The Best things in Rwanda

Every now and then I run a poll of my viewers to figure out what the best things to do, see and eat in Rwanda are. We're up to episode two at the moment, so plenty of time to join in with future polls.

On the Road Again... European Road Trip

Hi guys. Following on from my Rwandan Road trip, I'm now on a trip around Europe (and possibly Morocco). Off exploring the world, seeing new things, eating new (and sometimes odd) things. You can find the full playlist here, including a bit of pre-departure prep in Rwanda before I left. But I'll add a selection of my favourite videos below. Keep checking back over the next few weeks to see more. Also, if you enjoy my videos, I'd hugely appreciate a like, comment and subscribe. Those things really help to promote the videos and get the channel out to new viewers.

A day exploring English churches near my home

village, and a traditional craft fair.

A day playing on the beach with my cousin, Tamsin
(you can follow her here).

VIEW THE HAUNTED HOUSE TRILOGY!

VIEW MOROCCO AND BEYOND

Motoing Around Kigali

Hi guys. A non-book, non-writing related post!

I've been spending a bit of time videoing moto journeys around Kigali. It started with this trip:

And then people suggested other places to go.

So far we've been to Rebero, Nyamirambo and Gikondo.

This is mostly what I've been doing instead of writing lately. I try to upload in 4k but the internet can be a bit prohibitive, so the larger ones are regular HD. If you enjoy, subscribe to my channel and bookmark this page. I'll add more trips as they occur. 

Explaining the Pandemic to my Past Self

 

Something that got me through the pandemic with a smile is this lady, Julie Nolke. Her series where she explains each new development to her former self has been very entertaining. You can catch up on the links below. And for fans of Pitch Meeting, she just teamed up with Ryan George on this.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

1 Year Later 

Part 5

Part 6

Wordle One Month

Not bragging... well, bragging slgihtly. My first month of Wordle went well.

Wordle

 

Up until now, I haven't played Wordle, as I'm usually engrossed in Words With Friends, but I finished all my games and still couldn't sleep, so I thought I'd check it out. I've been playing for ten days and so far it seems fairly straightforward - though I know I've just jinxed it by saying that. My strategy is to start with LOUSE, because that knocks out three of the vowels. If none of those come up, I go for HAIRY, which sinks the other two. Once you know the vowels and the easy endings (S, R, H and Y) then there's only really D left as a sensible possibility. The one today was tough:

LOUSE

HIARY

DRAIN

GRAIN

TRAIN

It's harsh when you hit an ending with multiple rhyming options. The other ones that are difficult are double letters. So, LOONY for example, because you don't want to blow a vowel guess by doubling it unless you're sure. 

But, on the whole, there tend to be a limited number of options for a five-letter word once you get the vowels down. 

It's a bit tough for Brits as they use the American spelling for a lot of words, dropping the U in OU words, even though it was invented by a Brit. 

It's more fun than I was expecting, but I won't be tweeting my daily score.

OwlKitty

My friend Jo introduced me to OwlKitty with the Titanic episode, and I've been binge watching for two days straight. There's also a really sweet adoption video about how OwlKitty (AKA Lizzy) came to be.

Alasdair Beckett-King

 I'm really enjoying this guy  😄

The Untamed Squeee Post

The hair... oh my GOD, the hair.

I've just finished the final episode of The Untamed, and this is an unbridled squee post of pure joy. It was absolutely brilliant. I have to admit, I really don't know what to do with my life now. Going to miss this a lot. Is there a support network, rehab centre or something? Sure, it was fifty hours long, but it could have done with another twenty or so.

Just so much fun.

Kind of crap that they had to censor it because of repressive government stuff, which is undeniably ridiculous in this day and age, but the actors were amazing and did such a good job of getting the emotion across (or, like, no emotion at all in Yibo's case).

It's currently trending at nine stars on IMDB, which is really good going, and totally deserved. I think at least five of those stars are entirely for hair...

So, this is just a fun post bowing down to all the silly shit on YouTube and the wonderful fan art. 

It's currently showing on Netflix at the moment, but if you don't have that, the whole thing is also on YouTube. Just be advised that the first couple of hours are pretty confusing and you won't understand what's going on until much later. Just let the first few episodes wash over you. Once they reach Cloud Recesses it'll all start to fall into place.

So, on with the show. I'm loving the fan mashups. Example below. Best example ever at 5:00.

