Still Doing Other Things
Media consumption continues. Documentation continues.Movies & TV:Dark Tower: This could have been great. It could have been good. It settled for sadly forgettable. Too bad.The Mummy (Tom Cruise running edition) The best I can say about it is, "Welp, it kept a lot of production crew employed and effects people busy for a while." If I hadn't given up and started doing laundry & dusting after half an hour, my analysis would probably be more like, "OhgedohgedcanIhavethosetwohoursbackplease?"Black Mirror: Episode 5 was a pointless exercise in directorial control. The rest, I enjoyed. Far less overt gore in this season, for which I am grateful.A re-watch of Peaky Blinders + the new season. I don't know if I ever remembered to include the previous watches in a media consumption post. I watched the first one while doing a Boardwalk Empire binge and my brain, being a cluttered place, put them both in the same memory drawer. Oh, well. It's fantastic stuff: super-tight storytelling, phenomenal acting, brilliant direction, perfect costuming & production. Violent as hell.Something or other Planet of the Apes. The last one. Um. Ew. Watching these is like picking scabs. I can't stop, but I hate. No magical hydroelectric dam in this one, so it has that to recommend it. It also has Woody Harrelson channeling Marlon Brando from Apocalypse Now, and I don't know what to make of that.BooksMore Sarah Maclean aka "the Maclean I like better than the other two who also write 19th century British fantasies." They aren't deathless literature, but they're jolly good.Babylon's Ashes. The next-to latest Expanse novel. I LOVE THIS SERIES AND ALL THE CHARACTERS IN IT. (pretty sure I say that every time I finish one of these tomes. It bears repeating.) Re-settling into the timeline took a few chapters, but I was expecting that. Setting up the plot-board on something big takes time, and the scope of this work is beyond epic. The authors' take on colonialism's problematic side make for a bloody conflict-soaked take on space settlement. And yet... it isn't gritty, grimdark "we're all gonna die" morality play. It's the opposite of the shiny, optimistic, idealist-populated perfect-people science fiction of my youth...and yet it is relentlessly, infinitely hopeful about the future. It's a no-punches exploration of what it means to be human in an inhuman universe. I could go on for hours about the frail, imperfect, sometimes monstrous--and yet still heroic--protagonists. (but I won't)Other-other ThingsThat's all for now. I'm back on a regular schedule, and progress is occurring in the writing sector, but those things will get their own updates in due time. Gotta feed the blog something after all.