We’re in the double digit issues and somehow it’s been just over two months since Upbeat Nonsense launched. People keep subscribing, and last week’s story about Flame & Fable hit more than 500 likes on social media. Never underestimate the power of women and their special interests, everybody.

Thanks so much to everyone who’s been on this ride. I started this newsletter as a way to spill my decades of pop culture obsessions, in hopes that people would find some of it entertaining or helpful when selecting the next thing to watch, read, play or listen to. This really is a passion project as I look for longer-term employment, so please feel free to drop me $$ at (venmo) dakotah-kennedy or (cashapp) $dakotahsoperandi. 

Separately, if you are actively watching anything I’ve recommended, let me know! For example, is anyone watching Fallout? This season has been bananas. 

It’s the last week in the year of the snake, and yes, I am one of those girls with her fingers crossed that the year of the horse is different – in a good way.

Happy reading,
Dakotah

No theme this week, just a few pop culture pieces that I think are pretty special. 

I’m sneaking this one in under the theme of the Lunar New Year next week on Feb. 17. Fruits Basket is a Japanese series – comics and anime TV show – about the 12 signs of the Chinese Zodiac, with a teenage and generational trauma-filled twist. Essentially, the 12 signs haunt members of the Sohma family and it’s about how one girl tries to help them navigate – and hopefully break – the curse. 

Fruits Basket was originally a manga series and it’s gorgeous. There was a 2001 anime adaptation, but it ended abruptly and was never technically finished. Instead, in 2019, Fruits Basket got a completely new anime that is basically a shot-for-shot adaptation of the original books. 

So, I’d recommend reading the books and/or watching the 2019 anime. The 2001 version, in my opinion, is very skippable. If you’re looking to shop locally, check out Doki Doki in Lakewood. To be clear, if you like shoujo anime, this is the best one.

If you’ve seen it or manage to finish it over the weekend, you can also catch the prequel in theaters for one night only — Monday, Feb. 16.

Some of you might recognize Jamila Woods as the featured artist on songs such as “Blessings” or “No More Old Men” by Chance the Rapper. I first started listening to her in 2020, a time when needless to say, I was going through a lot . Her song, “Holy,” from that album is pretty amazing.

But I’m not here to talk about that album. 

In 2023, Woods released her third album, Water Made Us, and it’s really just beautiful. Picking one song to highlight was nearly impossible, but, I did it:

Over the last several years, more and more people have started waking up to the country’s systemic violence against Black people and other marginalized groups. I chose Just Mercy – the book or the film – because I think it’s a pretty accessible place to start. It’s nonfiction, set from the perspective of a Black civil rights lawyer who mostly defends men on death row.

If you’re already familiar with Stevenson and want more, check out: The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, The Condemnation of Little B by Elaine Brown, or Ava Duvernay’s award-winning limited series, When They See Us.

Similar to Asteroids, but snarkier.

After deleting X formerly known as Twitter, Zach Palumbo needed a better outlet for his “shitposting energy.” Instead of just downloading BlueSky, Palumbo finished creating his own video game, XORBIUS, available on Playdate.

“I’ve always liked outer space and started messing around with this concept about a little space ship flying around the screen. Something super, super basic.” Palumbo studied computer science and balances his day job as a software engineer with theater and music. 

Beyond designing the game, Palumbo leveraged his musical abilities to score an original soundtrack. A few years ago, he came up with a theme called “Boss Battle,” but with no particular game in mind. 

“I realized I could turn it into a jazzy space tune that would fit the atmosphere of the game,” he said. 

Despite dabbling in video game development since middle school, Palumbo said XORBIUS is his first completed game. He credits the simplicity to a relatively new handheld gaming system called Playdate. Unlike other handheld systems, the Playdate features a side crank that turns 360 degrees.

“I figured the easiest thing to make would be a game where the crank turns you around and lets you aim,” he said. Both the system and the game are “intentionally minimalist” and “technologically constrained,” making it easier to focus on one concept.

Part of the fun included writing more than 150 “tips and quotes” included throughout the game. For example, it’s likely to see statements such as “British children’s author J.K. Rowling has sued XORBIUS for libelous claims” or ”XORBIUS is now legal in 47 states and Puerto Rico!” at the bottom of the screen.

“This was a better outlet for my shitposting energy,” he said.

Right now, XORBIUS is only available on Playdate, but Palumbo said future iterations are possible. In the meantime, you can watch the trailer and hear some of the music. Separately, Palumbo is also performing in a new production of Elephant’s Graveyard through Feb. 22, if you’re looking for some live theater.

Sure, 2025 was also The Year of the Zine, but we’re doing it again.

