An Odd List-Type Assortment

Sorry this is kind of a messy post. It's just a random list of things that isn't enough to make individual blog posts on

Books I've read: 

Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

We Were Liars by E. Lockhart

The Labyrinth Novelization 

The View From The Cheap Seats by Neil Gaiman 

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl 

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery (Loved this one. All these books were good but this was one of my favourites)

Secrets For The Mad by Dodie

 My Plain Jane by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, Jodi Meadows (I thought 3 authors might be too much but they pulled it off I think)

Some YouTubers and Videos I've Been Rewatching Way Too Many Times

Jenny Nicholson (especially her SpiderQuest video & her Top 10 Halloween movie list lately) (And for real though what happened to Buzzy? I'm invested) 

Frank James (His 16 personality skits are my favourite)

Defunctland 

The Take

The Theorizer 

Morgan Adams 

Rachel Maksy (she's probably the one I've been watching most consistently lately)

Bernadette Banner (I don't sew but watching these sometimes I wonder why I don't)

Micarah Tewers (she's insane, love her)

Lindsay Ellis

There's a bunch of others. I spend way too much time on YouTube.

Me while watching too many Unsolved Crimes at midnight

The Sense and Sensibility commentary with Emma Thompson and the Producer is absolutely hilarious and interesting. Emma Thompson is incredibly British and I love her.

Microsoft Word is expensive. I've been using something called Apache Open Office and as far as I can tell it's practically the exact same as Microsoft Word except it's free. You can even open Microsoft Word documents in Open Office. It's been a lifesaver because I can't afford Microsoft Word. I was worried it was going to be a scam or some sort of virus download but I've had it for months and use it all the time. I don't know if this is helpful to anyone else but it was for me.  https://www.openoffice.org/

Berries and milk. It's one of those things my family has always done and I just sort of assumed everyone else did it too. You pour frozen blueberries in a bowl and then you pour milk into the bowl like it's cereal and just dump sugar on it (the quicker the better). It tastes amazing. I love when all the berries freeze together in a mound that you pick at and slowly the colour of the milk changes to this really pretty purple. It's incredibly aesthetic.  

Movies Part 4

I will probably make way too many of these posts but I find it helpful for myself to look back over later. Some of the GIFs aren't the best quality but they were the best I could find for some of them.

Tomb Raider

This was just a fun movie and I felt like I needed to start a whole workout routine afterwards.

Red Eye

This movie just really impressed me for multiple reasons. One reason was that this movie was very contained and with the situation happening I found it really interesting. A good majority of the movie was on a plane or in her house but that was closer to the end anyway. Lisa (played by Rachel McAdams) was an amazing Final Girl. The Final Girl trope means a lot to me and I just find it fun to watch as well 

Happy Death Day 1&2

I absolutely loved both of these. It's Tree's birthday and it ends with her being murdered but when she dies she wakes up and has to repeat the day and she keeps trying to find out who kills her and stop them so the loop will stop happening and save herself from being murdered. It's surprisingly comedic actually. I adored all her angry rages. She started out as kind of a terrible person but she gets better. Being murdered every day is great for character growth apparently. She's great, I love her.

All 4 of the Scream Movies

I'm generally not a big fan of Horror movies but I thought these were good. They felt more thriller than horror and they were very self aware about themselves. Sydney Prescott another amazing final girl.

Gravity Falls

I have no idea how to sum up this show in a Gif. It's perfect any time of year but it's set during summer break so it felt in theme and I got emotionally attached.

It's a bizarre and insane show, I love it. 

The Mummy 1&2

Loved Evie's drunk conversation. She's a really great character

I actually did see these when I was younger but I barely remembered them. I loved the first one. There was things I liked in the second one but it wasn't anywhere near as good as the first one. 

It was a cheesy action treasure hunting movie and it was pretty much everything I wanted. 

The second one has a terribly CGI'd Dwayne Johnson that's half scorpion and it's so bad I can't stop laughing at it.

What We Do In The Shadows

This is just a completely hilarious and satirical 'Mockumentary' of a group of vampires living now-a-days.

Tolkien

Onto the more fall end of this list...

I absolutely adored this movie. It's a biopic of Tolkien's life and it's very Dark Academic and Autumn-esque and the cinematography is stunning. I felt really inspired to write after watching it. It's definitely on my list of fall movies.

Summer Flowers And Skies

Summer is slowly coming to an end. It's still going on but Fall is on the horizon and I'm incredibly excited for it. But surprisingly I've really been enjoying Summer this year in between the times I've died in the heat. Maybe it's because it been an odd sort of Summer and Fallish combination at the same time. Part of the reason was I had a Peach Smoothie from McDonalds and it absolutely changed everything for me. It was so good.

   Anyways, before Summer slips too far away I took some photos of some plants and things.

The sunset was stunning one night with cotton candy blues and pinks and blazing colour in other places. My camera didn't do it justice but it's still pretty.

A couple of my youngest siblings came out while I was taking pictures and kept sitting on plants and picking them which was incredibly inconvenient but they were too cute about it to get mad at.

  

This geranium was difficult to get a picture of because the sun would come out and then disappear again and I had too quickly change settings constantly. But it was actually great because I'd notice plants I hadn't before like the purple bud above.

I was obsessed with this purple sweet pea flower because of the brush stroke looking pattern on it.

The bees were hard to get a picture of because the moment I'd get it in focus they'd move but I finally got one.

