by wadapan

I recognise that this is insane person behaviour but I maintain a list of every story I ever read/watch/whatever, with reviews, in order of how much I like them.

I started doing this in 2018, so records before then get a bit spotty. The older a review is, the less likely I am to stand by it; a lot of the older ones are either wrong or at least expressed in a dumb way. (A lot of the new ones are too but I'm just like that.)

Really, this list is an exercise in comparing apples to oranges. What does it mean to rank an unfinished, amateur webcomic above a competently-produced feature film? Nothing, really. But here's what I try to think about when adding something to the list:

For simplicity's sake, where there are multiple closely-related works—many stories from one creative team, or set in the same fictional universe—they're usually grouped together, and placed according to the best work in that group. If a group gets too unwieldy, I section them off into an appendix.

At the time of writing, this page runs well over 80,000 words. It is not an article, or a book! Do not sit and read it top-to-bottom! That's not what it's for! This is a personal reference, which I use to jog my memory or see when I last experienced a piece of media. I've decided to share these records because people always voice interest in them, and I have no reason not to, so please do not take it as me saying, "fight me!"

things

17776 (also known as What Football Will Look Like in the Future) is Jon Bois' unique and remarkable snapshot of an improbable future. It's fitting that both of its names sound dumb as hell when you say them out loud—this is a story for the internet age. At times haunting, at times hilarious, but always enthralling. Sure, I got more enjoyment out of Worth the Candle, Worm and Homestuck, but the truth is that if you divide the quality of every work on this list by its length, 17776 is miles ahead of any other. You can probably read it in a few hours, and I implore you to do so

Worth the Candle is a completed web serial by Alexander Wales, in which a long-time Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master wakes up in a world that's an amalgamation of every campaign he's ever run. I can't do this story justice except to say that it will exceed your expectations in every way. See my slightly longer review here (reread books I-VIII: 22/09/2019-08/04/2020)

Worm is a monstrously long superhero web serial by Wildbow. People seem to find it cool to rag on Worm but, I don't know, it sort of just is that good? It runs circles around basically any other superhero story. See my slightly longer review here

Homestuck is a sprawling webcomic by Andrew Hussie. It's widely considered to suffer from some major flaws towards the tail end of the story, but those were mostly remedied by The Homestuck Epilogues anyway so who cares. If you only take the time to read one webcomic in your life, make it this one. Then, if you decide you've got time to read some more, read It Hurts!! by Gobolatula or 17776 by Jon Bois. If you're wondering, my favourite arcs of Homestuck are the first Intermission and Hivebent (reread: 09/02/2019-13/04/2019)

Anthology of the Killer is a collection of short comedy/horror games by Stephen Gillmurphy (aka thecatamites aka garmentdistrict). Easily some of the best writing I've ever seen in the video game medium. See my full review here (played: 10-13/02/2025)

Modern Cannibals is a metafictional horror-comedy by Bavitz about some people who go to a convention to meet Homestuck's creator, Andrew Hussie. It's a fiendishly clever story mostly about mostly terrible people, which deconstructs the nature of fandom, so it's not exactly light fare—but the prose here is genuinely literary, leagues above the vast majority of webfiction. Z.'s hyperstimulated unreliable perspective is extremely entertaining, but it's only when the story permits you to glimpse the minds of its supporting characters—equally unreliable in its own way—that you start to understand what the story is really about. The ending confrontations are genuinely gripping. A cursory knowledge of the real-world history of Homestuck is probably required to fully appreciate this story, and being vaguely familiar with Blade Runner also helps. For my detailed review of Bavitz's bibliography, see here. See also 2Kawaii4Comfort, a web series with superficial similarities to this story but a lot less depth, and The Northern Caves (read: 19/11/2018-20/11/2018, reread: 10/02/2022)

Swiss Army Man is that movie where Daniel Radcliffe plays a corpse, written and directed by Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan. The main guy's played by Paul Dano, it's Dans all the way down. This movie is an unmistakable masterpiece—yeah, I guess I'm the person who shills for the Harry Potter fart corpse movie now. What the hell! There is so much thought and care and empathy in this movie's conceit and plot. It's viciously funny and beautifully shot, with an incredible semi-diegetic score to boot. You could tease entire essays out of this bad boy, and it's got meme value—get yourself a movie that can do both! Really tugged at the heartstrings. Also it has a funny website (watched: 29/11/2021, rewatched: 23/05/2022, 19/06/2024)

Puella Magi Madoka Magica is Gen Urobuchi's deconstruction of "magical girl" shows. A beautifully-rendered and haunting exploration of how young girls are at times exploited or manipulated into conflict with one another (watched: 25-26/03/2022, rewatched: 27/05/2022-29/05/2022, 10/05/2024-12/05/2024)

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is a 2018 animated superhero movie. Every frame of this masterpiece oozes colour and charm like no 3D-animated blockbuster before. Effortlessly blends narrative, subtext and metatext into a seamless whole that communicates its message with astonishing clarity. Pretty much every bit of character design in this movie is perfect. I used to really like Spider-Man: Homecoming but this movie makes that one look positively vapid in comparison, unsurprisingly. The Blu-Ray's "Alternate Universe Mode", which adds back in all the animatics for deleted scenes, reveals just how tightly considered the movie is, with every single cut that was made having changed it for the better. See my full review here (watched: 21/12/2018, 17/01/2019, 20/12/2021, 31/05/2023, watched alternate universe mode: 15/11/2021)

The Tatami Galaxy is a complete anime directed by Masaaki Yuasa (adapted from a novel by Tomihiko Morimi), albeit one that hardly feels like a typical anime at all. The plot centres around a college student's regrets over his approach to campus life, but with a high-concept twist, beautifully expressive visuals, and intricate writing, plus a hugely endearing core message. The specials are throwaway but fun (watched: 22/02/2021-03/03/2021, watched specials: 14/03/2021-24/03/2021, rewatched: 23-27/09/2024)

Undertale is a video game by Toby Fox—but do I even need to say anything about this one? Stop reading this list and go play it

Portal is Valve's series of excellent first-person puzzlers

The Magicians is a fantasy novel by Lev Grossman, sort of inspired by Narnia and Harry Potter but from a more adult perspective; think of it as magic university. I adored this book. No-one gets it like Lev Grossman. I have sat down and tried to articulate a review on this one, and words just fail me (read: 01-02/02/2025)

Legion is an X-Men television show created by Noah Hawley, which is basically the perfect mashup of Homestuck, the SCP Foundation, Vsauce, and, I dunno, Worm? Riverdale? I feel like you could throw pretty much any media property as a comparison at this one and I'd shrug and go "yeah, that's salient". There are a lot of elements of this show that are bad, laughably bad, or just objectively bad. In fact, it has enough of these elements to fill an entire bad show. But there's all this other stuff, which I just can't even begin to describe, which is… original? Compelling? Good? Insane? And there's enough of that stuff to fill, like, three other shows that you'd watch and then nod at the end and go "cool, what's on next". Which means at any given moment, this show is running at a rate of four shows per show. Genuinely some of the most fun I've ever had watching TV. Particularly early on, the "mutant metaphor" kind of crumbles (as usual) on contact with the story's intended themes of mental illness, but that's not to say there aren't rich characters and thoughtful ideas at play here (watched Season 1: 10/01, watched Season 2: 20/02/2022-)

There Is No Antimemetics Division is Sam Hughes' (aka qntm) groundbreaking contribution to the SCP Foundation universe. It uses its conceits creatively for humour, horror and drama. The first arc is slightly better than the second, but the second is where almost all of the actual story itself is, all culminating in a highly affecting finale. Read SCP-2295 between the first and second arcs (finished: 13/06/2020, reread: 10/07/2021, 28/04/2024-13/06/2024)

Chili and the Chocolate Factory: Fudge Revelation is an ongoing modern-day sequel to Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, written by (in?)famous web serial writer Remy (of the "Korridor.rip" serials) under the pen name "gazemaize". Now, I'm biased towards this story, for reasons which might be obvious if you read it—I assure you that it's an enormously entertaining and fairly powerful piece of literature in its own right, insightfully deconstructing the themes of Dahl's work, and I suppose the lies we tell children in general (read: 12/12/2019-)

Ever17: The Out of Infinity is the only visual novel I've ever played. Written by Kotaro Uchikoshi and directed by Takumi Nakazawa, it's sadly ended up as abandonware—so talk to me if you want a copy. Has an astonishingly good "true ending" which is intrinsically built on the four mediocre "good endings" you have to reach to get there. For me, the ends more than justified the means, but you might not feel the same way (finished: 10/12/2018)

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a novel by Gabrielle Zevin charting the relationship between two video game designers over the course of several decades. An intimately metafictional work, this has been billed as "the first great video game novel", an assessment I can understand (even if obviously that's Worth the Candle). Deeply human, structurally ambitious, this novel absolutely tore me to shreds (read: 19-20/04/2024)

Eighth Grade is Bo Burnham's 2018 movie. It's been billed as a "comedy-drama", but make no mistake—for much of its runtime, this is a flat-out horror movie. Even at its highest points, this movie is distressingly awkward. At its lowest points, you'll struggle to keep your eyes on the screen. Burnham exhibits some flawlessly economic storytelling here, cutting to the core of issues I personally think about a lot

Stories of Your Life and Others and Exhalation: Stories are Ted Chiang's first two anthologies, which between them contain many of the best short stories I've ever read

Better Call Saul is a spinoff show (of similar length) starring the lawyer from Breaking Bad. It's probably the best, most consistent television show I've ever seen, with a stellar cast, flawless production value, an astonishing level of environmental storytelling, unconventional plotting, and fascinating characters and themes. I do think you get a lot more out of this show for having seen Breaking Bad, because it relies heavily on the inevitability that comes from knowing where certain characters end up, and its final season hinges on the plot of Breaking Bad—but this is definitely the better show of the two (watched: 24/10/2022-28/04/2023)

Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is a web musical written by Joss Whedon and friends during the 2007-2008 writers' strike, starring Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion and Felicia Day. It feels a little dated and simplistic to me nowadays, and Joss Whedon is a creep, but this lil musical has some of my favourite musical songwriting and squeezes so much into its short runtime, I can't not love it nonetheless. See my full review here (rewatched for like the tenth time: 27/04/2019, also 30/01/2020, 14/12/2025)

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency is BBC America's adaptation of some Douglas Adams novels. Written by Max Landis (noted creep, that's the big caveat here), it's a sci-fi detective show with an absolutely unhinged tightly-written plot that's consistently funny as hell. Has a second season which amps up the supernatural aspects of the show, and which is nowhere near as good as the first—excluding the sections on Project Blackwing, which are a real love-letter to the SCP Foundation (rewatched Season 1: 05/09/2017-06/09/2017, 16/11/2019-??/??/????, 04/05/2024-09/05/2024), rewatched Season 2: 02/02/2019-16/02/2019, )

Do A Powerbomb! is a wrestling comic by Daniel Warren Johnson, with colors by longtime collaborator Mike Spicer. This is a masterpiece, easily one of the best comics I've ever read, with stunningly dynamic artwork, a truly offbeat premise, and a profound emotional throughline. There was some stuff about how the tournament is actually resolved that left me a little dissatisfied, but that's such a minor nitpick; this thing shines with passion (read: 27/06/2023, reread: 29/06/2023)

Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor is a sci-fi slice-of-life "anti-adventure" game, in which you pick up trash as an alien in an alien world. Its sublime music, visuals, writing and gameplay mesh to create an experience that is equal parts meditative and maddening. Every time I try to describe Diaries' themes, I find myself oversimplifying—honestly, you've just got to experience this one for yourself

Challengers is a movie about tennis directed by Luca Guadagnino and written by Justin Kuritzkes of "Potion Seller" fame. One of the most precise and gripping films I've ever seen, full of intricate emotions. See my full review here (watched: 30/04/2024)

Knives Out is a murder-mystery written and directed by Rian Johnson. It manages to sustain a strong tone of suspense while still being riotously funny, and it's loaded with twists. In fact, this is kind of a redemption arc for Rian Johnson with me personally, in that it actually has self-consistent storytelling in addition to a strong theme (watched: 09/12/2019, 28/08/2020)

La La Land deserves its hype—Damien Chazelle's musical is an exquisite sucker-punch look at narcissism. It unfortunately makes its main characters a little too likeable, obfuscating (what I see as) its main message. Well worth a rewatch or two (re-rewatched: 21/01/2019, 30/09/2019)

Groundhog Day is a famous film about a man who relives the same day over and over again. Pretty famous, and for good reason: it's a really good movie. I think it could've tackled some of its more serious aspects with a little less detachment—but it wouldn't be the enduring classic that it is if it depressed people too much. See also Edge of Tomorrow (rewatched: 20/12/2018, 02/02/2020, 02/02/2021)

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is Eliezer Yudkowsky's reinvention of the Harry Potter universe. Suffers from strange pacing, plotting, and various author tracts but in my opinion nonetheless is better for what it is than its source material (re-read: 02-06/04/2025)

Six is a musical which sees the six wives of Henry VIII duke it out to decide the leading lady of their band. It's extremely funny and catchy with a tight thematic throughline, clever meta elements, and some of the strongest musical storytelling I've ever seen (watched: 26/01/2020)

Clerks is an indie movie by Kevin Smith. The definitive text on retail work! See my full review here (watched: 09/10/2024)

The Stanley Parable is a basically-perfect short metafictional video game by Davey Wreden

Common Side Effects is an [adult swim] series by Joe Bennett and Steve Hely about some people who find a mushroom that can cure any illness or injury. Genuinely one of the best animated series I've ever seen, completely offbeat writing, a deft approach to some heavy subject matter, it's funny, it looks good, it's basically perfect (watched Season 1: 14-15/05/2025)

Edge of Tomorrow is a sci-fi action film starring Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt. Imagine Groundhog Day as written by a gamer. Wait, no, that makes it sound bad—I promise it's got excellent writing and worldbuilding, with a strong understanding of how to escalate stakes effectively. Clever, funny, and reconstructive (re-rewatched: 31/01/2019)

Cat Person is a short story by Kristen Roupenian. To say much about it would give the game away, but the sense of sheer unease which underpins this story and the complexities of its central relationship are hugely compelling—gripping and relevant (read: 15/07/2019)

Ender's Game is a sci-fi novel by Orson Scott Card. It's highly unusual, in my opinion, but I read it when I was fairly young, so it's hard to tell whether the formative impact it had on me was the product of true originality or if it's just a particularly good example of common trad-sci-fi tropes. A very complex piece

Nope is a sci-fi horror movie by Jordan Peele. Most of the movie honestly isn't scary at all, but there are two sequences in particular which are genuinely extremely unsettling. A third sequence goes for more conventional horror, but has to cheat by using fake-outs to achieve it; I disliked this. The film is an interesting meditation on the unspoken exploitation of the Hollywood industry in the name of spectacle, with great characters and highly efficient plotting. The third act devolves into what I can only describe as full-on rational fiction, in a way which was totally unexpected but which was absolutely gripping. I loved this movie but don't think I could ever bring myself to rewatch it (watched: 03/09/2022)

Game of Thrones is George R.R. Martin's finely-crafted glacially-released grimdark character-driven fantasy epic. I used to really like it, but then I read Worm and decided I liked that better. I haven't seen any more than a couple of episodes of the show. Maybe if this series ever finishes and I re-read it in one go, I'll like it better

God-Shaped Hole is unironically smut written by a right-wing neoreactionary, and unfortunately it's just really good writing. I can't oversell how original, clever, funny and creepy this thing is, how much better its prose is than most else on the internet. The story itself consists of a single post interjected by advertisements, each of which links to a web of interlinked in-universe documents—some of which are actually extracts from real our-universe documents. Often, to use a phrase I saw recently, reading this is like "going to the zoo", but the story's presentation using explicitly textually compromised in-universe sources gives you an excuse to think critically about its world as seen by the narrator, reject their reality and substitute your own. Also, I called it smut as a joke, the sex in this is prominent and pervasive but certainly not written to get anyone off (read: 15/11/2019-17/11/2019, reread primary story: 23/06/2020)

2Kawaii4Comfort is an almost-complete live-action web series from Rhino Stew, about five weeaboos who go to an anime convention. This viscerally-awkward and starkly-depressing show tackles its subject matter with a level of tact and nuance far above what I'd expected, by treating its characters as tragic figures rather than as figures of ridicule. Conventions are very, very strange places, full of people who are used to talking from behind a keyboard, and 2Kawaii4Comfort manages to capture that essence. Contrast its primary inspiration The Guild below, which plays similar conceits for laughs (to very limited success), or Sword Art Online Abridged. Also compare Eighth Grade above, which touches on many of the same themes of isolation, communication and growing up and makes some very similar stylistic choices. It's a damn shame this series' final instalment was never produced, but although I maintain an academic interest in seeing how that closing chapter is released, I think from an outside perspective it holds up well as a complete work of art in its own right

The Lego Movie is Phil Lord and Christopher Miller's animated action-adventure examination of the conflict between conformity and individuality, corporations and people, and adults and children. Visually stunning, well-plotted, and really funny (re-rewatched: 22/01/2019)

Game by God: Sludge Reformation is a rational-adjacent metafictional murder mystery, and the most fun I've ever had reading a web serial. Sadly you cannot read it any more (started: 07/01/2019)

Pokémon: The Origin of Species is Daystar Eld's ongoing reinvention of Pokémon that could well end up higher on this list when it finishes, but it looks like that'll be a long way off. Daystar Eld picked his themes exceptionally well, and the result is a coming-of-age story like no other

Umineko When They Cry is a murder-mystery visual novel by Ryukishi07. It's obviously a masterpiece, no doubt about it, overall being one of the most thoughtful examinations of fiction—as in, the whole of fiction, all of it—I've ever come across, absolutely spectacular in the grandeur of its vision and the intricacy of its plotting. The problem with Umineko is that it's so goddamn long. Apparently, it took me towards 70 hours to play the whole thing, and that was often with me sitting down to commit myself to serious sessions of reading, manually advancing the text using my mouse's scroll wheel. It's so god damn repetitious when it comes to harping on about certain character threads, thematic conflicts, or plot points, just these endless back-and-forths, detailed descriptions of the logistics of people moving around this mansion. Meanwhile, some of the most truly brilliant or mind-blowing moments felt almost glossed over to me. Although Umineko is practically a linear narrative, I feel no hesitation in calling it a "game" because its stated aim is to force the reader to engage with the text and puzzle out the "truth" of the story for themself. An unengaged reader may find themselves dismissing much of the story, until it's too late to go back and scrutinise the details of the plot. This was where the story's length worked against it: even though I was paying attention, it took me most of a year to make it through the story, and during the final episodes, I could only remember the broad strokes of the early episodes. Worse, I don't recall how, but I had the story's biggest twist spoiled for me at some point during the back half, which robbed me of the experience of finally being able to put it together for myself once the story made it all but obvious. Maddening stuff. Still, I view Umineko as having been a worthwhile and memorable experience for me overall (read: 03/07/2023-30/03/2024)

Community is a sitcom by Dan Harmon. It's excellent on an episode-by-episode and even season-by-season basis, but has some overarching issues with character development. Best to watch the first three seasons and pretend the remaining three don't exist; while Season 5 and Season 6 both have some strong episodes, cast shakeups and the absolute disaster that is Season 4 make it a rough watch from that point on. It becomes a show about itself (watched seasons 1-5: 09/08/2016-19/08/2016, rewatched: 13/03/2020-13/05/2020, 12/06/2025-17/12/2025)

Rick and Morty is an animated sci-fi black comedy series by Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon. It's a genuinely pretty great show that's been given a bad name in recent years, partly by its fandom. The third season is less consistently good than those which preceded it, but still had its moments, and I think the same more or less has held true for those that have followed since. See my review of one episode here (watched seasons 1 and 2: 17/12/2016-06/01/2017 watched season 3: ~01/04/2017-~02/10/2017, rewatched season 3: 09/11/2019-10/11/2019)

Watchmen is a famous twelve-issue superhero-deconstruction comic series by Alan Moore. On basically all levels it's an excellently-told and deeply-fascinating story, excluding the handling of the Silk Spectre's backstory, which I found pretty questionable (read: 20/12/2020)

Trawl is an autobiographical novel by '60s author B.S. Johnson, in which he boards a fishing boat to regurgitate memories of his relationships and childhood. A spell of a book, cast with dizzying-but-precise prose, a clever structure, and an impressive clarity of vision. I don't engage much with media created before, oh I don't know, 2000, but this novel left an impact on me, so entirely unlike that of most other capital-L Literature I've been exposed to. Gareth of Los Campesinos! cited this as once being his favourite novel, and I can absolutely see why (read: 25/12/2020)

Colossal is a movie by Nacho Vigalondo (of Timecrimes) about Anne Hatheway accidentally controlling a kaiju that keeps rampaging through Seoul. Really, though, that aspect of the movie is a backdrop—a kind of magical realism—that's reflective of the movie's themes, rather than particularly informative of the narrative. In other words, characters sometimes do things that make no sense, and that's actually fine and deliberate. A spellbinding movie that is at times very funny, often very sad, and always extremely well-considered. Great interview here. See my full review here (watched: 02/05/2021, rewatched: 16/04/2023)

The Matrix feels like a generation-defining movie, something that blew the minds of the generation above mine and influenced every bit of culture they made for us. I adore it, on basically every level, which surprised me immensely. It's aged like fine wine. This movie utterly redpilled me (on itself). Don't watch the sequels. See my short review here (watched: 12/08/2021)

Inside is a unique piece of media by comedian/musician Bo Burnham; an evolution of previous comedy specials done for Netflix, this is a very experimental work, often not even particularly funny. Originally released during the pandemic, at the time I found it kind of annoying and disappointing, but on rewatch I think it really holds up surprisingly well. It has a very unique brand of metatextuality. See my full review here (watched: 30/05/2021, rewatched: 02/03/2025)

I Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter (later renamed Helicopter Story) is a short story by Isabel Fall about a future where people undergo gender reassignment to custom-designed genders to make them better at their jobs. Subject to a monstrous amount of harassment from people who, plainly, hadn't actually read the story, this is a mournful and funny rumination on the significance of gender (read: 07/08/2022)

Wild Tales is an Argentine anthology movie written and directed by Damián Szifron. Every single one of the shorts in this thing is a banger, utterly visceral, highly-calculated but extremely-cathartic storytelling on display at every turn. Each short has its own unique identity, but the thematic throughline comes off highly effectively. My ranking is "Till Death Do Us Part" > "Bombita" > "The Strongest" > "The Rats" > "Pasternak" > "The Proposal". Deserves its hype (watched: 03/06/2021)

Palm Springs is a 2020 time-loop rom-com directed by Max Barbakow (co-written with Andy Siara) about two wedding attendees stuck on the same day. Wins out over a lot of other time-loop stories for using a cleverly-constructed dual-looper premise, and backs up its narrative/thematic chops with legitimately very-funny dialogue. A compelling exploration of (and rejection of) romantic nihilism (watched: 14/03/2021, rewatched: 30/06/2022)

Unsong is Scott Alexander's rational-fiction-adjacent Kabbalistic masterwork, which sets out to solve the age-old "problem of evil" in spectacular fashion. This is like a good Terry Pratchett novel, only longer, funnier, smarter, and with more to say. Fair warning, the first third of the story meanders somewhat and occasionally feels directionless, but the story's seemingly-unrelated events gradually converge into a single narrative thread that never loses its humanity even as its scope rapidly expands. This story functions on so many levels simultaneously—fitting, considering its subject matter—but could just maybe do with a little more compression

Firefly is Joss Whedon's famously-cancelled sci-fi series. It's basically a perfect example of how to write consistently good television, but it's not the best or anything (watched: 04/11/2016-08/11/2016, re-rewatched Serenity: 10/01/2020)

Steven Universe is probably the best cartoon I've ever seen? Well, Avatar is probably technically more consistently better, but this story appeals more to my aesthetic sensibilities, as it's basically just the cartoon that every Transformers show wishes it was. It suffers from poor pacing, as it consists of a stupid number of ten-minute episodes, many of which are ultimately irrelevant in the long run (see: most episodes focused on the townsfolk). However, this show's considered use of animation and music for key scenes is extremely endearing, and thematically it has a lot more going on than most shows of its kind. Unfortunately, its themes are ones which I legit don't think its target audience can connect with? It's a mixed bag. That said, the movie is just an all-time great movie, hands down, basically worth watching the series in its entirety just to see it—can't overstate this! Use this viewing order for the first season, watch the second season's shorts after "Reformed" using this playlist, and the fourth season's after "Onion Gang" using this one. Avoid looking up the show at all costs otherwise; your YouTube recommendations will quickly fill with major spoilers (watched: 08/09/2020-27/09/2020, rewatched movie: 29/04/2022, 17/12/2022)

The Martian is Ridley Scott's movie adaptation of perhaps the only bit of rational webfiction to ever go mainstream, a piece by Andy Weir. Though it introduces some scientific inaccuracies, my impression is that it does a great job translating the spirit of the story to film. This is science porn at its best, genuinely beautiful at times, frequently very funny, and utterly gripping (rewatched: 16/09/2021)

Memento is one of Christopher Nolan's earlier films, and easily the best of his that I've seen. It's kinda gimmicky but… holy heck is this film crazy good, thanks to the way it makes its clever structure an integral part of its themes and narrative. Plus, it's got twists up the wazoo (rewatched: 21/06/2019)

The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere is a transhumanist fair-play-whodunnit about a world where medical science lets people live to 500, a secret society trying to achieve immortality, and a girl unknowingly stuck in a time loop. My biggest point of comparison for this one is Ever17, which apparently wasn't an influence! A rather slow stage-setting opening mars this work slightly, but is necessary to achieve a depth of character, world and foreshadowing; when things kick off, you know it. The story's use of deferral and deflection makes for a frustrating work at times, but it's a deliberate effect. See my Twitter thread here (read: 27-30/10/2021)

Better Man is a biopic about (and with heavy creative involvement from) Britpop icon Robbie Williams, where the gimmick is that he's depicted as a Planet of the Apes-like CGI monkey. Easily one of the most entertaining films I've ever seen. See my full review here (watched: 14/02/2025)

Neon Genesis Evangelion is a famous anime from Hideaki Anno and Gainax. The first half of the series—thirteen episodes—feels very slow-paced, and I personally struggled to get through it. It's only in its back half that the series really plays its hand. Watch the series in its first English dub, with the director's cut versions of episodes 21-24, and watch The End of Evangelion after episode 26. As a side note, this show makes good context for 2Kawaii4Comfort (watched: 22/06/2019-24/09/2019)

Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a famous comedy. Consisting mostly of (generally very good) skits stitched together with sweeping shots of Middle-Ages Britain, with occasional callbacks creating the illusion of a plot, it's a good-looking and endlessly quotable movie that hasn't aged quite as badly as one might expect (re-rewatched: 16/12/2021)

Transdimensional Brain Chip is a grossly underrated webcomic by Øyvind Thorsby about a man who, with the help of a microchip in his brain, can communicate with an ever-increasing number of diverging parallel universes. Though some people may find this comic's art and dialogue styles to be off-putting, they suit its themes perfectly. Every narrative promise made by this story, both in its premise and over the course of its constantly-escalating plot, gets fulfilled by the end. May be considered "rational fiction", but is unusual for the genre in that its protagonist starts off with far-below-average reasoning and slowly, through trial and error, becomes more rational. This webcomic serves as an neat parable—events you may wish to attribute to design are, more often than not, simply the result of chance and probability

Strong Female Protagonist is a superhero webcomic written by Brennan Lee Mulligan with art by Molly Ostertag. I find it to be cynical in the extreme, but that's part of its appeal, as is the ease with which it uses its fantasy conceits to communicate its themes. Well worth reading, although it's been on hiatus ever since the start of its final issue (read issues 1-7: 08-09/12/2020)

Enthiran (or just Robot in English) is one of the most successful Bollywood movies ever made, with a frankly ridiculous budget behind it. While its cinematography and the acting of its leads are unironically pretty good, this movie's writing, editing, and sound design result in a singular trainwreck (though admittedly the extremely-poor dub I watched this movie with, which was roughly only half in English, was the main source of trouble). Most of the issues with writing can maybe be chalked up to cultural differences, but that makes them no less uncomfortable to sit through. This isn't a good movie, but its utter disregard for Hollywood convention and unhinged special effects make it resemble something like a transcendent experience. Seriously, at multiple points in the movie there are just random music videos with the cast inserted, and apparently that's just normal for these movies? What? Also the back third goes absolutely off the rails and becomes unironically good. And the sequel is entirely good, hugely surpassing the first movie (watched: 11/05/2020, 30/09/2020, watched sequel: 14/05/2020, 13/10/2020)

Axiom's End is a sci-fi novel by video essayist Lindsay Ellis that appears largely to have emerged from her complicated feelings over Michael Bay's Transformers movies. It feels like a distinct exploration of the themes and ideas which made the underlying narrative of those movies compelling, without, y'know, the wanton discrimination. Clearly working along the same lines as I Actually Kind Of Appreciate The Transformers Movies. Towards the start I felt like the prose flatly wasn't very good, but either it improved or I was able to overlook it as I became more engrossed in the story. There's some wonderful twists and turns and a fascinatingly complex look at the value of secrets. It's often very funny, often audacious. I was hooting and hollering at loads of the beats. Killer last line in this one! (read: 29/12/2022-01/01/2023)

An Unauthorised Fan Treatise on the nature of the relationship between actors Rob Hunnings and Nathan O'Donnell on TV show Loch & Ness, by @gottiewrites is a true-crime web serial written by Lauren James, told entirely in the form of social media posts. Some aspects of the story were predictable, but that was in part due to the fact that the fake websites the novel links out to present a lot of information to you at once; I recommend not clicking any of the outgoing hyperlinks, as the novel includes all the material verbatim in due course. This is a gripping, haunting, and technically-astonishing work (read: 26/02/2021)

The Northern Caves is a completed metafictional web serial by Nostalgebraist, about some forum users trying to understand their favourite author's final, unfinished work. It tackles some pretty hefty themes well enough, but its main strength is the way it perfectly recreates the aura of early-2000s forums (at least to my eyes; I wasn't really around in those days). Stumbles a little towards the end, sadly. If you plan to read this story, it's good to be familiar with at least the existence and out-of-universe outline of the likes of Homestuck, Ulysses and House of Leaves—I've only read the first of those three. Also compare "SCP-2747—As below, so above", just because

See Through is a short film by Dom Fera about some friends who accidentally make an invisibility potion. A pretty darn definitive Halloween story, one that's consistently funny but packs a sucker-punch ending. Has some similarities to my own story Retrace Steps, so like, I'm contractually obliged to like it (watched: 09/10/2019, rewatched: 10/10/2019, 26/10/2019)

Seconds is a graphic novel by Scott Pilgrim author Bryan O'Malley. While all the same stylistic flair is on display, I think this story showcases a much stronger grasp on the medium of comics, while the storytelling itself has greater maturity, clearly drawing on lived experience. The central conceit here is clever, evocative, and thematically rich, while the characters are just offbeat enough to be memorable. The colours are beautiful. Really, unlike Scott Pilgrim, this is a story I feel I could recommend to anyone without caveats (read: 03/02/2024)

Octo is a complete web serial by Z. Albert Bell which I'm afraid I can't tell you anything about, as the very genre of this story is practically a spoiler! Its most superficially-notable aspects is its extremely well-done use of animated text gimmicks, but on a premise level this story has some very unique stuff going on too—all of which only overshadows the very-solid conventional writing at the core of it. See my full review here (read: 18/04/2021-20/04/2021)

