Wandering Around Talking To Rainbows

I've been on jury duty this week, which involved a lot of waiting around, so I finished a library book, did a lot of knitting, and stress-wrote a fic.

Ain't No-one Else To Blame But Me (1464 words) by Glinda
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Heated Rivalry (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Alexei Rozanov | Andrei Rozanov, Ilya Rozanov
Additional Tags: Siblings, Hockey, Family Dynamics, Sibling Rivalry
Summary: Alexei’s first love was hockey; it did not love him back.

Anyway, what else? Movies! I have been watching them!

Pretty much on the spur of the moment, I went to see my local art house cinema’s Mystery Movie last Friday night. (My horror movie buddy, texted me the night before to see if I fancied it, we’ve done a horror mystery movie before and that was great but I wasn’t certain about one where I didn’t even know the genre. However, I haven’t see this friend in ages - she got married earlier this year, so she’s been busy - and I wanted that part of the evening, so I decided that actually I do trust the film curator enough that it’ll be a good time so said ‘fuck it’ and agreed.) To our mutual amusement it turned out to be Slither, an early 00s ridiculous splatter-fest that my buddy had actually seen in the cinema when it came out but it’s been so long since she saw it, all she could remember was that it had Nathan Fillion in it - or as she put it ‘the guy from Castle’. We laughed, we squealed, we heckled - a well/badly timed jump scare led to me wearing half a glass of wine - it was a pretty packed screening, full of fellow film nerds also having a good time. (Was it a good movie? No. Was it a good time? Absolutely. We do not require our horror movies to be good, though we like it when they are, but we do need them to commit to the bit.) And then afterwards, we went for cocktails and spent a glorious couple of hours ripping it apart, analysing the tropes and generally nerding out about horror movies, in between catching up on life.

My original plan for Friday night was to go and see The Mandolorian and Grogu because that seemed a good time for a Friday night when I wanted to turn my brain off and enjoy some action. The screenings were pretty limited near me, but I spotted there was one Sunday lunchtime, so I zoomed home from swimming and made it to that one. My main criticism of this film is that I think it wasn’t sure who it’s audience was, it didn’t seem to be willing to commit to whether it was a family film or not. There were whole sections with Grogu and the little mechanic aliens that were clearly aimed at kids, but a big chunk of the plot is all bounty hunters and gladiator style fights to the death. So like tonally, a bit all over the place, I wish they’d decided what kind of film they were making because for the record I’d have watched either version but there was a bit of whiplash going on there. (You could have cut a good half an hour/forty-five minutes out of it with no really storytelling loss, but I enjoyed spending time with those characters so it didn’t drag.) But, I can’t claim that I didn’t enjoy it. I watched three seasons of the Mandolorian purely for Djin and Grogu learning out to be a family and fighting bad guys, I’d likely have watched another three, so I was quite happy to watch another two and a bit hours of them doing their thing. Plus Sigourney Weaver as a New Republic senior officer, all very moral relativist but coming through in the crunch nonetheless, very hot.

And finally! I’ve had a documentary open in a tab on youtube for about six months, after reading a blog post about it somewhere, and I finally got round to watching it. Listers is a charming little indie documentary film by two brothers who discover the concept of competitive birdwatching, fall down a rabbithole investigating and end up spending a year living in a van making a film about doing their own ‘Big Year’. It’s both delightful and bizarre, just a fascinating deep dive into this whole other world and it’s dramas and foibles by two guys who’re outside it enough to see it’s eccentricities and have perspective on them, and fully aware that they have in fact been sucked into the culture of it. It’s a film made with a great deal of affection but also a clear sense of the ridiculous.

It feels like one moment, I was up to my eyes in election programme planning and the next it was the end of the month.

I think (I hope, I hope) that we’re finally making some progress on sorting the rotas at work because there’s frankly perilous levels of burnout so fingers crossed that I’ll start seeing some real improvements to the old work/life balance. I’m also back in the archives again for the second half of my 80/20 placement. I’ve got some boxes ordered so I can start getting the stuff that’s been digitised organised to go to cold store.

Speaking of work/life balance I’m taking myself off on holiday in August. You know how you can do these ‘week in Tuscany painting/learning to make pasta’ kind of holidays? I’m essentially doing one of those for sound recordists, I’m off to deepest Argyll to learn to use a bunch of weird and wonderful specialist microphones and get in some studio time. I’m hoping to reset my creative brain or at least make some art. (Worst case scenario I come home with a bunch of cool field recordings and having read a book and written some fic.) If it goes well, I want to start submitting sound art to projects/call outs again, I’ve missed doing that - I’ve missed that being part of who I am.

Despite work’s attempts to eat me alive, I’ve been having a decent year for consuming new-to-me media. Despite having watched no new films this month, I’m well ahead of where I was last year in terms of film watching, though in fairness, last year I re-watched a whole bunch of films at home but that didn’t start until June or so when I realised I wasn’t watching new films and went on a re-watching films and writing fic for them kick throughout July and August. I’m cautiously going to suggest that I’m more able to read fiction this year than last, but only cautiously because while I inhaled the latest Rivers of London book the other week, I’m conscious that this series is the only fiction I’ve been letting myself buy sight unseen over the last few years as I know I’m going to read them within at most a week or two of buying them. So there may be an element of exception proving the rule there. (The advantage of having gone to cover the same week long event for work this year and last, is that having inhaled a whole book during that week on both occasions I have a clear marker of where I was book wise both years. And the answer is, in exactly the same spot.) What I’ve definitely done is watch more drama series than the last few years. Limited series only but watching a six episode series over the course of a month is such an improvement over the last couple of years. So many watched the first episode, enjoyed it, never went back and watched the rest of it, situations. Okay so it’s only been Chernobyl and Heated Rivalry so far but I have missed being excited about shows.

I’m not sure if it’s correlation or causation, but it sure seems to have helped that I’ve had some good tv knitting on the go. I’ve just finished my election project scarf and having a non challenging craft project literally on hand definitely helped me actually focus and stay put for long enough to get engrossed.