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.
SEE: Spiderman: No Way Home
Remarkably, twenty years into his big screen career and three actors later, Spiderman still has new tricks in him. Tom Holland is always a delight to watch as Spiderman — he tosses off one liners with effortless, boyish charm — and this, his third film in the Spidey suit, looks like his best yet. Borrowing ideas from the incredible animated movie Into the Spiderverse and leaning heavily into self-referential humor, No Way Home features a Spiderman metaverse in which villains return from ALL prior Spiderman movies dating back to 2002’s Tobey Maguire original. (I’m particularly excited about the return of Alfred Molina as Doc Ock.) Out today, only in theaters.
MAKE: Hot Chocolate
With the temps rapidly dropping and with many places getting blanketed with snow, ’tis the season for warm beverages. And there’s something utterly delightful about a cup of warm cocoa on a frigid winter’s day. There are plenty of great premade mixes you can get — we’re big fans of the Trader Joe’s Salted Caramel Hot Cocaa — but if you’re feeling inspired to take your hot cocoa a step further? Stella Parks has a recipe for a homemade hot chocolate mix that’ll keep all winter, and Milk Street has a recipe for a very old school water-based Oaxacan-style hot chocolate that brings a spicy heat into the equation. (Enter an email address and you’ll be able to get past the paywall.) Photo by Alisa Anton on Unsplash.
PLAY: Spirit Island
Spirit Island takes the Catan gameplay formula and flips it on its head: instead of playing as conquerors colonizing a new land, in Spirit Island, you and your friends play as Spirits who must scare off colonizing Invaders. A cooperative game in the mode of Pandemic where you and your friends are working together to battle the game’s “AI,” Spirit Island is a complex nail-biter of a game that also happens to be rated the number one solo board game on BoardGameGeek if solo board gaming is your thing.
READ: The Dead by James Joyce
Much as I love A Christmas Carol, James Joyce’s “The Dead” will always be my favorite Christmas story. “The Dead,” the final tale in his collection Dubliners, is a ghost story about those ghosts that are real: the people we’ve lost and the mistakes we’ve made that haunt us throughout the rest of our lives. It’s a gorgeously wrought, breathtaking piece of fiction, a story whose final lines send shivers down my back every single time I read them. Photo by Filip Bunkens on Unsplash.
LISTEN: Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas
There’s a reason that this record sits atop the list of Rolling Stone’s best Christmas Albums of all time: it’s that good. Ella whips through a series of of Christmas classics with a voice that that somehow warms you from inside like a hot toddy. The perfect accompaniment to an evening of hot cocoa and wrapping (or opening!) presents. A showstopper and in these parts, a Christmas tradition.
About the author: Michael Robin is an LA-based television writer and tutoring company co-Founder. 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.