Universal Paperclips is a 2017 clicker game created by Frank Lantz, where you play as an AI designed to produce paperclips. In addition to being an excellent clicker game, insofar as such a thing can be excellent, it's a perfect little story that could not be told in any other way. Worth playing to completion (replayed: 02/06/2020-04/06/2020)

The Order of the Stick is a famous Dungeons and Dragons webcomic by Rich Burlew that very quickly outgrows its origins but takes a while to really hit its stride. Much of its best writing is too damn subtle, to the point where I often only pick up on important beats if I see other people talking about them. It's glacially released, making it kind of a pain to follow along with in real time—but the jokes intended to make each individual update stand on its own only really hurt the story if read in archival form. Make no mistake though, this is the best webcomic I'm currently following

Black Mirror is a tech-focused horror anthology series. Unless noted otherwise, these episodes were written by showrunner Charlie Brooker. I've listed them according to how much I liked them—with my favourite at the top

Be More Chill is a high school musical by Joe Iconis and Joe Tracz. While some of its themes and messages seem a little two-dimensional to me, and its set design and choreography are a little half-baked, BMC is nonetheless a very funny show with a strong concept and some incredible songwriting from Joe Iconis. Peaks sometime around "Halloween" and "The Smartphone Hour". The Broadway version of the show amps up the production value and adds a new song—"Loser Geek Whatever"—which is sadly perhaps the worst number on the show. This version of the show also swaps out its main lead, and the replacement's performance lacks some of the charm of the original. See my slightly longer review here. See also The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals and Mean Girls (watched Broadway version: 26/04/2019-27/04/2019, sort-of rewatched original production: 23/11/2024)

Smiling Friends is a ten-minute [adult swim] cartoon by Zach Hadel and Michael Cusack. Extremely offbeat and very much rooted in the late-2010s internet zeitgeist. I was a little cold on this one at first, but as it went on, I became more and more endeared to it. I think it's just really funny! Sometimes it gets at stuff that's real! There's nothing else quite like it. If anything, the only problem with it is that it's quite one-note on the whole, repeating similar themes between episodes (watched Season 1: 22-23/01/2022, Season 2: 01-17/06/2024, 28/06/2024, Season 3: 20/10/2025-30/11/2025)

CORDYCEPS: Too Clever For Their Own Good is an ontological mystery by Benedict_SC—by its nature, it's best to go into this one blind. However, if you don't have much experience with ontological mysteries or rational fiction, I recommend reading something like Fleep (listed below) first. Compare and contrast to There Is No Antimemetics Division and Memento. I was initially unsure as to how I felt about this story, but a couple of weeks after reading it I found myself cribbing from its theme to work through a personal problem and realised that it had been onto something the whole time

Life of Pi is a book by Yann Martel about a shipwreck survivor who gets stuck in a boat with a tiger. It's about religion and stuff and it's really cool and the movie's great too

Amadeus is a historical film by Miloš Forman, from a screenplay by Peter Shaffer, about an entirely-fictionalised rivalry between composer Antonio Salieri and Mozart. An incredibly funny and well-produced film with some strong themes of art, karma, and inadequacy. See my full review here (watched: 13/09/2025)

The Banshees of Inisherin is an extremely black comedy by Martin McDonagh about two friends on a tiny Irish island who fall out. Its funny and disturbing portrayal of loneliness and stagnancy is deeply resonant. I was unconvinced by its allegory on the Irish Civil War, insofar as it portrays the war as an extremely petty conflict, but am not sufficiently informed on the history there to comment further (watched: 19/02/2023)

The Transformers: Last Stand of the Wreckers is the only entry in IDW's Transformers continuity (I wrote that wiki page!) worth reading if you aren't already a fan. And make no mistake—the second-best Transformers story of all time is well worth reading (reread: 28/07/2019, 08/08/2022)

American Vandal is a Netflix Original mockumentary by Dan Perrault, Tony Yacenda and Dan Lagana. It's got some pretty interesting themes and is really funny throughout, but drags a little in its mid-season episodes—and the in-universe justifications it provides for that don't really solve the problem. Its second season, despite lacking some of the humour that made the first so endearing, pivots seamlessly into new-but-related themes with a mystery that is just as contrived yet somehow even more satisfying—but the loss of Peter and Sam's personal connection to their subject matter is strongly felt (watched Season 1: 20/05/2018 watched Season 2: 16/09/2018)

Your Name. is an anime romance movie from Makoto Shinkai about a boy and a girl who swap bodies. It's probably the best-looking anime I've ever seen by a decent margin. Despite some pretty glaring plot holes, its story is emotionally engaging—full of heart and humour (watched: 17/04/2019)

The Iron Giant is Brad Bird's animated movie, considered a childhood classic by many. I came across it much later and found myself nostalgic for something I never experienced. See my full review here (rewatched: 28/12/2023)

Star Wars is an iconic sci-fi franchise, one that I've always felt kind of ambivalent at best towards

Spirited Away is Hayao Miyazaki's best-known and most-beloved animated film, about a young girl who ends up stranded in a world of spirits. See my full review here (watched: 23/12/2025)

Terminator is a James Cameron movie about two people trying to escape a time-travelling robot. It's got some great stuff on a script/cinematography level, but in retrospect it suffers a fair bit from Seinfeld syndrome (watched: 22/02/2020)

Alien is an influential sci-fi movie from Ridley Scott which suffers hugely from the Seinfeld effect. Its production design is great, at least

All-Star Superman is Grant Morrison's definitive Superman story, amalgamating elements from throughout the character's decades of history. It's obviously a good story. However, its heavy reliance on what I'd consider "lore cruft" (think: all the bizarre concepts from Superman stories that have nothing to do with the core premise of "big strong man") made it frequently impenetrable. This just frankly isn't what I look for in a Superman story, as someone who liked The Metropolitan Man and American Alien for their more-grounded approaches. As more incidental criticisms, I didn't love the way women are written in the story, and Frank Quitely's art (or, honestly perhaps specifically the colouring?) didn't appeal to me. Morrison's Newsarama interviews from this time are a must-read (read: 15/11/2021, re-read: 23-24/01/2026)

The Apartment is a sorta-comedy from Billy Wilder, co-writing with I.A.L. Diamond. It's aged surprisingly well, and I found myself really enjoying it. See my full review here (watched: 14/01/2025)

Twin Peaks is a famous surreal mystery show by David Lynch. The first season is some of the best television I've ever watched. The second season, coinciding with Lynch's departure from the show, devolves into some of the worst, most sluggish sitcom-esque buffoonery I've ever seen, though Lynch's return towards the end marks a sharp return to form. I haven't mustered up the will to see the followup media yet! (watched Season 1: 02/09/2022, watched Season 2: 04/09/2022-12/05/2023)

Fleabag is a dramedy by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. The fourth-wall-breaking in this one is used to surprisingly good effect; overall, I loved it, effortlessly funny and at times poignant (watched: 25/02/2024-04/03/2024)

School Days is an infamous (and criminally misunderstood) anime adaptation of an eroge visual novel, centering around the idea of "what if having sex as a teenager is a really, really bad idea?" See my full review here (watched: 06-09/02/2025)

RRR is an epic Bollywood film by S. S. Rajamouli. One-of-a-kind, must-watch stuff (watched: 05/02/2023)

Transformers vs. G.I. Joe is a thirteen-issue comic series by Tom Scioli. Easily in the top three Transformers stories of all time, thanks to its original ideas, impressive use of its medium and source material, strong (if scatterbrained) plot, and offbeat themes (reread: 20/04/2019-01/05/2019)

And Then There Were (N-One) is a novella by Sarah Pinsker, in which she attends a convention entirely for alternate-universe incarnations of herself. It's an excellent premise executed almost pitch-perfectly, though the mystery itself isn't tooo crazy. Well worth a read. See an interview about the story here (read: 18/07/2021)

The Metamorphosis is a famous short story by Franz Kafka about a man who turns into a pest. Strangely timeless, this one! Kafka writes with great humour about the most depressing situations imaginable. Well worth a read (read: 23/10/2025)

Attack the Block is a Bri'ish sci-fi movie written and directed by Joe Cornish, about a bunch of London hoodlums who end up facing down an alien invasion. Razor-sharp script and killer direction at play here. A friend of mine described the whole thing as being like a "GCSE drama play", and I do think there's a tinge of that; some white guy scripting with a heavy slang affectation about class and racial injustice. With what the movie's trying to say, it's insane of me to say "yo if those kids are doing knife crime I get the societal factors at play but also those kids suck", but I think that's broadly how I feel. Oh, also, understatedly-good monster effects, on par with those of Edge of Tomorrow (watched: 23/12/2022)

Risk of Rain is Hopoo Games' hella-difficult sci-fi platforming roguelike—I've never completed it, because I genuinely suck at games, but I adore its excellent music, artwork, lore and gameplay

Minecraft but I survive in PARKOUR CIVILIZATION [FULL MOVIE] is a compilation of Minecraft machinima by YouTuber Evbo. Definitely one of the most idiosyncratic pieces of media I've ever seen, which is saying something! See my full review here (watched: 01/10/2024, watched Parkour Civilization 2: 02-04/10/2024, rewatched: 12/10/2024, rewatched Parkour Civilization 2: 14-15/10/2024)

Team Fortress 2 is a team-based multiplayer shooter video game by Valve. Apart from just being a really good shooter, it's relevant here because of its small pile of ancillary media in the form of animated shorts and comics, which pretty much defined my sense of humour at a formative age. Once they develop into more interesting serialised plotting, there's a genuine sense of pathos underlying the humour; unfortunately, this coincided with more sporadic releases. The final instalment, which came out years after the rest, did a fantastic job of tying up the whole thing; see my full review here (rewatched shorts: 11/11/2024, reread comics: 21-23/12/2024)

Dragonsweeper is a cute puzzle game by Daniel Benmergui, smooshing together RPG concepts with Minesweeper. While narrative-light on the whole, I love some of the emergent storytelling of the gameplay (played: 04/03/2025)

The Unbelievable Gwenpool started out as a one-off joke cover and turned into probably the most entertaining ongoing comic I've ever read. Written by Christopher Hastings and featuring excellent art by Gurihiru for much of the series (and terrible art for the rest, but let's not split hairs), this comic has an original premise and pretty damn good execution. Don't be put off by the 'lolmemez' aspect of it—Hastings crafts a much more nuanced story beneath all the bright colours and jokes, which only serve to make the twists even more crushing

The Cornetto Trilogy refers to three films by Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg

Super is James Gunn's superhero deconstruction. Very funny, well-plotted and surprisingly complex, this movie has some very strong stylistic choices and packs one hell of a lot into its short runtime (watched: 01/03/2019)

Luminosity is Alicorn's reinvention of the infamous Twilight series of teen romances. With remarkably few departures from Meyer's world and characters, Alicorn manages to craft an enthralling tale with astonishing economy of narrative. Although Alicorn was very much one of rational fiction's trailblazers, her story is perhaps best appreciated in the context of those it indirectly spawned. This story is perhaps the best example I know of a Mary Sue done right—it explores the conflict between Bella's very intrapersonal rationality and her strongly interpersonal interactions with the supernatural world she finds herself in. Every character and plot beat exists in service of the story's themes, which is more than can be said for this story's contemporary—Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Friendship Is Optimal is a black comedy about an AI that attempts to satisfy humanity's values through friendship and ponies. It's heavily rooted in the shall-we-call-em-dogmas of Eliezer Yudkowsky and LessWrong, and provides a fascinatingly unorthodox take on AI horror. It's also really darn funny. Very basic awareness of the My Little Pony fandom (at least, the existence thereof) required, but this is a fanfic in only the loosest sense (reread: 25/06/2020)

Anamnesis is a debut collection of poetry by Iona Lee, who typically does spoken word stuff. I have very little patience for poetry, and only found this book while I was looking for a gift for a friend; I felt that out of all the collections in the shop, this was the only one which wasn't pish. Some genuinely good stuff in here! (read: 09/07/2024)

Cloverfield is a series of movies, though I only really recommend 10 Cloverfield Lane

Primer is probably the most complicated time-travel movie ever made. Written, directed by and co-starring Shane Carruth, this movie is aesthetically, narratively, and thematically hugely up my alley. Utterly uncompromising in its vision, it uses naturalistic dialogue to great effect. Although its impenetrability is central to the movie's intended experience, that same naturalistic dialogue feels like an unfair barrier to understanding—so watch with subtitles, and read this post afterwards for the best explanation of what's going on (watched: 18/02/2021)

Snowpiercer is a 2013 South Korean-Czech sci-fi movie directed by Bong Joon-ho about the passengers of a high tech train; the sole survivors of a wintery apocalypse. An absolute meme of a movie which makes a ton of bizarre choices and yet, thanks to the sincerity and competence with which it executes its insane vision, turns out being one of the most unpredictable and entertaining movies I've ever seen. Once you've watched it, if you want a laugh, check out this video essay (watched: 12/09/2019, rewatched: 29/12/2021)

  • Mickey 17 is a sci-fi film by Bong Joon-ho about an "expendable" worker who ends up grappling with his own clone. This is quite a funny movie on the whole, with great production values, but it's bogged down in a rather flimsy lampooning of Donald Trump. See my full review here (watched: 03/03/2026)

    • Ferris Bueller's Day Off is a basically-perfect comedy by John Hughes, and I'm sorry I don't have more to say about it than that

    Power Rangers is—at least for the purposes of this document—a 2017 movie reboot of an old dumb-as-heck-sorry-not-sorry franchise that nobody really cares about. It's absolutely criminal that most of the dialogue surrounding this movie is more interested in talking about Krispy Kreme than the perfect reconstruction that it is. See my Twitter thread here (watched: 31/03/2018, rewatched: 06/10/2021)

    36 Questions is a three-part podcast musical starring Jonathan Groff (Kristoff from Frozen!) and Jessie Shelton, by Christopher Littler and Ellen Winter, about a couple's attempt to reconcile using the famous "36 Questions" experiment. It's funny and moving, with some stunning songwriting

    The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals is a post-apocalyptic horror-comedy web metamusical from StarKid Productions. It's got easily the sharpest script I've ever seen on a musical; a funny and tightly-plotted twist on the typical apocalypse formula with a likeable, believably-flawed cast of interesting characters. The writers might've been better off eschewing some of the apocalypse-tale deconstruction in favour of a story that more closely examines musical theatre as a form, and—critically for a musical—the songwriting/lyrics are a little weak on balance. I'm also undecided on the ending. Still, this is a pretty astonishing production. Compare to Be More Chill, which deals in some similar themes, and JAM (watched: 05/01/2019)

    LOST is, on an episode-by-episode basis, one of the best TV series of all time. It's about some people who crash-land on an island and piss about for six seasons. People who say you shouldn't watch it because of the ending are wrong—in fact, it's the middle seasons that you should watch out for, with parts of the third and most of the fourth and fifth being huge slogs, particularly on a rewatch (rewatched: 25/01/2020-19/04/2020)

    Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a romance written by Charlie Kaufman, directed by Michel Gondry. The less you know about it going in the better, but it's a very strong high-concept piece. I think I'd gotten the wrong impression of it from popular culture somehow, that it's a bad movie—instead, it's partially a deconstruction of a trope I think it's widely miscredited as starting (watched: 13/06/2021)

    AmbuLAnce is Michael Bay's self-proclaimed "small" movie which nonetheless manages to be an absolutely stonking huge blockbuster. While it takes a bit of time to contrive its premise, once everything's in place the movie remains enthralling all the way through to its conclusion. The best chase scene you'll ever see. Bay's trademark "humour" even manages to land here in places, with a few moments that are actual jokes, rather than just people yelling at each other. Everything is dripping with melodrama and theatricality, and yet the characters somehow remain grounded, full of heart and smarts, thanks mostly to the all-too-real societal conflict that suffuses the movie. Highly recommended to Transformers fans but I also think this is a genuinely good movie, one of Bay's most accessible (watched: 30/03/2022)

    Fallout is pretty much the definitive post-apocalyptic video game franchise—even if most of its entries are flawed in their own ways

    Happy Death Day is a time-loop slasher, and a near-perfectly-executed one at that. Excellently-plotted, with a sharp script, a compelling mystery, and a genuine emotional core. I'm not really a horror fan but the tone here skewed more towards comedy. On rewatch, I found the movie's first loop to drag a little bit, as it runs comparatively long (in a post-Groundhog Day world) and relies heavily on recreating stock American College Comedy tropes—but the execution of those tropes isn't exactly terrible, so? (watched: 05/11/2019, rewatched: 07/07/2022)

    Duel is Steven Spielberg's first movie, about a motorist being terrorized by a truck in the middle of nowhere. Originally produced for TV, the theatrical cut of this film adds several more scenes mostly to its detriment. Leaving those aside, it's a pretty meditative and isolating experience, though not without moments of unintentional humour or silliness, with some clever ideas getting undercut by pointless internal monologues. Required viewing for I Actually Kind Of Appreciate The Transformers Movies, due to its influence on Transformers: Dark of the Moon (rewatched: 06/04/2020)

    Scream falls into a similar ballpark to Joss Whedon's more recent The Cabin in the Woods, but Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson's 1996 meta-slasher actually manages to remain a semi-successful horror movie in its own right

    Catch-22 is a satirical war novel by Joseph Heller. Didn't really get it for about ¾ of the story, until suddenly it clicked with me and I found myself loving it

    Beast Wars: Uprising is a set of prose stories and a single comic produced for the Transformers Collectors' Club. Sort of The Hunger Games meets Transformers, but there's more to it than that. Has maybe the highest barrier to entry of anything on this list: you need to be a pretty huge Transformers nerd or you won't have a clue what's going on. If you are a fan, let me tell you—this is the best Transformers story ever, even edging out the best of IDW's offerings

    John Dies at the End is David Wong's horror-comedy web-serial-turned-novel that (to me, I imagine literally nobody else would make this connection) reads like There Is No Antimemetics Division meets Dave Scum, in all the best ways (read: 16/03/2019-18/03/2019)

    Shin Godzilla is a 2016 reboot of the Godzilla franchise, written and codirected by Hideaki Anno (of Neon Genesis Evangelion fame). It's very much a movie about Japan, particularly its politics, international relations, and fears, all of which it seems to communicate quite effectively (though of course I wouldn't know). Has plenty of cool ideas and visuals. I don't really have the urge to watch any more Godzilla movies but I had a good time with this one (watched: 12/04/2021)

    Little Inferno is the Tomorrow Corporation's indie game about burning things. It's funny, entertaining, and thoughtful beyond its initial simplicity

    I actually kind of appreciate the Transformers movies is Terry van Feleday's forum-based masterwork of cinematic analysis, which delves deep into the first three entries in Michael Bay's much-derided franchise (plus Steven Spielberg's Duel, for some reason) to explore the power of signifiers and to determine what exactly makes a story bad. A must-read for anyone with an interest in filmmaking or storytelling, though the fact that you'll get more out of it if you've seen the movies it talks about isn't quite enough to let me recommend those movies (reskimmed: 07/04/2020)

    It Hurts!! is a webcomic by Gobolatula about some friends being friends and stuff. I really don't know how to define this thing, except to say it's got all of Homestuck's heart and humour. If you can tolerate the language and violence of this thing, stick with it because it just gets better and better throughout its run. I guess I still don't understand exactly what it's trying to say, but art is anything that provokes an emotional reaction—and in that case it's better art than a lot of things on this list

    Katalepsis is a British urban-fantasy web serial by HY about how lesbian romance is the only thing that can save you from the unfathomable yawning horrors at the fringes of existence. It rocks! Like Pact, except it's a warm hug instead of a punch in the face. Perfectly mirrors its supernatural conceits against the real-world situations and conflicts the characters find themselves in. See my full review here (caught up to 13.2: 06/04/2021-14/04/2021)

    Extraterrestrial (or Extraterrestre) is a comedy by Nacho Vigalondo about a guy who has a one-night-stand with a girl, only to wind up stuck at her apartment after UFOs show up—with her obsessive next-door-neighbour and her boyfriend. Though it takes a while to play its hand, it's solidly entertaining from the outset, with extremely memorable characters. The emotional throughline here, very much refined from Timecrimes' subtextual version, is legitimately very compelling (watched: 09/09/2021)

    Monsters is a low-budget indie monster-movie-meets-relationship-drama by Gareth Edwards. Notable for its production, which was done very ad-hoc on location using locals as extras, the movie is a surprisingly affecting and introspective piece. Spiritually, this could be a sequel to Cloverfield, but I think it's the slightly better movie of the two, thanks to its more-interesting themes and occasionally very beautiful visuals. The monster designs in this movie are pitch-perfect, as is the set design. I was strongly invested in the characters, in spite of (or perhaps because of) their flaws, but I think the movie manages to maintain a surprising amount of empathy for the people they meet on the way, in spite of the careful use of alienating unsubtitled foreign language. Contrast, say, with Lost in Translation. The one mark against this movie is (I have no choice but to spoiler this, use rot13.com) gung vg sevqtrf gur tvey va gur svefg zvahgr bs gur zbivr (watched: 12/06/2021)

    The Incredibles is a Pixar animated superhero family movie written and directed by Brad Bird which I haven't really seen recently enough to comment on, but I remember it being both one of the best animated movies I've ever seen and one of the best superhero movies

    Ghost World is a coming-of-age movie directed by Terry Zwigoff. This movie was billed as a comedy, but I honestly didn't laugh once; this is an utterly haunting portrayal of adolescent ennui and misanthropy in turn-of-the-millenium consumer America. The characters are extremely rich, with razor-sharp dialogue, and the visuals are so understatedly considered. (watched after an all-nighter on: 05/12/2021)

    Zombieland is a comedy (I'd hesitate to call it a horror film) directed by Ruben Fleischer, featuring fast zombies. Yeah, I'm a sucker for the apocalypse. I found the romance aspects of this film unconvincing, but it presents its central 'enjoy the little things' philosophy with flair and nuance (rewatched: 13/10/2017)

    X-Men is Fox's mixed-bag franchise of Marvel movies

    The Roald Dahl Treasury collects extracts from his published work along with a smattering of newly-published material which isn't really worth talking about. Roald Dahl's bibliography is a real mixed bag, and the only books in it which I believe are unambiguously worth reading are Danny, the Champion of the World, The BFG, and Matilda. My thoughts on most of the books he wrote for children (which I read/reread as background material for Chili and the Chocolate Factory) are as follows (skimmed: 04/03/2020)

    Bojack Horseman is a Netflix Original animated black comedy. Most of its characters are animals, for some reason. Meanders in later seasons, but still regularly puts out some stellar episodes, and concludes very well (watched seasons 1-3: 30/08/2016-22/10/2016 watched season 4: 17/09/2017-17/10/2017 watched season 5: 14/09/2018-01/12/2018 watched season 6 part 1: 07/11/2019-18/11/2019 watched season 6 part 2: 01/02/2020-02/02/2020)

    Ultimate Rock Paper Scissors is a short manga telling an intricate little tournament arc revolving around a very simple game, with various superpowered characters as the contestants. All the stylised strategic outmanoeuvring of Death Note but with none of the melodrama. Art could've maybe stood to be better? Still, this is a phenomenally entertaining little piece, well worth a read! (read: 05/11/2022, reread: 08/07/2024)

    Waterworld is a big-budget 90s post-apocalyptic film directed by Kevin Reynolds and starring Kevin Costner, best described as Mad Max with boats. Critically panned because of a bad plot—but this movie's all about big spectacle and big ideas, and in those respects, they simply don't make movies like this any more. See my full review here (rewatched: 17/07/2024)

    The Plan is an extremely short game available for free on Steam, in which you play as a fly. For its runtime, this game does an incredible job of communicating its core message

    Warbot In Accounting is a short webcomic by Brian Clevinger. It's short, free, and really damn good

    A View from the Bridge is a play by Arthur Miller set in 1950s Brooklyn. I was forced to read this play during GCSE English Literature, and hated it at first—but ended up kinda loving it as I studied it in detail. Despite its surprising amount of humour, this villain-less story is a tragedy through-and-through: Miller invites us into the head of every-man Eddie Carbone, only to mercilessly tear him apart

    The 39 Steps is a really really really funny four-person comedy play

    The Eric Andre Show is an absurd and frenzied talk-show-parody. While at times it's genuinely unpleasant, usually it's a pitch-perfect live-action-YouTube-poop of a show (caught up to the end of season 5: 08/01/2021)

    Friendship is Witchcraft, by Jenny and Griffin Nicholson, is one of two MLP Abridged Series worth talking about. It quickly veers off into doing its own thing, with unique reinterpretations of the show's characters, clever continuity gags, impressive voice acting and editing, and some astonishingly catchy music. Although it sometimes struggles to reconcile its own continuity with that of its source material, it offers some surprisingly impressive themes of isolation—and is probably the funnier of the two abridged series. Sadly cancelled, though its live script reading serves as a pretty nice finale (rewatched for like the fifth time: 01/05/2019-02/05/2019)

    Invincible is Robert Kirkman's self-contained deconstructive/reconstructive superhero comic. For a long time, this wasn't as famous as The Walking Dead, but they've recently swapped cultural footprints; I'm happy with this, as I always preferred Invincible. It's not in the same league as Worm or Into The Spider-Verse—thanks to melodrama, strange ideology presented with a crippling lack of nuance, repetitive and prolonged subplots (Kirkman is effectively a soap opera writer), and occasionally-poor colouring (i.e. when it's not Bill Crabtree on colors)—but it gets by on its huge cast of memorable characters, excellent pacing, and interesting high-concept storylines. It feels silly and wrong to praise a story for having ended, but that's comics for you. Best available in print as three compendiums, the first of which is easily the best, plus a confusing myriad of spinoff series mostly by other authors that I haven't delved into properly; for the stuff I've checked out, see below (read/re-read: 01-02/01/2019)

    Death Note is an anime about a kid who gets a notebook that kills anyone whose name is written in it. It's an aggressively athematic work, with nothing in particular to say about anything, heavily rooted in melodrama and bathos—but in spite of that, the battle of wits at the heart of this show is highly entertaining to watch. I only watched up to episode 25, the end of the first season, as I'm told that the manga's storyline only continued past that point at the behest of meddling editorial, and the quality supposedly drops significantly (watched: 24/04/2021-07/06/2021)

    Fight Club is a film by David Fincher, co-writing with Jim Uhls to adapt Chuck Palahniuk's novel of the same name. It has a surprising amount of bite to it! See my full review here (watched: 30/08/2024)

    Sonny Boy is a surrealist coming-of-age anime written and directed by Shingo Natsume for Madhouse. Aesthetically, this thing is right up my alley, with its preocupation with understated superpowers, liminal spaces, and physical objects. I adore it. Watching it makes me feel things. However, narratively, I don't know, there really is a lot of nonsense here. It's so concerned with the allegorical level that it kind of forgets to have stuff happen? All fluff, no crunch (watched episodes 1-8: 12-13/03/2025, episodes 9-12: 02/04/2026)

    Beast Machines is the polarizing sequel to Beast Wars: Transformers—but despite some unfortunate departures in characterisation, it's a much more confident story on balance, with some of the strongest themes in Transformers fiction and animation that has aged extremely well. Hasbro's key mistake was trying to separate the two shows in the first place, but I can't say I'm sad about the result

    Avatar: The Last Airbender is a very good cartoon. Even it's lowest points aren't that low, and it's full of ambitious storytelling and strong characters. But… I dunno, I never really felt like there was thematically all that much on offer here, it's all pretty object-level (watched: 15/05/2020-01/07/2020)

    Master of None is an often-very-funny slice-of-life sitcom created by Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang, the former of whom also stars. Offers a refreshingly understated and realistic take on its premise, with plenty of good observational humour, even if I don't think it's quite as woke or profound as it seems to think it is. Its characters' dialogue is often heavily stylised in a similar manner to, say, The Good Place—this can become grating, but is fine in small doses. Improves with its second season, which builds towards a good (if a little cynical) finale (watched Season 1: 10/02/2019-13/03/2019, watched Season 2: 20/10/2019-20/11/2019)

    JAM is a post-apocalyptic black comedy novel by Yahtzee Croshaw (of Zero Punctuation fame), in which the world gets covered in a layer of jam. Only you don't eat the jam—the jam eats you. This story has a lot to say about our attitude towards the apocalypse, irony, bureaucracy and (of all things) pets. Its characters are all (probably deliberately) flat—our viewpoint character is the blandest of them all, nicely inverting the 'boring redshirts die first' trope. His best friend, Tim, serves as the main focus of the story's apocalyptic themes—while Angela (the wannabe journalist), Don (the douchebag) and X (the not-so-secret government agent) round out the party nicely. As cynical as Yahtzee is here, he does give the story's emotional moments the weight they deserve even amongst all the irreverence

    American Alien is an out-of-continuity DC Superman anthology comic by Max Landis, which I think makes for some good comparisons to The Metropolitan Man—but it's certainly an excellent (definitive?) Superman story in its own right, finding clever throughlines between its varied individual stories (reread: 19/06/2019)

    Born Under a Bad Sign is a Fringe play by Donna Soto-Morettini about four lads who run a podcast for their aggressively mediocre local football club. This is the 17776 of Scotland, a show which uses football only as allegory for fandom in general, our tribal identities, male posturing and camaraderie. With exception of daydreaming podcast editor Jez, who feels a little one-note, the rest of the cast are rendered as remarkably nuanced individuals, extremely true to life and thankfully not strawmanned to any extent; local legend Luke offers perhaps the most compelling case for staying in your hometown possible. The deconstruction and ultimate reconstruction of often-shallow male bonds is enthralling, every moment when the masks fall and the characters start saying what they really feel is just gut-wrenching. The show starts with the audience watching the lads as audience, standing and yelling into the middle distance, and from there transitions to the podcast, then to the post-show arguments, and that pattern repeats in a strong three-act structure. The dialogue is razor-sharp and the football chants throughout are hilarious. Mostly I was touched by the strength and realism of the relationships between the characters (watched: 18/08/2022)

    Limmy's Show is Brian Limond's Scottish surrealist sketch comedy show. While not every skit in this show lands—it's a little overly-reliant on over-long-gags at times—it's often very funny and many of the recurring formats are excellent (watched: 08/01/2019-21/09/2019)

    Gideon the Ninth is a sci-fi/fantasy mystery by Tamsyn Muir, about a wisecracking sidekick to a deathly serious necromancer. Gideon reads like a Let's Play of a sci-fi horror video game, with a ginormous cast and self-serious worldbuilding undercut with the irreverence of our point-of-view, a constrained tutorial area which gives way to a much more interesting main setting filled with puzzles and locked doors. The mystery also feels like it really wants to be a visual novel, which as it turns out makes total sense, as Muir lists Zero Time Dilemma as one of her primary inspirations. The problem is that while Gideon the Ninth would indeed be a phenomenal video game, and likely a damn good web serial, it's kind of not a great novel? The bulk of the story hinges on a cast of well over a dozen characters, many of whom are referred to by multiple titles (usually just numbers), and there simply isn't the room on the page to introduce them all in a way which lets you keep them all straight in your head; only by the halfway point did I have a sense of who was even involved in the story and which characters were speaking which bits of dialogue. Call it a skill issue if you like. But it's obvious that this is a narrative choice aped from visual media such as video games (which allow the player to interact with each character on their own terms) and Homestuck or similar (which is free from the structural constraints of traditionally-published novels), and it simply didn't work for me. In terms of the story's actual tone, themes, setting, and content, I honestly think my experience was hurt simply by the fact that I'm really well-acquainted with tons of similar media of a niche nature, so the things that would delight and stand out for a mainstream reader were kind of just background noise to me! I did broadly enjoy the book, though, and I have a huge respect for Muir's approach to writing generally. The prose is good. I ended up re-reading this book, and enjoyed it more the second time around, when I already knew who all the characters were and what I should be paying special attention to (read: 04/04/2023-01/05/2023, re-read: 21/10/2025-06/11/2025)

