- Our big thing this week was taking a weekend mini-break to celebrate my wife’s birthday (coming up tomorrow). As soon as work was done on Friday we headed into Seattle and checked in to the Olive 8. We’d stayed here over the summer during Worldcon and enjoyed it, so we decided to come back. Once we’d checked in and had dinner, our first thing for the weekend was…
- Shrew, a great version of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Really funny, but not at all shying away from the play’s more controversial and problematic elements, even to giving Katherine’s final monologue a wonderfully creepy, horror-movie-esque staging that worked wonderfully well.
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Saturday we had a nice lazy morning before braving a Seattle windstorm to walk down to the Pike Place Market to get breakfast and pick up fixings for lunch. Back to the hotel for lunch and lounging, and then we heading back down toward the Market for dinner and a show at the Seattle Can Can’s Hitchcock Hotel. Humor, dance, songs, nudity, and a great time; we even ended up with seats right by the stage (any closer and we’d have been part of the show…thankfully, that honor went to another member of the audience).
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After the show and a quick stop back at the hotel room, we headed up the hill to the Mercury for this month’s Saturday. This wasn’t on the original plan, but we had energy and it seemed like a good addition to the weekend’s plans. Amusingly, since this wasn’t in the original plan, I’d packed for walking around a rainy and windy Seattle, and I do believe that this is the first time I’ve ever gone to the Mercury wearing pants!
📸 Photos
📝 Writing
I took a look at this week’s updates to the Affinity design suite, and came out cautiously hopeful, which was a better place than I was afraid of ending up.
📺 Watching
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I finished the first (currently only) season of Alien: Earth early this week. That was very enjoyably and often disturbingly creepy, and does a better job of working with the perennial “what if xenomorphs made it to Earth” question than I was afraid it might, especially given that this is set before the original movie. I was particularly impressed with the work they did in blending the original very ’70s aesthetic with modern tech and techniques; it’s as good or better as the work done with both Rogue One and Andor in the Star Wars world.
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Sunday afternoon we watched Jurassic World: Rebirth. Mostly it was fine (I mean, it’s hard to go wrong with dinosaurs chasing people), but it kind of fell apart at the end with the “D-Rex” (dubbed the “Disappointment Rex” by my wife). Studios really need to remember that it’s entirely possible to write a good, enjoyable, fun adventure/horror sequel without constantly having to one-up the last one with something bigger (figuratively and literally). Still, sometimes you’re just in the mood to watch people make bad decision around dangerous animals, and the series continues to entertain on that front.
🔗 Linking
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Tom Ellison at McSweeney’s: Hi, It’s Me, Wikipedia, And I Am Ready For Your Apology: “In 2004, you saw some college guy using me and thought, ‘What a lazy cheater.’ ¶ Now you’d think, ‘At least he’s not asking Gemini.’ ¶ In a few years, you’ll say, ‘Wow, look, a human being who can read.'”
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Jesus Diaz at Fast Company: Canva’s new free Affinity app wants to sink the Adobe flagships: “Combined with a good toolset (still have to test this one) and the zero price tag, Canva may be launching a philosophical and strategic H-bomb at one of its biggest competitors. If it delivers, the creative world is about to feel the shockwave that may finally bust Adobe’s decades-old foundations.”