Reading

Entry tags:

movies

The Witch

Last night was good. Me and cosmolinguist went to see The Witch at the local cinema as a 10th anniversary screening. It's a favourite of V's but they were too tired to join us, and neither of us had seen it before. We grabbed food at Wagamama beforehand, since it was pretty empty and CO2 readings were low, and it was nice to just talk and eat together.

The film is as much a slow-burn drama as it is a horror film; there's a lot of wiggle room for different interpretations of events. The acting is superb on all fronts, but I was particularly impressed by Harvey Scrimshaw playing young son Caleb. On the way out of the cinema I was making comically mediocre bribes for E's soul - "Wouldst thou like a pint of mediocre lager?" and so on.

It was nice to spend a bit of time together doing something date-like.

Red

Extracts from John Logan's play Red, starring Alfred Molina as Mark Rothko turned up in my YouTube feed this morning. Was Rothko really so loud, angry and incapable of shutting up? Had I been nice young Ken, the assistant whom Rothko browbeats and lectures from the moment he enters the studio, I think I might have turned on my heel and walked straight out. I guess he needed the work.

I've never been too sure of my response to what I guess we'll call the New York school. Were these guys- abstracters and popsters- really as world-bestridingly wonderful as the Art World thinks they are? When I learned the other day that the CIA had a big hand in getting them talked up and exhibited, as a way of establishing the USA as cultured and futuristic in opposition to those grim, dim, backward-looking Russians, I thought, "Ah....."

That's not to say the New Yorkers were talentless. But. Pollock's drip paintings took abstraction to it's logical conclusion and so into a brick wall. Rauschenburg is chaotic and messy and as for Lichtenstein, how many blown up comic images can you turn out before that clever idea starts to pall? None of this work detains me. The only New York artist I love unreservedly is Andy Warhol. I love Andy because he is the artist as trickster, always one hop, skip and a jump ahead of you. Dali played the same game- and I admire Dali- but Andy was so much lighter on his feet.

And Rothko? What Rothko thought he was painting was the human tragedy, but is the human tragedy really inherent in those big vibrant wodges of colour? Would we talk about them in such terms if we hadn't been schooled to do so? Molina's Rothko stands nice young Ken in front of one of his paintings and asks him what he sees. And nice young Ken says "Red".

Life with two parents: Just about

My mum had a heart attack yesterday afternoon, followed by an angioplasty.

She was sitting up in bed and drinking coffee by 9pm last night, and seems to be fine now. They're keeping her in until Monday to make sure, but panic over.

Turns out that an angioplasty is nowadays an outpatient operation under local anaesthetic, with over 97% success rate. Modern medicine is awesome. And thank fuck for the NHS!

Current Music: Jealous of the Birds, "Kodachrome"

All the trees carve shards of light

Since

spatch's schedule blocks him from joining my birthday observed this weekend when my niece will be in town, it was important to him to take me somewhere nice on the day itself, and after some reconfiguration of plans based on parameters of pain, sleep, and sunset and some obstruction from construction and accidents on Route 2, we managed somewhere very nice indeed.

( Panoramas two-thirds sky and one-third land. )

We did not make it to the originally proposed bookstore: it was fine. We drove home down looping roads close-lined first with trees and then with malls as we made our way back from the Pioneer Valley into MetroWest. Fog drifted once across the highway from the marshes we were driving over. I looked for further meteors out the window through the least light-polluted hills and meadows, but saw mostly that I could still have read by the eighty-five-percent moon. It was a lot of time in the car and all worth it, an inland gift. It was, for everything going on in my life and outside of it, a good birthday.

Entry tags:

my house

(no subject)

I put up my winter curtains. The living room is certainly darker. Cozy? Well, certainly darker.

Thursday 9th October 2025

Do you have a Doctor Who community or a journal that we are not currently linking to? Leave a note in the comments and we'll add you to the watchlist (

doctor_watch).

Editor's Note: If your item was not linked, it's because the header lacked the information that we like to give our readers. Please at least give the title, rating, and pairing or characters, and please include the header in the storypost itself, not just in the linking post. Spoiler warnings are also greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Off-Dreamwidth News
Blogtor Who's video of the day for yesterday was a clip from 2015's "Into the Dalek"
Blogtor Who's video of the day for today is a clip from Class
Doctor Who: The Prison Paradox, coming soon from Titan Comics

(News via

doctorwhonews_feed and

blogtorwho_feed among others.)

Discussion and Miscellany

purplecat with Costume Bracket: Semi Final, Post 2

If you were not linked, and would like to be, contact us in the comments with further information and your link.

Entry tags:

I can't eat a celebratory chocolate biscuit if I'm melting at this now can I

I had a long day, full of meetings and people talking too much. The last was a focus group that went on too long because of one person talking too much and not following the very specifically stated brief: I said we're here to give recommendations to decision-makers and service providers, and this guy did what he always does which is "here's how I get around that by being Resilient and taking individual responsibility for this systemic problem! Cool story, bro.

