ISSUE #02 - JUNE 2026

june '26 favorites

SPREAD ME (SARAH GAILEY; 2025)

absolutely crazy work from gailey, the work of whom i’d already loved from reading the echo wife, that’s essentially a horror novella asking “what if The Thing from The Thing wanted to fuck you?” there’s a lot of incredible, weird pervert shit going on in this novel, following through on the promise of erotic body horror to a T. i LOVE kinsey. it doesn’t escape my usual gripes about novella pacing, as it has a split timeline structure going on that i have issues with the execution of, but i want to reread this badly enough to want to own it, which is a real treat.

AWARIA (2024)

short bullet hell game about being a butch maintenance tunnel worker repairing anti-ghost shielding so that you can kiss the ghosts. it RULES. the gameplay loop is difficult but, at least on the easier modes, not so difficult to provide more than a thrill of challenge. the ghost designs are delightful. the last few levels have catnip for me specifically by way of a) playing as your boss in game who i kept going “please just one chance” to every time i saw her show up between levels, & b) a gimmick for the very last fight that drove me wild. you can play it in like two hours & you should!

MOON RIVER (2026)

a short, atmospheric and deeply melancholy rpg where you are a mariner headed down moon river in search of a mysterious goal, while shadows that steal people’s bodies and senses—leaving them in living nonexistence—haunt your path, and need to be dispelled. i love the art of this game, especially the way it plays with shadow, i love the soundtrack, i love the sketches of characters we see and the vignettes from the mariner’s life before their journey, the trades and hope that you offer to people as you travel that don’t amount to anything materially but add so much to your character and the journey.

THE CREEPY AND FREAKY (KAMENTOTSU; 2025-26)

a manga that starts out as an anthology of horror stories through the frame of a shop of “fears” in an animal crossing-esque town, and slowly reveals itself to have some deeply weird shit going on. this is one that’s better experienced blindly, but what i can say is that it has a truly incredible cast of characters and my favorite is absolutely sakagami, who has some bonkers shit going on. i love her so much.

late-manga spoilers & nsfw mention!

there’s a part where sakagami talks about how when she was a kid, a child prodigy with a deep-rooted curiosity, she wanted to be a “witch’s cat” when she grew up, which earned her derision and rejection. forced into the box of society, they opened it up and found her, a witch’s cat… what a let-down, right? then when they discover they have to turn someone into a catperson for plot reasons, they perform the procedure on sakagami, and she forces them to do it without administering any painkillers and she transcends the concept of pain and comes like 30 times. and wakes up as a catgirl. it’s fantastic.

books & short stories

  • the guild hunters series, books #1-10 (nalini singh) – all of these were checked in on my library’s digital catalog, and i really needed some “junk food” to chew through at work this month. guild hunters DID deliver. if i went into every book we’d be here all night so here’s the top notes: paranormal romance about vampires, angels & humans with some really fascinating worldbuilding and a complex overarching plot, with some pretty major flaws i have to contend with every time i hit a new book. there’s some pretty bad fatphobia baked into the worldbuilding; while it has interesting and well-written female leads, the sex dynamics always flatten out to the same deeply irritating and misogynistic Dominant Man Taking Charge Of His Woman. some of the early stuff is very 2009. i’m sticking it out to see how the plot shakes out (and also because i’m… very curious about the quality of the later installments centering the one queer couple, who are written really well so far. little wary, mostly open-minded.)

  • spread me (sarah gailey; 2025) ★

  • wolf worm (t. kingfisher; 2026) – GROSS!!, in the best way. i love a reveal of a situation so horrifying i physically cover my eyes as if i’m seeing it and not the words on the page. reading it right after the news about screwworm making it back up into the u.s… well it definitely was timely and definitely had me going “what i get screwworm and die” every time i picked up steak at the grocery store.

  • grandmaster of demonic cultivation vol. 1 (mo xiang tong xiu; 2016) – reread! i wanted a refresher before i tried once again to get into the rest of the series, now that more of it is at my library. wei wuxian, sicko that you are. everyone go follow poorly-drawn-mdzs on tumblr.

  • “trilobite blues” (uel aramcheck, greater reality area; 2026) – up there for very short stories that make me feel emotional for a very long time. me & my pet trilobite will share an impossible present…

  • the creepy and the freaky (kamentotsu; 2025-26) ★

  • the woman who rides like a man (tamora pierce; 1986) – definitely not my favorite of the lioness series so far, but the catastrophic fallout of alanna & jonathan’s miscommunication and jonathan’s inability to treat alanna as she wants to be treated was SO good. glad it happened.

  • his majesty’s dragon (naomi novik; 2006) – fantastic style and sense of time & place, and a slow pace that i really enjoyed. laurence and temeraire are by far the highlight of the book, both of them interesting on their own but ten times better in relation to each other and how that relationship develops over time. the alternate history aspect is interesting, the worldbuilding is neat… but when i saw that this went on for eight more books, i didn’t find that i really wanted to see more than what it gave me. good on its own!

  • entangled life: how fungi make our worlds, change our minds & shape our futures (merlin sheldrake; 2020) – every like two years i try to finish this and every two years i get a little closer. and i’m still sticking it out right now!! i’m getting through it!! it’s a really fascinating read and i love learning more about fungi and the underpinnings of it in our ecosystems, i just have a difficult time with pretty much all nonfiction. slow & steady wins the fungi. truffle section is probably my favorite of what i’ve read!

