I just gave my therapist a link to my Dreamwidth. Only the public entries, but we thought it'd be useful for her to see how I express myself in writing. Obviously I'm a bit nervous about this!
As per my previous post, the audit went OK and we re-scoped down to two days onsite. There may be a few followup questions on Monday but we're basically done with it. I managed to make it to the office for 8:45 ahead of a 9am start!
The main complication was Storm Goretti, which hit the West Midlands and South-West on Thursday and Friday. I walked back from the office in a torrential downpour after work on Thursday, having been loaned a golf umbrella. The rain racing down the hilly streets and pavements soaked my feet, but it was still preferable to getting a taxi in the stationary central Bristol traffic.
I did think about trying to meet up with any of my Bristol friends but I was exhausted even after a shorter day at work, not least due to the early start. It was also distinctly not sitting outside weather. I crashed out for a couple of hours and decided to eat at the hotel rather than venture further afield. I did manage a brief mooch until my digestive system wanted to have a go at me for the disruption.
We finished early on Friday as well, and my boss and I shared a taxi to Bristol Temple Meads. All the direct services to Manchester were cancelled (as were many others across the country) but I managed to get home via changes in Birmingham and Stafford. I got a seat on each leg of the journey, and at least the stops meant I got brief breaks from masking. The one disruption that significantly impacted me was a vehicle driving into a bridge in Levenshulme, which stopped all trains between Stockport and Manchester Piccadilly - so I jumped out at Stockport and got a taxi home from there. I was very glad to be home, and earlier than planned!
We've so far had one problem identified by the audit - we should have done a risk assessment on our Bristol office, because laptops are stored there overnight. I'd been told that it was only used for meeting space and nothing was stored there, so it's a fair cop. I'll get that sorted tomorrow.
I'm feeling pretty good about the audit - our ISMS is lacking in a lot of ways, not least some overdue document reviews, and I'm glad we didn't get wrapped over the knuckles about that. My boss is happy with me, which is always nice.
I'm in Bristol for work for a couple of days. The work is annoying - it's a poorly-scoped ISO27001 audit, pencilled in for five days but I reckon we can do it in two, so I'm hoping I don't have to go back next week.
I spent the train down being That Wanker with my laptop out, updating another couple of documents ahead of the audit. Turns out with no Internet or other distractions I can actually get a few hours of useful work done... I cut about half of our Disaster Recovery Plan out, reducing verbiage to make it more streamlined and effective.
I was clever enough to get an earlier train into Manchester for my connection; the train I was recommended only gave me ten minutes to change at Piccadilly, and ended up running at least 7 minutes late. I managed to end up with a table seat, which was nice, but several hours wearing a mask is always going to suck. The CO2 meter was giving levels up to 2000ppm, so it was definitely worth doing (for reference: 400ppm is "fresh air"; 800ppm is where the CO2 helps the virus to breed. I try to stay under 800ppm without a mask).
Got into Temple Meads, bought a milkshake for a homeless guy, and hopped in a black cab to my hotel. It's a Premier Inn, rather perfunctory, but it'll do the job. I had dinner and went for a walk, which reminded me how hilly Bristol is!
I also enjoyed hearing some proper Bristol accents, and had to stop myself mimicking them. I'm close enough to where I grew up that my accent's veering to the rural anyway!
The Moonwalkers: A Journey with Tom Hanks
Jan. 7th, 2026 12:44 amI just got back from The Moonwalkers. I didn't know quite what to expect but had a great time. "The Lightbox" is a large dark space which allows a film to be projected onto all 4 walls and the floor. The film was about 45 minutes long, narrated by Tom Hanks.
Factually, I didn't learn that much from it, but again that wasn't the point. It was nice that every Apollo mission that reached the moon was mentioned. Usually people concentrate on 11 (the first landing), 13 (which didn't make it) and maybe 17 (the last one). But this film showed that every mission advanced our knowledge and understanding of the moon with experiments and new equipment, including the Lunar Roving Vehicle used by 15-17 which extended the range at which astronauts could operate away from the lander. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguist told me afterwards that the Sea of Tranquility was picked for 11 because it was the most boring place they could find to land, and even that was strewn with boulders which Armstrong had to avoid while landing manually.
