Legends of the Sun Pig

Films:

• Horns: Fiona really likes this film, and encouraged me to watch it. It’s a bit heavy-handed in places, but I quite enjoyed it. Other than his minor part in Now You See Me 2, this is the first time I’ve seen Daniel Radcliffe in a non-Potter role, and he was fine.
• Wind River: Slow, moving, bleak, grief-bitten, hard to watch in places, but a very powerful and beautiful film. This is what a Western looks like in 2017.
• Fantastic Four (2015): This film effectively simulates the feeling of falling asleep part-way through a film, then waking up and not understanding what is going on because you missed a crucial scene that explained why the characters are reacting to each other that way. Over and over again. It just made no sense.
• The Way Way Back: Sweet coming-of-age comedy with some effective grown-up relation stuff thrown in. Sam Rockwell’s emotionally stunted character neatly avoided coming across as creepy; Steve Carell plays against type as an emotionally abusive almost-stepfather. The film walks a lot of lines very successfully.
• The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its Young: Amazing documentary about a ridiculously tough multi-day ultramarathon race through the Tennessee mountains. But it’s not a rah-rah cheerleading story about athletes overcoming all odds. It’s very introverted, focusing on the quiet personal journeys that the runners make. Quirky and inspiring.
• The Art of Organized Noize: Good documentary about the people behind the rise of Atlanta hip-hop in the 90s. Lots of great background and stories that reinforce a lot of the stereotypes of how ruthlessly exploitative the music business can be.
• Thor: Ragnarok: Brilliant. More open and honest about being a genuine comedy than Guardians of the Galaxy was.
• Justice League: It has some good bits. It has some bad bits. (In the climactic battle, the villain actually says, “No! This cannot be!”) When the team is together, they don’t have the same on-screen chemistry as the Avengers. It’s okay, but it doesn’t sizzle.

TV:

• The Expanse season 2: Season one was good, season two is great. Loved this.
• Mindhunter: Loved this, too. I used to enjoy Criminal Minds, and Mindhunter is like the prequel.
• Rick and Morty season 3: Excellent
• The Sinner: Interesting premise — we know exactly who committed the crime, but the story revolves all around the why, which is hidden even from the killer herself until the end. Unfortunately it’s also a very slow show, and it would have been much more effective at half its length. Maybe even cut down to a feature film.
• The Good Place (seasons 1 & 2 up to mid-season break): Snappy and fun comedy about moral philosophy in the afterlife.
• House of Cards season 5: Abi and I had watched seasons 1-4 together end enjoyed them. We started season 5, but couldn’t finish it. This was long before the Kevin Spacey allegations broke. With Trump in the White House, the political shenanigans the fictional president was getting up to in the show were no longer entertaining. I can’t see us going back to it.
• Star Trek: Discovery (season 1 up to mid-season break): I thought the two-episode pilot was awful, but it has got better since then. Still not fantastic, but I’m willing to give it more rope. (Rainn Wilson as Harry Mudd is inspired, though.)
• Parks and Recreation: I’m almost through season 6 now. Still enjoying it.

Games:

• Universal Paperclips is a clicker game based on the idea of an AI whose mission is to make paperclips as efficiently in as great a volume as possible. Should be familiar if you are familiar with Nick Bostrom’s work, e.g. Superintelligence. I lost a couple of days to this.
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: Hard to say anything about this that others haven’t already said before me. It’s an amazing game, whose impact on the open-world sandbox genre will be felt for years to come.

Music: Wolf Alice (new album Visions of a Life), Linkin Park (back catalogue), The Ting Tings (back catalogue), The Cool Quest (new single “Running” + back catalogue)

It’s five years ago since I saw Hue and Cry at the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh, and that was with my parents, too! I’m on their mailing list, and when they were doing album announcements earlier this year they said they would be playing a special gig with the Average White Band in Glasgow. That sounded amazing, so I made sure to arrange my travel to include a trip to Glasgow last Thursday. I met up with Mum & Dad for dinner at Di Maggios after work, and then we walked up to the Concert Hall.

Hue and Cry had their full band with them, and looked thrilled to be there. They played a 45-minute opening set including “My Salt Heart”, “Looking for Linda”, “Labour of Love”, “Violently”, “Little Man”, and a couple of tracks from their new album, “The Way She Flies” and title track “Pocketful of Stones”. The Average White Band came on around 9 and played for an hour (including “Atlantic Avenue”, “Walk on By”, “Work to Do”, “A Love of Your Own”) then brought Pat and Greg and their saxophone and trumpet player back on stage for three songs (“Heading for a Fall” was one of them; I don’t remember the other two), before rounding off the night with — what else — “Pick up the Pieces” and “Let’s Go Round Again”. All the hits. The venue was seated, but they had everyone up and dancing in the aisles before it was over.

