Just 5 Quick Things that caught my attention recently. A whenever the mood strikes me series of things that I find interesting.
I like writing out these 5 Quick Things but I don’t want to do it every week so I’m just going to do them whenever the mood strikes or when I find five cool things to share. Hopefully you can enjoy SOMETHING from this list.
>Number One<
Lore Olympus – A modern comic retelling of Persephone
This comic is the cutest. A retelling of the story of Persephone in a very loose and expressive art style. The comic is a bit silly in a lot of aspects but there’s a lot of love in it and its tooth-rooting sweetness. It’s also one of my favorite mythological stories so it’s worth a look and maybe even a follow 😉
>Number Two<
Was Fanfic Different In the Olden Days? (Yes, but also No)
I am trying to compose some of my own thoughts about how I feel about the changing landscape of how we tell stories. While part of that is thinking deeply about how TV, media, and other commercial media has changed it’s also partly about how fan-driven media like fanfic have changed and this wiki summary and linked articles are an excellent starting point for really diving in to that discussion.
>Number Three<
I Bless The Rains in Gaelic
Humanity can stay today. This is Toto’s “Africa” preformed in Gaelic by what looks like close to 100 Irish teens. It’s one of those things you don’t realize you need until it’s right in front of you. Humans find an infinite number of reasons to connect with each other – and to me, this dumb 80’s pop song can make the world feel somehow smaller and a little more magical.
>Number Four<
Challenging Food Show: Ugly Delicious
Netflix has the power to make a lot of really amazing things and this is sort of one of them. Ugly Delicious is headed by David Chen, who I find as fascinating as I do frustrating. The show butts heads with its own mission and Chen himself has some weird ingrained bigotry and biases that make little sense but that’s kind of what the show is about. It’s about more than food, it’s about humans and appropriation, it’s about the political and the personal acts of eating food, and existing in a world that holds up one thing as good because of its origin but looks down on another for the same reason. I found the show genuinely difficult to watch for a number of reasons but it gives an interesting slice of life.
Pros: Tons of history lessons, beautiful slices of life, aggressively anti-imperialist and anti-appropriation, challenging in ways that are unexpected
Cons: Low on women’s voices, David Chen has a lot of weird biases that often made me want to stop watching because of how uncomfortable I felt, meandering narrative in many episodes makes it easy to tune out
Overall though it’s one worth watching as you tuck in to some take out on a lazy Sunday.
>Number Five<
An Antidote to the Negative Internet
I don’t know if it’s just a weird twist of getting old or maybe the world is just shitty enough that I want something good sometimes but I find myself following more positive content these days. That’s where this channel comes in: CinemaWins. It’s the antidote of CinemaSins, the troll-y, trash factory of a man listing nitpicks and stupid complaints at movies people liked. So instead, CinemaWins turns the formula upside down and he simply goes through movies and lists everything he likes about them. I can’t say I’d watch every one of these but if I’m in a really bad mood it can be nice to watch one and realize that yeah, movies are good and people put a lot of thought and love in to bringing fun and wonderful things in to this world. We should all be so lucky to take a moment and just appreciate that some things in this world are simple and good.
That’s all for today, see you again once I find five cool things 🙂