What Was January About

January generally sucks. It's cold, damp, dark, my muscles don't work. My post-Christmas finances don't add up and the heating bill rises exponentially per degree dropped. Nothing is really happening and it often feels it has little value beyond misery. That is usually how it goes.

This year I've opted for a slightly different take on it. It's ok for January to be a rubbishy non-month. I can just lean into the idea of zero expectation of output, and enjoy the emptiness. Nothing useful is going to happen. Does anything useful need to? The Romans didn't even include it on their calendar for a long time. Just ten months existed. The rest was unspace which they knew couldn't resolve into something valuable. Could it?

Last January I played Still Wakes the Deep. It was an incredible story and a part of it's bitter charm has naturally wormed its way in. The underlying theme of isolation. The whole thing takes place on a rig in the middle of nowhere. There are people around. Survivors. Mostly it's just you wandering and communicating what you can but there's nowhere else you can actually all go. Maybe January is like this. It's a place you can wander around alone and enjoy and just feel the vastness of an ocean around you. Maybe we can fill the rig with our own internal explorations.

If I'm to do it this well, I need to store things. I've forgotten most of the media I consumed last year and my thoughts on it already. So I have started a ledger of sorts. It was seeded this way at least. Transactional entries with a judgement of their cost. Playful to avoid it feeling like accounting. Maybe on the lines of Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry.

It was too hard to judge a daily dose of media though on these lines. Now it's more a journal of scribblings. Quick tallies of Things I have watched, read or played. It works for now. The only cost is time really.

In that spirit I want to make the most from that investment and at least share a few things from the ledger that stood out. The things I took onboard.

• 🎮Mystery Case Files Series. A game series for a mental check out. More on this in another post but they have a therapy value suitable for January.
• 🎮Tr-49. Still working through this deduction machinery but as database searching games go it has a great atmosphere and a bizarre story emerging. I love old books and archives so it's right up my aisle.
• 📖All the Living and the Dead. This book will change something in you. I'm absolutely positive. You will feel a deep empathy for those who work with death. You will treasure connections with the living. You will want to honour the dead. (It does have some very heavy content rooted in our increasing distance from tragedy but the book is not about darkness.)
• 🎞️Rental Family. Brendan Fraser is absolutely brilliant in this. The story is heart warming and heart breaking. I feel the first half was much stronger and real, with the second maybe pulling a few punches in favour of resolution. Themes of isolation and relationships do tug your soul though.
• 📺His &Hers. On the sharper end of murder mysteries. Tessa Thompson and Jon Bernthal make this work with a very excellent ending that will get you to question the impact a single event can have on peoples lives. Side shout to Sunita Mani who I loved as the side-lined detective who doesn't let go.
  

What was January about? For me it was about leaning into idleness. Restocking, refurbishing. Preparing my rig for the rest of the year.

"We do not miss you, precious weens, though as we sleep waves break the bow; Though storms gather beneath the brow of winter and woollen gathers now the clouds, And still wakes the deep, and still on we plow."