My dvd player isn’t region-free but taking a gamble that I can play region 2 dvds of the Erotic Ghost Story trilogy on my laptop with VLC media player. I can play other region dvds successfully. I tested Grave of the Fireflies, The Merchant of Venice and Alice au pays des merveilles.

A gen Z relative had never heard of The Wonderful Tale of Henry Sugar by Roald Dahl. Maybe reading Roald Dahl’s sometimes fucked up stories for adults as a child is more a Millennial thing.

I’ve ordered a dvd set from the UK of the three Erotic Ghost Story films. It’s time to face my demons.

Family Christmas done early. Leaves me with xmas day to myself to watch Hail Mary (1985). There’s something I want to write.

Films like Problem Child, Drop Dead Fred, Clifford and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective all feature an annoying lead character that is somehow given a very serious treatment. Drop Dead Fred didn’t have to go so hard with psychological realism. Is Pee Wee Herman the link I am missing? I’ve never seen it.

Watching Life of Brian. I’m not a big Monty Python person, more of a moderate Monty Python person, but I am into blasphemy so this is next up.

The little girl’s line in The Last Temptation of Christ that goes “There’s only one woman in the world. With different faces” is deeply misogynistic. I don’t think it harms the film in context since it happens in the middle of Jesus having a psychedelic trip but I don’t like it.

Seeing too much alien content lately. My idea for a film about aliens losing its appeal. Still I want to make a film as a response to the decline of cinema as an art form, I think that will be cathartic.

Watching The Last Temptation of Christ. In a drama the hero’s faith/beliefs/resolve get put to the test. That’s what was missing in The Prophet. Here it takes the gospels and ramps up the test that Christ is put through. It scrutinises the story of Christ but from a position of belief.

I don’t think our human laws have any connection to divine law if it exists. Justice is a human invention and still a work in progress.

I need to write, not post, but what’s getting in the way is I have several works planned but they’re all very delicate and subtle subjects and I need to be in very serene state of mind to write them. Some things you can write through a slump but not these.

Die Hard 2 is also a Christmas movie basically because it’s the same idea as the first one but at an airport.

Janet Frame was poor but she seemed to have a lot of access to pensions and funding and grants. She got money just to live in Spain and London and broaden her experience as a writer. Where do I get funds to just do that?

Turns out reading 56,000 words of your own dream diary in one afternoon/evening isn’t that much of a head trip. It only triggers memories of dreams from the more recent dreams and then you’re just reading a text. All my dreams are about inclusion/exclusion.

I keep seeing people posting pictures of Dostoyevsky books and saying how good it is. People don’t know how to read Dostoyevsky anymore. You’re supposed to respond by writing long diatribes in imitation of his style on esoteric religious and moral themes.

Windows doesn’t show the printer icon on the taskbar I have to click an up arrow. Then it makes me double click on the printer icon when it used to be one click. And then it doesn’t tell me how many pages it’s printing and where it’s up to, like it always used to.

What I need is “select all above” and “select all below”. Trying to print part of a long document is a nightmare.

Keeping a dream diary on my laptop forces me to turn it on every few days and install the updates regularly instead of all in one go.

All my life I have been right-clicking to select copy and paste and now I have to select “see more options” and it just makes me resent Windows every time I have to do an extra step. They just changed the UI so that instead of showing recently used programs it shows all programs alphabetically.

Finished Janet Frame’s three autobiographies collected under the title of the middle one An Angel at my Table. It was actually in the new year that I decided to read it; they had the first and third in seperate volumes at a secondhand bookstore in Mogo. I was too much of a completist to skip the 2nd

Religion deals in an area that is beyond rational which for someone with mental illness can sometimes be confused with the irrational, which makes it a tricky thing to navigate. By law in my jurisdiction your religious beliefs cannot be taken as a sign you’re unwell, but there are subtleties.

My year as a Christian in 2006 is the most complex of my life. I was certainly sincerely searching for answers but often strayed outside the confines of this particular discipline, because I just was not finding them on the inside.

Is there a book about the Catholic Church and cinema? I’m finding this interesting. Something called the Legion of Decency came up with their own rating system and condemned 8 1/2 amongst others and yet Joh Paul II lists 8 1/2 as one of the important films that you should see.

What cinema has over prose is warmth. The example I think of is the movie Jesus’ Son. It’s a perfect, faithful adaptation of the novel. The only significant though subtle difference is the text is a little icier. There’s something about actual actors and speech that softens a work, makes it human.

The Departed is Heat 2. It was alright I guess. A little too much going on.

Godard’s Hail Mary is a Christmas movie. I think it might be one of my favourite movies. It’s very tender. In think because it had a poor reception it took me a long time to stop doubting my love for it.

