When a sinister sublime weaponizes your emotional wounds — Spoilers ahead. With mentions of self-harm and suicide. As Den of Geek’s Alec Bojalad correctly noted, the entities as drawn by Gary in the first Bird Box film were Lovecraftian: deeply, disturbingly dark, and one of them even has facial tentacles like Cthulhu. If Bird Box’s invisible assailants were indeed…

Why I found this season of Netflix’s The Witcher personally unsettling — Includes Season 3 Vol. 1 ending spoilers and book spoilers. Season 3 opens with the little family of Geralt, Yennefer, and Ciri traveling together, on the run, going from one temporary home to another and paying their accommodations’ owners for their “discretion.” …

How do you tell a forbidden story? Draw the scene. — Here goes. I’m drawing the scene. And I’m going to change some details so I can deny its association with a real location, and with real people in my life. But I’m going to play up the details that drew me in when this person — let’s call him Santi…

Three tales — In the midst of pandemic lockdowns, my work-displaced chef husband turned his mom’s garage into an “essentials” food store. In the Philippines, the essentials were rice, cured meats, and frozen meals. Francis, my husband, printed a hundred copies of his store’s price list. He thought, he could walk around the…

How this impatient teacher dealt with students resorting to dubious “study guides” — I was drafting this post on my 11-year-old daughter’s computer. I was browsing images to add from Unsplash when she walked by, saw the title, and exclaimed: “Mom, you know what ChatGPT is?!!” She said it with this shock on her face that shocked me in turn. “What makes you…

Dwelling in the intersections of multiple, sometimes contrasting perspectives — My four-year-old, not-yet-speaking son Joaquin was diagnosed with autism a year ago, in 2022. Following the diagnosis, I had a very enlightening, perspective-shifting year of reading and asking around as much as I can about autism as a condition, a neurotype, and a disability. All three terms apply — condition…

Is the film’s sociopolitical message too deliberately played? — Chai Fonacier, the actress who played Filipino maid Diana in Nocebo, noted how carefully the producers approached the folkloric aspects of the film. “They did it with a lot of respect,” she said. “It comes from a protective space.” Local shamans were consulted, Filipino writers were employed, and Fonacier guarded…

Visiting the university after my resignation — I left when the streetlamps were turning on for the evening. I made it a point to leave alone, to walk back to the campus gates alone, leaving behind everyone I reconnected with again during socials and dinner. …

Takeaways of a literature professor mom — As much as I’m hopeful that my son acquires language, I’m just as prepared to accept that he may not speak at all. And that’s okay. Even if he obtains language, he may not want to speak it — all the time or only some of the time — and…