#abalienataecogitationes

oh, this is a lovely question!

in fact it’s not a new job - it’s a return to the place where i did work exp this time last summer, which has employed me on intermittent projects since.

it’s a little Catholic newspaper, so perhaps the best thing about it is that i really care about most of the stuff i’m researching and writing about. in all honesty, it hasn’t deepened my love for the Church (the stuff i come across, the people, the opinions, my God - when Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem He tells them not to weep for Him, but for themselves and their children; i look at the state of the Church and i see why) but i do care, and i get to speak to some fascinating people. it’s amazing how much someone will tell a complete stranger who telephones them and asks nicely about their life. today i spoke to a woman who runs a charity educating and empowering women and orphans of the AIDS crisis in Kenya, and who is in charge of spirituality across her home diocese. amazing.

i do also love the people i work with. we’re overwhelmingly female - our world news editor, sometimes the only man in the office, walks into news meetings saying ‘blessed am i amongst women’ - and everyone is so engaged and talented and interesting and generous.

abalienataecogitationes said:Spoiler: It’s not as good as the Iliad.

thoodleoo said: tbh it’s been years since i’ve read the whole thing. i’ve been assigned to read it like three or four times since the first time but i have never bothered. also i think i skipped like half of books three and five…whoops

gaius-marius-popularis said: Sin

That is definitely on the list.

anastrophic said: 'helen of sparta' YES

it probably was the best outcome. out of the ten, i only saw birdman, the imitation game, and the theory of everything, and birdman was head and shoulders above the other two. imitation game would have been a film that i would've felt was barely not a waste of 2 hours of my life if i also wasn't a big fan of that era of history and knew that that film was historical revisionism of the highest level. pretty sure that was a whole different fictional script that somebody wrote and then somebody else just decided to paste the names of a couple people who existed during the 40s in the united kingdom on. and the money i spent to go to the premiere of the theory of everything at tiff was some of the worst i've ever spent. it was a generic disneyfied clichefest with not a single moment of competence, much less innovation. i think redmayne was the least deserving of best actor, not even having seen the rest of the films.

birdman, as it was, was one of the two films i saw this year where i felt that i had gotten what i paid for (the other being the film i would have picked for best picture, citizenfour). it was competent in all the ways a film should be competent, but i never felt it did anything special, anything that should merit an award, much less a "best" award.

abalienataecogitationes said: I actually liked “The King’s Speech”, yes it was overtly sentimental and pandering, but in a charming sort of way.

i've liked most of the best picture winners i've seen, including all of the ones i listed on that post that i've seen. i can still guarantee that out of the thousands of films made in a year though, they're the ones that pandered the best, not were the best in any fashion. hollywood can't judge itself any more than a cop can investigate another cop. it will never understand why some movies are good and some movies aren't, and that's pretty fucking amazing for a group of people who have making movies as their job.