w/e 2024-03-10

I have watched too much TikTok this week. A guilty pleasure, but it least it’s less guilty and more pleasurable than watching, say, Celebrity Big Brother.

Its algorithm is like an over-eager parent, keen to make the most of any slight interest their offspring shows in anything. “She enjoyed reading that comic! So I’ve bought her a dozen classic graphic novels, Understanding Comics, a pile of Bristol board, these expensive pens and inks, a drawing board, and all the comics I enjoyed when I was her age.”

Or, “He watched that one compilation video of people finally making trick shots after hours of trying, so here are many, many more, because I assume one couldn’t possibly be enough.”

So I try not to get dragged into seams of content that would be depressingly addictive, as opposed to happily so: pranks, dashcam footage, war footage (real or gaming or paintball), etc.

Instead recently I’ve enjoyed this guy talking about making his running and cycling content, Aardman’s huge scheduling boards, Tawny Platis’s demonstrations of voiceover styles, more fonts talking by Elle Cordova, a movie prop radio alarm clock, a man waving from a bus, and some very good dogs.

I continue to like an Edinburgh architect talking about houses, ecosufficiency, the lovely DK Dreamhouse, and the more achievable attempts to Unfuck My Flat.

I’ve learned how to get better at pull ups (I can’t do any), how to do proper kettlebell swings, and ways to get more flexible.

I nearly got sucked in again looking for all those. It’s dangerous, and, as ever, you have to skip a lot of nonsense, but finding the fun, good things is a healthier addiction than crack, I imagine.

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§ We finished watching season two of Our Flag Means Death although I felt like giving up at any point. I’m not sure how a comedy about queer pirates can be unfunny and uneventful, but. Part-way through the first season it was good but then it got becalmed.

We’ve started watching Shōgun which I’m not finding as great as all the people I saw raving about the amazingness of the three episodes so far, but it’s fine and looks good.

It would be even better if all the people speaking Portuguese actually spoke it, instead of English, given the Japanese are speaking Japanese. This would have the benefit that Blackthorne wouldn’t sound like an unbearable ex-public-school chap on a gap year jaunt, out of his depth in exotic foreign lands, sometimes even doing a Winston Churchill impression. With the strange. Manner. In which. He speaks. To PEOPLE.

§ We saw four more films in the local Borderlines Film Festival this week – the most we’ve been out into the bustling bright city of Hereford in a week since we’ve been here I expect.

• All Of Us Strangers (2023, Andrew Haigh). Really good. I only wish I’d known even less about it than I did - never mind having seen a trailer for it – because that would have made it even better.
• Monster (2023, Hirokazu Kore-eda). Good but a bit too slow.
• That They May Face The Rising Sun (2023, Pat Collins). Even slower but excellent. There weren’t many reviews on Letterboxd so I wrote one.
• The Promised Land (2023, Nikolaj Arcel). Really good, like a brutal Western about settlers, but set in hierarchical 18th century Denmark.

A good run of films! And no trailers or adverts! And, one or two people aside, well-behaved audiences!

§ Happy springtime-time if you’re somewhere that celebrates the clocks changing today. Here, in the home of time itself [citation needed], we must wait until the end of the month. Time is late. But now that the sun is setting after 6pm, maybe we’ll soon get more than a day at a time without rain.