A failed photo of the moon but my mom told me that bright star there is actually Jupiter so that's cool 

In Which I Tony Stark A Post On Pre-Raphaelites

In 1848 a group of seven people called themselves 'The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood' in London in one of the members parents' houses. Well three gentleman were the original members. The rest were invited or requested to join later. They were under 25 (at least the three founders were. I haven't researched enough for the rest) and were disillusioned with the then current genre of painting. I'm not sure how you found a Brotherhood like this, but all I can picture is a group a Romantic Era artistic gentleman that are disenchanted with how the world is making glorified pinky promises to change things. It's my favourite pretentious boy band ever. So if anyone asks that's my answer. This is my favourite boy-band even though they weren't actually a band.

This group lasted for five years and apparently made quite the controversy. Ruffling feathers with paintings others called blasphemes. Notably Charles Dickens who thought John Millais's painting called 'Christ in the House of His Parents' made the 'Holy Family' look like alcoholics and slum dwellers and he thought the Mary in the painting looked ugly. The model for Mary was John Millais's sister-in-law Mary Hodgkinson so oops there with the tact Dickens. 

In fact, according to the Wikipedia article on this painting, Dickens described Mary as 'An alcoholic who looks so hideous in her ugliness, she would stand out from the rest of the company as a monster, in the vilest cabaret in France, or the lowest gin-shop in England.'

This is the painting btw. Mary is in the blue dress. 

Along with the other criticisms of it (some being that no one was wearing togas and that is was dirtier than depicted in most artwork involving Jesus or the apostles. Not even mentioning some of the more racist comments about it.) There was such a controversy about this painting that Queen Victoria herself requested to see the painting in private. But this painting and the controversy over this painting made the Pre-Raphaelite Brother-Hood movement famous.

I guess the Brotherhood's devotion to medievalist artwork and attention to detail was seen by some as jarring and ugly. I am getting a lot of this from a Wikipedia article not going to lie. Others loved this style and it reflected in their art. Eventually as all boy-bands tend to do they broke up after losing and replacing a member and while the style of the brother-hood continued, other artists could no longer offically label it PRB (Pre-Raphaelite Brother-Hood). So I guess the other ones count as off-brand knock-offs?

It was a wild ride for this group of guys. They had controversy, scandals, praise, pretty much everything you could hope for or expect from artistic 25 year old or younger members that make a brotherhood in their parents London basement. This is one of my favourite things ever and I needed to share. 

So shout out to that one comment on one of Taylor Swift's Folklore songs that said it had Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic and I needed to know what that meant which sent me down this rabbit-hole. I'm very grateful.

Summer In A Day/A Pretentious Picnic In The Woods

Aside from freaking out and obsessing over Taylor Swift's new album 'Folklore' (the Cardigan music video is gorgeous), eating McDonald's at a beach once for my sister's birthday, and being excited for the second season of Umbrella Academy dropping, I really haven't done anything summer related which has been sad. It's my own fault of course but I feel like I've been missing it. So in anticipation of watching Umbrella Academy's second season, me, Skye and her sister did summer in a day essentially. It was Skye's idea and I'm so glad it all worked out.

We played this song for the picnic 

We tried Gelato and Cannoli for the first time  which has been at least a decade long dream of Skye's. Cannoli is tube shaped Italian pastry filled with cream and chocolate chips and there's something else but I don't remember what it is. They were both absolutely amazing and perfectly summer.

We went to a few stores for supplies for a pretentious picnic in the woods and went to a fruit stand which was a big thing on our summer lists

We didn't realize the sparkling pop bottles we brought weren't the cork top kind and it was one of those sharp glass bottle tops but we didn't want to go back and get a bottle opener so Skye tried opening the bottle on a stump and the stump broke. Then she tried opening the bottle with a butter knife and after she almost stabbed herself in the chest she got it open and it was such a moment for all of us.

           

 

           

                                 

 Surprisingly we weren't bothered in the woods with the exception of a few flys which bothered Skye the most because by this point she was covered with pop. Gatsby would approve of this slightly feral, faeish, french-like picnic as a peak summer celebration.

  

  

We were taking Polaroids while we were having the picnic and wanted to get a shot of the sky because the light was really pretty and we picked up something on the camera which we nicknamed the void. It started off on a Polaroid as a couple specks and then started getting bigger every time we took a picture of it but then we changed the setting on the Polaroid camera and it disappeared so that was weird. For some reason every time we do something together something odd always happens and that was our X-files moment this time. It's probably just over exposure but it's still strange.

You can sort of see it

Then later we went night swimming for a few minutes and we expected to absolutely freeze, but the water was perfect and the night was stunning. It was all black velvety and there was the moonlight reflections on the water and we swam away from what was probably a patrol boat that was driving pretty close to us and most likely couldn't see us and we were just hoping we weren't going to get yelled at for being there or run over. And some of us were choking on water, we're not the most graceful. We also had makeup on and glitter and it got in some of our eyes. We listened to the radio and looked at the moon which was orangey when we were driving but white in the lake. But it was all perfect and it couldn't have gone better.

Then we waited and sat on a trampoline watching a thunderstorm in the distance until midnight for season two of Umbrella Academy to drop and watched a couple episodes before we all crashed and then we finished it the next day along with a bunch of Gravity Falls episodes.

It was all so perfect and stunning and everything I could have wished for and I'm so grateful we were able to do it