My Random Thoughts series has been running so long I'm starting to worry it's not really random. Oh, well. I did take a few months off from posting them, but that only means I have a few months of thoughts to post. And some memes and other stuff to look at just to keep it all a bit random. And now I've reached the milstone of 928 thoughts! What makes that a milestone? Nothing, really. It's just random. Enjoy!
Dear reader, I have been remiss. I have not posted in my Random Thoughts series in almost seven months. I have been doing a lot of random thinking since then. And I have collected even more random funny images. So without further ado, enjoy this Super Sized and Super Random collection of my Random Thoughts!
I have gotten behind on posting book reviews lately (I did get one last month), so I thought I should get around to that now that the spring semester is over and grades are entered.
And today just happens to be May the 4th, aka Star Wars Day (as observed recently based on the pun on the date), so I figured I would add a little bit about the latest season of the Star Wars show, Andor. Also, like many other people, I saw and had a lot of thoughts about Ryan Coogler's Sinners.
Books reviewed here: She Who Knows by Nnedi Okorafor, A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas, The Waste Lands by Stephen King, The 1619 Project, edited by Nikole Hannh-Jones, Orbital by Samantha Harvey, John Dies at The End by Jason Pargin, and How Fascism Works by Jason Stanley.
There is also a super secret Star Wars day review hidden in here...
Let the reviews commence!
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| MLK Day Parade, Chattanooga, TN, Jan. 20, 2025 |
Dear reader, the last month has been ... a lot. I lost two friends in October, and then there was the US election (I wrote about the election and Plato beforehand, and post-election thoughts may be coming soon). I admit I've had trouble finding the energy and time to do much with the blog lately (although I keep reminding myself that my tenth blog-aversary is coming next month!). Part of my blog-based reticence has been dealing with the aforementioned events. Some of it is that I've just been busy: there was Halloween, the election, and then in the last week, my Horror and Philosophy students had their film festival showcasing their short philosophical horror films (which were great!), and then the next day I went with a friend to Charlotte, NC to see Iron Maiden in concert for the first time since 2010 (see below for more on that experience!). One might say that I've been living a random life. Which of course calls for more random thoughts! And memes!
Last year I wrote a post called "So I Watched All the Oscar Nominees for Best Picture." I didn't set out to do so, but at some point I realized I had seen a few of the nominations and figured I might as well complete my tour. So I did! And it was mostly pretty fun. It didn't hurt that my favorite, Everything Everywhere All At Once, was the winner.
Well, dear reader, as Britney Spears once said, "Oops, I did it again."
Spooky Season has been in full swing for almost two full months here in the US. One of the better things my fellow Americans have done in recent decades: turning Halloween into a full two-month-long festival of ghoulish goodness!
I've been watching a lot of spooky movies, from the old school The Wolf Man to The Descent to the entire Pet Sematary cinematic universe (I re-read the novel, which remains better than any of the films, watched both film versions, even got to Pet Sematary 2, which I don't necessarily recommend, and the brand new, Pet Sematary: Bloodlines, which I do recommend). I've also been trying to branch out more internationally with films like Kandisha from France and Kaali Khuhi from India.
And there's spooky TV, too, most excellently The Fall of the House of Usher (Mike Flanagan's fantastic take on Edgar Allan Poe) and The Changeling (based on a novel by Victor LaValle starring LaKeith Stanfield). I may write up some thoughts about my spooky cinematic adventures later, maybe sometime before my horror and philosophy students present their films on November 16! (stay tuned for details on that)
But for now, here are a few of my spooky reads for spooky season 2023! Happy Halloween!
It's randomly that time again: My Random Thoughts series continues with Part 21! I haven't been moved to write much on this blog lately, but that doesn't mean the random thoughts have stopped. Far from it! I doubt I could turn them off if I wanted to, but lucky for me and for you, dear reader, I don't want to. And it's also an excuse for a random assortment of memes curated from my random internet amusements. Enjoy!
I don't always care about the Oscars. I don't even watch the ceremony every year. But this year I happened to notice that I had seen a few of the nominees for Best Picture already, so I figured: why not watch them all? So I did! And here's what I thought about all of them in a series of mini-reviews!
Overall I have to say I was pretty impressed with this year's crop of Oscar nominees. I found something to like about all of them, and some of them I thought were really good. One film stands far and above the others for me, but overall I can say I'm glad I watched all of these. I kind of hate ranking things precisely, so below is sort of my order of overall preference. But really who cares what I think? I guess we'll see what the Academy thinks a few hours after I post this!
