Ok so like, I need to remember what I thought of these so I know whether I want to buy them again and if it’s not somewhere on the internet for me to look, did I even write it down?
Anyway. This was fine. The pasta was a bit too small and there was too much liquid at the end which made fishing the pasta out a little tricky. It did smell and taste good.
Mirrored from half girl, half robot.
Once again, time for my round up of last year. In December, I had been thinking that I hadn’t seen many new films but now looking back at 2023’s list – I didn’t see that many new films then either in comparison to the years before (lol and I even mentioned that in my 2023 round up). Maybe films that I might have been interested in that were due to be released in 2023 and 2024 were affected by Covid and got delayed or cancelled. I guess we’ll see what 2025 shapes up like over the next year.
As usual, in reverse order of how much I liked them:
I don’t remember any new albums I listened to last year. I know Dave Hause put out some mostly vinyl only stuff that I did buy and enjoy – but I remember it mostly because it was a record you had to go in person to a gig and buy.
Speaking of which, I did go to 7 gigs in the end.
Electric Six was also one of those gigs where the queue for the ladies was non-existent and in an entertaining turn of events it was the other toilets with a queue. Plus the support act, Enjoyable Listens was really good and was kind of like if Gabriel Bruce was English and kind of eccentric.
I suppose if I wrote more about this stuff at the time it was happening I would remember more of it, but I guess I do ok. I went to Valencia because I needed to use a travel voucher and picked it because that’s where Formula E goes to do their testing (although after the huge flooding, 2024 testing had to be moved to Madrid). I saw the penultimate FE race of the season in London. I went to Margate so I could visit the Crab Museum and ended up also visiting other cool places like the Shell Grotto and Walmer Castle. Went on a short cruise visiting France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Went to Norfolk and stopped off at the Oliver Cromwell museum on the way. In sad news, that Uncle who kept swerving meeting up with us each time in the last 14 years that we’ve got on a plane to travel to the other side of the planet where he lives, did in fact die so I guess I was right that we’d never see him again. It is what it is. In happier news, one of my cousin’s daughters got married and I’m extremely pleased for her – her young man seems well brought up etc and I’m sure they will have many, many years of love and happiness ahead of them.
More gigs already planned for 2025, along with one small trip so far and another London e-prix.
Mirrored from half girl, half robot.
I used to post a lot on twitter and then twitter happened and now I’m not really there anymore and neither are a lot of people I would typically follow there – though it’s fifty-fifty on whether that’s because I only look at the “vroooom” motorsport list and not my following or because they’ve actually stopped posting there like I have.
Parts of it are like the post-livejournal splintering. Parts of it are worse because that was so long ago and some of my friends are no longer on the planet for me to be able to follow them to a new social media platform and it feels like I’m leaving them behind, though they’re not there to be left behind. If you get me.
There’s elements of keeping a dead loved one’s phone number in your phone/address book.
I read a lot of email newsletters and of course, I have a backlog of unread newsletters but once again it’s like stepping back into a better time, where the world felt better (though of course, these newsletters are all written during a time AFTER the last time I retreated into the past they offered that I can’t even remember what that event that sent me there was).
Trying to figure out what newsletters in my sidebar I’m still subscribed to and what ones are missing – I guess I’ll have to come back to this one.
I asked someone what their favourite shape was recently and now I’m gently spiralling around the sound of I-S O-S CE-LES
Mirrored from half girl, half robot.
While February 2023 feels like it was only a few weeks ago and I’m sort of wondering what I could have done all year, I also know that I did do some stuff.
I spent Eurovision week in Norfolk and another couple of weeks in Malaysia. I saw Loveless (twice), Asgeir, Dave Hause, Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox, Hozier, ThxSoMch and Sleep Token play live (and have already bought tickets for a few gigs next year). I went to the penultimate e-prix of the season in London and saw FE cars whizz about making their souped-up milk float noises (affectionate).
I did not really see that many new films – last year there were 25 and this year there are only 13. Partly, I feel like there just wasn’t a lot I felt like seeing at the London Film Festival but also, I did have kind of a general meh feeling about going to my local cinema. Was there even anything I might have seen in another year? I can only think of “The Marvels” and maybe there wasn’t anything else or I just didn’t hear about other films to make me go and see them.
Anyway, those 13 films in reverse order of how much I liked them, as is customary for such things:
Definitely see that last one.
Mirrored from half girl, half robot.
Disappointing to discover that when we’re travelling to the literally other side of the planet, one of my uncles will only see us in an airport in an adjacent country to the one we are going to.
Like.
