Here We Go Again

This one with more impressive antlers :-)

Mars Express French animated sci-fi film, tackling the subject of rights for non-human intelligences. These include both robots and dead people who have had their brains uploaded into robot bodies. Two cops tracking down hackers who 'jail-break' the artificials from their restrictions find themselves involved in a conspiracy of corruption and political manipulation.

It's a really good film, with a well balanced combination of action and ethical debate. It's also very French. Is it a good ending? Is it a sad ending? It might be a bit of both - like the real world, it's complicated, and who knows what the future holds?


Heretic A bottle psychological horror film, with a main cast of just three. Two young mormons visit the house of a man who wants to discuss theology and religion, but they soon start to get a bad feeling about their situation.

Hugh Grant is fantastic playing against type as an evil manipulator, slowly dragging people into a web of death and despair. Some of the religious commentary got a bit heavy-handed, even while valid, but overall I enjoyed it. A good example of what can be done with a small cast and a few sets.


Conclave Loved it! It's 90% political drama, with all the conspiracy and back-stabbing expected of the genre, that just happens to have the trappings of the Roman Catholic Church. It has a fantastic ensemble cast, with not a weak link among them. And of course I loved the ending, which absolutely cannot be spoiled.

Three or four years ago, we bought Kuro a microchip-activated feeder so that he could eat whenever he liked without the two young gannets stealing it.

Kuro was the smartest cat we've ever owned. He was also totally bombproof and insanely curious. To him, anything new was amazing - to be investigated instantly. Any new food he was offered, he would eat precisely because it was different and therefore great! Sometimes he would eat that new food for only a day or two, or maybe a week, and then go on strike and refuse to touch it again because it wasn't as good as his usual food once the novelty wore off.

We put the feeder down that first evening and pushed him into it to train it to his microchip. Then we pushed him towards it again. The door opened and there was food in it. Nom! He backed off and the door closed. We pushed him towards it again. Cool, more food! And then he ate enough and wandered off.

Half an hour later, we heard the whirr of the motor and crunching noises. He used it at his leisure forever after.


Now that Kuro's gone, his feeder was inherited by Yami. Her brother is an endless eater who would be obese if given half a chance. Yami self-regulates, just stops eating when she's not hungry any more, so having food available to her whenever she likes will be fine.

Yami isn't a dumb cat; she's perfectly smart, but she's incredibly apprehensive. Anything new is terrifying until proven otherwise. She disappears under the bed whenever the doorbell rings and won't come out when there's anyone else in the house. Offer her a new food and she refuses to eat it in case it's poison. She had to watch the other cats eat it for a couple of days before she'd agree to try it.

Fortunately, the noise of the feeder motor didn't bother her - she's been hearing it multiple times a day for years, after all. But the movement as the lid opened was a thing we knew we'd have to treat with caution.

We trained the feeder to her chip and set the feeder into stage one of its five training modes. In this mode, the lid is open and gives just the slightest twitch. That worked fine, so we put it to stage two - a little more lid movement. That was disturbing! But her food was right there and she was hungry and she was never murdered by it, so over four days or so, she stopped being weird about it and ate without hesitation. So on to stage three...

We are now into the final training stage where the lid is open just a fraction, so she can smell the food in there better, and she will use it with encouragement, but she's a bit humpy about it still. Once the lid's open, she's fine with it, but she disapproves of the opening movement right under her nose. And she hasn't learned yet that there's food in there all the time, so she could help herself at times other than when the humans yell at cat feeding times. But we're about 80% of the way there.

Kuro training time: 5 minutes
Yami training time: 3 weeks and counting

I was away for five days, two of which were the weekend, but work continued for some of them. We now have all the beams in place and lumber between them - the shoring is basically complete! So now the massive drill and crane have been removed (improving access immensely) and the true process of excavation has begun...



There will be a post on my long weekend away when I have photos organised :-)

I went on a trip to Vendovi Island in the San Juans on Saturday. It was a private island for decades before it was purchased by the San Juan Preservation trust in 2010. Other than a house and boat dock at the north end, the owners left it completely undeveloped, meaning it still has a lot of native plants.

The island is open to the public five days a week in summer - if you can get there. Which means having your own boat or chartering one. My trip was organised by the local audubon society who chartered a boat, so I figured it would probably be my only chance to get to this island and I signed up the first day. Despite being arranged by the audubon society, it was scheduled with the flowering of native plants in mind more than birds (although there were birds).

( Vendovi Island )

Reykjavik is by far the quietest capital city I've been in, which is no surprise since it's also the smallest. But it's weird to be in a capital that you can wander around on a Sunday morning and the streets are empty or have just one or two other people hanging out. It certainly makes it pleasant though!

This photo post is all out of order, because I spent several days in the capital with wildly varies weather. Some of the photos are in date order, some are of the same place in different conditions. The only logic to it is my logic! But there are a lot of photos...

( Reykjavik )

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. This had been sitting on the watch list of a couple of years, but there was always something else we wanted to watch more. And honestly, we should have watched it sooner, because it was a LOT of fun. Tatiana Maslany was brilliant, obviously - she always is. Anyone who's seen Orphan Black knows that she can nail anything - drama, comedy, any kind of character, she's got it, and she proves it again here.

It was the rest of it that surprised and delighted us. The writing was genuinely good, on point with brilliant zingers and the serious undertones. I know some people didn't like the breaking of the fourth wall, but it worked so well (at least it did right up until the last ep, which I thought took it too far). The costume design was superb - everything too big on her as Jennifer, and short and tight as She-Hulk. It is possible to be a Hulk and not rip your clothes on a daily basis with a good tailor and a little thought given to fabrics 🤣🤣🤣 The end credits, done as courtroom sketches were hilarious. The little changes each ep made them mandatory watching even when there wasn't a little episode cap part way through.

