Seven slices of cinema: Well, we kinda face to the north and real sudden-like turn left.

Seven slices of cinema: What the fuck are we doing?

Seven slices of cinema: It's magic time.

Seven slices of cinema: Cornetto?

Seven slices of cinema: An ecstasy of gold.

Seven slices of cinema: We're on an express elevator to hell, going down!

This is also a House of Stelfreeze (part 1 of 4)

I've always though Brian Stelfreeze has been a deeply underrated comics artist, even with a formidable legacy over the past few decades. His covers alone showcase his incredible sense of design, his wonderful use of colour, and a gorgeous gloss that is distinctly Stelfreeze. It's my distinct privilege to share some of my favourites on this blog. 

I really thought I would be dodging more mantraps

Like everyone else in the world, I thought quicksand would be a much bigger issue to deal with as an adult, but I am also somewhat surprised that mantraps aren't more of a problem.

I'm not sure if it's something I saw in Road Runner cartoons too much, or because Judge Fear had some giant fuck-off mantraps on his shoulders, and would use them to ensnare their prey. All I know for sure is that there is still a part of me that always wonders if there are traps lurking in the long grass, any time I go off the beaten track.

The Eltingville Club and the early nerd internet

There is a lot of hate and spite raging on the surface in Evan Dorkin's Eltingville comics, and that's what makes them so fucking funny, because they are getting so worked up about the dumbest shit in the world. But they can also be extraordinarily sad comics sometimes, especially when you see the spark of love for pop culture that curdled for these poor little bastards. 

There's a page, just after the club has properly broken up for good, when you see them set up the whole thing. And they just want to talk about the cool stuff they like, and about how much fun it is to talk with somebody - anybody- about role playing games and comics and horror movies and all that wonderful nonsense.

Every time I see that page, it weirdly remind me of the earliest days when I went online, in the mid-90s, and there was so much enthusiasm and glee about geek stuff. Just sheer unbridled passion for all the nerd stuff, and actual happiness that there are others who you can talk to about it. 

It very quickly became poisoned, even by the time the first message boards started to become a thing, the snark had set in permanently. It would be nice to think that after three decades we were over this shit, but it keeps coming back in the form of fuckwits like those Comicsgate clowns.

Of course it has always been there, plenty of comics mags in the 70s and 80s were full of shit-talking, with loads of arguments about things that literally nobody cares about anymore. And all those early rec.arts things were full of toxic behaviour.

But for a second there, the internet felt like a place which somebody could say what their favourite episode of the original Battlestar Galactica was, and didn't need to defend that opinion to the death. It was nice while it lasted, before it all got too Eltingville.

You can't take it with you

There were never any early Silver Age comics around when I was at my peak comics obsession, in the late 80s and 90s. There was never going to be a lot anyway, because I was geographically trapped on the arse end of the world, but when I first started seriously collecting, the oldest American comic book I had for a long time was a Jim Shooter/George Perez Avengers from 1977.

Even though, at that time, it was only a couple of decades since the Silver Age comics had been published - the gap between now and the launch of Image comics is significantly longer now - there weren't any Tales of Suspense or Mort Weisinger Superman comics to be found anywhere. The very, very few that I did spot in shops were slabbed on the wall, and fetching ridiculous prices.

But then, in the past decade, that's definitely changed, and it's been relatively easy to pick up multiple Lee/Kirby Fantastic Fours, mind-blowing Journey Into Mystery comics and Jimmy Olsen sci-fi shenanigans from the 1950s. There have been tonnes of bronze age, a fair amount of silver age, and even golden age suddenly available to me. It's been magnificent.

This could be because everyone went a bit Marie Kondo, and ditched everything, but I also genuinely think it's because the first wave of serious fanboys, who collected and hoarded all this shit for decades, are dying off.

All these exquisite collections, locked away in pristine condition by readers who bought the comics as kids in the 1960s. They're not kids anymore, and the Grim Reaper is calling, and their poor next of kin are lumbered with the task of getting rid of these things, and they go out into the world.

It does feel a bit morbid to get excited about this thought, and certainly more than a little selfish, but hell, these elder nerds could always be buried with them. I honestly wouldn't judge them for that, it was good enough for the fuckin' pharaohs.

It's the cycle of life, and I don't really think too hard about where my Invisibles are going when I merge with the infinite. But the comics live on, even if we don't, and can still inspire joy love after we're gone.  

