MICHELLE: I really loved The Last of Us, and one thing I can enthusiastically plug this week is HBO’s official companion podcast, in which the creator of the game, his co-showrunner, and the original voice of Joel go through each episode offering up all kinds of extra detail and interpretation.
SEAN: I’m running behind on this series, which everyone I know has already read, but The Locked Tomb has been my reading in between light novels lately (which is to say, about a chapter a day). Gideon the Ninth was fantastic, and I’m halfway through Harrow the Ninth, which is confusing but also fantastic. “Lesbian necromancers in space!”, as the pull quote says.
ANNA: I’m currently watching the k-drama Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha on Netflix. It is about a dentist who moves to a small town and gets involved with the quirky community in unexpected ways. I’m around halfway through, which is when I assume the hero’s psychological trauma appears to make everyone start crying after several solid episodes of rom-com antics.
MICHELLE: That reminds me that live-action version of The Full-Time Wife Escapist is on Netflix now and is also a great deal of fun!
KATE: I was disappointed in the second season of Picard, but the new season is a blast; sure, it’s got plenty of fan service, but the old gang have such great chemistry together that I can forgive some of the show’s clumsier references to characters and events from the original Next Generation series.
ASH: I finally got around to reading R. F. Kuang’s The Poppy War trilogy and am just about finished with the third book. An award-winning epic fantasy partly inspired by twentieth-century Chinese history, the series can be brutal but it’s also excellent. I already have more of Kuang’s work lined up ready to read (Babel: An Arcane History) and on pre-order (Yellowface).
MJ: In anticipation of its season two *hopefully* coming out in April sometime, I’ve been rewatching the first season of Link Click, a Chinese animated series about a trio who run a unique time travel service, available from Crunchyroll (originally licensed by Funimation before they merged). The English subtitles are… well. Um. But the story is so good and the characters so compelling, we’ll take what we can get. Check out the trailer for season one here and the opening theme here. It was one of our greatest finds during the pandemic and I’m pretty hyped up for the new season.
Okay, maybe not. But yes, I have indeed been reading some manga, or at least rereading, which is to say that I took some time this week to look at the new omnibus edition of CLAMP’s four-volume manga, 
I checked out the first volume of 
This week, we both read the first volume of the much-anticipated series 
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Cross Game, Omnibus Vol. 1 (Japanese vols. 1-3) | By Mitsuru Adachi | Viz Manga app | iPad 2, iOS 4.3 – For quite some time now, I’ve stood by quietly as my esteemed colleagues raved about Mitsuru Adachi’s Cross Game. I meant to catch up, truly I did, but as more time (and more volumes) passed me by, the idea of catching up at $15-$20 a pop seemed more than a bit daunting. Fortunately, the Viz iPad app has changed all that, offering me the opportunity to buy these volumes for half their print price, and on a terrific platform to boot!
Veronica Presents: Kevin Keller, Issue 2 | By Dan Parent | Archie Comics App | iPad 2, iOS 4.3 – Comic creators who work in a shared universe face specific, conjoined responsibilities when adding a new character to that universe: they have to simultaneously generate interest in the addition while reassuring the existing audience that they aren’t going to go too far off of the ranch. The situation poses some interesting challenges, and success stories aren’t exactly numerous. One noteworthy example is the addition of a gay teen, Kevin Keller, to the wholesome solar system that is Archie Comics.
A while ago, I was asked to write something up for the