Category: Diary Page 25 of 47

I spent this evening doing something I haven’t done for a long time: chatting on twitter. And it was awesome.

I used to do a lot more of it but, for various reasons, I’ve pulled back from twitter a bit over the last few years. I still post tweets here and there, and occasionally get into a brief tweet-reply conversation, but it’s rare these days that I’ll spend more than a few minutes at a time on the network. Tonight, however, I had multiple chats on the go with multiple people and it really reminded me of the ‘good old days’.

I was into twitter into quite a big way when it first started to get popular, and it’s no exaggeration to say that all of my friends are people I met through twitter. Without twitter I would basically not have a social life.

Sure, Twitter has its dark side, but if you manage it properly it can still be a positive experience. And that’s what tonight was: it was like having a few friends over to enjoy a glass or two of wine and chat about whatever random topics have caught our attention for the day. There was comfort in it, which is something that’s hard to come by on social media these days.

I’ve decided that my house is like a jigsaw. I get everything just the way I like it, then something needs moving: in this case a TV that needs to come out of the guest room.

Where do I put it? There’s nowhere left for it to go.

I have to make a space for it: a proper TV viewing space. But this means moving something else in order to make that space. And then making more space to move the thing into that I’ve just moved from somewhere else in order to make space.

It all worked out in the end–better, in fact, that it was before–but there’s still a cause and effect at play. We rarely leave empty space in our homes. Every corner is used, everything has its place. Moving one thing causes a reshuffling of the deck and you’re never quite sure where it’s all going to land until it’s finished.

Wouldn’t be a problem, really, if furniture wasn’t so damn heavy …

Today we went to Bricktober. It was a relatively spur of the moment decision (i.e. I only found out about it yesterday) but made for a very nice Last Day Of School Holidays treat for the kinderbesten.

LEGO has been an important part of our household—as it has been, I would imagine, for most family households. I used to play with it when I was a kid; I continued to play with it before I had my own kids; now, since the kinderbesten have inherited that fondness for LEGO, I have a house full of the stuff.

Bricktober presents an entirely different level of LEGO: massively detailed panoramas that hardcore fans have put together; custom builds of huge Star Wars vehicles; robotics experiments. You name it—if it’s possible to do it with LEGO, someone at Bricktober has probably done it. Or at least tried.

I left the exhibition full of admiration for what these fans had achieved with imagination, discipline and plastic bricks … and also with one of these:

Today I made the Kinderbesten tidy their rooms. They were relatively obedient but, as with most things involving kinderbesten, the effort to get them doing something is frequently greater than the effort required to do that thing yourself. However, I did exercise persistence and managed to coordinate and motivate the beasts into action upon this occasion.

At one point I did wonder if it was really worth the effort. It took at least an hour to get them to do what was probably about 15 minutes’ work. But we did get it done, and the rooms looked fantastic in the end: so much so, in fact, that I kept popping my head through the doors for the rest of the weekend to admire the change.

And that’s what makes it worth it. I wrote recently about quality of life, and how important it is to take some pleasure and satisfaction from your immediate surroundings. If the kinderbesten can appreciate just a little bit of that, and take a little bit more pleasure from being in their own space, then hopefully it can improve their quality of life too.

It has been quite a year for guarded cinematic expectations.

We had, at last, the first big screen version of Wonder Woman. Released as part of a grim canvas of dreary and uninspiring DC superhero movies, it’s hardly surprising that many people were excited at the thought of a Wonder Woman movie, but also wary of how it might turn out. It ended up being awesome and, rightfully, an enormous hit.

We had Ridley Scott finally doing a bona fide sequel to Alien with Alien Covenant. The trailer may have been great, but the finished movie proved to have far less meat on its bones that the problematic Prometheus and was underwhelming as an Alien movie too.

Then, most recently, Blade Runner 2049: a movie I refused to either get excited about, or assume I would be disappointed by. The trailers proved that the makers had been able to capture the look and feel of the first movie, but it still seemed a long shot that they could capture everything they needed to in order to craft a worthy follow-up.

And yet they did! It’s an amazing achievement. Blade Runner 2049 is a movie that is written entirely in the language of its predecessor (the look, the sound, even the feel) while still providing a fresh experience. It builds on the threads that the first movie laid out, but weaves its own narrative. I can’t think any other sequels (at this moment) that have managed to do this. Aliens and Empire Strikes Back, for example, are excellent sequels but seem to be crafted from rather different DNA than their forebears. On the other extreme, many superhero franchises throw out perfectly good sequels … which typically involve many of the same characters and story beats in an effort to provide audiences with familiarity.

Having had Blade Runner in my cinematic blood for the last 30 years, it’s hard for me to see the sequel without being mindful of the original. Knowledge of the first film certainly enhances appreciation of the second, but I believe Blade Runner 2049 has been built to stand on its own. It reminds me of the ambitious, big-thinking, story-driven science fiction movies of the 1970s: it’s driven by character as much as it is by big ideas, and while the visual effects are stunning, they never dominate the narrative.

It’s too bad it’s not doing that well at the box office. We seem, once again, to be in a time when this style of science fiction simply doesn’t draw the crowds. Or maybe it’s always been this way, and the few films that do make it through are wonderful aberrations. Which is why we end up treasuring them so.

Either way, I’m already looking forward to seeing this one again.

Thinking is hard. Using your brain is hard. I did a lot of it at work today and now I’m really, really tired.

So that’s all you get today.

I left no notes for my diary entry today.

I can only assume I had a perfectly ordinary day, doing perfectly ordinary things, and thinking perfectly ordinary thoughts. I would have finished my perfectly ordinary job for the day, returned to my perfectly ordinary home, and had a perfectly ordinary dinner. After this I probably enjoyed a perfectly ordinary evening before retiring to bed in a perfectly ordinary kind of a way.

