My video games have calcified

I used to be 10 years behind on video games, but I really think my tastes have petrified now, because I don't play any fairly recent games at all. I still haven't played GTA V properly, and I always play GTA, usually a decade late.

Partly it's because I don't have the hardware to do it. My home computer is old and held together by hopes and good intentions, and trying to load up any game with a bit of grunt inevitably ends in tears and failure.

The online nature of things now is also particularly annoying, trying to play games released after 2010 often require some kind of connection to an online thing that isn't even there anymore, so why even bother?

And of course I don't have the time, I got fucking washing to do.

But I still get great amounts of pleasure by going back and playing a dumb FPS from 2007, and the only thing that dates it is the slightly simpler graphics, but they aren't that bad. I'm okay with the pixelated fun, I had a crack at Goldeneye on the N64 a couple of years ago and still absolutely smashed it. The game still flowed.

I was never a huge gamer, it was just a fun thing to do, and I never really put in the effort to become properly good at anything, although I would rate myself on the few games I did manage to master in my youth. Maybe I'll just load up Grand Theft Auto San Andreas again.

Then there was no end to the rage and disappointment

I feel like such a fucking idiot complaining that I can't get new issues of 2000ad, or about what they are doing to the Legion of Super-Heroes, when there is so much horrible shit going on in the world. I see it all in my day job, and feel the impotent rage of the morally just, like anybody else with a soul.

There's an especially annoying tactic in modern politics of pointing out that something obviously meant to be a distraction is actually a distraction, because of course it is. But that doesn't mean you can't still be mad about the original thing. We're human beings! We contain multitudes!

And besides, sometimes - just sometimes - we need some distractions. During my work day, I've seen frankly horrifying photos and footage from Gaza, images so gory and upsetting there is no way I can even use them in the public arena because they're just too much.

And I can be angry about that, about insane fuckheads dropping 10,000 pound bombs on children in flimsy tents. I am incandescent with rage that the entire global political system is letting masses of people starve to death.

There's lots of other stuff to get fired up about, like the way political leaders take giant shits on the trans community for the crime of existing, or the general corruption in business and politics that no fucker ever seems to do anything about.

I can also be raging about the stupidity of my comic books, and I also know it is nothing compared to real world outrage. But it is a pleasant distraction. You can't wade in the horror all day long, you have to make your own life worth living, in any way you can.

I can be angry about many things at once, and I know which is important and what doesn't really matter. I think we all know that difference, even if so many of us pretend that they don't.

If John was still here

I still think a lot about a Q Magazine article from two decades ago that wondered what Lennon would be like if he hadn't been killed, and imagined him on the decks for Grand Royale, the Beastie Boys label, doing his own thing, and I still ache for a universe where that never happened.

It was still weird as fuck when he showed up in that Yesterday movie. That whole movie was weird as fuck, and largely not in a good way, and I think I've watched it five times.

The full body chill

There's a moment when you're experiencing a piece of entertainment that is so good that you can feel a chill down the spine. It can come out of nowhere, you're just sitting there watching a film or reading a book or comic, and then something happens that is so intense, or stylish, or moving, or brilliant, or just plain human, that you feel a a jolt in the back of the head, and the emotional filters in the soul open right up and breathe deeply.

And sometimes - just sometimes - it is something so good, it's a whole body chill.

It doesn't happen very often. I'm lucky if I get that sensation every couple of years, but it's already happened to me at the local theatre twice in 2025, which makes it a good year, even if both times it was seeing movies that were made decades ago.

The first time it happened, it was Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, which screened as part of a short season of Lynch films to honour the director after he recently merged with the infinite. It's a film I've seen a dozen times, but this was the first time on the big screen, and it was properly sublime. 

The Twin Peaks movie has had a cultural reassessment in the past few years, but was generally slagged off when it was first released (the mighty Kim Newman was the only critic who I saw acknowledge its genius at the time). It is, obviously, an amazing film, and an incredible experience seeing it at the cinema, where it belongs. 

I was already primed for it, helped by some short films of Lynch they showed before the main feature that I'd never seen before, and the final days of Laura Palmer played out with all the tragedy and strangeness I knew and loved.

And then it got to the actual murder scene, and it's so intense, and so loud, and so much of a sensory overload, and then it cuts to absolute silence for a few seconds when an angel shows up and it was such a moment of genuine movie magic that I could barely breathe, as the shiver spread from my spine and filled my whole body.

That's as good as it ever gets.

And then a couple of months later I go to the same cinema for a screening of 28 Days Later, in preparation for the belated sequel, and then it gets to that climactic scene, and the mood and music and tension have all ramped up to insane levels, and then Jim takes one step forward and Selina hesitates, and there it was again - the chill spreading from the spine to fill the whole body.

It's a curiously physical reaction to mental and emotional stimuli, but it's the clearest possible sign that the entertainment you're experiencing isn't just good - it's really fucking good. And that's something always worth chasing after, even if you have to rely on 20+-year-old films to get there.

That's not my nineties!

All history is subjective, but you only really see that when you have lived through a certain period yourself, and when contemporary sources are talking about something you were deeply invested in at the time. And while it might be existentially troubling to realize the 1990s were 30 years ago now, they are clearly history.

I wallow in as much nostalgia as any other 50-year-old, and am always a sucker for books and documentaries that look back at the years of my youth. But while it's not surprising that some things endure - it's extremely unsurprising how many people are still talking about Tarantino's earliest films - but it's always interesting to see what sticks around in the greater cultural memory, and what fades away.

