I’ve been thinking about how much we talk to strangers now. Those of us who have been online since our infancy slip comfortably into an online version of ourselves and beam our thoughts into the eyes of potentially thousands of people we will never physically meet or have a conversation with. The gap between the internet and the real world makes us feel like our actions in that realm belong to someone else, that the words we say aren’t reflective of our character, but of the version of us that exists digitally. Sometimes that character is a cleaner, sanitised version of ourselves, but a lot of the time I see people using the internet as an outlet for their meanest thoughts.

Sometimes I imagine the internet as a city, with people coming up to each other unprompted and saying the mean things they’d say in a comment section. It makes me think about Kiki’s Delivery Service.

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Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece has been lauded for decades for its stunning natural vistas, detailed depictions of bustling city life, its realistic take on burnout in a fantasy setting, and the overall wholesome, cosy vibe it settles the viewer into. However, I’ve always been drawn to the idea that Kiki’s Delivery Service is a movie about social interactions and first impressions.

Kiki’s journey is defined by the strangers she meets. As a 13 year old witch in training, she must find a town without a resident witch and tend to all of their magical needs. She lands upon a dense metropolis, Koriko, where the idea of magic is all but forgotten. Kiki’s first moments there provide a brutal reality check where her enthusiasm to help and spread kindness is met by a collective shrug of the shoulders.

Kiki’s happiness in Koriko is defined by the kindness of strangers. Asano, a local baker, takes her in and gives her a home. Ursula, a painter who lives in the woods, teaches her that burnout is a natural consequence of turning your passion into work and helps give her a sense of purpose. Tombo, though creeping her out a little at first, reminds her of how lucky she is to possess the gift of flying and helps her find some self worth. The same can be said for the old lady and her maid, who both provide a warm refuge from the turbulent outside world.

Those wholesome interactions are offset by equally jarring ones for Kiki. Some of the people she delivers to, like the boy who is gifted the cat toy and the old lady’s granddaughter who rudely dismisses the fish pie, give her an existential crisis. So much of the movie sees Kiki shrouded in kindness that she forgets that people can be cruel, that they don’t care that you spent hours flying through the rain to bring you something. Running into a cruel stranger can warp your perception of society, which leads to Kiki’s depression.

That first meeting with a stranger is vital to so much of Miyazaki’s work outside of Kiki. The reason the worlds he creates are so idyllic is because of the kindness that runs through them. Where would Ponyo be if she had run into someone other than Sotsuke? Totoro himself is a kind, mysterious stranger who helps find Mei. On the other side, the reason Spirited Away is so disorienting and scary is because of the callousness and apathy most of the strangers have. Reprieve is only found in the few kind and helpful people in the film.

A common refrain when discussing Miyazaki’s work is “I wish I could live in a Ghibli movie.” When people say this, they usually refer to the peaceful, beautiful hand drawn visuals that Miyazaki is so adept at crafting, but those vistas are just reflections of what we already have in real life. The actual fantasy of the cosy, warm Ghibli movie is the fact that so many people are so kind.

The internet has heavily influenced the way we see people. The recklessness with which strangers wield their meanness makes us see society as a whole that way, just like Kiki did after dropping off the fish pie. Today’s political landscape has made it so that gauging a stranger’s outlook and intentions is more important than ever, meaning people approach first impressions with such cynicism on both sides.

I understand the assumption that every stranger you run into has bad intentions, but Kiki’s Delivery Service makes me question what kind of stranger I want to be. I don’t want someone’s only interaction with me to completely poison their view of the world, and that applies for both physical and digital spaces. The way people talk to each other sucks, and I think the idea of separating your online self from your real self is just an excuse to feel okay about being a dickhead. It’s hardly groundbreaking, but Miyazaki’s movies are best when the message isn’t overcomplicated. Kiki’s Delivery Service is begging you to be kind.

Kiki’s Delivery Service is playing in 4K and IMAX across the UK. You better go watch it.

All images provided by GKIDS

A song

1

I think a lot about what it means to love cinema. I’ve adorned my clothing with symbols from movies I like. I’ve held up my favourite filmmakers as unimpeachable deities. I’ve harshly criticised some for the direction they’re taking the medium in. My living space is a shrine to Takahata and Miyazaki. My love for cinema has manifested in all of these obvious ways, ways that are fundamental and easy. But I think the most complicated act of love for cinema is seeking an understanding of its history, picking out directors notes from decades ago to understand their intent, to figure out what the film really means.

This pursuit of knowing clashes against a fundamental truth of art – that neither its creator nor its beholder can truly understand it. There’s a mystery and a magic to cinema that allows each individual to see it completely differently. I ran into this truth just a month ago during the Annecy festival. I got talking to Nick Park about Early Man, a film that I interpret as, Park, an icon of British life, contending with another fundamental aspect of Britishness, football. I told him how I saw it as a fascinating dissection of the British psyche, to which he responded, “I’m not sure about that, but I’d love to read your thesis on it.”

The act of film preservation is an undeniable force for good. The restoration of not only films themselves but interviews and conversations from almost 100 years ago are fascinating historical documents that extend the lifespan of the art and allow a new generation to fall in love with it. But as an individual lover of film, I wonder if it’s my responsibility to know all of these things, to read every interview and to flatten every film into a singular interpretation. That conflict is the basis of Satoshi Kon’s 2001 masterpiece, Millennium Actress.

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Millennium Actress depicts an attempt at preservation that deviates completely from the hard, solid facts we look for when diving into documents of cinema history. We follow a documentary crew filming a piece on the fictionalised legendary actress Chiyoko Fujiwara, someone who had disappeared from public life for decades. This precious interview is a lifelong dream for Genya Tachibana, but, embodying a journalist’s worst fear, the interview shoots utterly off the rails.

In Fujiwara’s ageing mind, her memories of her personal life and the images of her captured on celluloid have blurred, meaning groups of ninjas, devastating train robberies, space exploration and supernatural beings intrude on the linear biography she is attempting to tell and what Tachibana wants to capture.

What Kon captures so wonderfully is that, for those whose lives are dedicated to creating art, there is no separation. The pursuit of art is more engulfing than a job you attend between certain hours and have a clear division from, your life feeds your art and your art sustains your life. It is unknowable and frustrating to those seeking facts, like Tachibana in the story and to Kon’s audience who need to learn to let go and not get too caught up in what scenes are reality and which are fantasies driven by a senile mind. To Fujiwara, there is no difference.

Film history is littered with sliding doors moments, what ifs and events told completely differently from various perspectives that we’ll never know the exact truth behind. While preservations, rightfully so, look to find cold, hard answers, as an individual, I find Millennium Actress’s philosophy of letting go more alluring. Art is more powerful with the mysteries intact, sometimes knowing can break the illusion and take away cinema’s magic.

Millennium Actress ends on a harmonious note to my mode of thinking as we Fujiwara set off into space, an analog for her taking her final breaths, never having tracked down the man she fell in love with as a teenager. A life spent longing for something that never came is not framed as a tragedy, instead Fujiwara, in the final line of the film and perhaps her life, says, “After all, it’s the me who was chasing him that I love.”

Kon understands that gaps in knowledge, goals left unachieved, films not yet restored leaves us something to chase, gives us a reason to live. Maybe the right way to love cinema is to accept the eternal chase, maybe that’s the way I’ll keep my love for cinema alive until my final days. In this pursuit of total knowledge, I know there will always be something new to discover, a lifetime spent watching movies will not be enough, and that’s the beauty of it.

Except, in the act of commenting on preservation, Kon engages in an act of preservation. Millennium Actress is an attempt to wrap his love for cinema in a neat 80-minute package, a film where different filmmaking styles, genres and eras crash into the frame, as if he hit the fast forward button on history. Fujiwara herself is loosely based on the careers of Setsuko Hara and Hideko Takamine, another aspect of the film that tries to squeeze real history into its narrative. Even in making a film about the ways in which preservation is at odds with the mystical nature of cinema, Kon can’t help but try to preserve.