No point leaving the airport to spend any time there, he’s worried that we would want to stay in his house and like, I get that he is concerned about Covid (particularly while travelling) but we have never been welcome in his house and he’s over eighty so why would we even suggest that we would stay in his house? Get in another plane, after having flown thousands of miles already, to just visit the airport of another country and then immediately turn back and get on another plane to go back to the country we initially flew to.
Apparently we can “see him on Zoom” – we will not being seeing him on Zoom because we don’t see him on Zoom now, while we are on the other side of the planet so I can’t see that it’ll happen if we are 200 miles away instead of nearly 7,000 miles away.
Turns out 2011 will have been the last time we ever saw each other, which is particularly sad for my Mum who is his sister whereas I’m just a niece. We didn’t see him the last time we were there as he had some issue with tax in the country we were going to (which was also kind of a weird excuse – the reunion had been planned for some time and it’s not like he doesn’t have his own property in that country to live in anyway).
Mirrored from half girl, half robot.
The new Dave Hause album is SO good. Just, ugh, great great great.
The gig last month was great too and reminded me* that I should go listen to live music more often – something to look forward to and it’s a real mood booster when I’ve been. It’s always “why did you book this Past-me, I don’t feel like going out” beforehand and “Past-me you are a genius, this was the best idea” afterwards. So I’ve added in Postmodern Jukebox and Hozier between now and the Loveless gig I already have a ticket for and I see some time in my near future when I need to sit down and see what else is out there that I can put in around my existing commitments. Definitely see what’s more local to me than the nearest city too.
The other thing to figure out is the crossposter to my other blog – I think the one to Dreamwidth is still going fine but the one to my other WordPress install went wonky a while back and I’m not sure that the plugin I use for other stuff, that could also crosspost, would allow for the posting to Dreamwidth too. It’s been twenty years, I should probably learn how to write a WordPress plugin myself at this point.
Took Mum to see John Wick 4, which she loved and I think she scandalised her friends at church who didn’t expect someone her age to enjoy so much out and out violence. I think it’d be weirder that when you have Michelle Yeoh being a boss at martial arts action movies, a retiree with a similar kind of background wouldn’t love martial arts films too.
* that and seeing Asgeir at the beginning of March.
Mirrored from half girl, half robot.
As I noted in November, I didn’t post my 2021 films for some reason and I still don’t remember why but here they are. Shang-Chi was pretty great.
Did I do anything this year? Did I go anywhere? I feel like I did visit Walsingham but don’t remember anything about it – oh, I remember now. I actually went on holiday to Ipswich and then drove to visit Walsingham on one of the days I was there and that’s why I don’t remember staying in Walsingham.
I also attended one of the London e-prix and had the great idea of staying the night before in a hotel nearby because lol I am not waking up early to get there. That was also about the time I fell on my car and smacked my shin so hard on the doorframe that it got infected and I had the exciting opportunity to “enjoy” two different rounds of antibiotics. It’s still not the right colour, but that’ll get better in time.
I saw Daði Freyr at the Roundhouse, an event that I bought the ticket for over a year in advance thinking “the whole pandemic stuff will be gone by then” and it’s not really but it turns out that I’m one of those people for whom wearing a mask tight against my face for hours isn’t a hardship (even though I wear glasses and now that I’ve got a pair with the arms that curl round my ears rather than being straight, I’m less likely to have them just fall off my face). Sort of related – I’m pondering going to see Måneskin next year but am extremely ambivalent about the O2 Arena AND it’ll be when I have a week off and maybe I will want to go somewhere that week. We’ll see. Maybe if there are tickets still on sale closer to the time, I’ll decide then.
Anyway, onto the new films I saw in 2022, from least favourite to most favourite as is customary:
Mirrored from half girl, half robot.
I realised about half-way through this year that I didn’t post my films of 2021 but I don’t remember why I didn’t get to it.
Anyway. I’m a sporadic blogger, but I am here.
Mirrored from half girl, half robot.
And like, I don't really have anything to say here about those things.
Anyway, on to the customary look back at the new films I saw in 2020 from least liked to most liked. I didn't step foot in a cinema all year1, so I'm not entirely sure how I ended up seeing a good 10-15 more new films than usual - especially since I had a hard time sitting down and watching anything much over an hour long - and somehow I ended up watching like 100 films in total which seems... excessive. In previous years, I've said something about each film - that's not happening today lol.
