Movie Review: Argylle

Directed by Matthew Vaughn, 2024
IMDb Listing
Available on Apple TV

Pros: weird, lots of twists

Cons: you have to be in the right mood to enjoy it, the trailers spoil several plot twists (so try to learn as little about it as you can before seeing it).

Elly Conway is a novelist who gets in trouble with a real secret service agency as her ongoing series gets too close to the truth.

I’d never heard of Argylle when I saw it, which is the best way to approach this movie. It is so much fun. Wild and bizarre in just the right ways to be funny and charming. The less you know about the plot going in, the more interesting the twists are, as you really don’t know what’s coming next. There was even one laugh out loud moment towards the end where the situation was so comically dumb, but acted so well with such good effects I truly laughed WITH the film, enjoying the absurdity.

The actors are all great, taking their roles seriously despite the truly bizarre direction the film pivots to at times. There are some fun, well-choreographed fight scenes and good special effects.

You have to be in the right frame of mind to enjoy this. A lighthearted, go with the flow kind of mood. Because you really have to turn your brain off and just enjoy the ride. If you can do that, it’s a highly entertaining film.

TV Show Review: Fallout Season 1

IMDb listing

Pros: interesting character arcs, some great plot twists, good action sequences

Cons: lots of blood and gore, some nudity

Lucy MacLean leaves her mostly idilic nuclear fallout vault to rescue her father who’s been kidnapped by raiders. She is wildly unprepared for the world she finds on the surface.

I have never played the Fallout games though I watched part of a playthrough once (can’t say which game it was). So while I knew a handful of facts about the Fallout world (Pitboy, mutants, vaults), I was basically coming into the show blind.

I had concerns about the amount of gore in the trailer. I’m not a fan of gross humour/horror. So I watched the first episode as a test. And then kept watching. While there is a fair amount of gore, strategically closing my eyes at the right moment has helped (and the moments are generally telegraphed, so this worked well for me).

There are 3 main protagonists whose stories interweave, and they’re all compelling in their own ways. Two of them (Lucy and Maximus) have fairly simple backstories and motivations. The Ghoul’s story gets more and more complicated as the series progresses. The world’s complexities makes achieving their goals a real challenge. Watching Lucy confront her beliefs and see how she’s forced to change in order to live in this new world was heart-breaking. Ella Purnell is brilliant showing the progression from Lucy’s naivety to survivalism. Similarly, seeing who the Ghoul used to be before the nuclear blasts and wondering what’s brought him to this low point is interesting.

The set designs were beautifully done. I loved how they reinvented technology based on the divergence of history. The VHS style videotapes were kind of fun, as were some of the robots.

There were a lot of great fight scenes in a variety of locations. I appreciated that they were all fights for survival, rather than feeling cleanly choreographed. Everyone fights dirty in this world, or they die.

The story had some excellent plot twists (though, apparently many of these are known game storylines, so may not be surprising to those who’ve played them). I was happy that so many questions were answered by the final episode, while leaving enough to segway into a second season.

If you’re ok with gore and some nudity (one episode has a weird scene where a group of people derobe), then give this a try. The acting is great, the characters compelling, and the story shockingly good (especially compared to some other video game shows lately *cough* Halo *cough*).

Video: When You're Married to a Helldiver

I've been watching some youtube videos of people playing Helldiver 2, so this video by the Warp Zone made me laugh.

Ross Scott on Stop Killing Games

I've been watching Ross Scott, aka Accursed Farms' Freeman's Mind and Ross's Game Dungeon videos on youtube for years so I knew he was concerned about game publishers destroying video games for years. When Ubisoft decided to kill their online servers for The Crew, he kicked things into high gear. 

Basically, if you own a copy of The Crew, you're about to lose access to the game you paid for, forever. The move to online only games means there are more and more games each year dependent on publishers to maintain services that allow you to play. Once they stop, poof, the game - and the money you spent on it - are gone.

I'm embedding the long version of what he want to do to stop publishers from doing this. But if you want the VERY short version, he's got a 50 second video here.

