Secret Diary of a Fat Admirer

I’ve gotten way the fuck into comics lately, ranging from weird titles from publishers I’m pretty sure are defunct (Solar, Man of the Atom follows the ongoing adventures of an energy being whose origin story includes accidentally destroying his own timeline) to unsettling little horror tales (Gaiman’s Likely Stories disturbed me to the point of feeling physically ill once or twice) to big, bombastic superhero fair (just give me anything with Batman). It’s particularly this last category that I want to focus on, because it was while reading the 2018-onwards run of Justice League that I realised why I’ve been getting so into comics at the moment. They’re currently filling the niche that film used to fill.

You see, folks, I have a little problem when I go and see most films nowadays. The problem is very simple. While I still enjoy movies, that enjoyment is somewhat marred by the fact that NINETY PERCENT OF THE TIME I KNOW EXACTLY WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING TO HAPPEN! I’m a progressive chap- I’m a commie, a sometime-advocate for fat acceptance (obvs) and I’m viscerally disgusted every time I hear about some fresh injustice perpetrated against non-white ethnic groups by the racist-as-shit American legal system. I’d never call myself a feminist, but I accept that feminism has a point in terms of its broad complaints and aims (I part company from both rad and third wave on a fair number of specifics, but that’s probably just because of my nine foot musical penis). And yet, as most of you already know from my previous spates of bitching and moaning, media wokeness winds me up. It’s not just that it’s obviously insincere and designed to curry favour with an imaginary demographic of humourless wankers- it’s that it also hobbles any story’s ability to surprise or engage meaningfully with its own fictional universe. Give me a list of characters and tell me nothing about them besides skin colour, age and gender, and I’ll tell you who’s going to live, who’s going to die, who’ll be permitted a redemption arc, and who’ll turn out to be a ‘twist’ villain (and I use the term ‘twist’ with heavy-duty sarcasm marks). It’s cloying, constrictive and a death sentence for any kind of creativity. It’s gotten so bad that, whenever a movie does manage to pleasantly surprise me, I have to fight back tears of fucking gratitude. Progressive values are all well and good- I actively subscribe to them myself every time I go out and assassinate a member of the fucking Tory party- but modern movies and telly don’t operate from a place of deeply-held progressive values (or any values). The mainstream media’s ‘wokeness’ is just a tired list of boring tropes that cowardly, talentless screenwriters cling to lest creating something original engender cancellation.

And so, we come to comic books (and on comic books, if they have General Zod in them. Kneel before Zod? I certainly fucking will!). I was about type the words ‘even mainstream comic books are great’ but then I started laughing like the Joker watching a snuff movie, because that would have been an idiotic sentence. You see, while Superhero comics are ‘mainstream’ in the sense that they’re the thing people most associate with the medium, they still have a relatively tiny readership. In fact, I suspect that requiring their audience to know how to read is the main barrier to entry nowadays- it seems like something of a lost art.

The point is that I’ve been reading the ‘Justice/Doom War’ arc in Justice League and I’ve noticed something about it. It has a huge, diverse cast of characters from different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, different genders and different belief systems and walks of life… and not even one of them is an insufferable twat defined only by their relative privilege or oppression! To give you an example, Green Lantern John Stewart is a heroic space cop who happens to be black, but the plot never grinds to a halt so he can give us a lecture on race dynamics in modern America. He’s too busy using constructs of solid light to smash the ever-loving crap out of pan-dimensional cosmic monsters. When the plot does slow down to give him time to breathe, we learn more about his conflicted yet complementary history as both a soldier and an architect than we do about his skin colour. I mean, it’s not like it never comes up- the DC universe has some ties to reality and characters do occasionally find themselves on the receiving end of racism, but if it’s not relevant to what’s happening, the story doesn’t bend over backwards to include it. Conversely, Batman is a rich white dude, but the story never feels the need to ‘hold him accountable’. His main arc at the moment is about learning to be a good father figure to a sentient, telepathic starfish who wants to be the next Robin (yeah… the 2018 run is gloriously fucking weird). Hey! Here’s another example! On the surface, Hawkgirl is the epitome of the ‘strong female character’ beloved by modern media: a ferocious, take-no-shit warrior woman with countless lifetimes of carefully-honed experience. But she’s not some bloody sexless, characterless archetype designed as a flag for empowerment rather than a person: she’s a fully-developed character. She has complex internal motivations; she has romantic feelings for Martian Manhunter; she experiences grief and loss and is changed by them; she makes mistakes that she then has to triumph over. She doesn’t get to win just because she’s the first person on hand with a clitoris- she actually has to work and go through a character arc. Surprising and sometimes unpleasant things happen to her, making her a sympathetic and interesting character who I actually want to see triumph.

I could go on… and on… and on… and on… pretty much forever. I could probably write an entire essay just on how Lex Luthor uses his wealth for selfish ends even while purporting to represent a higher cause while Batman embodies an idealised version of how those with power and money should use it for the greater good. I could talk about how Superman is both effectively an immigrant and the most endearingly Rockwellian slice of walking Americana one can imagine. I could write fucking books on what the character of Perpetua says about the modern world’s complex relationship with faith and fanaticism and where the line is drawn.

But the real point is that I don’t know what’s going to happen next! Character who would never be allowed to triumph under their own power in movies succeed. Characters who would never be allowed to fail in movies get broken by horrible events and circumstances. Arcs are never what I expect them to be about, but always make sense when I look back and consider what I know about the character’s personality. It’s wonderfully refreshing in a way we just don’t get to see much nowadays… and I started to wonder why comics are so much better than everything else going on at the moment.

I was recently reading an Editorial in Metal Hurlant (basically the French 2000AD- a comic anthology of sci-fi and horror tales published on a monthly basis). The top brass were bemoaning the niche-ness of the comic book medium, asserting that comics should be promoted in bookstores and literary circles; that there should be a widespread push for them to reach a readership and audience that traditionally don’t engage with pulp culture (my term, not theirs). And what I realised is that this would be a terrible, terrible idea- because the main reason comics are so good is because they’re niche; their small; their disposable. Consider, if you will, the mainstream film industry. A big part of the reason that it mainly produces hot garbage is that it’s too big to take risks. Hollywood (for want of a better catch-all term) has spent its entire life-cycle pursuing larger and larger audiences so it can fund more and more epic blockbusters with bigger names and bigger, bolder FX. It’s a cycle of abuse in which each new generation of films has to outperform the generation before it. Meanwhile, because the audiences have to be so vast, the people making the flicks don’t think of those audiences as individual people with specific interests and ideas and a desire to be challenged and entertained. They think of them, instead, as demographic swathes; undifferentiated and united by broad, base commonalities that each project has to play to. But people aren’t demographics and the movie industry is currently getting a royal drubbing for its decades of ever-increasing contempt-of-the-viwer. Disney in particular is haemorrhaging money because it thought it would be a good idea to make Star Wars and Indiana Jones films and telly shows for a generic set of imagined demographics instead of people who actually like those franchises and are interested in the themes and ideas that go with them. As much as watching Disney fail gives me the warm fuzzies, I have to ask: who in their right mind would wish this fate on comics?

You see, folks, comics do sell plenty of copies- more than enough to justify the fairly modest expense of printing the darned things) but the overall audience for any one title is less than half the audience for any given major film release (I did some research and applied some maths that I won’t bore you with, but the absolute top selling comic books of recent years sold under a quarter million copies overall while an average film from any of the major studios sells around half a million cinema tickets in the US alone- and then there are the DVD and streaming sales on top of that. Notice how the latter number is more than double the former number. Regrettably, data on both films and comics is jealously guarded by vested interests, so I apologise for how ballpark those figures are, mind). Meanwhilethe total audience of comics in general is much narrower in certain key respects. Perhaps the most obvious point is this: pretty much everyone who reads comic books is a comic book fan, whereas not everyone who goes to the cinema is a cinephile. But what does that actually mean? Well, for one, it means that comic book readers and writers are more of community- they tend to trust one another more; leaps can be taken that would be considered too chancy when dealing with ‘demographics’. At the same time, however, the writers’ connection to the fans means they have a better sense of when something is going to alienate large sections of their audience or piss people off (something film-makers have proved either bad at or wilfully blind to lately). The result is stories that know what bold ideas they can pursue while also knowing where to draw the line.

I think another reason comics are currently kicking the film industry’s pallid white buttocks in terms of creative merit is that they’re real cheap. Paper on ink is much easier to organise and send forth into the world than a vast audiovisual experience containing hundreds of actors, countless FX and goodness-knows-how-many extras, all put together by an enormous team of people who often never get to meet one another. If I wanted, I could probably write, draw and distribute a limited run of say, fifty comics, for the price of a Payday Loan. I wouldn’t, because it’s not where my talent lies, but the point I’m trying to make is this: companies and distributors are more willing to do interesting things when there’s only pocket change on the line compared to when there’s millions or billions of dollars. It’s why we get comics like Serial Artist (about a dude who claims his paintings are of his murder victims and becomes the centre of a vast government conspiracy) and W0rldtr33 (an ongoing slice of weirdness in which the internet comes to life and starts murdering people). It’s why something comparatively mainstream like Justice League can have an arc about Batman parenting a starfish and why the whole thing becomes Dark Nights: Metal and Death Metal for awhile (the Metal comics are end-of-the-world stuff inspired by- obvs- heavy metal albums… and they’re fucking great). It’s why stuff like Metal Hurlant and 2000AD is given a chance to find readers. So do comics need to be bigger and more widely accepted? Fuck no! The fringe is always where interesting stuff happens and aiming for mainstream acceptability is, it seems to me, a massive trap. The allure of more money and better social status is like one of the bug-zapper lights that draws in the moths and then fries their brains.

