#OnBrand post I just made to FB:

Things I have unsuccessfully tried to find for friends this evening:
* BIPOC-authored erotica to a friend's particular taste
* a cheese Advent calendar that ships to Canada

I am a GREAT friend.

culture consumed (November, 2021)

music (all from Thom, no surprise)

• Thom messaged me:

  Just discovered a new girl fronted rock band because Siri misunderstood my request.
  
  Asked for Minusworld, got World Minus One.
  
  https://youtu.be/k6p4NTHvsQY

• Thom posted Shamir - Cisgender (Official Music Video) to FB, saying:

  [CW: blood, implied violence]

  So, Elizabeth and I once had a fight over my use of the phrase “most queer music video ever”*. And of course it’s complicated, because there are as many kinds of queer as there are queers. But this kind of amazing music video just landed on my list as a really strong contender.

  [ETA, the CW is for the video. There was neither blood nor implied violence in the fight Elizabeth and I had.]

  * Babe, I did not fact check my wording. I’m sorry, but we both know that Messenger search is terrible.

• Thom also showed me the music video for Rihanna, Kanye West, Paul McCartney - FourFiveSeconds because it came up in conversation
  
  
• One of Thom's friends posted about Frank Turner's song "Miranda," so Thom listened to it and then played it for me.
  We have assorted thoughts and feelings.
  Thom, later:

  Oh, I played “Miranda” for Den.
  
  Den: “I like that song. Don’t love the misgendering, though.”

books

• Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust America by Jennifer Harvey
• 5 picturebooks on worry/anxiety (trying to find books for a friend's kid)
  
• 2 pronoun/gender picturebooks
• [feminist SFF book club] Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant (and its prequel novella, Rolling in the Deep -- which I belatedly realized was actually published first)

live events

• Hadestown with Thom (Broadway in Boston -- I had seen the New York Theatre Workshop show in 2016, but hadn't seen the Broadway staging yet)
• a virtual poetry reading and conversation with H. Melt, author of There Are Trans People Here
• EP release of a musical that got canceled at the beginning of pandemic -- Songs From Beloved King: A Queer Bible Musical with Thom

  from the event description:

  Don’t miss this one-night only EP release and preview! The event will feature a live band and the original singers performing each tune, interspersed with conversations on the inspiration and origins of the songs, including how closely they relate to the biblical text and scholarship about the queerness of the Bible, as well as the themes of identity found in the Bible, and how current societal dialogue around these themes and the shared experiences of the queer community can be traced back throughout human history.

  You can listen to the EP here, and you can watch the EP event here.

tv with Thom (while we had a low-key day after they got their covid booster):

• the first 2 episodes of Marvel's What If...? - E01 "What If... Captain Carter Were the First Avenger?" & E02 "What If... T'Challa Became a Star-Lord?"
• the first 2 episodes of WandaVision -- E01 "Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience" & E02 "Don't Touch That Dial" (reminder to myself to read the comments on musesfool's post about those first 2 episodes)

other

• the Posten Norway ad When Harry met Santa ENG SUB

movies

• The Matrix (1999) with Thom
  -- Our plan is to (re)watch all the Matrix movies in advance of the new one coming out later this month.
  -- This is the only one we had seen before, but not for years.
  -- Given where we are now, we expected it to feel more like a trans girl story (and were also surprised* that the closing credits hadn't been edited to say the Wachowski Sisters The Wachowskis, etc.).
  * Edit: We both noticed it, but apparently only I was surprised. [Edit2: I was thinking of this about Netflix and Elliot Page -- though I guess that's just the in-platform metadata and not the credits within the shows/movies themselves.]
  You can Google "matrix trans allegory," and you'll get plenty of quotes from Lilly Wachowski from this short video from 2020. The video (around 0:55) says "What do you think of fans discussing the Matrix's trans allegory?" and she says, "I'm glad that it has gotten out that, you know, that was the original intention, but the world wasn't quite ready yet -- at a corporate level -- the corporate world wasn't ready for it." She also says (around 1:45), "The Matrix stuff was all about the desire for transformation, but it was all coming from a closeted point of view."