Self Isolation: Here We Go Again

I'm fine. I've got no symptoms, have been double jagged, and have had two negative lateral flow tests. But I got pinged as a close contact of a positive case, and though they're talking about changing the rules for self-isolation if you've had both vaccine doses, they haven't yet, so I'm on day three of ten days of self-isolation.

Yay.

I've been wracking my brains trying to work out what the contact could have been because I've been so. fucking. careful. and all I can come up with is the bus. We're in the middle of a heatwave here in Scotland, and my walk to work is an hour+ along a main road with no shade, and it was impossible to walk in and not arrive stinky, melty, and useless, so the bus, and everyone else had the same idea, so it's been busy...

Ah, well. Nothing for it but to hunker down and make use of that Disney Plus subscription, that I honestly don't know if the person whose account it is knows I'm still using.

I was really surprised by how much I enjoyed Loki - to the surprise of literally no-one I adored Sylvie - but I really bloody loved it, right up until the last episode. Not that I didn't enjoy the finale, I just didn't realise it was the finale until I saw it later on online. It was a perfectly serviceable episode, but it didn't resolve anything, or engage with the themes of the series; it didn't serve Loki's story, or Sylvie's, or Mobius's. All it did was introduce the next big Marvel villain. And, like, this is what I didn't want to happen when Disney announced all three hundred of its new Marvel shows, that it would all become so interconnected as to be incomprehensible.

I remember years ago watching the first half season of Agents of SHIELD, and giving up in disgust when there was a mid-season heel turn that only made sense if you'd been to see Captain America: Winter Soldier in the cinema. Now I can't remember if I was still a carer at the time or unemployed after my grandmother had passed away, but cinema trips were beyond my means, as were the movie channels. I saw the initial MCU movies when they finally came to terrestrial years later.

I mean, I was probably never going to be in the first flush of the MCU fandom because it was too much of a sausage fest for me, but even if it had been more up my alley, I was seeing these movies 2-3 years after they came out. And even though I am in a much better place now, and again I do not pay for this account, I still rankle at the notion that I have to watch all of these things to properly enjoy any of them.

Anyway, Loki is really good up until its last episode when it peters out like a wet fart; in this way it's like WandaVision...and different from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier which was like a wet fart all the way through.

The last thing I saw at the cinema before lockdown was Birds of Prey, which if it had been the last film I ever saw on the big screen I would have been okay with that, but cinema's making a comeback, and I've got to be brave eventually, so I was considering putting on my big girl pants and going to see Black Widow. Now, I'm sure it would have been better on the big screen, and I do want to help my local cinema - I worked there as a teenager, I've got a lot of affection for it, although don't eat the hotdogs, seriously - but I'm in self isolating, I'm bored, and my friendly neighbourhood password-sharer has paid for premier access.

By the way, I'm not as much of a freeloader as I sound, I traded my prime streaming password for his Disney plus. I would do well in a barter economy, I feel.

( Black Widow: my favourite movie circa 2015 )