Socialize
Right now there are four men in yellow and orange vests in my backyard frowning at the sewer line, which means we are wrapping up 2024 in an entirely appropriate way. I had the sewer line replaced in September because we’d been having occasional backups, and I thought I was pretty much done with it. Apparently not.
Besides the whole geopolitical shitstorm we also lost a beloved family pet after a year-long battle with a frustrating disease called “feline gastrointestinal eosinophilic sclerosing fibroplasia.” If that’s a new one on you, don’t feel bad — it was new to my (very experienced) vet. Since then we’ve had a number of minor (and more prosaic) health crises among the other pets in the household.
Also involving poop. Sewage has been a theme this year.
Q, the only cat I ever knew who could look angry while relaxing, and me — both in better days.
Letterboxd tells me I only watched 138 movies this year, which is quite a bit fewer than others. Some folks watch movies for stress reduction, but I am not one. The movie watching and writing has suffered as a result.
I did get seven movie reviews done. Two of them — Some Like It Hot and Knives Out — are favorites of mine. I’ve always found it much more difficult to write about movies that I like instead of movies I don’t, but I really wanted to push myself this year. I don’t know how well I did, but I am at least proud of making the effort.
This year was the first year I was really able to involve my teenage son in some movie-watching. He does not have much patience for films, but this year he took a film studies class in school and that seems to have given him some reasonable context. A lot of the movies we’ve watched together have been the classics: Blues Brothers, Arsenic and Old Lace, Rear Window, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
He hated 2001, and although it’s one of my favorites I honestly don’t blame him.
The only movie we watched in a movie theater this year was 1934’s The Thin Man which we got to see on the big screen thanks to our local non-profit historic theater.
A couple of movies we watched this year that made a huge impression on me, but I feel unprepared to write about were Donnie Darko and Muholland Drive. I rarely hear these two discussed in the same breath, but they strike me as pretty similar. Both of them will need a re-watch before I can write anything about them, I think, and the result for both is unlikely to really be a review. How do you review such strange films?
One movie waiting in the wings for a review is Spider Baby, an independently-released horror story featuring Lon Cheney in one of his last roles and Sid Haig in one of his first. Spider Baby is better than it has any right to be, largely because Cheney brought more genuine acting to the table than the script probably deserved. I need to re-watch this one again, though, too.
Other Media
Part D&D, part cooking show… and eventually far more serious than you might expect.
Unlike other years, a good portion of our watching-time was occupied by anime as well as TV shows both old and new. I am pretty sure we gave One Punch Man a re-watch. We also gave Jujutsu Kaisen a reasonable watch (a recommendation from my son). We watched Pokémon Concierge not once but twice, which was less difficult than it sounds. Are You Being Served got its umpteenth rewatch somewhere around the US Election. The son was introduced to Get Smart as part of our very own Survey of Mel Brooks class.
A big hit with us (but not the teen so much) was Delicious in Dungeon, a series that almost defies description. We’re hoping to see another season of this, but it’s through Netflix so… who knows.
Our great YouTube find this year was a series from Wired where they get experts on a subject to answer questions “from the Internet.” They call it Tech Support. One of our favorites was the Roller Coaster engineer:
Other than that, it was quite a lot of No Man’s Sky and knitting — the latter being an old hobby of mine I picked up again to keep me from doom-scrolling. It works really well. Unfortunately, it also puts downward pressure on my movie-watching and writing time. Knitting is probably the only other hobby — besides blogging — where I’ve spent more time doing it than watching YouTube videos about someone else doing it. For knitting instruction, though, I recommend Nimble Needles and Roxanne Richardson.
I see that the utility folks have left. They didn’t say anything to me, so I assume they’ve fixed whatever it is. It’s time for me to go break out the rug shampoo machine and try to rescue the basement carpet yet again.
Happy new year, and don’t let the bastards drag you down.