dolorosa_12: (amelie)
This is a brief roundup of everything I've watched in May that I have not yet discussed. Matthias and I have continued to take advantage of the fact that we have no commutes, and thus our free time begins the instant our working day stops, at 5pm, to catch up on a backlog of streaming series, mainly on Netflix.

This seems to have been a month of watching rather silly fantasy/horror shows in non-English languages: we've watched an Austrian show (Freud, which I discussed earlier on this blog), a Colombian show, an Italian show, and a Dutch one.

Read about these, and others, behind the cut )

And that's a (viewing) wrap on May!
dolorosa_12: (persephone lore olympus)
I spent the morning reading the entire first 'season' of the Lore Olympus webcomic, and now feel at a complete loss, given we're not going to get any more content until August. I then immediately did my usual thing of hunting down icons, fic, etc. The fandom seems active, but ... intense, so I think I will just do my own thing in my own corner. Today was the last day of my impromptu four-day weekend, and unlike Saturday, there was no freezing rain, just sunshine, and ice-cream, and pottering around in the courtyard garden.

From the heights, to the depths: I spent way too much time and emotional energy this afternoon writing an outraged email to my MP about Dominic Cummings. Given my MP is a Labour one, all he's going to be able to do in response is fulminate huffily on my behalf, but since making a loud, outraged nuisance of ourselves via email is all that we really have left, we might as well do that.

And then tomorrow it's back to work again — still at home, thankfully.
dolorosa_12: (amelie wondering)
I had a slight mental health wobble earlier this week, before making the rather obvious connection between my furiously miserable mood, and the fact that I had spent some time on Twitter. If I could just find a way to maintain the friendships and connections that I've made there, with people I don't speak to on any other platforms, I would leave that hellsite in a flash. I need to remember that whenever the UK government is being particularly horrible about immigrants, I need to steer clear of Twitter, otherwise it feels like standing in the middle of a public square and letting people take turns to punch and spit in my face.

Monday is a public holiday in the UK, although my library doesn't close. However, as I worked the previous May public holiday a couple of weeks ago, it's my turn to take the day off. Matthias and I elected to take today (Friday) off and make it a four-day weekend. Obviously we can't go anywhere (the travelling highlight of the long weekend is likely to be the trip we made this morning to buy difficult-to-obtain groceries from the street on the other side of town where the Chinese, Korean, Middle Eastern, Eastern European, Italian etc grocery stores are all located), but we've got a courtyard garden, it's very sunny, and I keep breaking away from writing this post to dance to Matthias's 100+ hour female vocal trance playlist which he's playing through the cheap external speakers.

In terms of reading I haven't had the brainspace to deal with anything more demanding than a reread of KJ Charles's Charm of Magpies trilogy, which at least was cozy and kind-hearted. I also signed up for a programme with the publisher Hodderscape which gives (UK-resident) participants one free ebook per month. My selection this month is Honeycomb, a book of short stories by Joanne Harris, all inspired by fairytales. We'll see how this goes — other than Chocolat, which I read years ago when I was a teenager, I can't say I've ever been hugely impressed with any of Harris's books. Given this one is free, I'm happy enough to give it a try. If anyone is interested in this programme let me know and I'll try to send on the details.

My plans for the remainder of the long weekend are to write fanfic (a month ago, one of my goals was to write at least 1000 words of fic in the next four-week period, and then I ended up writing ... 15,000 words — which I get is a miniscule amount for a lot of people, but given I only ever write fic in response to exchange prompts, this is a staggering amount for me), try to finally finish watching Jane the Virgin (I've had nine episodes to go for over a year, and I really need to sit down and just watch them), cook a bit, and transfer some of the plants I've got in pots on the kitchen windowsill into the garden. We should have been travelling down to Devon to visit our friends who live there, but given that's no longer possible, my holiday plans seem like a good substitute.

Today's post title is, of course, brought to you by that rallying cry of introverted Gen Y Australian homebodies everywhere:



I hope you are having delightful weekends.
dolorosa_12: (amelie)
I'm not normally one for podcasts, audio/video interviews, or really anything where I'm expected to take in information from audio content alone, but I've found myself enjoying the great wealth of offerings currently available in the wake of the pandemic. A lot of authors who would normally have been promoting their new publications with tours, face-to-face book launches and so on are having to be more creative, and the result has been a lot of fun, free events online. Whereas before I would have been unable to attend events that happened in the US (or even elsewhere in the UK — it's hard enough for me to get to a book launch in London), I'm now able to participate from the comfort of my living room.

