slow-mo
I’m ill :( I got the seasonal cold I managed to avoid for three years. But in lighter news I discovered my phone’s slow-mo feature and took this video in Leicester town center (which is probably where I got the cold from.)
shroom with a view
God, The Last Of Us puts fear in me like nothing else. The opening scene from the second episode of the show has been haunting me all day and caused me to google “science behind the last of us” “can mushrooms really do that shit” etc more than once.
Oh good, someone put it on YouTube. INCREDIBLE scene, amazing acting, absolutely terrifying in its realism. (Of course a scientist would act like that. Of course you would go home to be with your family.) Maybe living through a pandemic gives you a different perspective on these things. I’m gonna get a mushroom pizza because my thinking now is “might as well eat them before they eat you.”
Beth Matthews’ raw honesty saved lives, say mental health experts — BBC News – Home
It was only when she died that her family found how many people she helped with her writing.
Beth Matthews’ raw honesty saved lives, say mental health experts — BBC News – Home
This is an incredibly sad story, made all the worse by all the healthcare professionals who let this woman down.
But reading about all the lives Beth Matthews touched… I think there’s a tiny element of hope in there too. Very tiny. But still there.
My favourite photograph of the year so far
Greta Thunberg being carried away by police officers at a protest. The look on her face, man.
(Photo by Roberto Pfeil | Picture Alliance | Getty Images)
[apocalyptic rimshot]
Watched the first episode of The Last of Us soon as it aired here in England. I hate these terrifying dystopias where human life is cheap and rights are a thing of the past.
But enough about England! TLOU was very good indeed.
The Home Office doesn’t want you to watch this video
Recently a Holocaust survivor had some fully justified harsh words for Suella Braverman, and the Home Office was predictably not happy about it.
The people who posted the video have already said they won’t take it down, but I figured I’d save it just in case and upload it to my own webspace. (I encourage you to do the same!) Here it is.
Most important list
Today I learned that someone committed suicide by jumping from a window of the apartment building I used to live in. (It made the local news, so that’s how I know.) Hit home a little bit, obviously, not just because of the building but because of the massive mental health crisis I went through myself last year.
Nowadays whenever I write a piece of fiction that involves suicide I try to add a list of worldwide suicide hotlines somewhere in the notes. The best one I’ve seen is Wikipedia’s list, which is extremely in-depth and sorts everything neatly by country. I think that’s the one I’m gonna stick with.
Here it is again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suicide_crisis_lines
the etymology of the word ‘blog’ is insane
blog is a contraction of web-log.
log as in a record of your posts, but more generally as a record of events that happened. as in a ‘logbook’, a record of the speeds of a ship. log-book as in ‘chip log’, a piece of wood they tied to a rope to measure speed with
web as in the world wide web. as in a huge interconnected woven web of connections, but with computers and networks instead. the use of web in this context as such a metaphor was coined less than fifty years ago
the tendrils of history reach back so far and so close at once, and all so we can coin silly terms like “blogosphere.” do you see me. everything’s connected
and somehow we’re all still here on this site, leaving little bits of wood in each others’ spider webs to remember one another by
Glass Onion
Glass Onion is a movie where you cannot, I repeat cannot, point at any particular plot twist and say “This is bad writing, because no person would behave this incredibly unfathomably stupidly.” We have all lived through the same past few years and if anything Elon Musk, I mean “Miles Bron” isn’t stupid enough. Close, though.
Glass Onion is a James Bond film just a little bit to the left. (A lot to the left.) I am OBSESSED with this. It has all the ingredients: Daniel Craig, a megalomaniac who wants to take over the world, beautiful women in bikinis, weird tech, important things getting blown up. A fabulous deconstruction. I bet no-one would have blinked an eyelid at the movie’s explosive ending if Bond was involved, but that’s genre, baby.
Glass Onion is the best Among Us movie they could possibly have made.
Glass Onion is a Greek tragedy (even set in Greece!) when it comes to the sisters plot. There’s a great post on Tumblr about Cassandra and Helen. The moment I realized the significance of the naming I fell even more in love with the movie than I was already.
Glass Onion is also the best modern-day Sherlock Holmes movie they could possibly have made.
Glass Onion is haunting my dreams. Last night Benoit Blanc showed up and we looked at text messages of condolence sent to the family of a murder victim. “You know how I know who the murderer is? It’s always the last person to send a text,” he drawled. WHAT IS GOING ON(ION).
Glass Onion is angry as hell and long live its anger.