The sensory experience was interesting - the images were bigger than IMAX but not too bright, and the pitch black of the room meant there was good contrast between the inky black of space and the grey lunar regolith. Annoyingly, where we were sat (in the "reserved seats" for disabled people), we had a projector shining straight into our eyes, and also had to crane our necks to see some of the video on the wall alongside us. We were among the last to enter and didn't get a lot of time to orient ourselves and find seats; the large bank of seating in one corner was a clue to the "correct" place to sit but it was full by the time we got there, largely of wet coats. Still, that was a minor inconvenience. The sound levels were enough to be impressive but not overwhelming. I didn't notice them doing anything particularly clever with the "surround sound" but again maybe we were sat in the wrong place for that.
The overall impression was one of spectacle. The obvious sensory overload was projecting onto four walls (and the floor!) at once. Everywhere you looked there was something to see, usually in the form of collage. Kennedy's speech at Rice University, for example, is shown on the "main" wall while the sides show various footage of the crowd watching the speech. Experiments on the moon are shown through footage, while all the experimental apparatus for each Apollo mission is displayed on the sides. One of the great shots in the film is Armstrong taking the first step on the Moon, shown as a collage of the recorded TV broadcasts from around the world, with captions in different languages stating that the viewers were watching footage direct from the Moon. Obviously you can't take it all in at once, and that's kind of the point - this is a big overwhelming thing.
This is entirely fitting. The Apollo missions were a huge spectacle, and still represent one of the pinnacles of mankind's engineering capabilities. And the narrative recognises this - Hanks talks about how he watched the Apollo missions to the moon as a kid, and couldn't understand why some of his family got bored after a few hours. It features on-mission recordings from the Apollo astronauts, and interviews the astronauts from the upcoming Artemis mission which will see humans reach lunar orbit again this year, for the first time since 1972. During some of amazing wide shots, and soaring music, I felt tears in my eyes. It was a joy to experience.
For 45 minutes I forgot about the world's problems and revisited one of our greatest achievements. Totally worth it.
Double Lockout
Jan. 6th, 2026 02:29 amRecently I was playing around with the boot systems on my two main computers - laptop and desktop - to enable Secure Boot. This is a quite old tech by now, and helps protect against "evil maid" attacks where somebody has temporary access to your hardware and uses it to install some kind of persistent backdoor. I don't think this is a huge threat to me in real life but it's fairly standard behaviour now so I figured I'd familiarise myself with it.
In the process I managed to get myself locked out of both. This was mildly concerning, because usually I'd use one system to help me repair the other. Fortunately I managed to "repair" the desktop by simply disabling Secure Boot.
The laptop was a bit more complicated. ( Nerdy details )
For all that parts of this experience were frustrating, and the stakes were moderately high since going without my laptop would be a huge pain, I quite enjoyed this little pair of experiments. I learned new things, refreshed my memory of a few others, and found a weak spot in my nerding abilities. A larger, and more importantly faster, USB stick will be replacing its venerable predecessor on my keyring - and I'll keep the old one around for smaller file transfers too, so I don't have to keep reformatting.
Next steps are to figure out why Secure Boot doesn't work on the desktop, and to try and replace Grub with systemd-bootd on the laptop. But that can wait for a while before I'm in another geeky mood...
Merryneum Stasis
Jan. 1st, 2026 08:33 pmUrgh, the lack of routine in the Merryneum is knackering my sleep patterns. I didn't get out of bed until nearly 4pm today. I woke up at 10am with my alarm, then fell asleep until my 11:30am Pokemon Sleep alarm, then I stayed up for a bit but dozed off again. Then I got caught up doing Squaredle. I meant to do a couple of hours of day job work today to get ahead of next week's audit but I didn't get round to it.
At least I have the New Year Doof TV show this evening. It's nice to catch up with the Doof regulars and watch lots of cool and silly videos.
Will try again tomorrow...
