By Roy Mathur, on 2023-09-20, at 23:00:40--00:15:33 BST, for Captain Roy's Rusty Rocket Radio Show
The theme today? Surviving being single, mostly friendless, and lonely, except for, if you're me, an imaginary butler/henchthing/lab tech (and very possibly a criminal on the lam ).
Fygor! Attend your master at once!
In 501 I generally praised this very violent and very bloody sword and sorcery rotoscope animated film from 2021, but left out a few praiseworthy points I think add to the enjoyment of this grimdark fantasy. Namely: giant half-gods, vicious sexy bird people, a steampunk metal airship, and it's general Metal Hurlant-ishness and overall delightful extreme bonkersness.
In my defence, 501 was a long episode and I'm a solo podcaster.
Dracula on a ship, or rather the first Alien film rebooted to take place on a rickety old tub. Specifically: the voyage the fanged one takes to Grimsby on the Demeter in Bram Stoker's Dracula. It's hardly a spoiler to tell you that the crew disappears on arrival. This film seeks to fill in the gaps.
Creature design is good, but it takes an awful long time to get to the creature and it's slow and unegaging along the way. How they made a boring film about Dracula, or why they cast an American to play the Londoner lead, I don't know, but they did.
Adaptation of Stephen King's The Boogeyman that I read in the anthology Night Shift (1978).
It's the story of a man who's wife dies and then his family is predated upon by a fairytale boogeyman monster.
It's a staid, thankfully less so than Demeter, but still not scary.
However, the creature design is superb. It's a four limbed creature that walks like a giant spider and has another head and another set of arms within it's bag-like mouth. Fantastic and clever, especially as a variant in my culture, bolom soonga, steals children and stuffs them into a sack. It was so good I thought that it was a physical creature design, but no; all CGI. There's some debate as to inspiration. The creature FX guys say it was wholly ordinal, though the director says it was inspired by the double creature, the jotunn, Moder, from The Ritual (2017).
Rewatch watched this week: Godzilla (2014), Kong: Skull Island (2017), Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), Godzilla vs. Kong (2021). I can also highly recommend the first Japanese film Gojira (1954), which is a brilliant piece of Asian cinema----honour, family, duty---and not just for Kaiju nerds.
I think the YouTube Algorithm via Google knows what I'm doing because recommended for me were trailers for Toho's budget retro Godzilla Minus One (Nov 1 2023), it's 30th live action Godzilla movie following Shin Godzilla, thought it is not a sequel. We can also expect Apple TV+'s 10 episode mini-series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (November 17, 2023), starring Kurt Russell.
In this 2023 Apple TV+ series a book dealer's wife get's post-partum depression, kills their baby, and violently assaults him. Was she insane or was her child not her actually child, but a changeling?
Fascinating, but I'm having a hard time liking LaKeith Stanfield's Apollo Kagwa or his best friend Malcolm Barrett's damaged veteran, Patrice. Both have grating characters, though perhaps it's fair representation as they are predatory book dealers, though not quite as sleazy as The Ninth Gate's Dean Corso.
Those fallen Jedi... Why? With so many Jedi gone bad in the past, it's a wonder no one on the Jedi Council, when there still was one, brought the subject up. Maybe it's a universal constant that even in the Star Wars galaxy, people are gits.
We also see Annikin and Ahsoka's Force ghosts duel.
Finally, with only three episodes left, where in the Force is Thrawn?
I am almost (see later) exceedingly pleased with myself! I finally found the correct BIOS update for my old desktop PC and upgraded. This means I can use anything up to a low-end Xeon (socket 1155). Since then I have bought and fitted a Core i7-3770K and 2 DDR3 8GB RAM sticks running dual channel at 1333 MHz. I'll just be using Intel's iGPU until I can find a cheap graphics card. That is a massive upgrade from the previous Intel Core i3 2120 with 4 GB of RAM.
This is the first proper PC build project I have undertaken in many years. It started okay, but turned into a nightmare. I managed to bend the socket pins, resulting in an extra hour with a loupe and forceps tweezers. Socket pins were actual pins, not hairs, the last time I attempted this! I also broke off half of one heatsink mounting pin. In the end it worked, but it was a mission.
This has solved the dilemma of finding money to spend on a new PC.
With the new SD card replacing the borked one I bought recently, it booted!
I'm at a loss as to what I should do with it now, I'm guessing a better media player and passing the Pi3 B+ on to Mum and Dad?
I recently recommended podcasters to use an external recorder, rather than rely on crashable PCs. However, you will need a PC and a DAW or editor if you do a lot of punch and roll.
This applies more to heavily scripted podcasts, voice acting, etc. All I can say is dual tape your recording for the inevitable crashing of the PC.
It's crap now. When it started, it was good, now it is rubbish.
The worst I saw was a company blatantly selling fake brand name guitars at ludicrous prices.
You've heard my dating saga before. Nine apps, two singles groups, a couple of events, socialising via hobbies, over many, many years and, god help me, just being myself, as the most useless advice in the world tells us, and I'm still single.
