Too much pizza!

It is my experience that most people strongly overestimate how many slices of basic pizza that they can eat. I've had people swear to my face that they could get five whole pizzas down their gob, and I absolutely call shenanigans on this.

Because when I was young and living with uni students who saw any money they spent on food as money they were not spending on booze - and so were often ravenously hungry - we would go to Pizza Hut, which at that time had an all-you-can-eat buffet. And some of the hungriest people I've ever met in my entire life could not get above 30 slices. My own record was a paltry 23, which isn't even three pizza.

So when I hear any claims of being able to deal with the 40 slices that would come with five pizzas, I feel I can easily dismiss these boasts. People always think they can eat more pizza than they really can. It's a scientific fact.

Music critics have it hardest

In the every decreasing world of entertainment reviews, I still think the poor folk who try to review new music have it the hardest.

You can watch a movie or a TV show, read a book or comic or novel, and if you have to write words about it, you can probably do it with one viewing or reading. Do it for a short while, and you will probably have the angle for your review already settled by the time the credits roll.

(I tried movie reviewing for a couple of years when I first became a journo in the mid 00s, and gave it up because it really wasn't much fun as I thought it would be, and it was ruining my experiences of watching a movie for fun. I found some of those old reviews on our dying PC the other day and they were slightly interesting - I had the knowledge to write with confidence, but was so fucking pretentious).

But it's a different tune for the music reviewers. Never mind the fact that there is so much of it - dozens of albums are released around the world every week, and it is literally impossible to keep up with all the new music that gets up loaded to something like Youtube every single day.

But it also takes so long to figure out if you like a song. I have to listen to something a dozen times before I can come to a decision about it. To see if it has hooked me, has something properly unforgettable to it. Sometimes it takes that long to discover how annoying something is.

Sometimes a song can hit you out of the blue on an instant listen. But that is truly rare. It is only with real immersion into the song that you can find the heart of it.

And musical tastes change over the years, I am far more forgiving of pop music nonsense than I was when I was a teenage metaller, or slightly older raver. So much of the stuff I loved as a young perosn now sounds hopelessly adolescent, and I've always got an ear out for something new.

The only music I write about here is the stuff I have been listening to for years and years, and have some very definite - if occasionally fluid - opinions about it. But to write about everything that is coming in the deluge of the new, that's a real talent.

Commanded and Conquered: I think I'm in an abusive relationship with a 26-year-old video game

I really have to stop playing the old games so much, but I do keep winning. 

For a large part of the early 21st century, I was 10 years behind on my video games. It would take a decade before the games I played became cheap enough, or the computers I owned were grunty enough, and I would be clocking up GTA IV while everyone else was on V.

The situation has become inevitably worse, and I'm still plying GTA IV while everybody else in the world is frothing for VI, and I'm still playing the Command and Conquer games that came out 20 years ago.

I lost track of contemporary games when they all went online, and I have no interest in playing with other people, I just want to tackle a game without the randomness of the human factor. So I'm still playing the games that came out just after the turn of the century, and they have all the complexity I desire. I don't care if the graphics aren't as high def as the more modern versions, I was never into games for the visuals.

I always liked the Command and Conquer games, they appealed to my sense of tactics and strategy. I don't even know if they still make them, but it doesn't matter if they do, because I'm still happy with Red Alert 2 Yuri Revenge.

My main issue is that I get stuck on particularly hard levels of particular games, and just want to play them over and over until I master them. I can't stop, even when it gets majorly infuriating, or my back aches from sitting down for too long. 

I broke the habit last time by losing the disc I had of the first decade of C+C games, somewhere in the pile of old Uncut music CD compilations. But then I rediscovered that disc recently, and holy shit, it still works on our aging PC. Kinda.

I could play one of those addictive levels just fine (it's the last stage of the Chinese campaign on Generals, which is still fucking hard to win, even with a strategy I'm still working on), but my favourite level of C+C to ever play is the skirmish on on Red Alert 2 where you're facing off against seven other brutal enemies, all out to get you.

And while I can play that level, it does keep crashing on me, and I have to shut down the whole thing and start again.

It's a well-known software problem, something to do with the graphics falling over when confronted by the might of Windows 10, and I tried all the patches and none of them work.

But I still play it, it takes a lot longer because I have to manually save it every 30 seconds, and it keeps crashing. Sometimes it lasts for 10 minutes before crapping out, sometimes it crashes out in less than a minute, but I do keep winning.

I do win! And I wanna keep on winning, so I keep playing it and learn to live with the random shutdowns during crucial stages, and then it fucks me over in new ways, like just showing a black screen if any kind of notification comes through, and I still keep playing and I do keep winning, even when it feels like it's abusing me for fun. 

I do keep winning.

Crashing on the way to a Star Wars

I went to the first midnight session of The Rise Of Skywalker, driving there through the empty streets late at night, when I saw a guy on a moped take off through a red light and get knocked over by a car. He looked all right, but I was right at the front of the intersection, so I knew I had to get out and help deal with it, and would probably miss the start of the movie. So it goes.

And then I saw some flashing lights and realised there was a cop in an unmarked car on the other side of the intersection, who could take charge of the situation, and they immediately waved me through, so I got to the Star Wars in plenty of time.