But what the fuck is the point of all this rambling? Comics are good- and thank goodness, since a lot of shit isn’t at the moment. There, I got it all down to once sentence, so what was the point of the rest? Well, I suppose there’s a lesson to be learned here. I’m a writer finally starting my career; finally putting work out into the public domain with a real publisher. No, I don’t do comics: I do sci-fi and fantasy books. But the lesson’s still applicable and it’s this: it’s a lot better to be good than popular and sometimes- just sometimes- you really do have to pick between the two.

So despite being a British person and writer with an adopted trans daughter (sort of), I never weighed in on the matter when British writer J.K. Rowling allegedly said a bunch of transphobic stuff. The reason I didn’t weigh in publicly was very simply this: I couldn’t find the tweet or statement that started it all- the root cause of people’s hatred. Everybody alluded to The Terrible Things J.K. said but nobody was super keen to say what those things actually were. Which naturally led me to suspect that the whole thing was storm-in-a-teacup bullshit- a notion that I also partially derived from the fact that Rowling is kind of a milquetoast who probably hasn’t had a strong opinion in her comfortably middle-class life. If somebody online claimed I’d said something offensive, I’d believe them, because I basically start a knife-fight every time I open my gob. But J.K.? Do me a favour. Of course, I didn’t look very hard to find out what J.K. said, because the other reason I didn’t comment was that I didn’t care all that much. I’m a grown man. My contact with the Harry Potter universe is nostalgically rewatching the films once in awhile and maybe, at some point, playing the new RPG that’s just come out, should I ever have videogame money again. It’s not like I’m super invested in that world on an emotional level, because I only have the normal number of fucks to give about wizard children and the people who chronicle their adventures. So, my plan was to just never mention any of this. And then I stumbled on the comment that started it all by pure fucking chance and it was… so dull and inoffensive that it actually amazed me to the point where I medically had to say something. Yeah. I am literally incapable of shutting my fucking mouth when someone does a stoopid, as it turns out.

“Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating sex is real?” (I think the implication of the question mark s ‘er, no thanks’, basically). And that’s it. Nothing even implying that trans women aren’t real women. Nothing suggesting that they shouldn’t be treated with respect. SEVERAL opening sentences reaffirming the rights of everyone to live how and AS WHO they like… and then a gentle reminder that physical sex is real and that some people have actually lost their jobs for saying so, which sucks, because you shouldn’t be fired for stating a biological fact (unless the biological fact is that you just shat yourself and you choose to share it, loudly, at an important shareholders meeting). That’s the whole thing. I mean, there are some follow up tweets about how physical sex-based oppression is a real thing and about how J.K. feels a bit hurt by the trans activist community for turning on women-born-women when they try to address that oppression in the employment sphere. But that’s it. Now, maybe she said worse things later down the line- but these are the tweets that got everybody to dogpile onto her and anything after that point has to be viewed in the context of a harassed writer getting increasingly fed up explaining herself to people who won’t shut the fuck up on the internet when she’d probably rather be doing literally anything else.

So yeah. That’s what everyone’s got their knickers in a twist about. And that’s really dumb. In a world full of genuinely hateful bigots, attacking someone for pointing out that biological sex is a real, separate issue to gender identity and that arseholes have gotten people fired over saying that seems… well, it seems like a waste of energy more than anything else. There are people out there who haven’t actually encountered the source of this lunacy and have just taken the word of Internet Peeps that J.K. is an awful person (‘cause getting to the bottom of shit is difficult and what’s a person to do? Not just parrot the last opinion they saw fart its way across social media?).

Look, folks, folkettes, moustachioed three-titted hermaphrodites and people who identify as attack helicopters (shout out to all my homies at the Rotary Blade Club), there’s a lesson here. And that lesson is that you shouldn’t believe someone’s good or bad because someone on the internet tells you they are. People on the internet are just people, and people almost never have the faintest fucking idea what they’re talking about. There’s also a really, worryingly high proportion of internet ‘personalities’ (so called because they don’t have any in real life) who like to stir shit for the sake of stirring shit. Sometimes these people are easy to spot, because they’re bugfuck-crazy right-wingers in tinfoil hats claiming that everything in the media is a plot to destroy traditional family values (the same ‘traditional family values’ that caused women in the ‘50s to overdose on amphetamines to get the cleaning done and fathers to try and beat the gay out of their children). However, sometimes, the shit-stirrers are just a teeny, tiny bit smarter and will use the genuine disenfranchisement of a group to which they technically belong to cynically elicit sympathy for views that would be obvious bullshit if the person spouting them couldn’t claim to be oppressed. Rule of thumb: beware of anyone who wants you to believe that they have it tougher than the slave who had to clean the poop out of Abraham Lincoln’s chamber-pot hat (Fun “fact”: that’s why Honest Abe’s hat was so tall: he used it as an emergency latrine while travelling and it had to accommodate the prodigious length of his turds). Even if the person is right and they really do have it that tough, the fact that they’re prefacing what they’re about to say by EXPLAINING THAT TO YOU REALLY SLOWLY AND EMPHATICALLY should really be a red flag- a sign that they’re attempting to obfuscate the flimsiness of the actual point they’re about to queef out their face-hole. That’s not always the case (duh) but it should put you on your guard.

I can, and will, go further: I have never had opal fruit on me! Oh, hang on, that’s a line from A Bit of Fry and Laurie. What I meant to say was, I can, and will, go further: you really shouldn’t care to begin with if a creator has iffy opinions that in no way impact their work. You shouldn’t even care too much if they’ve actually done terrible shit. Because at the end of the day, the only part of them that’s relevant to you is the work they’ve created. T.S. Elliot was one of the greatest poets to have ever lived… but he was also a raving fascist. Lawrence Olivier was one of the greatest actors of his generations… but also a barely-functional alcoholic who delighted in fucking with his old Cambridge university in ways too baroque and specific to detail here. Frank Miller: amazing graphic novelist; protest-hater and all-round tosser. Don’t even get me started on all the shit Thompson and Bukowski got up to (though not together… I’d love to see that buddy movie, but it wouldn’t accurately reflect reality). There isn’t a composer in the whole world of prestigious, important classical music who wasn’t, on some deep level, a really fucked up person. Francis Bacon rates as one of the greatest artists ever to have been spat out by an uncaring world, but he also systematically ruined the lives of everyone around him, including himself. My point is that you can’t demand your art and media comes exclusively from good people… unless, of course, you’re comfortable exposing yourself to a pitifully small sliver of culture and starving your brain into grey fucking wallpaper paste. Trust me, if you have to seriously consider your options on that one, it’s alarmingly close already. Allow the personal and private failings of creators to be personal and private- even if the creator’s an egotist who keeps bringing it up in public. Accept that, for you, the work is what matters because YOU ARE NEVER GOING TO MEET THIS PERSON OR HAVE ANY IMPACT WHATSOEVER ON THEIR LIVES AND THEY ARE NEVER GOING TO MEET YOU OR HAVE ANY IMPACT ON YOU OUTSIDE THEIR WORK.

This has been a PSA from the Foundation of Terrible Bastards Making Good Art. As both a terrible person and a great writer, I now give you my permission to fuck off.

ADDITIONAL: Okay, so having posted this, I decided I was curious enough to check out JK Rowling’s twitter feed properly. And, to my amazement, I might have jumped the gun when I called her a milquetoast. She actually has some pretty strong opinions,,, but none of them seem to be about trans people in general. She had a go at Nicola Sturgeon for putting a PENIS-OWNING RAPIST OF WOMEN IN A WOMEN’S PRISON PURELY BECAUSE HE CLAIMED TO BE A WOMAN, but that’s not transphobia, is it? That’s an issue of protecting prisoners without penises from being raped by prisoners with penises. The whole ‘is Prisoner A trans or not’ issue is just obfuscation being used BY A RAPIST to get into a situation where they will have the opportunity to rape more people. While JK’s phrasing might leave something to be desired (if you’re the kind of person who needs every phrase to be padded to sooth your ego), “don’t let physically strong penis-owning rapists near vulnerable vagina-owners in an environment specifically designed to make escape impossible” shouldn’t be a controversial thing to say- and has less to do with trans rights than it does with just… common sense, I guess. Look, I’m neither a TERF nor a trans rights activist, though I know people who are both vulnerable women and people who are trans. I am the fucking Neutral Zone between the Federation and the Romulans here, but could we please all agree that miminising the risk of rape in prisons shouldn’t be controversial?

guerrillatech:

vixxey:

guerrillatech:

(Cis/trans)women aren’t the only ones that can get breast cancer, either.

Please boost this version 👆

Reblogging because I don’t want any of my followers to die from having their own tits turn agains them. It’s not the glorious Klingon death in battle I know y’all dream of, so stay safe and stay boob-aware.

TRIGGER WARNING: I still hate Chris Chibnall; unneccessary bukkake references; a tractor-crash described in punishing detail; the tragedy of being Wales (Britain’s Designated Punchline Province).