There Is No Power In A Union
Dec. 31st, 2025 02:05 pmAbout 9 months ago I joined UTAW, the tech worker's union (technically a branch of the CWU rather than a union in its own right). Recently I left it.
I joined because I was hoping to find a group of like-minded people in the tech industry, to take action on AI/LLM technology, and on the pandemic and Return To Office mandates. I didn't see anything like that on UTAW's website but I was told it'd be like "pushing at an open door". So I signed up, and joined the official Discord.
( Details )
Rather than pushing at an open door, I felt like I was in a maze full of open doors, leading nowhere but twisty circles. Nobody ever told me I couldn't do anything, but nobody explained what I could do instead. it was opaque to those not in the inner circle or not familiar with trade unions. I briefly considered standing for election as comms officer to try and fix some of these problems but I felt the union as a whole was institutionally hostile to improving, and my minimal level of engagement was already sucking a lot of my energy.
Resigning was also a farce; the CWU website wouldn't let me log in or reset a password using the email address via which they sent me communications. So I just cancelled the Direct Debit for my membership payment, and they were right on top of that - a few days later I got a letter confirming my membership had been cancelled.
I do think it'd be good to have some kind of organisation working in the interests of the tech sector and tech workers. But UTAW isn't it - it's something co-opting tech workers to serving the interests of the trade union movement. At least I only wasted a relatively small amount of time and money finding this out.
Coins for Coins
Dec. 8th, 2025 11:32 pmJust replaced the BIOS battery in mother_bones' laptop. A CR2016 cell costs about 50p and we happened to have a spare one in the battery box; the laptop SKU replacement part is just one of those, with two electrodes attached to a small connector. It's shrink-wrapped so you can't easily replace the battery within. A replacement part costs about £8-20.
So I carefully disassembled the part, cutting open the shrink rap with a craft knife, removing the electrodes from the cell with a spudger, and removing the last of the shrink wrap. I replaced the cell, and reconstructed the part as best I could, sellotaping it back together.
It's a bodge, but it works - no more clock complaints on boot-up. Saved us a few quid, and I got it fixed tonight rather than having to wait for a part to arrive.
Tonight, me and cosmolinguist drove over into Wales to visit Park in The Past for a performance of Beowulf. This was in the dirt-floored Earth House, a large building of wood with wool thatch and a fire in the middle. Guests sat at long wooden tables on a mixture of wooden benches and plastic chairs.
"Oswald the Great" told the story in English, from memory, and adapted it a little to the environment, including pointing out how Hrothgar's mead hall in the story didn't have an illuminated fire exit sign. There was a good amount of audience participation, including chanting Beowulf's name when he appears in the story, and some mild heckling, not least from the "high table" of staff reenactor blokes who were cast by the bard as Hrothgar, his wife ("with fulsome beard") and two advisors.
The story highlighted Beowulf getting naked to fight Grendel, and we assumed we were getting the monsterfucking version. Especially when Grendel's mother straddles Beowulf on the ground and starts choking him... but no, it remained mostly PG rated.
There was a bar in the hall, and we had some flavoured mead - elderflower for me, and chestnut for E. The story was told in three acts with breaks between featuring music performances from a talented mother-daughter folk duo. During one of the breaks, I grabbed a very tasty boar burger. It's a shame there wasn't any vegetarian hot food, but E survived with crisps and peanuts.
All in all we had a great time, cuddled up listening to the story, thumping tables and clapping to the music. The drive back through thick mist was fine, fuelled by Radio 1 dance music, and now we are knackered and in bed.
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere
Oct. 27th, 2025 02:13 amBruce Springsteen is a superstar. With five albums under his belt with the E Street Band, his first top 10 single in "Hungry Heart", and a hugely successful tour for album "The River", he's on the brink of global megastardom. The press, the public and his record label are hungry for more.
Bruce Springsteen is a mess. Haunted by memories of his childhood poverty and his violent alcoholic father, he repeatedly finds himself parked outside the now-empty Freehold NJ house where he grew up. He has had a string of girlfriends, but can't bring himself to commit to a relationship. In an isolated lakeside house in Colt's Neck, he records demos on an early four-track. He finds himself obsessed with spree killer Charles Starkweather who killed 11 people in Nebraska, and writes about people disconnected from society, from family, from community. The songs are deeply personal, stripped down... and entirely uncommercial.