The Departed starting to get good (enough). I have seen this but it may as well be the first time. Dicaprio stealing all his scenes among a bunch of heavies.

Thinking about the guy who wanted me to do family law for minimum wage if my job service provider paid a wage subsidy (I wasn’t old or young enough to be eligible). For minimum wage I am stacking shelves, I’m not practicing family law.

Thinking about Dyson Heydon’s book on contracts. He’s the guru on contracts so you’re supposed to overlook that he sexually harassed his associates as a sitting judge. Michael Kirby wrote a foreword to his book. This is the legal profession: can’t see the forest for the trees.

The only truly useless piece of education I have is my Graduate Diploma of Legal Practice. It’s a requirement of admission but I learned nothing at all from the College of Law that I didn’t learn in my bachelor of laws. It just exists to extort a chunk of money out of law graduates.

“Explaining” was handled well in Million Dollar Baby in a way it wasn’t in Avatar (two movies which are not comparable but which I watched recently.) The difference is Avatar likes explaining for explaining’s sake. In Million Dollar baby they have training sessions but also can switch it off.

I took a break from learning Indonesian. The idea was that because I had childhood traumatic events there, learning the language would be empowering. I think it was but it also caused a period of mood instability that was longer and deeper than I anticipated. I am back at it now though.

Tomorrow I finish up reading Janet Frame’s three autobiographies (before I give them as a gift). You used to be able to be a published author despite being painfully introverted. We’re not going to see works by people like Janet Frame anymore because now you need tik tok followers.

My writing practice has developed into putting upper limits on how much I do rather than minimum outputs. I have a tendency when I start an activity to not let myself stop. I just want to keep doing the thing. It’s why I make plans to do this and no more.

Because in postgraduate creative writing study I had worked to strict word limits I had wanted (now that I am free) to write something lengthy. But I have worked through it and my planned word length is too long for this subject matter, title, and intended readership. Cutting it down to a third.

Simplicity in writing is actually a complicated topic. I want my work in progress to be easy to read. I didn’t want that for some of my other works. A lot of the things people do to simplify their writing only succeed in making it harder, because with simplicity you can lose important information.

It was important to my creative practice to read the Valmiki Ramayana and The Journey to the West but these obviously being ancient/medieval are too old to be comp titles. It took a lot of time (about 80 hours), which I could have spent reading contemporary high fantasy and understanding the market.

There’s reading you do as part of creative practice and reading you do for market research (finding comp titles and so on). There is a certain degree of overlap but they are different. Reading that informs your art is much broader. I just wonder what proportion of each there should be.

I honestly don’t remember anything at all from The Departed. A lot of big name actors keep popping up one after the other. It kind of breaks the spell when Alec Baldwin and Martin Sheen are minor characters. It’s also weird to see Matt Damon and Leo Dicaprio in the same movie, they feel like rivals.

I put on The Departed last night and watched a little. Jack Nicholson’s character uses the N-word and I guess it’s to show he’s a tough street guy who says what he likes. This is the case in almost all of Tarantino’s movies as well but these all have strong antiracist themes, which Scorsese doesn’t.

King Agamemnon just got told in a dream he’s going to conquer Troy (a trick of Zeus) and then he says alright now is the time to test my soldier’s resolve and he tells his forces to sail home, hoping they won’t. Maybe don’t do that? If your King gives you direction you’re supposed to follow it.

NSW photo ID took six business days to arrive despite it being December and days away from xmas. Credit where it’s due: that was fast.

Sometimes the concept of a work is too large or small for the size. I have read short stories that should be novels and vice versa.

Something I’m noticing is that moving the action forward and moving the story forward are two different things. It would have something to do with significance of the narrated events.

I read about 45 books this year, I didn’t really count. Some books are longer than others so this isn’t really a good unit of measurement. I’ve kept up a high level of reading since completing my doctorate.

From here on in unless your translated book has a “translator’s foreword” and the name of the translator identified somewhere I am not taking a chance on reading it. I’m using google translate in language learning, but essentially as a dictionary. A wholly machine “translation” would be unreadable.

It’s concerning when our leaders indulge in a fantasy that “If only the country was more authoritarian bad things wouldn’t happen”.

Restricting freedom of speech with laws has never reduced extremism. You’ve got to use speech: get out there and engage in open dialogue. Hearts and minds have got to change voluntarily which is why the law is not an effective means of persuasion.

Just watched Million Dollar Baby. They used to make these small, profound, devastating but somehow also cheesy dramas about people who weren’t Wolverines and watching it now is painful because it’s a world we’ve lost.

I abandoned two books. Life is short. I don’t like to but I read enough to know they weren’t get any better.