Welcome to Brianna’s Digest. For the uninitiated to last week’s kick-off issue, this will be a subscriber-only, weekly blog round-up for my thoughts on bits of pop culture. Just whatever’s on my mind in the realm of movies, books, celebrities, music, podcasts (if I ever listen to more than one lol) TV, articles by “culture writers.” The go-to place for my hottest takes at the moment, or whatever.
Plus, my 30% off sale (in perpetuity) that I’m offering for new paid subscribers ends today, if you’d like to join the growing readership of Brianna’s Digest. I will probably do another one of these sales again soon, but why not strike while the iron’s hot?
I’m in Massachusetts for this week’s edition of Brianna’s Digest, current home of my parents as well as the Sturbridge Village joke as told by Stanley Tucci that I heard on a late-season episode of 30 Rock as my rewatch winds down (more on that later). As much as I love living in a metropolitan area, it’s nice to have a little home I can retreat to every few months where I can step outside and hear nothing but bird calls and rustling trees. If I spend too much time here, though, I start to go insane. Also, shout-out to my paid subscriber count, which has doubled since I started this blog last week—I can now count my subscribers on two hands.
Literature
In last week’s Digest, I mentioned that I would be transitioning from Don Delillo’s novel White Noise into Steve Brusatte’s non-fiction book The Rise and Reign of the Mammals. For background context, I was never really what you’d call a dinosaur kid—dinosaurs didn’t adorn my clothes nor school supplies, and I didn’t play with many memorable dinosaur toys in my rotation (I mostly created emotionally fraught scenarios for my Bratz dolls). But I was always passively fascinated by dinosaurs and prehistoric creatures. One of my favorite outings as a child was going to the King of Prussia Mall and getting to see the talking, animatronic T. Rex head at the long since closed FAO Shwarz but not actually get any toys.
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