After a day like that, with an ending like that, it was very sweet to get a message from my favorite person on my favorite team (mine). Our manager has asked her to work with me on the latest report, so this morning I asked if we could arrange a meeting and it'll be tomorrow morning. So at the very end of the day today, she sends me this:

Hi, this is just a message to tell you that I have reread [the last report, 2 of 3]. I now have an overwhelming urge to tell you that you are such a smart cookie. The report is brilliant and incredibly comprehensive. I'm quite intimidated in supporting you with [report 3 of 3]. Anyway this is me belatedly telling you that you are an awesome [our job title] and maybe you could eat a celebratory chocolate biscuit and pat yourself on the back.

A few sentences like that go a long way!

Current Music: Jealous of the Birds, "Pendulum"

Fierce as the Baltic sea

It is my birthday. I am forty-four years old, the age some fictional character must be. I woke to a pair of packages, one from

nineweaving that proved to be Vaughn Scribner's Merpeople: A Human History (2020) and from my parents which was a DVD of The Sea Wolf (1941). Hestia was a small black round of purr like an extra present at the foot of the bed. It is bright and brisk and cloudless as all the classical autumns outside.

Entry tags:

Interesting Links for 09-10-2025

1. How to weigh an octopus in only 8 wriggly steps: (tags:octopus weight video )

Well, That Was A Thing

That was an expensive lunch!

A very good lunch but I've never had a pricier one- or, at least, not that I've paid for myself.

French, nouvelle cuisine, leisurely....

And the most horrendous indigestion afterwards.

Still I'm glad to have had the experience.

Current Music: Crystal Eyes, "I'm Nature"

I want what's true

Most of the Draconids we saw tonight were short flashes like Morse in the mind of the dragon, but even through the faint haze and the half-sky shine of the harvest moon just past, we saw two true long-tailed fireballs like dragon-stars, streaking through Lyra and Boötes. Their radiant stands in Eltanin and Rastaban, the dragon's eyes. Meteors, too, feel like a gift for an erev birthday. I still dream one will earth itself in a field while I am watching.

Entry tags:

(no subject)

So, I’ve been in this place for a year now. I know what to expect weather wise. Know that the backyard needs outside help. Know which grocery stores to go to for various things. I’m still hesitant to go over to Eugene which seems much busier to me and is full of one way streets.

Winter will be closing in. Wearing a jacket to go out now. Thinking about digging out the heater to install in the bedroom. The cats are sleeping on the bed at night instead of the cool wood floor. Also, sometimes lying against my leg, that little radiator. I’m buying bird seed to put out in the coming months.

The recent sky has puzzled me. There were no clouds, at all. Just a bowl of blue (before the rain came). I found that so odd.

I remembered I have winter curtains to put up. Insulated. Will have to get around to that.

The cats have discovered the hilarity of middle of the night unrolling the toilet paper roll. In the morning I discover a wad of paper on the floor. Fun for Everybody!

I’ve ordered some ginger cookies from a place in Philly. Nostalgia, though I never liked them much when I was young. My taste buds were more sensitive then and these are intense cookies. At least they were and I had a sudden desire to taste them again. They mean Fall to me as well.

Current Music: Alex G, "Afterlife"

Reflections coming through the radio, the telephone, the TV

a_reasonable_man thought I could use a talisman and brought me a 1923 Peace dollar that belonged most likely to his grandfather's second wife. It's as old as my grandmother would be. I have buttoned it inside my coat. It's a treasure.

Ask Miriam (And Dylan)....

We asked Miriam, because she is wise in these matters, how we could tell someone who is being clingly and manipulative and stalkery how to fuck off without hurting their feelings.

And her answer was so simple: "Tell them you're sorry, but you already have a full slate of people you're committed to and you can't give them what they want...."

Yeah.....

Or as Dylan wrote and sang, "It ain't me, babe; it ain't me you're looking for...."

Entry tags:

Interesting Links for 08-10-2025

1. Iran's Bad Options: (tags:iran nuclearweapons )
2. The work to move the UK's electricity from where it's generated to where it's needed won't be finished until 2030.: (tags:electricity infrastructure uk thefuture planning )
3. England's Green Party comes out in favour of drug legalisation: (tags:legalisation drugs UK GreenParty )

But I'm No Gardener

Two skip-loads of rubble and miscellaneous junk have been extracted over the weeks from the garage conversion. The second- and last- of the skips was removed this morning. The forecourt will look bare without it.....

We have a large forecourt- and it's mostly paved- which is convenient if we have visitors with cars but is otherwise wasted space. Most of our neighbours have nice little front gardens- and I'd like to have one of too. A little lawn, generously filled with flowering shrubs and the appropriate annuals. The house at the corner has a front garden which fills up in the season with bright orange Californian poppies. Oh, but they're glorious.....

