It's been a month, huh. Sure has! More than. Last week I flew out to the midwest for a family funeral, so that was a thing.

I'm not going to catch up and also Yuletide bears, so anyway, yesterday I went out with friends to see Knives Out! It was good. Also, discussing the movie afterward, I learned two (non-spoilery) things about myself:

1. I can't remember the last time I went to see a movie in a theater that didn't have any explosions in it. This is not on purpose, but maybe I should try to branch out (or maybe sff-adjacent directors should consider being less explosive-dependent in their plotting. Just a thought.) The last time may actually have been in high school when a friend asked if I wanted to see a movie Saturday and I was experimenting with having a social life so I said yes, and it was inexplicably a romantic comedy (I thought maybe he liked one of the actors or something) and I realized like two years later that he probably thought it was a date and was trying to do a date thing. That can't possibly be the last one I saw with no explosions, can it?

2. I always go into any plot like the one in Knives Out - intricate locked-room murder mystery with comedy, eccentric and manipulative victim, literally everyone has a good motive, etc. - with the assumption that the first person you should suspect of involvement in the crime is the corpse. My friends said this is because I am too optimistic and normal people do not even consider this, but on reflection, I blame Ellen Raskin. When The Westing Game and The Tattooed Potato are your introduction to the genre, apparently you pick up tropes that are not as standard as Ellen Raskin makes them seem?