This has been a challenging post to get into because from memory, I basically haven’t watched or read anything this past May.
Is that really true? Have I watched nothing? How is that possible?
Well, one thing is that my back is a lot better than it was (I had a protruding disk that struck, conveniently, right before my daughter’s wedding). I still have some difficulties but generally feel a lot better, which means I’m not doing nearly as much lying around in bed binging Spooks or whatever.
More importantly, I got inspired after many years to revisit the idea of my “Family Movies”.
What’s that? Well, waaaaay back when my wife and I were coming up to our first anniversary, I surprised her by editing together a short summary of our year together as husband and wife. It was set to the tune of Pachelbel’s Canon in D, which is also the song that she walked down the aisle to in our wedding. The first half was basically a recap of our wedding, before it launched out into the rest of the year. Most of that year was covered with photos, except at the end when it broke into video, signifying the point in our lives when my wife won a video camera by entering a photography contest she’d seen in an in-flight magazine on our honeymoon (true story!)
When our second anniversary rolled around, I made another one, this time featuring bits of music from the likes of the Beatles (Dizzy Miss Lizzy) and Simon & Garfunkel (I Am A Rock). By this time our oldest daughter was born and so of course from then on the movies because basically just endless pictures of our kids.
I kept up this habit for thirteen years, which means there are thirteen films, most of which are 10-12 minutes long, which serve as summaries of our lives. They’ve been watched and rewatched endlessly because we all like revisiting these memories, and it’s sometimes a fun thing for the kids to show their friends and so on.

Now my oldest daughter is married and she wanted to take her husband through them. So on a couple of successive visits we revisited them all.
Now, I never had a specific reason for stopping making these films. There were various factors, but mostly it’s just that I fell behind on it, at first by just a little, then by a lot, then by too much to ever catch up on.
But rewatching them with my daughter and new son-in-law, I got inspired. This meant digging out messy hard drives and figuring out what footage existed from our fourteenth year (2015-2016, since each movie starts on our anniversary date which is in the middle of the year) and organising it, and then editing.
It’s quite hard to distill a year into 10-12 minutes, as you can imagine, and it possibly has gotten harder as time advanced and there are started to be multiple devices in our home capable of recording photos and video (including lots of footage of movies my kids made with their stuffed animals and lots of selfies and photo shoots they took with their friends).
But by watching the footage endlessly, particularly against music, I am able to slowly do it. I lose a lot of material that seems at first to be precious, but after watching it 100 times you realize you can do without. In the end, if I do this well, I am left with only the gold. Is it a little bit like the famous saying supposedly from Michelangelo about creating his famous David statue simply by chipping away everything that wasn’t David? Maybe. Just maybe it is.
Anyway, I managed to actually finish the Year 14 movie. It didn’t actually take me that many days, but it took a whooooole lot of hours. So where in previous months in a moment of inactivity I might have turned on some show to watch, now I was turning on the computer to work on this film. To my family’s great enjoyment, it’s complete, and I’ve kept up the momentum by working on the Year 15 movie as well, which is almost done.
How long will this new-found drive last? I don’t know. Maybe it will be something I keep doing forever. That means that maybe someday the films will be all about my (future, presumed) grandchildren. Or maybe they will just be shots of me and my wife sitting around our (future, presumed) empty nest, sitting around watching TV and petting our cats and dogs.
Anyway, I don’t share these movies publicly because 1) it’s a bit personal and 2) they use all sorts of copyrighted music I don’t have permission for, but here is a little clip from one of them. Typically, I put a funny or memorable moment that has some kind of sound in it in between the different songs in the movie. This bit is when one of my daughters proved how creative and flexible she was by pretending that a pile of rocks she had was a family, including giving them all names. It’s one of my favorite memories.
Interestingly, she’s just completed a university unit in geology!
Beside all that, what else has been going on?
Well, I’ve been watching Doctor Who, which has had its second Disney+ / Ncuti Gatwa season. It’s been a crazy thing, which you’ll know if you were watching it. But I’ve been writing about those episode individually (I still have to write up The Reality War, which feels pretty daunting). And there’s been other stuff I’ve watched or read, like Death in Paradise or The Flash by William Messner-Loebs Omnibus, but which I hadn’t finished by the end of the month.
At work I’ve been continuing to work on the documentary about Mt Margaret, which draws slowly toward its completion, and also an honouring video for the founders of our local mission centre (not the whole organisation) that we needed for an event we held during our recent retreat.
Scanning through recent photographs and other digital evidence, I can see that I also saw this rubbish bin near my office that someone had lit on fire.

Gross.
I visited a place called Bells Rapids to have a picnic with the family for Mother’s Day. As you can see, it was pretty dry.

At another time of year, this is actually a river.
And we had a Star Wars-themed birthday party for my daughter! That was fun. It was actually her 19th year and 1 month birthday, but her celebrations were delayed for various reasons. She wanted to have a fun birthday party where people dressed up, had lightsaber fights, and ate Star Wars-themed snacks.

This included blue milk (actually custard with food coloring), little tie-fighters made of cheese, Vege-mite (an Australian “delicacy”) and Shapes (an Australian cracker), and “lightsabers” that were really skewers with color-coded candies on them.


And we had a reasonably epic “Its over Anakin, I have the high ground” cake featuring old Playmobil toys.

The whole thing was pretty cool and I had a good time with my daughter that day helping to get everything ready.
Oh, the other thing I did this month that I can mention is I played Detention, an online shared escape room game from Virtual Escaping. I played this with my Best Man friend (ie, I was his Best Man and he was mine), who lives in California. Ah the joys of our post-pandemic world that has created such wonders such as escape room games that can be shared by people in opposite hemispheres. Oh well, maybe such things existed beforehand, but I didn’t really know about them.
Anyway, the “story” of Detention is that you are unhappily at your school on the weekend for detention, and then you fall asleep. When you open your eyes you are in some sort of nightmarish “Upside-Down” version of the world (which is only slightly different than the regular world), and you need to explore around solving puzzles to open different doors, which eventually ends with you waking up, ie winning the game.
It was a fun time with some puzzles that were reasonably challenging but not too difficult. We never needed to pursue any hints, and we got through it all in less than an hour and a quarter. If there was a disappointing aspect it’s just that the narrative aspects of the game are pretty weak, and the “celebration” that comes with winning is limited to just an abrupt screen that tells you that you’ve won.

So a good time.
June is now halfway over as I write this and already I know I’ll have a lot more to write about next time. So, until then…
Movie News
Motivation
Anime Batch
Ekspedisi Papua
Jasa Import China
Berita Olahraga