Obsessions
This was going to be one of those grab-bag blog posts about random stuff from my week. It mostly ended up being about movies, but there's some other stuff too.
Tomodachi Life continues to devour my free time. I've had to force myself not to play it this weekend because I'm on a (self-imposed) deadline for this fanfic I've been working on. Very sad for me. I miss my Miis.
And here I am writing this blog post instead anyway. Oops. Better get on with it.
Let me yell at you about movies for a bit
2026 has been a big movie year for me so far. I've been going to the cinema a lot (my unlimited pass for the local multiplex continues to justify itself) but my partner and I have also been watching a film almost every night instead of television.
I used to be a big TV girlie, but I don't think it's that controversial to say that the Golden Age is definitely over. There are six million different prestige dramas on six thousand different streaming services and none of them are that great. I fire up Poob and am confronted with some show I've never heard of in which Susan Sarandon plays a dentist who starts fudging the Boston mob's dental records to pay for her granddaughter's cancer treatment. I could spend eight hours watching that, wait three years for a second season that's slightly worse, and then the show will be cancelled. (What is the name of the Susan Sarandon mob dentist show? "A Brush With Danger"? "Impacted"? "Boston Dental"? Nobody knows because they were all busy rewatching The Office again.)
Or, instead of all that, I could just watch a movie and waste, at most, two and a half hours of my time. This somehow means I've watched almost 100 movies since the start of the year. Some of them have been terrible, but that's okay. I just love movies!!!
We accidentally started a streak of watching films from 1997, which turns out to have been a seriously stacked year. I have a lot of old favourites from 1997 already (Princess Mononoke, Face/Off, Romy and Michele's High School Reunion) but I've discovered some new favourites too. Clockwatchers is an underrated gem and Boogie Nights absolutely knocked my socks off. My 1997 timewarp could probably be a blog post in itself, so maybe I'll do some sort of wrap-up eventually once I burn myself out on the year. I still have to get around to Perfect Blue and I feel like people will be mad at me if I don't watch Perfect Blue.
Coming back to the present, though... we went to see Obsession at the cinema yesterday. I'm not a massive horror movie fan, but I will watch them sometimes if they sound interesting or have enough hype (or if they're Final Destination). Sometimes this backfires on me. Everyone went on about how Longlegs was the scariest thing ever, and then when I finally watched it, I thought it was pretty bad.
But in Obsession's case, I think the hype is very much justified. I was surprised by how genuinely disturbing I found it, and also by how much I've been thinking about it since. Which I guess is appropriate! Inde Navarrette's performance in particular is incredible – so terrifying and heartbreaking. I think it'll end up being one of my favourites of the year.
I feel like I could write another thousand words about this movie, but I also don't want to spoil it for anyone, so I won't. (But if you're someone who needs to check trigger warnings, check the trigger warnings.)
Gripe of the week
I massively cut down on caffeine many years ago because it was giving me anxiety spikes and heart palpitations. Now I drink herbal tea. I usually have at least five boxes on the go at once, because I like to have different types of tea for different times of day. And there's always one box that I only have as my first cup of the day.
For a while, my morning tea was Clipper's lemon and verbena blend, but then the supermarket stopped selling it. So I moved on to the Twinings strawberry and cucumber blend, which was really tasty, but they changed their packaging to individually wrap each teabag in single-use plastic foil. This fucked me off so much that I switched to Pukka's turmeric, ginger and orange tea. Turmeric and ginger is my go-to during the day anyway, but the orange gave it a little extra something.
I think I'm going to have to find a new morning tea. Pukka now costs £4.75 for 20 teabags. I used to be able to find it at a solid discount regularly, but now it's just been full price for ages. I refuse to pay 24p per teabag!
Eww, metrics
I try not to stat-watch too much, but the Ratlands passed 15,000 views this week. That's pretty cool! I know some of those hits are from bots, but some of them are from actual people. So if you're one of them: thanks for looking at my website! I continue to be glad I made it. If you haven't made a website, you should make a website.