John Wick vs John McClaene vs John Rambo

Silly but kinda funny

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LN5lzg3TE60

random stuff, because it's a rainy Saturday

Peter Gabriel - "My Body is a Cage" – from the Dark OST, because Gustavo Santaolalla's The Last Of Us put me in this mood. Wondering how Arcade Fire's version compares. One of the best song build-ups ever.

Reading ROCKSONG by Golnoosh Nour. Peter Gabriel's song is fitting. Good stuff, need to look up a lot of Iranian references.

catchy: Lady Gaga - "Bad Romance"

Also, fitting whacky video.

Lawnscapers

Wonderful mini series with Olivia Colman and David Thewlis about a true story of a couple of cold hearted murderers... or broken misfits... who killed her parents and pretended they were alive for the next fifteen years, before coming back from France, no money but some signed film posters and books and giving themselves up to the police.

Interesting filming, once actively breaking the fourth wall.

Hollie McNish - "Slug and other things i've been told to hate"

Only read a little so far but wonderful combination of prose about her life and experiences followed by a few poems about this.

 

"When I am Dead, Will You Finally Shut The Fuck Up" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yi-sWAAjqtQ

"Megatron, Transformers" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCO-YmLT8t4 

"British Natural Breakfast" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJw9yGqBYJ8

 

1917: Shortly after the United States' entry into the First World War, the US War Industries Board asks women to stop buying corsets to free up metal for war production. This step liberates some 28,000 tons of metal, enough to build two battleships.

On the topic of selfies, this made me rethink my dislike of them: Not everyone has a garden though, do they? Or a house they can furnish and decorate. For many people, especially pooror or younger people, their own body is all they have through which to represent themselves. Their owe blank canvas. Caking yourself in make-up and taking a selfie is surely not so different from obsessing over the pansies in the front garden or posting yet another photo of your kitchen renovation.
[...]
("The Self-Portrait" in Art Quarterly) a line about selfies. While the author rejoiced in artistic self-portaits in general, writing, 'The Self-Portrait claims its unique place in the history of human culture because of its ability to map, or seem to map, the fluid transformations of human identity. Making yourself visible is an attempt to clear some space', he then went on to say, while discussing the self-portraits of Paul Gauguin, that his complex representations of self 'read as especially pertinent in today's accelerated climate of personal aggrandisement through self-representation'. (Yes, selfies.)
[...]
his aside about selfies being 'personal aggrandisement' pissed me off. I don't believe that people take and share selfies merely for 'personal aggrandisement'. It seemed a very smug tosser of a comment to me. In fact, I think using big long words like 'aggrandisement' in an article is more of a cry for 'personal aggrandisement' than taking a selfie is.
[...]
After years of being represented, or not, by other people, finally a hell of a lot of people who couldn't before are able to take their own photos, to show themselves in the light they want with the filter they want at the time they want doing what they want tos how the world who they are according to themselves.i

apparently pigeons have twenty-four different receptors in their eyes (we only  have three). So chances are, pigeons are absolutely spectacular, but we have no way of seeing them.

dublin pigeon

for Rhiannon, who has always loved pigeons

i see you pigeons!
see that neck!
all emerald!
all amethyst!

sick to death
of all the praise
those fucking
parrots get

if you were
on instagram
i imagine
your account

would be
everyday updated
with selfies
of that lovely neck

shouting:

look at me you bastards!
i'm beautiful as well

yes, but have you ever seen my tits?

i agree with you completely;
nature is a precious source
of constant inspiration;
the way swallows sleep in air;

those starling mumurations;
migrations of the humpback whale;
the balance of a mountain goat
on misted cloudy cliffs;

this planet is a wonder
of course i am in awe of it
i'm just saying: have you ever seen my tits?
because they are quite spectacular as well;

these marshmallow masterpieces
shape shift every single month
like elephants in an earthquake
to warn of coming blood

able, for almost
twelve months of their life
to shoot milk across a room
with the mere surrender of my arms;

cramping to a baby's charms
across a tesco superstore;
leaking at the mere mention
of another needy child;

at other times –
masturbation's catalys
direct line to the clitoris
a wank between two clouds
for a very lucky penis

landing pad for happy endings
two pillows for a perfect nap;
faithful office stressballs;
comfort in a bun

i'm not saying that my breasts
are necessarily better
than some birds who sleep mid-air

i'm just saying
i understand why people stare

Cal Flyn - "Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape

Amazing book about the various places abandoned by humans. DMZ in Cyprus. Meltdown in Ukraine. Toxic waste near Staten Island.

