every atom of me (psst! i'm back!)
well, well, well, look who the bowl-cut lion dragged in
It’s 2023, which means MalonEmail went a full calendar year without darkening your digital doorstep even once. I’m sorry and you’re welcome. I’d explain, but you probably get the gist already. It’s some combination of “got a 9-to-5 job” and “continued spiraling existential crisis featuring a crushing lack of internal validation.” And TikTok, probably.
Give ‘em an update, will ya?
Sure! Finally got COVID in 2022. Twice. The first time leveled me for two weeks straight. (The day I was able to eat a baked potato without throwing up, I almost cried with happiness.) The second time, I picked it up at Medieval Times. (I know, I deserved that one.)
My partner and I moved in together in April, into a Koreatown duplex that feels like its own house. Somehow, we lucked out with the coolest landlady ever — we’re allowed to paint how we like, her big husky Bruce Lee greets me when I go to the side yard, and sometimes she brings us homemade kimchi (!). I can hear her in her rear unit playing her baby grand now. One of her students is learning the Howl’s Moving Castle theme.
And I took that paint thing to heart. Here is my office (!!), which I obsessed over turning into a forest for several months. That’s a mostly-fake moss wall on the left and a wallpaper mural on the right and a crazy manzanita branch I found on Facebook Marketplace in the middle. The kodama and the dragonfruit dragon are courtesy of Derrick, who is way too good at indulging my fits of whimsy.
No, no, a creative update
Oh. Well, fine. If you still follow me on Twitter, gods help us both. But you also probably know that I recapped the third and final season of His Dark Materials last month for Vulture. The tail of the streaming schedule is long, so I assume some of you might still be getting around to it. Indulge me, let me put all eight recaps in one place for later:
His Dark Materials Season Premiere Recap: Death is Going to Die
His Dark Materials Series-Finale Recap: Every Atom of You and Every Atom of Me*
*My favorite children, if I were the type to play favorites.
Honestly, I was pretty melancholy about finishing this run. This season, which follows the third book in Philip Pullman’s trilogy, The Amber Spyglass, involved writing not one but two recaps per week. Which, on top of a day job? A truly unwell kind of commitment to make. In December, no less. Throughout most of it, I was fighting that angst I’ve written about before, the dread that my recaps would end up being too gloomy, too hypercritical, for actual fans to get any sort of enjoyment out of them. But as luck would have it, the Vulture comment community was pretty receptive; I had a nice back-and-forth with a few of them that certainly improved my work overall.
When it was over, it was just … over. I spent the next few days of vacation in a sort of ADHD hangover, a trance devoid of executive function that involved getting distracted from putting on pants or feeding myself for hours on end. It was a project covering one of my favorite stories of all time, spanning three of the most deranged, transformative years of my life. It followed me into a relationship and a career change and a new home and a whole-ass global pandemic. I am not the same person I was when I started writing these in November 2019. In some ways, I am wiser, better. In most ways, I usually feel like I am worse. Two weeks later, I’m still not sure how to mourn that. But I’m working on it. I’m wearing pants now, anyway.
And with luck, and another unwell commitment, I’ll be back at it (at Vulture? Here? Still TBD) in March, when season 2 of Shadow and Bone drops. I saw the first couple episodes and they’re not what I expected! At all! It’ll be a fun one to dissect, that’s for sure.
Finally, just a quick Star Trek: Discovery epilogue: I stopped recapping it simply because … I hated the season 4 premiere. Like, full-body cringed through it. It leaned into every horrible misstep and left turn I thought it took in season 3 and turned each one up to 11. I couldn’t stand it. And like I said, nobody likes a recap that’s wall-to-wall haterade, you know? So, apologies to the handful of readers who emailed me wondering where they’d gone — I couldn’t bring myself to respond at the time, but please know your kind words made me positively weepy. They may or may not still be starred in my inbox. I love you.
Stuff that’s still good about Online™
Best part about not sending a newsletter for a year and a half: You get all the links I squirreled away in abandoned drafts over months, like little acorns for winter.
Alex Jung’s fantastic profile of Octavia Butler ahead of the debut of the Kindred series back in November. She’s my all-time, #1 hero, and Alex did so right by her.
If you read or watch sci-fi or fantasy stuff (and I know you do, the MCU counts!), you must read R.K. Duncan’s piece from back in October about fatphobia in SFF.
It’s been a while since Andor dropped, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t plug Gavia Baker-Whitelaw’s excellent writing about it — this one about cultural erasure in Star Wars was excellent.
This Vice essay from Edward Ongweso Jr. about the death of social media turned out to be, uh, depressingly correct.
More recent stuff, if you’re not a fan of the archival read:
E-girls are the military propaganda pinups of the 21st century, apparently. This piece was wild.
Speaking of wild, this piece about Netflix’s global head of television gave me hives. :)
This brief post from a Swarthmore linguistics professor about “-ussy” — the American Dialect Society’s 2022 word of the year — was very cool, as was this article they’re quoted in about it.
So, what’s next for MalonEmail?
I don’t know! Twitter sucks now, Tumblr and Instagram are overflowing with bots, and I deleted TikTok, so my online habits are changing rapidly. I might be back sooner than you think! If I do, I promise I’ll at least get back to some semblance of format. (This time, perfect was going to be the enemy of good. I have roughly 15 partial drafts piled up from the past year and a half.) What do you want to read from me? (Besides Discovery recaps.) Reply and let me know!
Let’s cap it off with the meme that made me laugh hardest in 2022
Why not?
OMG YOU'RE BACK IN MY INBOX!!!!