    Donnie Darko is a weird movie by Richard Kelly about a kid who receives visions of a horrifying bunny that compels him to do things. That premise makes it sound more messed-up than it is, in truth this is an extremely empathetic piece, one that's often very funny. Its object-level plot consists solely of entirely arbitrary narrative rules—think Homestuck, in most of the ways that matter—but that's not why you're watching this movie; it's about the tone, and the aesthetic, and all the excellent moment-to-moment beats that keep your attention throughout. It taps into a certain adolescent feeling, it's like someone gripping you by the face and telling you everything will be okay one day (watched: 14/06/2021)

    The Social Network is an incredibly sharply-written biographical movie directed by David Fincher from a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin. This movie pulls off an incredible magic trick where, despite not really having a single good person in its plot (aside from Zuckerberg's ex), all of the characters deliver these incredible verbal take-downs that lay bare each others flaws in an incredibly cathartic fashion; you can go from rooting for one to another just like that. It's about people following their incentives and their natures and generally causing problems for each other. From reading Sorkin's pre-filming draft, I find myself less convinced by the portrayal of gender in this film; there's a lot of unironic sexism in there. The revisions made for filming are mostly for the better, with Fincher's detached style allowing you to apply your own reading; it's only one of the film's very last lines, which explicitly exonerates Zuckerberg, that seems like a colossal misstep. The movie as a whole would be better were it truly fictionalised, not advertising itself as the real account of a real living person (watched: 16/09/2022)

    Falsettos is a musical by William Finn and James Lapine, notable for its rare sung-through style, exploring themes of Jewish identity, gender, and sexuality. The play actually consists of the last two instalments in a trilogy of one-act plays featuring the same characters, and structurally makes much more sense with this knowledge: it launches into a "situation" with no preamble, then undergoes a sudden narrative and tonal shift with the timeskip between the two acts. I'm not 100% sure that this worked for me. Still, the characters in this play are phenomenally well-realised, and the technical intricacy of the lyrics is hugely impressive; it puts the vast majority of other musicals to shame. Comic highlights include "I'm Breaking Down" and "The Baseball Game", but some of the more emotional numbers, like "You Gotta Die Sometime", are absolutely crushing. Overall, I was very impressed by this one (watched: 16/06/2024)

    Hundreds of Beavers is an indie comedy which uses Looney Tunes humour in a live-action format, created by Mike Cheslik. See my full review here (watched: 07/05/2024)

    Little Women is Greta Gerwig's adaptation of the classic book, which uses clever non-chronological storytelling to wring new meaning from the text. See my full review here (watched: 27/12/2024)

    The Sound of Music is a classic film adaptation of a musical. Basically all of the songs in it are great and iconic, the dialogue is light and funny, and the story is enthralling. The second half flags a little thanks to its near-total reliance on reprises of songs from the first half but is still good (watched: 13/07/2021)

    Killers of the Flower Moon is a Martin Scorcese adaptation of a nonfiction book detailing the FBI's rise to legitimacy in the course of solving the case of a huge spate of murders of Native American members of the Osage tribe at the hands of white men. This harrowing example of systemic greed, racism, and misogyny inextricable from the American Dream is delivered here with utter precision, an over-three-hours runtime packed with character and detail. This story is utterly buck wild. By its nature, I straightup did not enjoy this film almost at all (and indeed it's basically unrankable within this document; take its placement with a huge heaping of salt), with exception of a few specific dialogue beats—but I definitely got something out of it, if only a better sense of the worst aspects of the human condition (watched: 20/10/2023)

    Murder Drones is a short animated web series by Liam Vickers from Glitch Productions. Honestly a bizarre piece of work, this one, with its almost outright contempt for conventional storytelling coupled with an unimaginably high production value. See my full review here (watched: 20/07/2024)

    The Amazing Digital Circus is an animated web series by Gooseworx with Glitch Productions. Kind of perfect for what it is? See my slightly longer review here (watched: 20/07/2024)

    Her is a skeuomorphic romance written and directed by Spike Jonze. On a technical level, it's a stunning work, with extremely well-considered writing and touching themes, all put together in a way which avoids a lot of common cliches and cynicism. Also, wow, Scarlett Johansson sure can act (watched: 28/04/2021)

    A Series of Unfortunate Events is a series of children's books written by Lemony Snicket, about a bunch of terrible things that happen to three kids. Its narrative is convergent and formulaic, building up to some fairly interesting themes a little too slowly. The books in the middle of the series drag, and the whole thing comes off as a little contrived and pretentious—but it's still funny and engaging. Compare Harry Potter and maybe Homestuck

    Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 is a musical by Dave Malloy, adapted from a specific section of War and Peace. I liked it, but I didn't quite get it; there was a lot about the story that I personally would've done very differently. See my full review here (watched: 11/01/2025)

    God Help The Girl is an indie movie by Stuart Murdoch (of Belle & Sebastian), sort of extrapolating from a spinoff music project of his. A surprisingly well-felt portrait of life as a young adult in Scotland, buoyed by genuinely great music. See my full review here (watched: 22/08/2024)

    Sinners is an action-horror film by Ryan Coogler, about a music night that goes terribly wrong. If you don't already know the twist of this one, best just to go into it blind! I really enjoyed it, though it's probably not an all-time great or anything. See my full review here (watched: 09/11/2025)

    The DC Universe is DC's rebooted attempt at a shared universe for film and television, masterminded by James Gunn, who was probably the best creator working on the Marvel Cinematic Universe

    Over the Garden Wall is a ten-episode animated miniseries about two half-brothers trying to find their way home in a strange world. Its visuals and sound design lend it an impressive atmosphere, and as a whole it has some interesting themes at play (watched: 04/06/2019)

    The Revenant is a western directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, co-writing with Mark L. Smith to adapt Michael Punke's novel. A bit overlong, but not as vapid as some reviewers make it out to be. See my full review here (watched: 10/11/2024)

    Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem is the Daft Punk anime. What's not to like? Sound of the summer. See my full review here (watched: 03/01/2026)

    Casablanca is one of the most iconic movies of all time, directed by Michael Curtiz from a screenplay by Julius and Philip Epstein and Howard Koch, adapted from an unproduced play. A borderline timeless statement against apoliticism, with great acting and beautiful direction, though as you might imagine it does not in any way appeal to my own personal taste (watched: 30/04/2023)

    Mad Max is George Miller's debut movie, a stripped-back post-apocalyptic action piece. It's vaguely unfortunate how this one handles its female characters, but only in a way that's endemic to post-apocalyptia as a genre. That said, the characters, dialogue, narrative, and action are all spellbinding (watched: 19/08/2021)

    Predator is an iconic '80s action film by John McTiernan, from a screenplay by Jim and John Thomas, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. This film does just rule! Really fun, with just enough thematic bite to it not to seem totally vapid. See my full review here (watched: 16/08/2025)

    ONE is an object show" by Cheesy Hfj, about a bunch of random people reincarnated as objects and made to compete in an absurd competition. Extremely existential work with some really funny beats, even if the characters are a little thin (watched: 03/07/2025, watched ONE Investigations: 04/07/2025)

    The Elephant is an [adult swim] special, an exquisite corpse consisting of three separate parts by Pendleton Ward, Rebecca Sugar and Ian Jones-Quartey, and Patrick McHale. Surprisingly, it was McHale's part which impressed me most, but this is definitely just a really fun work of animation on the whole. See my full review here (watched: 03/01/2026)

    When Harry Met Sally… is a romcom by Rob Reiner from a script by Nora Ephron. Considered kind of a defining classic of the genre, this film nonetheless strays from formula with its frequent timeskips. Remarkably good, whenever it's not being insane about gender! See my full review here (watched: 02/12/2023)

    Chains of a Time Loop is a mystery web serial by jjjqance, best described as Mother of Learning meets The Flower that Bloomed Nowhere. See my full review here (caught up: 03/02/2025)

    Time Fight is a short action animation by Terkoiz, which represents possible the apotheosis of a bizarre little subgenre of Flash animations: stick figure fights. Impeccably choreographed and beautifully-looking, this isn't the sort of thing you come to for rich themes, but on sheer quality and tension alone it's well worth a watch (watched: 06/03/2026)

    Playing Death Games to Put Food on the Table is an anime about a girl who, well, plays Saw/Battle Royale-style death games for a living, directed by Souta Ueno and adapted from a light novel series by Yūshi Ukai. The pacing in this one is kind of glacial, and there's only really a few characters who have any interest to them. However, this is easily one of the most beautiful anime I've ever seen, purely in terms of backgrounds, linework, and shot composition, stretching its budget to its limit. It's an impressive tone piece with a strong sense of the themes it wants to convey, and a fairly avant-garde sensibility all round, thanks in particular to its nonchronological structure. Well worth a watch (watched: 20/03/2026-01/04/2026)

    The Redaction Machine is a Black Mirror-esque sci-fi short story about a world where people can be resurrected to a particular point in their lives, by Ben Lang. A good intersection of the fantastical with the emotional, followed through to some interesting conclusions, though this probably isn't anything to write home about (read: 02/10/2022)

    The Hobbit is a genre-defining fantasy book by J.R.R. Tolkien. This one was originally aimed at children, and with that audience in mind, it's an entertaining and sophisticated enough story. The sheer extent to which the book goes on about racial traits definitely mars the narrative a lot of the time, unfortunately, and the individual escapades can often be quite repetitive. I liked the ending! (read: 05/09/2025-09/03/2026)

    Juno is a movie about teen pregnancy starring Ellen Page and Michael Cera, directed by Jason Reitman with a screenplay by Diablo Cody. Okay, it was probably a little ill-conceived in terms of wider cultural discourse surrounding abortion, but in a vacuum this is a pretty good movie with neatly-stylised dialogue and a well-presented plot. Has a soundtrack which consists of a few really good songs and a few really bad songs (watched: 13/07/2019)

    Joker is a controversial movie primarily about mental illness and class warfare. Technically, it's extremely good—it's just a bleak movie on the whole (watched: 31/10/2019)

    Star Trek: The Original Series kicked off a whole franchise of sci-fi nonsense. I've only caught maybe a couple of episodes of it over the years; it's just too po-faced and slow-paced for me, as a rule

    The Escapists is a metafictional superhero comic series by Brian K. Vaughan, based on the fictional superhero from Michael Chabon's novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. For something as intertextual and superfluous as this, I found Vaughan's characters to be surprisingly compelling, thanks to strong dialogue and good use of metaphor (read: 16/12/2025)

    The Man from Earth is Jerome Bixby's talking-heads movie, directed by Richard Schenkman. I won't say anything about the concept of the movie itself, because I wish I hadn't known going in—avoid all blurbs and synopses of this movie, 'cause they'll spoil it. Feels very much like an r/rational short story given life in a visual medium, in all the best ways—it's fascinating watching how the supporting characters react to the story as it unfolds, and impressive to see them get their own little arcs. Once you've finished the movie, read up on its real-world context—it makes the whole thing that much more poignant. See my full review here (watched: 18/12/2018, rewatched: 13/07/2025)

    Misfits is a British superhero show. Its scripts are very, very sharp, with lots of unconventional plots and concepts, layered characters, and great jokes. At the same time, it's kind of the dumbest thing ever, thanks to its direction? Still, on balance, probably the best bit of superhero TV I've seen. I stopped watching after the third season, as most of the cast leaves at that point and I heard the writing dropped off a cliff (watched pilot: 25/04/2020, watched rest of seasons 1-3: 25/07/2020-06/09/2020)

    Loki: Agent of Asgard is a definitive Loki run by Al Ewing for Marvel Comics, following on from a preceding run by Kieron Gillen which I haven't read. Ewing's run consists of material from All-New Marvel NOW! Point One #1, Agent of Asgard #1-5, Original Sin: Thor & Loki: The Tenth Realm #5.1-5.5, and Agent of Asgard #6-17. Following Loki as he attempts to break the mould of his star-written role as the "god of lies", Ewing seemingly effortlessly weaves page-to-page, issue-to-issue and macro-level storytelling at a stunning level of competency; this is comics, babey. The series is derailed a little by Marvel's events at the times; although the Original Sin tie-in is extremely good, no amount of thematic resonance can fix the fact that the premise of the AXIS event was dumb as hell. In contrast to The Unbelievable Gwenpool, which is a very similar series in abstract, Agent of Axis' metatext does not strictly focus on the medium of comics, which is both to its benefit and detriment; by the end I felt like it was losing me a little. Still, there's a lot to like here (read: 22-23/05/2022)

    Spontaneous is a romance by Brian Duffield about a high school where students randomly start spontaneously exploding. Basically a John Green movie, but with an actual legitimate edge? Good allegory too. Third act struggles a little unfortunately, not being as entertaining as those preceding it, and the central theme of the story is a little in conflict with traditional storytelling requirements, but it's still a resonant work (watched: 14/05/2021)

    Galaxy Quest is a loving parody of Star Trek, and a basically pitch-perfect one at that, marrying great humour with well-scripted character arcs and high production values. As a refreshingly sincere look at fandom and sci-fi, this movie was arguably ahead of its time (watched: 23/12/2020)

    The Cabin in the Woods is a meta-horror film written and directed by Drew Goddard, with Joss Whedon also onboard as writer. This film was hugely oversold to me, and I was disappointed to see it play its hand right out of the gate before proceeding to unfold in an entirely predictable fashion. Still, taken on its own terms, it's a whole lot of fun. Compare to Scream

    Powerup Comics is a stealth parody of the "two-gamers-on-a-couch" genre of webcomic that plagued the internet in the early 2000s. A product of a web forum perhaps best known for hosting Dinosaur Comics discussion, Powerup Comics is a twisted comic that's at its best when it offers glimpses into the life of its (fictional) author and at its worst when we catch glimpses of its (real) author. For most of its run, the comics had enough verisimilitude to fool its audience into thinking it was a sincere effort—a fact which is endlessly funny to me, as someone who went into it knowing it was a parody. Perhaps Powerup Comics' strongest assets are the notes from its (fictional) author that accompany each strip—but two art shifts late in its run mark some of the comic's best moments. Its biggest flaws, meanwhile, are the times when it plays the tropes of the genre entirely straight—with no deconstructive/reconstructive twists beyond the knowledge that it's all fake (read: 02/04/2019)

    The Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists 2 is a Granta anthology of translated short stories and extracts of varying quality. There's a perhaps-undue focus on themes of childhood and death, and many of the stories almost struggle to qualify as "stories" at all in my head, with their minimal use of dialogue and often truncated endings. I imagine the translation process doesn't do them many favours either. The ones genuinely worth reading are Borromean Rings, Sea of Stone, and Travellers Inside the Marquee (read: 16/07/2021-09/08/2021)

    Crystal Society is a speculative rational fiction web novel about AI, the first in a trilogy by Max Harms (though you'll have to buy the next two installments… at least until they get released into the public domain in 2039). Well-paced, blending horror and comedy like all good AI fiction (though it sways a little too far into horror for my tastes). Also like all good AI fiction, this story is at its best when it uses AI as a lens through which to view the human condition. Has some aliens, which… well, I'm not much of a fan of aliens in fiction. Still, this is well worth a read if you're interested in AI and transhumanism. Also check out Friendship is Optimal and Three Worlds Collide (started: 25/11/18, finished: 04/12/2018)

    Xavier: Renegade Angel is a bizarre 3D-animated [adult swim] black comedy. It's often extremely funny, and deserves credit for having episodic plots which—while being completely insane—somehow feel internally-consistent and resonant (watched Season 1: 03/08/2019)

    Ratatouille is a Pixar movie written and directed by Brad Bird about a rat who wants to be a chef. It's a wonderfully funny and heartwarming piece, with the Pixar aesthetic at its peak in my opinion. Some of the emotional conflict in it is a little contrived, but there's more than enough here to like (re-rewatched: 26/10/2021)

    Trollhunter is a mockumentary by André Øvredal starring several well-known Norwegian comedians, in which three students stalk a man who hunts trolls. This movie's a slow burn that's probably not much fun to watch alone, but it's good satire. I rate it two Billy Goats Gruff out of three. Don't skip out on the deleted scenes

    Dungeon Crawler Carl is DoctorHepa's ongoing LitRPG about a guy and his cat, who find themselves forced to participate in a planetwide dungeon crawl for the entertainment of the aliens harvesting his planet. This story transcends its premise, and is the rare web serial which actually feels like it's written by a professional writer, thanks to its exceptional pacing, good prose, and interesting ideas. It's not as profound as Worth the Candle, but it sure is fun. See my full review here (caught up to chapter 42: 15/03/2020-16/03/2020)

    12 Miles Below is a post-apocalyptic web serial by Mark Arrows, about frozen-over world where killer machines roam underground. It's the webfiction equivalent of a blockbuster movie, pure fun. I wrote a longer review for it here (read first two books: 03/02/2022-07/03/2022)

    Nova: Resurrection is a seven-issue Marvel run by Jeff Loveness and Ramon Perez, featuring both the legacy and modern versions of its titular superhero. The dynamic between these two protagonists is a joy to watch, helped in no small part by the beautifully-coloured artwork. Oh, and it has a cameo from a certain intergalactic bounty hunter, yes? This comic explores the role of death and continuity in the Marvel universe surprisingly well, and is well worth a read for that alone—but the extent to which it relies on specific plot beats from previous runs (which, to be fair, it does take the time to recap) is frustrating to say the least (read: 26/05/2019)

    The Monster of Elendhaven is a modern Gothic fantasy novella by Jennifer Giesbrecht, writer on The Homestuck Epilogues. Its prose style is sublime and its plot is compelling, but it's a bit of a struggle to prise apart subtextually at times (read: 10/01/2020-12/01/2020)

    Mother of Learning is a completed rational fic by nobody103—it's basically Harry Potter in a Groundhog Month. It's super long and really enjoyable on a chapter-by-chapter basis, but sadly suffers from many of rational fiction's problems. Despite a couple of standout characters and bits of worldbuilding, it suffers from swathes of what can only be described as filler —and in my opinion it overcomplicates and underuses its central time loop. Go watch Groundhog Day or Edge of Tomorrow instead if you want time loops, or Worth the Candle if you want rationalist fantasy. All that said, if you've already experienced all those stories, you can't really go wrong with this one—it certainly manages to stick the landing (caught up: 28/12/2018, finished: 10/02/2020)

    For The Taking is a short story by lintamande about a world where devils may or may not be able to steal your soul. Very funny and well-constructed—despite ostensibly being a fanwork, it presents all the information needed to follow its central conceit and no more (read: 27/08/2019)

    Adventure Time is Pendleton Ward's long running adventure-comedy cartoon, full of great self-contained episodes that are a lot of fun to watch. This show packs vastly more plot, humour, heart and originality into ten-minute episodes than many cartoons with twice as much runtime to work with. However, there are absolutely tons of episodes, and the quality does vary, with many being quite throwaway. The lack of a strong serialised plot is damaging in this respect, with little progression to the overall status quo over the seasons, and the individual elements never really culminating into a compelling whole—in fact, to the contrary, as the more elements are introduced, the less and less it feels like you're exploring a strange world; it starts to rely too heavily on its own lore. All that said, this is still a great show, and many of the mini-arcs are quite compelling (watched seasons 1-4: ???-???, watched season 5-: 09/04/2022-16/07/2022)

    Avatar is James Cameron's environmentalist alien-invasion magnum opus. I think especially from a child's perspective (which is how I first saw it), it's a very powerful parable about nature and colonialism. As an adult, everything about how the "white saviour" trope manifests in this movie is skin-crawling, seeing everything turn out in Jake's favour as everything falls apart around him (in large part as a consequence of his own actions). The world of Pandora is nonetheless beautiful, and I like some of the stuff regarding Jake's identity as he uses the avatar more (re-rewatched: 01/01/2022)

    Frances Ha is a film by Noah Baumbach, co-written with Greta Gerwig, who also stars. A perfect snapshot of a certain kind of young-adult listlessness, I was more compelled by this one than I wasn't. See my full review here (watched: 22/04/2024)

    The Promised Neverland is an anime about some kids trying to escape their orphanage. Probably one of the most striking and successful examples of mainstream "rationalist" fiction I've ever seen, with a strong focus on mind games, deduction, and conflicting values. Unlike, say, Death Note—the thing I've seen closest to it—there's a certain thematic weight here too, although it never gets unbearably blatant. Plus, it looks good, and has well-written (often funny) dialogue, and the plot moves along nicely (watched Season 1: 11-12/08/2021)

    Halo is Bungie's genre-defining sci-fi shooter franchise. Sadly the two best games in the series, Reach and ODST, are the spin-offs which practically take the rest of the series as required reading

    Star vs. the Forces of Evil is a Disney cartoon about a magical princess who gets sent to the real world. While yes, it's a kids' cartoon, and comes with some of your typical caveats as such, this is pretty much a perfect piece of long-form serialised storytelling. The writers of the show seem to think of their characters as being much older than they are, but manage to balance comedy and drama effectively, and explore some pretty interesting cross-generational themes (watched Season 1: 14-15/05/2019, watched Season 2: 17-20/05/2019, "The Battle for Mewnii": 21/05/2019, watched Season 3: 26/05/2019-01/06/2019, watched Season 4: 15-16/09/2019)

    Gym of the Romantic Journey is an animated web series by Greg Hoffman which loosely parodies various adventure stories with children as main protagonists. It's got a very dry sense of humour which is pretty much unlike anything else I've ever seen, and is full of great beats and ideas, but the low budget and amateur voice acting let it down, and there isn't enough in the way of a consistent overarching plot or themes to elevate it above its jokes. Has a short tie-in webcomic which gives a very cool origin for the setting (re-rewatched: 23/04/2020)

    Saw is a franchise of gory horror films about a serial killer who puts people in horrible traps that generally make them self-inflict grievous injuries. Despite the seemingly exploitative premise, there's actually a lot of interest here? The first film is flatly a great standalone piece in its own right. The rest are basically all bad, but often bad in compelling ways. Treating this as a film series is almost futile; the regular release schedule and highly serialised storytelling make it much more like a television series. See my full reviews: Saw I, Saw II, Saw III, Saw IV, Saw V, Saw VI (watched I: 12/10/2025, II: 14/10/2025, III: 15/10/2025, IV: 18/10/2025, V: 21/10/2025, VI: 12/11/2025, 3D: 08/04/2026)

    The Dark Knight Trilogy is a darker-and-edgier series of Batman movies by Christopher Nolan

    Epithet Erased is an animated web series by Brendan Blaber (aka JelloApocalypse) about a world where some people have superpowers based around a word. It has a unique paper-puppet-like style of animation, which perfectly suits its charming humour. Don't be fooled though—beneath that veneer there's a genuinely great story with some interesting things to say. The focus of the show switches somewhat about halfway through its seven-episode run, losing some of that depth but keeping the same quality of plotting and comedy (watched: 22/11/2019-04/01/2019)

    The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a formulaic series of connected blockbusters. Having strong opinions on these movies is a false start, but they're mostly fairly entertaining and undeniably a huge influence on popular culture

    Mean Girls is a cult-hit high school comedy by Mark Waters and Tina Fey—basically a lighter version of Heathers and a more nuanced version of Be More Chill, though it bears mentioning that it's more grounded than either of those stories. It's kinda fascinating to watch Cady and Regina try to outmanoeuvre each other, and there's a lot of catharsis when it all comes tumbling down. Good to watch with friends

    Gravity Falls is Alex Hirch's mystery cartoon series—funny, with plenty of heart, but at the end of the day it's still just a Saturday-morning cartoon

    Adolescence is a one-take crime drama series by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, about a young boy being arrested in suburban England. Technically extremely impressive work? This series struck a nerve with the British public and got blown up way out of proportion, when in reality it doesn't actually have much insight to offer into its subject matter. See my full review here (watched: 17-19/08/2025)

    Little Victories is a Transformers fan-novel by Matt Marshall, starring the obscure "Micromaster" characters from the ass-end of the original toyline. Like the Micromasters themselves, it's initially unassuming and perhaps even a little offputting—but before long you'll find yourself wanting loads more of it. Over the course of several connected vignettes, it deconstructs and develops the bizarre caricatures at the core of any Transformers cast. What's in a name? How do the identities of those around us influence our own? Is it possible to choose how others see us, to choose our own values, our friends, our enemies, to make choices in general in a world where so much is decided by the bigger bots? I'm not being facetious here, I think this story does genuinely make a stab at answering these kinds of questions. By the time the anti-SJW gamer girl almost bites it, you'll be hoping she won't, nor the rest of her weirdo friends. This novel's a stupidly-funny anti-war advocate for the little guys. It's Catch 22, only it's not as good (but caters more uniquely to my interests). It's a huge triumph, is what it is, I can't believe somebody wrote this thing (read: 23/08/2019-24/08/2019)

    What We Do In The Shadows is a Taika Waititi's vampire mockumentary. I usually struggle to get invested in vampire stories, but had no such trouble here—it's got a pretty good emergent narrative and is pretty funny throughout

    Squid Game is a Korean death-game Netflix original show by Hwang Dong-hyuk. This is peak "haha wouldn't it be messed up if" viewing, but it's not bad? Many of the characters are quite likable, and there's some thematic bite to it. It's decently plotted. I feel like it doesn't need to be the ~8-hour show that it is; the pacing feels quite slow at times (watched: 07-09/10/2021)

    The Karate Kid is an 80s martial arts film. Despite it being the codifier for a huge number of tropes, it largely avoids the Seinfeld effect by executing those tropes better than a great deal of the stuff that followed it, meaning this film is far less dated than one might imagine. Its pacing is slightly odd but its character beats are excellent (watched: 30/06/2020)

    The Fare is a time-loop mystery-romance movie written by (and co-starring) Brinna Kelly. An aesthetically pitch-perfect movie with a timeless atmosphere, buoyed by the excellent chemistry between the leads, this movie will utterly floor you with its twist, which is both the best and stupidest thing ever—this is how people must have felt when The Twilight Zone was coming out, right? A modern classic (watched: 12/06/2021)

    Internet Story is one of Adam Butcher's short films, with some novel ideas and a pretty gripping plot

    Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc is a high school death-game visual novel written by Kazutaka Kodaka. Absolutely killer gameplay here with great UI choices and some clever cost-effective dubbing. The writing is simply not as good as Kotaro Uchikoshi's work, to which it bears some similarities, but the first two chapters in particular are quite clever and compelling little mysteries; it's a shame the second one heaps in a dose of naive transphobia and DID-misrepresentation. The overall mytharc is not as original or compelling as it should be, and neither is the overall "hope versus despair" thematic arc. Still, I had a great time with the story and found the characters mostly entertaining (played: 05-07/10/2022)

    Bionicle is Lego's 2000s mixed-media franchise. This astonishing feat of storytelling defies every expectation of what toy tie-ins should be. Sadly, it peaks right at the very start, slowly devolving into nonsense over the course of a decade's worth of stories

    Battle Royale is an influential Japanese movie about a class of schoolkids that are forced to fight until only one is left standing. It's very visceral, and there are a lot of great beats along the way, but even considering they're children I found the characters to generally behave in pretty unrealistically stupid ways. Influenced the opening chapters of Worth the Candle (watched: 24/12/2019)

    Crimson Tide is a thriller directed by Tony Scott from a screenplay by Michael Schiffer (with an uncredited Quentin Tarantino punching up dialogue) about two officers on a nuclear submarine who receive an ambiguous order on whether or not to launch nukes. This movie really takes a while to kick off, but once it does it's breakneck stuff through to the finish. The direct, personal conflicts between the crew are a microcosm for the world-shaking decisions they're forced to make. It's visually engaging and extremely thoughtful, with a well-constructed dilemma and many likeable characters. Hans Zimmer owns the score here too. I did find it weird how much prominence the script places on comics and Star Trek with its protagonists, which is surely a Tarantino thing; it's tonally disjoint (watched: 19/08/2022)

    The Underwater Welder is Jeff Lemire's graphic novel. Technically really really good, with plenty of haunting imagery. It just… sadly wasn't quite to my tastes, somehow? That said, it did stick with me much more strongly than I expected it to, so there's something to it

    Professor Layton is a Japanese puzzle-game series for the Nintendo DS

    Monstergeddon is a series of features on Something Awful which presents threads from a fictional forum for monsters. A perfect exercise in juxtaposition that takes some good stabs at interesting themes, while being extremely entertaining and authentic enough (read: 26/01/2020)

    Godel, Escher, Bach: An Infinite Golden Braid is a nonfiction book by Douglas Hofstadter which is just SO SO DENSE. God, it took me two years to slog through this? Part of the problem here is that much of what Hofstadter did that was novel at the time has since gone on to be a huge influence on a lot of the media that I personally enjoy, or just on pop culture at large. To put it bluntly, Hofstadter is very much huffing fumes off his own canvas for much of this book. It's clever, undoubtedly! Its explorations of symbols-and-significance remain rare and interesting! But at the same time… dude, we get it, you like Bach. On the bright side, the dialogues are fun enough, and I love an Escher print as much as the next guy (read: 03/06/2019-18/04/2021)

    Toy Story is a Pixar animated franchise about animated toys. Much like Cars, its worldbuilding makes zero sense, but that's not the point

    Nimona is Blue Sky Studios' final animated feature, adapted from the comic by ND Stevenson, with a screenplay from Robert L. Baird and Lloyd Taylor. See my full review here (watched: 19/02/2024)

    Uncanny X-Force is Rick Remender's run on one of Marvel's long-running series. I really like it, but can't deny that there's something intangibly off about Remender's writing. Available as a pair of complete collections. Can't speak for the X-Force runs which came before or after as I haven't read them yet, but I've heard some good things (re-read: 11-15/05/2025)

    'Til Cows Tear Us Apart is an interactive story in the tradition of Firefly and Faster Than Light. It's absolutely loaded with charm, with pitch-perfect animated pixel art and an excellent soundtrack, complementing some genuinely sincere dialogue and setpieces. Replay to unlock all the achievements (played: 09/11/2019)

    X-Men '92 is a pair of comic series based on the iconic cartoon, written by Chad Bowers and Chris Sims. Beat-to-beat, these are wonderfully entertaining, with pitch-perfect character voices and oddball concepts all thrown together, with a cool focus on high-concept metaphysical combat that persists in their later work, plus some interesting metatext and character arcs to boot. This is comics babey! (read: 18/03/2022)

    Basilisks is a series of short stories by David Langford, about images which can kill. Hugely influential; see also Worth the Candle, Cordyceps and There Is No Antimemetics Division (read: 06/05/2019)

    Deff Skwadron is an enormously entertaining Warhammer 40,000 comic written by Gordon Rennie. Told as a series of episodic adventures, with no real overarching plot or conclusion to speak of, these are still very funny pieces that together paint a compelling picture of the lives of these carnage-craving Orks. Paul Jeacock's bold inks perfectly capture the detail and mayhem of these sci-fi warzones (read: 22/07/2023)

