As for why it’s been a while since the last Mixed Media post, see my previous answer. I’m still writing a lot; the output is just ending up in different places. Including, curiously, a 2000+ word private diary entry I seem to produce at the start of each of my exams online timed assessments.
Under the pre-pandemic regulations most of the modules were assessed by a two-hour hand-written (don’t get me started) exam. Because the exam centres are closed or inaccessible now, the alternative arrangement is that we get a similar set of exam questions at home, and we have 48 hours to write essays on 2 of the 5 topics. Because of the open-book format, the essays can be longer and make better use of references.
The exam paper is given to us at 10:00 UK time. I download the exam paper at the appointed hour, and take my time to look over the questions, and…start writing about something else? I could rationalize this as a way of reflecting on my first impressions, as a warm-up exercise, or as a simple avoidance technique. However, in my readings for this term (Life Career Development) I came across a much-referenced paper by Ashforth, Kreiner, & Fugate (2000) about everyday role transitions and boundary-crossing activities.
Most of us have different roles we adopt in our daily lives depending on context: parent, husband, colleague, manager, subordinate, etc. One way of examining these roles is by how segmented or integrated they are. Strongly segmented roles have high boundaries between them, enforced by behavioural norms or physical distance, for example a parent who works as an airline pilot. You can’t easily cross over between the two. More integrated roles have blurred boundaries, for example an engineer who is also a manager, and who has to jump back and forth between identities multiple times throughout a day depending on which meeting they’re in.
The more segmented two roles are, the easier it is to maintain boundaries between them, but the harder it is to cross back and forth. More integrated roles imply blurrier boundaries. Ashforth et al. propose that more segmented roles are more likely to be associated with “rites of passage” – little rituals a person performs when they leave one role and enter another. Think: putting on a uniform at work, or listening to your favourite podcast on your bus journey home from work. We construct these rituals to help us maintain boundaries, and to adjust to the demands of a different role.
In a work context, people have different preferences for how segregated or integrated they want their jobs to be. This has shown up quite a bit during this pandemic, when many office workers have been forced by circumstances into a more integrated lifestyle. This suits some people, but others have found it enormously stressful, and have had to work hard to establish and maintain new boundaries.
Rituals and ceremonies around role transitions can play a key part, and my “diversion” before getting down to the business of actually writing my exam essays may be a part of that: it’s what I do to get my head in the game. I spend a couple of hours clearing my mind, writing about what’s been going on all around me, trapping my thoughts in a document so they can’t ambush me in the middle of the assessment.
It also gives me something to look back at and gauge my mental state before each of these exams, and recognize that no matter how much preparation and studying I do for each one, I still feel stressed and unprepared. And yet I’ve come out of each one so far with a decent grade? We’ll see how this most recent one turns out.
And now I also realize that my process for getting into the right mindset around an exam strongly resembles how I find my way back into a Mixed Media post after a gap of four months?
⭐️ Mystery Road
I’m going to give this a whole section of its own, because it spans movies and TV. Mystery Road the movie is from 2013. The sequel, Goldstone dates from 2016. Seasons 1 and 2 of the TV show Mystery Road were broadcast in 2018 and 2020, but the timeline of the TV show takes place between the first film and the second. After reading about them on Metafilter, I watched the films and the TV show in timeline order. They’re noir detective stories set in rural Australia, dealing with issues of race, greed, corruption, and exploitation. The cinematography is gorgeous, and Jay Pedersen as detective Jay Swan puts in a terrific performance as a man who is both driven and tormented by his pursuit of justice.
Episodic Video (TV)
- ⭐️ Impulse (seasons 1 & 2) I’d mentioned previously that I’d started watching this with Fiona. It’s a great show about teenager Henry discovering that she has the power to jump (teleport), but only under circumstances of life-threatening stress. It deals with themes of abuse, anger, and coming-of-age similar to the Steven Gould books (Jumper, Reflex, Impulse, and Exo) they’re based on. The series was a YouTube exclusive, which makes it hard to find elsewhere. The amount of music (and its nature) included as part of the show made it feel a bit like it was trying to cross-sell YouTube Music. Cancelled after 2 seasons, boo.
