Remap Recommends, Volume XV

Remember when you’d walk into a local music, book, or video store and there’d be an adorable section where the employees would recommend what they were interested in that month? 

Welcome to our little version of it, called Remap Recommends. 

It's a chance for the staff at Remap to let you know what they've been playing, reading, listening to, or watching.

Patrick Recommends: Resurrection

For reasons that will make more sense when you listen to Remap Radio, I've apparently been attracted to media featuring unreliable narrators. The difference between Resurrection, the video game And Roger, and other stories that centralize those kinds of perspectives, both come from a place of empathy. Mental illness has been a source of scares and tension for ages, and the reason it's trotted out over and over again is because it's cheap and effective. It's also insulting. It turns people who are suffering into props in a haunted house. It might feel good in the moment, but cheap and effective also means it doesn't last. But stories like Resurrection wrestle with the longstanding impacts of trauma and how really fucking scary that ends up being for the person who suffered the trauma and those in their lives. It's a different kind of scary, one that has you gripping the couch while at the same time wondering if you should be crying, it's a story I won't soon forget.

Rebecca Hall!

I love when some of our greatest actors are also genre freaks.

Rob Recommends: IndyCar Racing

Before I was into Formula 1, I loved Indycars. Named for the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, this is America’s top open-wheel racing category and unlike Formula 1, it has always featured a mix of oval and road course racing. The series suffered a devastating civil war in the late 90s / early 2000s that basically destroyed its popularity for a decade as two competing series cannibalized one another and I moved my allegiances to F1 entirely.

The IndyCar racing series has been in an odd place for a few years. The level of racing has frequently been exceptional, and the rules of IndyCar lead to a more evenly-matched competitive playing field than F1. For two or three out of the last five years, I’d probably say that I enjoyed watching IndyCars more than Formula 1. But the series hasn’t enjoyed the prestige or popularity of F1 and a lot of its excellence has flown beneath the radar.

It’s especially worth watching now though for a couple reasons.