"And the moth-hour went from the fields,
 And stars began to peep." - Yeats
There's a Garfield game for the Atari 2600. Or rather, there's a prototype. The game was never released, in the end. A sad fate for what amounts to quite a beautiful almost-game. I wish Garfield (the game) was real. But I will accept this gorgeous ghost. This pretty shadow. Garfield himself is rendered and animated beautifully. You start out atop a garden fence, and may traverse in a sprightly way…
You may have noticed that my last post was a frightening TWO WEEKS ago - that's right, I took a big break. This was partly to give myself more time for writing my beautiful and lucrative YouTube videos , but also because I was getting a bit tired out by writing posts every day (or almost every day). A woman must rest, after all. But now I must present you with my beautiful reading plans. I just…
15 Oes of St. Bridget, 15th Century, Netherlands. I saw some BOULETS ANGLAIS (English cannonballs) in a heap underneath a church this week and I thought, of course, "lovely balls". Something about them displayed sort of chaotically alongside architectural bits and pieces spoke to me - did these particular balls kill people? Did they knock down any parts of this building? There's something very…
Beautiful Thai elephant lamp, 15th-16th century, via Los Angeles County Museum of Art . This afternoon I saw a post by John McCafferty - a simple, beautiful sculpture of an elephant from 10th century Iran: The elephant in question, via Los Angeles County Museum of Art . Something about those perfect hollow circles for eyes captivated me, and I thought - today is an elephant day . So here are some…
Disney released their latest addition to the Descendants franchise on Friday - Descendants: Wicked Wonderland - and so naturally, I watched that thing. This is the fifth Descendants movie, and it follows Descendants: The Rise of Red to expand the spin-off world that started there. The further we go into the incoherent, faraway land of desperately added characters, the funnier, arguably, it gets.…
Let's get to the bottom of an important question today. We all know that the Spice Girls can be placed on a relative spectrum of evil, yet the public has long been afraid to do so, frightened of the retaliation that may arrive if the most evil Spice Girl was to get wind of our talk. But I am not afraid. I am fearless. So today I will reveal the truth about the evil levels of each Spice Girl.…
The Addiction (1995) is a very interesting movie. It's a super stylish vampire story shot in black and white, and it's concerned with the uncontrollable, searing pain of grief and the hideous tendrils of addiction. The pain of it all is palpable, and made all the more direct through its protagonist's low-level suppression of that pain. Underneath all that, though, is its incredible beauty. The…
My friend, the writer and musclebound hunk John Paul Brammer, who I saw the 2025 animated Smurfs movie with at the cinema (a beautiful memory), wrote an intriguing article about so-called “performative reading” on his Substack. I have been hearing this accursed two-word phrase, but I have never really paid it my full attention. It's been a fly buzzing round my head, easy to tune out. But now I…
Here is a short story about a fly, and about writing, and being near writing, and death, and public reaction, and laughing at yourself. Enjoy. *** Flies don’t live long. Three weeks, on average, for my kind. In any case, we spend our time in gargantuan rooms, privy to the whims of you all. There is a great network of fly gossip. We live for it, die for it, it is the sap of our little lifetimes,…
I was looking through NetGalley for a new book I could read before release, a tantalising short book with, perhaps, four existing reviews or so that I could check out and feel special for getting in on early (such is the great pleasure of it), and I spotted Erinrose Mager's Hot Fruit - a poetry collection (or... story collection, I suppose the cover does say 'stories' ) with that appealing,…
Here are some beautiful women. I've always loved tomboy style and all manner of relaxed, unfeminine looks, and granted I usually draw long-haired skirt enthusiasts, but there's a sort-of cartoon-y neutral body that pervades my drawings too. I rarely draw a person with any suggestion of breasts, for example. I love the boxy torso. Today, though, I thought I would create some women who have more of…
Recently, I watched the very exciting and quite nasty movie Gone Girl for the second time in my life. On my first viewing, I hadn't liked it. I had taken some offence to what I saw at the time as a clownish portrayal of a super evil psycho bitch, and a comparatively sympathetic husband despite his philandering and constant use of terms like the aforementioned "psycho bitch". I have to, in…