Being caught between these two posts, maybe that’s where love for a medium lies. There may not be one definitive stance to take as a film lover, our existence may be spent bouncing between the two. But what better way is there to keep your love for the medium alive than to constantly ponder on the best way to treat it? When we look back on our lives staring at screens, it’ll be the versions of us chasing that truth that we’ll love.

My favourite song right now

Watch Autokar

I caught up with the film’s director, Sylwia Szkiladz, and composer, Barbara Prazkov, to discuss the genesis of the film, matching creepy and cute styles, and how the film speaks to this political moment.

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How did the idea for the film come to you?

Szkiladz: The script was inspired by my own experience of immigration during the 90s, as a small girl moving from Poland to Belgium. I also used the testimonies of other people who were kids at the time. It’s definitely autobiographical. But there are also other stories that I wanted to put inside this.

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Another World is a wildly ambitious, beautiful film. Tracking the stories of multiple characters across various time periods through the prism of reincarnation, the Hong Kong animated feature bites off a lot, pulling the audience along through seemingly disconnected storylines with some of the most inventive and stunning visuals put to screen in animation in the past few years. The lynchpin of the story is Gudo, an overworldly being responsible for carrying souls through the afterlife and who feels compelled to stop humans from being corrupted with evil while they’re alive.

The film is thematically rich, looking at how we remember history, how evils from our past can impact our present and the human tendency towards darkness. I caught up with the film’s writer Polly Yeung and director Tommy Kai Chung to chat about those themes, their unique approach to character design and why it’s so rare to see an animated feature from Hong Kong.

Which of you discovered the novel first?

Yeung: It was around 10 years ago. I’m a live-action filmmaker and at that time, there was a campaign from the publisher Tokuma Shoten to translate around 50 Japanese novels into Chinese. They sent them to different filmmakers in China and Hong Kong to see if there’s any chance at an adaptation. I read all of them and spotted this novel, Sennenki -Thousand-year Journey of an Oni by Saijo Naka, and I felt like there was something mysterious behind the story. Initially, I wanted to adapt it into a live action movie but to depict this fantasy world, it was not the best way. I started to look for animation artists who worked on a film called Zombiology: Enjoy Yourself Tonight, one of my favourites. It opens and ends with an animated sequence that is one of the best things I’ve ever seen. It was directed by Tommy, so I reached out to him about this project.

Chung: I was so excited because I have wanted to make an animated feature, that was my dream. Polly brought me the story and invited me to the project and I said, why not? Polly is a very interesting person, because she’s so knowledgeable. I also really wanted to do a story about reincarnation. I see a lot of movies talking about this topic, but I have my own vision. I really want to express how I see reincarnation and I found my perspective is quite similar to Polly’s. We wanted to show that the journey you take after death should not be linear, you have to reflect on your previous life simultaneously.

That non-linearity is present from the film’s opening moments and little is explained about the different storylines we’re presented with. Was it difficult to manage the amount of information you give to the audience?

Yeung: Yes, but having an animatic made the creative process a lot easier and very different to live action, there’s so many uncertain elements that you cannot control. Tommy and I did a lot of work to keep reading the script and watching the animatic to see the problems of the storytelling, because from writing to drawing, there’s a very big gap. One of the main problems we came across was Gudo feeling like a protagonist, so we show the story of him meeting Yuri in different pieces throughout the film. That can be difficult for the audience to follow, but we know that it works when the different stories collide.

I love the character designs in the movie, especially the eyes of the human characters. What made you settle on that style?

Chung: You’re the first one to talk about the eyes! We tried to minimise the character of the eyes. For example, when I talk about Japanese anime, you already picture the crystal-looking eyes, but we tried to not do that. We wanted to give more space for the audience to put themselves into the character, making it as minimal as we can. We had difficulties while animating it because there’s limitations to showing the characters looking up or down. Also, close-ups were very hard to do. But that’s how we tell the story, using the eyes.

Gudo is an expressionless character, what were the challenges of expressing his emotions?

Yeung: At the beginning, we wanted him to be a little boy who would say very profound things, and putting a mask on him added a sense of mystery. There’s something we don’t know, so we lean in and listen more. Because of his short height, the audience can usually see his full body, meaning he can express his emotions with his arms and gestures.

The layout of the scenes is always so striking, is that a part of the process you focused on?

Chung: In the animation process there are a lot of stages where you can correct the layout, like in the storyboards and animatic. For some parts, we use 3D to help us animate more complex scenes which also can help bring more interesting layout.

Yeung: Tommy is born to be a layout artist, because when I watched his short films, that camera layout is one of the reasons that I wanted him to be in our film. If you watch his storyboards, from the very beginning, he knows how to play with the camera.

Why don’t we see much animation come from Hong Kong?

Yeung: The Hong Kong market is very small, but the minimum budget for making an animation movie is really high, so it is quite risky if we make an animation movie just for the Hong Kong market. The second big reason is our language. It is in Cantonese, not in Mandarin. In the golden age of Hong Kong cinema, people would watch films even if they were in Cantonese. But I think gradually, it seems to be fading out. We don’t have a big enough local demand for animation in Hong Kong alone because they buy Japanese or US animation to broadcast and put on streaming platforms. In Hong Kong, there are a lot of animation artists who work in the commercial industry, on short films and that’s it. They don’t have the chance to make original content.

Another World releases in UK cinemas on January 29th

A Song

Unrelated to the piece as always. Just been bumping this lately.

The London Film Festival was so long ago that I went and did another festival in between conceptualising and finally writing this article. Better late than never, I guess. LFF annually provides the best chance for me to break out of the animation bubble I’ve made for myself and allows me to sound like a normal human being in conversations with film journalists who don’t know a Shinkai from a Yamada. I value these few weeks spent at Picturehouse Central greatly.

This year’s edition saw me shooting for the bigger titles from name directors and those that gained buzz out of Cannes and Venice. This meant I was experiencing the films of people like Kelly Reichardt and Julia Ducournau for the first time while returning to the comfort of Rian Johnson and Yorgos Lanthimos. I would have loved to have seen more, but having to play and review a 20 hour Pokémon game in the middle of a festival gets in the way. Alas, here is every film I saw at LFF 2025, ranked.

18. Sirât

The first film I saw at LFF was one of the toughest watches I’ve had to endure all year. This film about a father looking for his daughter with his son in tow starts in a bleak, hopeless state and still finds a way to punch you in the gut a few more times on the way out. The disorientation of the journey the duo embark on alongside a group of desert ravers is excellently depicted, it encapsulates that terrifying, weightless feeling of not being tethered to home brilliantly. However, the bleakness feels designed to make you feel bad rather than to interrogate any real point. Not every movie has to have one, and plenty of people loved this, it just made me feel awful.

17. Alpha

I think I chose the worst Julia Ducournau to start with. Much like with Sirât, Alpha is moody and unrelentingly dark, but this time with more of a goal in mind. The film is looking to humanise AIDS and HIV victims, giving us insight into the suffering of both a teenage girl and a middle aged former addict. It breaks apart their family, it ostracises them from their friends, it hangs over every aspect of their lives. Alpha has good intentions, but is a tough watch in execution.

16. The Testament of Ann Lee

Musicals are a tough hang when you don’t like the music at all. Plenty of other critics have been taken with the deliberately paced siren songs that analog the religious ecstasy experienced by Ann Lee and her disciples, but these sequences refused to move me, as much as I was able to appreciate their technical brilliance. There’s plenty of thematic fruit to sink your teeth into here, the spread of religion across countries is always fascinating to watch, but I found piercing the rind to be an arduous task. Shout out to the scene where they have to clarify that she wasn’t super racist.

15. Endless Cookie

I thought I was going to fall head over heels for this for the first 20 minutes. Endless Cookie is the exact kind of form-breaking, structureless storytelling that I want to see more in animation, and for all its faults, Endless Cookie takes full advantage of the medium. This is an animated documentary that stitches together stories from the life of its director and his half brother, representing each of its participants in inventive, quasi-human character models and expressing their personalities in ways only animation can. However, the film’s sense of humour and scatterbrained tone became a real drag over a feature length runtime. I love this for the swing it takes, I just wish I loved the actual film.

