#may post

.

WHAT I’M READING:

books: 

i finished none of this is serious by catherine prasifka (who, btw, happens to be sally rooney’s sister in law) and very much enjoyed it. i wouldn’t say it’s a 5-star read, but definitely a 4-star one - i finished it in two days and was very hooked! the story is set in dublin and is a cross between three rooms, sally rooney’s general millennial figuring-your-shit-out-in-a-crumbling-world vibes, and metaphorical fantasy? i know it sounds weird, but it really works. the main plot follows sophie, a recent graduate trying to find her way between applying to jobs, evolving friendships, awkward situationships, etc., but also features a mysterious purple crack that randomly appears in the sky and is the subject of much anguish and speculation. the writing style is that crisp, quick, present tense shit that is now a bit cliché but that i will always eat right up regardless, so it really worked for me. however, what i found really interesting and unusual in the book was that the main character never actually speaks. she texts on her phone, has a rich internal monologue, but every conversation she has, you only really get the other person’s spoken quote, never hers. she explains what she thinks, and sometimes mentions what she doesn’t say, but while you know that she does respond something (i.e. she’s not mute), you never actually know what she says. the book obviously wants this to be a reflection on the “noise” that exists around us at the moment (social media, friends, etc) versus the relative “silence” of its main character. it’s like there’s so much being said around her, a constant, neverending buzz, but she never quite knows how to make herself heard/understood within that noise. i found this very clever and effective. generally, i think this book has a lot of embedded metaphors in its characters and situations, some that i really enjoyed (like sophie’s silence), and some that fell a bit more flat for me (like the crack in the sky - a metaphor of the news cycle? capitalism? the pandemic? - or sophie’s twin sister, hannah, who felt so one-dimensional i sometimes wondered if she was real or meant as a figment of sophie’s imagination and hatred of everything she isn’t but feels she should be?). but overall, i really related to sophie’s constant struggles with the split between her “online” life and irl. the book also really succeeds in portraying the difficult space of time between uni and work, where you’re done with uni but in the working world, no one wants you because you don’t have “experience.” all you want is to find a job, any job, to get some sort of validation/stability, and you don’t know what you have to do to achieve it. i really related to that and really recognised myself from a few years ago in the authors’ descriptions. lastly, i also really enjoyed grace, sophie’s best friend, to whom i really related to - it’s always interesting to get an outside perspective on what might be people’s perception of us, even though it’s not always flattering 🤣.

additionally, i am still reading 1984 on my kindle, i’m about 33% in. for now, i have to say, the book isn’t really grabbing my attention. i mean, i know it’s a classic and i do find it very interesting to see all of the “origins” of today’s dystopian novels in this story (and the style is definitely very modern) but i just - idk. i find myself skipping a lot of paragraphs of worldbuilding and description that seem a bit unnecessarily detailed. i suppose that at the time, the concept of the novel was new enough that everything needed to be explained but now, we’ve all read so much dystopia (especially in ya) that i feel like a lot of the intricacies of the world, i would already have assumed. so, idk. it’s definitely a good book and in my journey exploring “modern” classics, i’m enjoying this much more than i did to kill a mockingbird but still, i keep picking it up, reading a handful of pages, and finding my thoughts drifting as i keep reading. 

.

WHAT I’M WATCHING: 

peaky is over. thank god we know there will be a film in a couple of years cause otherwise i’d be utterly devastated. like most people, while my feelings towards this series were mixed (i think i’ll have more of a definite opinion upon rewatch), i really, really loved the finale. i think it was everything we could hope for, especially considering helen mccrory’s passing and the upheaval it obviously caused. i think you could probably write a thesis about the question of whether tommy really was ‘redeemed’ by the end but regardless, i truly loved this. peaky blinders is and will always be the show of my 20s and one of the most brilliant tv series ever made and i think that overall, the finale 100% lived up to expectations. 

in other news, i’ve also watched the abercrombie doc yesterday, which was such a strange and fascinating trip down memory lane, and i just sat with my thoughts for a good while afterwards. i think: 

one of the things that really struck me in mike jeffries’ attitude towards his critics is how much this marketing technique reminded me of ryanair. if you’re not familiar/not from europe, ryanair is an irish low-cost flight company that operates exclusively in europe and is very well-known for providing the Worst Possible Service to its customers, at the lowest cost possible. the planes fly, sure, and you will get there (interestingly, they’ve actually never had a major crash), but the workers are paid absolute peanuts and are employed under ridiculous irish contracts, regardless of where they are based in europe. the working conditions are terrible, the company makes you pay for literally everything, and the ceo openly claims to have considered things like: making people travel standing to save costs, or even making customers pay to use the bathrooms. these are very different companies, obviously, and ryanair has never had any discriminatory behaviours that we know of (if anything, they are known to hire more southern/eastern european staff to be able to pay them shittier salaries as the standard of living is lower in these countries) but i think there’s a very similar vein of: ‘yeah, i’m an arsehole, so what?’ brand image. it really came through in that interview where mike jeffries was like ‘yeah, we are exclusionary, that is our brand model.’ idk if it’s a ‘all press is good press’ ethos, or something else, but the attitude really reminded me of ryanair’s marketing. 

on a broader spectrum, while there is obviously an issue when you apply those conditions to staffing (i.e. don’t hire poc-s, etc.), fundamentally, sure, you can choose to only market to a small, fit, white section of the population, but that’ll make you look like a complete arsehole. and, i found it interesting how the brand image, because it was so outright exclusionary, went from ‘cool’ to ‘uncool’ as we, as a society, evolved as well. there was actually a really good quote from one of the women who were interviewed which summed it up excellently: ‘A&F’s aura went away precisely because exclusion was the root of their success, and exclusion itself stopped being quite so cool.’ it’s such a true statement and it made me so grateful that we, as society, have evolved in the right direction in the past 20 years. when you remember what the 90s/00s were like, it’s really nice to see how far we’ve come (even if obviously, we’re far from perfect these days).