This is the setting for the film "Deliver Me From Nowhere". Rather than your standard rock biopic, a greatest hits jukebox charting an artist or band's career from start to the present, this is a focused character piece about a man on the brink of despair, nearly lost to depression, trying to find meaning in the noise all around him. There are few hit songs in this film. We get a small piece of "Born To Run" performed at the end of his tour, and we hear the E Street Band working on an early version of what will eventually become "Born In The USA". But mostly we have the echoey acoustic guitar, harmonica and semi-mumbled vocals of "Nebraska".
We focus on his inner turmoil, how he fails to cope with a fling that's turning serious and putting him into a parental role, while still managing to play in Asbury Park at the Stone Pony club, where performing on stage serves as a distraction from his reality. We focus on his relationship with his father, mostly in the form of flashbacks. Matthew Anthony Pellicano Jr who plays Bruce as a child is incredible, the black and white film turning his eyes into black pits as he warily interacts with his drunken father, played brilliantly by Stephen Graham. And the adult Springsteen is captured by Jeremy Allen White in an amazing performance. The acting, direction and cinematography is all top-notch. It's a joy to watch the film, despite its heavy subject matter.
( But... )
One of the things that confuses me about this film is who it's for, other than cosmolinguist. It's been getting huge amounts of promotion, from bus adverts to the stars appearing on the Radio 1 Breakfast Show, most of whose listeners are far too young to have heard of Bruce Springsteen. And this film isn't a great introduction to Springsteen as a person, or his music - "Nebraska" is now considered a great work, but it was "Born in the USA", the album after it, which propelled him to stardom. Jeremy Allen White said that the only way he could make the film was to portray a rock star struggling with depression and recording a bleak album who just happened to be Bruce Springsteen. And on that basis they did a great job, but I expect that sort of film to be a smaller indie release. I'll be interested to see how the box office numbers work out for this, because I expect it to be a critically acclaimed financial bomb. In this way the movie seems to mirror the album itself, and I'm really hoping that nobody claims this is a deliberate irony...
(I was also slightly sad that there wasn't a post-credits scene where Timothée Chalamet's Bob Dylan is waiting for Bruce in a hotel room to recruit him to the Dad Rock Avengers.)
(this is a counterpart to cosmolinguist's entry here)
We left our intrepid trio unexpectedly still on the Scottish mainland after a last-hour ferry cancellation. The closest place I could find to stay was in Strathpeffer. It turns out that our hotel was a lovely Victorian pile. Our 3-person room was right up in the attic, presumably old staff / servant's quarters. It was called a "mountain view" room but our view of Ben Wyvis was rather obscured by chimneys.
We'd crashed out pretty early after arriving, which is just as well as we were awoken at 7am by a fire alarm. Fortunately this gave me a chance to catch up with correspondence about our ferry journey. Following the Wednesday evening cancellation, CalMac had rebooked our sailing for Saturday morning, cutting our time on the islands in half! But I managed to re-rebook for the Thursday evening, so we'd only be delayed by a day... if the ferry wasn't cancelled again!
The giant breakfast room contained the best breakfast haggis I've ever had. After we checked out we went for a nice stroll around the steep grounds, admiring the old lichen-covered trees and mossy lawns, before heading back inside for a restorative pot of tea, sitting on comfy old couches in a once-luxurious, empty lounge with huge portraits on the wall.
Strathpeffer itself is an old Victorian spa town and the Victorian-era terminus station is still standing, and now houses the Highland Museum of Childhood. This was a weird little museum - it has a collection of children's toys from the last 100 or so years, including some I remember from my own childhood, and the obligatory creepy dolls. There's also history of children's education in the highlands and islands over the last couple of centuries, including how the curriculum expanded from basic 3Rs to include cooking, handicrafts and farming as kids started to learn these less from their parents. There's a story about schools being so poorly funded that children were expected to bring a lump of coal or slab of peat into school with them, so between them the class could keep the fire burning for warmth all day. It was small but surprisingly dense and we spent a good time there.
