owenthurman

In late 2019, I:
- Watched Todd in the Shadows's video on Be Here Now
- Fell in love with "D'You Know What I Mean," opening track of Be Here Now, and listened to it about fifty times via the Youtube music video (you know the one, with the actualfax helicopters)
- Found Cerberusia's Yuletide prompt for Oasis omegaverse
- Listened to their first two albums. I liked the second album a little better, and on the second or third loop of it playing on Youtube in the background (because I hadn't even subscribed to Tidal yet), I went hey, this song's neat, I wonder what it's called? Friends, it was Wonderwall.
- Watched Supersonic, their two-hour documentary/extremely high-end marketing film.
- Watched a bunch of archive interviews on Youtube, read a bunch more. Fell alllllll the way down the rabbit hole. Collected all the links in a giant word doc that I maintain to this day and which formed the basis of the primer I posted a few months later.
- Wrote 5k of Oasis omegaverse porn. (Got an approving comment on it from one of the OG omegaverse writers!!)

Six years!! I can't believe all that's happened since. 2019 was the absolute nadir of their relationship, and now they hug on stage every night while grinning at each other like soppy adoring idiots. (You see what I mean.) I've written almost 120k of fic and stuck around more or less continuously for longer than I've been in any other fandom. I've seen Liam solo three times, Noel once, and Oasis twice. These gigs have taken me to London, Manchester, and Dublin (twice), after only having been to Europe once before, and have led me to meeting up with a bunch of friends while overseas, some for the first time IRL.

Meanwhile the world in general and I personally have gone through a lot of shit that continues unabated. It's been a very long six years.

The weather here has turned wet and cold, just as it was when I first listened to What's the Story Morning Glory on repeat in 2019. I put the album on in car this weekend, and the big wailing guitars and Liam's voice, helped along by the same grim autumn weather in which I first heard these songs, took me straight back to that original thrill of discovery.

We take our joy where we find it. I have found a lot of mine the past few years in this band and especially these two guys.

The Secret of Chimneys (1925) by Agatha Christie. An adventurous fellow arrives in England set on delivering a manuscript and a batch of illicit love letters and ends up in a wild plot involving a murder, a stolen jewel, and a Ruritanian country in Eastern Europe.

This is one of Christie's light-hearted romps. I definitely read this at some point 25+ years ago but had forgotten basically everything, including how much fun Christie is when she's in this mode. (Aside from the ambiant xenophobia, classism, antisemitism, and some unexpectedly central pro-monarchial sentiments.) I had a great time.

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Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains by Jon Krakauer. A collection of essays spanning a wide range of topics at least tangentially related to climbing. As the title suggests, not many women in this book. Overall a mixed bag, as an essay collection is liable to be, and sometimes Krakauer's voice wears a bit thin, especially when he's trying to be funny. OTOH, in the midst of "Tentbound," an otherwise tediously humorous essay on being stuck in your tent for days at a time, we get this passage, the end of which delights me more than I can even articulate:

Boredom presents a very real, if insidious, peril. To quote Blaine Harden from the Washington Post: "Boredom kills, and those it does not kill, it cripples, and those it does not cripple, it bleeds like a leech, leaving its victims pale, insipid, and brooding. Examples abound . . . Rats kept in comfortable isolation quickly become jumpy, irritable, and aggressive. Their bodies twitch, their tails grow scaly." The backcountry traveler, then, in addition to developing such skills as map and compass, or the prevention and treatment of blisters, must prepare mentally and materially to cope with boredome, lest his tail grow scaly.

My favorites out of the bunch are probably "Valdez Ice," about climbing frozen waterfalls; "Club Denali," about people attempting to climb Denali; and "Devil's Thumb," about him randomly deciding at the age of 23 to go to Alaska and solo climb a particular peak. You will notice all of these are about difficult, hazardous climbing in very cold temperatures, aka sort of similar to his Everest book.

In addition, usually Krakauer gives kind of mixed messages about his own climbing, on one hand saying it's an addiction and the only thing he's good at, and on the other hand only talking about how uncomfortable it is and how much he would rather be doing something else, So Devil's Thumb in particular was nice for a story of him actually doing some major climbing and only making a little bit of fun of himself over it.