Post-Release Week Fun! | The Friday(ish) Update

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Friday Update, in which I give a little insight into what I’ve been up to for the past seven days.

What have I been up to this week?

So, it’s actually been a couple of weeks since I last wrote one of these update posts. As sometimes happens, last week I was so caught-up in making the final touches to my video Think Tanks: How Fake Experts Shape the News and so needed to put my focus into that. But that video is now out!

A decent chunk of the week has been spent completing my “release week admin” of preparing perks for Patreon supporters (such as scripts and commentary tracks) and replying to the occasional comment. The response to the latest video has been really, really lovely. I thought it was going to be an incredibly niche topic so it’s been great to hear that so many people have been finding it interesting.

Alongside that more mundane, admin-y stuff, I’ve also been diving into some reading for my next video. I’ve already got through a couple of books and a whole bunch of shorter articles and am starting to get a really good sense of some of the key aspects of the topic I’m going to be focusing on. In next week’s edition of the Friday Update, I’ll let you know what that’s going to be—I’m pretty confident that you’re going to like this one!

And outside of work?

I had a really lovely couple of days last weekend. While I did have to do a couple of work-related bits and pieces with the video having gone out the night before, I found time to go to a friend’s birthday party and to go and visit a National Trust property with my parter (for non-UK readers, the National Trust is a charity which looks after old fancy houses and their gardens—it’s a fairly chill way to spend a Sunday!).

On Monday, I also went to see My Chemical Romance live! They were in the UK primarily to play some shows at a big stadium in Milton Keynes, but they also played a much more intimate special show around 50 minutes away from me. My partner and I went down and met up with some friends at the show and it was a huge amount of fun. 12 year-old Tom would have been over-the-moon to have been able to see MCR in such an intimate setting (and adult Tom didn’t mind much, either!).

What have I been reading/watching/listening to?

On Friday evening, I went to see Everything Everywhere All At Once at the cinema. And, if you’ve not seen it yet, I would definitely recommend it. The film follows a woman as she discovers that she’s part of a multiverse and discovers various different lives she could have led. It perfectly blends together examination of the more mundane, boring aspects of our lives with big, silly set pieces.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how Everything Everywhere All At Once feels like the kind of “clever”, “complicated” film that Christopher Nolan thinks that he makes (especially with regard to TENET). But he’s too bothered with impressing the audience and being SERIOUS that his films end up being quite dry. Everything Everywhere is never afraid to focus on small human moments alongside the big stuff where it’s introducing us to a massive universe.

Definite recommend!

That brings us to the end of this week’s edition of the Fridayish Update. I hope you’ve found it mildly insightful.

Thanks as ever for your generous support and I’ll look forward to updating you more next week!!