Current Music: Hayley Williams, "Mirtazapine"

For when the heart's a sinking stone

He said, I'm just out of hospital,
but I'm still flying.
—H.D., "R.A.F." (1941)

I had a lot of help—I was that sort of chap.
—Margery Allingham, The China Governess (1962)

Northbound and once again rear-facing for all the good that selecting my seat in advance did me, I watched the trees start to change beyond the gravel-span of the tracks from late southerly green to the occasional bright lick of Halloween leaves, as if the train were coming in to autumn.

spatch met me at the station with a roast beef sandwich. Hestia sniffed me all over intently and then licked my nose: I was acceptable despite a week in the company of other cat. I spent the rest of the night in a sort of liquescent state and reconstituted myself this afternoon just enough for a doctor's appointment, after which I promptly decohered for several hours again.

It was such a good trip. It was low-key, which was literally what the doctors ordered. I sat on a bench with my godchild and watched him sketch in his lesser notebook. I slept into the afternoon and no one cared that I often napped after just about any exertion from a walk around the block to dinner out at a Balkan market that served me a pljeskavica that it was doing its best to be bigger than my head and the first can of Schweppes Bitter Lemon I have seen in a store for years. I ate several species of fancy tinned fish. I did not manage to get to a museum with

selkie, but all things considered it may have been even better that we spent so much time just hanging out, mostly on the couch where one night my godchild came down to impart weird medical facts before returning to bed. Because he's reading it in English class, I left the first two lines of the Odyssey written for him on the refrigerator in dry-erase marker and Homeric Greek. I took many fewer photos than usual, but have my favorite: my godson, the Star.

I did not get a picture somewhere in Connecticut of the old fender pier of a swing bridge so overgrown with trees and brush, it had become an oak-trussed island, like the prow of a ship burial, but it was the best thing I saw on the return train. Changes in circumstances still being assimilated, but at least I was somewhere loving when they hit.

Entry tags:

critical role

(no subject)

I had a good pair of days in New York. Sunday I spent much of in the Natural History Museum, which I was in a dozen years or so ago, but since then they've added a lot, including a butterfly vivarium, before getting into the pop-up shop and getting myself a Mighty Nein t-shirt. I wore it the next day, first to the New York Public Library, where I went to see their exhibition of various items from their collection, to very old medieval tomes to materials related to various Broadway productions, then found their gift shop and bought myself a 2026 calendar of New Yorker cartoons, then to the local Drunk Shakespeare Society's performance of Drunk Dracula, where one of the ushers expressed their appreciation for it, nor was I the only person of the audience in one of the shirts from the pop-up. Drunk Dracula wasn't quite what the blurbs claimed, with the drunk member of the cast not really standing out much amid all their antics, but it was fun to watch.
And just being in New York City makes me happy. By the time I ended up getting myself one of their new metro cards, I did so knowing I was coming back at some point next year. If I don't make it to San Diego, I'm definitely going back to NYCC then. I might just go even if I do. I watched the Critical Role backstage stream after getting back this afternoon, and found myself feeling sad less because I'm not at the live show tonight and more just because I'm not in New York City any more.
But a couple hours later I got a notification that couldn't help but make me happy tonight: I've been podficced again! deepestbluesky podficced Knitting for the Chromatic Characters Podfic Anthology.

Entry tags:

Stornoway Road Trip 2025: The Journey Up

Recently, I went away with mother_bones and cosmolinguist to Scotland. This is a roughly annual trip to see V's son L who lives up there. He works in a hotel in Stornoway, and can only get time off out of season, so we usually go up in mid to late September after most of the cruise ships have stopped. Between the last ferry sailing from Ullapool to the island being about 5pm, the 8-10 hour journey and V's difficulty with mornings, it takes us two days to get up there and two days to get back.

On the way up, we planned to stop off in Stirling, in a hostel which had a room for 3 adults. We got stuck in a very long tailback after a lorry had shed its load, so I can now say that I've had a nap in the fast lane of the M6. This meant we got to Stirling later than planned, and had takeout delivered to our hostel. E and I went to explore the town, making our way up to the castle despite the late hour, enjoying the dark hilly streets. We stopped off for a pint in The Portcullis at the castle, and spotted the looming silhouette of the Star Pyramid which deserves a future look.

The morning after, we drove out of Stirling past The National Wallace Monument but didn't stop there. After a couple of hours driving we broke for lunch at the Ralia Cafe, a traditional haunt for us. I took a photo of E standing by the metal Highland Cow statue outside. I picked up a leaflet for the Highland Folk Museum in the next town, just off our route, and we stopped for a while to inspect a number of rebuilt and recreated buildings in a field, including a traditional Hebridean blackhouse. Weirdly, we ran into some Mancunians who recognised me and E from the Queer Kiki drinks on Thursday which we've only attended twice!

We hit our big snag as we were on the road between Inverness and Ullapool - the evening ferry was cancelled with about an hour's notice. This left us stranded with nowhere to sleep, along with a few hundred other people. We tried phoning around hotels and B&Bs in Ullapool itself but everywhere was booked out. Eventually I found a hotel in Strathpeffer, almost as far back as Inverness, where we could stay for the night. We grabbed fish and chips and a pint in Ullapool, then doubled back for an hour's driving before collapsing in bed...