Next door to the museum was a cafe where we had a nice lunch and fed a very good dog called Fudge who seems to live at the station. There was also a hippy shop where V and E bought a few knick-knacks. Finally we admired a carved wooden trunk with a potted history of Scotland, from Christian missionaries and Viking invasions through to space rockets and satellites! We then tried to visit the Pictish Eagle Stone but got the wrong directions and drove up a farm's drive. We saw the stone from the back and also some Valais Blacknose sheep, V's favourite breed.
We'd had a lovely time in Strathpeffer, but the prospect of a second ferry cancellation had been hanging over our heads, and it was time to get back on the road to Ullapool to discover our fate. This time things went pretty smoothly - we checked in at the ferry terminal, had a bit more of a potter around the town, including V and E checking out some local shops while I played Pokémon Go. I bought a present for sarahseamonster in the local bookshop. We loaded onto the ferry and stood on the deck to watch it pull away from the port. The journey was fairly uneventful - we gave E a tour of the ferry (which didn't take long), grabbed dinner from the onboard restaurant, and then napped in the front-facing lounge. It was dark by the time we pulled into Stornoway, but our AirBnB was only a few hundred yards from the ferry terminal so we arrived very quickly, unloaded our bags and once again collapsed into bed...
Last night was good. Me and cosmolinguist went to see The Witch at the local cinema as a 10th anniversary screening. It's a favourite of V's but they were too tired to join us, and neither of us had seen it before. We grabbed food at Wagamama beforehand, since it was pretty empty and CO2 readings were low, and it was nice to just talk and eat together.
The film is as much a slow-burn drama as it is a horror film; there's a lot of wiggle room for different interpretations of events. The acting is superb on all fronts, but I was particularly impressed by Harvey Scrimshaw playing young son Caleb. On the way out of the cinema I was making comically small bribes for E's soul - "Wouldst thou like a pint of mediocre lager?" and so on.
It was nice to spend a bit of time together doing something date-like.
Stornoway Road Trip 2025: The Journey Up
Oct. 8th, 2025 12:47 amRecently, I went away with mother_bones and cosmolinguist to Scotland. This is a roughly annual trip to see V's son L who lives up there. He works in a hotel in Stornoway, and can only get time off out of season, so we usually go up in mid to late September after most of the cruise ships have stopped. Between the last ferry sailing from Ullapool to the island being about 5pm, the 8-10 hour journey and V's difficulty with mornings, it takes us two days to get up there and two days to get back.
On the way up, we planned to stop off in Stirling, in a hostel which had a room for 3 adults. We got stuck in a very long tailback after a lorry had shed its load, so I can now say that I've had a nap in the fast lane of the M6. This meant we got to Stirling later than planned, and had takeout delivered to our hostel. E and I went to explore the town, making our way up to the castle despite the late hour, enjoying the dark hilly streets. We stopped off for a pint in The Portcullis at the castle, and spotted the looming silhouette of the Star Pyramid which deserves a future look.
The morning after, we drove out of Stirling past The National Wallace Monument but didn't stop there. After a couple of hours driving we broke for lunch at the Ralia Cafe, a traditional haunt for us. I took a photo of E standing by the metal Highland Cow statue outside. I picked up a leaflet for the Highland Folk Museum in the next town, just off our route, and we stopped for a while to inspect a number of rebuilt and recreated buildings in a field, including a traditional Hebridean blackhouse. Weirdly, we ran into some Mancunians who recognised me and E from the Queer Kiki drinks on Thursday which we've only attended twice!
We hit our big snag as we were on the road between Inverness and Ullapool - the evening ferry was cancelled with about an hour's notice. This left us stranded with nowhere to sleep, along with a few hundred other people. We tried phoning around hotels and B&Bs in Ullapool itself but everywhere was booked out. Eventually I found a hotel in Strathpeffer, almost as far back as Inverness, where we could stay for the night. We grabbed fish and chips and a pint in Ullapool, then doubled back for an hour's driving before collapsing in bed...