14. Dreamers

Dreamers was one of the most resonant films I saw at LFF, one that humanises refugees and immigrants in a political landscape hell bent on taking away their souls. This look into the culture of fear and hopelessness cultivated inside an immigration detention centre was heartbreaking, even if the characters were able to find some hope in the bleakness.

13. Silent Friend

It’s super difficult to complain about the pacing of an art house movie without sounding like an art house bro but man do I wish this one picked up the pace a bit. I appreciate the atmosphere it was shooting for but I found the ideas it was interrogating to be so interesting that I was desperate for the thing to progress. The concepts of scientific advancement throughout the years being owed to poetry, photography, love and an emotional connection to nature are so fascinating, and are explored in a beautiful way. These are the kinds of ideas that got me energised to study physics all those years ago. In so many ways this was made for me, but I found myself drifting away from it far too often.

12. ChaO

I can’t believe I dislike a movie that looks this gorgeous. My achilles heel in any animated movie is top-level backgrounds and environments and ChaO boasts some of the most beautiful backgrounds in any animated feature from the past 10 years. It’s astonishing how good this movie looks, equally astonishing is how painfully flat its characters are. ChaO is an adaptation of A Little Mermaid, with the titular character being a sea princess who falls in love with a human, in this case a regular degular guy named Stephen. Any conceivable trope about subservient women is part of ChaO’s DNA, a reminder of how desperately the industry needs more women in leadership roles. Keep an eye on Skwigly for my interview with the film’s director where I ask him about ChaO’s flimsy character.

11. Nouvelle Vague

I’ll keep this short as I reviewed this for What’s On Netflix, but Nouvelle Vague has so many interesting ideas, it almost excuses how boring the actual film is. Still, film history is always fun to watch.

10. Jay Kelly

Noah Baumbach’s vision of this dissection of a movie star almost plays all the right notes. I think that 2025 is the perfect year to make this movie, a year that confirmed that movie stars don’t get people to see movies anymore. Jay Kelly is a look into the magnetic charisma that only a movie star can have, the value that holds for the industry and for the art, and the incredible burden it is to mean so much to so many people. For me, the meta casting of George Clooney takes you away from the themes and ideas and the story itself and periodically makes you think “I wonder if George Clooney really thinks like this.” I’m eager to rewatch and see if it still hits me in the same way.

9. Decorado

Alberto Vásquez’s follow up to Unicorn Wars maintains the premise of dropping cute cartoon characters into a dark and confusing world, but instead of a psychedelic bloodbath, Decorado looks to represent the hopelessness and sterility of a society poisoned by late stage capitalism. Unlike the bleakness of Alpha and Sirât, Decorado feels it’s connecting to something every single one of us is feeling, the sense that everything we usually enjoy is being poisoned by corporations forcing enshittification on us. Decorado ends in an acceptance that freedom isn’t truly possible in a world run by a corporation, assimilate or die.

8. Twinless

It’s difficult to say much about Twinless other than it being extremely watchable. Gorgeous lighting and editing, really compelling, emotional, chaotic performances and a darkly funny script that manages to stay light and punch you in the gut in the exact right places. There’s a monologue from Dylan O’Brian in this movie that depicts the kind of depth I didn’t know he was capable of and moved me to tears.

7. Frankenstein

Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein is like if Guillermo Del Toro adapted Frankenstein. I know people have had a lot to say about how faithful it is as an adaptation and the way it depicts The Creature’s humanity, but watching this movie on the big screen, all I could look at was the production design. Every prop looks so good. The puppetry, the corpses, the dissected bodies, the massive green energy tubes, it’s an absolute feast. So excited for Guillermo’s career in animation.

6. The Secret Agent

I’m a sucker for a story of people finding joy under a fascist regime, something that shows that the human spirit is not made to be broken but to squeeze whatever juice it can out of the lemons it’s given. The Secret Agent is not a greyscale hellscape, it’s about a group of people who refuse to stop living despite persecution. It balances the horrors and the loss the everyday person experiences under fascism with the hope and energy needed to keep on fighting. A wonderful, tense, spirited and heartbreaking film.

5. Wake Up Dead Man

After Glass Onion, a movie I like, I worried that Rian Johnson was entering a comfort zone with these Knives Out sequels. Glass Onion is a fun time, but doesn’t expand on the ideas of the first in an interesting way and its satire lacks teeth because of it. Wake Up Dead Man is Johnson using his Netflix safety blanket to break out of that comfort zone of class satire and ends up making a mournful meditation on spirituality that somehow also works as a muder mystery caper. By making most of the ensemble cast bit players instead of main characters, Johnson is able to hone in on Josh O’Connor’s incredible performance as his character’s morality and spiritual duties clash with each other. One I cannot wait to watch again.

4. Is This Thing On?

Bradley Cooper finally let loose on trying to make a definitive masterpiece and ended up with his best film to date. Will Arnett and Laura Dern play a couple who can’t figure out if they’re drifting away from each other, if they’re tired of where their lives are or whether or not they’re changing at all, just that they expect they should be. Is This Thing On? gives us time to sit with these questions and vocalises them through Arnett’s stand-up performances. The masterstroke of the film is to have the normal dialogue scenes be funnier than the stand-up, meaning that when Arnett is on stage, it feels more like a therapy session.

3. The Mastermind

As good as Josh O’Connor is in Wake Up Dead Man, The Mastermind is by far his best performance of the year. Kelly Reichardt’s anti-heist movie is such a perfect encapsulation of a type of guy, the one who thinks he’s smarter than the system, the one who thinks he’s too smart to work a 9-5, the one who thinks he can cheat his way into a life of comfort through an elaborate scheme, only to turn out to be an idiot who gets caught the next day. It’s difficult not to draw a comparison between his character and the crypto/AI bros of today, the film being set in the 70s is a perfect way of making the analogy without slapping you over the head with it.

2. Bugonia

This list is mirrored in the sense that the films at the bottom and top both trade in bleakness. The difference between them is that the films at the top have some fun with it. Bugonia is Yorgos Lanthimos stuffing his esoteric style into a traditional kidnapping thriller, a match that works perfectly as Yorgos ramps up tension and relieves it with his specific brand of off-kilter imagery and humour. Jesse Plemons is a standout performer, playing a guy who knows he’s right but has to face up to how little that matters in the face of corporate machines. One I will rewatch for years to come.

1. No Other Choice

I’d make the joke about there being no other choice for my favourite of the festival but I feel like that’s been done. Anyone who knows me knows that I’ve had my share of shit kicked out of me by the job market, so a story of someone who decides to muder the other applicants for a job really resonated with me. What I found most interesting is the perspective of an older person, someone who has worked the traditional route of staying loyal to a company for 25 years and buying a beautiful home for his family, only to find himself unemployed in a world that needs humans less and less. The only way to survive is to lose some of your sanity and your humanity. Much like Bugonia, No Other Choice tackles the bleakness with a comedic tone, mostly thanks to a superhuman performance from Lee Byung-hun who should win every single Oscar they manufacture. Pair all of this with Park Chan-wook’s usual stellar eye for images and editing, and you have the best film of 2025 and a standout of the decade.

A Song

The Virtual Boy is one of the most notorious failures in gaming history. Coming from Nintendo after the SNES, a console that saw them see off competition from SEGA and continue to be leaders in the video game market, the Virtual Boy was an attempt at something far beyond its time. To say that VR was in its infancy at the time would be underselling it massively. The Virtual Boy was only able to render black and red graphics, its screen was only accessible by sitting down and peering into a set of goggles and shortly after release reports arrived that it was causing eye strain and nausea after prolonged use.