Here I am continuing to wander through my mid-40's. That's right, it's time for my annual birthday post!
Apparently I haven't done a "review of reviews" since February 2021 and most of my reviews on the blog lately have been for books, so I figured it was time to do a "Review of Reviews" for some of the TV and movies I've been watching lately.
So check out my review of reviews of Firestarter (2022), Everything Everywhere All At Once, Severance, Outer Range, Inside Job, Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and Gremlins 2: The New Batch! (Okay, you got me. Gremlins 2 is hardly new, but I did watch it recently, so here you go.)
I've also been watching all the new Star Trek shows as of late: Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: Lower Decks, Star Trek: Prodigy, and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. It's a fantastic time to be a Star Trek fan! But that's a lot of Star Trek, so I will cover those in a separate post.
Without further ado: my review of reviews!
I've been excited for the new Denis Villeneuve adaptation of Dune ever since I first heard about it a few years ago. If anyone could do right by one of my favorite novels, I figured it was the director of Arrival and Blade Runner 2049. I knew I would be seeing it. What my prescient vision didn't see, however, is what sort of world I would be seeing it in.
But the promise of Dune drew me to a local IMAX theater to behold it on the big screen with big sound, pandemic or not. I wore a mask (of course), silently lamenting the lack of mask discipline of many of my fellow movie-goers while sitting as far from them as possible. I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer...
So ... what did I think? As my prophecy could have foretold, I need to think about it some more to give a full review. But here are some initial non-spoiler-y thoughts.
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| One of my low-key birthday activities today |
Today is my birthday, and as has become tradition on this blog, it's time for a birthday post.
At 45, it occurs to me that I'm halfway to 90, an age I am statistically speaking unlikely to see. But that's okay. It's not like I can stop time or alter the fabric of basic arithmetic. Besides, I discovered several years ago that I had already reached middle age based on statistical life expectancy. So it's downhill from here. But again, that's okay. Downhill is the easier part.
Life isn't easier in terms of medical issues (as I have already begun to experience), but perhaps easier in terms of wisdom, at least if you count as wisdom the Socratic quip that true wisdom consists in knowing what you don't know.
My ever-expanding pandemic journal continues, now with Part 22. I guess a lot of people have decided the pandemic is over, but alas, it is not. And now we're having a new school year with a worse pandemic and fewer protections, so that's... great. But at least the memes continue. In fact, this post is overstuffed with memes, so ... enjoy!
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| From HBO's Lovecraft Country |
I reviewed Matt Ruff's novel Lovecraft Country about a month ago, and I told myself I'd review Misha Green's HBO adaptation once the season was complete.
My analogy of the relation between the book and the show is like the relationship between Bob Dylan’s and Jimi Hendrix’s versions of “All Along the Watchtower.” All the versions are good and technically the latter things are adaptations of the former, but the adaptations in both cases explode the original ideas into higher, mind-bending dimensions. (Misha Green's adaptation plays with this idea in interesting ways that I won't spoil).
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| From the show Metalocalypse |
It has become my tradition on this blog to write a post on my birthday. This tradition began in 2015, when I wrote a post called "Birthdays and Deathdays." I wrote something of a sequel in 2019 with "Birthdays, Deathdays, Climate Change, and Humanity."
I'm still thinking of a lot of those same issues here in 2020. But the pandemic also makes everything weird-but-not-in-a-good-way, not to mention continuing racial injustice and an impending, increasingly terrifying election here in the US.
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| Janelle Monáe and friends performing "Americans" |
Here's something I shared on social media:
Spending part of July 3 bringing lunches to poor people in the projects and homeless people in tent cities in the wealthiest country on Earth in the middle of a grossly mismanaged response to a pandemic makes me really excited about Independence Day this year.
(Just in case you missed it, yes, that is sarcasm.) Don’t get me wrong, I’m really, really glad to help, and I'm thankful for my friend who got me involved in the team. If people are suffering, one should help them. But it’s hard to get excited about a country that has the wealth to totally eliminate poverty, but has continued to choose not to do so year after year while the problems are in some cases actually getting worse. MLK made this point in the 1960’s. Others made it before him. There is no excuse.
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| Made at: https://www.jasondavies.com/wordcloud/ |
