Also Beforeigners (2019, Norway), which kinda qualifies for all of these categories.
Bbc Radio 4 have any number of dramas in their back catalogue. One that I particularly enjoyed is Alan Plater’s Only a Matter of Time - available on the Internet archive, I find.
Then Orson Welles original War of the Worlds by the Mercury Theatre on the Air in 1938 is well worth a listen. That is available in several places around the Web.
Then, of course, there is Big Finish, who started off doing Doctor Who audios and have produced hundreds over the years - far more hours than there are of T V Doctor Who, classic and new - but they also produce a lot of other dramas, based on other properties and some completely original.
Overall their earlier ones are where the standout tales are, but they are fairly reliably entertaining throughout.
Last was in May this year and the next - probably just camping - will be in September.
I am very fortunate in having a friend with a holiday chalet. A group of us go down to open in up and stay for a week or two most years. The only cost is the fuel to get there.
My SO and I usually aim to get another week away - maybe camping, maybe a holiday cottage - later in the year too.
We are in the UK and always go to other location in the UK for holidays. Neither of us have flown since the '90s and have no intention of doing so again.
I’ve got the same one here as on reddit, and on tildes as it happens. It is a variant on a local mythic being in my part of the world.
Personally, I always used to carry a paperback with me and would read in the odd moments that this writer seems to recall as being so dull and soul destroying. I still do carry e-books on my phone of course and use them in exactly the same way - but also with the option of doomscrolling, of course.
As for TV, I was never one for TV - or radio - as background noise. With fiends, I had a bit of reputation of going round and turning such things off when I entered the room, so that we could talk without distraction. I would ask them first, of course.
The Shannara series by Terry Brooks has a reputation as being an homage to LotR, and they are quite enjoyable.
Waaay back, this was what I turned to after reading LotR. He had only published the first then and it was what made me understand the difference between good writing and bad. It gave me nothing else other than that lesson and certainly didn’t scratch the itch that I had for something like LotR. In fact nothing did and I found it best to look for something completely different that was good in it’s own right rather than poor imitations.
A regular weekly schedule would look something like:
Yes, I thoroughly enjoy short stories, for all the reasons that you give.
I grew up on the classic fantasy tales: Conan, Fafhred and the Grey Mouser, the Dying Earth tales, and all of Dunsany, Clarke Ashton Smith etc etc as well as Lovecraft, Poe and M R James and the rest.
As well as focusing on a single mood or concept, as you suggest, short stories - particularly the more literary ones - are great as single character studies, or dealing with particular interactions in a way that isolates and brings them to the forefront simply by being given a beginning and end.
It is pretty clear that this is a joke sign/poster - akin to “you don’t have to be crazy to work here but it helps” and so on.
Another BF listener here - I really liked Walker and McGann on screen in Annika too.
Otherwise, my SO and I have the Ted Lasso finale lined up. The third season (yes, I know, but I agree with the Americans that there is a distinction between series and season) has been a necessary conclusion to the material in the previous two, but not without some fun moments.
And - in terms of other UK TV - we are just on to season two of Jam and Jerusalem which I totally missed at the time but am enjoying now.
Otherwise, in non-UK shows, Drops of God and Shrinking are the clear highlights in our lineup at the moment.
Some that I have enjoyed:
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
You can’t get a lot cooler than that.
My ‘big read’ this year is Finnegans Wake which I am reading weekly along with the reddit TrueLit sub. It would be a very different experience without the comments and interpretation from there, so that’s something that I will be thinking about…
Otherwise, The Twisted Ones by T Kingfisher, which is engaging and well paced, a Doctor Who novel from the '90s and am listening to Ron Hutton’s Queens of the Wild. This books are always authoritative and entertaining but I have only just started this one so can’t say a lot so far.
I have three "!subscribe pending"s in my list after a session of joining a few days back. For me, they are showing up in my sidebar and I can post to them as usual, it seems. It is just that they don’t change from ‘pending’.
There is https://beehaw.org/c/creative which seems to be fairly active and certainly includes some knitters.
It’s not quite there yet where I am, but I am certainly hoping to a bit later this summer from time to time. I have hopes of WFH (…From Hammock) at some stage, now that I have garden that is suitable.
Yes - -for certain values of SF. Nobody is going to call the MCU hard SF, and superheroes are a fairly clear genre of their own, but in the broadest sense that genre certainly feels like it fits into the overall category of SF.
I would advise not reading them all together. They were published separately and are best read that way IMHO - just dipped into between other reads. James had particular settings and themes that his did extremely well and returned to often. I love love his tales, but I must admit that reading them them all consecutively does them no favours.
I’m very much a fan of Dunsany - though I’m in my '50s so certainly don’t count as a younger reader. I clearly recall reading The Hoard of the Gibbelins as a teen (probably in de Camp’s The Spell of Seven) and being smitten from then on.
Moving further afield than fantasy, I don’t know if anyone reads M. R. James these days. His ghost stories are still adapted for seasonal TV shorts by the BBC as well as cropping up on Radio 4, but whether he is actually read…?
Another that is underappreciated is George and Weedon Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody, which to my mind is easily on a par with Three Men in a Boat, but gets nothing like as much appreciation. But, then how many people read Three Men… nowadays?
In meetings at work, for my actions or actions that I need to follow up on etc. If I am prepared, I will add them to an existing document that we are working from in the meeting or will create a specific actions email as we go. If I am not prepared, it will be notes jotted in a physical notebook. In either case, I will then copy any actions for me to MS TO Do - which is one of the very few relevant apps that we have available on both the locked down phones and laptops. Just occasionally, it is more appropriate to make notes directly in the TO Do app.
Generally for non-work stuff, I will use Google tasks - since it available on all platforms and integrates with the calendar etc. I would love to find a good alternative to google and have tried a few over the years, but have never found anything that I can get to at work and on all platforms at home and will integrate with a calendar that is also available on all platforms - including those that my SO uses - as well as this.
The majority of notes that I make these days are either things that I have to do or are updates on the status of particular projects or systems though.