Steve Martin makes me alive

So many comedians get desperately unfunny as they get older, as they get more settled and successful in life, but it's deeply comforting to see that Steve Martin can still bring the laughs with some classic slapstick. 

Only Murders in the Building is not something I would ever listen to as a podcast, but the ineffable charms of the lead actors and general bitchiness of everyone involved keeps the TV show compelling.

And Martin - who is pushing 80! - can still be laugh out loud funny when he brings the physical comedy. The scenes towards the end of the first season, where Martin's character has been drugged and he's trying to move are the most ridiculous piece of straight-up slapstick comedy I've seen since Martin was young.

Wagner on Dredd: The Robot War never ended

Judge Dredd is one of the great comic serials because it has unfolded in real time, with the title character growing and strengthening over decades and decades, and themes developing at the slowest pace, while still delivering loads of kickass action. 

And it still has one of the original creators coming in occasionally and blowing everyone away with incredible and concise new stories, which build on all those years of work. Long ago, back in the 1970s, John Wagner gave us the first great mega-epic with the first Robot War, and is still mining that technophobic vein for rich stories in the year 2024.

Specifically, he has been using the Mechanismo storyline - the logical progression of all that futuristic technology - to tell an ongoing saga of robot judges coming increasingly into use. It's a story that really kicked off 20 years into Wagner's Dredd stories, and the most recent issues of 2000ad have seen Wagner return to it, with his great collaborator Colin MacNeil.

The long game Wagner has been playing with the robot judges has suddenly blasted back into life,  quickly establishing the latest problems with ceding authority to robots, and has AI putting people under custody for their own good, which is very much an issue when that AI is coming in the form of a fucking big robot with massive firepower.

Dredd has been slowly coming around to his robotic comrades, with the robo-judges performing well in recent years - even old Joe can't argue with the numbers - but he never took a step back on his line that humans must always make the ultimate decisions. It has seemed like he was scared of the future, but he's also been proven right, because for a fascist bully-boy, Dredd is always right.

In a way, the great Robo War never ended, with robot Judge Spencer a direct evolution of the long-destroyed Call-Me Kenneth. And that's why Dredd remains a rock solid comic strip, still fresh after all these years, because it can keep coming back to a storyline again and again, and making it richer and smarter every time.

Asparagus picking with Ayn Rand

So the first proper job I ever get is asparagus picking in late 1991. All I have to do is get up at 4am, perform back-breaking labour for a few hours, and I get the princely sum of $150 for five days of work. I'm 16 years old and this is the most money I've ever had in my life, so that's fine by me, and 90 percent of it goes straight into comic books anyway.

The job itself is fairly easy - me and a dozen other pickers stride up and down the rows with long-handled blades, lopping off the matured asparagus and tossing it in a plastic bin on your hip. For the first three days, I go at the same speed as most of the other workers, but once I figured out that the sooner we were done, the sooner we could go home, and we'd still get paid the same, I started zooming down those rows. 

There were a couple of other dudes who went at the same pace as me, and the rest just wandered along, taking their time and dragging us all back. And I used to get so fucking annoyed by their pace, and that my labour was being extended through no fault of my own, and any personal capital or pride I had in getting the job done fast and well was watered down by the laziest sons of bitches on the planet.

And yes, I was reading my first Ayn Rand books at the time.

I was 16! Of course I was reading my first Rand books, and was primed for their message about how I was a special little boy, and nobody would understand me, and all I have to do is grind all the other bastards down before they got me first. 

And that could be enough to set me up as libertarian for life, because it's such an impressionable age. But I also read a lot of other books at that time that talked to me about concepts like empathy and helping your fellow man, and that maybe I ain't the centre of the goddamn universe, and maybe some people are slower than I am on the asparagus field, but there might be reasons for that, and those reasons are absolutely none of my fucking business.

I might have followed the Rand path for a while, but then I read Catch-22 a year or two later, and that seemed much more like my worldview, full of absurdity and weirdness, set in an incredibly arbitrary universe, full of young men dying who all thought they were special, but really weren't.

So I don't judge anybody who is a teenager and ranks Atlas Shrugged, with its crowd-pleasing notions of black and white, as the greatest book of all time, because I've been there too. But it's a complex world out there - even when you are just picking bloody asparagus - and you have to grow with it.

This is, was, and always will be a House of Sienkiewicz: A last dose of mutant mania

 

Flexograping it

Whenever anybody talks about the experiments with flexographic printing in the 1980s, it's almost always regarded as an unmitigated disaster. Most comics are printed on paper shinier than my arse in the year 2024, but people actually seemed to be genuinely upset by what flexograph did to their comics, back in the days of newsprint.

