# Enjoying: Games and Media

I recently received my new copy of The Encyclopedia of Radical Helping, and it's so delightful. I wish I had the budget to gift it to all my most caring friends who are part of movement & activism spaces - the two I have gifted it to so far have enjoyed it, too!

# Games

• I've still been greatly enjoying Fallen London, a web-based game that I wrote about a few months back. There's an Advent event going on now that's been fun over the last month, and I'm also getting in to some of the activities that can be unlocked in the mid-game like the University and Parabola which open up a lot of new things to do and explore.
• I finally tried Balatro, and it is as good as everyone says! I've been playing on iOS, mainly on ipad.
• I've also been enjoying the iOS game Ratropolis, a settlement defense roguelike game where your settlers are anthropomorphic rats. It fills a very different niche for me than Balatro - Balatro I can play casually while my kid is playing nearby, while Ratropolis demands my full attention while playing due to the real-time & fast-paced nature.

# Things I've Read

Not all of these are super recent, but I haven't shared them in blog form yet, so here you go.

• Passive Aggressive Work Emails with my Toddler About Dinner. The author, Bess Kalb, has more of these on her email newsletter and they're all great.
• "Eli Invents" by Rob Macaisa Colgate, a poem on the potential erotic of medical caregiving
• "my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell", a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks
• This essay on "the mother" by Gwendolyn Brooks (read the actual poem first!)
• HTML for People, a very nice new resource on how HTML works and how you can use it to make your own website, even if you're not a programmer for your job or don't consider yourself "techy"
• "Pixel Logic: A Guide to Pixel Art" is a real nice resource on making your own pixel art! For $10 it is jam-packed with useful tips and how-tos.
• "The Mad Farmer Liberation Front" poem by Wendell Brooks. Pair it with "Advice to Myself #2: Resistance" by Louise Erdrich.
• This website I came across about the Royal Canadian Mounted Police which has extremely strong zine vibes in my opinion. It's displays lots of photos in a college format pretty well on mobile, though the text size could definitely be bumped up for ease of reading. I just love that people are out there, putting their own resources or research together and out there on whatever their niche interest is.
• This actual zine, called Soldering is Easy: Here's how to do it, which has been translated in a whole bunch of languages!
• Kirby vs this blog post
• The Static Site Paradox
• This advice for writers is quite nice, and applies to many a creative pursuit. From the same author, "Underrated ways to change the world".
• "Priscilla, Queen of the Rideshare Mafia", an excellent and entertaining profile in Wired of a very prolific and successful (til she got busted and went to jail for 3 years) entrepreneur in the less-than-legal economy. Ottawa's public library has free access to magazines including Wired via the Libby app, which Lincoln's library doesn't offer, and I've been enjoying that!

# Not Enjoying: My Corporeal Form

Here's one thing I have distinctly not been enjoying lately: being extremely pregnant.

My pregnancy is now at term, which means the baby could be born today and that'd be totally fine, or, horrifyingly, it could be born in more than 3 weeks and that would also be fine, medically & statistically speaking. I started my parental leave a few weeks ago already, so I haven't been doing my paid job. Somehow I thought that starting leave at that point would give me time to tackle a bunch of projects before the baby came, but that has not been happening. I feel really frustrated at feeling like I have the time, but not the physical or mental capacity to do the things I would like to be doing for the majority of most of my days for the last several weeks. If anyone reading this currently lives right underneath (or sometimes, somehow, seemingly inside) my ribcage, please consider this yet another invitation to go ahead and get born any time now.

I would also like to give pneumonia two big thumbs down - our toddler got it first, then when hers cleared up, both parents got it as well. It's apparently been raging here in Ottawa especially among little kids and their caregivers. I am still having a couple hard coughing fits a day most days, despite the main illness being several weeks ago at this point. The cold air (even just going from the house to the car) is definitely a trigger, and so I haven't gotten much fresh air in a month or so. Combined with pregnancy gag reflex and a general lack of core/abdominal strength at the moment, I would give this whole experience a 0/10, no stars.