I don’t post on this blog as often as I’d like, but I felt like sharing some of the things I’ve been finding interesting this week. It may or may not become a regular feature!
On TV
I’ve finally bitten the bullet and cancelled my Netflix account, but I still have it until the beginning of next month, so I’ve been cramming. Since I have limited time, I’ll only watch stuff that really grabs my attention; I know some things are growers, but I don’t have time for that! For example, I started watching Heartstopper, but I had to conclude that it just wasn’t for me. Way too wholesome!
So, the main thing I want to recommend is The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself. It’s based on an apparently popular YA series, Half Bad by Sally Green, which I have never heard of because I am an OA (Old Adult). From what I gather, the show is a major improvement on the source material.
I was never the biggest Harry Potter fan (which has definitely made my life easier over the past couple of years), but I do love fantasy, including fantasy that riffs on the Harry Potter mythos like Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. TBS&TDH doesn’t strictly feel Harry Potter inspired–if anything, it reminded me more of the Wicca YA series (known as Sweep in other territories), which I began reading when I actually was a YA. Still, comparisons abound, despite the show not actually featuring a magical school, which is surely the main hallmark of the Harry Potter series.
It feels like Netflix isn’t sure how to market this show; the original thumbnail has been replaced with one which prominently displays HALF BAD, with the actual unwieldy title in a much smaller font underneath. I do hope this is getting an audience, though, since it’s some bold programming with a real sense of place (actual ASDA shopping bags!), not the liminal transatlantic world of something like Sex Education.
If you want to check out what else I’ve been watching, you can always check out my Letterboxd.
Reading
Along with Netflix, I’m also cancelling Kindle Unlimited and Audible this month, the upshot being that I’m trying to listen to, read and watch a bunch of stuff all at once. It’s not going well! I feel stressed!
I have been reading Cory Doctorow’s Radicalized, a collection of four novellas. I’ve been interested in Doctorow for a while, but this is my first time I’ve actually got around to reading his stuff. I loved the first story, Unauthorized Bread, but I was less impressed by Model Minority. On starting Radicalized (the title story), I decided to skip ahead, since I’m sensitive to certain medical stuff–I’d already suffered through the upsetting depictions of police brutality in the previous story, and hadn’t ultimately felt it was worth it. I’m now going back and forth on whether to finish the final story in the collection or just move on to something new. I’ll definitely give Doctorow another chance at some point, but I’m not feeling motivated to carry on with this collection just now.
Meanwhile, on Audible, I’ve been making a lot of use of the Plus Catalogue. The big discovery for me has been Theodore Sturgeon. The first thing I listened to was Some of Your Blood, a psychological horror novella written in epistolary form. I wouldn’t call it scary per se–good for me–but I did find it gripping and surprisingly affecting. Then I listened to Venus Plus X, published nine years before Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness but exploring a lot of the same ideas from a different angle. I couldn’t believe how ahead of its time it was. Now I’m listening to More Than Human, but I’m afraid I won’t have time to finish it before my subscription ends, so I may end up trying to get hold of a physical copy.
If you’re interested, you can read more detailed reviews over on my Goodreads.
Online
This online puzzle box is very cool, though be warned, for me it crashed when I had nearly completed it and I lost my progress. It got recommended by BoingBoing, and I think the server couldn’t handle the increased traffic. Part of my brain wanted me to start again from the very beginning, but instead I did the sane thing and used the solutions. Okay, I have a confession to make: I transposed the sudoku puzzles to an online soduko maker, but I messed up (I left an entire line of numbers off), so I had to use one of the solutions the first time around, too. Phew, glad I got that off my chest.
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With twitter on the decline, I’ve been turning back to discord–I was an early adopter of Mastodon, but it was never really my scene, and the instance I originally joined went offline in 2018. Besides, while I’m addicted to twitter, I don’t actually want to try and replace it with a clone; I don’t think it’s a good place for my mental health. I don’t have a ton of interactions on there, and when I make my account public I just end up getting myself into stupid arguments with obnoxious strangers in somebody else’s mentions, which is bad for everyone.
Is discord a good solution? I don’t know. I often get overwhelmed by the pace, and there tends to be at least one person in any given discord that I find annoying at the very least (hey, I never claimed to be gregarious). You can’t choose whom you follow; while you can “Block” people, all it does is hide their messages–but still leaves a tempting option to reveal them, which I always end up clicking when my curiosity gets the better of me. I’ve joined and left several discords at this point after I either became overwhelmed or had an interaction that went sour.
Still, at least everyone on a particular discord is there because they have some kind of shared interest, plus it’s almost inherently interactive. Rather than feeling like you’re pouring things out into a void and rarely being acknowledged, you’re practically guaranteed to get some kind of response. Of course, that could be a double-edged sword.
For now, I’m going to stick around on a few discords and see how I get on; maybe at some point I’ll manage to kick my social media habit for good.
Panicky in the UK 