Review 2002 review: Life.

Volunteering at the Commonwealth Games.
My computer was broken throughout the games and this looks like an attempt to make up for and it really does, from the description of the atmosphere, the anticipation, to expressing one of the few moments in my life when I’ve felt contented within a group and my growing admiration for netball (see above), which is still in place. With money an object the only way that I could have volunteered for the London Olympics would have been the football at Old Trafford, but with little certainty about working patterns and knowing that I might actually want to watch the games, I didn’t apply. That’s still the dichotomy of this kind of volunteering, that you’ll end up missing whatever event your volunteering for.



Visiting Paris.
This was the first time I’d been abroad in over a decade and the last time I left the country, barring visits to Cardiff and Belfast, money always being an object. Which means that even after ten years, those three days remain vivid despite having spent most of them in agony due to wearing the wrong shoes. Sitting in that café is probably my favourite memory. My plan was to move to Paris if I hadn’t been accepted onto my MA course and recently I’ve wondered if that might not have been the better option however unrealistic it seems now. But that was in 2005 when everything seemed possible and we had little clue of the financial canonball which was about the blow a hole in the wall of all our hopes.



The Death of Buffy.
Not my greatest three paragraphs by any means, but a decent reminder that for all the many amazing stories in subsequent seasons and comics, emotionally Buffy’s character arc completed at the close of her show’s fifth year. Rewatching the entire series in 2012 in conjunction with all of Joss Whedon’s other television work, while it’s impossible to say he peaked in this first five years, it’s certainly the longest sustained period of quality, even taking into account the shakier, college years elements of the fourth season. Now we await his SHIELD adaptation, and the extent to which his auteurism will infect the next phase of The Avengers films. If his first film is any indication, he may be on a roll again.



Blogs!
The transient nature of the internet, and the decline in the amateur blogosphere means that most of these sites have closed. From the highlighted five only John still has Sore Eyes and Boing Boing bounces. In Passing just has a text basic page suggesting it will be back up in 2008 (archive image). There’s more of a to do in the links at the bottom and I still read most of them, though the Gawker in that moment was far more New York centric and Cameron Crowe hadn’t made Elizabethtown (thank goodness We Bought A Zoo suggested a potential return to form). Supermodels Are Lonelier Than You Think! seems quite quaint now in comparison to the gossip blogs ten years later, though for the life of me I can’t imagine why I was reading it then anyway.



Five lists of five things I also loved
I have no memory of reading Mark Lawson’s The Battle for Room Service: Journeys to All the Safe Places, though I did meet him twice in the intervening years. Rescue Me with Sally Philips is still an underrated gem. My attempt to look cool in the list of music is entirely counteracted by not having listened to most of them since. Three out of the five websites are still posting, with the contents of OffTheTelly still online (thank goodness). The interesting thing about this first five predictions is that three of them eventually came to pass, but fortunately for some of humanity but unfortunately for everyone it’s neither of the bottom two. But notice: Buffy, Doctor Who and Shakespeare. Twas forever thus.