HIGHWAY TO THE GROTTYZONE: SU&SD Newsletter #70

Matt: Pow! The last four months have been STRESSFUL!

I’ve been moving house - which is exciting! After a decade in the same place, myself and my wife have been shufting ourselves just down the road to a different home, with a bit more space. Brilliantly, this means I’ll have a small space that’s pretty much just for filming and editing videos! I’m sure that many of you will miss the leafy loveliness of my old front room - the backdrop for gosh-knows HOW many videos - but after an initial patch of filming in a room that might border on bleak, I hope to have the new, smaller shooting space looking equally nice.

What’s most exciting for me, is that this might hopefully mean an end to the days of a bleary-eyed Matthew still up at midnight filming b-roll because I needed to pack away the “studio” setup on account of the “studio” being “most of my flat”.  If you’ve ever wondered why the B-Roll in our videos is sometimes not a 100% Accurate Representation of the Rules - this is one of the reasons why! (The main reason of course is that it doesn’t matter, it’s just B-Roll, it doesn’t matter, please stop)

And do you know what the BEST news is about this house move?? Because the circumstances are smooth and all parties are keen to get things done quickly, it shouldn’t disrupt my workflow too much - I’ll be living with my in-laws for a tiny stretch of time, but we should be in the new place within about three weeks. That’s right, I’ll have moved into my new house by THE START OF DECEMBER, 2022.

Hello! It is now MARCH. And honestly, I can’t complain! My in-laws are lovely - it’s a bit far out of town which has been very disruptive for Work & Life Stuffs, but I am in good health and - in the broad scheme of things - just about as bloody lucky as can be. But it turns out that living for the best chunk of ⅓ of a year in limbo is low-key demoralising and exhausting.

If I’d known things would take this long, I would have planned things differently - but unfortunately we ended up trapped in a perpetual loop in which things would almost DEFINITELY be going back to normal “sometime next week” - so it would seem ridiculous to make grand and complex plans, right? I’ll be able to start filming again in about 2 weeks!

Sixteen weeks later, and you’ll probably have noticed that I have not been appearing on Shut Up & Sit Down. And I’m really sorry about that! It is NOT COOL, and I really want to hammer that home to you folks - our lovely supporters and donors. I’ve been busy behind the scenes on other SU&SD stuff - as always! - but what really looked like it would just be an understandable blip slowly ballooned out to be a chasm of inactivity. It sucks for you, it sucks for me, it mainly sucks for the rest of the team, who have been brilliant as always.

Ignoring the obvious background exhaustion that invariably comes with moving house, I cannot wait to get a semi-functional studio in place and start filming things again. Or even just be close enough again to major transport links to, you know, see other members of the team? It is going to be GREAT, I cannot wait.

And now, having FINALLY got the keys to our brand new place, I have morphed into MAXIMUM SCRUBBING & FIXING MODE to get the place into a shape that means I can A) live in it, and B) make videos in it, and C) get back to some kind of semi-normal non-nomadic life. People keep asking if it is “a real fixer-upper”, and I’ve been telling them that “no, it isn’t that bad - I just need to repair a lot of the broken plumbing and get the electricity working safely and fix some holes in the walls and secure the building from vermin”.

So yeah, there’s a BIT of fixing and/or upping to be done, but I’m hitting it hard and fast and hoping to be back in your eyes and ears SOON. Just the other day I was scraping up all of the green ShrekDust that’s in the room I’ll be filming in! I don’t know what it is!! It seems Less Bad than the black DeathDust in the front room? So many cursed dusts, so little time.

Thank you again for your patience with us (me) over the last stretch of months - It’s been notably odd, and I should have said something earlier. But importantly, another big vocal thankyou for the patience of TEAM SHUT UP & SIT DOWN - Tom in particular has been a stellar force throughout my video absence, and I wanted to put it formally in writing that I think that he is Good and Brilliant, there, I SAID IT.

­What are we video games!  🎮

Quinns: I’m playing Beast Breaker on Switch, which I wouldn’t necessarily recommend but it has a lot of heart, and I’ve got my eye on the early access game Peglin on Steam, which is basically goblin pachinko. So I guess you could say that this season I am mostly into bouncing.

Is there enough bouncing in games? Where are the bouncy board games? Is this new bounce-related desire a brief affectation, or will my love of “the bounce” grow as we enter summer? I can’t answer a single one of these questions. Not a one.

Bounce!!

Tom: I think I’ll talk about Your Only Move Is Hustle in the next newsletter when I’ve plumbed its depths a little more - but for now I’ll just strongly recommend Pizza Tower to anyone with a sense of humour. Phenomenal videogame, endlessly funny, surprisingly considered, soundtrack that’s totally off-the-chain. Buy it, play it, love it etc etc It will legitimately be in my Top 10 games of the year, for sure. This video from Polygon might tempt you in if you’re even remotely interested!

