things surface from my brain without focused intention.

7. BROWSE: Archive dot org’s Magazine Rack.

The name of the Internet Archive can be deceptive. While it is best known for its miraculous and crucial Wayback Machine, it also hosts an unbelievable amount of digitized material that did not originate online. If you haven’t explored it before, try clicking on those little icons in its top menu bar! They will help you discover books, videos, audio, software (like the Internet Arcade), and photography, all freely available to browse and download.

My favorite community collection, or at least my favorite one I’ve found so far, is The Magazine Rack. It contains over half a million items going back over a century, in many languages and areas of focus. You’re going to see a lot of stuff in there about computers, video games, and Doctor Who; but also music, entertainment news, nature photography, pulp and literary fiction, and of course fashion. That’s where I like to go, myself, to flip through old issues of Tokyo street-style magazine fRUITS.

Maybe if you click through to try out one of those issues for yourself, then you and I will share a certain wordless understanding of how color and form can fill your eyes and imagination. Or maybe fRUITS and its extremely specific window into a time and place and demographic are not for you! But Creative Knitting, or Australian Railways, or Za Rulem, or Plan B, or Between the Lines might be.

8. TAKE: Some film snapshots.

Sophie, my mom, and Kat, on a windy beach day, in a hasty photo which I will treasure forever.

Sorry, I know this is a very Millennial Dink Man thing to say. But if you are like me and had a brief acquaintance with single-use film cameras in your youth, then promptly forgot about them for decades, I am here to tell you that you can still get them and they’re really fun. You can pick up a two-pack for like $30 on eBay. Then you can take one with you the next time you go to a friend’s house, or a celebration, or even a work event.

I’m not here to hold forth on the visual majesty of film grain or color gamuts or whatever. I do like those things, as you might have gathered from my endorsements of VHS movies and analog fashion magazines above. But what I really like is the act of taking a photo with intention. We take so many digital photos now, but I think we tend to treat the results as much more disposable than any “disposable camera” ever was.

The indifferent light of a cheap flash and the tiny aperture of a plastic lens are not always the most flattering combination. I think that’s okay. All our devices seem to be trying to flatter us a little too much these days. I like the scarcity of flawed, physical records, and the memories I can associate with them.

I’ve mostly recommended free stuff in this newsletter so far, but I must admit that playing around with film is not the cheapest hobby. You pay once for the film, a second time to get it developed, and a third time to get scans or prints. If you’re in Chicago, you can do all of these things at Bellows or Dodd Camera! But there are lots of mail-in options too, like Memphis Film Lab.

9. FROM KAT: There is a new MUNA single.

I mean, I know you already knew that, but you should probably listen to it again anyway.

10. PUT: the toppings on the other side of the cracker.

Here it is. The one thing I am nearly as passionate about as retro internet, analog film, old radio shows and magazines, and even apple crumble.

If there is one simple thing I want to convey as widely and emphatically as possible, it is this: the photography produced for Nabisco boxes has been lying to you your entire life.

Most crackers have salt on one side. This side is universally shown facing up. Whatever you put on that cracker—like some nut butter and a tiny marshmallow, or a slice of cheese and apple, or spicy hummus, or a Field Roast pepperoni and a couple drops of hot honey—you are instructed by the powers-that-be to load it onto the salted surface.

Defy them.

Salt enhances flavor and hunger, and if your dietary constraints do not exclude sodium, you should get to taste it when you eat it. Think of your cracker as akin to the bagel: you wouldn’t put the schmear on the same side as the seeds, would you?

Give your tongue the joy of getting the hit of salt first, priming your mouth for the fats and sugars that are to follow. It’s a small habit to change, but you might like it, and we must take our little joys where we can.

Anyway I told my dog about this and it blew his mind.

Probably because he wanted a cracker. Sorry Max. But thank you, dear reader, for your time and attention!

—Brendan

1. Kat, who has a gift for neologisms, named this anxiety “the scream radio.”

2. Keep an eye out for a fan-favorite cameo, Dropout nerds.

3. As I wrote this newsletter, I finally realized for the first time that Sandy Wood’s voice reminded me of Majel Barrett, who was the voice of Star Trek computers for over forty years. Two legends of calm enunciation!