There are 2 aspects of his campaign, depending on where you live and if you own a copy of The Crew.  If you own The Crew and live if France, he gives information on how to bring up the issue with Ubisoft and the French consumer protection agency. If you don't, or live elsewhere, he's setting up petitions you can sign.

In addition to the video, he's also got a website, stopkillinggames.com, with more information.

Book Review: Anxiety Workbook for Women by Bianca L. Rodriguez

Recently I’ve been working on reducing my anxiety so I requested this on NetGalley.

The book has 2 parts (Understanding Anxiety & How to Manage Your Anxiety) and 9 chapters (Anxiety & Women; Navigating Life with Anxiety; Calm Your Body & Mind; Observe Your Anxiety & Identify Your Triggers; Release Yourself from the Cycle of Worry & Rumination; Replace Your Anxious Behaviors with Healthy Ones; Navigate Relationships and Manage Social Anxiety; Acknowledge & Address Specific Phobias; and Reclaim Your Life & Reach Your Goals). The book ends with a short list of resources, online sites for additional help if you need it.

The first chapter has a lot of repetition, which is great for getting you to really take in the information. I found it helpful to learn why anxiety exists and how it’s meant to help in dangerous or unusual circumstances. Anxiety becomes a problem when it overstays its usefulness.

The book progresses through teaching you about anxiety, then ways to deal with different aspects of it using a variety of exercises. I found some activities worked better for me, but the variety means people with different ways of learning and thinking - and different levels and aspects of anxiety - will find useful activities. There were several exercises dealing with intrusive thoughts/ruminating on past actions, on how to relieve black & white thinking, etc. Unexpectedly the book didn’t just deal with ways to improve yourself in private, there’s a section on how to do small talk and introduce yourself to strangers. The chapter on breaking down goals into manageable pieces was also unexpected and useful. I really appreciated the reminder to celebrate your successes.

It is useful to try various exercises, even if you don’t think they’ll work for you. I did the ‘write a letter to your anxiety’ and it was surprisingly insightful.

Through the work I’ve done over the years some of these lessons were no longer necessary for me, but I could see how they would have helped (and were similar to techniques I used in the past).

If you suffer from anxiety and want to learn techniques that can help, give this workbook a try.

Book Review: Cascade Failure by L. M. Sagas

Pros: fun and interesting characters, tight plot, some thought provoking moments, good fight scenes

Cons:

Here’s the back cover blurb, which is simply perfect.

There are only three real powers in the Spiral: the corporate power of the Trust versus the Union's labor's leverage. Between them the Guild tries to keep everyone's hands above the table. It ain't easy.

Branded a Guild deserter, Jal "accidentally" lands a ride on a Guild ship. Helmed by an AI, with a ship's engineer/medic who doesn't see much of a difference between the two jobs, and a "don't make me shoot you" XO, the Guild crew of the Ambit is a little . . . different.

They're also in over their heads. Responding to a distress call from an abandoned planet, they find a mass grave, and a live programmer who knows how it happened. The Trust has plans. This isn't the first dead planet, and it's not going to be the last.

Unless the crew of the Ambit can stop it.

The characters are so much fun. They’re all neurotic in complementary ways. Surly and snipey at times, talkative and playful at others. Eoan’s curiosity about everything was a real joy. Despite their arguments it’s clear Nash and Saint are a tight knit crew. Seeing Jal and Anke dropped into the crew’s dynamic made for some great interactions.

The plot is tight with enough down time to get to know all of the characters between chase scenes and fights. There are some real tense moments.

The politics of this future are suitably complex without taking over the story. There are a few decent questions about morality and whether it’s better to focus on the needs of society at large vs saving your personal friends and family. And who should make the necessary sacrifices.

It’s a book about the choices we make and how we deal with the consequences of the bad decisions of our past. Of working as a team to complete a goal. Of betrayal and redemption.

It’s a delightful story that, though it dealt with heavy issues at times, left me feeling hopeful about the future.