Something that you might consider hopeful in this mess of a world is the persistence of brick and mortar bookstores. Despite obstacles such as online retail, people are still reaching for physical media. This month, Microcosm Publishing is celebrating 30 years of amplifying hundreds of independent authors across book, comic and zine formats. 

To celebrate, Microcosm plans to pay it forward, according to founder and author, Joe Biel, who grew up in the punk scene of Cleveland, OH. Biel, who now lives in Portland, also released an updated edition of their book, A People's Guide to Publishing, in hopes of removing barriers for aspiring publishers. 

“I'm so massively grateful that we were supported for this long and so bewildered that we all made it, but also feel like we're just moving along as we always have,” Biel, who also identifies as autistic with ADHD and OCD, said. 

Biel wasn’t diagnosed until their thirties, and writes a lot about the experience as a neurodivergent author and publisher. Although it made life difficult and “failure rampant,” Biel said it gave them a lifetime of experience to see that “adults don’t know what they are talking about.”

“This is particularly useful in publishing, where adults really don’t know what they are talking about,” Biel said. “As such, I threw out the rules that don’t make any sense or serve the stated goals. I rebuilt mechanisms for what was best for what I wanted to achieve.”

The types of titles that Microcosm publishes is diverse, to say the least. From Know Your Rights: Protect Yourself and Your Community from Police, ICE, the FBI, and the Justice System to How to (Not) Buy A Car: A Graphic Novel for a First-time Car Buyer, there’s fun for the whole family. 

There’s even some books about Ohio, including Ohio Enigmas, a puzzle book by Claire Mercer.

Upbeat Nonsense sat down with Biel to talk about 30 years as an independent publisher. Keep reading to hear what Biel had to say about zine culture and its Cleveland-based authors.

The Q&A below has been edited for brevity.

I grew up in a wee punk scene on W. 44th and Lorain, on the West Side of Cleveland when that neighborhood meant that you needed to bring a buddy with you to the gas station for safety. There were no artisanal brunch places yet. The kids were a bit older than me, and it captivated my imagination, as anything was possible. Some of the kids made zines and by 1993 I was hooked. School had been a total disappointment, so it was fascinating how cool reading could be, and I wanted to share that with the world. Zines felt within reach and less limiting. I wanted others to feel what I felt in those clubs. 

It always strikes me that it hasn't changed much at all. I mean, we publish more books, and some might argue that they are better or worse, but the people remain the same. One of the earliest surprises was that focusing on resources for at-risk weirdos like myself was that it appealed to lots of people who were treated as unimportant by society. So they came out of the woodwork in force to support us from the beginning. So, if anything, the world came around to our way of thinking in the past 30 years. That's a huge relief as I was hanging on by a thread for a while there. Politics are popular in a way that they weren't in our infancy. Those titles went from marginal to mainstream. And we're here for it. 

We want everything that we do to empower someone to change their life and the world around them. That takes many forms but mostly it's in projects and ideas that we could never conceive of on our own. We need the hive mind to bring the best concepts. We think the best projects are topics that most people think they already understand or consider boring but can be brought out to shine in new ways. That could be anything from the history of Hawaii, to coping skills for freaking out, to how to bookbind, to feeling less alone. Perhaps it's coming from a world of theatrical concepts, but all of that makes sense under the same tent to me. When we're tightening the screws on a project, we ask "Is this an audience that we can reach? Will this help people?", and that's when we green light it. 

It's funny. Danny Caine and I both hung out at Mac's Backs on Coventry but didn't know each other because there's more than a ten-year age difference. I didn't even know that he was from Cleveland when we started working together until I heard his accent! We've worked with tons of Clevelanders over the years. Some current ones include Jessica Mullen and Kelly Cree, and our cover designer, Ron Kretsch, lives in Cleveland and was someone that I knew from my 90s punk days. Nick Perry did a fantastic book with us, Hello Cleveland, about what makes the city so unique, and reporter Eric Sandy literally wrote the book on my childhood clubhouse, Speak in Tongues, for us. 

The "Year of Zines" was something that we did casually without thinking about it too much. But most of our best ideas are like that. And it turned out to be truer than we thought possible. Zines were massive in 2025. I think they help to make people feel like reading is something other than homework or an obligation. It shows you how cool the world is and you don't have to look at a brick of a book on your nightstand and feel guilty every night. So we're doing more of that in 2026.

Yoko Kanno and the Seatbelts will be in North America – Brooklyn, to be specific – in April for the first time ever. This is the composer who did the music for both Cowboy Bebop and Kids on the Slope. This is not a drill.

I’ve managed to pull together some semi-unhinged trips to see international artists like the pillows, m-flo, and Kyrary Pamyu Pamyu, but I’m not sure I’ll pull this one off. If you can go, you should. It won’t be anything less than epic.