We had seats right at the end of one row, and very close to one the doors to the auditorium. We had a lot of standing up to do while other people in the row were taking their seats, but it also mean I was able to make a sharp exit before the final applause had died down and make a beeline for the cloakroom. I passed the merch stand on the way. The attendants were telling everyone that the band were going to be signing CDs shortly. Because I was quick off the mark there was no queue for the cloakroom, and I was able to make it back to the merch stand, buy a CD and a poster, and zip to the signing line at the far end of the Concert Hall café before there was much of a line. By the time I had gathered my autographs from the band, there must have been 200 people behind me. Good timing!

Mum and Dad drove me back to Edinburgh afterwards, which was a kindness! They were staying in Edinburgh overnight because of an early morning appointment the next day, which was a useful coincidence. I don’t mind taking the late train back from Glasgow, but it’s nicer to travel with family.

Amazing musicianship. I have never seen anyone play a bass like that. His fingers fly over the strings faster than I could follow. And his drummer, Justin Brown, was just as wild. This was fantastic to watch and listen to, but there were points in some of the pieces (hard to call them songs) where my brain just couldn’t keep up it. The melody dissolved into lengthy chaotic excursions that were too fast for me to deal with. It was like they suddenly started speaking a different language, which is probably not too far from the truth: they switched from the familiar melodic funk of his recordings to free jazz and back again throughout the gig. I had a great time, but I didn’t understand it all!

Support was from Dorian Concept, whose unassuming stage presence belied a terrific electronic funk sound. Well worth listening to more of!

I’d been looking forward to this gig for many months. I had introduced my colleague Stu to Thundercat earlier this year, and we both went over to Glasgow for the gig in the day. Nice dinner at the Raven after work, and we caught the last train back to Edinburgh afterwards talking about Marvel TV shows and podcasts. Great evening.

Didn’t enjoy this as much as I had hoped to. I had forgotten how hard they rock, and that there was going to be moshing. I had positioned myself too close to the front and centre of the crowd, and I was at the edge of the mosh zone. I got shoved and pushed a lot, got beer poured over me, and at one point this giant of a Dutch guy leaned down and shouted something aggressive and incomprehensible right in my face. I didn’t feel safe, and I moved to the edge of the floor, where everything was still cramped and sticky and I had a shitty view.

The band were good, but the experience was worse than last year.

A month or so ago I started noticing a smell in my office. It was stale and peppery, like mature armpit sweat. But it only manifested in one particular corner of the office, to the right of my desk, just over my waste paper bin.

I checked around the bin for signs of dead animal or out-of-place organic matter, but there was nothing. I figured the smell might be getting trapped in the corner because of poor air circulation, so I started leaving my skylight window open wider and more often to let more air in. That still didn’t solve it.

Smell is an interesting thing for me. I don’t think my sense of smell is any more sensitive than anyone else’s. (Although I am one of these people for whom anything in the brassica family of vegetables, i.e. cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, brussels sprouts, etc. tastes bitter and awful.) But when I’m going through a period of depression bad smells make me tense, irritable, and even more unhappy. In fact, being hyper-aware of bad smells has for years been my most reliable symptom of depression, and a key signal that I need to start seeing my counsellor again.

But despite all the other stressors in my life this year, and knowing that I could get a whiff of week-old sweat if I moved my chair a meter to the right, I wasn’t feeling depressed in other ways. This apparent conflict made me speculate darkly about what else might be going on:

• Has my nasal early warning system broken down? Am I going to be excessively alert to bad smells even when I’m not depressed?
• Am I just imagining it? Have I broken through into a new realm of sensory hallucinations?
• Alex is a teenage lad. His room is across the corridor from mine. Has the smell of teenage male invaded my space?
• Is it me?? Have I crossed some boundary of weight, age, or inactivity that is making me stink?
• Am I going to have to break my office space down to the bare walls and concrete to get to the real source of the problem?
• Is this my life now??

Fortunately the obsession didn’t go too far. When I mentioned it to Abi, she nosed the corner, and agreed that there was a smell. And while I was away in Scotland the other week, she found the source!

On the half-height bookcase next to the waste paper bin, I kept a box of odds and ends and knick-knacks. A wooden clog Fiona had painted years ago, filled with USB thumb drives. Cables, stickers, old hard disks, concert ticket stubs, a can of compressed air. A roll of brown packing tape seemed a good candidate for organic chemical degradation, but when we took it out of the box and left it aside overnight, it didn’t smell at all.

Eventually we isolated the culprit: it was the box itself. An innocuous, apparently clean, stackable IKEA plastic tub. We took everything out of it, sniffed each item, and what was left was a pool of sweaty reek at the bottom of the box itself. The box. Normally at waist height on the bookcase, but just at head height whenever I leaned down to put something into my waste paper bin.

The relief I felt when Abi told me she had found the cause of the smell was amazing. Best present ever: I could have my peace of mind back! It wasn’t all in my head. I wasn’t going to have to re-calibrate my depression indicators. And I wasn’t going to have to burn the furniture and bleach every surface in my office. Bliss.