Thinking this should probably be the new official trailer:

More silly fun here and here (and no, I don't think Jiang Cheng is pissed off at him for being gay either, it's all the (many) other things, but it is still funny - the recorder music cracks me up every time).

On to sumptuous fan art. Almost all of these were on Pinterest and if you right-click using Chrome you can image search them to find original sources.

陈情令官方微博

             

Sadly, not enough of the Ghost General and Lady Wen. More needed!

Also, we must not forget to worship the Tortoise of Slaughter...

The coolest contacts ever known to man...

And, just, being a boss...

Totally and completely loved this series. Up there with Hotel del Luna. I watch a lot of Korean series, but this was my first C-drama (Chinese drama). My friend says I need to watch Word of Honour next, but I'm taking a moment. I really am going to miss these guys. 

Desperate to get the novel on Audible, but there's no English version yet. The moment that comes out, I'm all in. 

Boooo to censorship! But yay, so much yay, for making this! 

Go Go Disco Janet!

 

Thanks to Netflix, I finally got to see the final series of The Good Place last night. Like most people, I was crawling on the floor by the end. Kudos to a series that knows when to end, and went out in incredible style. That really was quite a ride.

There's been a few series lately that have appeared deceptively funny then turned out to be forking profound. My top three have been:

 

Hotel Del Luna

This is similar to The Good Place, in that there are moments of extreme silliness and it's deceptively comical at times. However, it's much darker and the episodes, at around an hour and a half, are much longer. 

It's all about a hotel where souls go when they die, to recover from life before heading on to reincarnation. It's run by a woman who cannot die because she's got a few issues to work through before she can let go of her former life.

As with TGP, you really get to know and care about the characters, which leads up to a hell of a finale. Make sure you have a cupboard full of tissues and a generous quantity of gin.

More about Korean soaps here.

 

The Good Place

Just brilliant. A very silly, very light-hearted look at mortality and morality in short, bite-sized episodes. Extremely easy to binge watch. Having said that, it poses some great philosophical dilemmas and leads up to a final series that is both heartbreaking and wonderfully fulfilling. As someone online put it, 'one of the most wholesome series out there.' 

It's about a group of people who wake up dead in the afterlife and think they're in heaven, or 'the good place.' But that's not entirely true, and they have some entertaining adventures working that out. 

It's easy to dismiss it at first because it is so glossy and upbeat, but that's how it pulls you in. It's best to watch it in one go. I found, with long gaps between releases, that it was hard to remember what had happened in the previous season by the time the next one came out.

As mentioned above, it had a really satisfying ending. It didn't do a Dexter or anything silly like that. Which is my only criticism with Hotel Del Luna, which also had an excellent finale, but then couldn't resist adding a little teaser trailer on the end for a potential next series that, thankfully, hasn't materialised. When a series is so good, you should leave it there. Immortalise it - which is a funny thing to say about a series dealing entirely with mortality.

TGP did a great job all round. We love you Disco Janet!

 After Life

This one is a slightly different fish to the other two, in that it's written and acted by a comedian, Ricky Gervais, but isn't all that funny. Or, rather, it's funny in a British way, which is my native humour, so I appreciate it, but I can see how it might come across as a bit bleak to other cultures. It's more of a serious drama with moments of comedy, rather than the other way around.

Still, it's absolutely excellent. Again, dealing with death and morality. Whereas Hotel Del Luna is about reincarnation, and The Good Place is a bit more Judeo-Christian in its outlook, in terms of heaven and hell, this one is from the atheist perspective. 

It's about a guy who's just lost the love of his life to cancer, and how he copes (or doesn't) with life after her death. It's very well done. It's the calm to TGP's crazy.

So, there you go. My top picks on the theme of life, death and in between.

Every Old School Computer Game

 

Yup, that about sums it up. If you love old-school computer games, check out Unavowed and the Blackwell series. They're fairly modern games, Unavowed came out in 2018, but they're done in the style of a pixelated RPG. It's like stepping back in time. They're great, and you can find them on Gog, along with originals like Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island and Gabriel Knight.

The Order of the Good Death

 

Oooh, I found this! It's Caitlin Doughty's channel. 

I read her book a while back, Smoke Gets in your Eyes, and highly recommend it.

She covers everything about death, from strange disasters and tragedies, through to iconic corpses such as sleeping beauty, the Romanovs and Jesse James, weird stuff such as suicide shaming, Cotard delusion and coffin births, and all things to do with facing your own mortality, such as ask a mortician.

