Five Things Make a Post

[pedanther]

* I've signed up for the Buzzword Reading Challenge, where each month there's a theme and a list of words and you read at least one book with one of those words in the title, because I thought it might give me an impetus to stretch myself a bit, or at least to get a few books out of the ever-growing to-read pile. The word list for January was "Who, What, When, Where, Why, or How", and the book I picked out of the to-read pile (which would also have done for February, March, August, or November) was The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M Valente. The word list for February is "He, His, She, Hers, Me, Mine, You, Yours, We, Ours, etc.", and I'm having a second crack at Our Mutual Friend; so far it's going much better than the first attempt, which ran out of steam a few chapters in. (I saw bits of the TV version that featured Paul McGann and Keeley Hawes, just enough to have an inkling of the troubles that await the protagonists but not enough to know whether any of them get happy endings. Or, in the case of some of them, to have a clear idea whether I should want them to have happy endings.)


* Our production of All Together Now! went really well. After that I took a break and didn't do anything for the Christmas Show except come and watch one performance. We're currently in rehearsals for the first show of the new year, which is called Female Transport and is a drama set on a convict ship bound for Australia. I'm playing the ship's captain (which, come to think of it, is also what I did last time we had a play set on a convict ship bound for Australia).


* My walking routine has fallen in a bit of a hole since I was boasting about how well it was doing. Weirdly, it feels like the onset of summer did it more damage than winter did. You'd think longer days and less chance of rain would make it easier to go for a walk, but my work hours shifted in a way that made it harder to find time in the mornings, and by the time it cooled down in the evenings I often couldn't summon the energy. One thing that has recently given my exercise routine a lift is that I finally got around to digging the bicycle out of storage and getting it serviced, and now I'm riding it pretty regularly. (And yes, that's how the walking routine started too, but the bicycle lets me do more exercise in less time so I'm hoping it'll persist.)


* I signed up for Disney+ a few months ago so I could watch Loki while my friends were still talking about it, and then I watched What If...?, and re-watched Ant-Man (I had remembered it was a fun movie, but not just how much fun it was)... and now I've fallen into the same trap I always seem to fall into with streaming services, where the monthly fees rack up while I don't watch anything because I can't make up my mind what to watch next. I do want to watch Ant-Man and the Wasp, and I'm at least a bit interested in at least some parts of WandaVision and Hawkeye, and I intend to watch The Mandalorian at some point, and that's barely scratching the surface of what's available. But somehow it always seems like something for another day.


* Instead, I've been watching a bunch of stuff on Youtube. One thing I have been watching a lot of recently is the British game show Taskmaster, in which the competitors are given eccentric challenges ranging from the seemingly simple ("Eat this egg. Fastest wins.") to the more elaborate ("Create the most thrilling soap opera cliffhanger. You have one hour."). A lot of the entertainment comes from comparing the different approaches taken by the different competitors (you might not think there could be four wildly distinct ways to "Eat this egg", but there were). Another thing I've been enjoying is a series of reaction videos on medusacascade's channel, where she's watching Babylon 5 for the first time. It's great getting to watch somebody new discover the show, and while it's not quite the same thing as watching the series again myself, it's enough like it that I suspect it's taking up a "this is the show I'm currently watching" slot in my brain and might be part of why I'm not currently getting around to watching any new scripted drama series.

Comments

[ariaflame]

I can definitely recommend Encanto for something on Disney+, but I also know the analysis paralysis that can come from having so many choices.

[splanky]

Taksmaster is amazing. I think the season with Rhod Gilbert (who is magnificently insane) is my favourite.

[thisbluespirit]

I've been watching Taskmaster over the last few months on and off - it is very entertaining and a great distraction from life. XD

Everyone seems to have been picking it up - I only tried it because people kept talking about it and I'd finished the Would I Lie To You? back episodes that our Freeview channels had to offer - and now other people on my flist seem to be also falling into it. (Fandom domino effect, I suppose.)

[pedanther]

There probably is a domino effect -- I started watching because several (otherwise unconnected) British people I know online were saying good things about it at around the same time.

[thisbluespirit]

I think so.

Oh, and Our Mutual Friend is my favourite Dickens - I hope you do get on with it a bit better, but Dickens is just Like That sometimes. When I first read them as a teen it was a toss up between loving one and wanting to throw the next across the room.

The adaptation is good, too! Apart from Paul McGann's terrible moustache, of course.

[rdm]

We are hopelessly addicted to Taskmaster, to the extent of repeatedly inflicting Seasons 7,12, and NZ2 on various friends.

Some of them still talk to us!

[leecetheartist]

All the information is on the task.

[igenlode]

To my surprise I actually really liked "Our Mutual Friend" (with the exception of the obvious anti-Fagin character -- I read that he was put in there because Dickens was accused of anti-Semitism, and the result has about as much success as most token character representation). And the reason I liked it was because it's *not* obvious who is the designated Main Protagonist, and the outcome is not clearly morally predestined in advance, so there is a genuine uncertainty over which way the author is going to go, and who gets redeemed and who doesn't... which meant that by the end I was really invested in the outcome and it had real emotional impact.