So many people obviously put so much thought into all the little details of this series. It's a shame about the weak magic-wand-waving in the final ep, but the rest of it rocked.


Ripley (Netflix). This one was also hanging on the watch list for the better part of the year. I saw very little about it on my tumblr dash, which was surprising, and I took it to be a negative, and honestly? That was real.

Andrew Scott was fantastic, no surprise there. The writing was good, solid and well thought out - no plot holes, some interesting tweaks. The direction was nailed - truly classy, beautifully framed and set up, an Emmy fully deserved. Though having said that, while I understand the choice to shoot in black and white and go full on with the period noir style, it has to be something of a crime to film on the Amalfi coast and not show the colours. I couldn't help looking at it and wishing I could see the sea, the sky, the art and architecture in all their glory.

In the end, though, its biggest failure is that it didn't make me feel. At all. You would think that with eight episodes, they could truly involve me with the characters and their lives and... nope. The 1999 Anthony Minghella film with a third of the running time gave me ALL of the feels, and the Netflix series was all style with no heart ☹️


Cobra Kai season six (Netflix). This had been a long wait! No way in hell was I going to watch five eps a year ago, then five eps five months later, then the final five of the season almost a year after it started. What drugs were Netflix on? In hindsight, having watched it, I can see why they thought it could work, because each batch of five eps covered a mini-arc, but still - an in-universe time jump of a month doesn't justify five months off air 😭

But watched all in one batch, I really loved this season. Cobra Kai has had its ups and downs over the years - as I've mentioned talking about earlier seasons, there was too much reliance on the old writing trope of 'inter-character drama that could have been solved with a five minute conversation if they weren't idiots'. But this season avoided that, and the characters all had reasons for what they did, or didn't, and everything made sense. I loved the ending too. From the start, Cobra Kai has been Johnny's redemption story, and in the end, it stayed true to that and let him take centre stage to complete his arc. It definitely gave me the feels ❤️


Cagney and Lacey. After I read Sharon Gless' autobiography, I got curious, because obviously she talked a lot about the show. I did see some of it when it aired, but I was a kid, and also I never saw it consistently. Gless had been reluctant to take the role when she was offered it, because she was the third actor to play Cagney. Loretta Swit played her in the initial film, but her commitment to M.A.S.H. excluded her from the follow up series. Meg Foster got the role for season one, but that season was canned after only six eps when the network decided it wasn't working. So it was offered to Gless, who initially turned it down. She was shooting a film with Michael Douglas, who was becoming quite the hot property, and she thought her film career was about to take off. It was actually Douglas who convinced her to take the role, pointing out that playing a cop on TV had been very good indeed for his career 😁 (That film Gless shot with Michael Douglas sank without a trace.)

I watched the abortive first season with Meg Foster, and you can see why it wasn't happening. Foster wasn't bad, but she wasn't great, and she didn't have the range. She couldn't play angry. You just never believed her when she yelled - her voice wasn't strong enough to carry that conviction. The difference when Gless took over for season two was immediate.

Season two was... fine. But it was very much episodic TV of its era. There was a bit of continuity, but not much, and when it was missing, you really noticed it. There was one ep, for instance, when information was leaking from the department, and Cagney and Lacey were bullied into spying on their fellow cops and reporting to IA. When the other detectives found out, they started getting the rats in their desk treatment. At the end of the ep, the leak is found, but the titular pair were still being ostracised, and the closing line was Cagney saying that things weren't going to be normal again for a long time. But of course, the very next ep, it was like it never happened.

After that I jumped ahead to season five, and now it was getting to be genuinely good. The continuity was there, actual arc plots and mini arcs running through the season. Things that happened in early eps were mentioned again half a season later. Events had consequences. Now it was the Cagney and Lacey that got all the acclaim, and you could see why it was really groundbreaking TV, and for more than being just the first series to have two female leads. You have to feel for poor Meg Foster, though - you film a show that gets canned for being crap, then it comes back to critical acclaim and gets Emmy nominations for both its leads every year it runs, when literally the only two things that changed were a different actor taking your part and a jazzy new theme tune. Ouch.

One of the saddest things about watching Cagney and Lacey was how little has changed in forty years. There are episodes about racism, about the awful way immigrants are treated and made scapegoats, about misogyny and sexual assault, about the fight for reproductive rights and the hideous people who attack women going into clinics, and damn. It's still the same old shit going on. People don't learn anything 😭

One of the crazy things about watching Cagney and Lacey at the same time as Cobra Kai was seeing Martin Kove in both, forty years apart. Holy hell, he is in amazing shape for a guy in his late 70s. I would have thought he was a decade younger...

The next day in Iceland started with a scheduled three hour glacier hike - with a forecast for rain throughout the day. Fun!

( Another ice day )

Day four in Iceland was the day with far to go - we went from Selfoss to the far side of Diamond Beach, a four hour ten minute drive. Except we took an hour long detour each way to Gulfoss, which made it over six hours of driving. Plus the time stopping at various waterfalls along the way...
The weather continued its pattern of getting worse by the day. But at least if there's going to be a day with lots of rain, it's not so bad if you're spending most of it in the car driving anyway. I'm not a fan of phone cameras generally, but I took a lot of phone photos that day. It's hard to take photos with a real camera when the wind keeps blowing rain and spray onto the lens. There's an advantage to that tiny crappy lens in the back of your phone sometimes 😭

( Water, water everywhere )

The weather was deteriorating each day at this point in our trip, and so we arrived at Thingvellir National Park in rain that was predicted to last for several hours. But we'd planned to walk, and walk we did!

( A drizzly day )