I’m always interested in new and helpful ways of tracking your health and fitness data, but well aware of the perils of getting obsessed with it. It needs to be a guide rather than the be all and end all of everything. That’s why the Gentler app caught my attention - advertising “better control of your well-being” by turning data into more human and accessible insights. It has all the usual information, workouts done, calories burned, time spent on activities, but it presents tham in a useful way.

When I want something a bit more relaxing to watch, I dip into Dawson’s Creek on Netflix. Maybe relaxing isn’t the right word, all those hyperbolic teenagers making a drama out of a molehill, but it’s a comforting treat regardless. The only problem with it is, up until this past week, the theme tune was Run Like Mad rather than the correct I Don’t Want to Wait by Paula Cole. Never has the Skip Intro button been more appropriate.

I recently finished watching the second series of Home Before Dark, an Apple TV+ show that is a mystery adventure following a family in a small town. When you try and describe this show in any more detail than that, it starts to sound a bit odd: Well, there’s a ten year old girl who thinks she’s a reporter and digs into a cold case when her family moves back to the small town her father grew up in.

I’ve previously watched all the James Bond movies to date, pending Time to Die, in a big journey from the opening credits of Dr. No to the closing sequence of Spectre. It was a heck of a ride full of highs and lows and good action sequences and questionable moments, and I loved it. So having completed the movies, tick, tick, tick, what next? I decided I wanted to read the books - a series of 12 novels and 2 collections of short stories published between 1953 and 1966.

Apple TV+ has a great strike rate so far when it comes to their TV original releases. We’ve watched a really good percentage of them and enjoyed almost all with just a couple of near misses along the way. That means we try and give everything come up a go because the chances are more than good that it’ll be worth watching. Thus, we watched Physical, a series staring Rose Byrne as a budding home video workout star trying to break through in the 1980s, whilst also supporting a family and a husband who has his own political ambitions.

It’s not ideal, is it, having to host an Olympic Games during an enduring worldwide pandemic. Tokyo 2020 delayed their games by a year and still it didn’t feel like it was really the right time to go ahead with it. But when would be the right time? That’s the difficult question. Many, many precautions were put in place and still athletes were having to self-isolate after catching or being pinged about a potential exposure to Covid.

I mentioned yesterday in my post about Riviera that I wasn’t a huge art fan, and that’s true but it made me wonder if it’s because I don’t know enough about the subject matter. A solution to that quickly leapt to my attention - the DailyArt app. The title says it all really, the app presents you with a new piece of art every single day with a bit of background and a story behind the piece.

I’m not a huge art lover, so it’s a bit of a wonder that the Sky show Riviera appealed to me. The show initially followed the dramatic and over-the-top adventures of an art curator in the South of France, dealing with deception, murder, and rebellious families, all with high fashion and expensive paintings draped along the way. The main draw, if I’m honest, was the lovely Julia Stiles and actually it ended up being worth watching.

A fun fact from Disney’s behind the scenes of the recent Loki series is that the God of Mischief has been on the big screen for less than two hours out of the fifty or so available in The Infinity Saga. Two hours across ten years, and yet this character is so incredible popular. I saw one of those weird bracket competitions on Twitter for who was the MCU’s best villain and it came down to Thanos vs Loki.

Of course the overarching plan is to watch all the films in the world, but there are quite a lot in existence already and then all these creative types just keep making more, so, you have to pick and choose. I’m sure you’re well aware by now that I love a structured challenge and I saw Stephen King tweeting recently about his ongoing project - to watch a movie from every year between 1961 and 2021.