Adam's Cool Website

What I'm Into This Week, End of Winter Edition

A 30-year-old anime, an academic horror podcast, and a lot of ski wax are keeping me entertained.

I've spent my alone time here in Florida kayaking around the mangroves.

I’ve always wanted to introduce my Chihuahua to a dolphin, good sense be damned. Hobbes is a five-pound canine who was born for the desert; he likes sunny windows and 100-degree days. I always imagined what it would be like to put him face to face with an 800-pound bottlenose and watch him adjust his mental map of the world to accommodate big, slippery fish-dogs.

I almost got my wish this week, when we took Hobbes out for a boat ride in Charlotte Harbor, just off the coast of southwestern Florida. I wrapped him in his life vest and my wife held him on her lap while we puttered out the canals and into the open bay. About a half-hour into the ride, I spotted it: an enormous gray dorsal fin, breaking the water. I looked over at Hobbes to see if he had seen it. No luck: His bulgy, beady eyes were squeezed almost shut. If I can lure him back onto the boat, I’ll try again; in the meantime, this is how I’ll be entertaining myself.

Modes of Thought in Anterran Literature

Found footage horror and its podcast equivalent, found audio, have never done anything for me historically. In the quarter-century since The Blair Witch Project, I think the “we found this tape in the woods/a dusty archive/an abandoned house’s basement” has become a tired trope. But every once in a while, someone finds a way to put the chill back into it.

Modes of Thought in Anterran Literature purports to be the recording of a class at fictional Harbridge University about the literature and history of Anterra, an unfathomably old civilization whose ruins researchers discovered deep beneath the ocean in the wake of a submarine accident. The problem? Besides the unnamed classics professor teaching the course, no one seems to believe Anterra is real. Evidence is scarce—a coverup by the Chinese government, he claims—and the professor’s insistence on talking about these maybe-imaginary ruins have made him a pariah in his field. But as strange occurrences and tragedies begin to creep in at the edges of the class, we’re left to wonder: Could the truth be even more chilling than he suspects?

Part of why this landed so hard for me is that Alexander Kemp, who co-created the show and voices the professor, is utterly believable. Rather than pressing the main character into mad scientist territory, Kemp plays him as a competent, affable instructor: He cracks jokes, invites discussion, and takes pains to emphasize to his students when he’s speculating about gaps in Anterra’s known history. Likewise, the classes aren’t ostentatious in their darkness. That just makes the unsettling details that begin to creep into his lectures—ritual self-mutilation, dark mythology, and, in one deliciously eerie sequence, an uncanny, reconstructed musical piece—begin to appear in his lectures. The show has its slower points—occasional digressions from the classroom and a broad satire of billionaire survivalists fell mostly flat for me. But overall, it’s a gripping listen that, four seasons in, is still playing its cards close.

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure 1993

Could this be the work of an enemy stand user?!

When Outside was still publishing monthly culture roundups, I had a running joke on Twitter that I was going to force its editors to publish my entry on Hirohiko Araki’s long running manga masterpiece JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, because, basically, I thought it would be funny to make the magazine whose journalism inspired Into Thin Air and Blackfish do that. Alas, my colleagues there have moved away from that kind of media coverage this year, so I'll just have to do it here instead.

Outside's editors when I turn in 200 lovingly-crafted words about Hirohiko Araki's longrunning comic masterpiece Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. pic.twitter.com/Ygsf08yxnL

— (((Adam Roy))) (@adnroy) April 26, 2023

Running continuously since 1987, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is pretty much exactly what the title promises: a series of people named JoJo having bizarre adventures involving, variously, vampires, ancient alien supermen, cyborg Nazis, cyborg Nazis fighting ancient alien supermen, magic dogs, and dramatic poses galore. It’s gloriously bizarre and over the top, and is so embedded in the culture that it has, as of 2024, two spiders and a tardigrade named after it.

Despite the 2012 series being better known and better animated, I’ve always had a soft spot for the original 1993 video adaptation, which I owned on VHS back when I was a kid. The series adapts the beloved, globetrotting Stardust Crusaders arc of the manga, which features grandfather and grandson Joseph Joestar and Jotaro Kujo and a gang of allies trekking to Egypt by air, sea, and land in search of their family’s nemesis, the vampiric ubermensch Dio. Thirty years after its original release, it’s still a near-perfect midnight watch, pulpy and hallucinatory in its weirdness.

Appreciation Post: At-Home Ski Maintenance

One of these days I'm going to get an actual vise, or so I keep telling myself.

From base welds to waxes, I do almost all of my ski maintenance at home. I tell my friends its because I’m too cheap to pay for a professional tune. That’s true, but, really, that’s not why I do it. There’s a glorious kind of stillness that I find in sharpening and ironing and buffing; after a while, those tasks become a kind of moving meditation. It’s a little like I’m scraping down the rough surfaces of my mind, slowly smoothing out my thoughts until my worries are a pile of waxen shavings lying on the floor. I put off waxing my skis for as long as I can—I was solidly into January by the time I busted out the iron for the first time—but I always end up enjoying it so much that I promise to make it part of my weekly routine. Maybe this is the spring that I finally do.