"They ever ask you, "Where you from?"Like, "Where you really from?"The question seems simple, but the answer's kinda long"
While I didn't get to go to the cinema last year, I did manage to go to two gigs back in February - Dave Hause at the Union Chapel which was FANTASTIC and Asgeir at Shepherd's Bush Empire, which was also delightful. Bedouin Soundclash was supposed to happen in May, but got pushed back to February 2021 and of course, it's now been cancelled. I'm not sure that they'll tour again so I'm glad I saw them when I could. The Star Wars concert that I was supposed to attend in March, was also cancelled, but I guess someone is always going to put on a Star Wars concert at the Royal Albert Hall, so that one will come around again one day.
1.I was going to say "weirdly," but look, we all know what's going on this year so it's not weird at all.
As usual, a rundown of the new films I saw this year – from least liked to most liked.
Anyway my ratings etc are all over here on Letterboxd and starting my yearly rating list at the beginning of the year and just adding to it throughout, rearranging as I go, continues to be one of the best ideas I have ever had.
I know this is titled 2019 Films and stuff but it’s 2020 now and I don’t remember what the “and stuff” was going to be, so I’ll just leave it at that.
Happy New Year!
Mirrored from half girl, half robot.
Or actually, not really. Just some minor griping about some stuff going on with the local church.
The priest at my church has had to go away for some sort of personal reasons, but the really interesting thing is how he and other priests belonging to their particular group keep going about a bunch of things – like they’re laying the groundwork for their own inability to remain as parish priests at my church.
The first thing seems to be kind of an obsession with the devil – how they can sense something at the church. What it really sound like, is a preoccupation with satan coupled with the new experience of living in a very quiet area, in a house that creaks like a normal house of its age, having previously only lived in busy cities and/or in community.
Then they’re convinced there is a witch down the road up to no good against them and the church.
And then… going on and on about how various parish priests have come to the church, gotten sick and then died. Which might work when told to some people, but doesn’t work when told to people who have known our parish priests very well over the years. The priests who were sick all arrived with existing health problems (and they conveniently neglect to remember a recent priest who is very much alive, appears hale and healthy but the rest of us know he has had lung problems for a long time) or just got old, and the normal things that come with old age occurred (also forgetting the priest who baptised me at our church who is now both extremely old but also, still alive lol).
Like, guys, the thing that there is in common about the priests who seem to have problems with satan at church are that you belong to this one group and like, you don’t seem to have enough faith or trust in God that He will take care of you which is like a big problem when you are a priest.
And don’t get me started on how saving money is apparently more important than saving souls.
It’s not quite time for my end of year film list (since I have at least one new film left to watch this year) but there have been things I’ve been thinking about writing down for probably a month now and just haven’t so here are some of those things.
Today I’m wearing a dress that my Mum made for me a few years ago. She made two dresses at the time but it’s only occurred to me now, that that’s when she really understood the trouble I have with getting shirts and dresses that fit properly across my shoulders and allow me to still move my arms.
The dresses don’t have sleeves because she had such trouble having to alter them away from their original patterns to make them fit that she decided to cut her losses. LOL.
Yeah, I used the Hozier fanfic title generator for this post, what of it.
Anyway, overdoing it with online gaming coupled with a busy period at work has done a number on my RSI, so obviously here I am writing about it, using the very instrument of my downfall. It’s kind of a pain because (other than the obvious actual physical pain etc) I want to support what’s left of my alliance even though we’re kind of a bit scuppered by everyone getting kind of burnt out and there not being anyone who really wants to lead ops. Probably doesn’t help that when you do try to do some leader-stuff, no one really follows instructions.
So, no gaming. Watching stuff or reading stuff only. Got an appointment with the doctor, who’s probably just going to tell me the same as before. Wondering if I need to do something to make the muscles in my forearms stronger and then maybe this would happen less?
It’s kind of a downer since I socialise a lot online and this makes it difficult. The discomfort in my arms is kind of a downer on its own.
Maybe I should get arm-warmers.
What’s Causing the Rise of Hoarding Disorder?
Even if they want to downsize (which is rare), there’s the overwhelming difficulty of sorting through the mess. People with severe hoarding disorder tend to be easily distracted and have a hard time focusing and concentrating. Paradoxically, they also tend to be perfectionists, so they’ll put off making decisions rather than risk being wrong. And when it comes to their own stuff, they don’t categorize by type. Rather than see an object as a member of a large group (say, one of 42 black T-shirts), they see it as singular, unique, special. Each black T-shirt is perceived apart from the others and carries its own history, significance, and worth. It’s not even categorized for storage (folded with other black T-shirts in a T-shirt drawer), but rather placed on a pile and retrieved spatially (that particular black T-shirt lives about four inches from the bottom of the corner stack). This leads to a deep aversion to someone touching the piles or sifting through them, unwittingly destroying the invisible ordering system.