There's loads more resources on her website, The Order of the Good Death.

Virtual Faceality

 

Been fixating on this a bit lately. It's not perfect, but it's very interesting. Waiting for the augmented reality version. There's so many online, but loving the Vitruvian Man and Van Gogh, old photographs like these and these, and the Tudors. I know it's helped to inspire a few writing friends when thinking about characters. Waiting for someone to do one of Sargon.

 

The Amber Ruffin Show

 

Amber Ruffin is a writer for Seth Meyers. She recently got her own show and it's really good fun. Definitely my kind of humour (see below). I think Catatonic sums it up perfectly. A friend asked yesterday how everyone was coping - I didn't realise we were supposed to be. Still, with a little bit of luck it will all be over soon. Well, soon-ish. Well, maybe not soon, but eventually.

Scoby or not Scoby, That is the Kombucha

 

I have just become a proud scoby momma. 

No, I didn't know what that was until earlier today, either.

Went for lunch with my lovely friend Gerry, and she gifted me a scoby, which is a round, rubbery disk of yeast and bacteria that you pop in a jar of strong, sweet tea. It gradually transforms the tea into a carbonated probiotic drink called kombucha. Rather amazing. More on that here.

It's quite entertaining, but also feels like a huge responsibility. I went out for pizza and came home with this whole other life form to care for. If you leave it too long it turns into vinegar, so you have to keep feeding it. Still, not as bad as the time I went out for Kinyarwanda lessons and came back with four cats.

In the same day, I also bought a yoga mat and I'm considering buying kimchi jars tomorrow. It's also been nine months since I had a cigarette... is this a weird symptom of nicotine withdrawal that nobody tells you about? 

I turn forty in a couple of months. Apparently my mid-life crisis is 'hipster.' Who knew?

Anyway, I've settled the little scoby into its new home, which is only marginally larger than its old home. Hopefully it will be okay in there until I can buy more suitable containers. I'm quite excited to see what happens. 

 

The Queen's Gambit

 

Netflix has really outdone itself lately. The Queen's Gambit is absolutely worth watching. It's stunning in every way, from set and costume through to plot. It's about a childhood chess protégé and her rise to fame, but all of the characters feel incredibly genuine. Different people come and go through her life and are important at different times, but all feel relatable. Very interesting that it was written by two men, as it feels like a story that not only has a female protagonist, but is very much told from a female perspective. It's extremely well done.

Ratched

I am loving this. Netflix has based an entire series around Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and it is delightful. Set in the same mental hospital, where the staff are more deranged than the patients.

Also found this very entertaining segment where the female cast read from a 1940's guide to hiring women. Oh me, oh my.

Old Meets Young

I stumbled across a series on YouTube that I've become rather fascinated by. Unfortunately, it's by something called Lad Bible, which is instantly off-putting, but the series itself is very interesting. They take older people and younger people either doing the same job, such as a doorman or nurse, or in the same circumstances, such as addicts, criminals, lottery winners and climate change activists, looking at how things have changed over the years. 

The one above about homelessness really hit me. Back when I was an undergrad, I knew a homeless guy called Michael who would often sit by the train station. One night, I sat with him as the pubs were emptying, and the amount of abuse he took was unreal. Being a student with a room to go to and parents to call if I was in trouble, I sort of felt I was above it in some way, but the moment I sat on that pavement with him, I was invisible. We watched bottles being hurled, a man get his face smashed in, and an endless forest of legs go past.

It was a strange experience, and many years later went on to inspire a character in a set of short stories.

Traditional Rwandan Dance Lessons

Shout out to Bijoux who is running traditional Rwandan dance sessions online during the lockdown. £36 for a six-week course, book through Hilde Cannoodt's site. They assure me there's no two-way video required, so you don't even have to get dressed, though you can video in if you want some extra support. Truly missing swimming during the lockdown so I really need this. I've already put on at least one box of Winnaz and a tub of Nutella. The course starts 4th June, so sign on up to support Bijoux and learn something new.

The Annals of Caledonia Pace

The lovely Matthew J Elliott and friends have just released a short, entertaining, murder mystery: The Culpeper Culprits. It's the first in a series that's free to listen to online and very cheap to download if you want to support the artists. So, come join in the fun with Caledonia Pace and her 'folios of felony'.