Out of desperation, I signed up to Facebook Dating, and what a pile of pants that is. Sugar babies, sex workers, horse people, sporty people, drunken slobs, psychopaths, and people claiming singlehood and no kids, but with obvious boyfriends, husbands, and children clumsily cropped out of shot.
Having a lot of people who are never there to celebrate your triumphs, console you in your losses, and literally don't care one iota about you, but are still Facebook Friends is soul destroying, so I deleted the lot. What spurred me to do that was the realisation that on Friday night (2023-09-15) there was not a single local friend willing to go down the pub with me. Not even one.
There's a Rancid song called Fall Back Down that extols the value of friendship. The people I removed didn't come near that rubric.
On the positive side, I enjoyed watching their profiles disappear as I unfriended and then refreshed the screen. Ping, ping, ping, goodbye.
I have a pinned post that says not to bother friending me. To reiterate, I don't use Facebook, except so that I can remain a member of a club that meets on Facebook. For anything else, visit my website where you'll find my email address. If you're an RL friend, you'll already have my phone number.
I've talked before about the difficultly in reconnecting with old friends and relations and have come to a couple of conclusions based on my experiences.
If you still can't connect, or even find them after years of trying---something I'd have thought nigh on impossible in our interconnected world---they are either dead, or worse, arseholes who are avoiding you. If the latter, count your blessings and move on.
Given my deep disappointment with humanity of late, will I retired to sulk in my wizarding tower?
No, bugger it, why give humanity the satisfaction?
Instead I plan to rejoin a local singles club I used to attend; a real world non-virtual thing.
This is a follow up from 501 about the nasty encounter with a random nutter spewing blood curdling threats at my mother and I.
Incredibly, after I made an official police report, the police actually called back some days later to clarify details. They said they'd pass on my recommendation of increasing patrols in the area. Considering the area is used by a lot of people---particularly women jogging alone and there have already been some serious violence (I looked up crimes stats)---I sincerely hope they do.
My physio's recommendation that I just go for it has not helped my back, so I'm booked in to see him in a month. However, despite the pain, I have not been sitting on my backside either.
I went into London on Saturday (2023-09-09), sod's law; the hottest day of the year, and I don't do well in heat, for a bit of socialising and clocked up more than 10 km by walking. The following Sunday (2023-09-17), as you'll find out later, I went into the big bad smoke again and exceeded even that by walking 12 km.
On being weighed at my last diabetes prevention course appointment, I had lost a kilogram since the previous meeting. However, my stress levels have been very high lately, which, of course, fuels stress eating, so that went up a few ounces on the next weigh-in. Pah!
I've also managed to find a temporary canoe partner to help me get the boat in and out and stop me plunging in. I go in for my first partner session on Saturday (2023-09-23). Since joining a club, I've only canoed twice so far, due to a combination of stupidity and health issues. The first time I fell in. On my second try, I tired myself out to the point that I was sick with exhaustion for two days. I am a ridiculous man.
Isn't it always the way? By the time you find out, it's already too late. That almost happened to me on Saturday (2023-09-16), when I first learned of the existence of the India Club via a Reuters article and news of it's closure the following day.
Now a bar and restaurant, the club was opened four years after Indian Independence in 1951 by the India League, which included the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru. It's been the meeting place for Indian associations over the years, and later became open to all as a restaurant and bar. Or at least it was until the historic premise, redolent of old London and India, was refused listed building status, engaged in a battle with the leaseholders, and finally, sadly loss.
On Sunday (2023-09-178), my mother and I traipsed over there in increasingly foul weather, just wanting to soak in a bit of atmosphere and a few snacks. The atmosphere was good-natured, but hectic and busy, as well it might be considering it's impending doom. We sipped tonic waters in the bar, then munched some poppadoms, pakoras, and samosas in the cafe-style restaurant. Like almost everyone else, including BBC London, we snapped pics. I signed the guest book, then we said goodbye to the 72 year-old cultural institution, part of the very fabric of London, about to be demolished to build yet another hotel that London certainly does not need.
So there you are. Geeklife and getting older.
Books, cinema, TV, rewatches, etc. are great for filling the gap left after you sicken of online social bollocks, but don't forget the real world because the real world is full of unrelenting bastardry and doesn't give two hoots about you.
To be clear: force yourself to regularly leave the wizarding tower. I know it's hard, especially with crippling anxiety, physical issues, gender, age, culture, race etc. but you have to do it, or you will become a shut-in and no one will care. In fact, the world will be glad to see you shrivel up and die. So it's up to you. What do I know? I'm a single aging brown British Asian-ish man with Tourettes, OCD, and IBS, who's into weird rock and geekery. If that's not a minority of a minority, I don't bloody well know what is.
If the copyright police haven't struck, I've posted a pic in this post of Merlin from Excalibur trapped in ice by Morganna. Ah, the trials and tribulations of wizardry, but its still better being Merlin, than not.