Legends of the Sun Pig

Sometimes email newsletters are more than just junk. Tucked at the bottom of the latest update from Toad The Wet Sprocket was a list of Glen Phillips dates for his current solo tour. And what was top of the list? Two gigs here in the Netherlands, one tomorrow evening in Harderwijk, and one afternoon show this Sunday at the Sugar Factory in Amsterdam.

That’s my Sunday afternoon sorted out, then!

It has been a month and a half since my last mixed media post, and I’ve watched a lot of films and TV shows since then, and I haven’t been keeping track of them. So I’m declaring mixed media bankruptcy, or mixedmediaruptcy or something like that. Basically this is just a short summary of the stuff that left enough of an impression to warrant a mention. (To clear out the old to-do-list guilt in my head, so I can let some new in.)

Sex Criminals by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky continues to be the best thing. Filled with thoughts about relationships, depression, growing up, and positively packed with sex jokes. And sex-activated superhero powers. They’ve really stepped up their game when it comes to the visual gags. For mature readers, duh.

Saga volume 4 remains likewisely brilliant.

Rat Queens, on the other hand, wasn’t nearly as good as I’d been hoping. It’s basically a D&D role-playing scenario, with lots of sass and swearing.

Fiona and I went to the cinema to see Seventh Son last weekend. It was not good. But we both enjoy going to the cinema for its own sake, and we’ve decided to do it more often. This afternoon we saw Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, which was entertaining. Because this month’s Loot Crate included a voucher for the Firefly online game, we’ve also been chain-watching Firefly this weekend. Alex and Fiona both adore it, and I’m loving seeing the old episodes again as well. So much good writing.

Alan Tudyk, Nathan Fillion, and PJ Haarsma are running an IndieGogo campaign that is probably of interest to Firefly fans:

Gaz Coombes‘ new album Matador is very good. Favourite tracks: “The English Ruse”, “Detroit”, and “Needle’s Eye”. Unfortunately I missed his gig in Amsterdam because I was away in New York.

A couple of weeks ago I chain-watched the first four seasons of The Walking Dead on Netflix. Whoa. Beyond compelling. Will be grabbing season 5 as soon as I can get the whole thing for download. (I don’t like waiting a week for each episode. We’re watching season 3 of Elementary once a week, but most of its stories are self-contained, and don’t end on massive cliffhangers.)

Various films:

• John Wick was thrilling, I suppose, but also joyless and gratuitous. Just as I don’t enjoy video games where the sole (or main) purpose is to do lots of killing without thought of the consequences, I don’t enjoy “mindless action flicks” as much as I used to. It’s not the violence I mind, it’s the carelessness. The Walking Dead, for example is extraordinarily violent and gory, but you can see how it affects the characters. It grinds them down. It changes, and sometimes destroys them.
• Taken: see above. Joyless, thoughtless.
• Turks & Caicos and Salting the Battlefield are episodes 2 and 3 in the Worricker trilogy that started with Page 8. Both are good spy stories that round out the character and trilogy, but they’re not as tense and neatly wrapped as the first one.
• A Most Wanted Man is another solid, smart, modern spy story that doesn’t rely on car chases and punching faces.
• The Drop is a gritty story of small-time crime gone bad, but again without histrionics and no need for high-octane action. I liked this quite a bit.
• Rush is an intense biographical dramatisation with lots of amazing racing scenes, but it tries a bit too hard to be “worthy”.
• Big Hero 6 is great fun from start to finish.
• Nightcrawler is a beautifully dark portrait of a sociopath finding his calling. Fascinating and distasteful at the same time. Great performance from Jake Gyllenhaal.
• Godzilla had too many people just standing around looking awestruck. That might actually happen in a real giant-creature emergency, but given the choice on a re-watch I’ll take Pacific Rim.
• Silver Linings Playbook is very sweet and delightful, with lovely performances all round. Given my comments about action movies above, I really think I should spend more time watching romantic comedies.

I’ve also started in on season 6 of Criminal Minds, have been trudging through a few more episodes of Person of Interest (he still isn’t), and caught the first few episodes of The Blacklist while I was in NY, because Netflix US happened to have it. Oh and a couple of eps of Parks and Recreation as well. (Nick Offerman/Ron Swanson reminds me of Patrick Nielsen Hayden, but don’t tell him I said that.)

I suppose I’ve been watching rather a lot of TV & films lately. It’s what I’m doing to force my mind to relax. Sometimes it works.

I tend to book my travel to Edinburgh about 2-3 months ahead, in blocks of 1-2 months. The last time I was making bookings was back in January. I’m planning ahead for May & June now, and I was somewhat shocked when I looked at the exchange rate. “1.38? That can’t be right…” But it was.

(The GBP:Euro rate was at about 1.45 when we moved to the Netherlands back in 2007, but it has been way below that since then.)

Eventually I realized that when I receive a GPG encrypted email, it simply means that the email was written by someone who would voluntarily use GPG. I don’t mean someone who cares about privacy, because I think we all care about privacy. There just seems to be something particular about people who try GPG and conclude that it’s a realistic path to introducing private communication in their lives for casual correspondence with strangers.

Increasingly, it’s a club that I don’t want to belong to anymore.

Moxie Marlinspike >> Blog >> GPG And Me.

After having raved at him for years about how great a gig venue Paradiso is, I finally managed to lure Alan across to the Netherlands for a couple of days last week, so we could see The Decemberists. On Monday we spent the afternoon wandering around Amsterdam. Lunch at De Brabantse Aap, hot chocolate and a brownie at Bagels and Beans on the Keizersgracht, and a beer or two at Café Hans en Grietje on the Spiegelgracht. Abi caught up with us there after work, and we had a steak at Los Argentinos before heading over to Paradiso. We were just too late for the support act (Serafina Steer), but in plenty of time for the Decemberists.

Set list:

1. The Singer Addresses His Audience
2. Cavalry Captain
3. Down By The Water
4. Calamity Song
5. Grace Cathedral Hill
6. Philomena
7. The Wrong Year
8. The Island: Come And See / The Landlord’s Daughter / You’ll Not Feel The Drowning
9. Los Angeles, I’m Yours
10. Carolina Low
11. The Sporting Life
12. The Rake’s Song
13. Make You Better
14. (Rock T-Shirt Challenge)
15. The Legionnaire’s Lament
16. 16 Military Wives
17. Oh Valencia

Encore 1:

18. 12/17/12
19. A Beginning Song

Encore 2:

20. The Mariner’s Revenge Song

Good audience participation on “16 Military Wives” and “The Mariner’s Revenge Song” – they seems to be perennial favourites. I didn’t know “The Mariner’s Revenge Song” when Abi and I went to see them a few years ago, but I knew what to expect this time round. I’d been hoping for more songs from The Hazards of Love, and Abi would have liked them to play June Hymn, but it was a good, long, and varied set (they were on stage for the best part of two hours). Definitely worth catching them live.