For Nintendo’s then Corporate Communications Manager, Perrin Kaplan, the console represented an exciting time for the company. “The Virtual Boy was just a very advanced product for that time,” Kaplan tells me over Zoom. “It was more like a peek forward, a really interesting and exciting look at what would be in the future. Nintendo has always excelled, and excels even today, at creating unique experiences completely different than anything else in the marketplace, which is why there’s so many beloved Nintendo fans. Innovation is their name. You think about all the augmented reality that we have today, like The Wizard of Oz in The Sphere, I think that the Virtual Boy was very early in that class of what we see more of today, and we’re not seeing tons of it yet. It’s still forming, how many years later. So I think it was a product that was early for its time.”

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As the number of podcasts and conversation shows on the internet approaches a critical mass, finding a hook to stand out amongst the crowd is increasingly difficult. It’s easy to think that this genre of online content has had the life drained from it but shows like Pick a Piece disprove that theory. Surrounding two people having a chat while building a Lego set, Pick a Piece is an antidote to the regimented, corporate podcasts that shoot to the top of charts as well as dull hang-out podcasts that shoot for cheap viral moments. 

I caught up with the minds behind Pick a Piece, Zain Khan and Ellis Lamai to discuss their backgrounds, conceptualising the show and developing both technical and creative skills. 

How did you guys get into doing creative stuff? Was it from studies or did something else spark it?

Zain: I didn't proceed beyond sixth form so I got into work quite quickly. I started in hospitality and then I got into IT and I've been doing that for the past four years. As for creativity, I'd often see it advertised as a course or as something that you can commit to for two years and you'd get a job out of it. But with the current landscape, it's hard for graduates to get a job so you have to just see it as an educational stepping stone, as opposed to a guarantee for a career. But I'm more of a consumer at the end of the day. I'm always going to watch a movie, I'm always going to play a video game and engage with entertainment. In terms of my creative pursuits, Pick a Piece was the first thing I've ever made.

Ellis: I had a pretty traditional upbringing and academic trajectory. I went to secondary school, I did uni, I did some development, that was around coding, HTML, that sort of thing. I wasn't really into it. I always had a love for the arts, ever since I was 13/14, I was really into movies, really into rap music. I didn't know if I was ever gonna do something creative during the pandemic. I had a little bit of a screenwriting phase, I've been so on and off with that. I don't know if it's even a real thing. But I did have a bit of that in me. How Pick a Piece came together was Zain was really passionate about this idea, and he talked to me about it quite a bit, and he just said, 'Yo, I want you to come co-host it.' And I was just like, 'Yeah, sure, I'll do it.' I didn't know how far it would go, and I didn't know what it would include, and I think it's been a really good journey in understanding and learning the mechanics of what goes on behind the show, but also my role in it, which is very forward facing, which I didn't imagine would be anything that I'd be doing.

Where did the idea for Pick a Piece come from?

Zain: The idea came from when I was playing Elden Ring. It was my first SoulsBourne game and as I was engaging with it and having to understand the mechanics of that game, I felt like if I was going to pursue anything outside of my career, it would have to be [like Eldin Ring] very, very different. Around the same time, I got a Lego set. I recall when I was building it, I was on the phone with my friend, casually building the Lego and I wasn't distracted or anything. It was quite calming and that's how it clicked for me. Initially I had a rough foundation but still people told me it had a lot of potential, that it's never done before. I put it on the back burner for a while because I wasn't ready to commit to fleshing out the idea. My friend, now my executive producer, was bugging me about the idea for a long time,and was telling me to flesh it out, take the opportunity to map out how I would go about the idea. Podcast interviews are in a very oversaturated market, so I thought about how I could recontextualize the interview podcast format and completely distance ourselves from that category completely.

What made you reach out to Ellis as a co-host?

Zain: Initially, I had a friend who is quite a charismatic, very likable guy, but for the whole infrastructure around having cameras, mics, all that other stuff, with two people, you'd have to be very compatible for it, and I just don't believe he was. I felt like Ellis was more compatible in that environment, because there is a level of restraint. But at the same time, I do believe me and him are similar in some ways. Again, we engage with entertainment the same way, we talk about it the same way, we don't alienate ourselves when we have a conversation. I think we can have a very like-minded, very fun conversation about entertainment in general. And in this environment, it translated really well.

How did you adapt to being on camera?

Ellis: It took me a bit of time because I never saw myself as the charismatic, front-of-camera guy, but it's just about rolling with it and the more I've done it, I've realized that there's so many other elements in control outside of me. So especially in the filming of this last episode, I was just trying to give as much as I could, and I was not really thinking about it, because at the end of the day, we've got people setting up cameras, we've got people editing it, they're gonna build it in their own perception, and it's my job to give them as many options and as much as they can work with in the circumstances that they have. So that's how I see it. But when I first started, it was very nerve wracking because I'm thinking about the cameras there, we've got this amount of time, but I think just doing it, I became more relaxed about the whole thing. It's just like, just whatever I'm feeling right now or whatever is going through my head, channel it into whatever I'm doing, and you can make something memorable or natural, because we highly consider and think about what we're putting out and what we're going to talk about beforehand, so I think being involved in the writing process helps me a lot as well. I can always think back to like the human moment I had when I was thinking about that topic or that line of dialog.

What does the writing process look like?

Zain: We intentionally don't ask each other questions during the filming process because if I were to ask Ellis a question, It would halt the pace of the show and redirect the attention from the current conversation, because now we've thrust into a completely different one. I'd rather allow that to be a whirlwind in terms of having organic conversation and letting everything intertwine. The conversations are still separated into segments which are indicated by the animations. It redirects the audience naturally into the next topic. And inside that topic we'll explore a variety of subjects which actually relate to the interior of the set. With the Jazz Club we've been building, we have been thinking about a lot of things through hospitality and I think there's a lot you can take out hospitality, little sub categories or topics like interpersonal skills, working in that environment, how the skills are transferable into a corporate environment, working conditions. It goes all over the place, but I think it all comes together quite neatly, and that's why we have a writing process. We map out the conversation and what we have to explicitly talk about, but there is improvisation allowed.

Ellis: One thing that helps is that our writing sessions are interactive. Some of the conversations that you see on screen are real conversations that were happening while writing and we just try and find a way to adapt it to this format. Sometimes there'll be confusion, or a block and what helps is saying 'Why not just make the complexity part of the conversation?'

I know this was initially envisioned as an interview show. How has that changed?

Ellis: One of the strongest decisions that we made was putting the Lego forward and putting ourselves as hosts forward  before we got into any interviews with guests. Just making sure this thing worked as a concept and that we worked as a team before we brought anyone bigger than us into it. I think that scheme has worked so in the future, we are thinking about interview subjects and people who could be on the show and we've definitely formatted it in a way where it's not too controversial or provocative that we could have an array of people to choose from.

Zain: I think if we do have a guest, it wouldn't be about them. They'll be present and they will participate with the Lego building, but I think the main centerpiece is building this Lego ecosystem. That's what warrants us to have a conversation. We're not going to ask someone the same question every other outlet would, we just get into a dialogue. It's very productive and there's a lot you can unearth from us and the guests, as well as the set itself. It's recontextualising the idea of how you interact with a celebrity.

Where did the idea for the animations come from?

Zain: It's another way of distancing ourselves from other interviews and podcasts. If we're going to make this Lego ecosystem exist beyond it just being a tangible product, why not animate it as well? The whole process behind animating Lego is quite unique and not a lot of people do it for leisure, it's more common to find someone trying to make a game on Unreal Engine 5 than they would ever be someone on blender trying to make a Lego short film. Our animator, Mike, is probably the only person in the UK that animates Lego in their leisure and we were quite lucky when we spoke to him about getting him involved. He has a history with Lego animation and has a YouTube channel and all that stuff, but I think with us, he definitely upped his skill set and  acclimated to what we wanted. With writing the animation, I thought about how we could show that Lego as an animation format can be quite chaotic, how we could have stop motion behave as chaotic as it is. If you look at the animation, it behaves like Lego. The mini figures actually behave as the mini figures that you would find in a Lego Store. I think it is a core component as to why people engage with the show because they're removed from the idea of actually having anything remotely as complex as that in this kind of show.