I see it on nostalgic MTV channels, which rarely play the kind of thing I was blasting in 1995, and go for the safest of options. I fucking knew I'd still be listening to Lenny Kravitz goin' my way for the rest of my life when I first heard it in '93, and it was loud and proud on the classic rock radio station I was listening to earlier today. 

That's to be expected, but I'm still surprised when I see it with comic books. My obsession with comics was all encompassing throughout the nineties, so when TwoMorrows put out one of its excellent books covering the decade in comics, I ate it all up, but I didn't always recognise what I was tasting.

Even after living through it all, there were still tiny bits of new information – Neil Adams getting DC to put up an extra $11k for his Robin costume - but in general it's a rough overview of mainstream comic books, without really getting into the details.

It's also really not my 90s. I was living on the arse end of the planet in an age before the internet when all this was going down, so all the big stories of the medium - notably the big industry boom and bust - generally passed me by, and I only noticed it when it was done.

My 1990s was the Invisibles (which gets an extravagant three paragraphs in that TwoMorrows book) and Love and Rockets (which gets one whole paragraph) and Matt Wagner's Grendel (which only gets a mention when he crosses over with Batman). 2000ad went through some huge changes through the decade, and somehow survived to make huge inroads into the 21st century, but you wouldn't know it from this book.

And that's okay. It really is. It makes me a little somber to think what the historical record will say when my generation are all dead and gone, but I can still hang on to what was important to me at the time, and is still a vital part of who I am. It always will be, no matter how many years go by.

My 100 favourite 2000ad covers (30-21): La Placa Rifa.

30. Prog 204 - art by Mike McMahon

29. Prog 718 - art by Cam Kennedy

28. Prog 474 - art by Kevin O'Neill

27. Prog 59 - art by Mike McMahon

26. Prog 1791 - art by Simon Fraser

25. Prog 1986 - art by Tom Foster

24. Prog 206 - art by Mike McMahon

23. Prog 1380 - art by Carlos Ezquerra

22. Prog 531 - art by John Higgins

21. Prog 517 - art by Brendan McCarthy

The exact moment Vertigo lost its cool

I was fully on board the Vertigo comics train for the first few years. I got hooked by the ad for the Enigma series, and was getting multiple comics every month for a while. They were smart, and they were cool, and they were stylish, and that was all I wanted in my comics. 

But I think I can also pinpoint the moment Vertigo lost that mojo, and it was when the Trenchcoat Brigade started firing magic fucking blasts out of their hands, and it was the uncoolest thing I'd ever seen. 

I still miss Vertigo, because we should all miss Vertigo, but they lost a lot of their cool a long time before they stopped publishing.

New music on the stereo: Show me the way

I remain terrified of losing interest in any new music, because that would mean I am finally old. So I keep seeking it out, and with an ocean of tunes and a limited number of trusted curators out there, I have a very specific way of finding the stuff I like. I obviously find new music through the recommendations of friends, or by hearing it on the radio, or on the soundtracks of movies like normal people, but I also have a weird system that I would not expect to work for anybody else in the world.

What I do is get Mojo and Uncut magazines out from the library, and unless some souless bastard has stolen it, I digitally rip the free CDs they come with, and I put eight of the albums onto one blank CD - they are all 15 songs long, so that's 120 tunes all up - and then I play them on the car stereo, but because it takes me a while to decide if I actually like a song or not, (I am amazed by music journalists who can come to a concrete opinion after one go), I put that uber-mix CD on the stereo in the family car and listen to every single one of those 120 songs three times for at least two minutes, and then twice for 90 seconds, and then once for one minute, and it usually takes a couple of months of driving around town to get through that amount of songs, but by then I've worked out which songs I like, which songs I'm indifferent to, and which songs are actively irritating, because even the most abstract piece of music is staying on that stereo for the full two minutes, and then I save the tunes I like to a regular playlist of all the greatest songs in history, and expand my musical range by just one little bit, through personal curation of a curated free CD on a British music mag.

Like I said, it works for me.

I just finished the latest round, and while results were heavily skewed by the fact that one of the CDs was full of punk nonsense - and they'll bury me a punk - I came back from this small musical odyssey with all sorts of lovely new sounds, including some fairly recent tunes by old faves that I somehow missed:

...some things I would never have been exposed to like these beauties:





...some old timey charmers:

and some absolute punk stompers:

 

There must be an easier way of getting new music, but I'm not interested in it.

Nobody ever needed an anti-Legion

I'm still a freak for the Legion of Super-Heroes, and still have crushes on many cute future girls, but there is no grokkin' way I want to read what DC are doing with the Legion right now

They've made them a bunch of evil bastards, which misses the point of the team to an astronomical degree. Even when things were at their worst for the greater universe - and they got pretty damn bleak at times - the kids of the Legion were the beacon in the night, the hope for a better future, even as the moon is exploding in the sky.

There is a long tradition of doing this sort of thing to heroes, there have been evil version of all the great super heroes, they have formed their own societies and gangs, but I don't want to read about a nasty Shrinking Violet. That's what the Legion of Super Villains was for.

If this is your thing - if this is your kink - then all power to you. It's obviously appealing to somebody, but I'm not that somebody. 

And fortunately, there have been decades and decades of Legion comics published by DC, and I'm sure I haven't read them all yet. The Legion have benefitted from the company's most recent trawls through its wonderful archives, and I was so repulsed by the evil version that I immediately bought Zap Goes the Legion, a chunky collection of the team at their very eaerly-70s best, before they got deconstructed into incoherence.

The stories are old and simplistic and sometimes very, very dated, but they're bright and energetic and get straight to the point, with some of the most wonderful art the comic has ever had.

Turns out I'm still a freak for the future, even if that future was published 50 years ago.