So, Doctor Who’s back- or is going to be later this year! And if you’re thinking “but it never went away…?” in a confused tone of thought, then congratulations on being completely fucking oblivious! The last few years have been… a car crash. But a not a fun car crash with lots of blood and guts to gawk at… more like one of those crap, country road car crashes where you pass a tractor upside down in a ditch with a farmer standing looking mournfully at it and wonder how something so slow and heavy failed to do the one thing it was trying to do so fucking miserably. That level of car-crash. So, when I say ‘Doctor Who’s back!’, what I mean is that Doctor Who is once more going to star talented actors and actresses and be written by experienced, skilled screen-writers who have paid their dues and actually have a handle on the genre their working in, as well as how to use themes, subtlety and subtext.

Now, to you or I or any sensible person, this just seems like straight-up good news. Russel T. Davies, who brought the show back to life in ‘05 is going to be showrunner, David Tennant is going to star, followed by Ncuti Gatwa (a BAFTA-winning actor, enthusiastic Who fan and all-round chocolate sex machine). For normal, mentally healthy people, this is a confluence of wonderful events that categorically does not invite shit-stirring. For certain parts of the media, however, it’s an excuse to invent dementedly racist straw-men from whole cloth, spread stupid-arse rumours about casting decisions in the hope of getting a rise, and just generally talk bollocks and pedal nonsense for clicks. So, because I can’t stand to see the discourse on something I love dominated by towering wankers with the media literacy of four year olds, I’ve decided to round up the rumours and op-eds, put them in a row, and subject them to the Firing Squad of Actual Facts. In other words, I’ve done the bare minimum of due diligence that the mainstream media didn’t bother to do and am now going to tell you which headlines are true and which are horseshit.

THE RUMOUR: ROSE TYLER IS NOW A DARK-SKINNED TRANS WOMAN
THE REALITY: This is, of course, absolute bullshit. The Guardian (which used to be fairly reputable, before they started letting nutters with no journalistic training write for them) got hold of the name ‘Rose’ and the name of a trans actress attached to the upcoming Doctor Who special, put two and two together and somehow came up with seven. Trans actress Yasmin Finney will be playing Donna Noble’s trans daughter, Rose Temple-Noble, not Rose Tyler. Amazingly, it turns out two people can be named Rose- one probably after the other. The Guardian article is absolutely fucking hilarious, however, on a number of levels. For a start, it’s just factually wrong in the way that an article published in a proper newspaper shouldn’t be, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It takes the form of an imagined argument with a made-up racist transphobe so arch that it’s immediately obvious nobody on Earth has ever uttered their side of the fictional conversation. Additionally, the author seems to think that Rose Tyler is a Time Lord who can change her face like the Doctor (which is incorrect… although, if it turned out that absorbing the Time Vortex that one time rewrote her DNA, I’d totally be there for that. But that’s just me writing fanfic in my brain- not a real thing within the show). To put the icing on the cake, the article invites all those evil, bigoted fake fans to fuck off while (and I quote) “the rest of us have a blast.” Apparently, ‘the rest of us’ who will be enjoying Doctor Who once all the mean, bad people have left are people who, er, don’t watch Doctor Who or know how to research really basic casting decisions. Genius.

THE RUMOUR: AFORESAID YASMIN FINNEY WILL BE NCUTI GATWA’S DOCTOR’S COMPANION
THE REALITY: This rumour is less stupid, in that it’s entirely possible she’ll have an important and ongoing role within the show once Gatwa takes over from David Tennant as the Doctor… but still no. She’s not the main, recurring companion for Gatwa’s Doctor. That honour goes to young up-and-comer Millie Gibson, who will be playing a character called Ruby Sunday. While we’re on the subject, I’d like to go on record and make a prediction right now, so we can check back and see if I was right in about, say, five years: while she doesn’t appeal to me personally (partly because I’m engaged and partly because she has less meat on her than ploughman’s sandwich), I predict Millie Gibson and her freakishly buoyant Jessica Rabbit chest-bongos will launch puberty early for an entire generation of Whovians. And now I’ve made that prediction… we play the waiting game. Preferably with our Bukkake-proof umbrellas raised and readied.

THE RUMOUR: NEIL PATRICK HARRIS WILL PLAY THE CELESTIAL TOYMAKER
THE REALITY: This one is possible but, as far as I can tell, not confirmed at the time of writing. It seems that the Beeb has released a photo of Harris in costume… but not told us who he’s playing. The Celestial Toymaker seems like a reasonable guess, because he’s an entity with incredible, seemingly magical powers coupled to an eccentric demeanour and aesthetic, while Harris is a magician in real life (yet another reason to love the guy) whose general persona approximates the classic-era villain. The costume, of course, also fits the bill. I would be fucking delighted if this one turned out to be true, but let’s not get our knickers dripping with anticipation just yet. It’s still entirely possible he’s playing someone else. Maybe the Dream Lord from that one episode where the Doctor was basically torturing himself inside his own mind; maybe a classic antagonist so obscure even I don’t know who they are; maybe someone completely new, invented for the upcoming 60^th Anniversary Special. We’ll just have to wait and see.

THE RUMOUR: GILLIAN ANDERSON MIGHT BE IN IT.
THE REALITY: That would be great, because Gillian Anderson is basically the Second Lady of Sci-Fi after Sigourney Weaver (who’s kind of too American to fit comfortably into the quintessentially British Whoniverse, awesome though she is). However, at the moment, it’s sheer wishful thinking on behalf of the fans and on behalf of Gatwa, who’d apparently like to see her involved. Actually, since we’re occasionally going to be getting female regenerations from now, could we just cast her as the next Doctor after Gatwa? I mean, I know that gender-flipping is stupid because it erases an important part of a character’s identity (it’s a point I’ve made many times), but I also realise the toothpaste isn’t going back in the tube on this one, so we might as well just cast some really great actresses instead. So, yeah: Gillian Anderson for Doctor Who! Let’s start a petition before they accidentally hire a talent-free walking charisma-dampner instead! Don’t laugh- it’s happened once already. Twice if you include Collin, the crap one of the two Bakers.

And that’s pretty much it for the rumours. As it turns out, only one worth writing up was actively shit-stirry, while the others were… well, one was kinda dumb but understandable and a couple were just wild optimism. Honestly, that’s pretty cool. It’s nice not to have to spend hours of my life dismantling idiots for once- only mere minutes. Before I go, there are a couple of things that the media have been saying about the coming era of Doctor Who that aren’t rumours but which I feel I might as well address while we’re here.

1) Yasmin Finney said her casting and role in Doctor Who will “change the world”. To be clear, it definitely won’t. It might very slightly course-correct casting decision criteria in the BBC’s drama department, and it’ll be nice for trans people to see one of their own in an important role in a sci-fi drama, but ‘changing the world’ is definitely beyond the scope of a role in a piece of modestly-budgeted British genre fiction. That said, I’m not going to roll my eyes and tut too loudly- Finney’s young and excitable and you’re allowed to say stupid shit when you’re young and excitable. That’s what you’re teenage years and early twenties are for. That and substance abuse.

2) Loads of media outlets are going on about what a big deal it is that Gatwa is the first black Doctor in the show’s history. Again, I’m sure it’ll be lovely for non-white Brits to see one of their own in the lead role of the Beeb’s flagship sci-fi drama, but it’s not really a historic moment just because it happens to be a first. Britain isn’t America and, while we have our share of racist cretins, for the most part national and regional identity are much more prominent in our collective psyche than skin tone. Case in point, both black and white Irish people hate the English with equal intensity, everyone makes fun of the Welsh with no reference to colour, the Scottish are universally feared as hard-cases and Cornwall refers to the rest of us as ‘the mainland’ despite not being an island. Meanwhile, if the TV show Luther has taught us anything, it’s that we’re actually pretty good at judging a man by the contents of his character and not the colour of his skin. Provided a man’s an untidy megalomaniacal wreck with anger management issues and connections in the criminal underworld, most Brits will embrace him as truly One Of Our Own regardless of his ethnic heritage. I slightly suspect that the media is hoping the racists will come out of the woodwork over Gatwa’s casting so that it can go into smug preachy mode and score some Right Side of History points with thickos, but since this is the UK not the deep south of the US of A, that probably isn’t going to happen and they should stop embarrassing themselves. The gender-flip of the Chibnall/Whitaker era was capital-letters BAD and attracted backlash because, across every regeneration, certain aspects of the Doctor’s character were specifically male-coded or masculine, so the change was damaging to the character. The same just isn’t true of his skin colour- he’s culturally coded as British (despite being an alien) but not necessarily white or even class-conforming, so it just isn’t the same thing.

Right, glad we got all that sorted out. I’ve got a few more things to say about Doctor Who now that we’re heading into a period when it’ll be worth watching again, but those are definitely separate blogs. Expect to see those sometime this week. Until then, I never made the Doctor’s vow to never be cruel or cowardly, so if you’d like to fuck off before I get my shotgun, that’d be swell.

TRIGGER WARNING: Overexplaining; references to Marvel’s Eternals that can only serve to bring back bad memories; me going on and on about how great a movie Get Out was for bloody ages; Chris Chibnall (not just in the blog- I just thought I’d use this Trigger Warning to remind you that, sadly, he still exists).

