Haven’t posted for a while and I won’t go into why because it’s boring; suffice to say that I’ve been wallowing.

I have some stuff planned for upcoming posts but today I just want to do a short one, introducing a new series I call Bundles of Joy. These are small things that bring me joy currently—so small they don’t merit a post of their own. In seasons like the one I’m going through, it’s good to take time to notice things that don’t suck. Otherwise they slip from your memory almost immediately, before you can savor them.

The Planet Crafter

I have been playing this game obsessively for the past month. It combines aspects of two of my favorite games, Subnautica and Surviving Mars. It’s a base-building survival game in which you’re terraforming a planet (and also solving a mystery but honestly who cares about that when there are bases to build). It’s still in early access, and I don’t normally fuck with games in early access, but it’s close to the release version and it’s well worth the price in its current state.

The Fall of the House of Usher

Mike Flanagan is making the best horror content on any platform right now. It’s spooky, and sometimes gory, while also being funny and a little camp. I love a ghost story, and his Haunting of Hill House is one of the best I’ve ever seen (at least up to the last episode) even though it bore no resemblance to Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House beyond the title and some character names. In fact, that’s one of the things I love about it. It’s hilarious to “base” something on a story and then not base it on the story.

House of Usher is in that same mold. I read a description of it as “if Edgar Allan Poe wrote Succession” and it’s very that. Except it isn’t because nothing about the story resembles Edgar Allan Poe at all. Each episode is named after one of his stories, but that’s where the similarity ends. Will a goldbug, or a black cat, or a telltale heart, or a pendulum make an appearance? Sure. But not in any way resembling the original story. Also, all the characters are named after Edgar Allan Poe characters, some of them from his poems, so we have a woman with the unlikely name of Tamerlane, among others.

The funniest part is the working of Poe’s writing into the dialogue. The story’s narrator and protagonist, Roderick Usher, was once a “poet” and he wrote things like Annabel Lee (for his wife of that name) and I think maybe spontaneously composes The Raven right on the spot. But my absolute favorite is the preacher at the funeral, performing an EAP mashup which includes parts of For Annie, Spirits of the Dead, The Premature Burial, and The Imp of the Perverse.

We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss—we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain.

Absolutely appropriate for a funeral! I need to make a note for my family that when I die I want the eulogy to be about fascination with the grotesque. You can’t stop thinking about my dead, rotting corpse, can you?

Mike Flanagan’s talent is to be able to include over-the-top, ridiculous details like this, without the whole story devolving into insanity the way that Ryan Murphy’s projects always do. Usher is a tight, satisfying story, the same way that Hill House and Bly Manor were.

Something else…?

There was something I wanted to write about. I remember thinking that should definitely go in a bundle of joy. But guess what? I didn’t write it down, and I’ve forgotten it. Maybe it will come back to me, and if so I’ll edit the post. But let this be a lesson to us all: take note of the good things before you forget them.