This weekend just gone was pretty good. On Friday night I cooked dinner and watched The Blackening with V and E, which was very silly. It's the first time in a while we've all been able to sit down and watch something together, and it was very cosy. Gym as usual on Saturday morning with cosmolinguist, except we picked up a friend who's just moved to the neighbourhood to give them a lift with us. It was nice to chat with them.
On Saturday afternoon we went to Manchester Alternative Pride, organised by Queer Roots Collective. It was at the Platt Fields market garden - the old bowling greens have been taken over and turned into a cool community garden growing edible food, but there's also space for a marquee and lots of little nooks and crannies. Again it was great that all three of us could go. We saw friends from a bunch of different places, enjoyed music and food, V got to do some lino printing of beetle patterns. After a little while I took V home due to tiredness, and came back for more drinks with E and friends. We got squiffy, talked an awful lot of nonsense with queer friends, and got crappy takeout on the way home, it was great.
On Sunday, me and E rented a van and drove to Merseyside, to help V's nephew clean out his late Mum's house. This had been planned previously but fallen through, so it was a bit more urgent now. It was a terrible, rainy day, and the house was dusty and its contents sticky. It was a horrible sensory experience for me, but E did a great job of ploughing through the kitchen, and between us we helped him make a big dent in the remaining stuff, including a trip to the tip. It was an exhausting day but I'm glad I could help out family. We came home to dinner cooked by angelofthenorth, chatted with a visiting friend and then collapsed in bed.
Women's Rugby World Cup: Wales v Scotland
Sep. 2nd, 2025 09:49 pmBit of a diary catch up here. Before last weekend, on Thursday 21st August, I spotted an advert for Women's Rugby World Cup 2025 matches in Manchester. I looked this up at home and learned that there were two matches that Saturday 23rd at the Salford Community Stadium near the Trafford Centre - Australia vs Samoa, and Wales vs Scotland. I knew that cosmolinguist, angelofthenorth and P would all be interested, so after work on Friday I tried to make the logistics work. I finally got everyone to agree a plan... and found out that the tickets were no longer on sale! I swore a lot and went to bed, grumpy.
On Saturday morning, the tickets were back on sale. It was too late to make the first match so we watched it on iPlayer instead. It was a drubbing for Samoa and probably wouldn't have been much fun anyway. Once it was over, I drove our gang over to the stadium. There were a couple of logistical snags but nothing that stopped us getting to our seats. I've not watched a sporting match in a stadium before, and it was good fun to be part of the crowd and watch the game up close. For £25 each we got decent seats near the centre line, which was very reasonable for international sport. We were yelling support for Wales, and behind us were a group of Scottish fans, but we never felt threatened or intimidated. Sadly Scotland rather handily beat Wales at the actual rugby, but it was an exciting match all the way and it was good to lean into the energy.
Not something I'd do all the time, but definitely a good experience.
Hospital Date
Aug. 30th, 2025 01:24 amDespite being a four-day week in the UK after a public holiday on Monday, it's felt like a long one. cosmolinguist didn't have any firm plans for this evening but I was thinking about going to a local foodie market, and he was thinking about going down the pub.
My girlfriend has been back in hospital and was told she'd be discharged about 5pm with a bunch of equipment, so I went to fetch her and took E along to help carry stuff. Hours ticked by with no discharge letter and no medication, and by 7 we were getting hungry. So we went out to dinner at Wok and Roll, a basic looking but tasty Chinese place near the hospital, where I had a gorgeous minced pork and aubergine casserole. After that we went to Big Hands next door so I could show the covered roof terrace to E. So we ended up having dinner and a drink together after all. Not quite what we had planned, but it was still lovely!
There was more hospital faffing after that, but it was still nice to spend some time together.
