I recently completed a playthrough of OXENFREE II: Lost Signals, the sequel to 2016's OXENFREE. I loved the first game, but the second fell flat. It inherited what made OXENFREE good, but not what made it great.

My job has a learning & development stipend. I usually use it to buy books that are relevant to my work. Here are the ones I read in 2025 and what I think of them.

the highest authority in any organization isn't the person with the fanciest title. it's not the person officially "in charge". the highest authority is the person with the keys. at a high school, that's a custodian. if the school is big and old enough, maybe it's one particular custodian who's been around long enough to collect keys to weird, forgotten spaces.

that custodian might be schmoozable.

i've seen one and a half lacrosse games in my life. one of them was a women's lacrosse game i watched while touring the stevens institute of technology. i was curious about what women's lacrosse was "supposed" to look like, a confusion borne from my experience at that other half of a game: a debacle of mean-spiritedness that illuminated some things about high schooler morality but very little about lacrosse. it was a dumb argument that metastasized into spectacle, a strange outgrowth of berkeley high schoolers' general inability to adequately answer the question: why not?

one theme of all these stories is that berkeley high's educational model was largely "fuck around and find out." as a comfortably middle-class white kid, i typically "found out" about power relationships by being on the right side of them - by learning that the person putatively in charge of you was not, and that there was a whole universe of agency that i could learn to exercise.

most of the school's black kids had a very, very different experience.