Progressive media is great isn’t it? Good, solid lefty films and TV shows that actually have intelligent, well-thought political ideas woven into their plots in a way that makes you think and inspires an emotional reaction. They’re brilliant! I love ‘em, and we’ll be coming, by the by, to some of my favourite examples. But then there’s ‘woke’ media- media that usually has one very simple point to make- usually one it hasn’t thought about even slightly- and won’t fucking shut up about, bringing plots and even entire arcs grinding to a halt so that it can alternately insult and lecture its audience. That shit can fall down an endless staircase into a big pile of Lego that then gets melted into molten plastic by the that wildfire stuff from Game of Thrones. Today, boys and girls, we’re going to be talking about the difference. It’s a difference I’ve never articulated before, despite my well-documented political views and my equally well-documented views on the state of western culture. Largely because I didn’t think it required that much thought. To me, it’s an obvious difference- a difference that announces itself with a full blown song and dance routine and a fireworks display. But I’ve seen enough people using the terms ‘progressive’ and ‘woke’ interchangeably now to realise that I’m going to have to pull out my mortar board, rap the world’s knuckles with a ruler and do some fuckin’ ‘splainin’. Buckle in, dickwidgets, we’s gon’ get y’all some education. Yee fucking haw.

Let’s start with an example of one of my favourite truly progressive films of recent years- a film that takes one heck of a swing at modern racism and practically knocks its fucking head off. I speak, of course, of Jordan Peele’s debut flick Get Out, in which the protagonist finds himself victimised by a superficially forward-looking white family who make such a song and dance about not being racist that things seem a little off from the moment he first meets them. Ultimately (spoilers!) it turns out that they want to scoop out his brain and transfer one of their consciousnesses to his body because they’ve convinced themselves that, if they inhabit a black body, they’ll magically be ‘cool’ and ‘street’. It culminates with Chris (our hero) having to stage a violent escape/retribution-spree in order to save himself from his would-be bodysnatchers. It’s a brilliant film that works as both a piece of pure entertainment and a nuanced political argument. What does it do right? Well, aren’t you lucky? I brought a fucking list!

1) It tells an entertaining (and frankly bonkers) story that has never been done before, surprises on first viewing and intrigues on repeat viewings WITHOUT STOPPING THE ACTION TO OVEREXPLAIN THE MOTHERFUCKING SUBTEXT.

2) It allows its story and politics to feed on each other organically, with the politics lending context to the story and the story demonstrating the value of the politics. At no point does one twist wildly to accommodate the other or get in the way of the other.

3) It has a sense of humour about itself. There’s an entire comic relief character who (and this is important) is actually funny because their jokes aren’t aimed at continually reinforcing the political message or bullying certain viewers (as jokes in a lot of woke media often are) but are used to provide entertaining interludes that help to break up the main plot and enrich the tone, making the world of the film feel less one-note and more lived-in.

4) It clearly and fairly signposts its intentions. There’s no mystery box whose contents turn out to be a tedious lecture on race-hate; there’s no bait and switch; there’s no flipping of race or gender followed by an ‘ooh aren’t we clever and edgy’ moment from and for the benefit of the film-makers (and literally nobody else). No. You go in expecting a vehemently anti-racist film with a black lead who’s an original character created by the screen-writer and that’s exactly what you get. Bravo this film for not fucking me about.

The result of all this is that Get Out isn’t just fun to watch: it’s persuasive. It doesn’t just tell you ‘racism is bad, m’kay’, it focuses on specific behaviours and modes of thoughts, follows them to their logical conclusion and demonstrates what the problem is without insulting you, the viewer, in the process. It makes a compelling case without insisting that you’re the bad guy if you don’t agree with every single word- or just if you haven’t thought about it before. You can watch it as just a fun, quirky film, sure, but if you engage with it intellectually, you might find yourself thinking ‘Actually, that’s a fair point. I hadn’t given that much thought before.’

For the feminist equivalent, I’d invite you to consider The Perfection (one of only two films I’ve ever described as ‘transcendent’) which uses similar tools (but in a different way) to address the specific species of sexism that runs through the classical music world like a blue vein through cheese- a blue vein you think is just part of the cheese’s colour and flavour until this film dissect’s the cheese for you and exposes a rich seam of poisonous fucking lyrium. That metaphor may have gotten away from me a bit- but the point is that that’s another good film that’s actually progressive and makes its point in an intelligent way.

Of course, some films and telly shows are progressive incidentally- it’s just part of their DNA and their plots don’t depend on a specific leftist or liberal points. Case in point, one of my favourite films of all time, Annihilation, which just happens to have a predominantly female cast in a genre that, at the time it was made, was very male-dominated, but which doesn’t feel the need to make a big deal of it. It’s actually a film about humanity encountering a cosmic lifeform that blends and fractalises genetic structures in ways that are simultaneously beautiful and deadly. And its a love story that transcends species. And its a horror film that features bears with the voices of screaming humans. And its an art-piece that meditates on the beautiful yet unsettling character of perfect symmetry itself. And its a character study. And… you know what, just go fucking watch it. The big, obvious progressive element somehow seems infinitely less important once you’ve actually watched the bloody thing, because it’s really just a nice touch and is so far from being the main point that you just kind of stop noticing after the hand-wave that explains it in-universe.

See? These are all progressive pieces of media that I like because they’re good. And I could go on: there’s Snowpiercer (the film, not the series- the series lost me when it inexplicably decided it wanted to be a murder mystery), in which mankind’s final, world-destroying class war is staged entirely within the confines of a posh train. There’s that one episode of Peter Capaldi era Doctor Who when the Doctor helps put the final nail in capitalism’s coffin. There’s basically all the Alien films, which, aside from having an unconventional female lead way before it was cool, were also hypercritical of the military-industrial complex and the generalised exploitation of natural resources both on and off Earth. There’s Luther, which was mostly an apolitical crime drama, but which just happened to centre on a burly black cop whose race isn’t mentioned even once because it’s not the sodding point. Actually, at the time, I don’t think most viewers even thought about Luther being black- he just was. There was less need to dive into the subtext of every casting decision and line because the battle lines hadn’t yet been drawn in the idiotic culture war that every moron on the planet (on both sides of the political spectrum, by the way) simultaneously decided was happening. But that’s by the by. Frankly, we could be here all fucking day if I had a mind to list everything that’s either expressly left-leaning and liberal or contains a key liberal element and is also VERY GOOD. But time’s winged chariot and all that. I promised to explain the difference between progressive media and ‘woke’ media, so we should probably get on with that.

Well, there are actually quite a few differences, starting with whether the writers and actors have brains in their skulls or just an IOU and a couple of loose corks. However, one of the key points I’ve already talked about is that progressive media wants to persuade you. It gets you to invest in its characters and its world and, while it’s doing that, it weaves an argument that you can consider or not- and it credits you with the wit to do that for yourself and won’t make you feel like slime if you politely decline to engage on that level. Woke media, in contrast, has no interest whatsoever in persuading you. In fact, it will very often go out of its way to antagonise you. Then it’ll call you a racist or a sexist or a homophobe or a bigot for being antagonised. Then it’ll give itself a big, hearty pat on the back for striking a blow for INSERT HISTORICALLY MISTREATED GROUP HERE, even though what it’s actually done is create a wave of reactionary hate from people who were probably either undecided, indifferent or moderate regarding INSERT GROUP HERE until a pretentious bloody movie called them all cunts for no reason whatsoever.

My favourite example of the above phenomenon has got to be a film called ‘Bros’, which is a gay rom-com that’s very, very keen to let you know how down with da gayz it is. When I first saw it advertised, my initial reaction was ‘Oh, hey, that’s a neat, niche little thing. My trans gay friend S (real name deleted to protect the innocent) might get a kick out of that’. Then, when it didn’t perform as well as a typical, mainstream rom-com on opening weekend, the cast took to twitter to snidely imply that all the people who didn’t go see it were homophobes (apparently- I have to admit, this is second-hand because I haven’t been on Twitter in fucking years. I moved and now live near a Dunlop’s, so whenever I want to see a reeking tyre-fire, I just pop up there with a box of matches instead). Anyway, the point is that instead of persuading the audience it had and trying to recruit viewers through streaming platforms and DVD sales using, you know, advertising, Bros instead decided to brow-beat the audience it didn’t have (because, let’s be clear, the stars would have had their leashes yanked sharpish if those behind the film weren’t on-board with this bit of media drama). It was good publicity- it made it look like the film was taking a stand… but I don’t think it made one single person give a shit about LGBTQ rights. If anything, it will have put people off giving a shit.

But that’s a bit of a sketchy example, since the viewer-baiting took place outside of the film itself and was largely achieved through contrived social media furore. In fact, I’d go so far as to suggest it wasn’t part of the original plan but just a desperate (and very stupid) reaction to a box office ranking that any other niche title would have been overjoyed about. No, for a real, solid example of where woke media prefers to bully than persuade, we really need to look at a show where the bullying happens in the media artefact itself.