To Wong Foo, Thanks For Bottoms
Aug. 24th, 2025 08:52 pmThis week I saw two films as part of Scene Festival, a queer film festival that's run alongside Manchester Pride. The first was an outdoor screening of To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar, the other classic mainstream 90s drag film that isn't Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Me and cosmolinguist hadn't seen it before. It was an outdoor screening, which was great pandemic-wise; we got there just after the screening started, and most of the deck chairs facing the screen were occupied, but we grabbed a picnic table behind them which was better for holding the pints we grabbed from the bar at Home.
The film's plot is reasonably simple - three drag queens are driving across country from New York to LA, and their car breaks down in a small town. They must stay until a spare part arrives, facing hostility from some of the locals, including a murderous sheriff. It includes threatened and actual sexual assault and domestic violence. But it's a light-hearted comedy, and a fantasy - it doesn't try to be realistic or gritty, and is based around how the locals are inspired and have their lives turned around by the queens. Despite for being a comedy, the girls themselves are never the butt of any queer-phobic jokes. And it's actually really well shot, and acted - Wesley Snipes and Patrick Swayze were known as an action hero and a romantic lead at the time, but they play their parts well. John Leguizamo was a bit more experienced in drag through his stand up comedy at the time and that shows.
There's a description of the difference between cross-dressers, transvestites, transsexuals and drag queens which doesn't stand up well, but was not a bad explanation for mainstream audiences in the mid-1990s. It's definitely a period piece in other ways too - the cops can be the butt of jokes and manage to be a threat without being too dangerous or over-militarised, and there's no mobile phones for a break down or sat nav for the road trip. Definitely worth watching though, with enough camp and kitschy moments to spice it up.
The night after, me and P went to Cultplex to see Bottoms, a high school sex comedy with several twists. The first of which is the queerness - our protagonists are two lesbian virgins, about to graduate high school and both crushing on popular cheerleaders. As they make clear, people don't hate them because they're gay, they hate them because they're "gay, ugly and untalented". They live in a small town where high school football is worshipped to a ridiculously over the top and camp degree, including the football team having a one-sided table at one end of the school cafeteria where they sit like The Last Supper.
After an incident at the start of term, bolstered by some runaway rumours, our girls set up a women's self defence class at the school, run like Fight Club, with the ultimate goal of getting laid. The club takes off in an unexpected direction and the girls ride their success for a while before it comes crashing down, right before the Homecoming Game. Can they get the gang back together, save the football team and get the girls?
This was a "party screening" where audience participation was encouraged, which meant people whooping whenever people beat each other up or girls made out. I was sad to have missed this film in cinemas but seeing it for the first time among a group of noisy queers was actually brilliant fun. It's not a subtle film - the girls' teacher asks on the blackboard "who invented feminism? Gloria Steinem, some other woman, or a man?" and there are lots of snarky inside jokes for queers and feminists alike. I can't recommend it enough if you want silly, over the top and surprisingly gory fun.
Queer Kiki
Aug. 19th, 2025 09:04 pmLast week, our usual Twitch / Discord club stream was rescheduled due to a music festival, so cosmolinguist had an unexpected free Thursday. There's a queer meetup in Manchester every Thursday, so we took the opportunity to head along - the venue has outdoor seating and it was a lovely evening.
We had a good time. There were people there I knew from other queer events across Manchester, including trans gym, but also lots of new people. I had arranged to meet a friend from Discord, recently arrived in Manchester from the States, and they were lovely. We drank beer and cocktails, chatted away, and didn't get home until after midnight. It was a very fluffy evening, and really made me feel like part of a community.
No TERF, No Fash, No SWP
Aug. 7th, 2025 01:33 amThis weekend was Trans Pride Manchester. I'd been looking forward to this for a while - it's a very different occasion from the big corporate Manchester Pride, and there's something very cool about thousands of trans and nonbinary people (plus supporters like me) marching around Manchester. It's a low-budget affair, lots of home-made banners and placards. This year cosmolinguist and I were marching with Not A Phase, who organise the trans gym sessions. The idea of marching as a bloc fell apart pretty much before we left the rally area, but there were still a bunch of relevant T-shirts scattered throughout the parade. P was there with roller derby people, and I gave her a little flag I'd made at Queer Club for her to wave.