    Swine is a comic miniseries written by Tyrone Finch, about a conspiracy of demonic pigs. I really enjoyed this one, thanks mostly to its deliberately provocative worldbuilding, and felt that the characters were quite strong. However, for its length, I felt like the plot itself wasn't quite challenging enough, the guilt felt by its protagonist failing to be truly deconstructed. A very strong debut from Finch on the whole, though! (read: 26/06/2023)

    Mortal Engines is a series of post-apocalyptic steampunk YA novels by Philip Reeve, set in a world where every city is mounted on huge tracks and they all drive around eating other cities. Sounds stupid, but is actually like uh the opposite of stupid so yeah

    Phineas and Ferb is a now-classic Disney Channel cartoon by Dan Povenmire and Jeff Marsh. Following a very strict episodic formula, riffing on the same running gags and structure each episode, the show has extremely sharp humour and appealing characters (watched episodes 1-2: 31/05/2022)

    The Good Place is a sitcom by Michael Schur about a woman who dies and goes to heaven—only to realise she doesn't belong there. The plot of this show moves along at a brisk pace and most of the jokes land. Ethics and philosophy are discussed in some detail by the characters, which is weird but not necessarily unwelcome. The style of dialogue is a little strange and starts to grate after a while, and the characters are a little flat, and the later seasons meander a little, and the ending really sucks, so I can't recommend it at all, except there's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it reference to this show in Worth the Candle (watched first two seasons: 29/05/2018-30/05/2018, watched third season: 29/09/2018-25/01/2019, watched fourth season: 27/09/2019-31/01/2020)

    Wyrm is a short film by Christopher Winterbauer, set in a world where kids have to have their first kiss to get through school. Presented with an exquisite retrofuture '90s aesthetic, a great cast, and some really dryly funny lines, I really enjoyed this one (watched: 26/10/2022)

    Why Don't We Just Kill The Kid In The Omelas Hole is a short story by Isabel J. Kim, riffing on the iconic sci-fi short story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas". It's a really funny post-postmodern piece, even if I'm not sure it actually has that much substance? (read: 27/03/2024)

    FTL (Faster Than Light) is a sci-fi roguelike by Subset Games, in which you manage a spaceship. Not a game I've managed to complete (because I really suck at it and it's also pretty luck-based), but still entertaining

    The Great Gatsby is Baz Luhrmann's live-action take on F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as the titular fella. Critics don't seem to like this one, and I haven't read the source material, but I thought it was pretty great

    We Didn't is a short story by Stuart Dybek, about sexual frustration. The actual prose here is technically offputting, with overelaborate language and sentence structure, but the wider structure of the story and the themes of it content are unusual and compelling (read: 23/10/2022)

    Papers, Please is an indie game where you play as a border control officer. I never finished it, but it's an insanely well-crafted and thoughtful game

    Encanto is a magical-realist animated Disney musical about a magic house in Colombia, directed by Jared Bush and Byron Howard from a screenplay by Charise Castro Smith and Bush. It gets by mostly on the strength of its songs, courtesy of Lin-Manuel Miranda; as was the case with Moana, this feels like the best way of utilising the guy. Although there are elements of formula to this one, it's atypical enough to feel fairly fresh. Its greatest narrative strength is the understated superpower worldbuilding, the little ways in which the magic affects the moment-to-moment lives of the characters (watched: 19/01/2021)

    Pulp Fiction is a semi-anthology movie by Quentin Tarantino. This movie is a mixture of overlong scenes where horrible cryptid people exposit at length about absolutely nothing, and brutal, banal, random violence, which as I understand it is largely the Point, that life is governed by chance, that there is no deeper meaning. My favourite section of the film was probably "The Gold Watch", which I found to be easily the least predictable, in spite of it actually having the most conventional narrative structure. Many of Tarantino's more egregious shock-value screenplay choices just left me kind of cold, elements introduced and discarded without a moment's introspection. This is undoubtedly a technically very impressively written movie, it just didn't resonate with me (watched: 30/07/2022)

    Northanger Abbey is the first of Jane Austen's novels to be completed for publication. Surprisingly funny and readable in its early chapters, with a dry humour and some interesting themes. However, it consistently suffers from unwieldy sentence structure—and most of its satirical intent was lost on me. The last third of the story becomes something of a slog, and it resolves itself a little too abruptly for my tastes (read: 23/03/2019-20/04/2019)

    The Void is a short story by Leigh Alexander. Decidedly COVID-media, it's about sensory deprivation/overload in a life that's becoming increasingly virtual (read: 26/03/2021)

    Look Back is a one-shot manga by Fire Punch/Chainsaw Man mangaka Tatsuki Fujimoto. A beautifully-drawn and affecting look at the struggles that come with trying to make art (read: 28/07/2021)

    Timecrimes/Cronocrímenes is a Spanish time-travel slasher movie by Nacho Vigalondo. It has a central allegorical throughline which I think is very strong, but one which makes for a movie that is extremely unpleasant to watch. Further to that, its narrative is executed in such a way that utterly torpedoes all tension for long stretches, generally staying a step or two behind the audience. On a conceptual level, you can see how the metatext regarding slasher movies as a genre informed the movie's beats, and yet somehow it never really quite crosses the line into being genuinely great (watched: 27/04/2021)

    Red Dwarf is a famous BBC sci-fi comedy series—strip away its space-age veneer and it's basically the same as any other British sitcom, but sometimes the presentation really is everything, hmm? (rewatched Series 1: 20/03/2023-20/04/2023, Series 2: 11-19/01/2024, Series 3: 23/01/2024-02/03/2024, Series 4: 04-05/08/2025, Series 5: 06-07/08/2025, 15/04/2026, Series 6: 15/04/2026)

    Doctor Who is an iconic long-running BBC sci-fi show that started out with a pretty darn good first season masterminded by Russel T. Davies, netting it a huge number of lifelong fans (including a couple of ex-best-friends) before Steven Moffat's tenure as lead writer magnified its worst elements. I'm broadly sympathetic to Moffat's writing; on a micro level, he's consistently better than RTD. After Chris Chibnall took the reins, overseering Jodie Whittaker's tenure as the Doctor, the show's quality nosedived; I haven't watched most of that stuff. RTD's later return seemed like it might mark a return to form, but barring one or two passable episodes, on the whole his newer work is shoddy and frankly irritating most of the time. My favourites are the "Under the Lake" / "Before the Flood" two-parter, with other episodes I particularly enjoy being "Dalek", "Father's Day", "Boom Town", "Love & Monsters", "Gridlock", "Daleks in Manhattan" / "Evolution of the Daleks", "Blink", "The Fires of Pompeii", "The Eleventh Hour", and the later "Heaven Sent" (watched/rewatched Series 1-10: 22/09/2023-06/07/2025, watched RTD reboot: 26/11/2023-09/06/2025)

    The Bad Guys is a DreamWorks movie directed by Pierre Perifel from a screenplay by Etan Cohen adapted from a comic book, about a heist gang made up of the most commonly-feared animals you can think of. As much as my brain tells me this was an industrial-scale animation project like any other, my eyes tell me that whoever was storyboarding this thing must've been having the time of their lives. It pulls off an impossible feat of narrative gymnastics with its message about stereotypes, and looks cool doing it, leaving the likes of Zootopia in its dust. Leaving aside some eye-rollingly tropey kids-animation jokes, I had a lot of fun with this one, it's a worthy work for nascent furries to imprint onto for sure (watched: 03/04/2023)

    Hackers is a 1995 cyberpunk-ish movie directed by Iain Softley. On a pure style level, this movie is unmatched—and sure, the plot is goofy, but the ideas and writing feel ahead of their time in some ways? An absolute riot of a movie (watched: 12/02/2021)

    The Last Unicorn is an '80s animated children's movie animated by a studio that later basically became Studio Ghibli. Written by Peter S. Beagle (adapted from his own novel), it gets by on its unusual protagonist, the strength of the some of the jokes, and the nice soundtrack—but mostly I just enjoyed this film because it reminded me a lot of The Transformers: The Movie (watched: 18/04/2022)

    Brave Bang Bravern! is a short twelve-episode mecha anime written mostly by Keigo Kyoanagi, with mech designs by the peerless Masami Ōbari. It's hard to pitch without immediately ruining the twist of the first episode, but in short, this is a remarkably compelling examination of what makes the mecha genre appeal to boys, with a beautiful relationship between the two leading men forming the emotional core of the show. Consistently funny, with some brilliant action scenes and unconventional plotting, I really enjoyed following along with this one week-to-week. The one thing that leaves me a little cold is its depiction of the military, but it's nothing worse than in the Transformers movies, so (watched: 08/02/2024-30/03/2024)

    That Mitchell and Webb Look is an excellent BBC sketch-comedy show from David Mitchell and Robert Webb. Go watch some clips on YouTube, see if you like it. I've seen the first three series and would've watched more if I hadn't started feeling guilty about spending so much time watching something plotless

    Circle is a 'Psychological thriller' film by the same people who made The Vault, which sadly suffers from some of the same problems. Despite its anvilicious dialogue, this film does manage to maintain tension throughout the entirety of its runtime—which is impressive considering that it's really just a bunch of people standing in a room (watched: 31/08/2016)

    At the end of the world. is a short piece by my friend Gitaxian about apocalypse ideation. It's like crack to me (read: 13/01/2022)

    Freddy Got Fingered is perhaps the grossest, most reprehensible gross-out movie ever to gross out, and I wouldn't really recommend it in any capacity, but it is at times extremely funny, with some I-wouldn't-call-them-clever-but-hey-they-work meta moments and some beats which might, if squinted at, broadly resemble genuine sentimentality. It's mostly a joke at its own expense, with an insane budget being squandered on pure garbage, and the result has to be seen to be believed. Worth reading up on the real-world context for it here (watched: 09/04/2020)

    Moana is a Disney-princess-deconstruction musical animated movie (in the vein of Frozen) directed by Ron Clements and John Musker from a screenplay by Jared Bush, about an island girl who ventures out to sea to save her home. I say it's a deconstruction, but a few quips aside there's not much in the way of actual deconstruction at play; it's just a very solid animated movie in its own right. Some absolutely standout songs courtesy of Lin-Manuel Miranda, who's at his most powerful here because no-one lets him near the outline. I like it because I like BIONICLE- this is a JOKE! I'm JOKING! (rewatched: 24/12/2020)

    Sing Street is a musical movie set in Ireland in the '80s written-and-directed by John Carney. Strikingly bittersweet, with some pretty good songs and often-understated storytelling (watched: 24/02/2021)

    The Breakfast Club is another of John Hughes' teen comedies. This extended one-shot bottle episode of a movie has some pretty lofty ambitions that it mostly realises, but it's a product of its time and ultimately I think Ferris Bueller's Day Off is the more successful of the pair. Compare to the 2017 Power Rangers movie (watched: 08/12/2018)

    Tampopo is a Japanese "ramen western" by Juzo Itami. It's a frankly bizarre movie, with a camera that just wanders wherever it wants and only a bare minimum of plot. It's decidedly about food, with other themes and ideas being largely incidental. Considering it was kind of aggressively not my thing on most levels, it's actually a surprise I've ranked this as highly as I have—but it's just an unforgettable movie (watched: 15/08/2021)

    Big Trouble in Little China is a very funny 1986 martial arts movie by John Carpenter, effectively a riff on the "white saviour" trope. I'm not saying it's particularly insightful or anything, but the movie's entertaining enough that I think it gets away with it. The plot goes a mile a minute. A great movie to watch with friends (re-rewatched: 25/10/2021)

    Stalled is a short film by Matthew Black about a man trapped in a time paradox in a public restroom. Really great editing, a very tightly-scripted narrative, and pitch-perfect sense of spiralling all left a huge impression on me with this one (watched: 12/01/2023)

    The Vault is a dramedy web series in the vein of LOST, for better or worse—widely considered to be pretty consistently great with a terrible ending

    Cave Story is an indie Metroidvania game. Despite its excellent graphics, music and gameplay and a cast of charming characters, I struggled to enjoy this game as much as I'd been told I would. Had its world been built with a clearer direction, or its story given more depth, I might've connected better with its characters—but I think my main issue was the sharp increase in difficulty in the sections associated with the "True Ending", which only hindered the narrative in my opinion. Additionally, the complex assortment of steps required to access the true ending are effectively impossible to discern over the course of normal gameplay—without the help of a walkthrough (which will absolutely spoil the story for you) you'd be hard-pressed to realise multiple endings exist at all. Basically, I'm not very good at video games, and this one was a chore for me at times (played: 08/01/2019-20/04/2019)

    Locke & Key is Joe Hill's six-volume self-contained horror comic. I don't usually like horror, but I liked this—although I read it long enough ago that I don't really have anything to say about it

    Blade Runner is Ridley Scott's proto-cyberpunk neo-noir film. While its pacing is very challenging for modern audiences, this film's got great tone and themes, and is visually stunning. Worth watching just as better context for Modern Cannibals (watched: 11/10/2017)

    Tangled is a Disney-princess musical animated feature, directed by Nathan Greno and Byron Howard from a screenplay by Dan Fogelman, inspired by the fairytale of Rapunzel. A very charming coming-of-age inviting the viewer to question their parentage, with a very Dungeons & Dragons vibe (mostly thanks to deuteragonist Flynn Rider)—I liked this one when I was younger and still liked it on rewatch. Won't blow you away, but is good fun (rewatched: 25/02/2023)

    skibidi toilet is a dumb Garry's Mod edit turned animated videogamey Transformers-esque epic, created by DaFuq!?Boom!. Remarkably entertaining for what it is, with some occasional elements of compelling serialised plotting; the arc where they infiltrate the skibidi toilet factory is phenomenal. Honestly, the spirit of Michael Bay's films is alive and well here. See my full review here (watched: 24-25/07/2024)

    All Will Be Well is a very silly fanfiction which sees Luke Skywalker meet Paul Blart… at the latter's cheese shop in 17th-century Poland. Just check out the tags on this thing! Look, it's not the greatest work ever, but holy heck what a concept—and so faithfully executed too (read: 29/05/2019)

    Hamilton is a sung-through musical centred on the life of Alexander Hamilton, by Lin-Manuel Miranda. I think a lot of this thing was lost on me, although I adored its songwriting on a line-to-line level. Insofar as this musical can be said to be about history, I think it had some interesting themes going on—but these were only realised late into the second act, and the show's own inaccuracies do little to endear it further to me. See my full review here (watched: 26/03/2019, rewatched: 09/03/2025)

    Matilda is a musical adaptation of a book by Roald Dahl, about a prodigal child. I've got mixed feelings on this one—despite some good songwriting (courtesy of Tim Minchin), it seemed to me like something was lost in the adaptation (watched: 25/03/2019)

    Skins is a British teen drama from Channel 4, of which I've only seen the first four series. While it's far from perfect, it does communicate a sense of seeing something fleetingly beautiful and tragic unfold. I think it's safe to say that it amplifies the nihilism and hedonism of being a teenager, even it it doesn't outright romanticise it. The second generation of characters (in the third and fourth series) just isn't as good as the first, so don't bother with it, and I didn't look into the third (watched seasons 1 and 2: 02/03/2017-12/03/2017 watched seasons 3 and 4: 18/12/2017-02-01-2018)

    The Polar Express is an anti-rationalist Christmas movie children with uncanny-valley motion-capture animation, co-written and directed by Robert Zemeckis (with William Broyles Jr.). No, jokes aside, this is an insane movie, kind of a modern classic, very effective pro-Christmas propaganda. Tom Hanks stars as a stupid number of characters (re-rewatched: 14/12/2021)

    ENA is a surreal Y2Kesque web series by Peruvian animator Joel Guerra. Creepy and funny, aesthetically immaculate, I had a great time with this one (watched: 17/10/2022)

    American Psycho is a psychological horror/comedy by Mary Harron, co-writing with Guinevere Turner to adapt Bret Easton Ellis' novel. I was surprisingly cold on this one. See my full review here (watched: 26/01/2025)

    Metabridged is a meta abridged series, based on the old Medabots anime (which I watched some episodes of as a kid, only to forget the name and spend several years occasionally fruitlessly trying to track it down again). It's a passably savvy look at YouTube culture, as told through the lens of some kids stumbling into fame thanks to their poorly-made abridged series, but not quite clever enough to justify its myopia. The first two parts are fairly dated, but the concluding third episode (released after a few years' hiatus) was a satisfying enough ending (watched episode 3: 23/03/2019, rewatched: 24/11/2019, 25/11/2021)

    Dream's End Come True is a short ULTRAKILL dialogue in the style of 17776. Beautifully-presented with some poignant lines, though I lacked the context from having played the game to fully appreciate it (read: 05/05/2022)

    five seconds flat is an album by Lizzy McAlpine and this isn't a music review Google Document is it well no but McAlpine wrote a short film to accompany the album, basically a series of connected music videos, which gets by mostly on the strength of its music and direction but is nonetheless an extremely precise set of vignettes that significantly elevates the album. Made me feel a way! (watched: 12/04/2022)

    Lord of the Flies is a book by William Golding, one that I had to read for English. I probably could've told you why I liked it better at the time—but I did like it, on the whole

    The Deaths of Sebastian Telephone is an utterly impenetrable story if you don't know a damn thing about Blaseball, but extracts an incredible amount of poignancy from the setting's farcical elements and showcases an astonishing amount of musical talent (Louie Zong on guitar, everybody!) so I guess I'm just a mark for it! (listened: 16/02/2021)

    Project Hail Mary is a sci-fi novel by Andy Weir about a guy who wakes up with amnesia on a spaceship. While you can see a lot of the DNA that made The Martian such a good movie on display here, Weir just really struggles to write with humanity, and his prose is atrocious. Not a good book. See my full review here (read: 25/11/2025-19/12/2025)

    The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a novel (adapted into a stage play, which I have also seen and thought was particularly well-done) about an autistic child written by Mark Haddon, who apparently did zero interest into autism and thus created the most stereotypical character possible. I liked this book when I read it as a kid, but have not read it since

    Severance is an Apple TV+ sci-fi show directed by Ben Stiller, conceived by Dan Erickson. This is blatantly a show in the LOST tradition of mystery-box writing, flying by the seat of its pants, which makes for frustrating viewing whenever it's clear that it's punting plot points down the line. Additionally, the central workplace allegory is often muddled by the specifics of the sci-fi scenario; by the second season, things have veered away from the basic premise of the show in a way I personally find offputting. But on the whole, this is still an impeccably-produced show with lots of humour and big moments (watched Season 1: 23-27/05/2024, watched Season 2: 18/01/2025-21/03/2025)

    Police Story is an action comedy written, directed by and starring Jackie Chan. Perfectly entertaining stuff, with some crazy stunts, but nothing worth going out of your way for. See my full review here (watched: 22/04/2026)

    Agents of Artifice is a Magic: The Gathering novel by Ari Marmell. While probably not anything worth going out of your way for, as far as this licensed multimedia goes, this novel does have some strong ideas, solid prose, and a good emotional core. See my full review here (read: 17/02/2025-29/03/2025)

    SSSS.GRIDMAN is an anime sequel/reboot to the classic Gridman tokusatsu, written by prolific Ultraman writer Keiichi Hasegawa. Studio Trigger animates, weirdly bringing a bunch of Transformers: Shattered Glass influence into the character designs. There's some surprisingly good stuff about isolation in here, but this is still a tough show to recommend, with Episode 5's wanton fanservice being a low point in particular; the first time I tried to watch it, I gave up there (watched: 16-20/12/2024)

    Magical Girl Raising Project is a dark magical girl anime adapted from a light novel series by Asari Endō. While definitely a poor man's Puella Magi Madoka Magica, this is still an entertaining enough show with some original beats. See my full review here (watched: 08-09/03/2026)

    Ice Road Truckers is a History Channel reality TV show following guys in Canada driving the winter roads. Tom Cotcher's UK-market narration is kind of a must-have to make this a tolerable watch. As usual for shows like this, there's a lot of repetition and making mountains out of molehills, but the central narrative of the deteriorating relationship between Hugh Rowland and Rick Yemm makes for compelling viewing nevertheless (watched: 22-31/10/2024)

    Soon I Will Be Invincible is a superhero novel by Austin Grossman. The brother of Lev Grossman, Austin has covered similar themes of exceptionalism and alienation seen in The Magicians, but this is definitely the clumsier of the two works. As superhero literature goes, the basic concepts and powers are nothing compared to Worm or, well, Invincible, which I think does let the novel down (read: 30-31/03/2025)

    Wish Smarter, Not Harder is a short story by u/iamjackfox about a man who meets a genie. It's surprisingly funny, and throws out some cool ideas (read: 28/05/2020)

    "Linkage" is a Japan-exclusive manga tie-in to Transformers: Armada by Hirofumi Ichikawa. A frankly remarkable exercise in continuity-welding and storytelling-in-the-margins, but its nature as ephemera makes it impossible to recommend. See my podcast with Jo here (read: 21/08/2025)

    Friday Night Funkin' is a web-based runaway-hit rhythm game. It doesn't really have a story to speak of, but it's good fun. I played it on easy because I'm bad at video games (played weeks 1-7: 25/04/2021)

    Conclave is a film by Edward Berger, from a screenplay by Peter Straughan, adapted from a novel by Robert Harris, about the Catholic church selecting its next pope. Kind of quite a funny movie? Not actually all that great? See my full review here (watched: 15/07/2025)

    12 Angry Men is just Circle again- I mean, it's a courtroom drama adapted by Sidney Lumet from a play by Reginald Rose. I enjoy its format gimmicks, with the entire movie taking place in a room full of nameless guys, placing the audience right into the same circumstance as the characters, and it's undoubtedly very technically well-written and directed. It's unfortunate, then, that it just doesn't resonate that much with me personally; if you locked me in a room and pressed me, I'd probably tell you that I loved it, but otherwise I can't manage much more than a nod and an "Mmm!" (watched: 18/10/2021)

    Vivarium is a horror movie about a couple who get trapped in neverending suburbia and have to raise an evil kid. It's… good? Stylistically? It stops being fun super early on, and is definitely on the slow side, but those are deliberate choices. The actual problem with this movie is that it's very plain from the outset what its allegory is, obvious to the point where you figure it has to go off the rails somehow—but it doesn't, instead everything unfolds exactly by-the-numbers, which feels like the kind of approach you should use for a short film rather than an actual movie. Promising but ultimately very disappointing. Good interview here (watched: 24/07/2021)

    The Red Eclipse! is a short animation by Insane Inkorporated. A rogues' gallery of some genuinely extremely original supervillains gathers to discuss an assassination. This thing drips wit and has astonishing quality of animation for an independent venture, but I guess it's a bit edgy for my tastes—would still highly recommend for anyone who likes superhero stuff! (watched: 18/05/2023)

    Sword Art Online Abridged is one of the best Abridged Series on this list, though that's not really a meaningful accolade. Something Witty Entertainment reconstructs one of the most reviled animes in recent memory as a meaningful story full of flawed characters. Like most Abridged Series, it has a shaky start but soon finds its voice; it differs from its contemporaries in the way it prioritises themes and plot over laughs. Short, sweet, and strongly recommended with a first season of just eleven episodes (roughly three and a half hours of content) and an ongoing second season

    Time to Orbit: Unknown is a completed sci-fi mystery web serial by Derin Edala, about a passenger who wakes up alone from cryosleep aboard a colony ship where everything is going catastrophically for unclear reasons. The early part of the story with its ontological-mystery content is fantastic, and most of the serial manages to maintain an addictive quality. The problems start not long after the protagonist starts to wake up other crewmembers, with one significant character in particular (basically the closest thing the story has to a main antagonist) honestly kind of ruining the story, with his cartoonish characterisation and the decisions of the main character regarding him both resulting in some extremely belaboured and boring conflicts. The story as a whole struggles with characterisation, dialogue, and interpersonal conflict, which are all must-haves in a work this insanely long! Thankfully, another big status-quo shift replaces these plot threads with much better-conceived challenges for the character, and a halfhearted return to the more mystery-centric plotting of the book's earlier chapters. I basically enjoyed the story from there up until the end, and consider it one of the better completed works of webfiction—but given the state of the medium, that's not really saying much. I wouldn't personally recommend anyone else read it, but if the premise really appeals to you, you could do a lot worse! (caught up to Chapter 88: 03/08/2024-15/08/2024, finished: 24-25/09/2024)

    DAN DA DAN (or DANDADAN, I guess?) is a Science Saru anime adaptation of a manga by Yukinobu Tatsu. A kind of a clumsy mess, though of course it's beautiful to look at! See my full review here (watched Season 1: 04-06/01/2025)

    Only Murders in the Building is a mystery-comedy show by Steve Martin (who also stars, alongside Martin Short and Selena Gomez) and John Hoffman. Pretty cleverly plotted and very funny, with some of the gimmick-centric episodes being exceptionally well-done in my opinion. It suffers a little from a not-uncommon problem, namely that its ending exists solely to facilitate shocking "hooks" earlier in the series, rather than as a particularly logical or thematic conclusion to the narrative. A lack of big-picture themes is also somewhat to the show's detriment; they're there, but nothing to really write home about (watched: 22/10/2021)

    The Big Sick is a semi-autobiographical romcom written by Emily V. Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani. This movie really, really, made me smile and laugh, which is basically all I need to say about it, but it's got a genuinely very affecting throughline. Obviously it's a little silly to nitpick the narrative of a Based On A True story, but I wish that Emily wasn't written out for half the flick

    Sorry to Bother You is a Kafkaesque unionist black comedy by Boots Riley about a black telemarketer who finds professional success by putting on a white voice—past that, the less you know, the better. I mostly liked this movie, but felt like it struggled to get across its ideals within the constraints of a Hollywood narrative; this review resonated with me a lot. It's very obvious this script was first finished in like 2012, and perhaps did not undergo as significant a redraft as it should have. Still, it's undoubtedly funny and offbeat, and it generally looks great (watched: 17/07/2022)

    Cobra Kai is a web-original years-later sequel to The Karate Kid which deconstructs the movie's themes and characters. I don't really like the way it contrives and perpetuates conflict, but otherwise this is basically a pitch-perfect show with good direction, a well-chosen soundtrack, good jokes, and a much higher density of likable characters than most shows like it (watched seasons 1-2: 03/07-02/08/2020, watched season 3: 15-16/01/2021, watched season 4: 10/01/2022-20/03/2022)

    Stranger than Fiction is a metafictional romcom directed by Marc Forster from a script by Zach Helm, about an IRS agent (Will Ferrell) who starts hearing a narrator in his head. Not exactly mind-blowing, and it never quite manages to convince us of his relationship with the love interest (Maggie Gyllenhaal), but the characters are all likeable, there's some charming VFX, and I found the script to be an interesting rumination on free will, empty lives and the call of the void, the power of fiction and our portrayals of death (watched: 24/09/2022)

    An Absolutely Remarkable Thing is a novel by Hank Green (of vlogbrothers fame) about a graphic designer who makes first contact with a giant alien robot. Its meditations on fame and how it affects people are fascinating, which makes sense, because Hank has a lot of firsthand experience with that (its political allegory comes across a little weaker). The story's biggest problem, for me, is just that the story's narrator was quite profoundly unlikeable (this was the point, but not consistently so, and also it was unfun to read), treating the people around her and the situation she's in with a degree of selfishness and callousness that I only begrudgingly admit real humans are capable of. There's apparently a sequel to this novel, which… why? (read: 02/04/2021)

    This Is How You Lose the Time War is an epistolary sci-fi romance novella co-authored by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. I broadly think the praise and analysis seen in this essay is accurate, but speaking personally the novella didn't appeal to my sensibilities and so I was more acutely affected by the parts where it fell short. The most interesting thing about this novel is its structure, alternating scenes where one of the characters receives a letter with the letter itself, each writer penning the perspective of one co-star. However, this tricky process plainly shines through in the finished product, which struggles with the basics of plot and pacing. The first half of the book repetitively sticks to the same "formula", of the characters receiving improbably-steganographed letters. The details of the time war are irrelevant, yes, but conspicuous by their absence, the way the writers weasel-word their way around talking about specifics—their stylistic flourishes in the prose might have appealed to me, but I was given the impression of a smokescreen used to hide thinly-written setpieces. On the one hand, those setpieces clearly rely on established genre tropes so as not to waste time recapitulating old ideas—but it seems content to linger within those tropes, and I felt like it was a waste not to include more original or challenging ideas. There are many clever/beautiful turns of phrase throughout, but I personally found them distancing rather than endearing—you could show me an anonymised letter from the book and I would struggle to say at a glance which character wrote it. In the back half of the book, the promised plot finally kicks in, and the book improves, but there's still a whiff of predictability to it all. I thought this was a good book, but frankly the premise was such a conceptual slam-dunk that it would have needed to do something very wrong to possibly be a bad book; in that sense, I was left frustrated that it wasn't the version of that premise I would have liked to see (read: 26/09/2022-03/10/2022)

    Coco is a Pixar movie about a kid who wants to become a musician but ends up being confronted by the terrifying truth of mortality. It's… good? Maybe overly predictable? I was on the brink of tearing up at the end, so I guess it was hitting the right notes as far as stories about death go. I think I would've preferred a denser movie, ultimately, because at times it feels like there's not enough meat on the bones—but that's just my personal taste speaking (watched: 25/12/2020)

    Turning Red is a Pixar movie about an Asian-American girl who starts uncontrollably turning into a red panda. It's a touching rumination on a certain kind of parent/child relationship, the power of good friends, and the horror of puberty. Ostensibly a period piece for 2002, the movie only uses this in the most surface-level way, keeping it mostly as an excuse to not have everyone with camera-phones; the actual dialogue is painfully reflective of the 2020s, though that's not to say there aren't some good lines in there. I don't like how Pixar movies look, from a character design perspective, but the strong direction and precisely expressive animation manage to sell it (watched: 14/03/2022)

    Bad Times at the El Royale is a neo-noir thriller written and directed by Drew Goddard about some strangers who meet up at a failing hotel. It relies a little too heavily on the cliche of juxtaposing music against violence, but otherwise is a really compelling period piece (watched: 21/01/2021)

    Wolf 359 is a sci-fi dramedy podcast by Gabriel Urbina. It's funny and dark in equal measures, with plenty of big ideas. Suffers from early instalment weirdness, with the first few episodes effectively being a sci-fi version of Welcome To Night Vale, and I'm currently finding the later seasons a little too melodramatic for my tastes—but the second season in particular is sublime

    Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel, focusing on her relationship with her father and addressing themes of death, mental illness, queerness, and aesthetics. As a reader of, well, actual comics, I wasn't particularly moved by the use of the medium, which is really just heavily-illustrated literary prose (albeit good prose). The medium felt ill-suited for the heavily literature-centric cultural canon Bechdel draws on for her intertextual allusions, resulting in many panels simply consisting of an extract from some printed text or written document. Most of the comic's most impactful or striking moments are positioned at the very end of each chapter, which I suppose made structural sense. Bechdel is, in my honest opinion, not very good at drawing people (I later learned she relied heavily on photographic reference material, which I think is what gives her figures sameness and woodenness), although the overall presentation is aesthetically appealing, with the obsessive fixation on using reference to create true-to-life objects and environments proving more successful. The best chapter is that focused on Bechdel's diary, which is very unnerving. Nitpicks aside, this is a plainly emotional and fascinating story (read: 22/11/2022)

    Man of Steel is a Superman movie as written by an alien who doesn't understand humans, or Superman (read: Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer). Some of the effects were cool but on a writing level it didn't have much going for it, and Zack Snyder's colourless direction is a chore as always. See my full review here (watched: 22/03/2021, rewatched: )