Travel Journal Ideas

I was speaking with a friend recently and we started trading journalling ideas and I realized I'd learned a bunch of things these past few months that she didn't know about, so I thought I'd share them with a larger audience.

For my past few trips I wanted to come back with pretty journals. For France I had this lovely idea of sitting in front of a cathedral sketching pieces of architecture. Well that never happened. These are research trips and they're packed FULL of sites, so there's little downtime. And my priority is photographs - hundreds of them per site, that all need to be double backed up (which for Italy took over an hour a night as my photo file sizes got larger and my phone was old).

Before I left for Italy I researched gifts for techies, looking for ideas for my husband, and stumbled across the Canon Ivy 2 (not sponsored). It's a mini printer that makes... 2x3 inch stickers! They're thin, so they don't bulk up my journal, you can customize them with text and other features (frames, shapes) and there are templates on the app so you can split the sheet into smaller photos (I generally printed all of mine as quarters, with 1/8s for things like food). I made my own mini template with the photo sizes so while I was writing my journal I could block out the space with a squiggled frame and then print and add the photo in later. The photos are on the darker side, a bit 'artistic' looking rather than true to life/vibrant. You can edit them in the app so I tended to brighten mine. There's also a blue sheet in each paper pack that you run through the printer first to calibrate it, and someone online suggested if you get a good one to keep it and use that one over and over again as some give brighter results. The printer comes with 10 pieces of paper. Replacement paper is not cheap though, and you have to use their stuff. (You can see three 1/4 pictures at the bottom of the picture below, the printer, a full page, the blue calibration paper and a full pack of 10 pages.)

While the printer worked great, I still want my next journal to be even prettier. So I bought a bunch of stickers and then got the idea to make my own! I lucked out and found a package of half sheet shipping labels for $1. I started by printing background text in different languages, then stained the sheet with coffee, added some coloured stamps and die cut them out. I've got a lot of stamps and dies from card crafting and it feels good to use them again (I haven't been very crafty the past few years). I cut out various leaves, mushrooms, mini houses, butterflies, cats, etc. I made country labels this way too. 

One of my favourite things about churches is their floor plans, which for research is so important. So I made mini stickers of them to add to my journal. I also started printing images of interesting things I'll be seeing at museums and whatnot (like the Jelling stones in Denmark).

I don't have a colour printer so I set up a page and had a copy shop print it for me. They wouldn't use my sticker paper (unsurprisingly), so I used another supply I'd bought, double sided adhesive paper. That was my original plan for the stickers before I found the labels. I printed mini city crests, manuscript pages, manuscript marginal figures, a picture of the currency I'll be using on the trip, and more museum pieces. I also printed out and coloured mini tarot cards. I'm planning to assign a different tarot card to cities I visit (for example Stockholm = sun card, Nuremberg = justice). I'm also bringing postage stamps. I have tons from when I used to collect them. I didn't have any from Sweden though, so I printed one off to make a sticker of it.

 I doubt I'll use of the supplies I've bought and made, but I guarantee I'll have a pretty journal when I get back!

As an addendum, my Eurail pass came with a premium code for a travel app called Find Penguins. I've looked into it a bit and it tracks your travel and allows you to post photos on their site. People can comment without needing their own account. You can make your trip public, for anyone to see, or private with only those who have the link being able to follow your trip. At the end of the trip you can buy a physical book from them that documents your trip, with a map, and daily information for where you went (city, temperature, altitude, photos, comments). The premium account lets you post more photos/videos per 'footprint' and gets you a free ebook of your trip at the end. If you sign up they give you a 3 month premium account trial - so if you want to use it, don't do what I did and sign up 4+ months early to test it out. Also, for the sake of security, people mention to start and stop your trip tracking at the airport so it doesn't add your house. This is especially important if you're doing the public setting. I haven't really tried the app out so this isn't an endorsement, just a heads up to check it out if you've not heard of it in case it interests you. I may post a review of it once I'm back.