The example that occurs to me off the cuff is the fucking trainwreck that started all this shit in the first place: the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot. And yes, I know WB did eventually apologise for it and that their apology took the form of the lovely Ghostbusters: Afterlife, so I can’t really stay mad at them. But it is a great example. The antagonising of the fans started early with the casting, which involved a complete gender-flip of the main cast (despite the fact that the jokes only really work on a metatextual level if the heroes are paragons of failed masculinity- but let’s leave the analysis at the door: that ain’t what we’re here for). The film-makers then underscored that particular bit of fan-baiting by making the only male character in the main cast a witless, ineffectual moron so archly caricatured that he’d only have made sense in a below-par MAD Magazine issue… or on the Conservative back-benches. They then decided it wasn’t even in continuity- meaning it wasn’t just a badly-conceived continuation of the franchise but a symbolic replacement of it. And finally, just give the screw one final turn, they stripped out all the word-play and cleverness that defined the comedy of the original and replaced it with slapstick. Really. Bad. Slapstick. This film was tailor made to piss people off. I don’t think that was it’s main purpose- I think some idiot probably legitimately thought it would be box office gold- but between the symbolic erasure of the original heroes, the ooh-look-at-us-being-all-feminist-but-not-really bullshit of the gender-flip, the bad writing and the direct insult to any self-respecting viewer with a penis, the effect was a belittling, degrading film that was always going to alienate a significant percentage of the audience. And then, of course, call them sexist for complaining that they’d gone to see a Ghostbusters film and been given a big ol’ turd sandwich instead. And before someone with a  really short memory accuses me of the same, just a quick reminder that one of my favourite movies of all time is Annihilation. And no, taste in movies doesn’t necessarily equate to political stripe, but if you insist on using that metric, you can consult the list of examples of really very good progressive media at the start of this blog to gauge my opinions using ALL the data.

For a more up-to-date example, I’d invite you to consider The Rings of Power on Amazon, which grates cheerfully against fans’ nerves by disregarding all of Tolkien’s themes and stylistic flourishes in favour of modern American attitudes and ideas (for a show set in a medieval fantasy world ostensibly based on books written in the 60s by a British man living in Britain. Who wants to play ‘Spot the Dissonance’?). Or Marvel’s Eternals. Actually, no. I’m not getting into fucking Eternals here. Even my filleting knife would get blunt trying to pick the bones out of that fucking mess.

In fact, let’s move on altogether! I’m here to explain the difference between woke media and actually progressive media- not provide a small mountain of proof that one sucks and one rocks. I feel that if I need to demonstrate something that obvious paragraph by paragraph, I might as well go and explain to a flat-Earther why the laws of physics forbid him from living on a space pancake.

I wanted to address another key difference between woke media and progressive media. Progressive, left-wing media has a consistent political ethos (see the more explicitly political examples from the first half of this blog) whereas woke media just kinda makes the right noises. Very often, its real politics are completely at odds with the noises its making, in fact. Which means- joy of joys- it’s time to talk about Chibnall-era Doctor Who. Again. And yes, even I’m sick of me at this point, but it really is the best example. Okay, let’s get this over with.

Chibnall-era Who is definitely woke. It has the first female Doctor (pity she can’t act)! It’s TARDIS crew is the most diverse in the show’s history (even bravely including a grown man who needs his Grandad’s help to ride a fucking bike. Wait, I said ‘bravely’. I meant ‘unnecessarily’). It’s got that one episode where the Doctor stops a time-travelling racist from fucking up Rosa Park’s big moment and therefore saves the Civil Rights Movement (never mind that the Civil Rights Movement was a complex, long-form struggle and the erasure of a single, admittedly important and famous moment within it still wouldn’t actually have effected its overall course by that much- it’s not like this show about actual fucking time travel that aspired, during Chibnall’s tenure, to be educational, has a duty to accurately portray the way history works. It’s totally fine to suggest that something that cost countless people their lives in a tiring, soul-crushing battle against systemic oppression ultimately boiled down to a bus seat. But I digress). So yeah. Definitely woke. But it wasn’t liberal or left-wing or progressive in any meaningful way. There’s that episode where Whitaker’s Doctor finds herself in the middle of a struggle between an evil corporation that kills its own workers and the guy trying to blow it up… and then she sides with the evil mega-corp. There’s that episode where the Doctor locks a bunch of giant spiders in a room to starve to death rather than DO LITERALLY ANYTHING ELSE, breaking with a long tradition of animal rights activism that goes way back to Pertwee’s Third Doctor. There’s that episode where she gives a lecture putting the blame for climate change on individuals and completely ignores the corporations and governments who are mainly to blame. Need I go on? I fucking hope not. The Ninth Doctor once exploded the entire top floor of a space station just for putting out programmes that kept the masses dumb and compliant. That was progressive. The Tenth Doctor had an entire arc about fighting corporate-made Cybermen. That was progressive. The Eleventh Doctor… okay, I don’t have any Eleven examples because he didn’t have the attention span to form a coherent political viewpoint, but the Twelfth Doctor once literally ended capitalism and punched a dude he was supposed to be interrogating for making a racist comment, even though it didn’t protect history or anything- he just really hated racism. All that was progressive. Chibnall’s Whitaker-Doctor was, in contrast, a walking catalogue of moral failures not worthy of the name ‘Doctor’… and that’s not progressive.

All of which leaves us with one question? Well, two if you count ‘when will this blog entry fucking end?’ But mainly, it leaves us asking ‘why?’ If woke media alienates the people who’d otherwise pay money to see it and the people making it don’t even believe the messages they’re mongering, what possible purpose could it serve? If it’s not profitable and it’s not heartfelt, what the fuck is it even for? The answer, of course, is ‘search me, mate’. I suspect that someone thought it might be profitable at one point. Fuck, for all I know, it actually is making money- the algorithms that define these things got divorced from our puny human version of logic yonks ago. All I can say for certain is that it’s a trend and, like all trends, will probably go away eventually. Unlike progressive media, which will continue being made because the people making it actually believe things and have interesting points to make. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go and cry over the squandered franchise potential of Annihilation- the film that deserved a billion sequels and got zero because western culture decided to shit itself instead. Fuckity bye.

Attention Hoopnuggets of the UK and beyond! I have a major announcement to make! I kind of low-key dropped it into the middle of my End of Year Awards blog already but I thought I’d do it properly. Ahem: I AM NOW AN ACTUAL PUBLISHED AUTHOR! MY FIRST WORK OF FICTION IS AVAILABLE THROUGH CULTURE MATTERS RIGHT NOW! Isn’t that exciting? For me, obviously, not for you. Enlightenment for All!, my debut short story, is a multi-generational saga spanning 20,000 years and charting the a quest to discover the meaning of life that stretches across countless worlds and societies. And yes, I actually deliver on the narrative promise of the story by revealing the meaning of life at the end (at least as it exists in the fictional universe). I know a lot of writers who tackle ideas around enlightenment and the true purpose of existence offer up an ‘inner peace’ cop-out or literally nothing because they can’t think of a convincing-sounding meaning of life. Me? I fucking deliver. I’d go so far as to say that Enlightenment for All! has the potential to actually instil new, real-world philosophical ideas about meaning and purpose into my more impressionable readers. I’m just that good.

Astonishingly, the story has already attracted praise from established literary figures- and I don’t just mean the one or two I know personally! A certain Birmingham-based but internationally known Royal Fellow of Literature has already lauded Enlightenment for All!’s technical craftsmanship while at least one fellow sci-fi writer has given the narrative and storytelling his seal of approval.

And do you know what the coolest part is? Enlightenment for All! isn’t an isolated piece of work. Culture Matters are publishing it to whet readers’ appetites for an entire book of short stories by yours truly, entitled Small Infinities, which will be out later this year- hopefully in just a few months! Best of all, both Enlightenment for All! and the upcoming Small Infinities collection are completely free. Culture Matters are releasing them as free PDF downloads- all you need is a web browser and the ability to view PDF files to get my work!

YOU CAN DOWNLOAD ENLIGHTENMENT FOR ALL! HERE!

I’ll keep you all posted about when the whole collection is out, but for now, enjoy a little taste of what’s to come. Well, I say little: it’s twenty-odd pages and it’s fucking bananas. Have fun!

So, it’s New Year. 2022 has done it’s song-and-dance routine and fucked off to the backstage area for a fag and a crafty wank, leaving us in the as-yet-untested hands of 2023. And you know what that means, don’t you, children? That’s right! It’s time for my annual New Year’s Resolutions Blog, in which I suggest resolutions that might get you killed, arrested or covered in gunge for my own sick amusement, and you lap it up like the culture-deprived fucking content junkies that you are. So, without further (or indeed any) ado, here’s this year’s crop. ‘Enjoy’- a word that is here used incorrectly.

Dare to be Square
You know what I’m fucking sick of? ‘Geek chic’, or whatever the fuck we’re calling it nowadays. You know the look I mean- the sexed-up nerd look with the big glasses and not-really-a-suit that people are still, inexplicably, wearing to cash in on the still-quite-recent credibility of geek cultural IP. And do you know why I’m sick of it? Because it’s missing the fucking point. Being a massive pulsating nerd isn’t about looking ‘chic’. Proper geeks don’t choose clothes with the intention of announcing to the world that they’re geeks- they choose clothes for the number of gadgets and gewgaws they can fit in the pockets. So here’s my New Year’s challenge to you- if you want to dress like a geek, dress like a real fucking geek: a buttoned-up white shirt, abysmal plaid trousers, a pocket-protector with three different coloured biros and a pocket calculator on a chain. Oh, and a haircut that you can do yourself with a washing up bowl and safety scissors. Feel chic? No? Fucking good! That means you’re doing it properly! And yes, before any of you say anything, I’m aware that I’m the most overdressed man on the planet. It’s not hypocrisy because, while I am a geek, I’m not just a geek and my clothes are chosen to reflect completely unrelated aspects of my identity. My waistcoat and tie I chose to reflect my dandy-ish sense of British self-assuredness, and my Geoffrey Dahmer-patterned underpants I chose to reflect my love of cannibalism.