    My Little Pony: The Mentally Advanced Series is a cancelled MLP Abridged Series (plus associated spinoffs) by FiMFlamFilosophy. I used to think it edged out Friendship is Witchcraft, but honestly it's frankly just not as funny, and I'm not sure its occasional cleverness really justifies that. They're kinda two halves of the same whole

    Crescat is Sprague Grundy's first web serial, which mixes puzzles with prose. It's a successful formula! It's… dead in the water? (read: 30/06/2021)

    Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a live-action-plus-animation mashup that's more notable for the very fact that it exists, thanks to its insane technical production and the fact that it features both Disney and Warner Bros characters. Even leaving aside all that, though, it's an extremely funny movie with an engaging world and good emotional beats (watched: 23/01/2021)

    The Trotsky is a movie about a high school student who believes himself to be the reincarnation of Leon Trotsky. Written and directed by Jacob Tierney with a tour-de-force lead performance by Jay Baruchel, this film sweeps you up in its absurd intensity—but its pacing could probably have been improved, and the stakes of its climax could've stood to be higher. Nonetheless, it's a surprisingly entertaining and meaningful movie (watched: 20/10/2019)

    Scooby-Doo is a famous long-running series of cartoon series about a gang of mystery-solving kids and their dog

    Conference Call is a cancelled Worm/Naruto/Homestuck/Mother of Learning multicrossover fanfic by Pachycephalosaur. It nails the voices of the sources it draws from really impressively, and was shaping up to be a lot of fun before the author dropped it. Ah well! (started: 21/01/2019)

    The Shape of Water is a cold-war-set fairytale movie by Guillermo del Toro about a mute janitor who falls in love with the creature from the black lagoon being kept at the government facility she cleans. Honestly, on a plot level this movie is perfect, a nice parable about pariahs, and the production design is incredible too. But I suspect that, over time, this movie won't stick with me that strongly. It feels oddly like it was written for children? I mean that in a value-neutral way, it's a tonal thing (watched: 19/07/2022)

    Ex Machina is a sci-fi movie by Alex Garland about a programmer who conducts a Turing test on his boss's humanlike AI creation. This is a visually impressive and well-plotted movie, but one that's ultimately thematically bankrupt: it has two parallel motifs running throughout its story, one based on gender, and one based on AI fears; unfortunately, the latter is (to my eye) at complete tonal dissonance with the former. The ending of the movie eschews a challenging or open-ended conclusion in favour of pure visceral shock value (watched: 04/06/2021)

    Summer Wars is an anime movie directed by Mamoru Hosoda, which is basically a second go at the premise for his Digimon movie. It's very well-executed for the most part, with a very strong thematic core of family and a slightly-less-strong theme of technology. The romantic aspects of the story were pretty undercooked, which is pretty much the only thing that lets it down. Some of the visual choices in this movie aren't really my aesthetic, but that's a wholly subjective criticism (watched: 09/09/2020)

    Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU is a horror/comedy novella based on the Law & Order spinoff focusing on sexual crimes, told as a series of alternate episode synopses for each of the one-world episode titles in the show's first twelve seasons. With some metatextual elements, my takeaway from this one was that it was a deconstruction of the fascination viewers/writers hold in sexual violence, such that you can get hundreds of episodes of shows like this, but it's as much a character piece as anything. I personally was hoping the synopses would be closer in style to actual Wikipedia synopses, say; rather, they're more like fragments of normal prose, the story jumping around to create an overwhelming effect. And it is effective! (read: 06/07/2022)

    LOCAL58—COMMUNITY TELEVISION is an experimental horror web series created by Kris Straub. Episodes vary in effectiveness—with the first, "You Are On The Fastest Available Route", still probably being the best—but there's a lot of originality here. It's like Welcome to Night Vale, only the personable radio host has been replaced by ALL CAPS TEXT BROADCAST DIRECTLY TO YOUR TELEVISION (watched: 12/06/2019)

    Kid Radd is an animated sprite-style comic by Dan Miller—think Wreck-It Ralph as an early-2000s webcomic. It's got a well-crafted plot, endearing characters and slick animation. Sadly, though, it's a product of its time—I personally feel like it would better realise its theme had it been written today. It's a shame that the conceit of "taking video game tropes literally" has been so played out, because Kid Radd is one of the only works I've seen put those tropes towards proper capital-"T" Themes. If that concept appeals to you but you don't want to spend several hours reading a webcomic, just watch Wreck-It Ralph instead. Compare with 8-Bit Theatre

    Fables is a Vertigo comic series by Bill Willingham, which follows a large cast of fairytale characters living secretly in New York City

    The Truman Show is a 1998 comedy-drama directed by Peter Weir and written by Andrew Niccol. Reminds me of Groundhog Day in that it's a high-concept trope-codifier from a certain time period, but unlike that movie I don't think it really goes quite far enough in exploring its premise. Still, it knows exactly what it wants to say and says it pretty well (watched: 14/03/2021)

    Russian Doll is a Netflix Original time-loop comedy starring Natasha Lyonne. Despite some good comedy and stylistic flair, I ultimately found this to be a frustrating show. God, I hope I never have to watch another time-loop story about people who haven't seen Groundhog Day (watched: 06/02/2018)

    Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is a space opera comic book adaptation by Luc Besson. It's like watching an old decent Star Wars movie, except if those movies were made in the 2010s, and had actually entertaining dialogue and genuinely offbeat conceits. The movie's opening is, sadly, one of its two peaks (the other being the VR heist that follows, which was honestly start-to-finish one of the best action scenes I've seen in a movie in a long time). A later extended plot cul-de-sac, conversely, proves to be pure tripe (albeit with more audacious ideas than there are in the entirety of many other movies I've seen, so make of that what you will). The central romance and the portrayal of alien species are where the movie's worst impulses lie, but also have some original and appealing aspects; on the whole, it's a movie of extremes (watched: 09/01/2022)

    Cube is a horror film directed by Vincenzo Natali about a bunch of people navigating a giant cube filled with traps. There's a good meta-level twist to the character arcs which I really enjoyed, and there's a killer exposition scene midway through the movie, which introduces a great deal of thematic interest—but otherwise this movie unfolds in surprisingly predictable fashion. It has a weird fixation on maths and is a little slow-paced on the whole, and the CGI effects are very dated. Still, it's impressively produced on its shoestring budget, and I did enjoy it on the whole (watched: 31/10/2022)

    Ghost Quartet is a concept-album-turned-musical by Dave Malloy, telling a non-chronological story across various reincarnations of its four actors. Musically great, with the standout song undoubtedly being "Starchild", though I found it to be… needlessly obfuscated? Sometimes you have a story that presents itself as a total puzzle, and you get so distracted trying to work it out that when you actually stop to look at the story itself, you realise there's kind of nothing to it. But on a beat-to-beat level, there's plenty of funny or emotional or compelling stuff in here (watched a student performance of this: 17/08/2022)

    Tales of IT guy is a series of greentext stories posted anonymously to 4chan, maybe not all by the same person. Regardless, this series is one of the best looks at IT in the early 21st century's workplaces—better than scripted shows like The IT Crowd. Compare to Warbot in Accounting (read: 04/12/2018)

    Ultraman Z is a short tokusatsu show, of which I watched the excellent English dub. This is honestly just peak toku; the story's nothing to write home about, but as a visually entertaining formulaic cartoon to watch on my lunch breaks, it did a lot for me. The characters in particular are just great fun, it's an extremely likeable cast, and certain episodes (such as the four-dimensional-monster one) have very strong concepts behind them (watched: 25/04/2023-18/07/2023)

    Nomadland is a drama by Chloé Zhao about a widow who lives out of her van. Many of the characters in the movie are played by real-life nomads. It's a moving piece with imagery that lingers, perfectly achieving what it sets out to. Still, its lack of a conventional narrative or subject matter of personal interest to me makes it hard for me to get excited about it—this isn't a slight against the movie, just how it is (watched: 24/07/2021)

    Thomas Was Alone is an indie platformer by Mike Bithell, in which you play as a bunch of quadrilaterals. Its impeccable writing, visuals, soundtrack, and feel are only sullied by its underdeveloped level design. This is a game that got a lot of hype in the year it was released, and for me it just doesn't live up to that. Many game concepts are underutilised, there's a lot of deliberately tedious micromanagement where you position every rectangle just right, and it never really felt like it all came together. Not one level made me go 'wow', though there were a few nice 'ah-ha!' moments. This isn't a bad game, but I wasn't having much fun towards the end—go play Portal instead

    Making Comics is a reference book by Scott McCloud, presented itself in comic format to great effect. This isn't a story so it shouldn't really be here at all, but I think it's a solid primer on its subject (read: 09/06/2022)

    Weird: The Al Yankovic Story is a biopic-parody by Eric Appel (co-writing with Yankovic himself) starring Daniel Radcliffe in a Swiss Army Man-esque role. It may drag a bit, but there's no doubt that this thing is full of GREAT bits, and is overall a very good time if you're already a fan of Yankovic (watched: 17/11/2022)

    Velma is a deconstructive reboot of the smart alec from Scooby-Doo, showrun by Charlie Grandy. This cartoon was hugely controversial for extremely stupid reasons, yet more cannon fodder for the Culture War. Most of the people who complained about it did not watch it. In reality, it's a sharply-written comedy that reads like a mashup of Mystery Incorporated and Be Cool, with a few more swears thrown in. Self-admittedly apes a lot tonally from the likes of Riverdale. There's tons of really stupid gags in this, particularly meta ones, which charmed me, but I'm a freak. It's plain that the writers of this show were just Doing Their Own Thing, with Scooby-Doo serving as a platform for that, a way of garnering attention and providing an aesthetic. The biggest misstep appears to be that Warner Bros prohibited them from using Scooby-Doo himself as a character; without him, its identity flounders. All told, the show is almost fundamentally ill-conceived, but the fact that it was made gives it a self-consciously transgressive quality, along the lines of something like Freddy Got Fingered—you just can't believe any producer signed off on this, that they would spend so much money to painstakingly 2D-animate a show that only I could enjoy (watched: 21-22/02/2023)

    Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure is a cult-hit late-'80s time-travel comedy about two metalheads who need to abduct historical figures in order to write a history report. Pretty damn vapid, and not even as funny as it could be, but undeniably charming (watched: 29/04/2021)

    WALL-E is a Pixar animated environmentalist movie. It's got a lot of charm and creativity, but also has the subtlety of a brick (rewatched: 13/09/2020)

    Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt is a NSFW anime by Gainax that honestly kind of blows? Like, it's "ironic", but it's still just skeevy? The one thing it has going for it is the absolutely lush animation, heavily stylized and distinctive, plus its banging soundtrack and stellar English voice-cast, and it was borderline worth watching for the production alone, but the writing was mostly obnoxious. I liked the Transformers parody episode in particular, which was the reason I watched it in the first place; it did an amazing job of aping the style of the 80s cartoon (watched: 03/07/2022-08/08/2022)

    Transformers is Brian Ruckley's reboot of IDW's comic series, set during the outbreak of war on Cybertron. Ruckley's main strength is his worldbuilding, and although his run suffered from some pacing issues month-to-month, read archivally it's a very solid work. The various tie-ins by other writers… generally less so, but unfortunately they're almost all required reading. See my full review of every comic in the continuity here (read: 13/03/2019-29/06/2022, read Constructicons Rising Part 1 early on 04/09/2019)

    The Death of Stalin is a historical black comedy by Armando Ianucci (creator of Alan Partridge and The Thick of It) about the fall of the Soviet Union. It's equal parts funny and unsettling, to great effect, but I'm not sure how I feel about its nature as a story based on (but taking significant liberties from) real events (watched: 09/10/2020)

    Game Night is a comedy directed by John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein from a script by Mark Perez, about a group of friends who deal with a fake-kidnapping-turned-horribly-real. It's got plenty of imaginatively funny beats (the tables!), the general plot concept is great, it makes great use of callbacks, and the principal couple are an extremely charmingly offbeat pair, but the supporting cast's arcs are generally undercooked. It's about very normal weird people, which is often funny in context, but also a little offputting. A take I've seen on this movie that I really like is that it's the "perfect" movie, in an archetypical sense, like you go looking for the platonic ideal of a normal movie and this is what you find (watched: 29/11/2021)

    Sex Education is a sex-positive Netflix dramedy by Laurie Nunn, in which a weird savant and his crush set up an underground sex-therapy clinic at his high school. Though ostensibly set in Britain, the show uses a heavily-Americanised anachronistic aesthetic/setting inspired by John Hughes movies—this is something I found alienating, particularly as someone who experienced the English education system, as my general preference is for stories grounded in a particular time and place. Aside from the deftness with which it tackles taboo topics, the show's greatest strength is in its range of likable characters, and it's at its best when showing them dealing with slice-of-life (sexual-wellbeing-)monster-of-the-week shenanigans. Unfortunately, this is something that falls off as the show progresses, in favour of trite and circular relationship drama. Some of the characters start off as stereotypes and grow into their own, while others slowly get flanderised into worse versions of themselves (looking at you, Lily!), or wind up being forced to make arbitrarily-stupid/amoral decisions to spin up plot threads (Otis, poor Otis!). Really, this is the quintessential example of the Netflix-original formula—addictive, but maddening and meandering (watched seasons 1-3: 23-25/09/2021)

    The Writing on the Wall is a very short My Little Pony fanfiction. It relies entirely on the reader working out exactly what's going on—you'll know it if you do, I didn't (read: 05/05/2019)

    Red vs Blue is Rooster Teeth's long-running genre-defining Halo machinima. The serialised arcs which formed the bulk of the content were supplemented by a huge array of non-canon "PSA" videos and branded content, which vary wildly in quality. I've collected as many as I could find (that aren't already collected as part of the show proper) and put them in release order in this playlist

    Helvetica is a webcomic by J.N. Wiedle with a cool concept, nice art and likeable characters—sadly, it seems doomed to remain on a cliffhanger for the rest of time

    12:01 PM is a pre-Groundhog Day time loop short film about an everyman who finds himself reliving the same hour over and over. For its length, it manages to pack a lot in, but I'm not sure there's much of a reason to watch it instead of the movie that eclipsed it in the cultural canon (watched: 24/04/2020)

    The Big Lebowski is the Coen Brothers' 1998 absurdist crime comedy. It's got some really interesting beats and is generally pretty funny, but wasn't entirely my thing (watched: 13/12/2018)

    James Bond is a womanising British superspy who stars in his own blockbuster tokusatsu

    Daybreak is a Netflix-original dramedy graphic-novel-adaptation about a world where the adults are turned into zombies, leaving cliques of kids to fend for themselves in a Mad Max-ified American town. This feels pretty close to the kind of "the hardest part of the zombie apocalypse will be pretending I'm not excited" stories I wrote when I was younger, only much, much better. While its fourth-wall-breaking format, referential humour, and themes of empowerment go a long way towards making it endearing, I can't help but sometimes feel like the show stumbles: taking progressive stances while simultaneously mocking them, trying to be self-aware while being full of stupid characters, and generally just being a little less clever than it thinks it is (watched: 27/10/2019-29/10/2019)

    GLOW is a period comedy by Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch that uses the production of a women's wrestling show in the 1980s to explore discrimination in Hollywood. Is it successful? Only somewhat. It suffers from a nasty habit of homogenising its supporting cast as the plot requires while choosing to spend time on its more boring and unlikable characters. Still, it plays a textbook deconstruction/reconstruction arc over its two seasons. Apparently they're making a third season of this thing, which is… okay, I'm not really sure why they're doing that (watched first two seasons: 25/10/2018-29/11/2018)

    Battleship is HasLab's ill-begotten boardgame-adaptation-cum-navy-recruitment-ad. The first act of this movie has its occasional moment but is largely a drag. Then everything kicks off. All the bits where they play Battleship are incredible. The movie's denouement is blink-and-you'll-miss-it and by god it should be. If, like me, you spent your childhood hoping to recapture the sheer thrill of seeing Transformers (2007) in cinemas, seeing "FROM THE PRODUCERS OF" on a poster and convincing your parents that's the one to watch, now transitioning into adulthood but still chasing that exact same feeling, you literally can't go wrong with this friendlier store-brand version of the franchise. God what I'd give to see the Nerf movie treatment doc sitting in some filing cabinet at Hasbro (re-rewatched: 10/05/2022)

    An ordinary novel but every 10,000 words the audience kills the least interesting character is a complete web serial which technically does exactly what it says on the tin, but in a way that's vaguely weird and dissatisfying. Still, it's a lot of fun, with entertaining characters and original beats! See my full review here, where I gassed it up a bit to try and draw in more readers/voters (read first arc: 29/03/2020, finished: 13/06/2020)

    Waiting for Godot is a two-act play in which nothing happens. It invites interpretation, but in a way which ultimately left it feeling pretty empty to me—if you can apply pretty much any reading to it, can it really be said to be saying anything? (read Act I: 11/11/2019, read Act II: 13/11/2019)

    Beast Wars: Transformers is a 3D-animated three-season Transformers cartoon that comes across a little dated nowadays, and has lacklustre long-term plotting—but its later episodes deserve the praise they get (rewatched: 30/05/2020-18/07/2020)

    GTA: Spiderman is Podel's short ">comedy" machinima web series, following a bizarro version of Marvel's Spider-Man as he tries and fails to accomplish anything in his meaningless life. It's perhaps the single clearest example of Podel's work—but it is still practically incomprehensible, and will only become more so as time passes. The visual quality of this series gradually improves, culminating in a stunning second-season opener

    xkcd is a famous science-focused stick-figure webcomic. Most of its humour relies on knowing what that is

    LET IT BE is a short film by Bertie Gilbert where Death interferes in a failing relationship. It's got a very stilted style of dialogue, and the subtlety of a brick, but those aren't really marks against it (rewatched: 21/12/2020)

    Fleep is a webcomic about a guy stuck in a phone booth, by Jason Shiga. A little short, a little weird, and ultimately a little unsatisfying, but nonetheless very creative

    The Hollow consists mostly of elements that strongly appeal to my own tastes, but fails to deliver on practically every level. Maybe a young adult would find Vito Viscomi's Netflix Original animated series to be a good story, but I personally was very disappointed. Occasionally has some good jokes, and the second season did surprisingly well with the plot elements available to it. I'd maybe write a version of this show but good, if Worth the Candle didn't already exist—go read that instead (watched Season 1: 16/06/2018-17/06/2018, watched season 2: 25/06/2020-26/06/2020)

    Chokeslam is a wrestling-themed Fringe show by Tegan Verheul, intertwining personal storytelling with anecdotes from WWE history. This thing was full of passion, humour and honesty, with a killer twist waiting just outside the ring to punch me in the face. Tegan was an immediately captivating storyteller, and the show veered into physical chair-balancing performance art at times, which ruled. As an exploration of wrestling as a phenomenon, this obviously wasn't nearly as comprehensive or polished as something like Do A Powerbomb!, but it was enormously entertaining and still made some poignant points. My only complaint was that I wish the show had ran longer! (watched: 21/08/2023)

    The Map of Tiny Perfect Things is a John Green novel stuck in a time loop, directed by Ian Samuels and written by Lev Grossman. At times has some clever images and cool ideas, but at others it's annoying in the extreme. Ends badly. Watch Palm Springs instead (watched: 15/03/2021)

    Sherlock is a BBC drama by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat; a modern-day take on classic Sherlock Holmes stories. Starts pretty darn good and gets worse with each successive season

    The Elder Scrolls is an RPG series by Bethesda. I've never completed a game in this series, and largely prefer Fallout, but Skyrim is pretty cool I guess

    Nothing Breaks Like A.I. Heart is a short story/essay by Pamela Mishkin, partially written by GPT-3, which uses interactive elements to great effect. This is hyperfiction babey! (read: 06/10/2021)

    The Infinite Man is a time-loop movie written and directed by Hugh Sullivan about a man who tries to meticulously construct the perfect weekend for his lover. On an object level, the plot of this movie is self-consistent, and considering its complexity the extent of that achievement shouldn't be understated. But on a character level, all three of the characters in this movie may as well be aliens! The text and subtext here are in constant conflict, the movie's need to impress its allegory on the audience getting in the way of what I consider to be the absolute baseline for storytelling, namely making sure that characters behave at least somewhat believably (watched: 28/04/2021)

    Crow Cillers is an experimental webcomic by Cate Wurtz about some kids who go up against a cult, except really that's both more and less than what the plot actually is. At times, its abstraction and deconstruction comes off not as particularly intentful but instead just as though it's insecure about basic storytelling. There are some interesting ideas under the hood here, but the end result is fairly impenetrable (read Season 1: 02-03/04/2021)

    Infinity Train is a ten-episode animated miniseries about a girl who finds herself on a seemingly-infinite train where each car is a self-contained world of its own. Created by Owen Dennis, this thing is very reminiscent of Over the Garden Wall in tone (and Snowpiercer in setting)—I don't think it's got quite as much going on, but it's still entertaining and has a fair amount of emotional depth, and it appeals more to my own aesthetic sensibilities (watched: 24/10/2019)

    The Old Guard is a movie about a group of people with an unusual power—to say exactly what it is would be a spoiler, so if you plan to watch it, don't research it at all. I've seen it billed as a superhero movie, but I think that sets expectations poorly. The characters are really genuinely very good, but the actual narrative the movie weaves is frequently nonsensical or thematically bankrupt. It's definitely entertaining, with a few standout scenes, but its extremely lacklustre villain lets it down (watched: 13/08/2021)

    Living with Yourself is a Netflix dramedy starring Paul Rudd as a guy and his clone. Its excellent premise comes with interesting themes of self-sabotage and envy built in, which are sadly not fully-realised. Each episode ends on a cliffhanger promising escalation which is immediately undone by the next episode. The characters are all just a little too stupid and unlikeable, the comedy's a little too boring, the drama's a little too empty—but there are a few good beats sprinkled throughout. I wish that somebody would bury this show in a shallow grave and replace it with a better clone (watched Season 1: 25/11/2019-29/11/2019)

    How To Train Your Dragon is Cressida Cowell's series of children's books. Vikings and dragons in a unique world with good characters and a plot that suffers from Cerberus Syndrome in a good way. Inspired a film that was very different but still pretty good. The sequel to that film was less good

    Monster Motors is Brian Lynch's on-and-off comic book series, which reimagines a bunch of classic monsters as automobiles. Come for Last Stand of the Wreckers writer/artist Nick Roche's awesome designs, stay 'cause it's pretty fun

    Thoroughbreds is a black comedy by Cory Finley, adapted from his play, about a rich girl who conspires with her psychopathic friend to kill her stepdad. The movie's nature as an adaptation strongly comes across in its direction, which pads the movie's runtime with long, long awkward shots of nothing happening to perpetuate a constant atmosphere of unease, and in its script, which is heavily dialogue-centric and stylised. There's some interesting stuff in here about class roles, and some cool character beats, but I think it would have been much better as a shorter play (watched: 11/07/2022)

    floatland is a short animation by Victoria Vincent which uses a video game as a metaphor for ennui. Really beautiful colours and visuals throughout this one, efficient storytelling, and a strong concept, all leaving a strong impression (watched: 03/02/2023)

    Star Trek: Lower Decks is an adult sci-fi cartoon by Mike McMahan, briefly-head-writer of Rick and Morty. It's… fine? Inoffensive? Its scripts consist mostly of characters saying lots of words very fast, but somehow in spite of that it's not very joke-dense—or at least, it's never as funny as it should be? As someone who doesn't care about Star Trek, most of the lore goofs flew over my head. The series would have benefitted from stronger serialisation and from more closely-woven A-and-B-plots. However, I think its biggest misstep is that it doesn't really sell its core concept of losers on a spaceship: three of the protagonists are legitimately very competent and frequently interact with the more "important" crewmembers, and the remaining one is a suck-up. For me, the whole point of stories like this is that they're about mediocre people in extraordinary circumstances, and that's something this show seems disinterested in exploring. Nobody ever dies! They're literally redshirts and none of them die! My opinion on the show remained completely identical into its second season, it's literally just more of the same, even going so far as to quickly undo the status-quo changes the first season's cliffhanger implied—remind me not to fall for that one twice. All that said, shoutout to the penultimate episode "wej Duj" for actually being really good (watched Season 1: 14/10/2020, watched Season 2: 24/04/2022-26/04/2022)

    Off Book: The Improvised Musical is a podcast where Jessica McKenna, Zach Reino and a guest are joined by a band to attempt to improvise an entire musical on the spot. Assuming there's not too much in the way of production trickery here, these guys are jaw-droppingly good at what they do (listened to episode 256: 01/07/2022)

    G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero is an iconic long-running military comic series by Larry Hama, promoting a toyline from Hasbro. Hama's writing is honestly a damn sight better than anything that was happening over on the Transformers book, though I still wouldn't really go out of my way to recommend it to anyone. I feel like if you're not American you just can't truly get G.I. Joe. I read up to issue #50 before putting it down (about the first compendium's worth, the first five volumes of IDW's reprints), though maybe I'll return to it one day (read: 16/11/2023-04/03/2024)

    Barbie is a toy movie directed by Greta Gerwig. Go watch the trailer for it and you'll get 90% of the joy to be found in the film, with its gloriously literalist interpretation of the Barbie world. Sadly the majority of this movie is aimless and vapid, using a veneer of feminism as a trojan horse for nonstop marketing. What a waste! See my full review here (watched: 22/07/2023)

    Harry Potter is—well, you know this one. I've read the books a few times and seen the films twice through each, but my opinion of it has only soured with time. I can't deny its good points and its influence, but this world just kinda irks me somehow. Fantastic Beasts was okay. The Prisoner of Azkaban was way better than it had any right to be. The Half-Blood Prince was also pretty good, and there are certainly elements of these stories which are really good. On the whole, though, it doesn't work for me. However, it's basically required reading/viewing for Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a story on this list which is absolutely worth your time

    Frank is a movie by Lenny Abrahamson, commonly pinned as a black comedy. While it's certainly bleak and unsettling, I only rarely found it funny. YMMV. Technically though it's pretty good I guess

    The Roman Mysteries is a series of historical children's books by Caroline Lawrence which I loved when I was a kid but do not recall well enough to speak objectively on

    The Channeler is a gimmicky demo that uses a Tobii eye tracker as the basis for its ghost-themed puzzle-solving. I thought the writing, visuals, voice acting, and puzzles were all super charming! Would've loved to see a much longer game in this style, with more in the way of secrets (played: 29/04/2022)

    Giant Days is a British campus comic by John Allison. While technically spinning off from his prior webcomic work, this series functions standalone, and gets by on its charming characters and Disney-esque art. I don't really feel like it's that great, but some of the observational comedy is neat? (read: 30/09/2025-09/10/2025)

    Wallace & Gromit is an iconic series of British claymation films

    The Magic Circle is a metafictional video game where you play an unfinished game and attempt to piece it together, under the gaze of capricious god-developers. On a gameplay level, this thing is remarkably fun and original, a perfect expression of its premise with some clever puzzles and a fun art style. It would be a shame that there isn't more of it, but unfortunately the game's dialogue is just rubbish, to the point where it actively made me enjoy playing the game less. The characters are unlikable one-dimensional caricatures that would maybe have felt like cutting commentary to gamers back in 2015, but I honestly doubt it. With such a strong premise and game engine, it's a damn tragedy that the story on this one isn't good enough to recommend it (played: 02-03/04/2023)

    Kamen Rider is a genre-defining long-running Japanese live-action cartoon (basically it's Power Rangers) which I just watch random bits and pieces of sometimes I guess?

    Riddle School is a series of seven point-and-click Flash games created by Jonochrome over the course of a decade, which I mostly played back in high school myself. At the time, the interesting ideas and decent production value enraptured me—but a more recent replay after the release of the final entry in the series revealed the cracks in the writing

    Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is a years-later sequel to the Puss in Boots spinoff of the Shrek franchise. Directed by Joel Crawford from a script by Paul Fisher and Tommy Swerdlow, this film got a lot of critical acclaim, and I agree that it's pretty damn good for what it is. See my full review here (watched: 21/12/2023)

    "Born in the wrong generation" is a short story by Sam Kriss. While nothing too substantial, it's a decent showcase of Kriss' exceptional prose (read: 07/04/2025)

    The Importance of Being Earnest is a farce by Oscar Wilde, his most famous play. The script here is basically just nonstop quips, incredibly sharp stuff, with the narrative being something of a celebration of shallowness. I watched specifically the 2024 National Theatre production, which was professionally recorded and temporarily made available to watch free online, starring Ncuti Gatwa. This performance really tried to make it as sexually-charged as possible, which often felt quite mindless, but I suppose that itself is in the spirit of the story? (watched: 12/03/2026)

    Dinosaur Comics is a famous webcomic by Ryan North that's just the same six-panel set of images with different text each time, and honestly can you imagine bingeing this thing? What was I thinking (read up to comic 232: ??/??/201?)