Japan - where the population is ofrecast to fall from 127 million to 100 million or lower by 2049 - one in every eight properties is already abandoned, forecast to rise to nearly a third of all housing stock by 2033. (The Japanese call them akiya, ghost homes.)

The Bikini Atoll, a ring of coral islets encircling a turquoise lagoon, was used by the United States as a nuclear weapons testing site during the 1940s and '50s - most notably for the 1954 Castle Bravo test, when a thermonuclear device more than seven thousand times the force of that dropped on Hiroshima was detonated, producing an explosion of such unexpected force it shocked the scientists that designed it and ultimately prompted a worldwide ban on atmospheric testing. [...] But in 2008, when an international team of researchers returned to the atoll to inspect the lagoon, they found to their surprise that a thriving underwater ecosystem had formed in the blast crater over the intervening decades. It looked, as one coral scientist commented in wonder, 'absolutely pristine'.

Rebecca Solnit once wrote of the 'blue of distance', the colour of hills that recede layer upon layer unto the horizon. Well, this is the green of time. The green that grows from nothing, anything, if left for long enough. It comes at first as mildew or mould. A misting of green-gray, or mustard-green, the green of decay. But then it grows and grows into the verdant palette of new life: leaf green, lime green, the green of fresh new shoots.

As Jeffrey McNeely, former chief scientist at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), has noted, the buffer zones between warring, prestate societies serve as refugia for wild game and thus have 'helped contribute to the rich biodiversity found today in many tropical forests'. Fear, therefore, is a force that shapes the world.

The plants shift in their seats, trade places, multiply and disappear - but only when we are not looking. To stand in the field and consider its progress is to confront the eerie sensation of having been elected the unwitting judge of a game of musical statues; the trees and plants frozen in comic poses, their riffling leaves giving them away as effectively as the shallow breath of the stilled by living body.

Coney Island Creek [...] For it is this mud, or rather the poisons held within it, that is the true legacy of this region's industrial past. [...] Tanneries used sulphuric acid to strip hides, arsenic to preserve them, lead acetate to bleach them and chromium to tan them. Hat-makers used mercury nitrates to turn fur into felt. And like the dye works in Paterson, they all dumped their waste straight into the water. [...] Originally a factory where cow bones were ground down to make fertiliser, the Lister Avenue plant was converted into a chemical works producing DDT in 1940, and later a manufacturer of phenoxy herbicides - specifically, the two chemicals that, when mixed into a 1:1 cocktail, constitute the notorious defoliant Agent Orange. [...] But the property's true notoriety centres around a byproduct of phenoxy herbicide production: dioxin - an extremely toxic family of compounds, exposure to even tiny quantities of which, in any form, is carcinogenic. In humans, it causes every type of cancer there is, as well as stunting the development of unborn babies and afflicting wholesale damage to the human immune system. TCDD, the dioxin produced at the Diamond Alkali works, is the most toxic of all.
    It was only years after production was halted that the public health risks associated with dioxins were fully appreciated. There is no truly 'safe' level of dioxin contamination; it's one of the most toxic substances known to man. It is 170,000 times more deadly than cyanide. The US Environmental Portection Agency considers water with dioxin levels of 31 parts per quadrillion (that is, 31 in 1,000,000,000,000,000) too contaminated to drink. [...] once accumulated in soil or sediment (or the bodies of living things), scientists estimate dioxin's half-life to be at least a century. Some, including the United States Department of Agriculture, go further, describing it as 'virtually nonbiodegradable'.

The Last of Us + The Last of Us part 2

Amazing storytelling and an emotional rollercoaster, both games.

The end of TLOU where Ellie asks Joel about whether she's truly not the only one and upon his lie just says "Ok"

Joel getting killed.

The final fight between Abby and Ellie.

 

Good way to spend pandy xmas.

Also, amazing score.

During the credits, Ashley Johnson (Ellie) and Troy Baker (Joel) cover "Wayfaring Stranger" (famous versions done by Emmylou Harris and Johnny Cash)

Descender

Finally finished all of Descender.  Wonderful graphic novel

 Jeff Lemire (Writer),

Dustin Nguyen (Artist),

Steve Wands  

films

* Ron's Gone Wrong - ok animation, definitely no pixar but it has its moments, about a little "b bot", a buddy for children, that is broken

* Ready Player One - so so, as shallow as the book, the Oasis animations made me think of Avatar