Admit that Fanfic Isn’t ‘Cultural Mythmaking’
Look, I love a good bit of fan fiction as much as the next man- especially when the show, book or property on which it’s based is being run into the ground by the last company to buy its rights (usually either Jeff Bezos or Mickey Mouse- he’s not just their mascot, he’s secretly the evil mastermind behind the whole horrific enterprise). By all means, keep writing fanfic. I encourage it! But a lot of you are in your forties now and your pretence that you’re doing something noble and important (as opposed to daft and fun) is getting creepy. It’s like if a man brought his anime body pillow on a double-date and introduced it as his girlfriend. Wait, wasn’t that the plot of an episode of Crackanory? The point is, it’s time to let it go. Admit that what you have is a hobby and that that’s fine. Cut the pseudo-intellectual bullshit about cultural artefacts being shaped as much by the fanbase as by the creators. As an actual now-published writer, I can assure you that I don’t even think about you randos when dredging a new story or setting from the filth at the bottom of my flinty little heart: I’m too busy channelling my mental illness and snorting powdered Mars Bars like fucking cocaine.

Contact a More Diverse Range of Great Old Ones
We all love summoning Cthulhu to issue in the end of the world, but has it ever occurred to you that he’s not the only Elder Being who waits dreaming beneath the minds and lives of men? Well, it should have! How do you think poor old Nyarlathotep feels, getting snubbed at every fucking cataclysm? Or Hastur, the King in Yellow- that guy practically invented the concept of spreading suffering through the slow, infectious patterns of cackling madness. Then there’s the Goat of a Thousand Young (whose true name I can’t actually post online because it contains an incidental racial slur). You all bang on about female representation but where’s she when you’re etching your sigils and runes of unspeakable power? Yeah. I bet a lot of you are hanging your heads in shame right now. Don’t be so fucking thoughtless next time.

Set Fire to Fancier Places
Every time there’s a riot, people set fire to the local MacDonald’s or KFC or whatever. And I sympathise- I really do. I’ve only ever been into a MacDonald’s twice in my adult life, but both of those times did leave me with a powerful desire to commit arson. The thing is, setting fire to a Macky Dee’s is just white noise at this point. It doesn’t make much of an impression. I think it’s time to aim higher: ignite Claridges or set a Fortnum and Mason ablaze. Maybe a burn down a John Lewis. Because if the goal is to make the rich and powerful sit up and take notice, you’re not going to do it by gutting a burger joint they don’t go to. You have to deprive them of the ability to buy fragranced tea-bags and fiddly little kitchen implements that only come in handy when you’re cooking a really specific brand of artisanal Burmese peach cobbler. You know- shit richos actually care about.

Make Friends with a Crow
I feel like this one’s pretty self-explanatory, but in case you need me to list the incentives, they are 1) You’ll have a bro who can peck your enemies’ eyes out for you, 2) You’ll never be short of a nest and 3) Whenever your crow friend is around you’ll automatically look like 20% more of a badarse just by proximity. So yeah: befriend a crow. It’s not just a New Year’s Resolution, it’s the best decision you’ll ever make.

Find that One French Pharmacy With the Time Travel Drugs
So, the last time I was in France on a family holiday, many years ago, my mother got a cold and went to the first chemists’ we could find. What she thought she was buying was a painkiller and flu-suppressant. As it turned out, it was an immensely powerful hallucinogen that made her see giant insects and fucked with her perception of time so thoroughly that to her it seemed like it was running backwards. Isn’t that a drug you want to try? I know I do, so let’s resolve here and now, you and I, to go on a magical odyssey to find the amazing French Abstract Time Dilation Drug and use it to bring the plot of the film Tenet kicking and screaming into reality!

Go on an Epic Quest for the Shimmering Sword of Cothroptar
Okay, I don’t want to alarm anyone, but the dimensions are aligning and soon the realms of Checkor and Tarton will spill over from their respective realities and into our world. Earth shall become the battle-field of two mighty armies, equipped with hyperreal battle-scarves and heat-seeking throwing-sporrans. The only hope to win the war and bring peace and justice to the weft and weave of tactile other-space is to journey to the land of Cothroptar, which lies across the Sea of Singing Absinthe. There, you shall meet a triclops in a three-piece suit, who sees things all to clearly, and will have to best him in a contest to see who can write the dirtiest limerick. If you succeed, he will give you the Sword of Cothroptar, which can unite the Berbury Tribes and force a peace between Checkor and Tarton, thereby sparing Earth the ravages of another Great Fabric War. So, you should probably resolve to do that.

Re-Read that Last One
Because it might take a couple of goes to sink in.

Make Love to Patrick Stewart Beneath a Starry Sky
Look, I know it’s a daunting challenge, but it’s probably your last chance. He’s an old man, folks. He’s not going to stay compos mentis or continent for much longer, is he? I’d get in there while you still can.

Reinvent a Dive Bar
I love the concept of a dive bar; absolute shit-holes where the strange, unsettling and menacingly surreal is allowed to happen simply because everyone inside is either weird themselves or too burnt-out to stop the weirdness. But I’ve always been slightly disappointed that you can’t actually dive in them. Thus, I give you perhaps the finest resolution on this list: I ask you to go forth and reinvent a dive bar… by flooding it. I don’t care if you do it one cup at a time or just connect a pump to the nearest swimming pool and a run a hose to the place- by the time you’re done, I want that shit-hole to be a swimming pool. A swimming pool where I can buy beer and where cocktail olives float past on their way to a better life.

Stop Reading this Before Your Fucking Brain Melts
You know, I could probably keep adding more and more and more of these, but I’m going to stop now because if I don’t, I might actually kill one of you through sheer force of strangeness. Plus, I kind of need to go get a cuppa.

I don’t have a witty round-up paragraph, so instead allow me to leave you on the following soul-destroying, robotic note: END OF BLOG.

It would be fair to say that 2022 got off to a flatulent yet anaemic start back in Ye Olde January and has since sign-waved between extremes of joyless and joyful like a sherry-addled schizophrenic telling you his life story at a Xmas party that just won’t fucking end, finally ending on a weirdly positive note. So, with that in mind and before the New Year bursts all over us like a faulty condom, let us roll up our sleeves and ferret through the detritus of the year in the hope of finding the purest diamonds and filthiest sludge-nuggets, so we can drape medals about them and call it an awards ceremony. Let’s rock and roll, fuckeroos!

The Feyd-Rautha Award for Having One Job and Not Fucking Doing It…
… Goes to Vladimir Putin, who gave himself the job of conquering the Ukraine and, despite having the military resources of an immense, wealthy country, a police state and a fully-subjugated media at his disposal, failed miserably. The war in Ukraine continues with no sign of Russia actually achieving anything. A bit’s been annexed- sort of- but Ukraine remains resolute and it’s highly probably that Russia’s ailing dictator will die before completing the job that he obviously intended to be his legacy. The stupid fucking twat.

The Suspicious Package that’s Actually a Present Award for Nicest Surprise…
… Goes to the film Bullet Train, which looked like nothing more than a good laugh from the adverts but turned out to be a legitimately perfect film, utterly flawless in narrative construction and characterisation… that also happened to be a really good laugh. Any film that has Brad Pitt singing the praises of fate and smart toilets while two hit men bicker about Thomas the Tank Engine has got to be worth the price of admission… and maybe a little dance.

The Patrick Stewart Painting a Naked Beethoven Award for Special Services to High Culture…
… Goes to another film, The Northman, which dared to ask ‘what if Hamlet and Beowulf were the same person’. It was a beautiful, meditative experience that reflected on the intersection between heroism and madness in pre-modern mythology… that also found time for fart jokes with Willem Dafoe and a big, epic sword-fight in front of an exploding volcano. I swear this is a real movie. I didn’t just neck a load of tramadol and hallucinate it while staring at an ant-farm. Go on, Google it. It’s real!

The Suspiciously Abrupt Bathroom Break Award for Shortest Tenure…
Goes to spittle-spraying, plate-faced, xenophobic freak, Liz Truss, who clawed her way to the position of Tory Prime Minister but lasted about as long as a fast-food restaurant called Jimmy’s Shit and Chip Salmonella Palace. She was promptly replaced by a urinary condition in a suit who somehow contrived to be worse than her, despite the fact that that should have been physically impossible.

The Joker Shooting a Chat-Show Host Dead Award for Most Satisfying Moment…
… Goes to the Doctor’s regeneration into previous, beloved Doctor Who star David Tennant shortly after the announcement that previous, beloved show-runner Russel T. Davis was being brought back to write and run the show again. The BBC is constitutionally capable of just saying ‘sorry, we fucked up’, but this does read as the closest possible equivalent. After a painfully ill-advised gender-flip, some lore-wrecking bullshit, an episode where the Doctor shilled for an evil mega-corp and a long-winded, multi-episode trudge through the colourful world of queer-baiting, the BBC seems to have finally realised that the last few years were a mistake. Will this lesson stay learned? Probably not. We’re talking about people who keep making the same crime drama every year and just calling it different names. Object permanence is not the Beeb’s strong-suit… but it’s still incredibly, viscerally satisfying to see a blustering, half-witted, incestuous institution forced into a U-turn, however temporary it might later end up being.