You've managed to secure some exciting collaborators for upcoming episodes, could you talk about them a bit?

Ellis: We've been very lucky in the amount of people who've really responded to what we're doing. With this upcoming episode, we've got people like fakemink, we've got Jim Legxacy again,  Pa Salieu,  Fimiguerrero. Those are a few guys who thankfully give their time to contribute to what we've been doing. With the voice actors, we're always thinking of people who we find interesting, but also have a wide appeal and would be interesting to see in this particular setting. So it's a little fun to maybe get people through the door on what we are.

 Anything else you wanna put out there?

Zain: The idea itself is unconventional because the people that make it are very unconventional. I wouldn't categorize ourselves as creators, everyone involved doesn't really come from a creative background. Our editor and producer, Kaine, is specializing in wealth management, and Jan, our executive producer, he's working with Jim Legxacy now, but academically he was doing marketing. Rania, who assisted on the first episode, comes from a law background. We see this as a whole different challenge for us. We retain that same sort of ingenuity, that integrity from our professions and transferred it here. If you have an entire infrastructure going behind this, I just don't see it as completely creative. I see it as a massive responsibility, and that's a responsibility which you have to respect because it is quite a technical undertaking and a tough show to make.

Pick a Piece episode 2 is out right now:

Movies come with an expectation of surreality. When something is manifested on a screen, the human brain, in a response built up over the last 100 years, prepares itself to be whisked off into a fantasy world. This makes films like Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness jarring, fascinating, alienating and deliciously dissectible, films that feel absurd but, in their text, are mundane.

The three stories that comprise Kinds of Kindness depict regular relationships that take on an alien form when perceived through a slightly tessellated reality. A drop of abnormality in a character’s movement or phrasing, an unsettling score and some film grain creates a gap between our world and the world of the film. With that tone set, normal interactions suddenly seem like weird rituals and the world feels chaotic and glued together with chewing gum.

Kinds of Kindness’ opening act is a dissection of power dynamics in the workplace. At work, we’re expected to do whatever our boss tells us to do, we accept this social contract for eight hours, five days a week and think nothing of it. But what if your boss controls your eating habits, the way you spend your free time, who you choose as a life partner, what if they tell you to kill someone? Lanthimos finds the borders of our comfort zones and pushes the dynamics that we take as gospel just over the line.

The other two stories go on to depict a couple growing apart and the followers of a religion. The former is twisted by a paranoia from Jesse Plemons’ character that his wife has literally been replaced by a different person. Because we’re watching a movie, we give credence to his mania, and emotionally we can understand the grief that comes with seeing someone you love evolve into something you don’t recognise.

The latter finds mundanity in the community of a sex cult on the lookout for a messiah figure with magical healing powers. The absurdity of the premise is cut by the willingness and casualness with which the characters play out these rituals. With no historical context for this religion, we think they look insane.

These snapshots of a reality slightly removed from our own allows us to see how deeply tangled we are in social contracts and weird evolutionary quirks in our brains developed over thousands of years that define the bizarre rituals we engage with daily. “The way things are” is a result of immeasurable amounts of philosophies, ideas, biologies, traumas and joys all stacked on top of one another. I don’t think Kinds of Kindness knows if this is a good or bad thing, it simply points out that it’s weird.

Something I’ve been listening to

I had doubts about using this newsletter as a dumping ground for thoughts on films I wouldn’t get the chance to cover professionally, but it’s grown into a necessity. See, film journalism traps newcomers in a catch-22. Publications don’t want to cover films after they release, they want their reviews and interviews sorted before the film comes out, so as a journalist you try to see films early, but in order to see films early you need to convince PRs (who are difficult to get ahold of without the help of more experienced friends) that you’re worthy of getting into a screening by telling them which publication you’ll be covering it for, but you haven’t seen the film yet so you don’t quite have an angle you can pitch to publications.

That was a long-winded way of saying: I can hopefully get into more screenings if I have an active newsletter with a number of subscribers where I can guarantee coverage of films.

My motivations aren’t purely out of selfishness, I also feel like this can be a space where I can discuss how movies make me feel a few weeks after they’ve been out, something that there doesn’t seem to be space for in written journalism. Hence: Decoding Furiosa.

Do you have it in you

Even as a member of Gen Z, I’m finding that the films that excite me the most aren’t the ones from younger voices looking to speak to the unique experiences of my age range, but those from old masters arriving at a thesis statement on how a life should be lived. Miyazaki’s How Do You Live?, Wenders’ Perfect Days and Miller’s Furiosa each have their philosophies on what we dedicate our lives to, what we choose to endure and accept and what we chase. But most pressingly, they all feel like these directors expressing lessons they wish they knew when they were my age.

I couldn’t make sense of Furiosa on my first viewing. It’s a well documented experience at this point – you watched Fury Road, you felt things you’d never felt before, you wanted to scream at the top of your lungs, inhaling grains of sand in an apocalyptic wasteland, you see the rave reactions to Furiosa out of Cannes and expect to leave the cinema wanting to punch people and break things. Instead, Furiosa proves to be the feel-bad blockbuster of 2024.

In the lunacy of his high-octane, lawless Australian hell-scape, George Miller gives us a story about the mundanity of adulthood. Furiosa’s kidnapping and imprisonment by Dementus gives her the motivation to get revenge. While what we experience as an audience are some of the greatest action sequences put to film since the last instalment in the franchise, our protagonist takes no joy in it. This is bureaucratic, the liminal space before she gets to kill Dementus.

The years that pass before Furiosa is face-to-face with her foe again are miserable for her, and with Dementus on his knees, a gun to his head, Furiosa realises the pointlessness of it all, only being able to demand that Dementus “give them back,” “them” being her lost family members, her lost home, the memories of a life she should have had if she weren’t taken and forced to grow up too soon. Furiosa is a film that mourns a lost childhood.

To make it epic

Furiosa understood what happiness was once. She experienced a few fleeting years of it in The Green Place and that pit of hope lodged itself in the back of her mind, slowly corroding as she became one with the wasteland. She expected that feeling to rush back as soon as she was able to push a bullet through Dementus, but by this point she had blocked off the side of her that would have been able to feel it.

Miller posits that all we’re doing as adults is making goals for ourselves that we hope will help us recover the weightless feeling of childhood, something simply unattainable once you’ve spent years navigating the wasteland of adulthood. The Mad Max universe is full of people inventing rules and acting like they matter, squabbling over resources like children, playing dress-up and driving cars off ramps, trying to recover some sort of feeling in a broken world, trying to “make it epic.”

This is Miller’s view of the world, a society of attention seeking adults who can’t quite get over the trauma of growing up, leaving behind the time where you were the centre of attention for a much bigger world where the majority of people simply do not give a fuck.

What is there for people my age to work towards? What can I hold onto that won’t disintegrate? Is there anything worth chasing when the only stress-free moments of life were experienced with an undeveloped brain? George Miller made a cautionary tale telling us to be wary of sacrificing joy to reach a goal, because you’ll feel nothing when you finally do it.

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Something I’ve been listening to

There are great thinkers from this generation and the last who struggle to see purity in modern entertainment, but I’ve always seen the potential for poetry in electric power. A controller in your hands is worth as much as a book or a pen. A game on the screen holds the same value as a Hitchcock or a Herzog. I find beauty, elegance and emotion in lines C++ code as easily as I do words printed on bark or images flickering through reels of film.

Design of an interactive experience goes beyond what’s required to structure a story. It takes a more nuanced understanding of human behaviour, desire, frustration, determination, thumb co-ordination and satisfaction. If the task set in front of every game is to navigate the dungeons of human psyche, to unlock the door that unleashes some positive emotion leaving the player attached to wiggling a thumb stick a certain way or finding the correct combination of buttons to stretch themselves over a certain hurdle, then The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is the nightmare key.

