Happy Solstice, POMEs! We’re celebrating the shortest day of the year with some fun diversions, and some long reads for the long night.
There’s a very special conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn occurring tonight with the solstice that we hope you get to see! Some people are calling it “the Christmas Star,” which: fine, sure. Other people are checking their horoscopes to take advantage of the once-in-a-millennium celestial energy. If (like your Pacific Northwest-residing snack-compiler) your home skies are plagued by winter cloud cover, you can still celebrate this most ancient holiday in the 2020 fashion virtually, perhaps by watching the sun rise over Stonehenge, for example.
If you’re getting some holiday downtime this year, perhaps you could use some new games to try out with your pals at home or online? We are super excited about Mundane Magic, a one-page RPG by friend of POME Lysa Penrose, where you play a meddling crone trying to fix a flaw in the weave of reality! We are also thematically intrigued by the one-shot RPG Snack Attack, a Honey Heist hack where: “1 – You have a complex plan that requires precise timing. 2 – You are GODDAMN RACCOON.”
Among the many things we are looking forward to in the new solar and calendar years are, of course, GOOD COMICS, and we are looking respectfully at WITCHBLOOD, a new Vault comics series by Matthew Erman and Lisa Sterle, who also gave us the much-beloved Modern Witch Tarot. Featuring “punk witches and vampire bikers redefining tropes from the history of Americana” (!!) WITCHBLOOD launches in March.
YA is a genre that continues to boom in both comics and prose, but YA protagonists are still “not like other girls,” writes Ashia Monet. This is part of why we POMEs treasure coming of age stories (both fictional and not!) that break these conventions: for a sample of what we mean, check out this wonderful interview with POME fave Maia Kobabe about eir comics memoir Gender Queer.
Do you crave a fascinating deep dive into the mind of the common Bro, and its connection with the decline of the U.S. empire? Here you go, it won’t disappoint.
Hazlitt is featuring reflection on 2020 by its writers, and we were drawn in by Anthony Oliveira’s beautiful and heart-wrenching “The Year in the Wilderness,” exploring the meaning and shape of despair. On a more playful, yet equally heartfelt note, our favorite “Twitter-addled” advice columnist J.P. Brammer discusses whether there is such a thing as “The One” in his always-delightful newsletter, ¡Hola Papi!
When it comes to love and loss, if all else fails, please keep with you the knowledge that medieval Egyptian lesbians existed, and left behind their very horniest love spells to prove it.