Before the march started, there were some good speeches, including from both the outgoing and new directors of Trans Pride Manchester. There's been a changing of the guard at the top, which is a good thing - the old crew did their best but were swamped by the commitment and weren't great at either seeking or accepting more volunteer help. I'm hoping that under new leadership the event will go from strength to strength (and they'll put the events on the website rather than locked behind an Instagram login, and I'll actually get chased up when I volunteer to steward the march!)
Much like last year, fascists happened to pick the same weekend to have their own little shindig in the city centre. On an organising group, somebody from the Socialist Worker's Party was claiming that Trans Pride Manchester should cancel itself and everyone should go join the SWP (Stand Up To Racism being an SWP front) protest against the fascists. And if we didn't, and went to Trans Pride instead, then we were enabling fascism which made us fascists ourselves. This is the kind of bonkers nonsense the SWP usually come out with, but I intended to go from the end of the Trans Pride march to a non-SWP counter-demo anyway. So the message on my placard was "No TERF, No fash, No SWP, Trans Rights" in coloured bubble lettering. Lots of people commented positively on my placard, particularly the "No SWP" bit. They're not actually popular among the communities they claim to represent; just well funded and obsessive.
The march itself was good fun. Positive vibes all around, friendly faces from trans gym, Queer Club, UTAW and other places. The vibes were excellent. My favourite chant was "We're here, we're mad, we're gonna trans your Dad." I'd planned to meet up with a couple of the young queerlings I know from the Internet but neither of them managed to make it and were terribly apologetic. At the end of the march we sat and chatted with friends in Vimto Park, before heading up to Piccadilly Gardens. By the time we got there, we couldn't see any fascists or counter-protesters. So instead we went for a drink with a friend at Mala in the Northern Quarter. Turns out that the fash had marched off to St Peter's Square which is why we missed them. The drink, food and associated chatter was lovely, but I was soon flagging and we had evening plans, so we headed back towards the bus stop.
On the way back through Piccadilly Gardens about half a dozen fash had returned and several of them approached me on seeing my sign, asking to interview me for their shitty fascist YouTube channels. I'm pretty good at being boring, and I didn't rise to their bait or give them any "content". Some other people had come over to make sure I was OK and they said they appreciated the way I handled the fascists. Sadly the buses were screwed up and it took us a long time to get home, and we were both too tired to go out to the trans show at Contact we'd planned. Still, it was a good day!
The next day, I saw pictures of the fascist march. A smaller group, all waving the same flags, looking miserable and practically outnumbered by their police escort. Of course they got all the press coverage again. But we had the better day, the better cause, and the better lives.
Control in the Dark
Jul. 29th, 2025 05:26 pmLast week, P and I went to a Pitchblack Playback event this evening to hear Joy Division's "Closer" album played in full in the dark, at Cultplex in Manchester. The cinema PA was good - not oppressively loud like a nightclub, but bass you can feel and quality good enough to really appreciate the music and the production. They have to keep fire escape signs on for legal reasons, so you get given a little blindfold to keep the last of the darkness out.
I'm not really used to Joy Division as an album band. They only released two in Ian Curtis' lifetime, and their most famous track "Love Will Tear Us Apart" doesn't appear on either of them. There's about a billion releases in their name though, from live gigs, various scraps left around the recording studio, and other ephemera to feed the obsessive fanbase. So listening to this from start to finish was an odd experience. It covers a lot of ground musically, definitely anchored in post-punk driving guitars and basslines but embracing some of the electronic / dance vibes which would later be explored by New Order. If you're sitting in the dark with no distractions your brain certainly makes a lot of connections with other things.
Everyone sitting down was weird, but me and P tapped our toes and jiggled along to the music happily. Which made it a more communal experience than just doing it on my own, which I think would have been a different vibe again. But most people there were in small groups, with only one or two solo adventurers.
Due to P's broken leg we left shortly after the playback concluded - they had a second album listening party that evening, and the accessible exit is through the listening room, so we couldn't stay without essentially being trapped for the duration. It was an interesting experience and I'm glad she suggested it as a date idea.
