…are the fucking worst. Jesus, how can you live with yourself if you pretend you were murdered and you are flopping around like you’re having an epileptic fit. How can you look your friends in the eye afterwards? How can you look yourself in the eye afterwards, you fucking fraud!!?!?!
Birthday Celebration
Today was my birthday. Yesterday as well as the day before yesterday, colleagues had their birthday, too. So when I got to work, and the others had brought a shit-ton of birthday cake, I was really glad that I managed to convince my friend Alina (of Solid Cocktails fame) to make me a bunch of boozy bonbons. They cake came in the morning, and I treated everyone to the bonbons in the late afternoon. They were very well received.
My work is pretty challenging at the moment because I had two new team members start today. This meant I had to welcome them, guide them, set them up and get them started on a project. All new managerial tasks for me. Luckily, both guys were excellent sports and they hit the ground running. Really happy.
Last night, Joasia and I ate at Gebroeders Hartering again, which was absolutely lovely. Today, lots of people messaged me, so I felt quite fortunate. Jody sang for me, Moulsari sang for me, Eva, Scott, Lucie and Minna sang for me. Made me feel loved.
Later this week Jim is going to come over, and we’re planning to have some birthday drinks at House Bar. Thomas, who runs the bar, agreed to make me two different birthday punches for the people I’ve invited. A group of us are going to have dinner at The Beefsteak Club beforehand, and hopefully we’ll do something fun afterwards. Maybe Club NYX. Would be fun.
Ocean’s Eight
Yesterday evening I watched Ocean’s Eight and I thought it was great (within the context of fun heist-comedy films.) It is without a shadow of a doubt better than Ocean’s Twelve and Ocean’s Thirteen, but not quite as polished as Ocean’s Eleven.
Sandra Bullock carried the film well. Blanchett as a tough, punk-rock chick; yes, please. Sarah Paulson was a delight. Rihanna had everything she needed to be the cool hacker. Awkwafina was perfectly quirky and I totally fell in love with her. Helena Bonham Carter as a troubled fashion designer was a great fit. And Anne Hathaway stole the show as the smart-than-she-looks socialite and film star who just wants to have friends.
The plot was perfectly ridiculous but immensely entertaining, and if I really haven’t find something to complain about, it’s that the magnet-lock subplot could have been a interesting narrative element, if it hadn’t be resolved twenty seconds later by asking someone’s little sister for a solution. Perhaps it was simply done to send the message that young, smart girls can be STEM-geniuses, but then still I would have loved to see that exposed more. (And I’m just going to ignore the giant “oh, the necklace must have fallen off my neck while I was running for the bathroom” plot-hole. Wasn’t it supposed to have a magnetic lock!?)
The recent trend of redoing a bro-film format (Ghostbusters, The Hangover, e.g.) with an all-female cast film (Ghostbusters, Rough Night, e.g.) hasn’t been faring very well. The all-female Ghostbusters was so awful even the amazing Kate McKinnon couldn’t save it. But this film made it work very well and in a way that felt like it wasn’t just a derivation of an already done format.
Why I Closed My Twitter Account
Recently Twitter sent me a notification saying “It was 9 years ago today that you joined Twitter” and the first thing I thought was; time to close down my account. This shit has been going on long enough.
I had been toying with the idea of closing my account down for a while, and the only reason was that the environment was so incredibly toxic. The things I saw were either self-promotion or the ugliest side of identity politics.
You tweet that you think that there are things you agree with when it comes to fourth-wave feminism, and you can expect a vicious response from one side. Say that you believe that you don’t agree with the denialism of ignoring biological difference between men and women, and you can expect a vicious response from the other side.
Both the regressive left and the conservative right have entrenched themselves so deeply in the foxholes they dug on the Twitter Battlesphere, that I got tired of reading those tweets, even from the people that I agreed with. It becomes hard to be a centrist.
In the meantime, I’m playing around with Instagram, but my interest there is slowly fading as well. Social media maakt meer kapot dan je lief is.
An Empty Weekend
Recently I made mention of the fact that I had burned through a lot of my social bandwidth lately, so I decided that I would go training on Friday, have a naughty beverage at HPS afterwards and then have a quiet weekend. It was a success. On Saturday I did some groceries in the morning, having gotten up bright and early (a rarity for Saturdays following an evening at HPS). The rest of the morning was spent writing on the game that I’m going to be running.
In the afternoon, the rest of my gaming group came over and we gamed until the early evening. Then Moulsari came over, we ate together and watched the remainder of Wild Wild Country. The following day I spent writing and gaming until Joasia came back from Poland. We briefly watched something together and called it a day.
I haven’t had a quiet weekend like that in ages and it was exactly what the doctor ordered.