Before the movie started, I thought it was a sign that I was destined to be there. By the time it had finished and I realised it was a chaotic and cowardly mess of a film, I thought it was a different kind of sign altogether. 

Eighties comics on the new release shelves

There was a sense of anything could happen in late 80s mainstream comics, after the big hits of Watchmen and Maus and the Dark Knight Returns and so on, anything could come along. Creator-owned work was at a peak, and mainstream comics were making a real quantum leap in quality and craft.

That feeling of innovation and thoughtfulness - for me - has largely faded away over the years, although there will always be pockets of breathtaking creativity in the weird and wonderful medium of periodical comics. And it is deeply reassuring to see some of the old dogs of that era still doing the work.  

Because now there are new Grendel and Concrete comics coming out in the next few months. A Swamp Thing issue from 1988 has just been released, complete with a Johnny DC column and vintage ads for comics that were on sale three decades ago.

(I picked up the Swamp Thing comic for the novelty of it, and enjoyed it more than I thought. I found most of the Veitch run fairly average, but #88 was pretty good in the end. It's so far from controversial though, that it really show what true cowards were at the time - and can still be.)

Obviously the world has moved on, the entire readership and industry has changed. But the pages of Grendel will feature Christine Spar battling evil vampires, and Larry is no doubt doing something dumb in Concrete, so how much has really changed?

I've been a Grendel fan since back in the day, and have all the Concrete that Paul Chadwick ever produced, so I've already got my orders in for the new comics. I doubt they will be able to capture the fire for comics that I had when I first starting reading their adventures so long ago, but I can only hope they spark something new. 

The day CHiPs came to Timaru

It's almost impossible to contemplate in an age of unending streamers, but we only had two TV channels to choose from when I was a kid. This meant you watched a lot of crap, but it also meant everybody you knew watched the same crap.

So when a TV show was big, it was properly big. Everybody watched it because everybody was watching the same thing, there was no other choice.  Sometimes this led to some tiny tragedies - my Nana would want to watch Coronation St and I would miss the latest episode of the Hulk, and I can still feel the echoes of the despair at missing A Night To Remember one Sunday afternoon, because I was such a huge freak about disasters.

We didn't even get our first video player until I was nine, and that changed everything. But before that, I was at the whims of adults and TV programmers.

So everybody watched Happy Days and M*A*S*H. Everybody watched the Dukes of Hazzard and Knight Rider and the A-Team. And you can bet your butt that everybody watched CHiPs.

It's such blatant and obvious copaganda to my old and jaded eyes, but I dearly loved CHiPs as a kid. They were almost like superheroes, with their flashy boots and helmets, and almost science fiction with their sleek bikes with all the latest technology. Erik Estrada was so ridiculously handsome, he may have been my first crush on a man. 

And I know I wasn't the only one, because the first time I got freaked out by the size of a crowd was when CHiPs came to town. It wasn't Jon or Ponch or anybody like that, just two random guys from the real life highway patrol, but the main street of Timaru was packed out in excitement, I didn't even get close to those men in tight light brown uniforms.

It was probably only a few hundred people in a small town on the arse end of the world, but it was still a big crowd, and a big crowd that came out to see some traffic cops. Everybody loved CHiPs, and I think everybody loved those boots. 

The Adventures of Luther Arkwright: Not now, Luther!

- The Adventures of Luther Arkwright #7 

Written and drawn by Bryan Talbot 

Letters by Steve Haynie

When the six eyes of Triad are on you

Look, while I haven't been attracted to comic book characters since I was the same age as Kitty Pryde, I'm also saying is that there is a three-month slice of space/time where I have the deepest and most profound crush on Triad from the Legion of Super-Heroes, when she was drawn with a massive bowl cut by brilliant British artist Alan Davis. Sheer bloody perfection.

You're a fucking weapon

The last five minutes of Weapons is the best experience I've had in a movie theatre in years. It was just so perfect, so cathartic, so intense, and still really fucking horrible.

Once the thrills have died down, the part that resonates the most with me is the feeling that it really captures this moment in time in a way much more serious films don't.

Because it's the end result of what happens when the old are feeding off the weak and devouring them. We see them in the news every day - parasites in power who will destroy everything, if it means they can hold on to their meagre power and life for one more day. 

And the grown-ups - who are neither innocent children nor malevolent elders - are just useless, they can't help because they've got their own pressures, and can even be weaponised against their own children. It's notable that the one little kid who isn't bewitched is the only one who actually does something useful and stops the madness.

But you can only push the kids so far before it all boils over, and they will come to you and tear you fucking apart.

Some movies are trying to grasp the vibe of life in the early 21st century, and so many of them are just painfully clumsy - I know enough about Eddington to know that I can never watch it, for instance. And some of them are perfect - I think of the 'people are under a lot of stress' scene from Twin Peaks The Return all the fucking time. 

And then there are those tiny kids smashing through windows and coming for the old witch, not stopping for anything because things have gone too fucking far this time, and ripping the old fucker who has hurt so many people apart with their teeth. It isn't just a big fat metaphor for modern society, it's a clear warning to all old fuckers everywhere. 

Age with dignity and empathy, or face the bloody consequences.