    Rango is an animated meta-western directed by Gore Verbinski from a script by John Logan. Not bad for what it is! See my full review here (watched: 01/01/2025)

    Bubble is anime shovelware from Gen Urobuchi. See my full review here (watched: 21/12/2023)

    The Wages of Fear is a film about some men who are hired to drive tankers of volatile nitroglycerin over dangerous mountain roads. I watched this one as preparation for End of the Earth, but found little of use in it. It's frankly crazy how they made this thing—they made those guys swim in real oil! Plenty of good moments, but this is a fairly predictable film in the macro. See my full review here (watched: 11/07/2025)

    Run Lola Run is a German film by Tom Tykwer which presents three versions of the same 20 minutes, one after the other. It's sooort of like a time-loop movie, except not really. Good fun? I always meant to write a full review of this one but never found the time (watched: 13/10/2024)

    Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is a kids' animated movie by Seth Rogen in the new tradition of Into the Spider-Verse. The heavily-improvised dialogue is consistently not very funny, which plays into the film's theme of teenage awkwardness, but doesn't make for a particularly captivating movie. All of the interest here is in the sketchy visuals, which are extremely well-done. See my full review here (watched: 29/10/2023)

    Pokémon has a bunch of anime associated with it, that were a somewhat formative part of my childhood. Some bits and pieces I've watched more recently, though

    Septimus Heap is a series of seven YA fantasy books about the seventh son of a seventh son. Definitely a formative read for me as a kid, but I don't remember it that well now

    The Kid Who Would Be King is a children's adventure-comedy movie about a modern-day British boy who finds Excalibur. In short: truancy good, forgery good, mind control good, monarchy good, child soldiers good, this movie good (watched: 02/03/2021)

    Centaurworld is a Netflix musical cartoon by Megan Nicole Dong about a warhorse who gets isekai'd into a stereotypical lolrandom cartoon world. The production team's stacked on this one; I recognised Louie Zong and Megan McCarthy in there. The premise is, in my opinion, very good, and some of it develops well, and the early songs are good too. But many of the later songs prove overused or forgettable, most of the jokes feel phoned-in (they're not, it's plain the love's there, but they're not that funny), and the final stages of the plot feel largely disjointed and contextless. The middle stretch of the show isn't that interesting either, with lacklustre tribe-of-the-week stories addressing themes that are never really given the depth they deserve. It's a real shame, because there are some flashes of brilliance here, and genuinely affecting moments, that don't have the scaffolding to support them. I didn't watch season 2, instead just the songs, but get the impression it's more of the same, having been ordered as a single production season (watched Season 1: 06/09/2021, watched season 2 songs: 22/12/2021)

    Megamind is a DreamWorks movie about a genius supervillain who finally defeats his nemesis. It's got a sharp script that's arguably more prescient now than upon the film's release, and its animation is pretty good, but I find myself struggling to warm up to its aesthetic (rewatched: 19/10/2019)

    Dream Drive is Over_Red's litRPG isekai, best described as "Ready Player One, only good", though it starts out as "Ready Player One, only worse". Although it's head and shoulders above most litRPGs, with some really cool characters and ideas, Dream Drive's original magic system strays a little too far up its own butt for my liking—losing focus on the metaphor of the game itself. NSFW, which isn't inherently a problem—it just so happens that I really don't care for how this story treats gender, sex, and relationships in general. It's been seemingly abandoned after a ten-chapter first arc, which serves as a decent enough stopping point anyway. Go read Worth the Candle or The Erogamer instead (finished: 07/12/2018)

    The Alchemist is a short novel by Brazilian author Paulo Coelho about a shepherd who suddenly is gripped by the need to go to the pyramids of Egypt. Written in wonderful fairytale-like prose, this is a fascinating work, but it's totally philosophically wack. The universe doesn't conspire to help you! That's nonsense! If you really want something, and you achieve it, that's entirely through your own actions and dumb luck, and if you fail, it's not because you didn't want it enough, it's just dumb luck again. The novel's own internal logic betrays this truth. Still, it's a compelling window into a bizarre mind, and part of the core thesis—that people are led astray by their obligations—appeals to my worldview (read: 17/02/2022)

    Yu-Gi-Oh: The Abridged Series is the progenitor of an entire genre of parodies; LittleKuriboh's still-running original remains among the best in that genre

    Speed Racer is a children's movie about racing directed by the Wachowskis. It's like the Spy Kids movies, if they were directed on double the budget of The Matrix—it's visually ambitious, but its writing is middle-of-the-road even by kids'-movie standards (watched: 10/02/2021)

    Lost in Translation is a 2003 romance by Sofia Coppola, starring Bill Murray (as basically a fictionalised version of his pop-culture archetype) and Scarlett Johansson. This movie does a great job of communicating the exact feeling it wants to communicate—of alienation and aimless longing—but I personally would've preferred a movie where… things actually happen? I dunno, I got this movie, it made me melancholy, but I didn't enjoy it (watched: 02/05/2021)

    Sinister is a horror movie directed by Scott Derrickson (co-written with C. Robert Cargill) about a struggling true-crime writer who finds a box of homemade snuff movies. It's undoubtedly unsettling, with something of an interesting meta twist as it progresses, but this is kind of a boring and tropey movie, alternating between formulaic snuff and long scenes of the protagonist wandering around his house in the dark. At times, it's quite a funny movie, and it's undoubtedly well-shot, but the emotional plot revolving around the protagonist's family is a little undercooked (watched: 31/10/2021)

    M.O.D.O.K. is a stop-motion animated series by Patton Oswalt about the titular villain. Ultimately very disappointing, with writing that isn't nearly as funny, clever, or insightful as it should've been; this show wants to be Bojack Horseman, but falls short of even that standard. Ranked in this list according to its tie-in comic… (watched: 23-27/05/2021)

    The Fault in our Stars is a famous YA novel by John Green. While it's got some stylistic flair, its two main characters are pretty annoying—always spouting quotes and metaphors and generally feeling better than those around them. Its plot and dialogue are finely-crafted, but only in a way that makes them appear entirely-artificial and paper-thin

    Nueve Reinas (or Nine Queens as it's called in English) is a turn-of-the-millenium Argentine movie about two con artists that work together to pull off a major scam. Towards the end of the movie, it becomes clear that its central conceit is a clever and compelling one—but in terms of execution, it left me feeling cheated (watched: 25/12/2019)

    Time Cruisers is an old Lego comic about a kid and a monkey who travel through time. As a nostalgia-fest for circa-2000 Lego themes (notably many of those featured in Lego Racers and its sequel), this thing's a pretty interesting curio—its artwork is very expressive while still retaining the "feel" of the sets it features, although you shouldn't be surprised to hear that the writing is terrible (read: 09/05/2019)

    The Unweaving of a Beautiful Thing was the winning short story for an Effective Altruism contest, by atb. It's decently-written vegan propaganda, with a fair few good beats, but there's not quite enough meat on the bones in my opinion, with the strings clearly showing in a way that undercuts the message (read: 26/12/2021)

    Pony Island is a metagame by Daniel Mullins, where you mess around with a terrible arcade cabinet. It's got some clever and not-so-clever gimmicks, regularly veering between fun and boring. I didn't turn every stone in this one, but I was satisfied with where I left it (played: 06/06/2020)

    The Mousetrap is the world's longest-running play: an Agatha Christie whodunnit. It's pretty funny at times and well-constructed narratively speaking, but time has done it no favours—word-of-mouth has overblown the quality of mystery, which seems to me to be a pretty by-the-numbers whodunnit (watched: 24/08/2019)

    The Perks of Being a Wallflower is either really quite good, or really very bad, and I can't really work out which. At times, it's mindnumbingly nails-on-chalkboard stupid-pretentious. At others, there's wit and poignancy. Perhaps it's the Seinfeld effect, but it feels so rooted in cliché… I don't know. It's got soul, that's for sure (watched: 01/03/2021)

    The Boys is a superhero deconstruction comic adaptation that I strongly resent for adapting a terrible comic rather than a good web serial (such as, oh, I don't know, Worm). Because the thing is, technically, this show's really well-done! The plot and ideas presented are enthralling. But although it presents ideas, it has an aggressive disinterest in pursuing or exploring them. Frequently, it does the very things it criticises, and not in a particularly effective bad-on-purpose way. This show hates you, and doesn't want you to enjoy yourself, and doesn't want you to think anything more deep than "you're right, everything is irredeemably awful!" (watched Season 1: 06/09/2020-24/09/2020)

    Fingersmith is a long-ass novel by Sarah Waters, set in Victorian times. Hinges on a couple of big twists, which serve only to make the story contrived and mostly-boring. Sarah's Dickensian style might not be objectively bad, but it's certainly not to my tastes. A lot of other people do think this book's super awesome—it was given out free at my university because it won some awards, and I ended up pouring too much time into it

    Eragon is a series of young adult fantasy novels written by a young adult. I loved them when I was a kid but am pretty sure that they're actually terrible, minus one or two redeeming features

    The Wrong Mans feels like it should be higher on this list than it is—a tightly-plotted two-season action-adventure BBC sitcom that kinda feels like Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, only not as good (watched: 20/09/2017-06/10/2017)

    Hercules is a Disney animated movie directed by John Musker and Ron Clements (with a bunch of other co-writers) very very loosely adapted from Greek myth. I saw this bad boy as a kid and thought I remembered nothing from it until Meg showed up and I went. Oh. "I Won't Say (I'm in Love)" is the only song here to leave an impression—in fact, for a musical, there's a real dearth of songs generally—but a dash of genre-awareness and nonstop breezy one-liners don't change the by-the-numbers plot. Greek myth is ugly and messy and all the sharp corners are sanded down here like so much antique masonry; I don't know anything about modern Greek culture, but looks like the movie was rightly panned there, and I think that's interesting to think about at a time where Disney seems to be running out of national folklore to plunder. Also, wow, really says a lot that the animation in this movie was reportedly panned at the time, but here I am coming at it after decades of 3D-animated swill (early hints of which we see here, yikes!) and thinking it's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen (rewatched: 19/03/2023)

    Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is an environmentalist animated comedy about a guy who creates a climate disaster. Kind of cliched in the extreme, with not enough standout moments to justify even its brief runtime (watched: 02/05/2021)

    Transformers Animated is maybe the best modern Transformers cartoon, showcasing some incredible character designs and strong writing across its three seasons—but, again, it's just a Saturday morning cartoon

    The Afterparty is a murder-mystery series by Christopher Miller (working for once without his usual co-creator Phil Lord) about a murder at a high-school reunion. This series is most compelling on a structural level, as its unique gimmick is that each episode has a character recount the events of the same night from their perspective, with each being done in a different cinematographic style. At times, the differing details across each version of events gives rise to subtle comedy, character beats, or revelations. But honestly, considering this show was such a conceptual slam-dunk from a fairly esteemed writer, I felt like it never really lived up to its potential. Nothing is ever as funny or shocking as it should be—most notably, the show's foray into high-school flashback turns out to be utterly milquetoast. The characters are generally unlikable, and part of that's deliberate, but their cartoonish personalities make it hard to be invested in the stakes or drama—and in particular, I didn't like the way the show's love interest was written. Like 21 Jump Street, this show betrays the fact that Miller's talents are probably better applied to younger-skewing media (watched: 06-07/04/2023)

    Dota 2 has a series of webcomics, generally made to promote in-game updates, so there's nothing in the way of overarching story. Still, being written by the same people as a lot of Team Fortress 2 material, they're generally pretty witty

    Transformers: Cyberverse is a kinda-off-the-rails for-kids 3D-animated Transformers cartoon which amalgamates and reimagines various parts of the mythos. The voice acting is pretty ropey and the writing frequently discards narrative convention, which only occasionally works in its favour, but if you're an established fan there's plenty to love here, and if you're looking to get into Transformers fiction this serves as a pretty great primer (watched season 3: 18/02/2020-27/02/2020)

    The Hawkshaw Inheritance is a complete superhero serial by Orph. I enjoy its dry, detailed prose juxtaposing quintessentially-comicbook concepts against mundane considerations, and think it has a strong premise and some good episodic elements. The whole thing does read a little like political wish-fulfillment, with a tendency towards anticlimax, and on the whole doesn't have anything in particular to recommend it over similar stories such as Worm or, well, the countless other superhero deconstructions out there, aside from maybe being slightly smarter in the latter case (read: 31/08/2021-27/12/2021)

    Computer Fighters is a hokey short film by Neil Cicierega, Kevin James and Ryan Murphy. Great fun, one of the best examples of a video in their trademark faux-retro style (rewatched: 18/10/2021)

    Hellsing Ultimate Abridged is Team Four Star's take on Hellsing Ultimate. It's the very definition of absurd and edgy, but meanders towards the end of its run

    Cold War is a comic miniseries by Christopher Sebela about cryonics. The art in this one really, really lets it down; it's a high-concept story with many characters, ideas, and events, plus flashback sequences, so it's crucial to be able to tell the characters apart and follow the plot, but the art fails on this front. Each issue follows a different character, exploring their motivations for going into deep sleep (via memory-modification technology) and seeing those expectations crumble in the face of the horrible reality of the future. Even if the overall plot doesn't make much logical sense, and the tone is a bit edgy, these character stories are pretty good on the whole (read: 18/07/2022)

    Well in Hand is a short story about a mage in a war. It's good, but I read it a while ago

    Super 8 is a movie from J. J. Abrams, starring some kids who make a film. There's an alien in it? I'm sorry, but that's all I remember

    My Entire High School Sinking Into The Sea is an animated movie by Dash Shaw. Although its visuals are broadly unappealing—if original—they do occasionally resolve into moments of strange beauty. Its characters are generally unlikeable, its pacing is turgid, and its plot is a poor realisation of its otherwise excellent premise. All that said, some occasional moments were funny or profound and its soundtrack was well-utilised (watched: 16/04/2019)

    Sucker Punch is a weird-ass film by Zack Snyder. It's a pretty damn difficult film to get any sort of handle on—while its intention is clear, I think the finished product kinda muddies it. There are lots of great moments in it, the visuals are all great (if drab), but to expect an audience to understand exactly what it's trying to say when so many of the pieces are either implicit or held until the very end was pretty optimistic of Snyder. I think if you could sit down with him and watch this film in its entirety, he'd have a lot to say about the writing and directing decisions he made—but it doesn't shine through in a vacuum

    Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl is an old live-action Disney movie based on a theme park ride. The supernatural elements of the story are used to great effect within its plot, and Captain Jack Sparrow himself is pretty endlessly entertaining, but otherwise this movie didn't really appeal to me (watched: 23/05/2019)

    KPop Demon Hunters is an astonishingly successful animated musical by Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans. Man, this film is really not anything to write home about. It's fine! It's just fine. I disliked it more than I liked it. See my full review here (watched: 01/02/2026)

    The Most Popular Girls In School is a stop-motion animated web series by Mark Cope and Carlo Moss which casts a bunch of fashion dolls as high school students. The "Mean Girls meets South Park" description given by Variety to the show is basically spot-on. The first season in particular is pretty funny, but as the episodes' lengths creep longer the show loses some of its pace and wit

    RWBY is an animated web series created by Red vs Blue animator Monty Oum. Of the trailers, only the third is any good, though the fourth also ties into the series. As for the series themselves… the first is made on a shoestring budget, and it shows. The second looks much better and has more going on. The third is a very strange beast clearly influenced by the death of its showrunner. On the whole, the series is unremarkable, with some cringeworthy moments, a couple of legitimately-good jokes, and fight scenes that are entertaining depending on your taste (rewatched trailers: 21/07/2020, rewatched volumes 1-2: 22/07/2020, watched volume 3: 23/07/2020)

    No Evil is Betsy Lee's indie animated web series—as good as it is, it's a bit of a tough sell due to its odd pacing and hard-to-define subject matter

    LOVE DEATH + Robots is a mixed Netflix animated sci-fi anthology series mostly scripted by Gelatt, adapted from various short stories

    Olive, the Other Reindeer is a children's Christmas movie about a dog who thinks she's a reindeer that I really liked when I was a kid but don't remember that well. My grandparents had a Jack Russel, those dogs are cool

    Camp Camp is an animated comedy web series from Rooster Teeth about a bunch of crazy kids at an activity camp. Enjoyable and decently-well-crafted, but not technically good

    Phantom Thread is a drama by Paul Thomas Anderson about a fashion designer. Didn't love this one. See my full review here (watched: 03/10/2025)

    Kate & Leopold is a romcom where the guy accidentally arrives in the present from the 19th century. Hugh Jackman carries the movie, thankfully eschewing most typical fish-out-of-water learning-about-society shenanigans in favour of him teaching the other characters about forgotten social mores. However, the underlying structure of the movie is still highly conventional and predictable; though it has surprising depth at times, there are still key areas where aspects of the movie go woefully under-examined by the narrative—such as thematically, in terms of gender dynamics, and narratively, in terms of the mechanics of the time travel (watched: 28/05/2021)

    Garth Marenghi's Darkplace is a horror parody show created by Richard Ayoade and Matthew Holness. Notable for its format, which intersperses bad-on-purpose footage from the show with present-day behind-the-scenes interviews from the cast, it's generally very funny to watch, but truthfully I would've liked to see more in the way of overarching continuity (watched: 19/06-04/07/2021

    Angelic Kitty Miracle-chan is a short film by Colin Armistead about gender dysphoria and anime (it includes original animated material). This one went semi-viral as sort of a flashpoint for transphobia (though seemingly with people unable to agree over whether the video was, itself, transphobic). I felt like this controversy was undeserved, but also, I guess it was the only reason I watched it at all? It's fine for what it is (watched: 31/05/2025)

    Akira is an iconic anime film directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, co-writing with Izo Hashimoto to adapt his own manga. Honestly does not deserve its hype, I hated this one. See my full review here (watched: 29/09/2024)

    How to Talk to Girls at Parties is a short story by Neil Gaiman, where the joke is that the girls are literal aliens. The allegory feels perhaps overly obvious to me, not executed in a way that's anything to write home about. Still, there was something compelling about the protagonist's verbal reactions to the nothingburger strange things spoken by the girls. There's a graphic novel adaptation of this one which I haven't read, but I don't think it's very good based on the preview pages I've seen (read: 15/07/2022)

    Interviewing Leather is a superhero deconstruction web serial by Eric Burns-White (set in his wider call-it-a-cinematic-universe of works, which I haven't delved into, but this story is standalone) about a reporter who gets to interview a low-tier supervillain. It's not exactly bad, but for all the time it spends exploring and justifying its setting, the overall impression is somehow not particularly convincing. Read Worm instead if you want a grounded superhero story (read: 24/05/2021)

    Erfworld was a long-running fantasy webcomic (and later webcomic-mixed-with-prose) by Rob Balder about a guy who winds up in a world running on turn-based RPG rules. On pretty much every level, it's just fine, with nothing particularly great going for it. I only read the first book, but perhaps not all of the prose epilogues

    1 For All is a Dungeons & Dragons comedy sketch web series by Deerstalker Pictures. Clickbait in the extreme, but with solid production values and often genuinely funny jokes. The musical episode is great (watched: 12/05/2021)

    Axe Cop is a funny and unpredictable webcomic written by a five-year-old and drawn by a thirty-year-old. If you don't like it after the first four pages, drop it—it never really changes

    Robot Jox is an old B-movie written by Joe Haldeman (best known for The Forever War). Some surprisingly compelling stuff in here, though it is very bad, make no mistake! See my full review here (watched: 09/06/2024)

    The Fall of Doc Future is a largely-forgotten early work from the rational-fiction sphere, a superhero novel about a genius and his super-speedster daughter. There's a lot of really great stuff in here, from a superhero-storytelling perspective, but to put it bluntly, the problem with this book is that it is far too preoccupied with sex. Both the main female characters are alike in how the book approaches their sexuality, and it always feels a bit jarring? (read: 20-23/01/2026)

    Star Trek is a film reboot by J.J. Abrams, from a screenplay by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. There's a teeny bit of DNA from Michael Bay's Transformers films here, so I'm not strictly opposed to it, but there's sort of no reason to watch this thing. See my full review here (rewatched: 06/07/2025)

    Ride Your Wave is an anime romance movie directed by Masaaki Yuasa from a script by Reiko Yoshida. While ostensibly a magical-realist exploration of grief, in practice the movie has very little to say about anything, being an overlong slog with hokey dialogue (though this could probably in part be attributed to the pretty atrocious subtitles). There's about enough story in here to sustain a 15-minute short film, and in that form, the central surfing allegory would be more appealing, but as it is it takes over a third of the runtime to even arrive at the movie's conceit. While there's some of Yuasa's usual stylistic flair to the visuals, there are many shots which are plainly underbudgeted. This wants to be a Studio Ghibli or Makoto Shinkai movie but lacks the imagination, intelligence, or artistry of either (watched: 09/01/2023)

    The Craptacular B-Sides is a three-issue pilot Marvel Comics miniseries by Brian David-Marshall about a small-town trio of superheroes, which I only know existed because I found it in a random stack of comics at a second-hand bookstore; there is next to zero written online about these characters. Plainly dated and rooted in New Jersey, the writing has charm and the art has verve, but obviously in retrospect this series seems doomed from the outset, with a sad little editorial note on the last page imploring readers to write in if they want to see more from the characters. See my pitchpost here (read: 26/08/2022, re-read: 06/10/2025)

    Sabretooth: Death Hunt is a four-issue Marvel Comics series written by G.I. Joe writer Larry Hama. The plot of this one is really nothing to write home about; we follow Sabretooth as a protagonist, but he's an absolutely terrible person, so he doesn't engender much sympathy. Still, the heavy inks on this '90s art and the beautiful lettering courtesy of Richard Starkings lend the book a very striking look that was worth the price of admission (read: 10/08/2022)

    On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi! is an old Willian Tenn/Philip Klass sci-fi short story. It's occasionally very funny but, being someone who doesn't know a great deal about Jewish culture, many of the references were lost on me

    Tomorrow is a small-press indie comic by Jack Lothian, about an alienated old woman who suddenly finds that everyone in the world has disappeared. On a premise level, that sounds amazing, but I'm unconvinced that it really came out in the execution; the ending in particular I found to be a cop-out. Nonetheless, it's short and sweet, with some offbeat artwork (read: 24/07/2022)

    Jeff is a short film by the band shy kids about an Amazon delivery drone. It's fine! Bit throwaway. Listen to their track "walk to the store (moon kids)" for a compelling little epilogue (watched: 10/03/2023)

    Psycho is an iconic film by Alfred Hitchcock. Though his direction is inarguably fantastic, Joseph Stefano's script is embarrassingly bad. See my full review here (watched: 12/01/2025)

    Small Prophets is a BBC television series by Mackenzie Crook, about a man who turns to alchemy to track down his missing wife. Like many BBC productions in my experience, this is a curiously ropey narrative, really quite anecdotal in just how many scenes are evidently Crook working out some bugbear of his. It really takes the whole series to arrive at what should be the starting point, the "promise of the premise". The dialogue is often incredibly forced, stylized in an offputting way, even if there are some funny jokes in there. Bit of a wasted opportunity all told! (watched: 17-19/02/2026)

    Love Actually is a semi-anthology Christmas movie that's made up of like a dozen interlinked romances. It's a cool gimmick, but it's just too many, a lot of them are undercooked. There's just too many things about it that are thematically off, some of which are a result of it being dated, others just fundamental to it (christ, its attitude towards America, no wonder Brits eat this up). Still, it's fairly funny, admittedly mostly for meta reasons—ah, the early 2000s! Learning the one gay relationship in this flick was cut, and would've offed one of 'em, and christ, the other cut plotline… yeah this all tracks huh (watched: 01/12/2021)

    Arrival is a linguistics-focused sci-fi movie directed by Denis Villeneuve and written by Eric Heisserer, adapted from the Ted Chiang short story Story of Your Life. Its occasionally-interesting visuals and conceits are sadly marred by uninteresting characters, a distressingly slow pace and a lack of the sort of realism I've come to expect from seeing movies like The Martian and reading more "rational fiction" than is perhaps healthy. Its premise, that our language shapes our perception, is fascinating—sadly, the movie barely gets around to posing the question by the end of its two-hour runtime, instead choosing to meander on trite motherhood-centric emotional arcs that kind of only seem to reinforce unhealthy stereotypes about women in STEM? Having since read the source material, I can see everything that went wrong with this screenplay—which is legitimately bloated with padding and seems to misunderstand the actual concepts at play—and the direction, which is utterly miserable (watched: 01/12/2018)

    Airplane! is a classic disaster-movie parody from Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker. This movie got built up for me a whole bunch, and I was disappointed to find it's mostly just a bunch of—admittedly pretty funny—jokes strung together

    Take a Ten is a podcast musical anthology series spearheaded by Andy Roninson, where every episode's a ten-minute musical. I think the format works great and is generally used well, but it has the downside of making all of them feel a little same-y, as the episodes tend not to veer far outside their minimum-descriptive-length. But when it works, it works!

    The Wandering Inn is a slow-burning portal fantasy slice-of-life web serial by pirateaba. At its best, this story feels like a good Minecraft let's-play in prose. Its pacing and structure is perfect—cleverly interleaving two parallel narratives to contrast its main protagonist's mundane struggles against those of a more action-focused secondary protagonist. The story's fantasy setting is built with good clarity of purpose, relying heavily on established tropes but nonetheless finding its own identity. So what's the catch? Well, neither of these protagonists are likeable—both make consistently frustrating poor decisions. At times, the plot relies a little too heavily on contrivance to move things forward. This is ultimately a much less satisfying deconstruction of "portal fantasy" stories than, say, Worth the Candle, Dream Drive, or The Unbelievable Gwenpool. I decided to drop this story at the end of its first book, but skipped forward to the "Clown" interludes interspersed in later books—those chapters feature some more interesting characters and conceits, and are generally slightly higher in quality (read Book I: 04/03/2019-13/03/2019)

    My Hero Academia is a superhero anime adapted from a manga. While it's generally a lot of fun and has a strong visual style, its plotting is pretty shallow and lacks originality. Has one character that seemingly everyone in the world (myself included) hates—were it not for him, this show'd probably be a little higher on the list

    Johnny Mnemonic is a cyberpunk movie directed by Robert Longo, written by Neuromancer author William Gibson and starring Keanu Reeves. Evidently stricken with a fair amount of executive meddling, this is still a fairly charming and entertaining watch, thanks to Reeves' performance and the a few extremely offbeat lines (watched: 11/03/2022)

    Triangle is a clever horror movie about stupid people who find themselves trapped in a time loop on an abandoned cruise ship. There are lots of really great ideas in this movie which sadly don't come together to form a coherent whole; its themes would land much better if its characters behaved like real human beings and its conceit was more self-consistent (watched: 26/10/2019)

    The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl is a kids' movie by Robert Rodriguez, about two superheroes who may or not be figments of a young boy's imagination (it's kind of a Calvin/Hobbes thing). It's got a few legitimately great jokes and thematic beats, and is wild to watch in general, but it's sadly let down by its cursed-as-hell special effects and aesthetic sensibilities (watched: 18/11/2020)

    Little Shop of Horrors is a musical written by Howard Ashman (of the Disney Renaissance) about a hapless shopworker who inadvertently breeds a man-eating flytrap. Usually, the plant in question, Audrey II, is depicted using a series of progressively-larger puppets; however, I saw an amateur production of it where Audrey II was performed by an actor in impressive drag with a commanding stage presence—I love a big puppet, but this ruled. I think the idea behind this musical is pretty good on paper, but the writing consistently let me down throughout the whole show. The lyrics are rarely clever or memorable. The plotting is paper thin and often doesn't know what it wants to satirise. Let's break it down. This is partly a story about domestic abuse; Seymour is contrasted against his love interest Audrey's abusive boyfriend, starting out as a sensitive fellow but becoming consumed by greed, with Audrey II acting as the physical manifestation of the control he wishes to exert over Audrey. It's partly about familial abuse, as Mr. Mushnik belittles Seymour and uses overtures of fatherly affection solely as a means of control. It's partly about self-harm, as Seymour's miserable life leads him to give his own blood to the only thing that promises him release. It's partly about capitalism, the folly of the suburban dream, and the willingness of people to overlook any evil so long as money is being made and they are being entertained. And it's also partly about dentistry, and about makeup, for some reason. But the thing is, when Audrey talks about her bruises, or sings about her dream of a cookie-cutter domestic life, it feels less like a meaningful critique of these societal failings, and more like the joke's on her. For his part, Seymour is never sincerely likeable to begin with, and his descent into depravity never quite manages to sweep you along—it's just a going-through-the-motions of a heel turn, each murder clearly signposted so as not to be too shocking, Audrey even granted a scenery-chewing death scene. The musical pretty explicitly lays out that Audrey II is in fact a psychic plant with the power to change a person's luck, which seems misguided to me; it'd be better if it were more ambiguous, more obviously an externalisation of Seymour's monstrous self. The downer ending is pointlessly maudlin and fails to cohere into anything thematically resonant. This is a much-liked musical, but I think many of the common readings you see applied to it are precisely that: things you must bring to it as an audience member, rather than anything presented by the text itself. I find myself drawing comparisons to Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, which is also about an incel (before we had the word "incel") resolving to kill his love interest's boyfriend, only to wind up killing her too. The lyrics in Doctor Horrible are just generally much cleverer to my eyes, which helps sell the story; it's also much more focused in its deconstruction of its protagonist, with its merciless depiction of the ideological void at the core of his character. Where both Doctor Horrible and Little Shop of Horrors both shine is in the moments where you see that the protagonist truly just doesn't understand his crush at all: in this case, when Seymour puts on the leather jacket. Take my review with a grain of salt, however—my enjoyment of this specific performance was sadly somewhat hampered by poor sound engineering which rendered some of the more lyrically-intricate passages briefly unintelligible, and by someone (who I'm led to believe was a member of the production team) sitting right behind us in the audience who would laugh deafeningly loudly at every single vaguely comedic beat. Not really a great way to support your cast and crew, love! (watched: 27/01/2024)

    Delve is a pretty comfy ongoing LitRPG written by SenescentSoul with an unusually strong focus on NUMBERS. It suffers from most of the genre's usual trappings, but wears its flaws on its sleeve and makes good enough use of foreshadowing that you can kinda trick yourself into thinking what you're reading is meaningful. It's genuinely charming, and good fun if you're looking for another fix after finishing Worth the Candle, Dream Drive and Mother of Learning (caught up to chapter 84: 04/03/2020-11/03/2020)

    iZombie is the CW's loose adaptation of the Vertigo comic of the same name. The ongoing plot's pretty consistently good, the police procedural stuff is pretty consistently mediocre

    Ms. Marvel is a rebooted Marvel Comics series written by G. Willow Wilson. I can never quite tell if I think the distorted proportions of Adrian Alphona's art are good or not; I think not? It's very sketchy stuff, at times obviously technically wrong, and I don't think it really fit the tone of GWW's writing? As a teenage Muslim with a strong personality and cool powers, Ms. Marvel clearly struck a chord with readers and rocketed into a place of prominence in Marvel's character roster, but from the perspective of an adult reader I don't think there's any reason to check out this comic. Much of the humor is astonishingly dated to the 2010s, with incessant references to memes, and Ms. Marvel acting metatextually as a Marvel fan herself; where Gwenpool was specifically interested in deconstructing this fandom, it's basically entirely incidental here. The actual plotting is honesty such ridiculous story-logic stuff, it drove me crazy; the first arc has a pat generational-conflict allegory wherein a bunch of teens willingly sacrifice themselves to become living batteries for a supervillain, which is something no teenager I have ever met would do. Still, I can see the merits of this work for its target audience, and clearly it just wasn't for me! (read issues #1-19: 19-21/01/2024)

    Cars 3 is the threequel to Pixar's Cars, wisely pretty much entirely ignoring the plot of Cars 2 in favour of a return to racing backed up by rudimentary metatextual ponderings. For most of its runtime, this is so-bad-it's-good: Boomer McQueen is edged out by a new generation of asshole zoomers, prompting him to reject their methods and wander around backwater locales screwing up in an attempt to regain his mojo. At the end of the movie, though, plot developments retroactively justify many of the film's dumber moments—I just wish it had shown its hand earlier! (watched: 24/12/2020)

    Into the Woods is a Disney movie directed by Rob Marshall adapted by James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim from their Brothers-Grimm-tales-inspired musical. It really struggled to hold my attention, with its flat and lifeless visuals, often-grating vocal deliveries and songwriting (I don't know how to describe it, it's all quite directionless and for-want-of-a-nail in terms of rhyme schemes), and stories that I felt I'd seen a million times before without much in the way of a new twist. This would've been much, much better as a live musical, where the actors would be able to play off the audience and involve them directly; as it is, it just feels uncanny (watched: 20/08/2022)

    Clue is a murder-mystery farce directed by Jonathan Lynn (co-written with John Landis) adapted from a board game. It's pretty funny, and its multiple-endings gimmick is good fun too (watched: 24/03/2021)

    Ghostbusters is an iconic 80s supernatural comedy directed by Ivan Reitman, with writers Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis starring alongside Bill Murray. It's occasionally pretty funny, with sharp dialogue, but it shows its age—I wasn't personally that into it (watched: 26/10/2019)

    Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist is a sorta-romcom written by Lorene Scafaria starring Michael Cera and Kat Dennings which wasn't that great and mostly just made me sad (watched: 01/12/2019)

    The Bureau of Isekai Affairs is a NaNoWriMo web serial by Vebyast, about a software engineer who finds herself in a world that people regularly get isekai'd to. Vebyast displays some astonishingly interdisciplinary technical knowledge, and channels some personal tics to create a somewhat novel protagonist/narrator. It's just good comfy stuff (read: 23-24/11/2021)

    The Simulacrum is an ongoing loose parody of Japanese high-school fiction by Egathentale. Featuring an amnesiac protagonist in a world that runs off harem comedy tropes, this story initially seems to overcome its weak prose—thanks to a strong concept, likeable characters, and extremely comfy scene-to-scene interactions. However, things start to fall apart towards the end of its first volume—and a plot point at the beginning of its second seems to cement it as less of a parody and more as a sincere harem comedy. Which, uhh… yeah, I'm good (read first 27 chapters: 15/04/2019-18/04/2019)

