This piece originally appeared as part of my weekly newsletter, The Full Lid on 8th March 2019. If you liked it, and want a weekly down of pop culture enthusiasm, occasional ketchup recipes and me enjoying things, then check out the archive and sign up here. Podcasting is doing a thing again. Last time it …
This piece originally appeared as part of my weekly newsletter, The Full Lid on 22nd February 2019. If you liked it, and want a weekly down of pop culture enthusiasm, occasional ketchup recipes and me enjoying things, then check out the archive and sign up here. Let’s start with a little thematically appropriate music. [youtube …
The Expanse begins in the final minutes of its third season. Which is a hyperbolic exaggeration on one hand and a salute to the sheer audacity of the first three seasons on the other. In the space of under 40 episodes the show has shifted from ‘traumatized survivors busk their way through a political scandal’ to …
This piece originally appeared as part of my weekly newsletter, The Full Lid on 8th February 2019. If you liked it, and want a weekly down of pop culture enthusiasm, occasional ketchup recipes and me enjoying things, then check out the archive and sign up here. Oh boy. Okay, business pants on. This week, Spotify, …
Tim O’Brien is a Vietnam vet famous for the novel Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried, his anthology of short stories about his time there. The idea he expresses in that title, your experiences being the things you sling around you, isn’t new (Jacob Marley says hello. Or perhaps ‘HELLOOOOOOOO!’) but I find the utility of …
As Christopher Priest (This one not this one but both do good work) pointed out, a magic trick has three elements to it: The Pledge-The magician shows you something ordinary or familiar. The Turn-The magician makes the ordinary extraordinary. The Prestige-The actual magic trick. A bunny where there could be no bunny. Last week’s episode of Discovery was built this …
I’ve been thinking a lot about narrative expectation recently. Pretty much every job I have I can get better at by watching, reading, listening to and playing things. So I do a lot of that, often at the same time. This week, as is often the case, that threw up some interesting comparisons. Luther is Neil …
There’s a hashtag trending at the moment which is the laziest, lowest hanging fruit fat joke you can imagine about the current US President. I mean they all are, no hashtag jokes are good, no mocking nickname in the history of mocking nicknames has been half as funny as the emotionally stunted 15 year …