Category: Everything Else

The Rites of December

At the beginning of every year, I write a big list of the things I want to do that year. I’ve done this for the last few years now, and it’s a great way of keeping those things at the front of your mind throughout the year – I look back at it all the time.

Note that it is not a to-do list. These are not things that I have to do by the end of the year, and they don’t necessarily roll over into the next year if I don’t do them. It is simply a list of things I want to do – an intention list. (It’s a concept I want to explain more in another post or video.)

Inevitably, there are some things on the list each year that I don’t get round to – I’m just focusing on other things, and they get pushed to the back of the queue. What I want to do this year – and in subsequent years – is to make December the month of doing things that I haven’t gotten round to all year. All those things on the list for the year that I haven’t done yet I want to do in December.

Of course, there’s a good chance I won’t be able to do all of them. Some of them are quite big projects – far too much to do in one twelfth of the year – but that’s fine. To complement my New Year’s Day Tradition, and to give the year a sense of completion, for me, December is about finishing things off.

New Term: Autolobotomite

‘Lobotomite’ is a great word. It refers to someone who is brainless, stupid – as though they have been lobotomised. It’s a great insult that I like to use to refer to Hollywood writers.

We are living through the Great Age of Stupidity, and the demand for insults for stupid people greatly exceeds the supply. Much of the idiocy we see in the world today seems to be self-inflicted – people who have achieved great antisagacity (there’s another new word) by choosing to believe quite obvious nonsense, by refusing debate and discussion, and by rejecting anything that has even the slightest whiff of their enemy’s benodorous scent. There are people who seem to adore their own un-knowledge – and then they also resent anyone who criticises their own adoration of their un-knowledge. Instead of turtles all the way down, it’s just wilful stupidity supported by even more and stronger wilful stupidity.

For these people I can only use the term ‘autolobotomite’ – a person whose intellectual injuries are self-inflicted – a person whose lack of intelligence or knowledge is a result of their own beliefs.

Also, ‘antisagacity’ = ‘the opposite of sagacity’, and ‘benodorous’ = ‘nice-smelling’ – i.e., the opposite of ‘malodorous’.

Ricocheting between iconic and farcical – Red, White, & Royal Blue Review

I had no idea about this film when it was actually released – didn’t know it existed. I’ve only found out about it from the images and GIFs shared prolifically on social media in the months since its release. This suggests a somewhat underfunded marketing operation – given that I am probably the film’s target audience (gay, a royalist, and a big comedy fan).

I’ve been meaning to watch this film for the last few weeks, and now that I have (or am – I’ve actually started writing this with about ten minutes of the film left to go), I find the experience is utterly bizarre. This film violently ricochets between moments that could be iconic, and moments of such bad dialogue, such cultural ignorance, such TV-obsessed Californian idiocy that I almost stopped watching then and there.

The flaws in this film appear right from the outset in the form of utterly dreadful dialogue. And it’s all of the usual stuff we tend to see in bad dialogue: sentences that no real human would ever say, characters expositing their own psycho-analysis as the first line of a conversation, the writers using the actors as conduits for their Twitter-informed political beliefs, and gross TikTok slang spoken unironically as though it won’t horribly date the film in just six months. The most egregious example of that last one is Rachel Hilson’s character (whose name I couldn’t even guess) saying at 1 minute 37 seconds into the film ‘you’ve been yucking my yum all day’ – a phrase so unpleasant I think it could actually give someone IBS.

The bad dialogue appears right throughout the film, but about half the time it is compensated for by the skill of the actors. I have long said that a great actor can take even the worst-written dialogue and make it sound amazing (although perhaps sometimes only with a few spontaneous edits to it). In this regard, Nicholas Galitzine (who plays Prince Henry) and Rachel Hilson shine. (Hilson has had many years of experience fighting with unwieldy dialogue on Love, Victor – a show that is the unproclaimed king of unnatural dialogue.)

In fact, this is a film carried by its core cast, not by its writing. In this regard it is similar to Heartstopper, Love, Victor, and Love, Simon. (Why do so many recent gay romance films and television shows have this problem?) This film is mainly carried by the charisma of its two leads: Nicholas Galitzine and Taylor Zakhar Perez – with the former giving a really stand-out performance. Of course, this is the main requirement for a romance film or show – the two leads must have chemistry. Everything else can be a disaster, but as long as the two leads are convincing, the story will still be enjoyable. (I’ve said this of Heartstopper too – a disastrous, wholly unconvincing plot, but wholly convincing leads.)

