Hello! If you are in the United States, this might be a long holiday weekend for you. If so, I hope you're enjoying it! I happen to have tomorrow off and I'm excited as heck about it. I work in a hospital so I end up working a lot of holidays. I was actually supposed to be on call tomorrow but someone else offered to take it and I was more than happy to let them have it. I have no specific plans other than to stay at home and relax.
I've got some links to share!
- Bladerunner Aquarelle - I found out about this on a Metafilter post recently but it's actually from 2012. A quote from the Mastodon post, where the Metafilter user found this: "twelve years ago, a painter by the name of anders ramsell painted 12,597 aquarelle paintings of blade runner, shot by shot, of the entire film edited down to ~35 minutes. it took two years of painstaking work, all done in his spare time after work each night. This is wild and beautiful. I also love how things on the Internet bubble up time and again.
- Move Posters Perfected - here's another cool thing I found through Metafilter. One of the users is a fan of movie posters and an art director by trade. He curated a collection of over 3,000 movie poster images with the intention of using an old TV to display them. He edited the posters to remove imperfections and even adjusted the black coloring to look good OLED tvs. All of this is cloud-based so when he adds a new poster to his collection, it's available to you, too! His site has an interesting Before/After section showing some of the touch up work he did on the posters, he's got a great DIY explanation of how you can create your own set-up. He does ask for a one time fee of $20 to cover his hosting costs. I think this is such a cool idea. I just happen to have an old TV I was going to get rid of but maybe I will repurpose it.
- Godzilla, the Official Cookbook - Oh my gosh, how can you NOT want this? If you look this up on Amazon they have pictures of a couple of the dishes like Guaczilla (which uses the avocado shell to make a Godzilla head) and Godzilla Loaf (meatloaf in the shape of a Godzilla foot). This would be such a fun thing to have on hand for a watch party. It's on preorder right now and I am highly tempted to get it.
I had the chance to have lunch with one of my good friends this week. We've known each other since we were 12! We are both committed cat ladies and also committed homebodies. We went to one of the local Chinese restaurants, had a delicious lunch and caught up on what was going on in our lives.
I took Thursday off of work this week because I had a doctor's appointment. I've had some hip pain that I've been ignoring in the hope that it would go away. I think it's been going on about a year now. Not only has it not gone away, it's gotten worse, moved into the other hip and aggravated an old knee injury from 20 years ago (I tore my ACL and never had it repaired, just went through PT at the time). It's gotten to the point that it's hard for me to do my job and I'm in some level of pain all the time. X-rays showed I have advanced degenerative joint disease in the bad hip and moderate DJD in the other one. That's not really what I was expecting to hear. I was hoping it would be something more fixable. I will be getting 8 weeks of physical therapy. I'm curious what the PT will say about this because the doctor pretty much wanted to send me straight to an orthopedic surgeon for a hip replacement, which is something I'm opposed to doing at this point in time.
Listening
I had pre-ordered an album on Bandcamp and it dropped on Friday. Oh my gosh, it is so good! Synthesizing the Silk Roads is:
Compiled from ultra-rare dead stock pressed at a Soviet-era vinyl plant in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, this first-of-its-kind fully licensed album features a supreme selection of Uzbek disco, Tajik electronic folk, Uyghur guitar licks, Crimean Tatar jazz, Korean brass, and genre-defying styles from Soviet Central Asia.If that sounds at all like your kind of jam, then I suggest you check this out.
This is one of my favorite tracks from the album.
My son is always introducing me to cool music. He came over today and one of the things he had me listen to was this dungeon synth music. I really liked it and it's now on my Bandcamp wishlist.
We were looking at all this music on YouTube and while he was showing me that song I saw some album artwork that intrigued me as did the genre - desert synth. The album is Tales from Southern Realms by Ziggurath. Found these guys on Bandcamp, too. Turns out desert synth is dungeon synth with Middle Eastern kind of vibes. I like it.
Reading
I finished my anthology, Familiars ed. by Patricia Bray & Joshua Palmatier. This was the perfect book to read after my epic series. Some of the forms that the familiars took were really creative- in one story, the familiar was an apron!
Now I'm reading A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas. This is the second book in a series. I was gifted the first book and I liked it but I wasn't sure I liked it enough to buy the other books so I checked this out from the library (after waiting 2 months for a copy to become available!). I am enjoying this second book even more than the first one. This is an adventure/romance (although fairly light on that) involving the land of Faerie.
Watching
Still slowly doling out episodes of Slow Horses. I'm on season 3 and season 4 starts on September 4th. After that I will be all caught up. Other than that, I haven't really been watching much in the way of TV shows. I have been watching a lot of YouTube. I feel like this blog entry is already getting kind of long but maybe next week I'll make a list of the channels I watch most.
Well, I'm off to have a cup of Dandy Blend (coffee alternative with roasted barley, rye, chicory and dandelion) and read some more of my book.