  • absolution (jeff vandermeer; 2024) – i don’t usually throw my DNFs on here but this one’s notable because i love the original southern reach trilogy. got about 20% of the way into this one, just past the end of the first ‘act’, and it just doesn’t hit for me, in its style or its narrative. somehow it found the least interesting perspective to describe any of the horror that could be compelling. augh!

games

  • minecraft – the fathoms datapack is a great time for people who love dredge (2023) but get scared playing dredge (me). all its missing is the dead wife

  • slime feet (nadia nova; 2024) – explicit yuri vn about a girl terminally ill with a mystery virus that turns her into slime & her girlfriend on the other side of the work computer that can’t visit her due to quarantine. good, fun, miserable read that got me really interested in the videotome engine

  • TOEM (2021) – I LOVE YOU PHOTOGRAPHY GAME!! i managed to nab one of the cheaper refurbished original steam decks after waiting for months on their restock and this has been so perfect to play on it. i really like the ghosts mechanic

  • OFF (2025 remake) – this game has a place close to my heart from watching the original years ago and i finally picked up the remake in a humble bundle. haven’t finished it yet but the new combat feels… interesting? there’s a lot of friction there, and i’ve gotta get a better handle on it. the art’s phenomenal, as always.

  • flock around (2026) – do you enjoy birdwatching, or photography, or playing a silly game with your friends? pick up flock around it’s great fun & it’s only like 5 bucks. the style they use for the birds is detailed enough to get good patterns & shapes & colors and also silly enough that sometimes a bird looks at you head-on and it is completely ridiculous. the birdsong is great. my favorite fact abt this game’s development is because a lot of recorded bird noises are copyrighted, the developer slowed down bird noises, mimicked them with their own voice, and then sped it up to make all the noises in the game. and they sound ACCURATE!

  • on-together virtual co-working (2026) – this game continues to be really great for getting chores done and being able to glance up and see other folks working. i owe all my laundry to it right now

  • awaria (2024) ★

  • moon river (2026) ★

movies & television

  • pacific rim (2013) – a rewatch of one of my favorite movies of all time to show it to a friend, and it’s still so great. always, always thinking about drift compatibility, and the connection between pilots, and the connection between them and their jaegers. it’s all so good!!

  • dr. horrible’s sing-along blog (2008) – rewatch for my mom’s birthday, as it’s one of my parents’ favorites and subsequently i’ve seen it a lot. the songs are as fun as ever (i love a good duet!!) but god, it does not hold up at all in so many aspects. comically so. but shoutout bad horse (the thoroughbred of sin) (he got the application that you just sent in!)

  • alien stage (2022-25) – i have a lot of things to say about alien stage & most of them are not very flattering. however if you’re in the market for a good concept album, some fun animation, toxic relationships, and not thinking too hard about it after, you’re in luck!

alien stage thoughts, full series spoilers

alien stage is a twelve ‘episode’ series where each episode is a music video. the songs in these videos are diegetic, part of a music competition in a world where humans have long since been enslaved by aliens and some are forced to compete to the death using song in a tournament. the visuals of each video cut between the competition itself – with a stage setting, costumes, etc. – and flashbacks to the participants’ childhoods together (or, later on, the human rebellion in present-day). the art is gorgeous, the music is good, and there’s really interesting imagery and depictions of toxic relationships in a world rigged against you. there’s some supplementary stuff that turns it into a weird little multimedia story.

however i can’t think about it too hard, because the story isn’t very good.

listen, i know there’s an audience for torture porn hype moments & aura with no substance beyond glimpses at interesting interpersonal relationships, but today i am not that audience. the setting is paper-thin. we have all seen “humans are enslaved by aliens and used as chattel/pets” before. it is not a new sci-fi setting. this is treading no new ground. on its face that’s not necessarily a bad thing. what gets me particularly bad is the rebellion. hyuna, an escapee from the training grounds that the rest of the participants grew up in, is one of the leaders of the rebellion, and she’s depicted throughout as somewhat ruthless—prioritizing the many over the individual, etc.—which puts her at odds with the main character mizi, who prioritizes her love and family above all else. interesting moral conflict! gives hyuna a reason for not having done anything about alien stage before people had to die this season!

however. the rebellion’s plan is to launch a rocket into space with “pet human records” in hopes that it will… reach humans who might have already escaped the empire? give people… hope?? UNCLEAR! HUUUH? when mizi eventually snaps after hyuna’s death and brings the rocket back down, blowing up alien stage and all of the aliens inside it, this is treated as like, a crazy and violent and inappropriate thing to do, in comparison to the peaceful path of… nearly pointless hope rocket that does nothing to aid or change anyone’s material circumstance at all. that’s what they were working towards this whole time? that’s what people had to die for? we are given 0 indication of like, life outside the empire beyond the rebellion. ok man, yeah. sure. there’s a point in one of the supplementary comics where a character is like, “who knows who committed the original sin [in this series of events]?” and man, i think the original sin might have been the enslavement of an entire species? i think that one’s pretty clear actually. maybe you should do something about that. maybe you should look at what’s actionable here.

also, you know, everyone loves it when the only brown main character kills herself for an amoral blonde white man and tells him that he should “forgive himself endlessly”. especially when her death is completely insane because why was the rebellion (wants to save humanity) pointing live weaponry at the unarmed blonde man to begin with? do we not have tazers?

tl;dr: i think maybe we should blow up the empire more, actually