Rewatching Voyager at the moment and it’s a lot better than I remembered. It’s not great, in the way post season 4 DS9 or mid-period TNG could be great, but neither is it ever baffling nonsense, in the way pre-season 4 DS9 and early/late TNG could be baffling nonsense. It did some interesting things with the format…

‘New Picard trailer just dropped. We should probably say something about it. Have we got anyone on staff who doesn’t know anything about the franchise, and appears to have open contempt for anyone who does?’

Huh. In one of those wierd moments of synchronicity I found myself, as a long time lover of a good (hell even a mediocre) heist film, wondering only this morning if and how you could make that sort of structure work in audio. I’m a bit skeptical - so much of the pleasure seems to depend on fleeting visual clues,…

There was a moment in the late-ish 80s where if you were a shy, small town teenage misfit boy The Smiths, and Morrissey himself, were an absolute cultural liferaft.

So has Occam’s Razor gone down the back of a sofa? Are we just sort of pretending that the last decade hasn’t seen the widespread, unregulated commercial availability of airborne devices that can be remotely controlled from great distances, and which look and move very differently from the kind of vehicles we’re used…

The child is holding a machine gun.

‘I didn’t know it would be this ridiculous’ is such a dead giveaway as to the sort of horrible tightrope the Republicans are walking. They knew it would be somewhat stupid, but not so visibly dumb that they’d have to break kayfabe to the base by publically disavowing it.

I’m such a latecomer to Hip Hop (my teenage tastes, certainly, were quite blindingly white) that my first proper encounter with De La Soul was their much (and to my ears deservedly) -lauded ‘comeback’ album a few months ago.

That is such a tell. I have a theory that a lot of this stuff you get from white male centrist types is an argument that they’re having with themselves in public.

It tries to have a bureaucratic villain, I seem to remember. There’s some vague and rather hard to follow conflict about whose responsibility everything is - people muttering about one of the companies involved in making some of the kit which I think flares up into a brief argument between Ed Harris and some…

I think what this has become in my head is a really great Sunday afternoon hangover/day-off-with-a-bad-cold film - large, hearty and satsifying, if not particularly refined. And I think that’s quite an achievement, seeing as most of the really good ones of those seem to be from the 60s and 70s (I’m talking really long…

We must surely add Aliens to the list?

For those who saw that intriguing little thing about the way the Wandvision musical motif recurs in the soundtrack - appearances of White Vision are accompanied by what sounds like a literal tonal inversion of it, which is pretty neat.

Fun story - more years ago than I would care to admit, I took a year long Creative Writing course. The module on novel writing was run by none other than Patrick Ness (who at that point had published one reasonably well-reviewed Pynchon-esqe thingy called ‘The Crash of Hennington).

There’s a rumour going around the internet that if you turn the sound off and cue up Dark Side of the Moon just as the HBO logo appears, you’ll be having a much better time.

It might have been useful to have somebody on hand who knows that there are more accents than ‘British’. Both of the film performances retain aspects’ of the actors actual accents. Cox as Lektor - who I believe studied recordings of an actual serial killer locked up in a Scottish prison - is using something like his…

This is all very well, but it’s pretty basic stuff. For me the pinnacle of this sort of thing, in pop culture at least, is Die Hard. So, so much cleverer than it needs to be with its basic goodies = Winter Wonderland, baddies = Beethoven’s 9th structure. 

I don’t think it’s actually about being clean or not getting diseases, so much as being able to force those around you to make a show of not daring to impinge on your personal environment in a way you don’t completely control. Howard Hughes was fine living in his own filth as far as I understand it, he just couldn’t…

I get what you mean (suddenly-20%-nicer-Amos and Peaches was something of a drag), but I sort of liked that they gave Naomi as much space to be properly put through the wringer - and to come out the other side stronger and truly free of her past - as she gets in the book. If she’d been in and out in three or four…

Series 7 is great, and genuinely has some interesting things to say - I don’t know why it’s gone down the memory hole as far as it has except that its refusal to distance itself from us by setting itself in some notional ‘future’ makes it more of an uncomfortable watch than people can bear.