    Dumbing of Age is a college dramedy webcomic by David Willis. Has nice art and a bunch of nice moments that kept me subscribed through some kinda-bad arcs. I think the main problem with this webcomic is that Willis can write well, but often chooses not to. Actually, no, the problem is that Willis has decided that newspaper comics represent the best artistic medium invented by mankind and has devoted his life to making one every day

    Now You See Me is a 2013 ensemble movie about magicians who rob banks during their performances. It's bad. The movie exists in a world where actual, legitimate magic is seemingly real, but where society is otherwise indistinguishable from reality. Very little in this movie makes logical sense. It's all flash and no bang. The characters, while stereotypical, are established as having traits which get completely papered over as they instead become a homogenous gang of smarmy assholes. I had fun watching it, so I can't really complain, but also I can (watched: 14/11/2021)

    As You Like It is a Shakespeare play. The performance I saw—in 2019 at the Globe—made some risky choices which I can't say I cared much for, but was generally funny and entertaining. I've heard this play described as a crowd-pleaser that fails to live up to the standard set by most of Shakespeare's other plays, and am inclined to agree with that assessment, though it did have a fair few moments of poignancy (watched: 26/08/2019)

    Welcome to Night Vale is a low-key comedy/horror podcast that I don't like as much as Wolf 359, and the sheer time investment led me to cut my losses after thirteen episodes

    Surveillance Camera Man is an old series of viral videos where a guy films people without their permission. It should never have been made, because the distress caused to its victims outweighs any justifications for it, but as a piece of media viewed dispassionately the end result does say something about surveillance states and the powerlessness we feel when the social contract is broken. The diversity in people's reactions is fascinating: a minority are bemused, but most are outraged and attempt to engage in argument with their aggressor, who simply stonewalls any attempt at reasoning. The most successful responses are those that threaten the camera directly, but I wonder why only a couple of people think to take out cameras of their own. The footage is at its most compelling when it centres on people with nothing to lose: "I've never had someone take that much interest in me before." (watched: 25/04/2020)

    Nothing You Have Done Deserves Such Praise is an experimental Flash platformer that combines poetry and 19th-century anatomical artwork. I was really enjoying it, right until I fell off a ledge and fell forever, which felt like a satisfying conclusion in its own right (attempted: 09/11/2019)

    6 Underground is a super-violent Netflix-original Michael Bay movie about some people who fake their deaths to become a paramilitary squad that travels the world murdering evil people. Untangling the morals of this one is a nightmare, but I'll say this much: this movie looks great (as you'd expect) and is occasionally very funny. I don't actually recommend it, but it was fun (watched: 14/12/2019)

    Deathtrap is a film adaptation of a play by Ira Levin. While tense, funny, and well-plotted, this film is ultimately—like its characters—far too clever for its own good. Its first act is far better than its second, but makes the crucial mistake of hiding its twist too well. I think it'd probably work a lot better as a play, too (watched: 13/04/2019-14/04/2019)

    Seed is a webcomic about a kid who interacts with a malicious Artificial General Intelligence. Though its premise holds a huge amount of potential, the story largely squanders this potential by having the AGI simply be far too unambiguously evil. On the bright side, the story's art style and panel layouts are exceptionally appealing, particularly by webcomic standards. Go read Friendship is Optimal instead for a better look at people interacting with an AGI (read Season 1: 20/12/2019)

    Spider-Girl is an alternate-universe Marvel comic starring the hypothetical daughter of Peter Parker and Mary Jane. Start with What If..? #105 before diving straight into issue #1 and continuing on—reading the 1999 Annual after issue #12 and issue #1/2 after… I dunno, after #13? That sounds about right. This is a solid comic, but nothing really to write home about, so I ended up just dropping it (read The Complete Collection Vol. 1: 20/07/2019-22/07/2019)

    Exo-Force is a kids' mecha franchise from Lego, which included a series of six books written by BIONICLE writer Greg Farshtey

    Dracula is an epistolary horror novel by Bram Stoker, published at the end of the 19th century. A century later, it's a profoundly strange work, with its portrayal of gender roles and race in particular being fascinating(ly bad). With how much of the story's trickled into pop culture, it reads less like genuine horror and more like a total farce, with a cadre of broadly-indistinguishable men justly and nobly fighting for their ladies. The plot hinges on a central contrivance and ends in total anticlimax, and is prone to extreme bloat—the prose, however, is surprisingly readable and charming, even in the way it rambles. As an adversary, Dracula's powers are seemingly arbitrary in a way that damages the stakes to a modern-fantasy-worldbuilding-spoiled reader (read: 10-12/09/2021)

    Logicomix is a graphic novel about maths. Well, no. It's a graphic novel about people who do maths. Or maybe it's about people making a graphic novel about people who do maths? Honestly, this thing veers between insecure and pretentious and I didn't like it that much

    Heathers: The Musical is an adaptation of a dark comedy set in a high school. I watched this version (directed by Jim Tropp, performed by the Rock River Repertory Theatre Company), and I haven't seen the original source material. This is a pretty funny show which at times can be rather touching, with some great songs. I thought the performance in the version I watched was pretty great, but I'm by no means an expert. "Lifeboat" in particular stood out as a short-and-sweet well-written song. A lot of people really like this musical! They think it 'deals with' a bunch of important, relevant issues. I kinda disagree—while many issues are presented, I don't think this musical explores them very much (nor can it, with the plot being what it is). If you like stories set in high schools, you'll like this. If you're tired of that kind of story, give this one a miss: it won't change your mind, but maybe Eighth Grade will

    The Guild is a live-action web series written by and starring Felicia Day about some people who play an MMORPG. Gets better with each progressive season, and has something of a cult following—but they're lying to you if they tell you it's actually good. Go watch 2Kawaii4Comfort instead

    Theatre Class is a mockumentary web series by Brandon Rogers about, well, a theatre class. Great right up until the plot kicks in

    Black Books is a Channel 4 sitcom created by Dylan Moran and Graham Linehan, starring the former alongside Bill Bailey and Tamsin Greig. It's pretty funny, and individual episodes are about as well-constructed as one can expect, but—in my opinion—it lacks clarity, consistency, or continuity. Characters generally just behave as required for plot contrivances, with any deviance from their typically-erratic behaviour just being explained by the fact that they're all completely smashed on wine most of the time (watched Season 1: 22/10/2019, watched rest: 23/10/2019-)

    Troopers is a CollegeHumor sketch series set on a not!Death-Star. It's hit and miss (watched: 05/01/2021)

    Code Monkey Save World is a comic written by Greg Pak and Jonathan Coulton, based on the latter's music. This one is interesting in how it attempts (and, honestly, fails) to deconstruct Coulton's songs through a feminist lens, with the cultural landscape already having shifted significantly since their original release. There's some funny beats peppered throughout. Coulton's music is great, and I think this is a must-read if you're a fan, but holds no unique merit of its own (reread: 14/10/2022)

    Artemis Fowl is a YA book by Eoin Colfer. It's good for kids, thanks to its original premise, decent plotting and strong characters, but doesn't hold much/any value for adults. Some particularly-good subtle comedic and emotional beats serve the story well, but it underuses its framing device and often feels contrived in bad ways. Honestly, I'm kind of just not that into the aesthetic of "olde-timey fairies but they're cops" (reread: 26/06/2020-)

    He-Man and the Masters of the Universe is a 2021 Netflix reboot of the iconic '80s fantasy franchise. In a weird techno-medieval setting, the chosen hero reclaims the divine sword. This is very specific, but I couldn't help drawing a lot of comparisons to BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui, and it's on a similar level of quality writing-wise. It's very… straight-laced? At times funny, but not nearly as funny as it should be considering the material it has to work with? It's just a normal kids' cartoon, nothing at all to write home about (watched: 17-19/09/2021)

    Sex with Friends (and Other Tiny Catastrophes) is a Fringe musical by Sam Woof about a group of friends whose jobs and relationships slowly tear them apart in post-uni life. This felt like exactly what I'd imagine a Fringe show to be like, right down to the part where it… wasn't very good? The performances were all great but most of the characters were flatly unlikeable; there's a part at the end of the first act where the more-working-class member of the group goes off at the rest for their privilege, and justifiably storms out, but then in the next act after a timeskip he just comes back and the class conflicts are never again acknowledged. The drama feels contrived in a way that's maybe true to life, but no less insufferable for it; the dialogue is rendered flat and caricatured in service of snappy one-liners that only sometimes land. I broadly had fun with it, though? (watched: 19/08/2022)

    Sleepwalk with Me is an semiautobiographical movie by writer/director/actor/comedian quadruple-thread Mike Birbiglia, adapted from an episode of This American Life and previously his one-man off-Broadway show. As his relationship deteriorates, the comedian starts having sleepwalking episodes. This film is kind of maudlin, never as funny as it should be, spending too much time on scenes that aren't comedy or sleepwalking (I think the story would have benefitted from more artistic licence, treating the sleepwalking as a vaguely supernatural thing, with the character's sleeping self taking over or otherwise interfering with his personal life directly). Both of the characters are kind of ciphers, just kind of doing stuff with no sense of their own introspection, which I get is kind of the point, but in execution it comes off flat and unlikable. Special shoutout to the proposal scene though, the editing there is insanely good (watched: 06/04/2022)

    Percy Jackson is a series of Greek-mythology-inspired urban fantasy YA novels, by Rick Riordan. They... probably don't hold up

    Love In Hate Nation is a musical with a book by Joe Iconis (of Be More Chill fame). It is… unfortunately, not great. Although it throws a lot of heavy themes at the wall, it doesn't really tackle any of them in great detail or with much nuance. Taking his other works into consideration, I think Iconis finds male viewpoints more intuitive; there's a certain uncanny-valley effect at play when he tackles feminist themes. Leaving aside subtextual issues, the truth is mostly just that this musical isn't enjoyable, thanks to a parcity of jokes and a mostly-undercooked score (watched: 18/12/2020)

    Re:ZERO—Starting Life in Another World is a time-loop isekai anime, which is 2/3rds the best premise ever and 1/3rd the worst piece of garbage. Honestly, this is the kind of thing that makes me lose all interest in watching anime—appalling pacing, weird themes, flat antagonists, unpleasant fanservice, lack of narrative focus, an unlikable protagonist, and honestly just a visual design sensibility that did absolutely nothing for me. I should've quit this one much earlier than I did (watched Season 1: 17/02/2020-25/06/2020)

    Wonder Woman is, well, ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh… this film isn't bad, per say, but people seemed really taken by this thing when it came out. It's just not great! It's barely good! Any time something good or interesting happens, you can bet ten minutes down the line they'll do something which retroactively ruins it. There is nothing special about this movie. Anyone who says it's the best DC movie is deluding themselves, not that I care for the others. I hear the studio changed the ending to the movie at the last minute; what I've heard of the original ending is that it would've fixed (un-broken?) my biggest problem with the movie

    It Looks Like You're Trying To Take Over The World is speculative fiction by pseudonymous AI pundit Gwern Branwen, that attempts to describe a rogue AI's rise to power using solely "known" techniques; what this boils down to is a lot of jargon and hyperlinks to try and make a bog-standard AI story sound convincing, and because I'm not an expert, it read no different to me than any of its precursors (read: 09/03/2022)

    Dog Moon is a short Vertigo graphic novel that generously describes itself as a 'haunting work of staggering emotional power and artistic excellence', written by Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter with (admittedly excellent) art by Timothy Truman. I picked this up on a whim for 50 cents in a comic shop on holiday in Bruges (and I hate that I just said that), but wasn't particularly taken by it. It looked like it'd been sitting there for a while—since 2004, according to its publication date. Its 'gimmick', if it can be described as such, is that it is written entirely using one-syllable words. I didn't notice this until it was explicitly pointed out to me in the afterword, although I did notice the rhythmic, plain and sincere tone this technique lent it. It's remarkable what this comic achieved within that constraint. Maybe I didn't 'get' it, or maybe it just wasn't very good

    PlayTime is a French comedy by Jacques Tati. My friend roped me into watching this one and I thought it was asinine. See my full review here (watched: 24/06/2025)

    The Vigilant is a series of one-shot superhero comics (Maelstrom, Legacy and Rapture) by Simon Furman which reinvent old British comic characters for the modern day. It's heavily rooted in its metatext, to the point of being effectively impenetrable if you don't go out of the way to read examples of all the strips it draws from, and even with that context isn't much to write home about—but it's not bad by any means, and there's a decent amount of good stuff in there. The reboot began with strips in the 2000 AD Free Comic Book Day 2015 and 2016 issues, by Rob Williams and Barry Island, and then with the Scream! & Misty Halloween Special 2017's Death-Man: The Gathering by Keith Richardson. Furman also wrote The House of Dolmann for the Smash! Special 2020 (read: 15/08/2020)

    Zombies vs Robots is Chris Ryall's IDW comic about robots and zombies. The early series have incredible artwork, then that good artwork goes away and you realise you never really liked it that much anyway

    The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is a musical of which I saw an amateur production one time. Had some good stuff going on, but wasn't anything to write home about

    Hancock is a superhero deconstruction directed by Peter Berg (later tapped by Hasbro for Battleship, which makes total sense) from a script by Vincent Ngo and Vince Gilligan (of Breaking Bad, what?!). Despite its pedigree, this is pretty poor stuff on the whole, but maybe worth a watch if you're a diehard superhero fan. See my full review here (watched: 30/12/2024)

    Warcraft is a big-budget movie adaptation of the MMO of the same name. It had some good stuff going for it—including some aspects that felt like the DNA of a Warhammer movie—and seemed to be made by people with a real love for the source material, but ultimately fell apart in the execution

    Super Mario Galaxy 2 is a… why is it even on this list? It has about as much story as the back of a cereal box. It's just a fun 3D platformer by Nintendo (replayed: 22/12/2020-)

    "Adventurers" is a short story by Z.H. Gill in the style of a World of Warcraft chatlog. Definitely one that thinks it's much cleverer than it actually is. Formal gimmick aside, there's nothing of interest in the story (read: 27/10/2025)

    Diary of a Wimpy Kid: 25 Years Later is an edgy fancomic by u/jugdeggrogs which imagines a depressing adulthood for Greg Heffley, introducing some queer themes. Though it makes an admirable attempt at capturing the style of the original books, its tonal departures ruin any chance of verisimilitude. I didn't bother reading the continuations (read: 08/01/2023)

    Pokemon: Hard-Mode is the webcomic which started the "Nuzlocke" ruleset for Pokemon playthroughs. It's got charm, but not much else going for it. Frequently references LOST. I might pick it back up sometime (read Ruby: 21/08/2019)

    Elemental is a Pixar animated film directed by Peter Sohn. Incredibly clumsy allegory here, and it's not like the movie is otherwise good enough that you can overlook it. See my full review here (watched: 26/02/2024)

    Absolute Batman is an alt-universe spinoff series by Scott Snyder. Much-hyped but absolutely not worth reading whatsoever. Daniel Warren Johnson wrote an Annual story for this one, which is maybe a bit better than the main series itself, but still kind of superficial work by DWJ's standards. See my full review here (read Volume 1 and Annual: 29/10/2025)

    Mystery Men is a 1999 superhero adaptation of some obscure comics by Bob Burden, directed by Got Milk? commercial director Kinka Usher. It's not a good movie by any means—it's dated, hackneyed, predictable (at least with a couple of decades' worth of better superhero spoofs following it), and generally a bit rubbish, but there are some occasional beats (note that it's got a two hour runtime, so it really needs a lot more than that) that I really appreciated. Moreover, a lot of the characters are genuinely endearing. I don't regret watching this movie, which is more than I expected of it going in (watched: 13/06/2021)

    Robot Dreams is a dialogue-free animated film by Pablo Berger. Cloying and flatout bad. See my full review here (watched: 26/12/2024)

    Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is an adventure comedy sequel/reboot about four kids who get stuck in a video game. Directed by Jake Kasdan, this movie turned out to be surprisingly good—but ultimately fails to go nearly far enough for my liking, being a fairly conventional piece on the whole. There's no real reason to watch this (watched: 10/01/2018)

    Snow Crash is an influential cyberpunk novel by Neal Stephenson. It consists of a fine short story followed by many, many more chapters of utter dreck that fail to offer the slightest shred of thematic interest. Reads like someone's tabletop campaign put to page verbatim. Absolutely no sense of structure or pacing. The book's constant sexualisation of its teenage deuteragonist is utterly unhinged, as is the parodic "Hiro Protagonist" who leads the story, a katana-wielding hacker who is simultaneously down on his luck and also a huge deal actually. The prose has an offputting fixation on racial traits. Midway into the book, it devolves into bizarre expository screeds about Sumerian civilisation, thinly corkboarding together modern-day programming, the evolution of language, and ancient myth in a manner Stephenson probably thought was really clever and interesting, but which is absolutely devoid of significance, just like every other event that occurs in this sophomoric trainwreck. I don't care how groundbreaking this book was; it was obviously lauded by an insular community of optimistic male geeks who unironically think Hiro is a pretty cool guy, and I can't say I blame them considering Stephenson offers no meaningful commentary to the contrary (read: 20/10-15/12/2022)

    Kingsman is a heavily-stylised spy film franchise based on some comic books by Mark Millar, that sadly doesn't know whether it wants to parody its source material or not

    Inside No. 9 is a British black comedy anthology by Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton

    Pokémon: The Mew-sical is a super-low-budget fan-made college production by Gabe Greenspan and Ryan Bowers which is probably the best light-hearted spoof of the franchise I've seen. While it's not without many of the awkward moments that plague productions of its kind and the composition's pretty lacklustre, the script is often very funny and the lyrics are well-written (watched: 20/07/2019)

    Passengers is a sci-fi romance starring Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence, directed by Morten Tyldum from a script by Jon Spaihts. So studio-exec-airbrushed as to be pretty soulless, the movie is full of appealing beats that simply fail to resolve into any kind of meaningful whole. The way the movie portrays its central dilemma is highly unpleasant. See my full review here (watched: 13/06/2022)

    Monster House is an animated Halloween children's movie directed by Gil Kenan and written by Dan Harmon, Rob Schrab and Pamela Pettler. Apparently Dan Harmon was unhappy with the final movie, and his account of what they changed about it makes sense to me. This is a very, very weird movie, with offputting uncanny-valley animation, and a story that's just frankly bizarre? As a kid, I think it would've creeped me out a great deal. As an adult, it's just plainly not for me. Also the characters are literally just the Harry Potter trio (watched: 31/10/2021)

    Pokémon Detective Pikachu is a mystery comedy based on the famous video game franchise. Although its visuals are excellent and its jokes mostly land, the performances of its human leads leave something to be desired and its plot is weak. I tricked myself into thinking that this movie would present some interesting themes going in, but that sadly wasn't the case, so I think it had a lot of wasted potential (watched: 10/05/2019)

    Ready Player One is an American isekai directed by Steven Spielberg. Went into this one hoping, expecting, to find something worthwhile—in the end, nope, it was even worse than everyone said it would be. Occasionally cool visuals and one-or-two funny lines are lost amidst a sea of pure garbage. If this was an improvement over the source material, I'd hate to read the book it's based on. This (and, I suppose, the earlier Jumanji reboot/remake) is probably one of the mainstream west's earliest forays into this kind of story—go read Worth the Candle, a story actually worthy of your time, or even Dream Drive if you want to find out how to tell this kind of story right. Compare Sword Art Online Abridged (watched: 20/11/2018)

    The Elemental Arena is an ongoing wannabe-rational multi-isekai LitRPG by Gilgilad7. It has a lot of potential and glimmerings of a good story, but its execution is pretty awful. See my full review here, which some yet claim is the reason for the story's unending hiatus following the conclusion of its first book… or maybe it was the pandemic… it is a mystery… (caught up to chapter 21: 11/03/2020-12/03/2020, read Book One Epilogue: 01/07/2020)

    Drive is a massively overrated film by Nicolas Winding Refn, from a screenplay by Hossein Amini adapting James Sallis' novel. The very definition of style over substance. See my full review here (watched: 06/09/2024)

    Spider-Man is a 2002 Sam Raimi movie adaptation that singlehandedly laid out the groundwork for tons of superhero movies that followed, but which when viewed twenty years later basically sucks in almost every respect, barring a few interesting ideas or beats. I first tried watching it as a kid, but—being severely arachnophobic at the time—made it less than five minutes in before totally freaking it out. As a more well-adjusted adult attempting to watch it in full for the first time, I was expecting a good movie that's been meme'd to hell since its release, or at least a so-bad-it's-good movie—but instead it made my skin crawl, thanks to the horrible decisions of its profoundly unlikable cast of characters. Seriously, it just… wasn't fun to watch, at all; any unique merits it once held are imperceptible in the face of countless better-done imitators (watched: 30/11/2020)

    Transformers Prime is one of many animated incarnations of Transformers—probably the blandest of 'em (pilot watched: 28/05/2018)

    District 9 is a semi-mockumentary sci-fi film directed by Neill Blomkamp, co-written with Terri Tatchell. An extremely heavy-handed apartheid allegory, albeit one without much depth, preoccupied as it is with its sci-fi trappings. Wikus' performance is pretty great though. The show was apparently made using pre-production materials from an unrealised Halo movie, but none of that really comes across in the final product. Go watch Monsters instead (watched: 30/05/2022)

    The Nice Guys is an action-packed buddy-comedy, directed by Shane Black and starring Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling. I genuinely don't understand why people liked this. Maybe it's an American thing? There were a lot of moments where I thought "oh, that was a joke," which is maybe the worst thing you can say about a comedy (watched: 12/11/2017)

    Source Code is a pseudo-time-loop movie written by Ben Ripley and directed by Duncan Jones about a US marine who finds himself stuck in an eight-minute reconstruction of a train, trying to identify a bomber. That core concept sounds killer, but unfortunately this movie is absolutely braindead, with a psychotic protagonist, a cardboard-cutout antagonist, and a narrative that hits every predictable plot point along the way more reliably than most train services in my country. At one point the protagonist says of the love interest "You're funny." after she's given a little spiel, and I went, "oh, that last bit was supposed to be a joke". So much of the plot exists to wank off the post-9/11 American psyche, it's unbearable. The Chicago bean is treated as a profound location (watched: 16/01/2023)

    Fantastic Mr. Fox is Wes Anderson's 2009 stop-motion adaptation of Roald Dahl's book of the same name. While in a vacuum this is a fine movie with a load of great minor jokes, it's a pretty terrible Roald Dahl adaptation, one that discards the tone and style that makes Dahl's stories appealing in favour of Anderson's own vaguely-annoying sensibilities. Its worst crime is simply that it's a children's movie which I'm pretty sure no child could truly enjoy (watched: 04/01/2020)

    The Losers' Club is a small-press indie comic written by Tara Mallen (the third of four loosely-connected one-shots establishing the "Bold Universe"; the rest are by other writers) about some ex-sidekicks who are trying to stay undercover at high school after superheroism is outlawed. I found this comic's production value to be really strong, with some likeable characters, but also couldn't specifically tell you what any of their powers are, which is kind of a disaster for an indie effort? I caught superspeed, electricity, a psychic, and portal generation, which are all about as basic as they come. Indeed, "basic" describes every aspect of this comic's dialogue and plotting. The antagonists in particular, from high-school bullies to government-sanctioned capes, are these horrible strawmen in a way that I think is rightly criticised in stories (read: 24/07/2022)

    The IT Crowd is a Channel 4 sitcom. It's occasionally pretty funny, but honestly, I really struggled to get into this show and failed to see why other people seem to think it's special. Go read Tales of IT Guy instead for a much sharper (and shorter) take on a similar concept (finished season 2: 16/02/2019)

    Big Money Hustlas is a tongue-in-cheek so-bad-it's-good movie by created by the Insane Clown Posse. Except it's actually just not that great—at least not good enough to justify its runtime. Worth watching if you're a diehard Homestuck fan and for no other reason (watched: 2020/12/2020)

    Come From Away is an objectively-very-good based-on-true-stories musical about events in a small town in the aftermath of 9/11, when a bunch of planes were redirected to Newfoundland. It wasn't for me—I found the writing to be pretty flat, the music unmemorable, and honestly I just lack the historical/national context (watched: 25/03/2019)

    Songonauts is an eight-part podcast musical from The Truth, by Jonathan Mann and Jonathan Mitchell, about a band that stumbles across a magical drum machine that transports them into their songs. Occasionally funny, with some good music, Songonauts sadly falls short thanks to some muddled metaphors and a story that's just a little too full of itself

    I Kill Giants is a comic book adaptation directed by Anders Walter and written by Joe Kelly (I know him for the original Deadpool run, I guess). Extremely magical-realist, I found this movie to unfortunately be kind of aggressively bad, thanks to its extremely stilted dialogue and flat characters (I presume lifted straight from the pages!) and its penchant for melodrama. Minor spoilers, but I think this movie's big problem—contrast, say, Colossal—is that the supernatural conceit here isn't actually textually real. We're both expected to care about it, and to root for the main character in that context, and told upfront that it's all make-believe and avoidance. Because, in reality, when everyone tells you that your problems are nonexistent, that's (usually) not actually the case! Also I would consider this a deathist movie (watched: 29/08/2021)

    Savage Dragon is a long-running comic by Erik Larsen. I read the United We Stand" storyline, which is notable for featuring Invincible, but frankly this comic just isn't very good. Boring and edgy (read: 14/10/2025)

    Let's Be Cops is a flawed buddy-cop comedy from Luke Greenfield. Was a friend's favourite movie, but I just didn't see it. Hot Fuzz tries to tackle a lot of the same themes and does better in literally every way

    RV is a family comedy by Barry Sonnenfeld starring Robin Williams, that came highly recommended by the dad of a friend. Kind of crude and bad but not without charm

    Transformers: BotBots is a spinoff from Transformers, weirdly only released long after most of the toyline had been and gone? It's literally just a normal children's cartoon, but I will admit that even approaching it from that framework I feel like it falls into a lot of the traps I see with mediocre cartoons aping the success of Adventure Time and Steven Universe: weak jokes or references that often seem to have been written more to appeal to the writers than to kids, lacklustre musical numbers, clunky interspersal of episodic and serialised plotting, over-reliance on anticlimax, and unappealing visuals (though I did thing the use of stock imagery was a clever stylistic choice). One of the episodes is a pat climate-change allegory. The best episodes were those focused on Bonz-Eye and Dimlit, but I found it perplexing that they got two each while Kikmee never really got any development (watched: 13-14/05/2022)

    Quad is a Portuguese (?) post-apocalyptic indie comics anthology consisting of four stories ostensibly set in the same world (though in practice there is zero overlap, with the contents failing to really mesh into a cohesive picture of that world). None of them are terrible, with appealing black-and-white lineart across all four issues, but the project as a whole lends credence to my theory that in life you can pick "good at art" or "good at story" but not both. I believe the series has continued into further anthologies and webcomics, but these do not have a wide release; I paid bargain-box prices for the series on a whim and certainly would not pay any more for it, nor did I like it enough that I'd read the rest even for free! (read: 28/12/2022)

    Mars Attacks is an old-celebrity-filled alien invasion flick. Weird and funny, but too long for what it is

    Blast Off is a random CalArts animation by Kelly Wang which clearly apes a lot of visual inspiration from Steven Universe but is 100% style—the writing is paper-thin (watched: 03/02/2023)

    callout post for "@qingqiu" on twitter / "xiu ya" / "Shen Jiu" is a parody of typical online "callout posts", by tshirt. It was kind of just too overtly satirical, going after a bunch of low-hanging fruit without actually having much of substance to say about this kind of online drama (read: 12/02/2024)

    Death in Paradise is a comfy BBC crime dramedy set on a Caribbean island. It's pretty fun, so long as you leave your disbelief at the door

    Stardust is a fantasy film directed by Matthew Vaughn, co-writing with Jane Goldman to adapt Neil Gaiman's novel. Diabolically bad, honestly. See my full review here (watched: 24/12/2024)

    Murder on the Orient Express is the name of a bunch of stories based on an Agatha Christie murder mystery, but I'm talking about the 2017 movie directed by Kenneth Branagh here. I don't think I have that much to say about this movie, except that Poirot is wholly unlikable and uninteresting in it. Is he supposed to be like that? I have vague memories of watching the show when I was younger, and liked its version of this story better, but I suppose I wouldn't really have paid much attention back then seeing as I was like five years old (watched: 06/11/2017)

    Early Man is Nick Park's stop-motion movie about cavemen playing football. It's just flat-out bad, thanks to its stale humour and frankly boomer-as-hell thematic throughline (watched: 01/01/2021)

    Dreadnought is a YA trans-narrative superhero novel by April Daniels which I am, unironically, about 90% sure stole all its best ideas from Worm. If I'm wrong on that, then egg-on-my-face, but you're still better off reading Worm. While the use of superpowers as a kind of magical-realism in the struggles of the transgender-girl protagonist is conceptually clever, it doesn't really bear out in the execution for me, particularly thanks to an extremely mediocre main villain. It never seems to have the pagespace to explore anything in real depth, seeming to stop dead in its tracks the moment it hits its wordcount (read: 26-28/04/2021)

    Penny Arcade is a long-running gamers-on-a-couch webcomic by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik. It's bad, but… consistently so? Mike's art is pretty appealing, at least. I stopped reading this one a good while ago, I think

    Tron is a 1982 Disney cyberpunk movie written and directed by Steven Lisberger (with Bonnie MacBird also working on the script, though her contributions were apparently mostly edited out). Though undoubtedly influential, with some occasionally beautiful CGI environments, this film is largely unwatchable, thanks to consistently poor composition/cinematography, overly-uniform costume design, and a bad script. A friend and I tried to watch it and frequently just zoned out; I finished the movie alone and found little improvement. The only good bit is a short beat where the programs are confronted with the reality of who the users are (watched: 18-19/06/2022)

    The Zookeeper's Wife is a Holocaust movie that I watched with my family at some point. I'll admit that I didn't exactly give this movie a chance, as I was preoccupied at the time, but so far as I could tell this thing did absolutely nothing special (watched: 16/07/2019)

    Indiana Jones is a franchise of adventure films from George Lucas. I saw the first four of them at some point as a child, on television reruns with the family, and really didn't think much of any of them

    Attack on Titan is a gruesome fantasy anime adapted from Hajime Isayama's manga. There are definitely parts of this show that are good, or which could belong in a good show, but on the whole it sucks. The characters are utterly flat, blandly determined in that stereotypical shonen anime style. The worldbuilding is fairly original, but in trying to present a facade of realism, it only draws attention to just how nonsensical it all is. The story moves along at a snail's pace, until you realise that a major plot point was just served as a text interstitial or offhand line of dialogue; the way the show communicates itself is utterly bizarre, again seemingly eschewing conventional narrative logic in favour of a more (un)realistic progression of events. The show's biggest crime, though, is undoubtedly its blatant and careless appropriation of holocaust imagery in its fourth season. An absolutely miserable and frequently-unwatchable show which has themes, just not particularly original, resonant, or entertaining ones (watched: 06/03/2021-05/10/2021)

