The end (of the year) is nigh

I’ve spent today mostly puttering with plants and crocheting. The amount of my life crochet and Baldur’s Gate 3 has consumed means that I’m taking a slightly more neglectful stance on my plants – which is kinda fine in the winter anyway. It’s been dark and chilly. My plants wouldn’t know what to do if I gave them water. Most everything dying back is something I know will recover, like this mostly-brown spider plant I repotted today. It had a gajillion happy roots and was mostly just pouting at me because it wanted more room, not because I hadn’t watered it in a month. I anticipate its rebound before long tbh.

Another hobby which claimed my attention toward the end of the year is the site hosting this post. Egregious has been around for years, providing a place for Rory and I to blog when we felt like it. Mostly I focused on hosting fiction previously; now I am mostly doing movie reviews. Will I still be posting here in 2024? Only time will tell.

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The three most popular non-fiction posts on Egregious are:

• My review for Barbie (2023)
• Five Christmas Movies Worth Watching
• My review for Last Christmas (2019)

Other well-viewed posts of mine are also rather critical. It seems like people kinda prefer when I playfully talk shit about movies they like. I’m most surprised by the placement of my “listicle” thingy there, since I didn’t link it/discuss it as widely as other stuff. There is some attraction to overviews among folks who read me.

There are oddly random posts which also got high traffic, mostly because of my site’s layout. If you read one personal post, you have probably been recommended another post called My Dog Is So Gay, and it turns out my dog’s face with a stupid title is the closest thing to clickbait I get. There are also fewer personal posts to recommend, so the same ones surface a lot. Naturally the dog is the most popular appearance.

None of these traffic numbers are high, mind you. I haven’t invested into anything for visibility. It doesn’t make sense when I’m just here for fun, you know? But I’m grateful for the fifty-whatever people hanging out.

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I shifted my bird of paradise today (it’s a very tall green plant with five big leaves) and discovered an earwig on the wall behind it. I only screamed a little bit. I didn’t even run away. That’s how grownup I’ve gotten about bugs lately.

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It’s interesting to me that Bookriot’s list of 8 Books the Authors Regretted Writing includes The Anarchist Cookbook. It seems to have really shaken the author, who was young when he wrote it, to have his information embraced by violent factions. I tend to think of TAC as being a rather neutral book though — it’s one of those things where a curious author can find it useful for plot, and an armchair philosopher can respect the freedom of information. It must feel extremely strange to be the one who aggregated the information though.

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The New York Review has a great read about indigenous people taken to Europe in the 16th century.

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Want some cool shots of deep ocean vents? Ars Technica has us covered.

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Balloon Juice’s previously prescient friend predicts Trump will win the presidency if he can run again. I am also somewhat of a psychic myself (read this as ironically as you like) and I think that we are going to have the threat of his election dangled over us to motivate the complacent public into voting for the other guy, and it will work, but we’re all going to come out of it feeling like traumatized shit led by a DNC that never bothered to address the real issues while busily terrifying us. At this point they clearly find it more effective to be anti-them rather than pro-issues, if that makes any sense.

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AJE reports on New York Times going after OpenAI.

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Through Colossal, a glimpse of a magnificent art installation with large-figure roman numerals.

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Folks are mocking Christopher Nolan for saying Zack Snyder’s fingerprints are all over modern superhero movies. (Variety) I’m sorry to say I agree with Nolan, though. Zack Snyder’s style of slow-motion emphasis action scenes with quick-cuts, his heavy-handed digital grading, and his experiential approach to emotion-based storytelling rather than reason-based storytelling has honestly kinda parked its butt all over modern blockbusters. For better or worse. It’s like how you can attribute a certain amount of gloss and lens flares and lack of denouement to JJ Abrams, badly written women and unnecessarily large physical set pieces and convoluted storytelling to Nolan, and the BWAAAMMMMM noise to Michael Bay.

The actual content of these filmmakers’ movies do not always have massive cultural impact, but their *styles* are industry behemoths.

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I was very minimal hype for cinema in 2023, and I’ve been wondering if it’s a mood thing, a lingering pandemic malaise that keeps me indoors, or if movies just kinda suck. Variety lists the anticipated movies of 2024. I think the malaise is clearing a little?

I do want to see Argylle because it’s about a redheaded middle aged writer and I’m so, so cheap for movies about writers. I will see it streaming.

I’m not excited about Dune II but I will definitely watch it streaming too.

Challengers might be fun. I like Guadignino’s flicks usually, and I enjoy the idea of mmf drama, always. On the other hand, I still haven’t gotten around to Bones and All.

I can’t admit that I will be gladly watching Joker 2 without reminding everyone I’m DC trash, but…

I’ll show up for Venom 3 (on my home tv) if it’s as gay as the first two.

Everything else is deep in “ehh” territory or all the way down to “you could not pay me to visit a theater for this.”

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Hey babe, hot new growth substrate dropping in Sweden. (Engadget)