This week’s entry: Historical currencies

In our monthly book club, we discuss whatever we happen to be reading and ask everyone in the comments to do the same. What Are You Reading This Month?

I’m a middle-aged man dating a younger guy. He wanted to be a “boy” to a Dom top daddy, and I was happy to oblige. The sex is amazing, and we click as people, too. Then a couple days ago, he told me he wanted to explore small penis humiliation (SPH). I was taken aback—not by the request, but because his penis is NOT…

“Every age gets the savior it deserves,” Sam Lipsyte writes late in his fourth novel, Hark. Born in 1968, Lipsyte grew up during the era of Kool-Aid cults and sannyasin sects. He attended college in the decade when greed was God, and published his first novel, The Subject Steve, on that terrible Tuesday when suicidal…

It’s a tale as old as Facebook: An unknown author at the start of their career writes a story. It becomes a viral phenomenon, launching a thousand hot takes and think pieces about whether it rightfully or not reflects These Troubled Times. Amid the tsunami of debates, analyses, and debates over these analyses, a…

Never forget that film critic Roger Ebert gave Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace four stars upon its release 20 years ago. While Episode I disappointed many longtime Star Wars enthusiasts, Blast Points hosts Jason Gibner and Gabe Bott are celebrating the film’s 20th anniversary with 12 monthly episodes focusing…

Adèle, by the French-Moroccan author Leila Slimani, is set to be released in English tomorrow, coming to English readers after Slimani’s Prix Goncourt-winning novel, The Perfect Nanny. But chronologically, Adèle came first. It was the author’s debut novel, apparently one inspired by the well-publicized scandal…

Whether you’re a die-hard superhero fan or an art enthusiast looking for works that meld text and visuals in innovative ways, 2019 has some remarkable comic books and graphic novels to satisfy your needs. Our most anticipated comics of the year feature some first-rate creative pairings along with noteworthy works from…

I’m a 40-year-old guy with a 30-year-old girlfriend. We’ve been together a year, and I can see a future with her. But there are problems. This girl comes after two minutes of stimulation, be it manual, oral, or penile. As someone who takes pride in my foreplay/pussy-eating abilities, this is a bummer. She gets wet to…

If you’re at all curious about a career in animation but don’t know where to start for information, Natalie Nourigat’s I Moved To Los Angeles To Work In Animation is a great first step. Nourigat has a talent for effervescent autobiographical comics (see: her 2012 collection of diary comics, Between Gears), and her new…

If Eve Babitz had never existed, Los Angeles would have had to invent her. The Joan Didions and Nathanael Wests of the world have had their say, their razor-sharp indictments of Hollywood and the City Of Angels standing as the de facto depiction of a West Coast culture that leaves its denizens as vapid and soulless…

TV writer and Fatman On Batman co-host Marc Bernardin has been threatening to start a Battlestar Galactica rewatch podcast for years. His desire to talk BSG in podcast form clearly comes from his personal love of the show, but it also comes from the fact that he’s friends with one of the show’s stars, actress Tricia…

Martian Manhunter is one of the coolest characters at DC Comics. He’s the last survivor of an alien race in the vein of Superman, but with an expanded power set that includes telepathy, invisibility, and shape-shifting. And unlike Superman, J’onn J’onzz was an active member of his alien society before becoming a…

On New Year’s Eve, we received a tarot reading, and we were told the coming year would bring a great abundance. An abundance of what? Judging from our ever-growing to-read pile, we can only assume the cards meant “books,” because there are quite a few coming our way in 2019. On the fiction front, we’re looking forward…

If someone had told us years ago that Squirrel Girl would have an award-winning, best-selling comic, we probably would have laughed in their face. But as The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl approaches its 50th issue (eight issues of volume one plus 42 issues of volume two), it remains one of the most consistently delightful…

The best meal I ever made was a New Year’s Eve dinner a few years back. Nothing about it was particularly unusual—bacon, a big piece of meat, dark chocolate. I’m not in the habit of preparing heavy, decadent meals, and neither are my friends who’d be eating with me, instead favoring somewhat healthier fare that…

Berlin (Drawn & Quarterly) is an imposing book. It’s nearly two inches thick and the size of a hefty textbook, the kind that takes effort to read. The title aptly indicates exactly what the book is about: though there are more than a dozen characters that flow through the story, Berlin itself is the star of the show,…

Podcasts simply couldn’t contain themselves in 2018. Beyond setting multiple records (the third season of Serial was its biggest to date, and with a historically large advertising deal), this ever-growing audio medium also saw some of its most acclaimed series leap to television, with Dirty John on Bravo and Homecoming

At the end of 2018, it’s easy to feel like the people in power just don’t care. Refugees are turned away from sanctuary with tear gas; rights of marginalized communities are systematically stripped away; political corruption runs rampant; mass shootings are an everyday occurrence; and little is being done to stop the…

Straight and married but not boring, and heading to my parents’ house for our first family Christmas since my asshole MAGA brother “stumbled over” the Tumblr blog where the wife and I posted about our sexual adventures. (Pics of MMF threesomes and cross-dressing/pegging sessions, plus some dirty “true enough”…