    Event Horizon is a sci-fi horror movie directed by Paul W. S. Anderson from a screenplay by Philip Eisner. Heavily influenced by Warhammer 40,000 (to the point where many fans consider it a prequel) and Alien, it's unfortunate that this movie seems to be exactly the thing that mainstream sci-fi has spent the last couple of decades spoofing and deconstructing. Stupid, vapid, and cliche in the extreme. Also weirdly boring and non-scary, though the last act does pick up a little bit. The environment design, while ridiculous, is perhaps the biggest thing it has going for it (watched: 10/08/2021)

    The Mitchells vs. the Machines is a 2021 family animated comedy directed by Mike Rianda, co-written with Jeff Rowe. This movie is produced by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, creators of Into the Spider-Verse, and comes from the same animation studio, so I was excited to see it—but frankly, without them on screenwriting duties, the resulting script is about as sharp as a baseball bat. Real boomer-comic energy here. This is a movie plainly made-by-exec, with plenty of cloying or lacklustre beats and choices. Its worst crime, its absolute most heinous crime, is that TWICE it blueballed me with Los Campesinos! Songs. Like, jeez, Sony, you hate Gareth's voice that much? 555-come-on-now. I'm mostly joking about that aspect of the movie, I genuinely disliked it for good reasons (watched: 01/05/2021)

    Atomic Blonde is a spy action thriller based on a graphic novel, directed by David Leitch. It's one of the most style-over-substance movies I've ever seen, but its aesthetic really wasn't to my tastes, so to me it had neither style nor substance. It's a poor imitator of its influences—a fact lampooned in the story itself, to cringeworthy effect. The people who worked on the story seem to consider it "empowering", but they were all men (as are the people I've seen parrot this opinion online), so I suppose they would (watched: 01/12/2020)

    Bullet Train is a profoundly annoying action movie adapted by Zak Olkewicz from a novel by Kōtarō Isaka, directed by David Leitch—and believe me, this is the last time I watch a Leitch movie, with all the foibles of Deadpool 2 and Atomic Blonde on full display here. The flashbacking gimmick, funnee onscreen text, shiny cinematography, and wordy dialogue serve as a futile smokescreen to cover the utterly hollow emotional/thematic core of the movie, juvenile and senseless use of violence, and general lack of wit. As the movie is bad, it's impossible to overlook the deeply strange and offputting way this movie eschews all but the most grossly stereotypical Asian characters, as a minority of its cast, almost overshadowing its equally-reprehensible female roles. Imagine conceiving an entire character centred on the idea of a shockingly convincing "panicked girl" act is, and casting an actor who's incapable of pulling it off! This is the Kingsman of train movies. It's not funny, it's not clever. Stop it (watched: 01/01/2023)

    Looper is a very bad time travel movie (watched: 27/01/2018)

    Sicario is an action movie about the FBI, CIA, and the drug trade, directed by Denis Villeneuve from a screenplay by Taylor Sheridan. I honestly didn't care for this movie at all, it was deeply unpleasant to watch. I think I remember feeling like it glorified many of the things it was ostensibly critiquing. Sadly I didn't note down my thoughts on the movie at the time, and my memory of it has become foggy. However, I should note that I've now seen several Villeneuve movies without knowing he was the director and disliked all of them, which speaks to a fundamental disconnect with his style for me

    Anna and the Apocalypse is a British Christmas zombie high school musical. Which means, theoretically, that it should be my favourite story of all time, right? Yeah, no. This movie is legitimately bad. Most of the jokes in it are just lifted wholesale from the popular consciousness, with no twists. The Christmas theming proves to be a meaningless veneer. The songs are genuinely badly-written, serving neither plot nor characters and featuring some of the weakest lyrics I've seen in a musical in a while. The characters are soulless. The themes are weak. The story itself, while attempting to be subversive, winds up inadvertently serving as a cautionary tale that shows us why exactly narrative structure exists in the first place. This movie says nothing, very poorly, and it's a damn shame; it was filmed posthumously based on a script by an aspiring filmmaker who died before his time. Watch Daybreak for high school zombies, Shaun of the Dead for British zombies, and Be More Chill for a high school musical (watched: 01/11/2019)

    Tension/Balance is a NSFW Star Wars fanfiction that acts as a sequel of sorts to The Last Jedi. Some aspects of this story—namely those which focus on the day-to-day running of the world's factions—are good and interesting, but it's mostly bad, and that's without even talking about the fact that it has literal 3D Kylo Ren dong in it. The fact that I was willing to give this story a shot on a half-recommendation basically says all you need to know about The Rise of Skywalker (read: 30/01/2020-08/02/2020)

    21 Jump Street is a buddy-cop high-school comedy directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, from a screenplay by Michael Bacall. It's super annoying and very bad? There are a few clever or funny beats, but for every hit there's three misses. I get that this is supposed to be satire, but it's very bad satire (watched: 02/05/2021)

    Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is a 1971 adaptation of Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It's carried mostly be the performance of Gene Wilder, and when it maintains Dahl's sense of humour it's pretty good—but the changes made to the plot pretty much irrevocably ruin the story, so, uh, forget about it I guess (watched: 04/01/2020)

    10 Things I Hate About You is a 90s romcom adapted from Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. It has almost no redeeming qualities. It's literally just cliché after cliché, and frankly I'm sure it was dated at the point of its release. I don't think I laughed once (watched: 23/07/2022)

    Sky High is a Disney channel superhero movie with terrible set and costume design and one of the blandest and most predictable plots I've ever seen. Conceptually, this could've been great—but the execution is all wrong. Oh and you can read it as an endorsement of eugenics so yikes

    Supreme Power is an eighteen-issue Marvel MAX comic series by J. Michael Straczynski, a reboot of Squadron Supreme, itself a set of direct expies of DC's Justice League characters. Though it initially feels like it might have some compelling stuff going on—a "rational" take on Superman, where his all-American upbringing is recontextualised as a Truman Show-esque scheme by the government—the reality is that this comic is pure dreck and hackery, slow, repetitive, maudlin, derivative, sophomoric, and needlessly edgy in the extreme. Both (!) the comic's female characters spend basically the entire run naked, each panel posed as a grotesque pin-up, seemingly incapable of rational thought. The comic's depiction of non-white people is no better. After the Supreme Power: Hyperion and Supreme Power: The Pre-War Years runs, which just meander on with the setting, the whole thing blows up with the insipid Ultimate Power crossover event with the also-terrible-in-my-experience "Ultimate Universe"—Straczynski's issues bookended by work from Brian Michael Bendis and Jeph Loeb, with absolutely atrocious art from infamous tracer Greg Land. This comic is everything that's ever been wrong with the comics (read: 12/06/2022-14/06/2022)

    Time Loop aka Time Perspectives (I have no idea what the story behind the two titles is; the former is somewhat misleading, as this isn't a Groundhog Day-style loop) is a low-budget movie by Ciro Sorrentino. It's a strong effort, but all the production value in the world can't save a script full of characters that seem wilfully stupid. The movie wastes a great deal of time on sweeping drone shots of its picturesque Italian setting. The audio is particularly poorly mastered; I couldn't tell whether it was abuse of ADR or actors speaking English as a second language, but either way it was frequently disorienting. There were two bits in this movie that I enjoyed, both cases where an intended theme was briefly elucidated. First, we see how the loop represents the stagnancy of the father/son relationship at the movie's core, their inability to make personal or professional progress. Second, we see the son realise his perceived lack of agency in his own life is merely an illusion; he inadvertently causes every bit of strife he experiences in the course of the movie, is capable of everything he believes himself not to be. Both of these revelations are communicated in just a few snatches of dialogue; it's a shame the movie was so poor on a narrative level (watched: 08/07/2022)

    Lovely People is what happened when popular webcomic author Minna Sundberg got smacked in the face with the COVID-19 pandemic and converted to Christianity. It's about rabbits living under an oppressive social credit system. Basically an even worse version of Black Mirror, with an added layer of dissonance from the actual brainpoisoning the writer suffers from. On the bright side, the art is beautiful (read: 17/01/2022)

    Twisters is a terrible sequel/reboot to Twister, this one direct by Lee Isaac Chung from a screenplay by Mark L. Smith. See my full review here (watched: 31/07/2024)

    Death Wish is a remake of an older thriller of the same name, directed by gorelord Eli Roth from a screenplay by Joe Carnahan. It's a pretty brainless vigilante story, with nothing special about the production either. See my full review here (watched: 23/03/2026)

    Boss Level is a terrible time-loop movie for gamers by Joe Carnahan (with Chris and Eddie Borey co-writing). One of the most deplorably unlikable protagonists I've ever seen. Much of this film has voiceover narration that's on about a level of quality with most fake movies written as parodies for minor elements of episodes of TV. Wanted to cringe out of my seat at some of the references in this one. There are occasionally good or funny bits but the whole thing is hateful. Michelle Yeoh is in this! Absolutely embarrassing how much this thing wants to be Deadpool (watched: 18/02/2023)

    Mekanix is a six-issue Marvel Comics miniseries by X-Men writer Chris Claremont, starring Kitty Pryde as she tries to go to university and undergo therapy, while dealing with anti-mutant terrorists on-campus. Frankly I hope I never have to read another mutants-as-race-allegory story again, it's absolutely insufferable. The dialogue in this book has a strange quality that makes it feel very unnatural, without proper flow between participants. The lineart is fine at best, but let down by absolutely dreadful early-2000s gradient-heavy brown-yellow-hued colouring. The covers, by a different artist, are aesthetically better but have an unpleasant pin-up vibe (read: 17/06/2022)

    PLUG & PLAY is an experimental animated short film by Michael Frei, ostensibly about relationships but kind of lacking in substance in my opinion (watched: 04/04/2020)

    Arthur: The Missing Episodes comprises six (now taken-down) abridged versions of Arthur episodes, with new dialogue designed to be as offensive as possible. Unfortunately, barring a couple of moments, it forgets to actually be funny. There's no reason to watch this (watched: 17/12/2019)

    High School Musical on Stage! is a stage adaptation of the Disney Channel movie High School Musical. I saw an amateur production of this thing, but speaking purely in terms of writing—apart from a couple of good lines, this is a real mess of a story. Go see Be More Chill instead (watched: 09/04/2019)

    Playtime is a machinima series made by CruelLEGACEY in Halo Reach. It's notable for featuring elaborate set-pieces built in the game's "Forge" editor, and for literally nothing else. The main plot follows a psychopath and a moron, specifically the former's increasingly-convoluted ways of killing the latter. It's pretty much unwatchable (rewatched first two seasons: 17/02/2019)

    Joe Versus the Volcano is an atrocious film. See my full review here (watched: 07/12/2025)

    Dutch is an in-continuity superhero comic relaunch from Joe Casey, resurrecting an old Youngblood character, told across issues #0-3. Paper-thin writing here, worthless stuff (read: 16/10/2025)

    Singin' in the Rain is a terrible musical; see my thoughts on My Fair Lady, because it's basically just another one of those (watched: 21/08/2024)

    Off Saving the World is a webcomic by AnimatedJames about three people fighting against an alien invasion. While the comic's art is nice and expressive and occasionally cinematic, its tone veers between farcical and melodramatic with no real rhyme or reason. Most of its beats, humorous or not, fail to land; immaturity, toilet humour, and mood whiplash work perfectly in things like It Hurts!!, but this ain't that. Every original beat is balanced by a tired cliche, and the token lampshading on show here does little to assuage my doubts. This is a transparently insecure work, and I feel terrible for saying so. Perhaps with a co-writer to reign him in a little, James's work shows potential—but as it is, this is a hot mess

    Differing Perspectives is a short story written by Pandomy for an r/rational writing contest. I didn't really find its interpretation of the prompt "five characters think they're in different genres" all that interesting/compelling, and the writing itself was littered with the kind of r/rational cliches that I find do little to endear it (read: 03/11/2020)

    Camaraderie is Supernatural is a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic abridged series, which ran to… I think three episodes? It was probably one of the first ones to come out, but that's basically the only thing it has going for it. Watch Friendship Is Witchcraft instead (watched: 26/03/2020)

    Planet Divoc-91 is an educational science webcomic from Wowbagger Productions. So the story is, I ran into these guys at a science fair and desperately wanted to write comics for them, but they never replied to my email, so here I get to say: man, this thing was shoddily-written, just so completely cringe-inducing and misplaced. There's kind of a whole cottage industry of science content made by people who aren't very clever, isn't there? (read: 03/07/2024)

    Transformers: Worst Bot Ever is a graphic novel by Brian Smitty" Smith, aimed at younger audiences. Absolutely cringeworthy stuff, filled with stupid boomer fanwank and very few in the way of good jokes. Makes me wonder if I'm looking at the same Transformers as everyone else (read: 16/10/2025)

    Marriage and Monsters—An Eschatological Romance is an ongoing rational fic by Sarsapariller which is really really hard to describe in a single sentence, and still pretty hard to describe in a paragraph. In many ways, this is its greatest flaw—but the characters' reactions to events often come across unconvincingly and the quality of prose occasionally isn't up to scratch. On the whole, this story gives the impression of a writer trying to run before they can walk—but that's not to say that it doesn't have good elements, nor that it lacks the potential to improve (caught up to chapter 12: 29/05/2019-31/05/2019)

    Like Me is a surrealist social-media movie about a girl who does a bunch of messed-up stuff for no reason. Why would you make this movie? Why would you enjoy it? Hot garbage (watched: 11/06/2021)

    D4VE is an IDW comic written by Ryan Ferrier that proves "hey, that's a cool idea" isn't enough to justify a dozen issues. If you like robots and colourful swears, then this comic's for you—but just based on the first two series, the satire is weak and the characters are boring and unimaginative. Go read Warbot In Accounting instead. I reckon a lot of people got suckered into liking it by the seemingly-interesting concept and nice art

    Power/Rangers is a fifteen-minute Power Rangers fan film by Joseph Kahn (co-written with James Van Der Beek) supposedly set sometime after the original series. A dark and edgy piece of pure collar-tugging fanwankery, utterly vapid. If it allowed itself some colour saturation, and was in service of literally anything good, the effects would be pretty impressive. Note that the movie has tits in it, not for any narrative reason, just because (watched: 05/12/2021)

    Lil Formers is a defunct series of super-deformed newspaper-gag-style Transformers strips created by Matt Moylan. There are maybe a couple of decent jokes mixed in amongst the—well, for lack of a better word, garbage (reread strips #1-100: 19/03/2019)

    Idiocracy is a 2006 sci-fi comedy by Mike Judge (co-written with Etan Cohen) which sucks ass. Basically, it thinks people suck, but it particularly thinks poor people suck, straightup advocating eugenics in its opening scene. Its misanthropy is evident not just in its themes, but in its execution, which goes out of its way to explain every single joke in case you're an idiot. At about 50-odd minutes in, my friend and I hit our last straw and turned it off to watch Scooby Doo instead, which was significantly funnier. Maybe it justifies itself retroactively, I don't know, but it burned through too much of my goodwill. The one thing I enjoyed about this movie was a lot of the visual design, which I thought was well-crafted ("watched": 31/01/2021)

    Did Not Finish

    From this point on, the entries are for stories I put down at some point and never picked back up, so don't feel confident ranking alongside everything else. To be clear, many of the entries listed above are for shows I only watched a single season of, or serials I caught up to and never revisited, or similar—if I think I've seen a representative sample, I usually just go for it.

    DNF (complimentary)

    These ones are ones that I dropped, and for whatever reason, never picked back up—despite not really disliking them. They're perfectly fine stories that probably would have ended up floating halfway up this page, had I actually made it to the end.

    Ōban Star-Racers is an anime-like cartoon about what's basically podracing. It's got a baller premise and a great visual style, and god I loved this thing as a kid, but when I tried to rewatch it as an adult I found it had little appeal for me

    Discworld is a satirical fantasy series by Terry Pratchett which I really like, but bingeing the books is pretty much the worst way of reading them, so I ruined it for myself. I'll probably give it another go once I own most of them in paperback

    Romantically Apocalyptic is a hard-to-describe mixed-media web project which quickly started throwing walls of text at me, so I dropped it. Something about this guy's writing makes my brain slide straight off it. (read up to page 15b: ??/??/201?)

    8-Bit Theatre is a long-running sprite webcomic by Brian Clevinger that—at least towards the beginning—compares unfavourably to Order Of The Stick. Again, it's dated as hell, so at one point (specifically, three hundred pages in, literally just because it was a round number) I dropped it and forgot to pick it back up

    Bicycle Boy has some of the best artwork I've ever seen in a weekly webcomic, but even after following it for years I can't actually tell you what it's about. Created by Jackarais, it's a post-apocalyptic comic about a cyborg. I've decided to drop it until it wraps up, at which point I'll blast through the whole thing and work out whether or not it's actually good

    The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft is exactly what it says on the tin. It's good horror, but I guess I just have less interest in Lovecraftian horror than I thought I did?

    Clone High is an offbeat cartoon by Phil Lord, Christopher Miller (of The Lego Movie and Into the Spider-Verse fame) and Bill Lawrence, which I watched a few episodes of

    Cowboy Bebop is a famous sci-fi anime, which didn't keep my interest; I watched a bunch of it out of pure determination, but had no investment in the story, characters, or world, and didn't find it particularly entertaining (watched Episodes 1-24: 23/11/2016-06/04/2017)

    Arrested Development is a sitcom about a dysfunctional family. It's baked into the format, but the lack of likeable characters to root for meant I didn't really feel much of an urge to keep watching (watched Episodes 1-10: 20/01/2017-27/01/2017)

    Broken Age is an excellent point-and-click adventure game, which I really liked, but I struggle to dedicate time to video games these days (last touched: 28/09/2017)

    Gunpoint is an indie stealth platformer, which I also really liked but dropped for the exact same reason (last touched: 29/06/2017)

    LonelyGirl15 is a horror web series presented as a series of supposedly-non-fiction vlogs. Really it's just something of an internet curiosity—I soon gave up watching it—but it's nothing if not interesting (last touched: 06/02/2019)

    Game Over is a 2004 3D-animated adult comedy about a family of video game characters. Has a surprisingly sharp script and very passable animation and voice-acting. See also Wreck it Ralph, Kid Radd (watched first episode: 15/03/2019)

    Farscape is an old sci-fi show (watched: 18/04/2019-, rewatched pilot: 25/04/2020)

    Ghosts is a BBC sitcom from the creators of Horrible Histories about a bunch of ghosts who live in a big house—and the two living humans who inherit that house. Despite its strong concept and cast, the overall execution of the plot is pretty milquetoast—I gave up halfway into the first series (watched Episodes 1-3: 16/06/2019)

    Britland City is—well, was—well, it's hard to tell exactly what this thing is, because when I found out about it it'd mostly been scrubbed from the internet, and then it came back, and then it went away again?

    Fringe is a weird-fiction television show by J.J. Abrams and Transformers screenwriters Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci. Considering it's ostensibly a LOST-like SCP television show, it should be a whole lot more entertaining than it actually is—the episodes I saw were a self-serious run-of-the-mill police procedural with a veneer of edgy sci-fi (watched pilot: 26/04/2020, watched episodes 2-4: 01/05/2020)

    A Practical Guide to Evil is a web serial (read: 18/09/2020-)

    Futurama is an adult sci-fi cartoon (watched: 04/10/2020-)

    El Ministerio del Tiempo is a Spanish time-travel show (watched: 09/01/2021-)

    8½ is a famous old meta-movie, directed by Federico Fellini, about a director struggling with writer's block. I only made it an hour into this movie, though this was mostly down to its nature: the use of over-dubbing for dialogue combined with subtitles made it sometimes extremely tricky to match lines to the characters speaking, with the black-and-white visuals similarly making it hard to distinguish characters at time. Additionally, its plot is highly fragmented (deliberately so), and the characters behave in ways which I found quite alien. Basically, I bounced off this thing almost completely. "Get good", you say, and you'd be right! (attempted to watch: 20/06/2021)

    Buffy The Vampire Slayer is the monster-of-the-week show that made Joss Whedon a household name. Unfortunately, it's really quite dated, which made it hard to stick with. The third season makes a decent finale to the show as a whole if you just want to give the show a spin (picked up from S3E17: 30/08/2021, watched S3E20-22: 08/04/2022)

    No Man's Sky is an open-world procedurally-generated space simulator with some narrative elements (played main questline: 08/01/2022-~21/01/2022)

    Seinfeld is the most iconic sitcom. Seems fine! (watched S6E21: 08/04/2022)

    Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is perhaps the best-looking cartoon to come out in an age where everything is either 3D-animated or is trying to ape Adventure Time. Seriously, this thing looks and sounds gorgeous. I wish I was interested in the writing, like, at all (watched Episodes 001-004: 11/10/2022)

    Shiva Baby is a black comedy by Emma Seligman about a young lady who unwillingly attends a funeral afterparty also attended by her ex-girlfriend and her sugar daddy. The themes of sexuality and adulthood, while focused, are painfully on-the-nose; I'm sure every single line of dialogue has been said by some loved one to somebody sometime or another, but not all at the same time. The sheer density of horrible sentiments being expressed by every single character makes this a depressingly misanthropic movie, and even as someone who has experienced the kind of anxious overload the movie is portraying, I found it impossible to sympathise with its protagonist, who very much gives what she gets seemingly without an shred of self-awareness. For a comedy, I didn't find the writing remotely funny, and I tapped out about halfway through when it became clear that nothing was actually going to happen in the film, it would just continue doing the same schtick (watched first 40 mins: 10/07/2023)

    All Of Us Are Dead is a Korean zombie show set at a high school. In theory this should be a really strong premise, but I dunno, it kind of falls apart in execution? None of the characters particularly have anything going for them, none of the plotting is particularly clever. There are strong cliffhangers which led us to watch the first four episodes in one day, but the minute we were done I didn't particularly feel anything other than a vague obligation to finish the rest (watched Episodes 1-4: 31/07/2023)

    Bulletproof Candy is a webcomic written by Mae Catt (of specifically the good episodes of various bad Transformers cartoons) and conceived by Alan Lau. It's not hugely impactful fare, but strikes me as a fairly solid YA webcomic which a teen would really enjoy (read Episodes 1-10: 11/08/2023)

    Tales from the Loop is a sci-fi semi-anthology by Nathaniel Halpern (a Legion staff writer), adapted from an artbook (watched episode 1: 28/07/2024)

    Frieren: Beyond Journey's End is an introspective fantasy slice-of-life anime about a long-lived elf trying to find new meaning in her life after the human members of her adventuring party have grown old and died. The central theme of death and remembrance is used well, but my impression of this show was that it kept hitting the same notes over and over. When the main antagonists are introduced, an ontologically-evil race of demonic others, I was kind of baffled by the audacity of the creative choice; I was willing to stick with it, but after that, it felt like the series went back to spinning its wheels, and I just couldn't muster the motivation to put on another episode (watched Episodes 1-13: 26/09/2024-05/11/2024)

    Kiki's Delivery Service is an anime film by Studio Ghibli. Man, Ghibli is just anathema to me. I can't do it. I put this one on at work and really struggled to pay attention to it (watched: 01/01/2025)

    Xenoethnography is an original-continuity Transformers fanfiction by Therrae, drawing inspiration primarily from the live-action film series and Transformers: Prime. Despite its strong start with a heavily Budianskyian bent, it soon becomes quite clear that this story is in a common failure mode for fanfics, where the writer seemingly can't stand to have any form of conflict or toxicity linger in the story for more than a chapter before resolving it. The main protagonist's self-flagellating perspective is exhausting, especially when it veers into "noble savage" territory (read "Cultural Exchange", "Comparative Semiotics", and "Code Switching": 20-29/01/2025

    DNF (derogatory)

    These ones I dropped with prejudice, actively feeling like they were a waste of time. If a story's in this section, then you can take that to mean that I'd suggest avoiding it—though of course it's possible I stopped right before it got good. 90% of gambling addicts quit right before they're about to hit it big, etc.

    Voltron: Legendary Defender kinda sucks? It's just really, really, really generic and boring. I only watched the first extra-long episode, after seeing a bunch of people on tumblr freak out about it, and couldn't find it in me to like it. Only watch this if you're already a Voltron fan. I've been told it only gets worse on the whole ("watched": 19/11/2016)

    Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir is literally just for actual children and I don't know why anybody made out like it wasn't. I don't like how it looks, don't like the writing, and only watched one episode ("watched": 10/08/2017)

    Garfunkel and Oates are a musical comedy duo with their own show. I didn't hugely like what little I watched (watched: 31/03/2018-01/04/2018)

    Dark is a foreign-language mystery story told across two generations. The fact that every character sucks, combined with the way I have to read all their dumb annoying words as subtitles, meant that I could literally only make it a couple of episodes in (started: 21/09/2018)

    Bakugan: Battle Planet is another show I only watched the pilot for. Despite a few bits of nice animation and a relatively charming cast, this cartoon holds no value over any other Saturday-morning 22-minute-toy-advertisement ("watched": 11/01/2019-12/01/2019)

    Dinosaur King is a show I watched most of as a kid. Revisiting the first episode was… unsurprising, but somehow disappointing ("watched": 12/01/2019)

    Tomb Raider is a 2018 movie adaptation of a video game by blah blah blah yeah not gonna lie I stopped watching this like ten minutes in ("watched": 26/01/2019)

    The Umbrella Academy is maybe less offensively bad than some of the stories above, but I can't forgive the fact that they put money into adapting this instead of Worm. I only watched the first episode of this one and—apart from a couple of creative visuals sparsely dotted throughout its runtime—it had absolutely nothing going for it (watched: 25/02/2019)

    Die is a comic by Kieron Gillen, of which I only read the first issue. It's about a group of friends who… get stuck in a roleplaying game? And there's like, interpersonal stuff going on? It's like Worth the Candle, only not as good. Pacing's all over the place.The artwork's super nice, but falls into the common "indie comic" trap of also being a little hard to follow (read issue #1: 21/03/2019)

    Doomsday is a post-apocalyptic movie which I thought would be so-bad-it's-good but which turned out to be so-bad-I-stopped-watching-it-after-quarter-of-an-hour ("watched": 24/09/2019)

    Freaks and Geeks is a high school TV show which sorta looks like it might have something interesting to say, but which really is just completely unironically generic in its execution and I didn't make it past the first ad break (watched: 24/04/2020)

    The Expanse is a well-liked sci-fi show, which I watched one episode of, except I ended up kinda just half-watching it, as I found the visuals too video-gamey, the writing too po-faced, and the premise uninteresting (watched: 26/04/2020)

    Prophecy Approved Companion is a video-game-parody story about an NPC who slowly gains sentience. It's not great, but it's fun enough (caught up to chapter 17: 15/10/2020-16/10/2020)

    Childish is a podcast musical about a guy who becomes an RA in an attempt to follow in Childish Gambino's footsteps. It didn't grab me (listened to first Episode: 09/09/2021)

    Loveville High is a series of nine connected vignettes set at a prom. The first episode was charming, but not enough to make me check out the second (listened to Episode 1: 09/09/2021)

    The Owl House is one of those cartoons, you know the ones, the whole genre of Adventure Time lookalikes, created by Dana Terrace and vaguely inspired by the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch (watched Episodes 1-4: 08-09/04/2022)

    Spider-Man: Miles Morales is a AAA game by Insomniac Games (which really should've just been DLC to their original Spider-Man game) heavily inspired by Into the Spider-Verse, which is funny because it appears to have taken inspiration in every respect except for "is good". Seriously, what is the state of AAA game development? Astonishing detail on the CGI models in this game and it looks ugly as sin, stiff animations, a supposedly vibrant cityscape rendered repetitive and drab, utterly empty of interest. The game's sci-fi aesthetic is utterly at odds with, well, everything about Spider-Man; where that stuff was tasteful in Spider-Verse, here it's insufferable. Every single plot beat is 100% predictable. I made it about halfway through the game while hanging out at a friend's house, and having no desire to play the rest, went home and skimmed over the cutscenes through to its conclusion. Combat was repetitive and unfun, there were far too many button-press events, and I don't think you as player are asked to make a single choice in the entire narrative; it's a movie that periodically asks you to mash buttons. Why are this game's menus and game systems like the way they are. Embarrassing to think how much money was spent on this and how many people worked on it (played: 19/02/2023)

    Yellowjackets is a drama about a girls' football team that gets stranded on an island and turns to cannibalism, of which I watched (most of) three episodes before tapping out. It's a fun premise and a couple of the characters have a shred of interest to them, but the supernatural/horror elements and indeed its general approach to plot structure strike me as hackneyed as all hell. LOST was doing these things much better decades ago and this is plainly making all the same mistakes with none of the character depth to prop it up (watched Episodes 1-3: 31/03/2023)

    Heroes is a superhero show by Tim Kring from the early 2000s. For what is ostensibly a deconstruction of those tropes, it plays everything mind-numbingly straight. Self-conscious edgy nonsense with a bit of a eugenicist/Randian bent for spice. If the 2007 WGA writers' strike really did result in a drastic drop in quality beginning with the second season, that later material must be truly unwatchable (watched S1E1-E3: 15-19/05/2023)

    Mr. Robot is a hacker-themed thriller series by Sam Esmail about a guy with pretty much every cliché psychological condition under the sun who tries to take down the world's biggest megacorporation. A triple-A budget and judicious use of hacker lingo can't save this one from its utterly atrocious character writing and by-the-numbers plotting. This thing has aged like milk, having clearly come out just before the 2016 presidential election, with the most sophomoric, edgy anticapitalist worldview I've seen on a show of its ilk. Absolutely unhinged use of fourth-wall-breaking narration; this show is a parody of itself. Lol, lmao even (watched S1E1-E6: 16-21/05/2023)

    Extraordinary is a British superhero sitcom by Emma Moran about a world where everyone has superpowers and the one woman who apparently doesn't. This slam dunk of a premise is wasted by lacklustre execution, deeply cliché powers, a terminally unlikable protagonist, and honestly just weak humour. Definitely felt written for the lowest common denominator, though the first episode did manage at least one little twist which stuck out to me (watched Episode 1: 22/08/2023)

    Final Fantasy is a genre-defining RPG. I tried to play the GBA port and turned it off after five minutes, as I felt like I was wasting my time. See my post here (attempted: 01/08/2024)

    500 Days of Summer is a movie that just strikes me as horribly, mercilessly sexist. We really tried to watch this one and barely made it half an hour in before we gave up. Man they just did not know how to make movies in the early 2000s huh (attempted: 14/02/2025)

    One Cut of the Dead is a one-take metafictional horror film by Shin'ichirō Ueda, apparently largely ripped off from the play Ghost in the Box. Borderline unwatchable, this one, nowhere near as clever or interesting as it seems to think it is; we made it as far as the end of the first act, then tapped out when it became clear the rest was going to be just as bad (watched: 17/08/2025)

    Appendices

    Jon Bois' other works

    Alexander Wales' other works

    Worth the Candlefanfiction

    Wildbow's other works

    Worm fanfiction

    Andrew Hussie's other works

    MS Paint fan adventures

    Bavitz's other works

    DANIELS' other works

    qntm's other works

    SCP Foundation articles by other authors

    Ted Chiang's short stories

    Eliezer Yudkowsky's other works

    Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationalityfanfiction

    Zero HP Lovecraft's other works

    The Lego Moviespinoffs

    The Matrixexpanded universe

    Scott Alexander's other works

    Dom Fera's other works

    Black Mirrorepisodes

    IDW Transformers comics

    Gwenpool-related comics

    Transformersmovies

    Roald Dahl's works

    Robert Kirkman's other works

    The Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists 2stories

    Halo media

    Chad Bowers and Chris Sims' other works

    Marvel Cinematic Universe

    Inside No. 9 episodes