Daily drawing me back to my Switch is the feeling that this game understands me. I am a consumer who yearns to be a creator.

I will probably never have the time, tools or talent to make an entire game, certainly not one of the size and scale of Tears of the Kingdom, but the game ensures that no two players will experience the game in the same way. TOTK asks you to bring your own unique brand of creativity to Hyrule. Not only are you free to tackle the story in any order, not only do you have infinite ways of destruction while in combat, but the very way you traverse around the world is only limited by your creativity.

Through this, TOTK achieves a cosmically impossible balance of making players feel like Hyrule is their own, while being shocked at the new creatures, story beats and mechanics that lie behind every corner.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a miracle of design. Miracles are hard to put into words, especially on a random rambling newsletter. I’ll never do this game justice, I could never do Breath of the Wild justice, sometimes an unexplainable piece of art comes along and you just have to marvel at it.

I’ve clearly failed at that, but I can’t help but be inspired when something shatters the expectations of what a certain medium can be. We’ll be talking about this exact period of time for years, and I had to set this feeling in stone.

However, the latest AI technology has seemed to capture public imagination. People are excited by idea that AI can write your emails and essays, and even create art for you. For some, it feels like stepping into a sci-fi movie, with fictional levels of automation now possible. But as with many sci-fi stories, the new technology introduced to the world carries a tinge of dystopia.

AI art algorithms rely on a feed of existing art which it can analyse and aggregate. If you give an algorithm the prompt “Totoro in a Mission Impossible movie,” it searches for existing art of both Totoro and Mission Impossible before combining them. This can be done without permission from the original artists, with creators of such algorithms and writers of such prompts claiming the mishmash art as their own, as original.

This practice has been unfortunately embraced by large sections of the Internet, despite its clear negative impact on artists. Actual creators are receiving less work while their existing art is vulnerable to being stolen. Such concerns don’t weigh on most people. The appeal of ‘making’ something that feels unique because of the prompts they enter is strong. This blatant disregard for creators uncovers the core reason why the job of ‘artist’ is one of the hardest to achieve success in. Our society is built to be jealous.

Those in favour of AI art will argue that they are fighting for the people, that they are putting artistic tools in their hands. This line of thinking cannot work as it treats artists as some kind of higher class with a power over the public. Artists are the people, much more than tech bros.

In fact, their crusades are fuelled by a jealousy of talent. We are not a society that looks to celebrate talent, as much as we look to exploit it, profit off it, and run it into the ground. The only systems in which artists can find ‘success’ are ones where they agree to losing partial, or in some cases whole, ownership of their art. We look at someone with talent and decide that some of it should be ours.

AI art is the fulfilment of a dream only dreamt in the latest stages of capitalism. For those who want to exist in artistic industries without making art, AI is their ticket. It is no surprise that AI art feels soulless and empty as it does not come from the want to tell a story, or to create, it comes from the want to profit, to steal and to achieve convenience at the cost of others.

We should not be a society that hates those who can do wondrous things with a pen, a brush or a drawing tablet. They should be revered and loved for their unique abilities. Our love for new technology, the simulated feeling of creation and our jealousy of artists has combined to introduce something that only weakens our culture. It discourages the creation of art with originality, heart and humanity.

I don’t even watch TV that much. Things slip so easily from my mind that the idea of a 10-hour commitment makes me anxious, as does the idea of starting something and not finishing it. Binging is also a no-go for me. Sitting there for so long doesn’t line up with my restlessness.

This doesn’t mean TV never catches my eye, I just have to catch it as it releases. The ‘appointment viewing’ model is the only way these things get down my throat, which definitely limits the pool of shows qualifying for this list.

Still, I can only rank what I’ve seen, and what I’ve seen I really wanna write about. So I will, here it is.

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5. Ms. Marvel (Disney+)

I couldn’t not include the show that made me tear up week on week. This character, more than any in the Marvel Universe, means the most to me. Kamala Khan’s stories are wholesome and the character is so hilarious and charismatic and BROWN.

Indescribable tension arrested me in the seconds before hitting play on the first episode. They had to get this right, for Kamala, for me, for the representation of South Asian people everywhere.

I weeped when the opening scene depicted Kamala taking a driving test, turning on the car to a Punjabi radio station blasting embarrassingly loudly from the speakers. The specificity, the relatability, the charisma of Iman Vellani’s performance – they did it.

The first two episodes of the show are dynamic, stylish, directed with flare and are packed with personality. The show does get away from itself as the plot thickens and they attempt to link the entire history of the Djin to the entire history of South Asian people in real life. The weight of expectation and representation proved to be too much. Still, the show holds a special place.

One of my favourite experiences of 2022 was rewatching each episode with my mum as they came out. The feeling of seeing her invest in a Marvel thing for the first time. The acknowledgment from her that we were watching us on screen. It’s not something I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing before.

4. The Boys (Season 3) [Amazon Prime]

It would be really easy to let the aesthetic of The Boys bar you from ever checking out the show. It has that over the top violence and nudity that makes it a prime target for teenage boys going through an edge lord phase, but it displays great social satire. They say that satire is dead because nothing is more ridiculous than real life anymore, but The Boys is.

The show-runners clearly hold delight in making audiences cringe and gawk at its disgusting spectacle, but they also ensure to give it purpose. The world of The Boys needs to be heightened beyond our world, and beyond any superhero-laden worlds we’ve seen before. We need to see the extremities of Homelander’s evil in order to fee the impact of his rising fanbase and political sway. This character is written to perfection and parodies the indoctrination of young men by right-wing figures to uncomfortable levels of accuracy.

It is a tough show to enjoy if you’re trying to escape our firehell reality, but it’s hard to say it’s not good.

3. Severance (Apple TV+)

Where the hell did this come from? Apple TV+ rarely misses, they’ve knocked out another gorgeous, auteur-driven, original show like it’s nothing.

Severance introduces the idea of separating your work and home lives, literally. In this world you can get a procedure that divides your brain between your work memories and home memories, essentially creating two distinct versions of you.

I love a story that can introduce a single piece of technology, then spend the entire time contemplating what that means philosophically. The work versions of these people, named ‘innies,’ spend their time wondering who they are on the outside, what the world is like. Do I have a wife? Kids? Am I a broke loser? Why else would I do this to myself?

Meanwhile, the company that invented the surgery, Lumon, have their workers doing inexplicable, menial tasks with no clear purpose, surrounding them with mystery. Simultaneously, the innies seek the purpose of their work and the truth of who they are.

This thing just feels like a sci-fi short story that was published in the 50s and just ends with everyone dying, I love that. Black Mirror is the easy comparison to make, but this feels much more concentrated and fleshed out than any episode of that show. Each episode adds another layer of philosophy, another thing to consider, another existential crisis for those on the inside and outside.

2. Andor (Disney +)

I’ve written about this masterpiece before. About its anti-fascist message, about its depiction of oppression, about its depiction of a galaxy-wide revolution. We meet characters and get to know them for a relatively fleeting moment, but that’s all it takes for show-runner Tony Gilroy to empower them with the ability to break your heart, to give you hope, to disappoint you, to surprise you.

You should just watch this. Similarly to The Boys, there are devastating displays of evil, but what Andor never abandons is hope. The show is Gilroy shaking you, screaming at you until you get it in your head that no matter how broken the system is, no matter how many times they have broken your spirit, how many people they have taken from you, revolution is possible.

Just writing this has me ready to take the whole world on. This show is something special, don’t let it disappear.

1. The Rehearsal (NOW TV)

Contrary to my regular habits, I sat there are watched this whole thing in a day. I was mesmerised, humoured, and eventually devastated. I’ve never seen anything like this. I’ve never wanted to know a mind like Nathan Fielder’s. Nothing else, film or show, weighed on me as heavily as this did.

The Rehearsal alerted me to a bigotry I held about reality TV. I so snobbishly looked down on these clearly scripted shows that masquerade as truth. I never saw the potential in reality TV for high art, and The Rehearsal is high art.