This Happy Breed (1944) is one of director David Lean's lesser-known films. I watched it a few months ago as part of my ongoing quest to see all of his films (I've now seen four of seventeen - quite a way still to go), and I was mesmerised. Crucially, it's adapted from a Noël Coward play (just like my favourite film, Brief Encounter ), and so it has that brilliant complexity and sense of place…
An exemplary Nintendogs dog. It's time, reader, for me to reveal to you some beautiful game screenshots that I have been keeping in a very special folder on my computer. I'm in the habit of taking a lot of screenshots when I play video games, but sometimes these poor screenshots have nowhere to go. And so, they languish inside my screenshots folder, lonely and neglected. Well, no more. I present…
I knew I wasn't really the target audience for new cheesy BBC drama The Other Bennet Sister on account of my eternal hatred of the sillification of period dramas, but nevertheless I gave it a shot just to check it out, and to see Richard E. Grant doing his thing as Mr Bennet. The thing is, I've never been a fan of period dramas that veer towards the anachronistic. What I look for in them is a…
Some games in the Atari 2600 library, many of them infact, are stinky. Here are three choice stinky selections that I will most likely never be playing again. 1. The Challenge of Nexar This one is promising, initially. We are greeted by a colourful screen with horizontal lines in different shades, signifying a 3D plane ahead from which enemies will emerge. Our task, predictably, is to shoot those…
Berserk is a beautifully designed game. You are a gorgeous, perfectly rendered human, your legs scrambling for purchase - Looney Tunes style - as you walk away from droids with rotating heads. The game is about shooting these guys, and not getting shot by them. And it's ideal. As I'm always saying about Atari 2600 games, the best ones perfect the simplest concepts. Here, we are confronted with a…
Hello beautiful readers. I've been thinking about Markiplier's Iron Lung , released earlier this year. It occupies a fascinating spot in the YouTuber movie canon by virture of being, in some ways, the most true YouTuber movie. You see, Markiplier is a capital Y YouTuber, and so this thing is so distinct from Obsession (a movie by, really, a filmmaker with a YouTube channel), and Backrooms (I still…
It's been a second since I've shared beautiful images from my 3DS, so here is a selection of lovely gifs of the city's details, shuddering and swaying as they must. Here are some people chilling at a café. I love all that outdoor seating, although it is somewhat ruined by the prevalence of smoking. I don't want to sit there if I'm guaranteed a big waft of cigarette smoke. Because I'm crazy. Here I…
TikTok likes to latch onto things. It dumps me into little niches so quickly and transparently that I am always fascinated by its new assigned interest. Some of these end up being short lived—a particular song that keeps coming up for a while, or a particular creator who makes approx. five thousand of the same video of them doing a particular move—but others are cyclical topics that keep returning…
I would like to present you, today, with a dog character. This dog is perpetually angry, because she knows that she is better than you (she has good taste in obscure films, and her favourite fruit is the peach). She is very aware of her own good looks, and she likes to lie angrily on the floor, mostly. Otherwise, she has brief periods of serenity when looking on the reminders of days gone by. This…
Last week, in a great intellectual pursuit intended to thicken my already swollen mind (take a moment to picture the cycling circus animals doing laps within), I decided to straight up read seven books in seven days. Cover design from Leonard Smithers' Catalogue of Rare Books (1896), by Aubrey Beardsley. Here are the books I read, and a brief note on each one: The Midwife’s Apprentice by Karen…
I can't bear it. It is currently 37 °C (feels like 43 ° , apparently) and I am melting into a pathetic little puddle. I have the use of one of those portable AC units with a tube that you can throw out of your window. I'm happy I have it, but it is, dear reader, not enough. My brain feels like a sludge, and so I have given myself permission to spend a full four hours reading today (or, possibly,…
If you have ever had the misfortune of staying or living on a main road, you might intimately know the interminable, horrible sound of car horn based noise pollution. It seems that quite a lot of drivers view their horns less as emergency startlers, and more as an opportunity to express any minor vexation. This might not be so bad if it wasn't for the vexation being, for some, constant. Jack…
I don't know if you know much about the Nation of Islam , a black nationalist religious organisation founded in 1930, but after reading James Baldwin's tale of meeting their leader and his criticism of the group in his fabulous short book The Fire Next Time , I wanted to know a bit more about them and primarily their mythology claiming that white people were created by a specific servant of the…