Krypto? Two Days In A Row?

I'm looking forward to Blaugust beginning on Friday for the simple reason it'll give me something to write about. Let me rephrase that. It'll give me something to write about that someone might want to read. 

It's not that I'm short of ideas. More that I'm short of ideas that fit the supposed purpose and function of this blog, which started out as place where I could write brief, pithy opinion pieces about Massively Multiple Online Roleplaying Games and shifted over time to accomodate anything and everything in the broad sphere of popular culture that interested, irked or excited me.

And so it remains. Except, as astute readers may have noticed, it now features mostly posts about things I might watch or play or read or otherwise consume rather than those I actually have consumed.

Which is fine, I guess. As a reading experience I'm not sure there's a huge qualitative difference in a post where I describe some new game I read about and speculate on whether I'd want to play it and one where I recount in needless detail my personal experience with a game I have actually acquired an played, based on little more than the tutorial, which is probably as much as I'm ever going to see of it.

Ditto songs. Back when I came up with the intentionally faux-naif title What I've Been Listening To Lately for my regular music feature, it did at least tend to include some songs I'd been playing in the background while I was writing other posts. Now, it's mostly songs I've heard once and bookmarked, then  listened to once more as I decide what goes into the latest post. 

And does it matter? Probably not. They're songs I liked enough to make a note of and then enough more to keep in on a second listen. I can assure everyone I do still listen to a lot more new or new-to-me songs than ever make it onto the blog, so anything that appears here has at least passed the audition. 

Similarly, I read about and watch trailers for plenty of games I can't even be bothered to bookmark and some of the ones I do save for later get kicked out on review without ever meriting so much as a mention here. Does that make those posts materially inferior to the endless stream of uneccessarily lengthy analyses of every last, tiny development in Guild Wars 2, something that provided the backbone of this blog for the best part of a decade?

Second-to-last GW2 screenshot I ever took. Apparently in October 2023,
which means I must have played more recently than I thought.

 

Posts on TV shows describe a slightly different arc. I very rarely, if ever, write about shows I haven't seen and usually I wait until I've seen the entire run before putting finger to key. Which would be all well and good if I was actually watching any but at the moment I'm not. I literally haven't looked at any of my streaming platforms at all for almost a couple of weeks now. I'm not writing about TV because I'm not watching any.

What I am doing, as I've mentioned far too often, is making music with AI. I do this all the time now. It is close to being the only leisure activity/hobby I have at the moment. It's taken over all the time I used to use both to play games and watch shows and some extra besides. And I have more sense than to post about that more than once in a very long while, much though I'd love to. It'd be the blogging equivalent of cornering someone at a party and reading them your poetry.

With any other spare time I get, I've been scanning, digitizing and editing the novella I mentioned, from which I'm spinning off all these songs. That's taking some time, too. What I'll do with it after that remains to be seen but I won't just be putting it up on this blog or talking about it here other than in this kind of tangential reference. I want to do something a bit more substantive than that although I'm still puzzling over what that might be.

All of the above makes for a somewhat self-indulgent post on the last day of July but a week from now, as we approach Week Two of Blaugust - Introduce Yourself Week - it will suddenly become entirely relevant, appropriate and apposite. Even tomorrow, on Blaugust Day One, it will kind of make sense. 

Maybe don't read it until then? Oh, sorry... too late...

Anyway, in the spirit of writing about things I haven't done, let me say a little about the two new superhero movies that just came out - Superman and The Fantastic Four: First Steps. The first thing I wanted to say is that I have considered going to see both of them. And, indeed, am still so considering.

This is a notable event. I believe the last movie I went to see on release at the cinema was Arrival back in 2016. If I've seen anything since, I can't remember it. I'd blame my absence from the cinema on the pandemic but on that evidence I'd dropped off the wagon well before then. 

Post-pandemic I have tried to get my former movie-going partner to come and see a couple of things with me but she's not interested any more, having also had the habit broken by the enforced shut-down. As for going with Mrs Bhagpuss, who's never been a keen cinema-goer but could occasionally be tempted, now we have Beryl, who cannot be left Home Alone (Although she could sit with us as we watched Home Alone, together, at home, I suppose. I've never actually seen Home Alone...) going out together to do anything non-dog-friendly involves such a logistical performance neither of us can be bothered with it.

Which leaves going to the movies on my own, something I used to do not all that infrequently when I was younger. Much younger. 

I have no existential objections. It's actually a good way to see movies if you want to concentrate on the film rather than have a Shared Social Experience. It's just a bit more effort than I'm quite ready for... although that might be changing.

I want to see Superman enough that I did get as far as looking up the times of showings. I was thinking of going this week but my mother had a health scare and ended up in hospital so a lot of time was spent driving backwards and forwards that could have been spent sitting in a darkened auditorium.

She's back home now, though, and next week is - in theory - clear of obligations (See how long that lasts...) so maybe...

I am and almost always have been a Superman fan, of course, which explains some of the interest. All the same, I haven't felt any burning desire, let alone need, to see a Superman movie since Christopher Reeve first donned the cape in 1978. This movie feels different, though, as evidenced by my previous posts, gosh-wowing over the trailers. 

Superman (And even more so Supergirl.) fans of a certain age have a very particular view of the right way to do The Superman Family. It's been a while since there's been a movie that felt like it might come anywhere close to the mark. This one does and it seems almost rude not to celebrate the occasion by paying to see it.

If Superman has been inadequately served by Hollywood, though, what about The Fantastic Four?  Marvel's First Family, the bedrock on which the entire Marvel Universe was built, have infamously never been given the treatment they deserve by any medium other than the comics themselves. There have been some FF films and they have been bad.

  (The 2015 Version. Apparently the movie is even worse than the trailer. Scary thought.)

By all accounts, the new one isn't. It's good. Maybe very good. That alone makes it worth seeing, if only out of curiosity.

The thing about the Fantastic Four, though, is that they were always more respected than loved, even by Marvel fans. In the 1960s, Superman was old-fashioned in a way that seemed wholly appropriate to the company that published his adventures but the FF always seemed to carry an aura of The Establishment about them that made them something of an odd fit for Marvel's increasingly counter-culture image. 

Let's be honest - Reed and Sue Richards came off like someone's parents. Then Franklin Richards popped out and they really were. What with Johnny Storm seeming to have walked off the set of 77 Sunset Strip and Ben Grimm acting like he had to be in his forties at least, I never really got how the FF were supposed to be part of the same teenage Swinging Sixties set as SpiderMan or the X-Men. It's no wonder their classic run is a whole series of introductions for hipper heroes like the Silver Surfer and Adam Warlock. 

For all that, the team is seminal, with an importance that can't be ignored. Once again, if there's finally a version of the Fantastic Four up on screen that works, I can't but help feel I ought to make some effort to go check it out.

Chances are I won't. I'll likely end up getting both movies on DVD or even watching them on a streaming platform, although that's possibly even less likely to happen than seeing them at the cinema.

I almost said, if you've seen either of them, let me know what you think in the comments, but then I remembered I'm still trying to avoid spoilers so maybe don't do that just yet. Save it for the post when I talk about actually having seen either or both of them.

You might have a while to wait.