Silo

One of the observations I would make today is that although PN was a new friend and someone I didn’t know especially well, attending her funeral has given me something of an outlet to express some of the grief and pain I’m experiencing in my own life. I think this must be the case as the grief I’ve experienced is disproportionate. Some of it is the generic grief of the death of a young person, some is the grief of a new friendship, a new connection ended unexpectedly, and part of it is, of course, grief for PN for her friends and her family all of whom are going through a very difficult experience right now.

Meeting A was important because I could see that she had been deeply affected by PN’s death and I think we connected in the pain around it. I don’t know how she felt but she and I spoke briefly at the funeral and I was able to thank her for calling and for talking to me about the circumstances of PN’s death and thank her for giving me an opportunity to talk to somebody else. I had found myself really alone and without anybody to express those feelings to and being able to speak to someone who did know PN, who did have a close relationship with her was important to me.

I did quite a lot of video editing today. I had forgotten how engaging and interesting a task it is. The process of looking at what you have and thinking about how you can cut it to make it into something more useful, more direct and powerful. The video I’m working on is a submission for an awards ceremony and is the sort of leftovers of a piece of work that I completed. Now it’s the “let’s go to an awards and see if we can win a prize” part of that programme.

It is a little challenging when it comes to creating words, media, and video content in that people appear to assume it’s going to take five minutes to do, but there’s quite a lot of stages in the process and it’s not a simple thing. Sometimes you need some time just to think through the structure, the shape. How are you going to present this message, how are you going to bring everything together, so it feels reasonably cohesive?

I don’t think expectations are too high, probably my expectations are the highest but still it feels like it’s “well come on we asked for this yesterday why don’t we have a polished version today?”

In the evening I watched silo season 3 episode 9 which is the one where the attack is launched during the open day and everybody finds themselves swept down into silos to begin the postapocalyptic tale properly. It kind of makes me want to reread the books.  The story has problems and holes and challenges but it is really intriguing and the idea of finding yourself born into a situation over which you have no control, with other people pulling the strings, with questions of faith and confidence and rules and laws is a neat analogy for life. I enjoy thinking about the machine voice advising the leaders of each silo and the characters’ gradual realisation it’s almost certainly some sort of coordinating person on the other end of a radio.

Having read the books I know that the nanotechnology that’s used to kill everybody is also deployed to keep some of the characters alive for an extraordinarily long time and I I suspect in season 4 we’ll see some of that with the big bad emerging and the adventure continuing in Silo 1. I look forward to seeing some of the differences which exist there. The elevators, more modern technology etc. I really enjoyed the quite tragic setup in the TV show with the anchor couple being separated into different silos right at the beginning and are then knowing that there’s no way they’re going to be able to travel between the two after the disaster.