Everything But the Kitchen Sink 08.03.2026
It was a wild week for Her Majesty the Princess Luna. Her main person - Mom - was out of town visiting relatives, so it was up to the JV lineup (me) to make sure that all of Luna’s needs were taken care of. This meant a walk early in the morning, breakfast + greenie snack afterwards, extra time outside after that (the main reason to deploy Luna Face), and then an afternoon car ride + adventure somewhere. Plus, dad went away for the weekend on a bicycling trip so until Mom got back later Saturday evening it really was just the two of us. Luna slept on my bed, which she basically never does, and while stretching out next to me at 3am kicked me right in the head, waking me up immediately. Not ideal. Luckily for her she is fluffy and lovable and generally good-natured which allows me to forgive these slights. All ended well.
Anyway! Let’s see what we got up to over the past week:
TV
X-Men 97 was back to a solid episode! I feel like the formula of “intense monologue” + “sweet fight scene” = Good One! And maybe it was just the fact that the original animated series and every single movie went so hard on Wolverine but I’m kinda Wolverine’d out. I’d prefer maybe a whole season where he’s just a support character or off doing other stuff. We know his deal at this point. I’m sad that we’re down to just a couple episodes left, but hopefully they’ll be bangers and we won’t have to wait too long for the next season.
Silo finally had a good one! And, what a coincidence, it involved Juliette getting most of her memory back / getting the blanks filled in from the end of the last season. Like…why did I have to wait 5 episodes for that!?!? Couldn’t we have done that at the end of the season premiere? Or maybe episode 2? Like I mentioned in earlier Kitchen Sinks, I want to keep watching the show, but I need a reason. If they keep taking steps back narratively then I’m going to lose interest, so hopefully they keep this season going strong and kick it into high gear.
Because mom wanted someone to talk about it with, I’ve started watching Dark Winds on Netflix. It’s been pretty good so far! It’s been a very simple formula, which I appreciate in both a period piece and a mystery set in a small town: fairly small main cast of characters + making the setting feel thoroughly lived-in + solid pace for the whodunnit. Dark Winds has gotten all of these right so far, and I really like the sort of nebulous idea of Native magic. Just enough weird things happen due to the use of this magic to make us think it’s real, but the ‘rules’ of the world haven’t really codified its existence. Fun balancing act.
BOOKS
More Hickman X-Men this week, and I’ve enjoyed it thoroughly. The only thing about it that I find sad is that the premise for this book working at all relies on Xavier’s dream completely failing, and that’s a little bleak to fully consider. Like I’ve mentioned previously, I haven’t been a particularly avid X-Men reader in like 20 years and it’s very fun to me that Scott Summers has become considerably more militant and active than just simply ‘Field Team Leader.’ He’s much more of an actual crusader now, and I like seeing his advocacy of Mutant Rights show up in a vastly more assertive fashion.
GAMING
Not a ton here, as I skipped EDH night when a huge thunderstorm showed up right as I was going to leave the house. I did not feel like driving through crappy weather when the TV was blaring about a tornado warning.
I did go to a draft on Sunday with some acquaintances. A team Mystery Pack draft, which I unfortunately beefed. I was hoping that cornering the market on aggressive White would pay dividends, and I was able to do that but at least in this draft it was not nearly good enough to beat up my opponents. I ended up with a small Green splash but it wasn’t effective enough. I think I had the makings of a fine Boros deck had I read the draft correctly, but I didn’t and so a 1-2 performance was probably about the best I could have asked for. Ah well. I managed to make a nice trade with Jarvis for the best parts of his draft winnings for some Quirion Dryads I got at a shop for $0.20 apiece several weeks back, so that wasn’t so bad.
TRIVIA
A heinous performance. We were in First Place by a mile exiting the first half. Then we had a bad second half but we were still in Fourth. Then we decided to bet huge on the finale when we were supremely confident we knew the answer (me included)…but we beefed it. The only saving grace was that a ton of extra teams did too so we only ended up in 9th instead of like 17th where we belonged. But oh well. The usually-excellent hosts entered our points wrong (the points and games played for our team don’t reflect this past week’s performance) but I don’t think the added points are enough to get us into 3rd place. Still, it’s tough watching our chances at 1st Place overall slip away. Here’s hoping we can pick ourselves back up and make another run at it as this season reaches the backend.
SPORTS
Football season is ready to ramp up, which is absolutely delightful. It’s all upside and possibility at this point, although the Harbaugh era has traditionally brought with it a gigantic injury that violently stress tests the roster depth and brings with it considerable existential dread. Hopefully with the Minter era we can skip that part until a little later in the year.