Yes. All perfectly ordinary. Nothing out of the ordinary happened today. Absolutely nothing at all.

Since Monday brings nothing of either mortal or spiritual worth, I’m stealing this diary entry for weekend thoughts.

While setting up my new LED lighting strip over the weekend I did find myself wondering: why the hell am I buying all these dumb gadgets? They cost money (albeit not much) and I don’t need them … so why do it? The answer is, of course: because I like buying them.

The slightly less simplistic answer is that these things add to my quality of life, and investing a bit of disposable income into my quality of life is a pretty sensible investment if you ask me. We are surrounded by stress and pressure on all sides, and carving out a few small pleasures here and there is one way of dealing with that. For me, something as trivial as being able to control the lighting in my home means I get to completely relax and unwind when I sit down at the end of the way. In turn, this means I’m that little bit less stressed with Kinderbesten, and I’m that bit more refreshed when I go to work the next day, which means I can focus on my job that bit more, which means job satisfaction, which means less stress … and you see how it goes.

So, yeah – these $30 bluetooth bulbs are making my life PERFECT!

I watched a film called In Your Eyes tonight. Sunday night is, occasionally, my night to check out ‘hidden gems’ on Netflix, and In Your Eyes came out on a few separate lists so I figured I’d give it a go.

I didn’t realise until it started that it was written by Joss Whedon, but it’s largely shorn of his typical pop-culture charm. What it does retain is the emotional wrangling that made various moments in Buffy The Vampire Slayer feel like they’d literally reached directly into your chest just so they could make your heart feel like its protective layer had been ripped away.

The major theme of the film, in my interpretation at least, is of being connected to someone (that one someone); and whether that connection is to the right person or the wrong person. We typically end up partnering with people through the major circumstances of our lives–such as work, location, and so on–but what if entirely unexpected chance brought you together with the right person; a person you might otherwise never have met?

The film also caused me to ponder the way that we seek connections all the time. Not just to one person, but to anyone. Some of us can live large parts of our lives alone, but we will always want to touch base with other people: whether it’s chatting to that random person in the supermarket, or reaching out through social media, or even just by taking a walk in the park. We are, by nature, resistant to being alone. We need other people to remind us that we are there; that we matter; that we have substance.

But, mostly the film made me–as it was probably intended to–ponder about being connected to that one person. There’s (bizarrely) a useful explanation relating to headphone cables that comes into play here. Headphone cables are always tangled. You can stow them away nice and neatly, but they will almost always come out again tangled. This is because there is basically just one arrangement in which the headphone cable is not tangled. Conversely, there are millions of ways in which the cable can be tangled.

Similarly, there are millions of people out there who are not the right person. There are millions of ways of meeting those people. There are a select few who are the one. The chances of meeting them are tenuous, fleeting, and almost impossible. The odds are stacked against us. If you get that chance, take it.

I watched Blade Runner today for my Awesome Saturday Night Movie. If you weren’t already aware, it’s one of my favourite films. You’ll probably be even less aware that it’s a fair few years since I last watched it.

Well, folks, it was absolutely incredible. The sound. The imagery. The design. The performances. I just fell in love with the film all over again.

And that got me thinking: for me, Blade Runner is a special experience; for many cinephiles, Blade Runner is a critically important movie; for others, it’s meh. So I began to wonder: how much of my personal experience, and my memories of the movie, is tied up in my appreciation for Blade Runner?

The first time I watched it was with my Dad. He rented it on VHS and we watched it one Saturday afternoon. I would have been around 13 years of age. I knew the film well enough, but certainly not to the intimate detail that the internet today allows you immerse yourself in movies that you’ve never seen. I knew the music (my Dad had the old not-Vangelis soundtrack album); I’d seen plenty of magazine coverage of the film during my pilgrimages to Forbidden Planet; I knew it was by the director of my favourite film; I knew it starred Indiana Solo. That was probably about it. My first viewing was like completing a puzzle: finally getting to watch the movie because it having not seen it was a gaping hole in my cinephilia.

At some point over the ensuing years I acquired my own copy: either recorded from TV, or copied from a rental release. I would invite friends around specifically to watch Blade Runner. On my own, I would watch it endlessly until its moment were seared into my brain. I would discuss it tirelessly with my other movie-loving friends. I remember the first retail VHS copy being released, with its piss-ugly sleeve. I remember my Dad being able to get us tickets to the first London screening of the Director’s Cut, which was hugely exciting. I remember the first, very lacking, DVD edition (a non-anamorphic, zero extras, release of the Director’s Cut).

Eventually The Final Cut was released. I preordered a beautiful tin-box edition on DVD and watched everything: all the different versions, and the awesome making of documentary. Mere weeks later, I saw a bluray edition of the same for silly money, so I snapped that up as well.

Watching The Final Cut tonight brought back many of these memories. The movie was filled with tiny moments that I’d forgotten about, but felt like old friends. It was familiar, but also long enough since my last viewing that I was able to watch it with fresh eyes. Had I (somehow) never seen Blade Runner before, I suspect I would have come away feeling that I’d discovered a new friend–much as my recent Tarantino first-viewings have left me. However, my deep love for the movie is unavoidably entwined with my memories of it, and the role it has played across the lion’s share of my life. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Blade Runner has defined me, but I am as much defined by being ‘someone who loves Blade Runner‘ as I am defined by being ‘someone who loves red wine’ or ‘someone who likes horror movies’.

And, of course, if you’ve ever seen Blade Runner and given its themes more than a passing thought, you should appreciate the irony of all that.