Links and Loves: It's Fall, Y'all
Kansas City finally dipped below 70 degrees, so it’s open season on being basic af. It’s 90 degrees now (I don’t want to talk about it), but I saw three (3) trees drop a few leaves, so you’ll have to pry fall from my not-so-cold, dead hands. Here are a few things (besides my growing hoard of Dollar Spot pumpkins) that I loved this week. If you need me, I’ll be curled up in front of a spooky movie in as many luxurious knits as I can manage. You stay mad, I’ll stay cozy.
1. Horror Movies with Rules
Horror and I weren’t always friends. Sleepy afternoon at Grandma’s + The Ring + 9 year old me did not mix well, and I was sure I’d be a ‘fraidy cat forever. In high school, Scream changed everything. I love clumsy Ghostface and the schlocky dumb teens, but what really grabbed me were the rules.
Randy’s right, every horror movie has rules, and for me, they’re the best part. As we creep closer to Halloween, expect to hear more on my favorite horror tropes.
SideBar: The best horror movies with Rules
It Follows
One of my favorites of all time. A killer monster and a killer score.
The Boy
I laughed my way through to the awesome twist.
The Purge franchise
The first one is good, but the second really gets the ball rolling. In this case, the rules at the center of the story are laws, and which ones are suspended or unsuspended on Purge night.
2. Teacher classroom setup vlogs
Nothing warms my cold, Capricorn heart like a new package of school supplies. Teacher classroom setup vlogs are a category I stumbled into late at night, 6 videos deep in a Youtube rabbit hole. Watching teachers sort supplies, label dozens of small bins and color-code everything is extremely satisfying.
3. This little girl dancing to the Halloween theme
What can I say? It’s a mood.
4. American Vandal
My favorite, incredibly stupid, Peabody-award-winning Netflix Original is back. No show mixes high brow and low brow comedy quite like American Vandal. Season 1 began as a Making a Murderer spoof focused on a wildly NSFW high school prank, and its pitch-perfect parody is truly something to be seen. I raced through season 2’s mystery of The Turd Burglar, willing to brave any amount of excrement for the sharp, raucously funny lines in each episode.
5. Paste-ups
I played hooky last Friday to attend a microadvocacy workshop through Made in the Middle. It wasn’t until the week before, when faced with the possibility that I would be the only writer in a room of designers, that I panicked. Turns out, I wasn’t out of my depth at all. Maybe I tapped into a deep muscle memory of collage-making. Maybe I’m a visual thinker after all. Either way, copying, cutting and pasting my ideas together was enough to fill my head with zine ideas.
The L Word: Longreads
I can (and have) spend hours on longform.org reading the best fiction, true crime and extended features the internet has to offer.
Here are a few worth spending time with: