The Eldritch Bat

I'm Ellie—Eldritch is long for Ellie. I was born in 1991. I'm nonbinary and go by she or they pronouns. I'm a panromantic asexual, and married to another panromantic asexual*. I'm a full-time wheelchair user due to being debilitatingly chronically ill. I'm neurodivergent (evidenced by the paragraphs instead of bullet points, I guess). I curse—a lot. I'm white: German-Irish-American. Think that's all you should know about me specifically.

This blog is mostly just a ton of random shit: fandom**; nature; shitposts; and rambling—both original posts and in the tags of things. See below the cut for a ton of probably unnecessary About info, and also info for specific tags, my icon, and header.

The strength of The Bourne Identity is that it's not doing too much. It gives you stillness, it gives you humanity, it lets you be with Bourne in the story as opposed to just watching Bourne in the story, which is what Supremacy brings. And even then, the shortness and shakiness and tightness and framing of the shots makes it hard to even watch him! The majority of shots in Identity are around 4 seconds long—that creates a sense of anxiety while still being long enough for you to see what you need to see. The majority of shots in Supremacy, on the other hand, are something like 1.5 seconds. That's too fucking short, it's frantic instead of uneasy. And the shots are generally too tight and too hectic to be able to see what you need to see if you have any kind of difficulty with processing (like Cakewife). Sure, the shakiness was supposed to enhance the action, but seeing as how it's an action movie, it was overused and the story and characterization and even the fucking choreography suffer for it!

A really easy thing to compare are the car chases. The shakiness of the camera was only as much as made sense for being in the car in Identity. And the chase itself was far more controlled, the driving was way more fucking impressive.

Then you've got unnecessary shake for Bourne talking to the Neski daughter. That scene should not have had any shake. It brought nothing to the emotion of the scene—if anything, it was distracting.

I've been trying to sit with things while I've not been watching, really make sure I want to keep up with it, that I actually care about the characters and what happens with them still or whether that was all brought on by intense hyperfixation due to the immense stress of life and needing an escape from it, and I had a moment last night where I got really, like... "let's gooo!" about it, knowing today was the final which means my usual watch days will be back on the schedule, so I feel good about that, too.

There's sooo much negativity going around right now (and for good reason, I won't deny that) that it made me kind of question everything, but I think that bit of excitement about it was the only sign I needed to know how I feel about it. I just...don't know how to not have hope 😅 It's all nothingburgers lately, and I know that, but from what I've seen of the crumbs they're still worth seeing, so I'm here for it. I also know I'm a little less critical, even though I can see what other people are talking about and why they feel that way, so that helps.

Listen. I've said it before and it'll always be something I come back to, but I've never given up on the Pittsburgh Penguins, even though they've been disappointing me for years and years—even when I was barely following hockey they were the only team I paid attention to; I'm not liable to give up on the farm soap—which contains one of the comfort characters of all time, I might add—unless something super egregious happens.

Gifts from my wife from work. She was having fun with the laminator so made me a new bookmark, and the Ted Lasso book was a donation that the staff get first dibs on.