The Now Page

This is a page concept I saw on Matt Cole Wilson's website, who in turn got it from Derek Sivers. Seems like a fun enough idea, so let's talk about right now!

Last Updated 05 May 2026

Personal

Things have really and truly settled down compared to this time last year, which is great. Honestly, right now has been the most delightfully mundane my life has been since... hmmm, 2023? Maybe even 2022? If it sounds like I'm complaining, I'm definitely not.

Projects

My biggest project right now is to move the website (or at least the Ramblings page) to Eleventy. Every time I make a new post, I update the index, the Ramblings page, the prior ramble, and the RSS feed MANUALLY. In the grand scheme of things, this doesn't take a ton of time, but it does subconciously make me not want to post a lot, or not want to bother with smaller posts. With any luck, Eleventy's pagination will make this much easier.

Concept-wise, I get Eleventy's whole thing. It's learning stuff like Nunjucks and Liquid that I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around. But I'm really not complaining, I wanted a website that could also be a project. If I can at least get a basic-ass blog with pagination set up I'll be a happy camper.

I am still digitizing any and every tape I come across while thrifting, going to estate sales, etc. Some of which have had some really neat stuff... I'm not going to call it "Lost Media" per se, because for all I know this stuff still exists somewhere in a media conglomerate's company archives. No, this is more like inaccesable media, stuff that isn't availble to be streamed anywhere, nor ever existed on home media. I've recovered four 1985 episodes of the soap opera Another World, one episode of failed CBS drama series LA Doctors, and an odd episode of A Whole New Ballgame, a very short-lived ABC sitcom. It's a crossover episode with Coach! Sadly Shelley Fabares' guest appearance didn't move the needle any.

What are you listening to?

Haute and Freddy's debut album Big Disgrace came out last week and I fuckin love it. I mentioned the duo recently in my My 2025 in Music ramble. I've got a sizeable hunch they're probably going to make an appearance in the 2026 version as well.

Last year I found an old Panasonic boom box from the 80s at the Goodwill for $12. I bought a replacement band for it and my husband helped get it back up and running, and it's been real nice to have on in the background when I'm working from home. While noodling around with the tuning dial I accidentally discovered Radio K, the local college station, and they're fun to listen to. But mainly it's been a fun way to get back into listening to cassette tapes. Before the boombox, I had maybe half a dozen tapes and a very finnicky Sanyo portable tape player that was honestly more trouble than its worth to use. But since getting the boombox, I've gotten a couple more tapes to listen to. I don't think I'm gonna go full tapehead, my physical music format of choice is still vinyl, but it's been a fun little thing to play around with. Actually, my most favoritest tape to listen to is one of those tape-with-a-35mm-aux-jack-sticking-out-of-it adapters for car stereos, and I like to pop that thing into the boombox, hook the aux jack into an old phone, and listen to the Classic American Top 40 station. Hearing Casey Kasem come out of this old boombox just feels right, y'know?

What are you reading?

Earlier this week I finished Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City, a book I bought basically sight unseen from the Kobo store. Like, I didn't even know if it was fiction or nonfiction. Turns out it's a medieval fantasy novel -- an army regiment of engineers led by a clever but cowardly/unreliable chief return home only to find their city surrounded by a vast enemy. It was a very slow burn for me; I almost bounced off it my first quarter through. But I'm glad I stuck with it, because I've really enjoyed it. I went in thinking I was going to read a fairly dry book about medieval siegecraft, and wouldn't ya know it, this book is actually quite funny. I won't get into spoilers, but I will say this is one of those books with a very divisive ending. I didn't hate it, I don't need a "and they lived happily ever after" at the end of my books, but I will admit I wasn't expecting the conclusion to be so abrupt.

From walled cities to... uh... walls made with sediment, the book I just started reading is The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization. Hey, did you know that we as a planet are running out of sand? And it's really important to a lot of our modern society? And as we go digging for more, we're destroying the planet in the process? So that's great. I'm only a few chapters in and so far it's got me intensely bouncing back and forth between sand-related dread and giggling when I'm reminded of the sand film from The Simpsons. Mostly the dread part.

What are you playing?

So far my 2026 has been back-to-back non-cozy cozy games. I don't mean to imply these are bad games, far from it.

First up this year is Grimshire, a game that could be reductively described as "Stardew Valley but with deadlines". You're a cute anthropomorphic critter in a quaint town full of anthropomorphic critters. And then the plague hits and you're cut off from all other nearby towns, where you get most of your food from. The survival of everyone in town depends entirely on your ability to grow crops and catch fish. And depending on what difficulty you're playing, this can be a daunting task. Townsfolk can die, and how are you gonna upgrade your pickaxe if the only blacksmith in town starved to death? I mean, I'm assuming the local blacksmith can die, I don't actually know because I didn't lose a single citizen. This isn't much of a brag, because there was a minute there where my entire town subsisted on worms and acorns. Like Stardew, you can also theoretically date townsfolk and/or spruce up your home with cute decor, but I found every waking minute needed to be spent on tending to crops, livestock, etc. Otherwise, it's worms and acorns again for supper.

Pokopia was nice enough to come out close-ish to my birthday, which is all the excuse I needed to splurge a little and get me a copy along with a Switch 2. The game itself is like an ABBA song, cheerful melodies upon initial reaction, and then you dig a little deeper and find it to be far more melancholy than you pictured. Not that I'm going to call Pokopia some sort of grimdark game, but... I guess it's possibly the grimmest Pokemon game I can think of?

This isn't why I called Pokopia a non-cozy cozy game. For me, Pokopia is slightly stressful. This little creature wants the environment to be more humid. this little creature, who I thought would love living in the dark, actually doesn't. This creature wants a house filled with "wobbly stuff", and I don't know what the fuck that means. Maybe like a see-saw? And then there's the design paralysis. I am not particularly clever at games where you build things, and Pokopia begs you to redesign an entire world from scratch. At least when Animal Crossing: New Horizons allowed you to design your island, you didn't have to also completely design your villager's houses from the ground up AND furnish them.