Maybe it's an insulation thing in the UK, but I don't appreciate having to go through five different doors just to get from one room to another.

The Long Walk (2025) is a great bro movie because it gets at the very core of a lot of deep male friendships, which involves, you guessed it, taking long walks together and doing shit like intermittently hanging arms around each other's shoulders.

Playing a 5 hour noir ambiance white noise video on YouTube while reading the new Pynchon only to realise that it's already it's dark, gloomy, and raining outside my window.

Watching the new Long Way series and as much as I love coming back to the expansive yet intimate adventure feel of the whole thing, it also puts a real fine point on how fun it can be to, you know, have a bunch of money.

a story that gets bogged down in the details. peat fiction

Well, plenty of next things fell through and now I have no clue what to do. Rudderless as a headless chicken. I've also stopped making sense.

Sometimes it feels like all life is, is waiting for the next thing to happen.

The rush I get from a good cracking of my back can only be described as being transported into your dream home for about five seconds.

Reading Stienbeck is like getting an IV drip of concentrated, beautiful life.

For one, it's been 11 days since my last post. Time is moving too fast. I can barely feel it. At the same time, I feel overwhelmed. Is there a name for that? Its almost 3 am. I could cry.

Watched Oliver Stone's Wall Street properly for the first time (fun little Sean Young/Daryl Hannah reunion) but the kicker was reading Roger Ebert's review after and seeing the truth of the last decade of American policy and global economics just out there, plainly laid. Time to watch the sequel ig.

Sleep schedule's fucked because I'm off the grass and dear God I forgot what a nightmare insomnia thought spirals are.

Wrote a few hundred proper words after a long few weeks and now it feels like the air's back in my lungs. There really is no comparable feeling to that of a story finally starting to lock into place in my head as well as on the page.

Watched Crimson Tide last night, and the movie's definitely aged, but I could still get into it. Can't imagine the electric feeling one would've had seeing it opening night.

Really listened to Another Day in Paradise by Phil Collins right now and I can't imagine how good it must've felt listening to it when it first came out.

Goddamn, women are so beautiful and it sucks that I'm only thinking about my work these days.

Geez, if I wasn't so wasted right now I could've written the next masterpiece, or so I believe.

I don't know why I don't think about it enough, but Thunderbolts may genuinely be one of the best films of the decade? There's something so oddly intimate and current about it painted on an abstract superhero landscape. It's like sad Thor on overdrive, The Bear distilled, the unsaid truth said well.

I've become the '20 tabs open since forever' guy and I think I don't like it.

Rewatching The Pheonecian Scheme and it's striking how plainly literary his movies have been since Grand Budapest. Funny and/or serious but always emotionally centered novels, short stories, or prose poems, all tied together by an exploration of the metaphysical edges of film as a narrative medium.

Everyone talking about historical inaccuracies in the new Odyssey adaptation as if the whole thing isn't fiction...? I feel like I'm the crazy one here.

So much of Wes Anderson and Edgar Wright's style of humor comes from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and it's honestly beautiful.

It's kind of amazing that the Phineas & Ferb revival hasn't lost a step, but more than that, getting episodes like 'Deconstructing Doof' or 'Tropey Mctropeface' so early in the season I think shows that the creators anticipated and appreciate that their audience has matured.

haywriters.com Poem of mine won second prize at the Hay Writers' Circle Poetry Competition, go check it out!

It's June already. It only just sunk in that it's 2025 and now the dread of half the year being over is creeping up close.

I complain about my laptop creaking and whining loudly as a result of being old but then every time I sit down and get up from anywhere, I make similar noises.

Getting a new screen guard feels like basically getting a new phone. Also, nice to be able to use the fingerprint scanner again after god knows how long.

Rewatching Downton Abbey: A New Era (2022) and gosh, it's such a comfort with these characters. I want 8 more films and at least 700 more seasons of the show.

Heard 'खुळ्या लवड्याच्या' from the kitchen of this restaurant, this is a sign of great authentic Kolhapuri food on the way.

Finally watched Jaws (1975) and I get it now.

Every new @sumsung.bsky.social UI update is somehow worse than the last, I swear these companies keep trying to emulate the Apple UI only to piss off and alienate Android users like me. Gods forbid a phone stay usable for more than 6 months.

Hour 29 of my journey and I'm having whatever the opposite of jet lag is. Adrenalin suppressing all the exhaustion due to the prospect of being home after 8 long months on the other side of the world. Gods only know how my body's gonna react once this rush wears off though. 4 hours of journey left.

Solzhenitsyn's August 1914 is unintentionally the funniest book I could've chosen for my 33 hour journey home. C'est la vie, c'est nul.

Andor experience so stressful that I'm watching American news to calm down.

Forgot to post this but went to the pride & prejudice re-release, had forgotten Judi Dench is in it; audibly gasped and got goosebumps when she appeared on screen. No one has ever had more aura than her.

Cronenberg might be the greatest modern filmmaker.

Rewatching Scarface (1984) and at least half of Tony Montana's charm is him being a skittish little guy that's always angry and a little out of his depth. The other half is Pacino and De Palma mining him for a good bit of comedy.

Tony Leung entering Hard Boiled (1992) like he's the coolest motherfucker alive.

Watching Andor is just a transcendent experience in butt-clenching.

Rewatching The Spy Who Loved Me (1972) and not only is this movie insanely trippy, it also might be one of the most influential action movies of all time.

Decided to go the gym for the first time this year (I paid for the yearly membership, like ya do) and my day has just been horrible after that for entirely different reasons. Nonetheless, I will fabricate causation and say, fuck gyms man.

Man, @scalzi.com man, day twenty-three. I didn't know it but I really needed that. Thank you.

Sometimes there will be days like today when I'll feel like doing nothing and I won't but then I'll also feel like absorbing the breadth and length of human knowledge (or at least the bits I'm interested in) before the night ends. I should just sleep.

Rewatching master and commander on a whim and got blasted with the reminder that Peter Weir is a visual poet and also one of the best to ever do it. What a film, what a guy.

I wrote something about Temple of Doom today, and it made me go reading about Indiana Jones again. I found some of the initial story ideas they had for Last Crusade, and my god did we dodge some fuckin bullets.

Been trying to come up with a Chandigarh-inspired company town only to find out because of an IPL match that there's a New Chandigarh. Fell to my knees.

I bet they all think they're Captain Nemo when really they're Karl Strombergs.

Thinking again about Jeff Nichols' The Bikeriders (2023). One of the most important films of the decade about wayward masculinity and how some of our lizard brains perceive connection.

Would be fun to have a West Wing revival of the current US administration where everyone is actively performing Sorkin-esque debates and monologues that lead to the country imploding bit by bit each episode. Zero hint of irony in any of it.

Watching Only Yesterday (1991) and god, the level of awareness and insight this film has about itself allows for so much dramatic heft. Witnessing what is sure to be one of my favorite films.