I got to see La La Land a few weeks back at the London Film Festival and ever since watching it I’ve been waiting frantically for the soundtrack to come out. There’s just so much I love about this movie!

The soundtrack is now available on Spotify and it’s as wonderful as I remembered. Almost every single track on this leaves me grinning like an idiot:

La La Land feels like your old school Hollywood musical with magical set pieces, tap dancing routines and super catchy music, but with a story and sensibilities for our generation. I can’t wait to rewatch it when it’s comes out in January!

Nobody expects the lady code troll:

I read The Circle last year, so have been curious to see how the movie adaption would turn out. The book creeped me out enough, that I ended up tweeting and sharing less online, and I’m still considering the implications of how we interpret and act on transparency and openness.

I’m a little underwhelmed by the trailer though. I don’t think it really captures the interesting parts of the story:

I watched Arrival a couple of weeks back and loved it so much, I really want to check out the short story it was based on, Story of Your Life. It appears in Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others anthology, alongside 7 other short stories.

Here’s the description from Amazon:

From a soaring Babylonian tower that connects a flat Earth with the firmament above, to a world where angelic visitations are a wondrous and terrifying part of everyday life; from a neural modification that eliminates the appeal of physical beauty, to an alien language that challenges our very perception of time and reality. . . Chiang’s rigorously imagined fantasia invites us to question our understanding of the universe and our place in it.

You can get Stories of Your Life and Others on Amazon for £6.99.

Love this!

I’ve been slowly making my way through all the Studio Ghibli movies, and it’s so cool to see some of the characters transposed over real life footage!

I finally got around to watching that Death Stranding teaser that came out last week at the Game Awards – it looks so good!

Besides that, there’s a new gameplay trailer for Mass Effect: Andromeda. I can’t wait for this – there’s just so much about the Mass Effect world and games that I love, and this looks like so much fun!

Who doesn’t love a geometric print? I love the optical illusion in this dress and the colours make it really stand out!

You can get this Louche dress from Joy for £55:

As you might have noticed, this is my 5th post this week! I’ve been trying to figure out how to get back to writing more regularly and sharing more of the ‘stuff’ I’ve been consuming in my spare time. The general idea is to do at least one quick and easy post per day about something I’m interested in. So far it’s motivating me to write more, but I’d love to hear what people are most interested in hearing about!

In light of that, I’m reviving another ‘old’ post series of mine ‘Listening To‘: I started it with the intention to share what music I’m enjoying, but am expanding that to include podcasts, audio books and concerts!

For today’s post I wanted to highlight a podcast I started listening to recently: Imaginary Worlds. It describes itself as:

“Imaginary Worlds is a bi-weekly podcast about science fiction and other fantasy genres — how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. These are the backstories to our stories.”

It’s my new favourite podcast and in the past 2 weeks I’ve listened to the majority of their archive (it goes back about 2 years)! Imaginary Worlds gives us a glimpse behind the curtain of some of my favourite geeky books and shows: Star Wars, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, there are a ton of different geeky topics that get covered, often with perspectives that I hadn’t considered before. Pretty much anyone that enjoys geeky stories should try out this podcast!

Current favourites episodes: Fantasy Maps about the work and detail that goes into creating them, 1977, a look into the state of the world and pop culture when Star Wars came out, and Beware of Cyber City about a three-dimensional model of a town that the military uses for cyber war games.

I’m looking forward to so many movies coming out in the next couple of months, so I thought I should revive this blog post series! Each month I’ll highlight 4 movies I want to see – here are my December choices:

Moana

It’s a new Disney movie! If you’re a long time reader, you’ll know how much I love my Disney animation movies and I can’t wait to see this one. Moana tells the story of the titular character Moana, the daughter of the chief of a Polynesian tribe, who is chosen by the ocean to lift a curse. The film features music by Lin-Manuel Miranda from Hamilton fame – my Discover Weekly accidentally spoilt some of the music already and it’s so good! I might have been listening to How Far I’ll Go on repeat for the last couple of days…

Release date: Friday 2 December

Sully

I remember hearing about the plane landing in the Hudson back in 2009, but I had no idea about the story of the aftermath of it all. Sully features Tom Hanks as Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the captain who landed the plane and shows the subsequent publicity and investigation of the landing.

Release date: Friday 2 December

Star Wars: Rogue One

Do I really need to explain why I’m excited for this? Tickets are already available to book – I’ll be enjoying this in 70mm IMAX!

Release date: Friday 16 December

Passengers

I saw an early trailer for this and since then I’ve been trying to avoid as much as I can about this movie – I have the feeling it’s one that you might easily get spoiled for! Passengers features Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence as two passengers on a spacecraft traveling to a distant colony planet that are awakened from their cryogenic sleep 90 years early. It’s being promoted as a romantic sci-fi, so I’m curious to see how this turns out.

Release date: Wednesday 21 December