lastly, on an even broader point, it struck me how the rise and fall of abercrombie correlated, over the same period of time, with the rise and fall of the marketing of the american ‘image’ in europe. i think that anyone who was a kid/teenager in the 00s in europe probably remembers how ‘cool’ the people who wore A&F/Hollister in school were, not only because of the brand image itself, but also because that meant they had been to america! i remember that even having an american distant cousin sort of gave me street cred 🤣. whenever i visited them, i would not only bringing all those ‘cool’ brands from the us back for me, but also for my friends! those stores didn’t exist in europe and having american clothing was so ‘cool’ and trendy, because it also demonstrated that you were ‘cool’ and had been to cool places like new york or boston, or la. honestly, i cannot overstate how cool america was back then. they had all this stuff we didn’t have, all these films and tv shows, everyone i knew wanted to live there. i remember two of my friends got into a fight because friend A had gone to new york on holiday and the next year friend B did, and friend A accused B of ‘copying’ her for attention. it was madness. and now, no one i know wants to live in the us, bar from a girl in work, but she always justifies it by like ‘i know it’s bad but my boyfriend is american so we’ll have to live there eventually.’ and i don’t really know where this fall in status came from. is it the war in iraq, or the fact that we all got access to social media and realised america is So Bad in terms of healthcare, racism, etc. or just the living conditions deteriorating there? idk but it really happened throughout the 00s and early 10s, exactly at the same time as A&F’s rise and fall. and, don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of issues with europe, but i think it’s interesting that both A&F and america in general ceased to be aspirational at the same time. 

.

WHAT I’M LISTENING TO:

there aren’t really any podcasts that i truly remember from this month but i’ve very much been enjoying the irish times’ women’s podcast, which has just fed my usual annoyance at the patriarchy 🤣. 

aside from that, top five songs currently are: 

que tout s’danse by noé preszow - i’ve recently gotten obsessed with because i think it might be the theme song to one of the upcoming castles chapters

bad habits by ed sheeran - idk man i’ve just been in love with this song for a year now, it’s not going away. i find it very inspiring. 

anthem by yonaka & barns courtney - another upcoming castles song

the kids are all rebels by lenii - same as the above but also i love lenii so much. i’ve been following her for a few years now but it was so nice to see her finally get the traction she deserved on tiktok over the pandemic!

laura by bat for lashes - another fic song 🤣🤣 omg. not castles though. 

.

WHAT I’M WRITING:

as i’ve mentioned on here the past few weeks, my main focus this past month has been castles. i was hoping i would be able to post by this weekend but that has sort of fallen off track. i’ve been fighting seasonal allergies and been extremely tired due to my company returning to the office; i feel like commuting has taken up even more of my writing time. as i said on here, i’ve been feeling very guilty over my lack of updates lately and feel like i need to cut myself some slack. it’s just so hard comparing my 90k output from sep 2020 to may 2021 (when i wasn’t working) to the barely three chapters i’ve produced since then. it’s even more frustrating because when i do get time to focus on castles and actually write it, i love doing so So Much, but it just takes a lot of time and focus and finding time to do that whilst working full time is just So Damn Hard. 

so like, idk. what i can promise you is that i am working on it. i have about 15k of a first draft at the moment, and i’m working on the rest/polishing it. as i said here, all i know is that once i do manage to get this done the way i want, there will probably be loads of content coming your way at once. so, i suppose, at least there’s that, haha.  

.

WHAT I’M DOING:

you may not have noticed this because i sort of cleverly queued up some posts lately, but i’ve been taking a sort of social media break. i say “sort of” cause it’s not been a hard cut or anything, but i just deleted discord and tumblr off my phone and honestly, i think it was for the best. my screen time was getting absolutely ridiculous and i was having a very hard time focusing on things (writing included) - honestly, being constantly on my phone just wasn’t much fun anymore. i probably will reinstall tumblr eventually but i think, for the most part, i’m going to stay off discord (or at least, off the regular “chats”), just concentrating on fanfic conversations, etc. you might or might have seen it (not linking anything here cause i don’t want to restart the debate, and it’s not my point), but i had a disagreement with a discord that was created recently, restricting membership to a particular age group. and, it got me thinking a lot about the way we’ve now “restricted” fandoms to “exclusive” discord servers, that so few people can access, especially when they are invite-only. there’s gazillions of hp discord servers at the moment, each centred into their own little silo, and while i completely understand people who think differently, i’m not sure that’s what i want for myself. 

i think we’re kind of congregating with fans that not only have the same general interests as we do, but also are of the same demographic, same countries, same fandom niche, etc. it’s becoming more and more niche to the point that disagreement and debate is practically nonexistent. and, don’t get me wrong, i’ve 100% participated in that myself, and i’ve found amazing communities and met amazing people along the way, but i generally have been finding that we are all a bit guilty (again, myself very much included) of finding our own safe echo chambers, both in fandom and otherwise, to the point that interacting with the “outside” and people who think differently becomes harder and harder to tolerate. like, yeah, there are a lot of stupid kids on tumblr, and a lot of arseholes, but i think we actually need those to live healthily in society. and again, it’s not a diss to anyone who does seek those “safe” secluded spaces, i’ve sought them myself in the past, but i don’t think they’re actually good for my mental health and the person that i am. as proven by the fact that i needed a social media break from it all, lmao 🤣🤣. 

so anyway, i’m still on discord, and i might still interact here and there, and will defo get back on tumblr, but i think i’m better when i’m on the sidelines on this one, ahah.

anyway, i think that will be all for now. i hope you all have lovely month :). 

lots of love,