DC and Marvel both tried out the process on a wide range of comics, from New Mutants to Conquerors of the Barren Earth, and was occasionally used on some fairly important comics, like the first issue of Crisis on Infinite Earths. 

It was an attempt to get the most out of the crappy paper stock of the day, pushing up the vibrancy of the colours to an abnormal degree, giving everything a neon sheen, and nobody in the comic community had nice things to say about it. It scorched the retinas, they said, and the whole process had massive problems with colours bleeding outside the lines.

The fan press of the day was full of the scorn, but I always thought it looked terrific. There is a part of me that always likes his comics loud and garish and over the top, and the flexographic process gave it plenty of that. The subdued tones of the newsprint didn't give that kind of thrill.

Nobody cares about this kind of thing anymore. Nobody worries about the difference between Mando and Baxter paper. But these old comics, with the experimental garishness, they're still out there, and they're still as brilliantly eye-scorching as ever.

Happy birthday to the ground!

My daughter turns five years old today, and it has been, without any doubt, the best five years of my life. It's also been exhausting and scary and all that, and it definitely all went by far too quickly.

Anyway, this is her favourite song in the world right, (closely followed by the Doctor Who goblin song). I happily approve, and genuinely can't wait to see what she gets into next.

Cheeseburger with a side of Deadpool

It does seem a little weird that the Deadpool movies can be so hugely popular, and generate billions in dollar in revenue, without anybody really having much interesting to say about them. They're a lot of fun, with the fourth wall breaking, the incredible carnage, and the absolutely non-stop snark, but there's nothing much to add.

While the latest one has some added Wolverine, it really is just like all the rest, even with a staggering number of cameos. Like every single Marvel film, it's fine. Just fine.

It's easy to think the fact that the new one is now the highest-earning R-rated film in US movie history is a sign of the end of modern cinema, but they are just fast food, and there's tonnes of other gourmet options out there.

I've eaten at a couple of the most well-regarded restaurants on the planet, and I'll never forget those meals and will probably never stop talking about them, but I've also had the most disposable burgers and fried chicken on the planet, and while those meals can be extraordinarily satisfying, I have nothing to say about them.

You can have both kinds of dining experiences - if your diet was solely filet-o-fish and KFC buckets, that could be a concern, and everything would taste like nothing. (I'm sincerely not judging anybody who does live like this, some people are fine with this kind of diet, and god bless you, good sirs.) But life is better when you have a taste of low and high.

So yeah, I went to Deadpool with my best mate Kyle and we had a bloody good time and that's all there is to it. Then I come home and watch some Jodorowsky or Lynch or something, and can feel all the different ways movies can move me. You can have both of these experiences.

One of them is disposable, and one might leave you with a wonderful taste of cinema that you'll remember forever, and never stop talking about. Both are valid.

Get Burrows

Good comic art makes life so much better, and it's always an absolute pleasure when the work of an artist that has previously left you cold work finally clicks with you.

My most recent example of this has been Jacen Burrows. I've never really been a fan - he was one of the artists who first really came to attention with his work on Avatar, the comics company with the worst art direction in the history of the medium, and even fine work on comics like Necronomicon or on various Marvel things was never thrilling to me. His line too thin, too empty, too static.

But I think his current work on Get Fury, the latest Punisher/Fury storyline from Garth Ennis, is fucking excellent. Even compared to his earlier art on the same character with the same writer, it's taken a step forward, with a much thicker line and a loosening in his figurework that gives everything a whole lot more vitality.

I don't know if this is a conscious decision on the artist's part, or can be attributed to the inking work of Guillermo Ortego, but the end result gives me a new appreciation of his art, and seeing the violence of Frank Castle in such clarity does actually make life better.

Once upon a movie storybook

You don't really see the storybooks for big blockbuster films anymore, but I genuinely used to think they were a vital part of the whole movie experience. 

Back when the idea of getting a copy of an actual movie was basically impossible, the storybooks were the next best thing - telling the plot of the film in a few dozen pages, with lavish full colour movie stills.

I still have a couple I had back in the day - the one for the third Mad Max film, which really made it look like family friendly fun, Thunderdome and all; the one for David Lynch's Dune, which really did make it look like the next Star Wars; and the the one for Return of the Jedi, which actually was the next Star Wars. 

