Since I’m no longer doing my monthly updates, I thought I’d start a new irregular series of posts about stuff I am currently liking. This one has TV and tunes.

Watching

Fringe
Fringe! I love Fringe. It’s definitely in my top ten TV shows ever. Season 5 has been great, especially impressive since they rebooted it in a way that made all the characters unlikable for a while but turns out they knew what they were doing. This was possibly going to be the last season ever and so they’ve added a lot of callbacks to previous seasons in a way that’s awesome and not ‘sideways world in LOST’. I guess what makes Fringe so great is that for all the crazy plot twists and gruesome weirdness, it’s so good at bringing in multiple versions of the same characters and making you love them all in distinct ways. Anyway, I’m super happy it’s been renewed for a final short season next year, especially since (vague spoiler) they got all the happy ending stuff out of the way this season and can go nuts next year.

Game of Thrones
I’ve been slightly concerned at how not totally over-excited I have been about the return of Game of Thrones. It’s still better than 99% of things on TV and I still usually end up watching it at 10am ‘cos I can’t wait any longer but being a book reader and seeing scenes and characters combined and condensed has been getting in the way of total enjoyment. However, they went totally off book this week and I’m actually enjoying that a lot more since I don’t know what they’re up to now. Either way, the actors are still keeping this awesome every week. Big question though – baby direwolves vs baby dragons? I can’t decide.

Homeland
This was good too, although for a few horrible moments it felt like it was going to go all 24. There’s a mole in CTU etc. Actually a lot of the situations were very 24 (some of the same writers involved) but they managed the plot twists really well in that while I had no idea what was going to happen, it did at least feel like the writers weren’t making ut up as they went along. Or, you know, having to blow up a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles to outdo themselves. Interested to see what happens next season.

The Bridge
I wasn’t going to get into this, since there’s so much else on at the moment and I’m wary of turning into someone who watches any Scandi-drama BBC4 throws at us. But I did like The Killing a lot and I did love Borgen even more, and The Bridge is great, if also fairly ridiculous. While still basically a serial killer police procedural, the dual Denmark/Sweden stuff and the great leads are making this very watchable. I fully expect to dislike the ending though – these red herringy shows never end well. It’s all on iPlayer if you want to catch up.

Mad Men
I get the feeling I’m doing Mad Men wrong. I always enjoy it but I only ever love it when it tips over into comedy. All the symbolism and drama is way less interesting to me. Luckily, there has been a fair amount of hilarity this season so as long as that keeps up, I’ll keep watching. Glad that means I don’t have to worry about spoilers either.

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I am not enjoying May very much so far. The weather has been ridiculous, I have too much to do and then I also got a jury service citation. I’ve always wanted to do jury service, up until I got another letter saying we might have to do an EIGHT WEEK trial. Can you imagine? Even if I had a low paying job I hated, that would be a bit much. I had to go along today and luckily, they told us that particular case has been postponed. There was an audible sigh of relief through the jury area! I may still get to do a short case but I’ll be just as happy to get sent home again tomorrow.

Anyway, with that possible doom ahead of me, I figured I should get out and have some fun. Emma notified me about a huge book sale in Edinburgh (what an enabler!), and it was the first sunny day in ages so I had a jaunt. The book sale was pretty amazing – so much stuff! It filled the whole church, the whole outside area and a garage around the back. I was fairly restrained and only bought 6 books, for a mere £8. There wasn’t much of interest in the travel section or it could have been worse. Amongst my finds were the next two Wheel of Time books, which I was just planning on restarting, for 50p each and a 1930s edition of The Kangchenjunga Adventure with awesome library sticker. I also bumped into Emma who found some amazing stuff.

I then hiked up the hill to Hannah Zakari to drop off some more product, say hello to my bread slice brooches and buy a cute booklet by Naoshi. And then I popped into the National Museum of Scotland to see the train posters exhibition. I was looking forward to this and was a little surprised to find it was only about 15 posters in a tiny room, along with a few other train-related exhibits. What was there was amazing including some of the original artwork, but I could have looked at ten times as many posters before I got bored. They did have some good stuff in the shop though so I picked up some great postcards.

And then I went home and started reading my books.

As a “serial entrepreneur”, I’m rarely short of ideas, but sometimes people suggest stuff that is both a great idea and easy to do and so yesterday found me attempting some simple origami to illustrate my new origami paper packs! I am not awesome at origami but these all turned out okay. That’s a swan, because I threw my crane in the bin when I couldn’t get it to work.

Anyway, if you like origami, you can now buy packs of 8 15cm square sheets in my usual wrapping paper designs and get folding. I’ve already sold some so clearly this was a good idea. Thanks to Chrissy at Paper Kawaii for the suggestion – check out her site for some great crafty projects.

Meanwhile, other great ideas of mine and yours are continuing production.

Thanks to everyone who came along to the bookfair. It was a fun weekend and sales were pretty good. I was slightly miffed when I realised I hadn’t sold a single copy of my book zine I made especially for the occasion but at least it’s selling online! I’ve also put together a pack of all four Oddments zines in PDF format so you can download the whole lot in one go for just £2.50! And if you couldn’t make it, I’ll also be selling zines at the Glasgow Comic Mart at the Panopticon in June.

In boring postage news, I’ve now increased the postage on all my shops to cover the recent price changes, (apart from Folksy which I have put on holiday as it needs an overhaul and will take ages). I do apologise to my international buyers for the huge increase – I wish there was a cheaper way. I have added flat rate discounted shipping for orders over £20 so it’s worth making a big order. Here’s the new shipping rates page.

Oddments #4 is back from the printers and looks great! You can buy it in my shop now and I’ll be adding a PDF version once I get some spare time. As previously mentioned, it’s the book issue, so it has stuff on my favourite bookshops for old and independent books, some of my favourite book finds and tales from the visitor book we kept in our flat when bands used to stay over. Plus, for fun, there’s a pull out colour mini zine in the middle all about my Day in the Life which includes outfit drawings, doodles of everything I ate and my word of the day! I hope you like it.

You can also buy a copy in person at the Glasgow International Artists Bookfair this weekend. I’ll be there Saturday and Sunday selling a range of zines, books and bookmarks from Pushpin Zines. I’ve never actually been in the Royal Concert Hall before so it should be fun. I have a few cool things planned, including a box of pre-owned zines at bargain prices. Some of them are way old so a good chance to pick up some zine history.

Every time I make a zine, it’s really stressful getting it finished and wondering if I could have done things better, but once it’s printed I can’t wait to do another one. Maybe I’ll dust off another of my works in progress in time for the Comic Mart in June?

So, I finished my zine and it’s waiting at the printers for me to pick up! Seeing as I was doing it for the book fair, it seemed a good time to do the book issue. For the cover, I took a photo of my own bookshelf.

The top shelf is exactly as it always is and the lower shelf I actually carted over stuff from my big bookshelf since all my hardback and independent books are in that one and I mention a lot of them in the zine. Anyway, the big version is on Flickr so you can have a nose at my books. I’ll hopefully be back soon with more details of the zine, unless something went horribly wrong at the printers.