Web Travails – January 2012

So, in the first of what I hope will be an ongoing series to document the sometimes strange and interesting places I end up on the web, here’s where I’ve been lurking this month…

Have you ever thought about an actor you haven’t heard about for ages and wondered what they’re up to now? Maybe it’s just me having nothing better to think about but I do it all the time (what, for instance, happened to Rachael Leigh Cook from She’s All That? Okay, a quick search on imdb.com has revealed she’s been working all this time but I’m not a Robot Chicken fan so how would I know? Speaking of She’s All That, I watched another similar-but-not-really Freddie Prinze Jr. offering called Down to You on Netflix last night. It wasn’t great. Why did Freddie and Julia Stiles fall out so easily? Why did he pine after her for so bloody long instead of growing a pair and moving on? Why was he not locked up by the nice men in white coats for drinking shampoo of all things? What the hell was up with Julia Stiles’s walk?! Anyway, I’ve digressed…) Another actress you might not have heard about for a while is Heather Donahue from The Blair Witch Project.

You remember her now, right? – the hysterical girl with the bungee jumping snot. Well, it turns out she’s been growing medicinal marijuana since 2007. I kid you not; she’s even written a book about it:

I should thank Gef of Wag the Fox for posting this on Facebook. Closer inspection of Growgirl: How My Life After the Blair Witch Project Went to Pot actually reveals it to be well written and more than a little intriguing, starting with Donahue’s life as a sometime actress and charting the ensuing fallout from Blair Witch Project media mania. It’s not available for Kindle though

When I’m not obsessing over the fate of late 1990′s teen movie stars, I love reading about other writers’ lives, particularly anything about how they write. It’s probably something that’s only of interest to another writer, but Susannah Conway’s interview with dark fantasy author Justine Musk is a really interesting example of this. She talks about how her ideas come to her (often while rocking out in her car, of course), how a daily word count doesn’t work for her and how she deals with writer’s block. If you’re into this kind of thing, Susannah has a whole series of interviews like this on her blog. They’re called My Creative Life and they’re excellent.

My favourite photograph this month is this portrait of a girl with the most beautiful red hair found at ThatBohemianGirl.

Wouldn’t she make a great character in a story?

Finally, I found this site yesterday – Baby Goth Knits – and instantly wanted to own/make everything on it. BabyGothKnitter, site founder and self-confessed ex-hellraiser and mother of three, makes all her knits herself and sells them on eBay and Etsy. Her stuff’s reasonably priced too.

I am so in lust.