I listened to a live chat between Tasha Suri and Rowenna Miller about historical fantasy two days ago, last night I watched SA Chakraborty on Instagram Live (this actually wasn't that good, because the person interviewing her was dreadful and didn't ask any interesting questions, but I appreciated the opportunity to hear about the Daevabad trilogy getting its own Netflix show!), and this morning I listened to Philip Pullman and Michael Rosen talk about writing and language on the BBC. The latter probably would have happened, pandemic or not, but it was still delightful.

I'm not sure all this has turned me into an audio convert, but it's been a nice, diverting distraction.

Today's post's title is brought to you by one of my favourite songs, which just sounds like summer feels.

dolorosa_12: (florence glitter)
I have a deep, earnest, and enduring love of Eurovision. I've loved it since before I ever moved to Europe — like a lot of Australians, I watched it fairly religiously on Australian TV every year, simultaneously baffled and gleeful. Thankfully, when I moved to the UK, I found myself firmly ensconced within a social circle which shared my love for all things Eurovision, with varying degrees of sincerity and irony.

For many years, my husband and I hosted Eurovision parties of varying sizes — over the past few years it had dwindled to [profile] notasapleausure and her husband, as our original crowd of local friends moved on to other cities. And of course, due to the pandemic, this year Eurovision was cancelled. Thinking we would get nothing, Matthias and I had already arranged to have a viewing party via Facebook — interested friends could watch the different acts on Youtube, and air their thoughts in the comments of a post I made. It was a great deal of fun, especially given I hosted it in the early days of lockdown, when there was a real need to lift morale.

I should have known, however, that even with the contest itself cancelled, Eurovision would find a way to infect our screens with sparkles, wind machines, and multiple lyrics featuring the words 'fire' and 'desire' rhymed together.

Instead of the contest, there was a simultaneous Eurovision celebration broadcast across all the competing nations — the performers who were supposed to have been competing this year played snatches of their songs and aired videos recorded in their homes, old winners (or simply old fan favourites) dialed in with performances of their own, and the whole thing just ended up being a sort of festival of Eurovision, celebrating this ridiculous cultural phenomenon, and the weird people who love it.

In any other year, I would have found it too treacly and earnest, but in 'these current challenging times' earnest was exactly what I was looking for. Matthias, [personal profile] notasapleasure and I aired our thoughts in a group chat, Twitter memed away as usual, Måns Zelmerlöw found yet another Eurovision-related camera in front of which to fling himself, and a good time was had by all.

This marks the second year in which I've spent Eurovision night crying. Last year Eurovision was on the same day as the Australian federal election, and I kept breaking into bitter tears at the futility of hoping for an even mildly left-wing government within my lifetime in any country in which I have voting rights. This year it was the montage of empty concert halls in Europe (and the Opera House in Sydney, my Sydney) which had me misty-eyed. Oh, my weary, hopeless heart!

_______________________
As an aside, I am feeling the lack of any decent Eurovision icons keenly. I shall have to investigate...
dolorosa_12: (newspaper)
  • Working from home continues without change for us in the academic library world, in spite of the garbled, incoherent, irresponsible messaging from the government. I've had a pretty good working week — a bit of online teaching, a bunch of Twitter and website analytics (which basically just told me what I knew already), a lot of research support, and some very good professional news which I can't post about yet. It's looking like my university/employer is in this for the long haul.

  • This morning I chatted with my mother in Australia, this afternoon Matthias and I will be having virtual drinks with friends in Ely and Vienna, and next weekend we'll have a virtual catch-up with our friends in Devon, whose house we were meant to be visiting this time next week. That's probably about the amount of online socialising I can handle — I'm pretty introverted and find any more than that incredibly draining.

  • This weekend should be Eurovision, and Matthias and I would normally have hosted some kind of viewing party. Obviously the actual song contest is not going ahead, but the BBC are putting on a Eurovision retrospective/showcase thingy, so I think we'll watch that tonight.

  • Other than work and video calls, life is punctuated, as ever, by TV and books. I'm aiming to write a couple of longer roundup posts towards the end of the month.

  • I'm currently doing a Pagan Chronicles reread, which is my ultimate comfort series, and always makes me want to write Babylonne/Isidore fanfic. The trouble is that I find it hard to come up with plots beyond 'Babylonne and Isidore bicker amiably with each other about medieval theology.'


  • I hope you're all safe and well.
    dolorosa_12: (being human)
    I've been feeling pretty blah all weekend. I suspect it's because of the (premature) relaxing of the lockdown (honestly, any government slogan that requires the immediate publication of clarifying footnotes is insufficiently clear), and impending (online) meetings next week to discuss our eventual return to work in the library/offices.