- ⭐️ I Am Not Okay With This (season 1) Another coming-of-age story with a girl realizing she has powers. Very different sensibilities, but deals with some similar themes of belonging and abandonment. The characters are more awkward, the episodes shorter, the finale even more unresolved. Cancelled after 1 season, boo.
- ⭐️ La Casa De Papel (seasons 1-4) I do love a good heist story, and this keeps delivering for two seasons, at least. Seasons 3 & 4 are a bit of a re-tread, with a bigger budget, to cash in on the show’s unexpected popularity. (Like, literally, I wonder if they used the same set for the main hall of both the Mint in seasons 1&2 and the Bank in seasons 3&4, just with different dressing.) Reminded me of my desire to watch more non-American TV.
- The Mandalorian (season 2) It’s fine. The production values are amazing, and it delivers heaps of Star Wars fanservice. I’ll be controversial and say that I thought the climactic scene in the season finale was weak, narratively unsatisfying, and didn’t match the quality of the special effects elsewhere. As time goes by, I’m less and less enthused by how cheaply life is treated in the Star Wars universe.
- Westworld (season 3) It’s fine. It expands the canvas of the first two seasons to reveal the world behind it. Can’t help but feel that Jonathan Nolan’s earlier show Person of Interest did a more entertaining and less confusing job of handling the themes of fractured identity and emerging superintelligence, though.
- ⭐️ Don’t F*** With Cats Bunch of internet nerds track down a serial killer. Terrifically entertaining multi-part documentary. There are many ways the facts of this case could have been assembled into a narrative, and the choice to go with this one was unique and fascinating.
- ⭐️ Alice in Borderland (season 1) This has a bit of a Ready Player One vibe in the sense that the protagonist is transported into a world of puzzles where his background as a gamer is essential to his success and survival – but with a more lethal flavour. The first episode has echoes of Cube, and a few episodes later it shakes up the cast more ruthlessly than I’d expected. The whole season keeps you on your toes, with plenty of twists about what’s really happening. Hoping for a second season.
- Archer (season 11) It’s fine. Archer came up in a meeting at work the other day. Is this season good enough to recommend that someone start at season 1 to get all the way here? No. So many of Archer’s running gags and catchphrases were established in much earlier seasons, which I also find hard to recommend because they’re kinda crude and insensitive. I think the last great gag that Archer pulled off was changing the entire setting of the show in season 8 but keeping the same characters in the same relationships and situations as if nothing was out of the ordinary.
- ⭐️ Star Trek Picard (season 1) Hmm… I’m going to give this a star, even though there are some dubious story choices along the way, and the finale has plot holes big enough to pilot a Borg cube through. I enjoyed watching Picard assemble himself a new crew to take on one last mission. Raffi and Rios are great. I would like to have seen more of Picard’s Romulan staff Zhaban and Laris, who only show up in the first three episodes. Production values are lavish and modern, and I think it would be hard to re-watch episodes of Next Gen now to remind myself of some of the relevant storylines from back then. Also, interesting to see the Qowat Milat introduced here, after I’d come across them briefly in Discovery. I’m disappointed that the writers decided that the best representative of an all-female order for the quest was the one male who had ever been adopted by them. The phrase “a promise is a prison; do not make yourself another’s jailer” will stick with me.
Films
- 💩 Power Project Could have been an interesting superpowers / detective thriller crossover. Wasn’t.
- Timetrap Interesting low-budget one-way time travel thriller, but it features too many really poor life decisions the characters make along the way to make it really click together.
- Hocus Pocus Fiona made me watch it.
- ⭐️ Alita: Battle Angel Okay, I really liked this. Gorgeous production design, intriguing backstory, sympathetic characters, dastardly villains, and phenomenal action scenes. Except it doesn’t end. It just sets up for part 2, which, as far as I know, isn’t being made.
- ⭐️ Arriety Sweet and gentle Studio Ghibly adaptation of The Borrowers. Lovely animation.
