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francistimestwoI just started trying to use my Neocities seriously, which means I'm blatantly and transparently copying my friend Ellis, which means I'll probably be copying the way she structures blog posts too. Sorry, Ellis - you seem to know what you're doing and I don't so I intend to follow you around like a digital baby duck until I do. I'm also thinking of doing reviews on here - I have Goodreads and Letterboxd but I don't feel like painting my opinions on a piece of media's pages, you know? That's for my friends and whatever strangers stumble upon my page.
Most of August was spent home alone. My stepmum and littlest brother were in Bulgaria, and Dad joined them for a lot of the month, and somebody needs to feed the cat, and then my mum and other stepmum and less-little brother were in Ireland so I couldn't go hang out with them. There was talk of me going to see my grandparents in Ireland, but I had work and also I didn't really want to enter the misgendering thunderdome so I put it off another year. I had a nice enough time on my own.
The main highlight of the month, though, was going to Luxembourg with my friend Ciaran. The headlines of that are:
Most of August was spent home alone. My stepmum and littlest brother were in Bulgaria, and Dad joined them for a lot of the month, and somebody needs to feed the cat, and then my mum and other stepmum and less-little brother were in Ireland so I couldn't go hang out with them. There was talk of me going to see my grandparents in Ireland, but I had work and also I didn't really want to enter the misgendering thunderdome so I put it off another year. I had a nice enough time on my own.
The main highlight of the month, though, was going to Luxembourg with my friend Ciaran. The headlines of that are:
- Walking around in a stream while Ciaran sat at the side waiting for me to fall over (I didn't!)
- The restaurant where they didn't speak English so I was coasting by on what A-Level French remains in the back of my brain and thought I was doing really well until it came time to ask for the bill and I didn't know the word so I just feebly said, "...argent?" (trans: "...money?").
- A really ill-advised hike, where we didn't realise the buses didn't actually get that near to the Luxembourg/Belgium/Germany tripoint and we had to walk for about 3 hours total and it stormed and rained the whole time.
- A fairground in town. I hadn't been to one in a very long time and Ciaran's into that sort of thing so we ended up spending way too much money there. There was a stall selling oysters. I'm baffled by the thought process.
- A cat cafe with three entire bald bitches.
- The last night, where I made Ciaran watch a video of people dunking on Colleen Hoover and that somehow led into looking at the notes for his old unfinished fanfics (which at the time I described as "like if Riverdale was A Little Life") and that led into us revisiting one we wrote together and updating an old fic for a fandom I will not disclose lest I out Ciaran and myself as people who write [REDACTED] fanfiction in the year of our lord 2023. Unfortunately this was very good for the creative blockage I've had going on lately, so you have that to thank for my Neocities page.
- I finally got around to reading and finishing Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation this month. I really liked it, though I feel like I would have liked it more if I was better at reading. It's written in a way that I can absolutely tell is beautiful but don't really have the reading comprehension to understand how. It's a little frustrating in that way but I can recognise I need to work on that.
- I've also been reading Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I'm a way off finishing it but it's got some good ideas. To be honest, I started reading it to write an essay about Bluey or whatever. I'm sure it's what he would have wanted.
- Watched a fair bit of TV this month (see: home alone, fuck all to do). I got through Poker Face probably about three times because my dad and less-little brother were watching it at the same time in the same house so I binged it with my brother and then binged it again with my brother because he wanted to show his girlfriend and then my dad, who doesn't have the energy for bingeing, wanted to catch up so I watched some of it with him, but then I realised I had been on my phone for the last few episodes and had a very poor idea of what was going on, so I rewatched those, and then sometimes when I was home alone I just put it on because I was bored. It's a really good show! Charlie is a really fun character and Natasha Lyonne is probably 60% of that. A bit copaganda-y in parts, which is a shame because the sort of citizen detective angle (yes, I also watched Yellowjackets recently) has a lot of potential to not be that, but it's less than you'd expect from the genre. Still - very fun, very well-written. Rian Johnson knows how to do a mystery but you knew that already.
- I also watched I'm A Virgo in two days. Please, if you take anything from this blog post, watch I'm A Virgo. It's a very hard show to recommend because it has a pretty stupid title out of context and "superheroes, but, like, subverted and cool" is not really new ground, but I'm begging you to watch it anyway. It's about a 13-foot boy leaving his house for the first time and making friends and becoming a communist. It has a surreal quality that gets used to both hilarious and tragic effect. It has the best autistic character to ever be explicitly not autistic. It has my best friend Jones, whose superpower is breadtube. It put Sorry To Bother You and anything Boots Riley directs ever again at the top of my to-watch list. I can't adequately convey how much I want you to watch I'm A Virgo.
- Riverdale's last episode came out while I was in Luxembourg, so I watched it in the hotel room with Ciaran pretending I didn't exist. Mixed feelings. Season 7 as a whole isn't the best sendoff for the show; it's trying to appeal to the portion of the show's audience that very vocally dropped off after season 2 or 3 by returning to the more "high school drama with incidental murder stuff" vibe of season 1, with the most Riverdalian part of it being the 1950s of it all, which isn't Riverdalian enough to carry more than a few episodes of Riverdale. That said, I did, out loud, say "yay!" at the core four polyamory reveal. I would've liked that to have actually developed instead of being a surprise reveal at the last minute, but at least I could see the way they were building up to it. I also like the reading that the ending is a kind of horror, trapping them back in the story, but a lot of that is me imagining a different ending that did the show justice.
