Category: Longform
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The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years, 2016 - ★★★★½
Watched on Tuesday January 17, 2023.
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, 2022 - ★★★
The usual Marvel daftness. I enjoyed it, but really, there's just so much of this stuff now that it's become ridiculous.
And I kind of hate what they've done to Wanda between this and WandaVision, which this kind of follows straight on from.
Summer of Soul (...or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), 2021 - ★★★★
Excellent documentary about the Harlem Cultural Festival, an outdoor music festival in 1969. The same year as Woodstock, but much less well-known. The footage was shot at the time, but lay in a basement for fifty years, because the then-filmmakers couldn't get it broadcast.
We get Nina Simone, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Sly & the Family Stone, Mahalia Jackson, Stevie Wonder…
If I have a complaint it's that I'd like there to be more of the music and less of the interviews. Or not less of them: the interviews are good. I especially liked the ones that started with some of the surviving performers watching their younger selves. But for most of the acts we just get one song, and an interview gets superimposed over part of it.
Well worth a watch, though.
Together We Will Go by J Michael Straczynski (Books 2023, 1) 📚
Content warning: suicide
The first book of the year. JMS of Babylon 5 fame tells the story of a group of people who, each for their own varied reason, want to end their life.
One of their number arranges a final bus trip, across the USA, with the plan being to drive off a cliff in California. There are legal implications, so the law gets involved.
It’s desperately sad, yet happy and life-affirming at the same time. It’s told through first-person accounts of each of the characters, who have been asked to journal their experience. They’re very well-developed and you grow attached to them.
So you don’t want them to die. But you do want them to make it.
A Look Back at my 2022
The Year in Blogging
Only 98 posts in 2022, broken down as follows.
| Month | Posts |
|---|---|
| Jan | 11 |
| Feb | 11 |
| Mar | 7 |
| Apr | 5 |
| May | 2 |
| Jun | 5 |
| Jul | 4 |
| Aug | 6 |
| Sep | 11 |
| Oct | 7 |
| Nov | 11 |
| Dec | 18 |
I’m shocked that I posted less than 100 times, but there you go. I’ve been busy with other things.
Other Things
Writing a Novel
What time I had for writing outside of work, I tried to spend mainly on completing my novel. You’ll recall that I did a Creative Writing MA in 2020–21. I graduated in May 2022. My dissertation was essentially the first 15,000 words of a novel (along with a preface on how it had all come together). I promised myself that I’d finish it by the end of the year. I haven’t quite achieved that goal, but I expect to in the next couple of weeks.
New Job
But to that ‘outside of work’, above: I started a new job in February. I never quite got round to writing about it here, except on my /now page, which is an infrequently-maintained page that’s meant to say what I’m up to at any time. I was and am glad to have it, of course, but it’s amazing how much working 9–5:30 again takes away from your ability to do other things.
The job itself? I was employed as a Java Developer — that’s literally in my job title — and I have written precisely zero lines of Java.
Instead, I found myself plunged into the exciting new world of infrastructure as code, or IaC, and the Terraform language. I might write more about that at some point, but in short, it seems I work in DevOps now, and I’m enjoying it.
Digression: On Writing at Work
I’ve written over 70,000 words of a novel over the past year-and-a-half or so. But since February I’ve written something like 100,000 words at work. This comes from keeping copious notes on what I’ve being doing and what I’ve learned, and so on. I thank Obsidian for making it easy to do so, and for working in a way that matches how I want to work. But I wonder: why didn’t I keep notes like this before? I always wrote things down, of course, but not this systematically, this comprehensively.
It’s a mystery.
Jury Duty
In May I spent three weeks on a Jury at Wood Green Crown Court. That was an interesting experience. I might write more about it one day.
Etc
And all the other things that make up life. Hey, I even read 33 books last year!
RRR, 2022 - ★★★½
A mad, wild ride, by turns gruesome and hilarious. It's essentially a superhero bromance set in India during the Raj.
A lot of fun, but maybe just a tad too long at over three hours? Good way to see out the old year and see in the new, though.
The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman (Books 2022, 33) 📚
Not just another murder mystery, but an undeniably cosy one. OK, the deaths aren’t cosy, obviously, but the mood and vibe of the book certainly is.
The club in question is made up of four residents at a retirement village. They start out by speculatively investigating cold cases that a former member, who had been a police officer, had records of. But soon a hot case lands right in front of them, and things get interesting.
It’s hilarious in places, moving, well-plotted, and, let’s face it, a tad unconvincing. But you don’t let that bother you while you’re reading it.
Which you should do.
Knives Out, 2019 - ★★★★
Watching the sequel the other day led us to a rewatch of the original. I see I only gave it three and a half stars (though no comments) in 2019. I’d probably tend toward four now, because I’m feeling more generous.
A murder mystery. If it wasn’t for alliteration, would that be such a popular genre?