- ⭐️ Tenet I’d been looking forward to seeing this on the big screen, because in the trailers it looked like one of the biggest movie spectacles in years. But then, you know, pandemic. I was annoyed at Christopher Nolan keeping on trying to get the movie into cinemas throughout the year, when it was pretty clear that being in enclosed spaces with other people was a really bad idea, but on the other hand, that kept pushing the release date further back, which meant longer and longer to wait before seeing the film. The Warner Brothers went “fuck it,” and decided to release all the films they’d been queueing up anyway, with same-day cinema and VOD launches throughout 2021. Tenet was available on 15th December, the same week as my exam, and I was holding it out for myself as a treat for when the week was over. It certainly is a spectacle! But perhaps a bit too clever for its own good. As Fiona and I were watching it, we kept being sucked out of the flow of the action wondering what had just happened and how it was supposed to work. I think I’ll need to rewatch it to feel like I understand it.
- ⭐️ Soul Having just completed a whole module about life career development covering subjects of job satisfaction, person-environment fit, and callings, this made for interesting viewing. Wonderfully animated, sweet, laugh-out loud funny, I enjoyed this on many levels.
Books
- ⭐️ Hal Herzog – Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat Great introduction to the field of anthrozoology, the sociological/psychological study of how humans interact with animals. The subtitle of the book is “Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight About Animals” This has my attention. I no longer eat meat but I don’t think I identify as a “vegetarian,” because to me the phrase feels too burdened with ideology. Also, I love our cats, but I fret about the morality of keeping companion animals for my human benefit. The book doesn’t have any clear answers beyond “it’s complicated”, but it presents a constant stream of thought-provoking questions. Recommended!
- ⭐️ John Carreyrou – Bad Blood Abi had mentioned the podcast The Dropout about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, and I’d read various news stories about the company and it’s downfall, but for some reason an Ars Technica article in September tipped the balance towards me wanting to read more. The book is written practically like a thriller, and is a fascinating view of an utter train wreck of a Silicon Valley startup story.
- DT Max – The Family That Couldn’t Sleep Not actually about sleep, (a subject that fascinates me) but about untreatable prion diseases like BSE and – the villain of this book – fatal familial insomnia. A medical and historical detective story.
- ⭐️ Richard Thaler – Misbehaving The best parts of this book are Thaler’s descriptions of how the interplay between psychology and economics led to the field of behavioural economics; the worst parts are the somewhat self-congratulatory closing chapters. Thaler expresses a common frustration that although behavioural economics has become established at the microeconomic level, it continues to be underrepresented at the level of macroeconomic policy.
- Mark Waid, Humberto Ramos et al. – Champions (volume 1) For a book that starts with Ms. Marvel quitting the Avengers because she’s upset with the amount of punching and collateral property damage they cause, there sure is a lot of punching and property damage later on.
- ⭐️ Ian Rankin – A Song for the Dark Times Tidy Rebus thriller, set partly in Edinburgh and partly in the Flow Country, which I’d just heard about recently on the 99% Invisible episode “For The Love Of Peat”. Two murders, hundreds of miles apart. Are they connected…?
Music
For me, this year has been characterised by long stretches of listening to all the works of a single artist or group. Halsey at the start of the year, Underworld in spring and early summer, The Naked And Famous late summer, and Dua Lipa has been the soundtrack of my December. I listened to the Song Exploder episode about Levitating back in October, but it took me a month or two to catch up. The Song Exploder TV show is also great, but I haven’t watched all the episodes yet. Fynn Kliemann’s thousand-plus track playlist of chilled out beats has been a regular palette-cleanser.
According to Spotify, I was in the top 0.005% of Underworld listeners this year. With 1.3M monthly listeners, I think that puts me into their top 100 devotees? What can I say? Drift is really good.
Podcasts
Home Cooking with Samin Nosrat (of Salt Fat Acid Heat fame) and Hrishikesh Hirway (of Song Exploder fame) is a delight. It’s a funny, charming, unpretentious cooking show with enough vegetarian (see note above) consideration to keep me happy. I need to try Marcella Hazan’s simple tomato sauce recipe, as noted in episode 2, soon.
