(September 15 – 21)

Planning for the podcast took a few leaps and bounds this week. My Awesome Partner came up with the perfect name for the show: Slightly Odd Tales, and this inspired me enough to put together some basic artwork, which you can see below.

I spent the rest of the week putting this artwork to good use by setting up placeholder Medium sites (where the written versions of the stories will live) and Patreon pages (where people can throw money at me should they feel so compelled). While the podcast is still several months away, this all felt like great progress.

I also started a new short story which I’m pretty excited about.

Watching

I watched two films with the Elderbeast this week, starting with Friday The 13th Part 3 for horror friday. I don’t have a whole lot to say about this one, except it remains as much fun as the first time around. One of the tropes of the Friday The 13th films seems to be that at least half of the characters must be as annoying as they can possibly be, so that we end up really, really looking forward to their inevitable deaths.

For Saturday night, continuing with the Elderbeast’s bid to watch the top ten IMDB movies, we watched Pulp Fiction. This was borderline age-inappropriate, but I made the call that the Elderbeast could handle it—and I’m glad I did.

Pulp Fiction arrived in cinemas at the same time that I was studying film at university, and watching it again reminded me how hugely exciting it was at the time. Revisiting it now after many, many years was a real treat, and it was a joy to see how easily the Elderbeast connected with it.

It’s interesting to note that, even with his second film, Tarantino displays a certain indulgence in some scenes, when he would have been better served reaching for the editing scissors. This is most obvious in the early parts of Bruce Willis’s segment which features a lot of ‘character building’ that doesn’t really move anything forward, and suffers deeply in comparison to the overwhelmingly brilliant John Travolta / Uma Thurman segment. However, it’s one minor dip in a movie that otherwise remains excellent—and this weekend’s viewing was a welcome reminder of why Pulp Fiction is so highly, and rightfully, regarded.

Reading

This week I felt compelled to revisit the audiobook of The Dispatcher (written by John Scalzi, performed by Zachary Quinto). I listen to this a year or two ago, and enjoyed it a lot, but was thinking about it last week and realised that I couldn’t remember a great deal about it. I remembered that it had something to do with people no longer dying, and that the idea was wrapped around a pretty decent detective mystery … and that was about it.

Well, I’m obviously not going to spoil the story for you here, but it was a rewarding listen, even the second time around, and John Scalzi did a good job of exploring the themes brought up by his central concept without them overloading the story. A great example of a big idea wrapped up into a relatively neat little novella.