­What are we music!  🎵

Ava: I am still flitting around relentlessly with not a lot of albums to give me something meaty to write about. The death of Brianna Ghey led me to look for reassurance in SOPHIE’s Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-insides, and it remains a very transcendent experience. I still haven’t even checked out the rest of Yard Act’s record after someone pointed me towards 100% endurance and it unexpectedly made me cry. The Philip Glass section of Robert Wilson’s never fully performed 24 hour opera The Civil Wars: A tree is best measured when it’s down is finally on Spotify? I still can’t get over how much I love Laurie Anderson showing up in a thing and reading some words? I might be a little out of touch.

Tom: Lots of great new (to me) music this month. The four “seasonal” records from Fuubutsushi have been on near-constant rotation whilst settling into my new flat, and I thoroughly encourage everyone who needs a minute to unwind to slap one of them on. ‘Natsukashii’ is great if you need something a little more upbeat and summery, whilst their self-titled is the ‘oozing out the speakers on a sunday morning’ kind of record. Speaking of sundays - Domenique Dumont’s ‘People On Sunday’ is a kind of aquatic, hazy synthesiser suite that’s been great for writing to - it’s on right now! Long train journeys have been soundtracked by ‘Notes with Attachments’ from Pino Palladino and Blake Mills, where I’m entranced by whatever audio effect is going on in the shaky, ‘inside-a-washing-machine’ segments of the track ‘Ekute’ on that record. All round a really diverse and pleasing instrumental album! I wasn’t completely smitten with the new Young Fathers album ‘Heavy Heavy’ like I have been with some of their previous work, but there are some really beautiful moments when they lean a little into pop (Shoot Me Down, Rice, Ululation) that outweigh the slightly more cheesy and saccharine full-pop stretches of the tracklist (Drum, Geronimo). If you’re looking for something more fast-paced and energetic, then ‘Finally, New’ from They Hate Change has a really curious high-tempo approach to rap that dabbles in some really smooth, glossy, soft breakbeat that wouldn’t be out of place on like, a Dreamcast racing game? Big fan.

What are we watching? 📺

Ava: Hardly at the cutting edge here either, I finally got round to watching Yellowjackets after various things made me interested and then uninterested over and over again. I think it’s kind of brilliant though. It’s easy to look at in terms of other shows, Buffy, Lost, Twin Peaks, Bad Girls, to name a few. But I think this broadly does the show of football playing teens stranded in the wilds of North America and their elder selves dealing with mystery and trauma a disservice. There’s a surface level here that is simple horror fun, but there’s also some incredibly nuanced understandings of trauma, belief and mental health underpinning everything. It’s quite specific, but the cast is brilliant, and the story is more satisfying than its puzzlebox surface would have you believe. I’m very eager for the next series.

And obviously The Last of Us is proving to be distinctly better than I really imagined it would be. Though I find it weird that I still haven’t played the games, but understand game logic enough to spot quite a few of the references? It’s very odd having a show abruptly become an obvious video game setpiece for a bit. And even odder that it mostly works.

Quinns: I’m rewatching Succession - again - in preparation for the fourth and final season dropping on March 26th. My friends had mixed feelings upon hearing that these will be the last episodes we get, but personally? I’m over the moon. The one fear I had with Succession was that the Roys’ power struggle would go on forever, kited ever-onward to continue making HBO more money, but it sounds like we’re getting a conclusion once and for all.

What are we reading? 📚

Ava: I actually managed to finish a book. In fact, I drank it in three days flat because it was just that gripping. I feel like Quinns has already mentioned this, but Project Hail Mary was an absolute delight. Andy Weir’s Hard Sci-Fi suits a story a bit more ‘fantastical’ but no less lonely and humane as The Martian (to be fair, I haven’t read the book, only seen the film). It feels like a love letter to science and teaching and learning and having to remember that at core, people are really different in how they understand things, but the act of communicating across that is probably the most important thing? I can happily forgive a lot of flaws for this sort of thing, and I really loved it.

Quinns: Approximately 22 years late to the literary sensation of the year, this month I read reputable doorstop Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. And I had a blast! Never have 576 pages about a family slowly coming to terms with the patriarch’s dementia been so much fun.

In all seriousness, it’s a monumentally good family story and laugh-out-loud funny. The thing I found most affecting about Franzen’s writing, though, is his inexhaustible sympathy for his characters. Individually, every member of the book’s family are nightmares (and they’re an even larger nightmare in aggregate, during family gatherings), but no matter how unreasonable, self-centred or stubborn they act, the lush interiority Franzen gives them all makes their behaviour seem like the only reasonable way to behave, given what they’ve been through. Which is to say, what they’ve put one another through.

Tremendous book. I can’t recommend it highly enough.