Our anniversary

[Shuggy]

I haven't been here for years, but tomorrow (here, NZ), February 9, 2026 is the 20th anniversary of my then boyfriend and I seeing Brokeback, and we consider it our wedding anniversary, because 100 m from the cinema, he stopped the car and said "Well? Do we want to end up like Ennis, with a couple of shirts in a wardrobe, and a postcard?" I said No, and he began to move in with me full-time, and we've been together for 22 years.
When Annie Proulx came through to promote her next book, we went up afterwards to thank her. It took her a little to realise that we weren't just more of those tedious people who'd written fanfic with a happy ending: we'd lived one!

Is any of the old crowd still here? I've forgotten many of your real names, but there was the lady who was a docent at the Asian Art Museum in SF, and Peter who has cycled all of SF and done much to promote cycling there, who I stayed wtih in the Mission. If you're still about, it would be great to get back in touch.
Shaggy

[Front-Ranger]

So nice to see you on here, Shuggy, and hear your good news. Congratulations on your anniversary! Hope to see you around sometimes, don't be a stranger!

[Shuggy]

Thank you. The anniversary had my husband and me reminiscing in the early hours of the morning. I wonder if the film changed many other people's lives as much as it did ours. Maybe something else would have pushed us together, or maybe we would have just drifted on, and then drifted apart.

I really miss basic, non-commercial community fora like this. The IMDb boards (from which this sprang, thanks, second director Pierre Tremblay!) were good, and a lot of valuable cinema data vanished when they were deleted without warning. Likewise the Richard Dawkins forum, for bad reasons. I gave up the bird one a month after Musk bought it, and I was clearly right to do so. (Joined Bluesky) I've largely given up FB (joined Substack). The whole increasing montization of the Internet has made more and more of it toxic.

Underlying this is that screens themselves are addictive. (I was hooked when I bought my first home computer in 1986, but Stan Freeberg lampooned TV addiction in 1963!

). Oligcarchs, advertisers - capitalists in general - have magnified that addition in every way they can, including personalising what they send us - along with stealing and profiting off our data. And they focus on the poor and poorly educated.