Sarcasm is an adjusted stress reaction.

Watching:

Season 6 of Game of Thrones, which benefits enormously from overtaking the books. Suddenly stalled character arcs are moving again! Dany gets to do more than be a bit out of her depth (and Emilia Clarke gets to do more than look pensive)! More Diana Rigg! The Braavosi equivalent of "The Ember Island Players"!

( Significant spoilers )As a palate cleanser, I then watched the three episodes of House that featured Lin-Manuel Miranda. I moved on from that series early in season 3, but such is the nature of the series that I had no trouble at all picking it up in season 6. (Shocking spoilers: beneath his gruff exterior, House cares a lot. I know, I know, it's news to me, too.)

Season 6 opens with House in a psychiatric hospital, and LMM is his roommate, a Puerto Rican rapper with bi-polar disorder. It's full of ableist cliches and also regular cliches, but LMM is a delightful human being in any situation, and Andre Braugher plays the guy in charge, so if you squint a bit, it looks like a really odd episode of Brooklyn 99.

Next: Stranger Things, followed, I think, by a Gravity Falls rewatch.

Reading:

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child -- but you knew that. I'm still having a lot of feelings. It's a problem.

(It turns out that if you post a couple of times about Draco Malfoy to Tumblr, you start being followed by ... hunk blogs? Tumblrs dedicated to male models? I feel bad for them, I am absolutely the last person they should be following.)

Then I started reading American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century by Harold Blum, but it wasn't enough to overcome my MASSIVE BOOK HANGOVER, so I turned to Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

(There are currently no plans to bring Cursed Child to Australia, but there are pretty close ties between the producers and the Australian theatre industry -- yes, I just googled -- so I feel like I should start putting money aside to buy tickets as soon as it's announced.)

Other things, not actually culture:

I've almost finished the quilt top I've been working on for the last few months -- my very first quilt that's just for me! It's a lap blanket for the couch. At my current speed, it will probably be finished by the end of summer.

I seem to have hayfever for the very first time in my life -- although it's winter, Melbourne has apparently been inundated by pollens from all over the place, and a lot of people have developed hayfever for the first time. I DON'T CARE FOR IT. I'm itchy all the time, my previously well-managed dermatitis is off the charts. I could go out and buy antihistamines, but I know there's a box around here ... somewhere. So I'm stubbornly suffering while I look for it. 

(Also, I kind of overspent this fortnight, so I'm on a really tight budget until I get paid on Wednesday. I'm not regretting my Cursed Child impulse purchase, mind, but I am quite itchy, and I'm running out of tissues fast.)

I read the play yesterday afternoon, and have basically been floating on Harry Potter Feels ever since. And I got tired of attempting to squee without spoilers on Twitter, so I'm shifting to a more appropriate venue.

( Spoilers and squee. )