    As a result, my weekend plans, which looked like:

  • Weed garden

  • Finish stressful administrative task

  • Write long review blog post about Black Sails

  • Thoroughly declutter clothing drawers and wardrobe

  • Read


  • ended up being more like:

  • Scroll idly through social media for hours

  • Flip through new Sami Tamimi cookbook

  • Drink wine

  • Sleep


  • I did at least manage the stressful administrative task, but other than that it has been a weekend of drastically lowered expectations. I finished one book and am contemplating doing a Pagan Chronicles reread, since I don't have the mental energy to start something new. My two favourite Kidrouks, and the overwhelmed people who love them might be just what I need to cut through my current feelings of fogginess.

    Other than that Matthias and I finished off the third season of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and (re)watched Strictly Ballroom, which ... has not aged well in some regards, but is still the cheesy love letter to daggy Australian suburbia that I remember.

    Tonight we will probably finish off the latest show in our Netflix backlog, Freud, a ridiculous German-language series set in nineteenth-century Vienna, in which the eponymous psychotherapist finds himself solving mysteries with the Viennese police, and caught up in political machinations that involve Hungarian aristocrats and occultists, hypnotised mediums, grisly murders, and the upper echelons of the Austrian army. I love it to bits: to my mind it's like a mashup of Vienna Blood and Penny Dreadful, with the worst parts removed and only the best elements remaining. It's definitely been one of my TV highlights of the year so far.

    Right now it's pouring with rain, so I think I will curl up with a cup of tea and the first Pagan Chronicles book, and try to salvage my mood for what is left of the weekend.
    dolorosa_12: (emily the strange)
    Everyone who requested letters with recipes from me a while back should either have received, or will receive their letters soon — I posted the last of the batch today. I enjoyed writing them and have more stationery and stamps, so at some point I'll put up another post asking for recipients.

    I'm at the point where I've finally caved and admitted that the only fiction I feel mentally capable of engaging with is historical mysteries with heavy h/c elements, which means Benjamin January, Roma Sub Rosa, and Ovidia Yu's series set in 1930s Singapore. I took a look at the 500-page 'literary' novel that I'd been planning on reading next, and just went nope and retreated back to the cosy, comforting and mildly formulaic.

    The prompt for Day Twelve of the fandom meme is as follows:

    L: Say something genuinely nice about a character who isn’t one of your faves.

    I'm struggling a bit with this one, because I don't spend a lot of time in fandom thinking about characters who aren't my favourites.

    I'll talk about Jaxon Hall from Samantha Shannon's Bone Season series. He's not really the type of character that I warm to, although he seems to be the favourite for most of the fandom. However, I love (and find hilarious) his unwavering commitment to doing things for The Aesthetic™. Going about dressed in full on 2050s Victoriana? Absolutely. Writing the definitive guide to clandestine, illegal supernatural abilities solely so that he can rank his own ability highest in the hierarchy, and then funding an illegal printing press to distribute it, deliberately styling it as an underground Victorian pamphlet? Of course. He's completely ridiculous and over the top, especially given he runs an illegal syndicate of petty criminals with superpowers and should be trying to stay under the radar.

    The other days )
    dolorosa_12: (grimes janelle)
    This is a musical interlude to interrupt the flood of fandom meme content that I've been posting recently.

    Australia's political response to the pandemic has been as abysmal as its response to the terrible bushfires in the summer, which is not surprising, given the dreadful Prime Minister and government currently in charge. I have to admit, however, that I was shocked at the sheer level of bumbling, wilful incompetence in both instances.

    One positive result of all that incompetence, however, is this song and video (with both lyrics and visuals packed with allusions to specific instances of shambolic, vindictive government incompetence), a collaboration between Briggs and Tim Minchin, which takes the government to task with exquisite and deserved brutality. I love it.



    Even the Ruby Princess had a captain, indeed.
    dolorosa_12: (teen wolf)
    One day I will post something that's not about COVID-19 (and catch up with all your comments), but today is not that day.

    However, today's post is about two acts of collective warmth and kindness and community that lifted my spirits in the face of the catastrophe.

    Just kindness and community spirit behind the cut )

    We are far apart, though together.
    dolorosa_12: (fever ray)
    Since my last post, things have happened very quickly.

    COVID-19 )

    I will leave you with some links to happy and amusing ways people are dealing with the crisis. I've been most moved by images and videos of city-dwellers socialising with each other from their individual apartment balconies or open windows. Urban life is not alienating: those of us who live in cities do have a sense of community, and it is coming through beautifully right now.

    Scenes of people on balconies from around the world

    Finns dance to 'Sandstorm' by Darude from their balconies, open windows, and back gardens

    A man in Toulouse runs a marathon on his seven-metre balcony

    Sports commentator with no sport on which to comment provides commentary for scenes of ordinary life

    If any of you have similar links, share them in the comments and I will add them to the post. Much love to you all.

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