Still Aten't Dead Redux
Hello! I've been meaning to blog about loads of things, but obviously now that I've got round to sitting at the "post an entry" screen my mind's gone blank. So, general update.
...Hmm. I feel like I've been Doing Stuff, but I haven't really. My friend J's back from a while in Australia (and London for ~5 years before that) so I've been hanging out with him a bit - he's doing a huge comics clearout so I bought a full box of comics off him, including the full run + offshoots of Books of Magic, and a bunch of smaller runs of things. Like the 5-piece comic of 300, which has just beautiful art and really high production values. It feels weird to be raving about the quality of the paper, but...yeah. He came round yesterday and we watched the first six eps of this season of Who - he hadn't seen them because: Australia, and it was so much fun to watch them again now! Everyone should go back and watch at least Eleventh Hour and the Angels ones. (And he did not notice The Scene in Flesh & Stone, and I didn't squeak or giggle or stare at him intently. Yay me.)
We're going to watch the other seven at the weekend sometime, and I'm dreading The Lodger. I don't know why I've (still) got such a visceral reaction to it - I actually get angry when I see people saying they liked it. (Especially Jacob from TWOP, who loved it and hated the finale, which is just weird.) Though I realise this reaction is irrational, and haven't been shouting at people, just staying out of the conversations and avoiding reading good reviews of it. Hopefully on a re-watch I'll be able to pick out what exactly it is that hit one of my buttons, and assess the rest more rationally!
Media stuff: There's a Studio Ghibli game coming out for the PS3, and the trailer looks amazing.
Pratchett's Unseen Academicals is far better than I had expected, given that I haven't been that impressed with his books of late AND it's about football.
I'm still keeping track of the books I'm reading on a flickr set - about 75 by mid-year, which is pretty respectable. (72 in the set, but one of them's a trilogy so counts as three. And I've read maybe three or four books on my phone, too.)
I've started watching The Wire, and it's mesmerising. I'm getting to it late, but it's worth it.
Oh, more general media stuff - I spent six or eight hours on Friday night watching the news channels frantically attempt to cover a police stand-off live when they weren't allowed anywhere near it. And with people all over the country watching and discussing it via Twitter and forums and blogs. SO WEIRD. New media is definitely changing our psychology, I think. It's voyeuristic, but (although this sounds amazingly pretentious) it also felt like witnessing, like the act of watching it was important somehow. Some people seemed proud to turn the TV off and thought that those of us watching it were like ghouls at a car crash, but it would have felt wrong to me to turn off the TV and the news websites and pretend it wasn't happening, to go and read fanfic or play computer games while people's lives were in the balance. There's so much stuff tied up together it's hard to analyse though - separate from the "witnessing", it was interesting from a "watching the media" point of view and from a "psychology of the public" point of view; the coverage was intermittently hilarious and surreal (Gazza?!); and the people discussing it on Twitter were witty, thoughtful, intense, and generally engaged.
And then I spent a disproportionate amount of Saturday and Sunday arguing about the whole thing with IDIOTS, because that's what the Digital Spy forums are for.
...Hmm. I feel like I've been Doing Stuff, but I haven't really. My friend J's back from a while in Australia (and London for ~5 years before that) so I've been hanging out with him a bit - he's doing a huge comics clearout so I bought a full box of comics off him, including the full run + offshoots of Books of Magic, and a bunch of smaller runs of things. Like the 5-piece comic of 300, which has just beautiful art and really high production values. It feels weird to be raving about the quality of the paper, but...yeah. He came round yesterday and we watched the first six eps of this season of Who - he hadn't seen them because: Australia, and it was so much fun to watch them again now! Everyone should go back and watch at least Eleventh Hour and the Angels ones. (And he did not notice The Scene in Flesh & Stone, and I didn't squeak or giggle or stare at him intently. Yay me.)
We're going to watch the other seven at the weekend sometime, and I'm dreading The Lodger. I don't know why I've (still) got such a visceral reaction to it - I actually get angry when I see people saying they liked it. (Especially Jacob from TWOP, who loved it and hated the finale, which is just weird.) Though I realise this reaction is irrational, and haven't been shouting at people, just staying out of the conversations and avoiding reading good reviews of it. Hopefully on a re-watch I'll be able to pick out what exactly it is that hit one of my buttons, and assess the rest more rationally!
Media stuff: There's a Studio Ghibli game coming out for the PS3, and the trailer looks amazing.
Pratchett's Unseen Academicals is far better than I had expected, given that I haven't been that impressed with his books of late AND it's about football.
I'm still keeping track of the books I'm reading on a flickr set - about 75 by mid-year, which is pretty respectable. (72 in the set, but one of them's a trilogy so counts as three. And I've read maybe three or four books on my phone, too.)
I've started watching The Wire, and it's mesmerising. I'm getting to it late, but it's worth it.
Oh, more general media stuff - I spent six or eight hours on Friday night watching the news channels frantically attempt to cover a police stand-off live when they weren't allowed anywhere near it. And with people all over the country watching and discussing it via Twitter and forums and blogs. SO WEIRD. New media is definitely changing our psychology, I think. It's voyeuristic, but (although this sounds amazingly pretentious) it also felt like witnessing, like the act of watching it was important somehow. Some people seemed proud to turn the TV off and thought that those of us watching it were like ghouls at a car crash, but it would have felt wrong to me to turn off the TV and the news websites and pretend it wasn't happening, to go and read fanfic or play computer games while people's lives were in the balance. There's so much stuff tied up together it's hard to analyse though - separate from the "witnessing", it was interesting from a "watching the media" point of view and from a "psychology of the public" point of view; the coverage was intermittently hilarious and surreal (Gazza?!); and the people discussing it on Twitter were witty, thoughtful, intense, and generally engaged.
And then I spent a disproportionate amount of Saturday and Sunday arguing about the whole thing with IDIOTS, because that's what the Digital Spy forums are for.