Things I've enjoyed recently other than the Photography Marathon:

1. EVERYTHING BRITISH ROYALTY. I don't know, guys. I watched the entirety of The Crown, then rewatched The King's Speech and The Queen because idk I guess I just need more Elizabeth in my life? What even. I started watching Victoria too, on a roll and all, but quit pretty quickly; it was hard switching to a teen-aged queen so quickly after the maturity of The Crown.

2. It's possible that the sudden royalty obsession came from the recent royal engagement news, but it's EQUALLY AS LIKELY that it came from either

(a) my watching Netflix's A Christmas Prince - the actual dumbest perfectest but truly bad (yet wonderful) holiday romance novel film, which had every single trope: American journalist goes undercover at a European Palace as a tutor to the young princess, in order to get a scoop on whether the Prince intends to marry by the end of the year, which he must in order to inherit. Will she and the Prince end up falling in love? WHO KNOWS REALLY.

or

(b) my watching the BBC's new Howards End, which boils down to Hayley Atwell being utterly gorgeous as [Peggy Carter's mom] Margaret Schlegel and Matthew Macfadyen being finally hot as Mr. Wilcox, though I don't think I'm actually supposed to ship them as much as I did. Just, British period dramas where everything is delivered with such restraint doesn't always get to me but with these two. Like, gah, look at the proposal scene - in text, or if you will, at least until someone takes it down, on youtube. They've known each other for a while and were neighbors and had two platonic yet chaperoned lunches and now he's showing her a house which she's considering leasing and as she suspected, boom, proposal. I love her character here, and they just play it so well. Not to mention later on, when due to the circumstances [of him being a douchebag] he's all, "I have the honor now to release you of your engagement," and man does he deliver the line.

Anyway, it's a well-made period drama that isn't subversive and I'm not sure is justifiable other than for the purposes of giving Hayley Atwell and Philippa Coulthard as her sister good parts to play, but I enjoyed it greatly.

[After reading some more about E.M. Forester who wrote the book but whom I knew literally nothing about, I read The Machine Stops (text), his short story from 1909 about future technology an essentially the internet. I am not a big classic scifi or short story reader so for all I know it was super par for the course, but for 1909, it's a pretty interesting read.]

ANYWAY - as a post script to all this royalty talk, I'll just take a moment to rec copperbadge's God Save the Queen, because a Captain America/WWII-era Elizabeth crossover needed to happen at some point, of course, so it did.

3. For Hebrew-subtitle-readers - I'd heard good things about Tzufit Grant's Avudim/Lost and I've only watched the three-episode story opening this season but damn, it's good. The show is an investigative documentary helping people track and reunite with missing relatives, and the season opens with Lost in Morocco: a 76-year-old old Jewish-Moroccan woman who immigrated to Israel with her two kids in the '80s is looking for her four eldest children, who were kidnapped/taken away by the authorities in Casablanca in the '60s. It is a wild ride, and I'm looking forward to watching more episodes when I'm in the right kind of mood.

4. Okay I'm going to spare you most of my unending MCU cast feelings because I'll never stop if I start, but I'll just say that: a) recent photos of Sebastian Stan not just with gray stubble but with actual graying hair are driving me crazy, I assume a byproduct of being in my thirties, b) I just listened to the two 2016 episodes (1, 2) where Anna Faris had Chris Evans and Jenny Slate (and Chris Pratt) on her podcast, and this is like the flirtiest thing I've ever listened to and a joy to listen to if you have any interest in these people, though I'm 100% sure they wouldn't have recorded it had they known they were right on the cusp of dating. Having said that, I will also point you towards the Evans/Slate tag on AO3 which has only 2 works on it but both of them are fanfuckingtastic.

5. Romantic comedies are not so much a well-made genre these days but I watched Home Again, which came out this September, and could not wipe the delighted grin off my face the entire way through. Reese Witherspoon plays a single mother of two, who has a single night of partying on her 40th birthday and ends up with guys in their mid-twenties, best friends and aspiring filmmakers, living in her guesthouse, one of whom is her love interest. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop and something to go terribly wrong, but while the plot has some ~obstacles for them to overcome, most of this movie is just really fun and sweet and her having three young hot guys who adore her and admire her and get along well with her kids and it's like 90 minutes of delightful wish-fulfillment and I loved it a lot. Here's the trailer; the first half of the trailer sets it up and that's all you need, really.

6. Just random youtube videos that made me happy, like this video of Joe Keery and Gaten Matarazzo completing intimacy challenges which I feel should just in general be mandatory filmed exercises for all actors and characters I like, or seeing Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet on Ellen, which - I was not super into the prospect of this movie (Call Me By Your Name) or these actors, but after seeing them interact on camera it's hard not to root for everything about this project to succeed. And okay now I've actually watched a clip of a scene and yes, definitely want to see this movie.