I still cherish my copy of the Star Trek III: The Search For Spock storybook, because I got it right at he time I was first absolutely obsessed with all things Trek, and that love still radiates off the page when I flick through it; and I still have one for the Phar Lap movie, a film that absolutely nobody cares about these days, but was the only movie storybook that ever showed up in the Scholastic Book Club thing at school.

I read them all a hundred times before I ever saw the movies, and it may be part of the reason I'm not really bothered by spoilers. Because while these books gave you the entire plot, they never diminished the thrills of the actual film. You don't get the subtleties of the acting, or the rush of the music, just the facts, man. 

I'm sure kids these days find ways to obsess about movies long before they actually get to see them, but the storybooks always worked for me.

ClanDestine and the unlocked uncertainty of a comic from years ago

When you spend your entire damn life collecting and reading comic books, you're going to imprint strange, unknowable emotions on the things - on both the physical object and the stories and art they contain. And they can linger there for years, ready to leap out at you from the most unlikely places, and reduce you to a mild emotional wreck without warning.

It happened to me recently with the ClanDestine, a Marvel UK comic created, written and drawn by the mighty Alan Davis. As a Davis fan from the start, I collected every issue published with these characters that the artist produced (Davis has pointedly ignored the later issues of the original run, with some very early Bryan Hitch art, so I can safely ignore them too.)

There should be hundreds of issues of the ClanDestine, but there are only a handful. After the initial eight-issue run, there were a couple of short miniseries, and a surprise appearance in some 2012 annuals, and that's about it.

There are several reasons why it never really caught on with audiences - it came just as the market imploded (and Marvel UK was almost completely wiped out); it had a concept that might have been just a bit too complex for its own good; and maybe comic book readers are just fucking idiots who don't know a good thing when it falls right into their lap.

In the end, it's a slightly weird and absolutely gorgeous superhero comic, inhabiting an infinitesimal corner of the Marvel Universe. But it also came out exactly at the time I was leaving home, and reading them again recently unlocked all that uncertainty about that time of my life again.

I remember reading the second issue on one of the first nights in my first flat, when I was unemployed and alone and far from home. I didn't know what I was doing or where I was going or how I was going to get there, but I did have a shiny new Alan Davis comic to keep me company, and that was something.

And reading it now, knowing that it isn't long for the world, that same comic feels tentative in its first steps, unsure of how it's going to be received, and how much of that is me imprinting myself onto it? 

ClanDestine isn't my favourite Alan Davis work (although it might squeak into the top five), but I ain't ever getting rid of these comics. They were there, 30 years ago, when I really needed them, and I only have to crack them open again to feel all that youthful uncertainty and possibility flow back. That's worth hanging onto.

This is still a house of Sienkiewicz: Just imagine (part 2)

Gimme the caaaaash!

I love it when directors show up in small parts in the most random of movies, like the multiple creepy roles David Cronenberg has contributed for other filmmakers, or Frank Darabont getting car jacked in John Carpenter's godawful Vampires.

But it still took me 30 years to find out the director of the excellent La Haine is the same guy with the great hat who tries to rob Bruce Willis at his front door in The Fifth Element. Either deed would be enough to be immortal, producing two of them in one lifetime is just showing off.

This is my life now: The wake up wake up song

Of course I want the four-year-old to build up her own musical tastes, but we still play all sorts of tunes in the car when we're driving around, and she does pick things up. And even though it was inevitable she was going to dig the 90s britpop tunes I still dig so much, it was still an absolute pleasure to hear her demand the 'wake up, wake up' song on the way to pre-school the other day.

She started with the proper stuff, and was a Jarvis Cocker fan before she was two, and then falling for the cartoon brilliance of the Gorillaz, with Blur being a natural part of that. Even with that track record, it still took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out what she was talking about when she demanded the wake up song, until she came out with those long and strangulated 'weeelllll's.

I also shouldn't be surprised, because 30-somethhing years later, that tune still fucking rips. The call to arms, the evocation of the sheer pleasure of walking around the town to your favourite tune, the lust for life, the fucking balls of the entire enterprise.

I've always felt that Oasis are a great band to sing along to, because you can wail along as much as you like, and you still won't come close to matching Liam's wonderful histrionics. The latest generation are backing up that theory for me, and I'll play that tune anytime she asks. 

Nothing in the mail

While I know it's very fashionable to talk about how we are all living in a late-stage capitalist society, (haven't we always been?), I do think the fact that the global mail system is getting exponentially shittier says something about the times we live in. 