The charisma of the leads is enough to keep me watching (indeed, glued to the screen for their scenes together), but it isn’t enough to stop me recoiling in horror every two minutes at everything else. The film has a multitude of basic errors in how British royalty works that betray a distinctly American misunderstanding of the concept. Without wishing to insult my American friends, it’s not that Americans can’t understand royalty, it’s that there seems to be something about American culture that puts them at a unique disadvantage when it comes to understanding it – both the traditions of it and the reasoning behind it. Americans seem to have a much greater hill to climb in order to understand it, and they often stop half-way up. This film gives the strong impression that the writers have learned most of what they know about British royalty from other films and television dramas, rather than from watching actual royal events or even just reading about it – actually being interested in it. It is a parody of royalty – more alike to the show The Windsors than it is to the real thing. The royal family and their assistants are portrayed as stuck-up fuddy-duddies whose social attitudes and beliefs are still Victorian. They are the epitome of the ultra-conservative arch-nemesis that I think nowadays might only exist in the minds of internet commentators. The film is also laced with condescension – an attitude of ‘Oh you silly Brits with your royalty! The American way is much better! You should be like us!’. It’s an insular attitude that reveals someone as having not thought about the subject for very long.

As I say, though, this film veers wildly between moments dominated by these errors and moments that could have made this film great. The casting of Stephen Fry as the fictional King James III was inspired – he should play kings more often. Unfortunately, his performance was ruined almost immediately by overly-verbose dialogue that was contradictory from one line to the next. His character exists not as a person with a personality, but simply as a megaphone for the misapprehensions of the writers. The character’s best moments are when he’s not speaking.

It’s a shame – this film could have been great – iconic. Its basic structure is sound – all of the things that take it down are things that could have been fixed on the day of filming with just a few seconds of thought.

I don’t often do star ratings, but I would give this film a 5 out of 10.

New Project: A Dictionary of British Place Names

I have started a new project today. In short, it is a small web-app giving information on the etymology of British place names. I’ve made it a sub-site of my main website – you can view it here: http://benjamintmilnes.com/dictionary-of-british-place-names/#/.

I decided to do this project quite spontaneously this morning. The idea’s been floating around in my head for a few days or so. I’m normally quite reluctant to start new projects of this kind nowadays – I have a lot of projects – too many, really – and each new project takes time away from the others. However, this project is quite valuable for the world-building for On The Subject Of Trolls, and it is relatively simple to do, so I decided to start it.

Amazingly, I’ve managed to get it to a ‘finished’ state in just a few hours. Now, when I say ‘finished’ here, I don’t necessarily mean absolutely complete in all ways. I find it useful to distinguish between different kinds of ‘finished’. A part of this project is actually researching and writing out the etymology for all or lots of British place names. (I may not do absolutely all British place names – I may only do a few hundred or a few thousand in total.) This is something that is very difficult to do all in one go – this is something that’s better to do gradually over time, so I don’t include this in what I mean by ‘finished’. Similarly, with any web-app, there are often hundreds of features that you could program into it – I don’t include these in ‘finished’ either. With projects like this, I generally consider them finished when I have something that I can put online, that works (even if it only has a limited number of features), that looks polished, and that contains well-formed data (even if it’s only a small amount of data). In the case of this project, I have managed to create 11 data files for place names, create the compiler (which takes those data files and outputs a JSON file that the web-app effectively uses as its database), and create a polished front-end.

So the web-app is now online and available. It describes the etymology of various British place names. In future you will be able to search for place names that have a particular suffix or that have a particular element in them. There are other fun features that it could have too – like rendering a map of Britain using the names that places had in a given century. It only contains a few entries so far, but I will add to that over time.

This is a very fun project to do. I have liked etymology for a long time – I can’t remember when it was that I started looking things up on etymonline.com several times a day – probably about seven or eight years ago – but it has been a fascination of mine for a long time. Place names is an area of etymology that is somewhat lacking online – it’s fun being able to create something new that’s useful.

A New Year’s Day Tradition

Over the last five years or so I have gradually developed a number of my own traditions around Yule and the new year. One of these is that on New Year’s Day I try to do lots of the activities that I want to do throughout the year. If I want to do lots of writing that year, then I do some writing on New Year’s Day. If I want to make lots of videos for my YouTube channel that year, then I do something related to making videos on New Year’s Day (it doesn’t have to be actually recording a video – I could just do something that’s useful generally, like learning more about how to light videos).

Now this isn’t about New Year’s resolutions – I don’t do New Year’s resolutions (because I think if a resolution is worth making then it’s worth making at whatever time of year you happen to think about it). This tradition isn’t about getting a head-start on New Year’s resolutions. Instead it’s just about having a good start to the year. If I want to do lots of writing in a given year, then if I do lots of writing on the first day of the year, by the end of the first day the year’s going very well – 100% of it was spent doing the things that I wanted to do.

This tradition is about making the first day of the year the example day for the rest of the year. If all the days can be like the first day, then it will be a good year. My aim on this New Year’s Day is to do a lot of reading, and maybe go through a lot of my old writing notes and scan in anything that only exists in paper form.