I wouldn’t want to spoil anything about this show, so I’ll focus on the impact it had on me. My mesmerisation with The Rehearsal came with this sense of never knowing if what you were watching was truthful. The schemes of Nathan Fielder and the structure he has set up feel too ridiculous to be true, yet the people on the show are so human, so untrained, so regular.

Constantly questioning authenticity makes for a really funny show viewed from one angle, but seem like psychopathic behaviour from another. No other piece of art from 2022 has had me in sheer disbelief in what I was looking at, what was unfolding, what this person just said, the deacon they just made.

It also kicked off a Nathan Fielder binge, where I watched the entirety of his mockumentary show, Nathan For You, in a month. The Rehearsal had me acting unregular. Specific scenes still play over and over again in my head which make me question… people? truth? I’m not even sure. I’m still in the haze of watching this show.

Thank you

For putting up with my listing addiction. I’ve got a couple more to come, I hope you stick around

2022 was the year of accepting that I cannot listen to every album that comes out. A younger Ryan with more time and less hobbies would absolutely hate me for saying that, and he would despise me for my listening habits this year. See, with that acceptance came a shameful number of albums that just slipped through the cracks. I didn’t hear a lot, and few albums stuck around long enough to become a part of my 2022.

In a way, that makes this list extra special. In another way, it makes me question if I even consider myself a music lover anymore, but we’ll focus on the former. The ability to stick to my teflon brain in 2022 is one that makes an album special. These are the albums that forced me to spend time with them in 2022.

Note: Mike’s Beware of the Monkey and Diz’s The Way Forward Is Not The Way Home were albums I greatly enjoyed but released a little too late to feel right on this list. I will consider them 2023 albums in my mind.

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7. Hypnos by Ravyn Lenae

Lullabies for a restless brain.

With it’s gentle swings and breezy vocals, Hypnos doesn’t jump out as an album that stops you in your tracks. For me, it served as an antidote to a year that moved at supersonic speed. I valued my time spent with Hypnos because of its unique ability to reduce my heart rate and release the tension in my shoulders with the strum of a guitar.

The instrumental cohesion running through the project traps you in a trance, allowing Ravyn to take you on a journey with her strong, memorable melodies. Her unique, airy tones feel comfortable resting on top of instrumentals that meander peacefully as well as those that impose themselves on the listener. The control she exhibits likens her to the titular hypnotist, an expert in manipulating the emotions of her subject. I needed something that made me slow down this year, Hypnos made a vital intervention.

Favourite tracks:

“Satellites” (prod. Steve Lacy, Monte Booker, Luke Titus)

“3D” (prod. Monte Booker, Phoelix)

“Skin Tight” (prod. Steve Lacy)

Hypnos

6. Deathfame by Quelle Chris

Begging to be recognised as ‘alive.’

Already on a legendary run of albums, Quelle Chris continues to capture my imagination. I barely write a little article each month and every time I do I feel like I’m out of ideas, that I have nothing interesting to say anymore. Quelle has released some of the most concept-heavy albums of recent years at a frightening clip but never seems starved for an idea.

Deathfame centres around the idea that artists are only appreciated once they pass, an establishment Quelle actively rebels against through the album. He wants his life to be recognised, rather than his death. He wants to know now that he is loved. He wants to feel the effect his art is making in real time. Why should these pleasures be locked away from the living?

“Alive Ain’t Always Living” is the first full track on the album, an expression of gratitude for life. Though the album’s concept may lend itself to angst, Quelle is sure to open the album with grace and humility, which allows Deathfame to be framed as a simple desire to live more life, to feel more happiness. This is a yearning I deeply relate to, and when its placed over the level and variety of production on display here, it makes for pure intoxication. Despite being at number 6 on this list, Deathfame carries my favourite instrumental of the year in “The Sky Is Blue Because The Sunset Is Red.” Melancholic piano chords and choral “oooo”s season this intricate posse cut.

Deathfame made me want to live more. That’s powerful stuff.

Favourite tracks:

“Alive Ain’t Always Living” (prod. Chris Keys, Quelle Chris)

“The Sky Is Blue Because The Sunset Is Red” (prod. Chris Keys, Knxwledge)

“Deathfame” (prod. Quelle Chris)

Deathfame

5. Component System with the Auto Reverse by Open Mike Eagle

Meeting adversity with aggression.

Lighting the fire in your belly is not what Open Mike Eagle has made his name from. His last couple albums, Anime Trauma & Divorce and Brick Body Kids Still Daydream, are stories of loss, depression and painful nostalgia. The former details his work in therapy and his mission of self care, making it easy to draw a line between that and Component System with the Auto Reverse, an album that is as stripped back and confident as Open Mike has ever sounded.

Even with that confidence, doubt creeps into his writing on the odd line. We also hear his usual self-deprecation, but here it sounds more like self-acceptance rather than self-loathing. A recognition of flaws is not a sign of weakness.

Another aspect of his previous two albums, which appeared less on Component System, was the softer instrumentals which strayed further and further away from Mike’s hip-hop roots. “Burner Account” (prod. Quelle Chris) and “Crenshaw Homeland” (prod. Diamond D) see Open Mike float over as dusty instrumentals as we’ve heard in recent years.

It’s impossible to write about my connection to this album without mentioning “For DOOM,” a two-minute dedication to the greatest to ever do it, a source of endless inspiration for both myself and Mike. Listening to Open Mike knowing he is a disciple of DOOM has always strengthened my connection to his music, and this track where he pours out everything that DOOM meant to him hit right where it hurts. He raps about buying a DOOM mask off Etsy to “rock it proudly,” how he has a couple songs with him but never directly talked, an experience he values because “who the fuck ever gets to rock with their heroes.” The final few bars on the track land the final gut punch as he raps “Got a pic of you spitting on some art in my living room / I memorised your lyrics / and seen every interview / I looked into the eyes of the piece / he ain’t really you! / … supervillain.”

Component System was a bold foot forward by one of my favourite artists which maintained all the reasons why I love him to begin with.

Favourite tracks:

“79th and Stony Island” (prod. Quelle Chris)

“Multi-Game Arcade Cabinet” (prod. Illingsworth)

“For DOOM” (prod. Illingsworth)

Component System with the Auto Reverse

4. things I should have said a year ago by Otis Mensah

Face down in the well of regret.

A gentle note manifests in your left ear, others join it, they swirl around your head like water around a drain, a voice caresses the tops of their heads saying “I’m the black box / I survived it all / Always chasing the night before with a knife and fork.” This is the immediate experience of pressing play on Otis Mensah’s latest project.

It sets the tone of an album full of paper mache instrumentals that congeal together tentatively, that feel like they could break open and dissolve at the mere sight of water, that are scarred by Otis’ writings of could’ve beens and almosts. That opening track, “Black Box” ends with Otis crooning a wistful sadness as he sings “Find me anything to kill some time / A soliloquy, a lullaby / We were so close / We were so close,” displaying the overbearing nature of regret on his mind.

Such dark theming itself can be overbearing and can lead you to believe that there are no moments of levity here. Each instrumental on the album is soulful and melodic. “Old Boy” and “Grievances” in particular boast beats worthy of endless looping. Otis is also playful in his delivery, seamlessly transitioning between singing and rapping like it’s a matter of flicking a switch, furthering this dichotomy between hearing the album and truly listening.

What kept me coming back time and again in 2022 was the album’s centrepiece, “Before Venice.” Otis’ angelic vocals soar on what feels more like a church sermon than a rap song. The hook provides such profusely poetic phrases that feel great as they roll of the tongue, he sings “We sunk before Venice did / Bee stung on my penmanship / The piggy-back ride broke my spine / Made a landmine of my sentiment” documenting the explosive, life-altering experience of a break up.

You just gotta listen to this album, listen to this artist. He continues to put out the most special, inventive music coming out of Sheffield.

Favourite tracks (all produced by Otis Mensah):

“Before Venice”

“Woodlouse Are Friends”

“Black Box”

things I should have said a year ago

3. Laurel Hell by Mitski

The ugly side of desire.