The Pluggity McPlugface Award for Best New Work of Fiction…
… Goes to Enlightenment for All!, a brand new short story published by left-wing magazine Culture Matters and available to download for free, right now. Taking place across 20,000 years and charting a multi-generational effort to uncover the secret of enlightenment itself, it’s already being hailed as an important work of outsider ‘gypsy futurism’ by a certain internationally-respected poet WHO I AM IN NO WAY ADMITTING BEING RELATED TO. Oh, did I not mention? I’m the author! I wrote it! I am a proper published author, and this one story is set to be followed by a whole book in the New Year! Take a moment to let that sink in: I have a story available through one of Britain’s leading leftist magazines and a book of short stories slated to come out through the same soon. Once again: for all the squalidness of modern society, my life is fucking awesome.

The Garth Meringue Award for Abject Terror…
… Goes to Smile, which- like Bullet Train- is a fucking perfect movie… albeit measured by a different metric. In this case, the metric for success is the number of ruined trousers associated with the media artefact’s existence, which has got to be well into the millions by now. This is neither the time nor place for a review, but Smile terrified me in a way that few films every have. Its capacity to induce fear is truly awe-inspiring… as its related capacity to ruin trousers.

The Special Award for Taking the Piss Like a Fucking Sewer System…
… Goes to the recent rises in gas and electric prices. The UK’s price rises are among the highest on the European continent, because the people in charge of this country’s energy policies are craven, witless morons who have cheerfully privatised the energy sector while failing to arrange alternate sources of power at the state level. As a result, heating a home is now a slightly more expensive endeavour than just fucking off and starting a new life… ON THE MOON!

The Beige Flake in an Unflavoured Ice-Cream Award for Existing…
… Goes to tepid new Marvel telly-show, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, which has a fucking amazing title and contains one of Marvel Comics’ most beloved female characters… yet arrived to the resounding sound of ‘meh’. I never watched it myself, but I feel comfortable including it in my end of year round-up because, er, neither did anyone else. Why? Well, a combination of dodgy effects, formulaic episodes and one scene in which poor old Bruce Banner gets an ear-bashing from the title character that the fans just weren’t standing for. And that’s it: something that should have been a hilarious, weird odyssey through Marvel’s lesser-known catalogue arrived ended up making almost zero impression on the shape of popular culture. Pity really- but something from Marvel making so little impression is actually, weirdly impressive in itself. If they reverse-engineer the properties that made it so forgettable, they could render them down to a paint and use it disguise fucking military aircraft carriers.

The Salvador Dali Riding a Neon Zebra Through a Sky Made of Pancakes Award for Sheer Fucking Weirdness…
… Goes to Everything Everywhere All at Once, a pseudo-comedy about the multiverse, divergent timelines, dildos, pinatas, family drama, rocks with googly eyes and putting everything on a bagel so that it collapses in on itself and becomes a reality-consuming singularity. It’s a great movie with a brilliantly talented actress and comedian in the leading roll. I realise I’ve done a lot of media mentions in this end of year round-up, but I feel like it’s important to praise films like this. If we don’t shine a light on quality, we end up with dreck. Good, original films and telly are rare, especially in a world where everything is a copy of some pre-existing IP, transcribed and adjusted and mutated until its no longer recognisable as itself. We live in a world where Jeff Bezos can buy the right to Lord of the Rings lore just so he can wipe his bald, pointless cock on it and where all of pop culture is dominated by a single, soulless corporation. When smaller creators with original ideas do something great, we should shine a light on it. So I am. Well done this film.

The ‘What, Really?’ Award for Unexpected Good News…
… Goes to the news that James Gunn is going to be put in charge of the DC cinematic universe, which is unexpected and good- the two criteria for shockingly underwhelming award.

The Wonderful Fucking Timing Award…
… Is the last award of the entry and goes to my car- or former car- which chose the week before Xmas to break down irreparably, leaking oil, petrol and water all at the same time while the engine misfired systematically. I loved that old motor, but its timing was always somewhat on the spectacular side. And so we end our awards ceremony on a personal and profoundly trivial note. So it goes.

And that was 2022. It averaged out to be pretty okay and now its ending to make way for 2023, which promises to be the latest in a long line of years. Until then (and the inevitable New Years Resolutions blog), bye.

TRIGGER WARNING: Eggnog, the KKK, Lycanthropy, Etc. You know, normal Xmas stuff.

Ho ho ho and happy fucking Cringletide to all you festive wretches out there in the blogosphere (a term that was last relevant in the early 2000s but which I’m going to cling to like a limpet just for the sake of being irritatingly pretentious). It probably hasn’t escaped your notice that the UK is in the middle of a cost of living crisis- meaning that quite a lot of us are having to choose between heating our homes and, er, eating. It’s a bit of a pisser, to say the least, and doubly so around the holiday season. How are you supposed to celebrate Xmas when you have to re-mortgage your own teeth just to get in the weekly shop?  Well, fear not! I have some suggestions for how you can celebrate the holidays affordably… which I’m giving to you now, at half five in the afternoon on Xmas day when they won’t do you any good. Because I’m a prick. Here we go!

1. Make Your Own Eggnog…
… By fermenting old shoe leather and drain-cleaner in a tin bathtub. Yes, it’ll probably kill you, but you’ll feel like a proper Yuletide hillbilly and, at the end of the day, isn’t that what the season is really about?

2. Give the Gift of Influenza
It’s flu season and, as we all know from the trenches and that last Star Wars film, nothing brings people together like shared suffering. So go forth, contract a virus, and take it home to your loved ones! You can celebrate Yulemas by huddling together, sneezing and complaining about your lurgies. Also, it’ll save money on the obligatory roast dinner, because you’ll all be too sick to eat it!

3. Play a Game
This would actually be a dangerously sensible suggestion if I was advocating a rousing round of Cards Against Humanity or some other laugh-out-loud party game. But you know what’s even better than games everyone enjoys and that bring people together? Games that help forge unbreakable bonds by putting you in life or death situations! My personal favourite is the Wink Murder game, played with a silenced Walther .32 calibre pistol.

4. Get Bit, Dawg
You know what’s really underrated? Being a fucking werewolf! What does that have to do with Xmas? Well, Xmas is all about familial togetherness- and there’s no family closer or more committed to each other than a werewolf pack. Why spend the holiday season as a weak, fragile human being when you and your loved ones could be out and about as irrepressible lupine monsters, frolicking in the snow and biting the heads off terrified peasants? Now that’s a Cringle’s Day activity the kids will remember and cherish for the rest of their lives. Just remember: lycanthropy is for life, not just for Xmas, so make sure you always know when it’s a full moon afterwards.

5. Steal Some Snow
Are you dreaming of a White Christmas? Well, so are the KKK, but in a much more racist way. But that’s besides the point. You can’t make it snow… but you can go and get some snow from someone who has too much and won’t notice it’s missing. I hear Johnny Depp always has some going spare and often forgets to lock his door. To be clear, when I saw ‘snow’, I actually mean cocaine- the most festive drug there is!

6. Start a Santa Night at Your Local Fight Club
Because even the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world needs a little holiday spirit at this time of year. Instead of bunking off your fight club meeting to celebrate Xmas this year, why not bring Xmas to Fight Club. Give everyone Santa hats and decides who fights who by pulling crackers! Having a suitably Xmas-y prize for the winner- nothing stupidly expensive, just a nice pair of Xmas socks or something. Go on, it’ll be fun.

7. Punch Chris Chibnall in the Face
It’s never a bad time to punch Chris Chibnall in the face… or to set him on fire… or to stand on an overpass with your cock out, wait for him to pass under and then widdle on him from a great height. However, it’s hard to find the time to do these things. With Xmas providing time off for much of the population and a good excuse to treat yourself, why not take advantage of all that to take your revenge. It’s the best present you could possibly give yourself and it’s free!

8. Hide Under Brian Cox’s Xmas Tree and Confess Your Undying Love When he Comes Down on Xmas Morning
It’s the perfect gift for both of you! And yes, I know you all thought I’d forgotten about that running joke, but that’s silly. I’m oop North now, and, as the Starks are so fond of reminding us all: the North remembers.

9. Paint Your Own Xmas Baubles
And by ‘baubles’, I do of course mean ‘testicles’. You’ll feel reet Xmas-y afterwards. And quite sticky, probably.

10. Liberate Some Turkeys
It sucks to be a turkey at Xmas, though the stupid bastards do keep voting for it. Wait, sorry… I’m thinking of the British public, who every five years exercise their right to elect the party most committed to killing them all and issuing in the end of the fucking world (usually the fucking Tories). Hey! That gives me an idea- turkeys deserve to live and the British Public deserve to be deprived of things they love, so why not go and release a bunch of turkeys so they get to live and the endless prat-hoard don’t get to eat them. Just a heads up, though, I wouldn’t leave this one ‘til Xmas day, or you’ll jut be throwing dead, pre-roasted birds over garden fences yelling “be free, my beautifuls!” like a mad cunt.

And that’s it. I could go on… but I won’t. I’ve got my very sexy fiance dozing on the bed next to me, a Xmas dinner being prepped by family members much better at cooking than I am and an episode of Doctor Who from when it was still good to watch. Enjoy the holidays, fuckos: I’m off.

WARNING: Don’t assume you know where I’m going with this until the end. This is a LONG fucking read not because I’m ranting but because I’ve thought a lot about the title question and wrote this almost as a stream of consciousness as I worked out what my opinions actually were. And yes, I know the title is super fucking loaded, but again: DON’T ASSUME THAT MEANS ANYTHING. It’s literally just the question I’m debating with myself.

