I have a lot of fun faffing about in Procreate* making things for my own amusement, including this logo which I made in loving tribute to the website that made managing my 2022 Year of Movies possible, the one and only Letterboxd. Should I be asked to both cease and desist, I shall! But I can’t state what a difference using the site has made in not just my film-watching life but the rest of it. Keeping a record of what I watch, oftentimes with the effort to write a short review, helps me anchor myself to points in time and remember the film and the mundane but often relevant events around it. For example, I began learning how to crochet toward the end of last year. I can’t recall exactly when off the top of my head in this instant, but I do know that if I go over to my diary and look for Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future (2022), I can find the date of when I finally got the hang of single crochet, because I was working on that while I was watching the movie, and that’s what gets me from point A to point B.
It’s an unconventional route, sure, but my brain folds the roadmap weird sometimes.
Speaking of roadmaps and weird, let’s take a tiny scenic detour on our way to the theater. C’mere. Bring it in. This is a pep talk for both of us, because I need to hear it, too.
Alright.
Whatever it is you want to do, it doesn’t matter if you start small, start cringey, start cheesy, or some combination of the three. It matters that you just START. Everyone you admire had to start somewhere, and I guarantee you that even very talented and self-assured people have had a period of at least being mid, if not sucking completely, at some aspect of their wheelhouse.
If you don’t know what you’re doing entirely, that’s fine! It’s how you learn! Maybe, while trying to cover for one of those gaps, you’ll figure out some new/new-ish way to do something that makes everyone else go, “Why didn’t I think of that?”, and boom, you’re an innovator, just because you looked at the problem differently, or didn’t let a little not-knowing stop you from trying to get there, or you process things unconventionally.
Maybe, in time, I’ll learn how to just start a column on here without some kind of long winded preamble! The dreams don’t have to be big to create meaningful change!
So with all THAT out of the way, this is where I’m just gonna start talking about movies and I’m keeping the name simple: Cosmic Loves Movies! Hurray! I have a lot of thoughts about movies and want to make an actual effort to articulate those thoughts into essays and other reflections. I do a little of this in my Letterboxd reviews, and in coming weeks I’ll start importing some of my better entries and expanding on them. In the meantime, you can check out my account here and marvel at how many times in a year one person can reasonably watch 2022’s Barbarian.
As an introduction to this column, I had the intent to write a short piece about my main genre love, horror, but there was no way I was getting out of “Hello! I’m A Horror Fan and I’m Weirdly Wholesome (and Actually, There’s a Lot More of Us Than You Think!)” in under six pages. Between my own time constraints (and timeblindness! I’m just going to keep talking about that until I earn my World’s Most Annoying ADHDer badge) and your own important things to do, dear reader, I’ll cut us both a break this time and simply tell you what to expect from future Movie Mondays/Cosmic Loves Movies: expanded Letterboxd reviews! Short essays about specific movies, directors, and topics that I think deserve examination! Horror stuff! Queer stuff! Maligned Teen Girl Cinema! Profiles of horror/movie YouTube channels/podcasts that deserve more love! (Which, with hope, will spur me to actually listen to more of the horror podcasts to which I am subscribed!) Retrospectives on movies as I continue to grow and understand more things about the world! AND MORE!
I appreciate you stopping by and if you’d like, I’ll see you back here again Wednesday for a mystery grab-bag post! To be honest I just haven’t figured out what I want to do Wednesdays yet. I might just post pictures of Ziggy Purrdust, my li’l orange boy. I promise you’ll want to come back for that.
Adios, amigos! ❤
P.s.: if you use Procreate and like the halftone look in the logo, it’s from the BeatTones pack from True Grit Texture Supply which I just got recently. There are SO MANY brushes and they all look great, plus a couple of liners that match the grungey look of the textures. This is 100% not a paid promotion—I’m just a weird old person excited about sharing the cool stuff that makes making digital art fun. (This kind of sharing is also part of the original way we used to do “blogs” back in the day. Maybe Wednesday will be pictures of Ziggy AND a “Back in MY Day with Great-Aunt Cosmic” on the subject of Web Logs? Tune back in to find out!)
Cosmic’s Read-o-Rama 