It me.
Well, I’m somewhere between untidy and hoarder because when I do actually tidy, there’s a lot less “stuff” but yeah, that’s basically my filing system. Whenever a well-intentioned person attempts to tidy for me, without my knowledge, I always end up losing stuff and… having to buy replacements because I can’t find the thing – which I feel is the opposite of what the ideal outcome would be. :/
So far some of the things lost when tidied include: a boxed copy of Evil Genius (which I’ve just re-bought in the Steam sale as a download), a mobile phone and most recently the cable to connect my camera to my laptop (and also to charge my Mum’s Kobo – so yeah I’ve had to re-buy that one).
And there’s no way of knowing if the lost things are just…here somewhere or if they’ve accidentally gone in the bin.
The 42 black t-shirts is also me. However, I have a “black t-shirt shelf” to go with my “not-black t-shirt” shelf.
Mirrored from half girl, half robot.
I mean I get why every single one of the trackbacks on my blog from my other blog is put in the “probably spam” category but like, it would be amazing to just be able to set “OK trackbacks from this particular other blog are fine.”
Mirrored from half girl, half robot.
It’s not quite the end of the year just yet1, but I have decided that it is highly unlikely I am going to leave the house and make the five minute journey to my local multiplex. My film logging widget tells me that I saw fewer films in total this year than I did last year and from looking at last year’s films in review blog and my letterboxd list of 2018 films, I also saw fewer new films. Was it just that there were fewer films that took my fancy released? Could I just not be bothered to go out and see them? I know there were a few that I thought “well, I’ll just wait for them to be on TV” that I can’t even remember the titles of now.
I nearly said that there wasn’t a Star Wars film out in 2018 but I guess Solo counts as one of those, so it’s not even that. I could really do with a new Star Trek film – although Discovery is coming back in the new year and I am p excited for that.
Anyway, onward – from least liked to most liked. Once again, “least liked” doesn’t necessarily mean it was bad but I think I did watch more films I felt kind of indifferent about this year:
And that’s it for the new films I saw in 2018. I feel like I would have liked to go to more gigs, but sometimes I’m just not interested in the people who are touring here. I visited Norfolk on holiday and that was great. I ate a great many delicious things. 2018 was okay.
1. Well, I started writing this 3 days ago.
2. It had been a long day.
Mirrored from half girl, half robot.
The whole essay is here.
To Haraway, the cyborg is a matter of fiction, a struggle over life and death, a modern war orgy, a map, a condensed image, a creature without gender. The manifesto coopts cyborg identity while eliminating reference to disabled people on which the notion of the cyborg is premised. Disabled people who use tech to live are cyborgs. Our lives are not metaphors.
Mirrored from half girl, half robot.
I am languishing in my sickbed, riddled with plague and reading about all this Tumblr stuff.
Maybe not plague. A cold.
I know that the ringing in my ears is louder when I’m sick, but it’s coupled with the sound of the water moving through the radiators and hot water pipes – a similar sound to the one I hear in my ears – which makes it all worse somehow. No amount of earplug-wearing will help when it’s a noise already in my head.
Coincidentally, I’m also reading about how places like restaurants are really loud. I’m constantly thinking about how loud places are and how it seems like everywhere has gotten louder but can’t really decided whether they really have become louder or I just notice more now that I try to avoid loud noises. Probably both.
Restaurants are so loud because architects don’t design them to be quiet. Much of this shift in design boils down to changing conceptions of what makes a space seem upscale or luxurious, as well as evolving trends in food service. Right now, high-end surfaces connote luxury, such as the slate and wood of restaurants including The Osprey in Brooklyn or Atomix in Manhattan.
This trend is not limited to New York. According to Architectural Digest, mid-century modern and minimalism are both here to stay. That means sparse, modern decor; high, exposed ceilings; and almost no soft goods, such as curtains, upholstery, or carpets. These design features are a feast for the eyes, but a nightmare for the ears. No soft goods and tall ceilings mean nothing is absorbing sound energy, and a room full of hard surfaces serves as a big sonic mirror, reflecting sound around the room.The result is a loud space that renders speech unintelligible. Now that it’s so commonplace, the din of a loud restaurant is unavoidable. That’s bad for your health—and worse for the staff who works there. But it also degrades the thing that eating out is meant to culture: a shared social experience that rejuvenates, rather than harms, its participants.
Mirrored from half girl, half robot.