I live on the arse end of the world, with only a tiny local market for entertainment, so most of the comic thrills I get have to come in from overseas. That's always been the way, and it's always been a dodgy process - in pre-internet days it would literally be years before I tracked down issues of the New Warriors that never showed up at the local bookstores. 

Now, I can go direct to the source and order the comics myself over the internet, through ebay, or mycomicshop.com, or from the 2000ad shop. And that's worked well for years, but now it's getting so much less reliable. 

I dropped almost a hundred bucks on Judge Dredd Megazines, Sci-Fi Specials and Zenith collections at the 2000ad store, and somehow less than half the order showed up, with no explanation. And the only way I can get my regular dosage of Empire magazine (not counting digital, which is no fun at all), is through the subscription service, and it's now been four months since I got an issue. 

I have gone back to both of these providers,  and they have assured me they were sent out and they will  still replace anything that has disappeared, but all these packages are getting lost at the same time, and it feels like something has broken down. It's never been a perfect service, getting things this far across the oceans, but it's never been as bad as this.. 

I'm not giving up, I have a 30-year-old habit of buying Empire every month and my history with 2000ad goes much deeper than that, and I'm not going to stop now, but these things are not sold in any shops anywhere near to me, and the only option left is through the post. And when that fails, there's nothing left. Just the cultural wasteland and an empty letterbox.

'Who benefited?'

Donald Sutherland was a truly great actor, because every movie he was in was better when he was in it. The stoned ramblings in Kelly's Heroes, the hopeless desperation of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the effortless cool of M*A*S*H. Everything was better with some Donald in it.

And for all that, it's his 16-minute scene in JFK that still hits hardest. Stone's film is stacked with incredible talent - Tommy Lee Jones and Joe Pesci chewing the movie up and spitting it out, Jack Lemmon doing his thing to chilling effect, John Candy being truly amazing in it - and then Big Donald blows them all away with a hugely charming and unsettlingly menacing monologue, blowing the whole movie apart with an infodump of biblical proportions.

In and out with Superman

It's somewhat jarring to note that there has nearly been more years of post-Crisis Superman than the original Golden and Silver Age ideal. Superman wasn't even 50 years old when he got the full 1980s reboot, and it's been nearly 40 years since then.

And there has been a metric shit-tonne of Superman comics since then, pulled together by tight continuity ever since John Byrne's Man of Steel kicked things off in 1986. Since then, there has been decades of weekly publication of Superman comics, with an ongoing storyline bridging multiple titles, and various specials and crossovers and guest appearances along the way. 

Nobody can keep up with all that over all those years (unless your name is Mike Sterling), but it doesn't really matter if you're not 100 percent up to speed. I've probably read less than a third of Superman comics since I started seriously following the character's adventures in the late 80s, and have still been able to follow things. 

I probably only read half of all the comics that came out in the triangle numbers era, and that was my era - the only time I came close to filling out a proper run of consecutive Superman comics was in the period immediately before and after the whole Death of Superman thing, and that was a run of no more fifty issues in a run of never-ending escapades

And yet, I've always been able to follow it easy enough. I might miss the odd crucial details, but always able to follow the big picture, and know roughly what is going on.  

I did lose track a little in the early 2000s, around the time that Ed McGuiness gave us a beautifully massive Kal-El, but using the local library system meant I could follow what was happening in the past 15 years. And even now, I just got a recent collection of the current Superman's post-Warworld adventures from the local library, and could pick up the story easily enough.

One thing that keeps it easy is how little actually changes on the larger levels, like the apparent deaths and rebirths of Superman's various loved ones. And no matter what Super-era you are in, Luthor is always going to be an absolute tool - a petty, jealous and foolish little man - no matter how hard they try to give him a soul.

Sometimes I fill in the blanks, and get a bunch of cheap back issues from 1998 or whatever, and they are always fun, but never essential. The essential nature of the big, bright Superman saga is never in the details, it's as broad as a Wayne Boring chest, and just as easy to follow.

Down by the river

Growing up in a town of 3000 people, in a time when monstrously powerful computers didn't live in your front pocket, there wasn't a hell of a lot to do. No movie theatres, no malls or big stores to hang out at. There was a fairly decent spaceies parlour, and a couple of good video stores, but no real entertainment at all, and while I know this totally makes me sound like a truly old fart, we had to make our own fun. Luckily, we had The River. 

