120: November 2024

Becoming Alien continues apace. The writing process this month has been a series of oscillations between “it’s so over” and “I’m so back,” which is nice when I’m feeling good about what I’ve just written, and terrifying when it doesn’t feel like it’s working. Right now I’ve achieved a state of equilibrium, which will be knocked over the next time I realize that my deadline is in two weeks. (It’s so over.) Just two short sections to go, and a rewatch and a quick polish of the manuscript as a whole. (I’m so back.)

What I wrote:

For Bright Wall/Dark Room’s neo-noir edition, I wrote about Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville. It’s a curious movie; I didn’t enjoy it the first time I saw it, but it’s grown on me as I’ve written about it. The film is science fiction noir with a deep vein of antifascist sentiment; I read into it a lot of my own frustrations with LLMs and the desire to make everything frictionless through technology.

It has also been a busy month at Seeing & Believing! I wrote about Conclave (loved it), A Real Pain (liked it), and a dual issue about Wicked and Gladiator II (enjoyed parts but ultimately neither are for me).

What I talked about:

I got back together with Andrew and Hannah, along with Mark Shaw and Patrick Willems, for Authorized Podcast’s Thanksgiving episode. Rather than talking about a novelization, we each picked a recipe from the Alien Cookbook, which is an actual recipe book published by an actual publisher that contains instructions for making all kinds of xenomorph-inspired dishes. Not that the dish I picked was actually edible, but the venture was a hoot.