I frequently describe western culture as ‘dying’ because most of the media that defines it is no longer made to fulfil a genuine creative vision or explore an idea but to either a) earn lots of money, b) manage a soulless corporation’s image by hastily applying a by-the-numbers coat of faux-progressive paint, c) ensure that a property aforesaid corporation acquired awhile ago doesn’t accidentally slide into public ownership or d) some spirit-crushingly awful combination of all of the above. However, I recently found an article that’s even more pessimistic about the state of culture than I am. Apparently, culture’s not just dying- it’s dead. Well, it would certainly explain the smell.

The article I’m talking about- actually a few different articles, now that I think about it- make the point that a thriving culture is fundamentally antithetical to democracy as we currently understand it. If anyone can declare anything to be either a work of genius or a travesty then there’s no longer any meaningful metric by which to evaluate cultural output and no way to sift that which is worth preserving from the background noise. You no longer have to know things or have practised analytical skills or a deeper, intertextual understanding of cultural works that have gone before to set yourself up as a pundit or media analyst. Thanks to the internet, all you need is a web address and the ability to attract eyeballs.

Now, on one level, this isn’t a bad thing. Case in point: me! I’m not a member of the social elite, but I’m still able to publish pieces, such as this one, that anyone can find and read. I belong to a class of people without money or resources but with genuine passion and a desire to provide meaningful analysis (but also dick jokes, because I never claimed to be emotionally mature- just intellectually superior). Likewise, some of my favourite analyses and pieces of cultural commentary from the last twenty years have come from pundits who essentially created themselves from a base of nothing with nothing but a sincere interest in their subject matter and a relatively nuanced take on the society that produced it.

Unfortunately such people are not the rule, nor do they command the greatest degree of public attention. Most of the people who shape our perception of our cultural milieu and help some things succeed while others fail are- and I’m being as polite as I can here- cunts. And when I say ‘cunts’ I mean… well, I mean ‘cunts’, but I also mean ‘bad actors’: people who are motivated by a desire to keep themselves relevant and guarantee that others see them in a positive light. You can’t honestly analyse a piece of media if you’re worrying that your readers or viewers are going to call you a racist or sexist for shitting all over the latest Star Wars abortion or a ‘libtard’ for pointing out that maybe ageing bigot Clint Eastwood should just fucking retire and stop having anything to do with movies. And that’s a problem, because it means that nobody holds garbage to account for being garbage. In fact, quite a lot of people will actively defend it because it reflects the ideologies of their assumed audience, whatever those may be. Of course, good stuff is also praised and tiptoed around in the same way, but garbage is easier to produce than good stuff. In any system where trash is afforded the same level of attention and adoration as actual works of meaning, the trash will very quickly come to dominate the cultural landscape, because there’s no incentive to put in the work to produce the other kind of media. At which point you no longer have a cultural landscape, but just a big, reeking dumpsite full of ‘content’- endlessly disposable; endlessly regurgitated; and endlessly self-congratulatory because nobody’s ever taken its fucking talentless creators aside, slapped them, and told them to piss off to Reality TV where they belong.

But thinking about the claim that culture is dead, I was astonished to realise I don’t actually agree. Yeah- when I saw the title of the article, I thought “crikey! This looks like it’s going to reflect my opinion on the state of the world!” but, because I was being prompted to think about the issue in more depth, I ended up concluding that I think something slightly different.

You see, most media has always been twattish. It’s made by twats, for twats and of twats. Okay, not usually ‘of twats’, but I needed an extra thing to round out the Rule of Three. I think the current level of paucity only feels more egregious than usual because we had a few really good years at very beginning of the current century. Not that everything made in that time was high culture, you understand (fuckity no it most certainly was not)but there was a kind of goofy sincerity to it that was easy to find admirable. To use the distinction made by everyone’s favourite cartoon about an alcoholic scientist, it was joyful rather than joyless. While this doesn’t really have anything to do with the actual decline of meaningful culture (enjoyable isn’t the same as spiritually and intellectually enriching after all- if it was, we could all wank our way to enlightenment), it does mean that the decline has felt more acute than it really is. The truth is that if you want to encounter genuinely enriching culture rather than content, you’ve always had to go the margins. The truest books are the ones that get banned or suppressed on the grounds of perceived salaciousness. The most stirring pieces of music are rarely heard outside of small venues and the CD collections of obsessive nutters. The best films and telly appear randomly on the budget fringes and then sink into obscurity because they couldn’t find a large enough audience. It’s always been thus. Bemoaning the proliferation of Dan Brown clones and bad romances on our bookshelves is fun and at least represents an attempt to hold trash-pedlars to account. Pointing out that The Rings of Power has the writing chops of a four year old with a crayon up his nose is certainly a worthwhile critical endeavour. But these abominations aren’t new. They’re the default- we were just allowed to forget that for about ten years at the start of the century. These are, after all, mainstream things and culture has always been the preserve of a relatively small number of people. I don’t mean the conventional ‘elites’ of academia and the economy either. The small number of people I refer to are those charmed and cursed few who are mentally ill enough to get inspired but functional enough to do something with that inspiration. Hi, by the way.

I’m not saying things aren’t bad. True culture has always been thin on the ground, but popular culture is in a more worryingly aberrant situation. A single company dominates almost all of it. Even its largest competitors are judged by the metric set by that company. And that company is a creatively bankrupt, bloated fuckstorm that may still be using slave labour to make its merch (it’s suspiciously hard to confirm, as I’ve noted before). So yes. Things are very, very bad. But they’re not irremediably bad. The margins are still where they’ve always been, waiting to shelter poor fucks like you and I from the aforesaid fuckstorm. I mean, I’m about to be a published author, so things can’t be going that badly. Right? Right? Never mind.

I also read another article recently that made a different argument regarding the death of western culture. This article said that our culture was effectively dead because we no loner connect to anything larger than ourselves- not our past; not our ceremonies or rites; not our shared narrative about who we are. We have, apparently, become ‘uprooted’. The polyphony of freedoms we enjoy is a double-edged sword that has unmoored us. We still have a sense of self, but its cobbled together from whatever bits and pieces we can find lying around rather than built on a solid foundation. I’m… wary of this argument. It’s too easy for right-wing madmen and charlatans to co-opt. The moment you start talking about a loss of roots, you get some frothing-mouthed neocon lunatic jumping up and down with excitement ready to blame our disconnection from our roots on whatever the scape-goat du jour is. Usually immigrants, because right-wingers are not overly endowed in the imagination department. Just look at their conspiracy theories- they’re boring shit about the Earth being flat (and therefore less interesting than it really is) and imaginary paedophile rings. For the purposes of contrast, consider the conspiracy theories of genuine apolitical, certified tinfoil-wearers. Those kooks get to believe in giants living in the hollow core of the Earth and shape-shifting lizards who have coopted entire monarchies! But I digress.

Wait, what was I talking about? Oh yeah: is western culture dead because we’ve become ‘uprooted’? Well, if we can set aside the racists and xenophobes who want to make the issue of ‘uprooting’ a dog-whistle for a moment, the answer is… complicated. Certainly, a shared sense of communal identity helps to sustain a healthy culture. Even though the past was horrible and only usually survived by people who did horrible things, understanding its relationship to you also allows you a sense of continuity. To be part of a narrative that is greater than yourself fills a basic and oft-unacknowledged human need. Remember those conspiracy theories I mentioned? Well, that’s why those happen. People will turn to anything to feel that they’re part of something. And if that thing happens to be the nonsense ravings of a failed sci-fi writer? So be it. Cough cough scientology cough cough. I also think that capitalism in general and trickle-down economics in particular have done a really good job of destroying our collective sense that we belong to something greater than ourselves. By providing an economic justification for selfishness and cutting the ties that made people responsible for each other, I believe late-stage capitalism has done more to harm our sense of collective (rather than individual) self than any other ideological mechanism of the past thousand years. Even feudalism didn’t fuck us up this badly.

BUT! Yes, there’s a but- a large, shapely one. But… I don’t actually think that ‘uprooting’ has spread quite widely enough to destroy culture. The big, capital cities are certainly a write-off- London is like a polished, empty shell, too big and mean for the people who try to inhabit it and New York over in the States is visibly falling apart. But using that metric makes a floored assumption- it assumes that our cities are the centre of our culture. And they’re not. Despite its best efforts, capitalism has utterly failed to squash the basic sense of shared identity out of people in smaller communities. I live on a small, dead-end street in a tiny town near the ancient university city of Durham. The people here aren’t a traditional community- we came here because this is where the council housing was. None of us knew eachother before. We don’t even all have nationality in common. But there’s a level of basic decency and mutual respect that just seems automatic- even natural. There’s something in the human spirit, I think, that resists uprooting by putting down new roots and making new connections. Yes, people have to fight harder to do that than ever before, but it takes more than a smarmy git in a suit telling you its okay to be a selfish turd to turn you into one.

So no, culture isn’t dead. Culture in the sense of media that generates new ideas is rare, but it always has been. Culture in the sense of shared identity is embattled because of the cult of selfishness, but it still finds strange new ways to reform.

I’m not an optimist by nature. I still think culture in both senses is dying… but dead? No. Not yet. It’s kept on life-support by small groups of people- people who are willing to make new connections with other types of people without prejudice and people who are mad enough to create new stories and songs and media even though they’ll only ever be watched by five other people and maybe a duck. And there’s something glorious about that.