Caoimhe @cailleach@abhlach.ie

Also, unlike the more famous adaptations, there's a bit at the end of the tape stating that there is a way to avoid dying of the curse as long as you follow the following instructions. The teenagers who watched the tape before have taped over the instructions with an advert.

One bit I liked was that when he was driving out to the cabin where the kids watched the tape he was imagining some old, run-down scene out of Friday the 13th (Friday the 13th gets mentioned a few times) but the place is brand new, built less than a year ago, full of modcons.

He thinks people are scared of things either by evolutionary response or they're taught to be afraid of them. His small daughter was not frightened of seeing a Godzilla statue but was scared of a demon mask. Therefore there must be an evolutionary reason to be afraid of demons.

Other thoughts: The main character, Asakawa, a journalist who's a little bit more inclined to believe in the occult than his editor is, makes some strange leaps in logic. His attempt at a scientific explanation of how four teenagers simultaneously died of a heart attack is that they all contracted a brand new type of virus. That arrived on Earth by meteor impact.

The schoolkids who died watched the tape at a cabin in a brand new holiday resort where they rent tapes to guests, pretty much all of them American sci-fi or horror movies. These kinds of contrasts definitely stand out to me in a story that's about a piece of modern technology (VHS tapes, it was written in 1990) becoming the means of transmitting a curse. I wonder when Sadako comes more into the plot if her life reflect this theme as well.

This is presumably a translation of more ordinary terms in Japanese that don't stand out as much, so they're probably don't make themselves felt as much in the original text, but they are used a lot and I feel like there's deliberate contrasts. One of the girls who died after watching the tape has a Western-style bedroom, her parents have a Japanese-style one. She also died while drinking Coke.

I'm up to the point where the main character has watched the tape. One thing that's stuck out to me is the apparent contrast between the young, modern and Western and the old, traditional and Japanese. There's a lot of mention of Japanese-style rooms and Western-style rooms.

"Captain the forward sensors are picking up bad vibes in this sector of space."
"Lieutenant give me an analysis. How bad are these vibes?"
"One moment, Captain. Rancid sir. Utterly rancid."
"Battlestations everyone."

The saying, "Life is just one damn thing after another," is a gross underestimate. The damn things overlap.
-The Cincinnati Enquirer, the 21st of February 1947

sleepy binch syndrome is really beating the shit out of me today

I got an email off Asos saying that they'd cancelled my order as I had requested (I hadn't) and that I had not been charged (I had). The only customer service option seems to be a live chat with someone whose English is not great (not their fault).

I'm definitely weighing whether it's worth continuing to try and cut out caffeine versus go back to a moderate amount. Caffeine dependency isn't really that bad, it's just the withdrawal that really sucks. If I can cut it out entirely or just go back to drinking it every day those are both fine really.

I have just learned that chocolate has caffeine in it. This might explain some of the chocolate cravings.

She sleeps soundly, feeling no guilt from her crimes.

the cat shat in the sink again 😞

I very much appreciated that the straight man of The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent was played by an Irish woman so she sounded closer to an actual normal person to me than a holywood normal person.

I did the dishes I deserve a medal

My keyboard is full of cat hair.