It’s Friday. Looking for something to switch up your weekend, or to give you an excuse to relax a little? That’s what the Weekend Reset is for. Each week we’ll pull together five things to get your weekend started. Could be something to read or watch, something to eat or listen to, or even something to do. Enjoy the weekend fellas.
With multiple feet of snow dumped on some parts of the country in the last few days and an even more intense coldsnap expected to come soon, we’re all eager to get our hygge on these days. And there’s nothing more hygge than a snowy winter’s morning with the smell of warm cinnamon wafting through the house. Cinnamon buns are deceptively simple to make — they take a bit of a time investment, yes, and you do need to start them the day before you eat them, but there’s no complicated technique involved — and the results are always worth it. I recommend the Stella Parks recipe, which allows you to do almost all the work in a stand mixer.
This is one weird, weird, wonderful videogame. You play as Jesse Faden, who comes to visit the Federal Bureau of Control to investigate her missing brother — only for a paranormal event to happen that suddenly turns her into the Director of the Bureau. You’re tasked with purging the Bureau of “The Hiss,” an otherworldly force that is corrupting and possessing everyone at the FBC. But instead of playing like a conventional third person shooter, this game gets real strange, real fast: you are given psychic abilities in the game, that make combat so much more satisfying than just a simple run-and-gun shooter. And the graphics here are just incredible — every gorgeously crafted, reflective floor and seemingly endless dark corridor contributes to a mood of creeping, weird, psychological dread. Available on all major systems and PC.
If you, like me, adore the recent golden age of brilliantly written TV drama that started cropping up in the wake of The Sopranos in the early 2000s, Alan Sepinwall’s book is the perfect read for you. Sepinwall — a lifelong TV critic, who now works for Rolling Stone — tracks the history and evolution of this recent TV golden age from Oz and The Sopranos to Mad Men and Deadwood and Friday Night Lights. There’s tons of great research here — he interviews showrunners on almost all of the shows he writes about, and talks about their creative process behind the scenes. A fantastic read.
SOPHIE, a Grammy-nominated producer and electronic musician who built strange, luminous, experimental glass-houses of futurist electro-pop, passed away last week in a tragic accident. This record — her one full length — is a perfect introduction to her indescribable signature sound — chipmunk vocals over synths and bass drops, an amalgam of musical styles that was uniquely hers. This is an album that challenges our notions of what pop music can be, and the more I listen to it, the more it sticks with me.
Like many of us, I’ve spent a lot of time since last March finding ways to improve my living space. But because I live in a rental, there are certain things I just can’t do — like, for example, tearing the butt-ugly circa-1957 medicine cabinets out of the bathroom walls and replacing them with something more dignified. Enter: Mirrormate. I’d all but given up on those medicine cabinets when I discovered this company, which makes custom-sized frames that you can attach to frame a wall-mounted mirror or medicine cabinet. Turned out to be super easy to install, landlord-friendly, and very reasonably priced. If you’re super handy, though, you could probably do this totally DIY per this video. A great and simple way to improve your bathroom.
About the author: Michael Robin is an LA-based television writer. When he’s not working away on his latest pilot script, you can find him scuba diving, hosting Shabbat dinners, or goofing off with his goldendoodle, Biggie Lebowski.