It wasn't any particular stretch of water, sometimes it was the Opihi, or the Temuka, or the Pareora, it was always just The River, On long summer days, it was the place to cool off. Nothing too fast flowing, like the Rangitata or the Waitaki, just a pleasant flow of water deep enough to give you some decent swimming spots along the way. 

Some of those swimming spots are still my favourite places in the world, even if a lot of them have been contaminated by dodgy farmers over the years, (making it so hard to take seriously their pissy protests in their shitty little tractors, complaining about having to comply with regulations when their literal piss and shit has seeped into the waterways for fucking decades.)

Even when it was far too cold to go into the water - which is about 3/4 of the year around here - there was plenty to do down there. If I needed a place to chill in the quiet and read comic books, there was always a spot in the grass, or I could head down with my mates to build weird roadways in the clay for our toy cars, and set up massively complicated forts in fallen trees for the Star Wars and GI Joe figures to rampage through.

It was a  place where you could explore overgrown tracks and find tiny spots of serene beauty, or learn to skip stones across the surface of the water.  There was always room to build small bonfires, or just look for critters and fish in the water.

Best of all, there was always plenty of sticks around, and kids who were mad for all things Star Wars could be sword fighting for hours and hours, learning to dodge and parry and thrust through sheer instinct and youthful recklessness. I still have some scars and am still very proud of them all.

I don't miss the rivers themselves, they're still there, even if those fucking farmers have drained so much of it for their irrigation. They've been running down the Canterbury plains for millennia, and will keep running as long as there are clouds in the sky. But I can miss those cheap and easy thrills, when all you needed to fill in an afternoon was a stick, a stone and some water.

This is still a house of Sienkiewicz: Just imagine (part 1)

I can't Get Back

Like everyone else who grew up in the late 20th century, I fucking love the Beatles. All those gorgeous melodies, all that grand ambition. They really did change the world, man. And those four chancers from Liverpool gave us tunes that will be played and listened to and enjoyed for as long as human beings exist in this universe.

But I still can not sit through more than 10 minutes of the Get Back thing before fading out. We finally caved and got Disney+ recently - almost entirely because I just wanted to watch the new Doctor Who - and I keep trying to give Get Back a chance, but I just can't do it. 

I really do appreciate all the work that's gone into stitching it together, and the parts when those immortal songs emerge from the noodling whims of the band are always impressive, but I just don't need to see the fab four mumble and moan about the creation of it all.

I don't feel like I'm getting any really any huge insight into the creative process, and it all feels like a DVD extra that got out of control. And Beatles tunes aren't maths exams, I don't need to see the working, I just want to listen to the glorious results.

The brilliance of the Bane

The great geek hive mind can get so fucking exhausting - I still remember how 'everybody knows' that The Gunfighters was the worst Doctor Who story, until people actually got to see it and found out it was a fun slice of sixties sci/fi western; and it's actually remarkable how many articles still being published that still unilaterally profess that absolutely everybody hated the final season of Game of Thrones. 

And one of the most irritating examples of the past decade has been about a goddamn voice. Just the other day, while reading about something completely unrelated, I came across the brazen assertion that nobody could understand what Tom Hardy's Bane was saying in the Dark Knight Returns.

It's an easy mark, but it's objectively not true, it's easy as hell to tell what he's saying, and there is never a moment when you are not sure what the big guy's intentions are (although it should be noted that he is lying his arse off for the vast majority of his screen time). I don't have the best hearing in the world, but I could make it out easily enough.

Besides, it's bloody great! That outrageously unknowable accent, the weird inflection on the wrong words, it's a fucking terrific use of voice to create menace and uncertainty, while also being quite funny. The hive mind might say it's a mistake, but I say it's perfect.

Everyone should know that.

Fast forward!

I am never more grateful to have the little button that lets you skip 10 seconds on a piece of audio, than when I'm happily listening to a podcast with two excellent comedians talking about their favourite movies, and it suddenly has several minutes of advertisements for other podcasts that I will never, ever listen to.

It wouldn't be so bad if it was something even vaguely relevant to the original thing I'm listening to, but they're for shows that sound like the absolute worst shit in the world. Very serious true crimes bollocks by people with very serious voices. Screeching adolescent men talking about sports that mean nothing to me. Tedious political punditry that takes a very long time to say very much about very little.

I'm already listening to one of your shows, surely you have some idea of what I like, and I am always looking for new things. But not this, and that 10sec function is getting a heavy workout, until I hear the comedians cackling about Michael Mann again.