you know how some birders maintain a Life List of all the species they’ve identified? well I have that but for sea slugs (really opisthobranchs more broadly). I’m gonna add that as a page on my website because I can, because it’s neat, and because it’s funny1,2.
watch this space once I unpack my boxes of books3 and can flip through the books I probably tucked my active list into back in 2007. if I can’t find it I’ll reconstruct to the best of my ability, I think I was up to 25 species or something.
did I draft this post in my head and only remember my URL when I actually started typing this sentence: yes ↩︎
shoutout to nicky flowers for inspiring me to add more random pages to this website ↩︎
home construction means I had to pack up four shelves of books so all of my marine science is temporarily inaccessible ↩︎
For the past several years, I’ve treated October as an excuse to watch the Big Famous Movies (horror edition) that I’ve never gotten around to watching, plus some other ones thrown in that are on-theme. So far Natalie and I have done:
Draculas month, featuring:
Dracula (1931). The One with Bela Lugosi
Dracula’s Daughter (1936)
Dracula (1958). Lee/Cushing, delightful
The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974). Hammer Horror and Hong Kong martial arts crossover.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). has also inspired a different project, “watch every film costumed or designed by Eiko Ishioka”
Zombies month, featuring:
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Dawn of the Dead (1978)
Day of the Dead (1985)
Evil Dead II (1987). watching Evil Dead in the Draculas year inspired the zombie theme
One Cut of the Dead (2017)
Aliens month (ongoing this year!), featuring:
Alien (1979)
Aliens (1986)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
The Thing from Another World (1951)
The Thing (1982)
So here’s where you come in: what are some important themes we could do? What goes on those lists? I’m largely looking for The Big Ones (like the Romero trilogy, Alien, Dracula, stuff like that), but give me any sleeper hits you think really should not be missed and what theme they go with. I don’t do great with loving depictions of torture or human-on-human violence, but if you think there’s something I really shouldn’t miss for cultural reasons, recommend it and let me know whether I should prepare myself going in.
Future themes we’re rotating in our minds include: Vampires (non-Dracula edition), Ghosts (The Shining, Poltergeist, etc),Horror Comedy (things like Evil Dead would go here), Witches, and Werewolves. Any major categories we missed? Recommendations for movies to add to theme year reprises are also welcome.
Shana tovah everyone! I finally have a chance to sit down and go through some of the posts I’ve been bookmarking in my RSS reader to share with you.
Blog Posts
Three Views of Victor Frankenstein’s Guilt – An essay from Calliope that was originally posted to Cohost, but they reposted it to their blog and I’m bringing it here so that you read it. Calliope has great thoughts on Gothic literature and I really love the diversity of ways one can read Victor Frankenstein’s motivation. Plus, it’s motivating me to reread Frankenstein for the first time in about two decades, right on time for Spooky Month.
Star Trek Writers’ Guides – Do you know about Cliff Pervocracy’s PDF hobby? You should. It’s great. Immensely relatable. He collects PDFs of… stuff… reads them, and writes about them. In this case it’s writers’ guides for both The Original Series (TOS) and The Next Generation (TNG). As someone who’s primarily familiar with TOS (and about half of DS9) and has just recently started watching TNG, these are fascinating. It’s really neat to read the evolution of what Star Trek thinks it’s all about.1
a bunch of podcasts (happy international podcast day) – I love podcasts (when I’m in the mood for them, anyway!). Dante did a neat writeup of podcasts covering different historical periods, that I’m absolutely going to go through for recommendations. And maybe someday I’ll write up a list of my own favorites…
On Content Warnings – A thoughtful writeup by Shel on the utility and drawbacks of content warnings. Well worth a ponder, especially as we (…I) move to a more blog-centric internet and try to come up with my own categorization systems.
This is a book about French peasants doing religious crimes – A writeup of a talk Laura Michet gave a few years ago! I definitely want to track down a copy of this book. I mean, who doesn’t want to read about oddball Medieval Christian heresy?
Art
Daily Art on tumblr is working with generative art (as far as I can tell, older/more traditional generative art rather than newer generation general AI tools… please let me know if you find out otherwise). I’ve got it in my feed reader for a daily art bite. Really loving how a bunch of the designs a week ago turned out looking like quilt designs.
I got nothing. But this came through one of my tumblr feeds and it rules.
sweet nectar – art of one of wormvermin’s OCs. not embedding a photo because there is tity, though it’s closer to “classical nude” than “hardcore porn”
one of these days my life will slow down enough that I can actually get all these saved posts into a document and then it’s all over for y’all. I’ve got like three weeks of posts to get through! (I will probably split it into multiple roundups though just for the sake of scale.)
one half-row of two-color brioche knit… theoretically
In a classic turn for me, I’m not only learning a new knitting technique (brioche) but doing it in two colors at once. Brioche is a really cool and plush knit form that basically ends up with a double layer of fabric at the end, and a lot of designs end up fully reversible. I have heard from my pal Seth that actually, two-color can be a slightly easier way to learn brioche knitting because there’s an easier way to tell apart the two active sides of the knit… so I’m hoping that helps.
Since I’ve never done brioche before, I’m starting with a swatch to get my footing before I break into the hat pattern I’m planning to make (seriously it’s so cute, go check it out). I’m also going to swatch the repeating pattern to see what size needles I need to use to get the hat to be the right size. Because I am, as previously established, a brain genius who likes to make things hard for myself, I am going to swatch flat, even though the pattern is written in the round. This means that I’m going to have to remember which pattern rows are “wrong” sides and knit reversed stitches (purl where it says knit and vice versa) on all those rows. I’m guessing I’m going to mess up kind of a lot but what can I say? it’s an adventure.
