Another destructively long Monday. Yeesh. Hopefully the end of the heatwave means these’ll be a little more bearable going forward.
On Friday, after a failed first attempt last week — we’d recorded the appointment as happening on… different Fridays — I had my first introduction at my new school where I’ll be student teaching through to the end of the calendar year. It was nice! The vibes were good! I hung around for the rest of the day and observed some classes. 1B, who I won’t be teaching, wasn’t that different from 1C last year, a lot of the same types of little guy (also known as boy) in there. The combined 5th/6th year was very different, a lot more chill — the difference in age and in, these folks chose to take this class, makes a huge difference. We clicked pretty well. I’ll be involved in one way or another in all of their art-related classes, and I think it’s gonna go: Fine. Great? Somewhere on that spectrum.
Also, another short film in the can. I’ve got a loose go-ahead to release these but I think they’ll be fun to drop as a little miniseries when they’re all done.
Below the fold: Notes on this website and on storytelling. TV and film thoughts.
Website updates
Pleased the new theme is comfortably in place. The shape of it was the plan all along, though a lot of the details more fell into place than anything. I wanted it to feel like a blog in the way Kubrick did, so I never really spent that much time thinking about anything other than header-body-sidebar — things like front pages with just dates and titles on them have a certain appeal from a keeping-it-simple perspective, but that’s “posting articles” and not “blogging.” And as you know, I’m blogging here.
I used the skeleton theme from underscores.me as a base because, well, that’s what it’s for, and this way I didn’t need to dive deep into WordPress/ClassicPress documentation to do everything step by step, and 90% of the work was just CSS. Speaking of CSS, I continue to use needlessly overfeatured Swiss army knife Bootstrap as a base here and everywhere. It sometimes feels like a crutch, but I don’t think my sites feel like boilerplate Bootstrap sites, and anyway, a crutch is meant to be an aid — there’s nothing wrong with using one.1I do concede that between Underscores and Bootstrap I’m loading quite a bit of unused or pointless CSS, but in terms of how much data gets downloaded I’ve managed to keep both this blog and the other sites well under 1MB, which I think is pretty good for the Year of Luigi 2023.
At time of writing I still have a post-it with some things that need doing, but they’re fairly minor in the grand scheme of things. Once I’ve finished the post-it I’ll ask on here if there’s anything that stands out as still needing to be done, but you know, I continue to tinker.
Making comics, telling stories
Clicking through UNEND while fixing it up a fresh site, I can see everything that’s wrong with it. A big one, that I’ve kinda always known was true, is a tendency to make big narrative jumps and assume the Reader will figure it out because, well, I figured it out, why wouldn’t the Reader? Doing more felt like holding the Reader’s hand. I like to think I’ve got much less bad at it with an additional 8 years of practice under my belt, but at some point I should really read through Annie Forever with this in mind.
Bits from Letterboxd
The twist in the middle here is the closest thing the people of 1941 had to 2010’s Remember Me and I, for one, think we’ve made a lot of silly progress.
Television
- Ahsoka continues to frustrate. Seeing first Anakin again in the world between worlds and then him and Ahsoka together in Clone Wars flashbacks should be a dream come true. But it feels stale and manufactured. Maybe it’s just limited by the Star Wars shows’ Filonian urge to show off its toys. Maybe it’s that these actors don’t share the weight of the history the characters have. Maybe Clone Wars only worked because of George, and the occasional occurrences of “Star Wars being good” since he sold it were accidents. I don’t know.
- Harley Quinn wraps up season 4 as still the best, gayest superhero show on TV. Even when Harley and Ivy are operating at polar ideological opposites the show never even suggests that that could lead to them breaking up, because we all know they’re fucking inseparable, and it’s: Great. A blast.
- The Morning Show is back and continues to feel vestigial to its original premise. But that’s what I said at the start of season two, and I thought that went very well.
YouTube
- Also back, the best show on YouTube, Jet Lag: The Game. In a perfect world Jet Lag simply drops an infinite amount of episodes year-round, but this is their third season this year, so, you know, who am I to complain. Go Ben go!
Doctor Who
- In the end it lands on me quite well, it’s a tale very specific to the particular flavours of the Davison incarnation, but it’s not hard to read the first story of In the Night, Pursuit of the Nightjar, as being “about” #dwsr — the loosely-organised online community dedicated to showing up whenever the show does location filming — and how the natural inclinations of that kind of fan can, on occasion, turn quite nasty, even with no ill intent whatsoever. A compelling basis for a charming tale.
The second story, Resistor, is similarly specifically well suited to the Davison era, but in a totally different way — how has Doctor Who never really done “1982 secret underground Yugoslavian rock band versus the secret police” before?
Books
- Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow continues its steady clacking uphill to the top of the rollercoaster that I’m certain is going to send me down an emotional loop-de-loop.
Things I’ve Passive-Aggressively Declared “Content” This Week
- Sigh. Yeah, the Netflix One Piece again.
Also, one necropost. Why not go look for it?