Also in the vein of artists making slight departures from a previous sound, we have Mitski embracing synth pop on Laurel Hell. There is brightness, clarity and swing to the soundscape, things that I don’t usually associate with Mitski’s music. What grounds Laurel Hell in familiarity for Mitski fans is the expression of her lyrical gifts.

Mitski’s writes in a way that makes you intimately familiar with experiences you’ve never had. On “Should’ve Been Me” she sings “When I saw the girl looked just like me / And it broke my heart the lengths you went to hold me / To get to have me,” I have never been in a situation like that but her ability to lyricise her emotional processing is this ultimate communicator.

Another showcase of her outstanding skills on the pen is “Stay Soft.” Lines like “Open up your heart / Like the gates of hell” and “Tell me what you want to burn away / ‘Cause I could be your stoker” carry such strong imagery worthy of dissection in high school classrooms.

Though it has become an unfortunate cliche for Mitski’s fans to boil her art down to ‘sad girl music,’ it’s hard to deny the relatability of songs like “Working For The Knife.” This track is home to one of my favourite lines I heard all year, “I cry at the start of every movie / I guess ‘cause I wish I was making things too / But I’m working for the knife.” I have never heard the idea of self-sabotage expressed so viscerally and it hit me on the most fundamental level. Mitski continues to put me in shoes I’ve never worn and gives me the words to make sense of my own reality.

Favourite tracks (all produced by Patrick Hyland and Mitski):

“Working For The Knife”

“Stay Soft”

“That’s Our Lamp”

Laurel Hell

2. NO THANK YOU by Little Simz

This is what control looks like.

I can’t believe it’s been less than a month since I heard this. Speak of albums that force you to listen, NO THANK YOU made itself comfortable in my life immediately. Simz claims that “life doesn’t come with pre-sets” but I was programmed to love this album.

As I write this I am fighting the distracting beauty of “Angel,” the album’s intro. Starting with pleasantly looped vocal samples which eventually have Cleo Sol’s vocalising and soft violins placed on top, the track is emblematic of the progressive nature of each song on the album. How a song starts is not at all representative of how one will end. The instrumentals are as omnidirectional as Simz’s flow, capable of reaching any space at any time. Inflo and Simz have extraterrestrial chemistry here.

10 tracks and 50 minutes long, the album divides that time almost equally. The extended track lengths allow for epic stories to be spun, for musical twists and cuts, and for Simz to express the many shades of her artistry. Each track contributes to the overall tapestry of an album while being a novel in itself.

What caught my ear is what’s perhaps the most simple of NO THANK YOU’s offerings, “Who Even Cares.” The penultimate track feels like a moment of reflection before the grand finale. You’re thrown into this groovy, yet mellow and almost melancholic, instrumental. You’re welcomed by Cleo Sol’s soft voice melded into the beat, carefully, measuredly producing this miracle of a melody which I could listen to on repeat for hours alone. Simz’s contributions feel like a cherry on top, removing the sharpness from her voice and taking this sympathetic tone as themes of losing hope and hitting rock bottom are explored.

NO THANK YOU is an album you have to hear to believe. This is not something that happens all the time. Simz perfects the skills you already knew she had and expands into territories you didn’t know were possible. A miracle of an album.

Favourite tracks (all produced by Inflo):

“Who Even Cares”

“Angel”

“No Merci”

NO THANK YOU

1. Laughing so Hard, it Hurts by Mavi

Soul bearing between drum loops.

I find it way too difficult to write about things that I like this much. I always sit here and ask “what can I even say?” Especially when it comes to Mavi, a supremely gifted wordsmith and artist whose talents need no explanation. My words feel insignificant to the experience of not just listening to this album, but living with it.

It is really hard to make art that is a true reflection of a person. The inclusion of honesty in something that is designed to be consumed by a load of people who don’t know you is a hard decision to make. You want to be in control of how you’re perceived. For Mavi to not only bear his soul on Laughing so Hard, it Hurts, but to express it in poetry so gorgeous… it just leaves me at a loss for words.

Equally as skilful and brave is the lack of answers on the album. Mavi asks a lot of questions about life, how to do it right, how to explain how he feels, how to make sense of it all. Is it okay to brag? Is it okay to be truly honest? On “My Good Ghosts” he asks “You might die if you get too high / And you might die if you don’t even try / So what’s the difference?” interrogating his fear of success and failure. The same track is home to the lines “Maybe we just depressed because the trees depressed / And the sea depressed / The only thing we see is death,” forcing us to simultaneously grapple with internal and external strife.

The overbearing amount of information to process in our personal lives and our collective lives weighs heavily on this album. Pulling together the positive and negative images of self is something explored on “Baking Soda” where in a few lines Mavi declares himself a king and wishes he was better at communicating with those he loves. The song’s hook contains the lines “She said ‘we either on drugs or need to be’ / Which is better?” another question left answerless.

I have said a lot about an album I didn’t have a lot to say about. It’s just good. The production is good, the lyrics are written beautifully, and it is my favourite album of 2022. Thank you, Mavi.

Favourite tracks:

“My Good Ghosts” (prod. COFFEEBLACK)

“Reason” (prod. Ovrkast)

“Spoiled Brat” (prod. Wulf Morpheus)

Laughing so Hard, it Hurts

It was a weird gaming year for me. I am firmly a Nintendo guy, but of the last few years, this carried the fewest first party releases that really appealed to me. I also bought an Xbox Series S and had the endless expanse at Gamepass at my disposal, for which I used to fuel my shameful FIFA addiction as well as run through some indies. I say all that to say that I didn’t have a year full of games that blew me away. I never got around to Eldin Ring and I don’t have a PlayStation, denying me access to the beauty of Horizon and God of War. Instead, 2022 was a year of gaming for comfort. 

I composed this list with that viewpoint. As much as I enjoyed games like Inside and Tunic, they were not games I pumped hours into, they were not the things I’d throw on after coming home from work. Each game on this list either provided me with immense comfort or implanted in me a swelling of emotion which few games do.

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5. Pokémon Violet

So yeah, the game is broken. It is glitchy and slow and kinda ugly at times. That is all true and absolutely limited my enjoyment of it. But lying beneath that layer of dust and mud lies one of the most fun games to come out of Game Freak in their entire history. 

I’m not sure how to expand on that, the thing is just fun. Riding around on your big purple mechanical Pokémon feels great, and gradually upgrading him provides such a lovely sense of accomplishment. Gaining access to new areas of a map due to new abilities to swim, fly and climb is just a general blanket positive for any game. 

Observing Pokémon in their natural habitat, interacting with each other and with you is endlessly fascinating. The immersion of the game would be unbelievable without its brokenness. The varying difficulty of raid battles and their increasingly alluring rewards make them an addictive pastime. I’ve spent hours jumping from raid to raid. In some ways, the goal of an open world game is to make the world interesting enough to ignore the main story for, and I think this game gets there. 

There is so much wrong with this game but man did they get the core of it so right. We as Pokémon fans spend too much time hoping for the next game to be the flawless one, a constant longing for an imaginary lover. It’s probably never coming. The Pokémon company is an unstoppable machine and Game Freak are under constant pressure to squeeze out the product. It sucks, and the fans deserve better, but as long as the potential remains this high, hope is inevitable.

4. Unpacking

I told you, this list is about comfort. Unpacking perfectly manipulates the cognitive dissonance in my silly little brain. If you told me, in real life, that there was a house full of boxes and you wanted me to unpack them and make sure everything is in the right place but also looks nice, I’d have an absolute breakdown. No way I’m doing all that. However, if all the boxes and items were in a comfy 16-bit art style, I’d consider it. 

A fascinating thing about humans is that we find the idea of doing menial tasks way more appealing than actually doing them. The nostalgic filter placed on life through Unpacking provides this idealised version of lovingly crafting your living space, your home. You’re reminded of some trinket you’d forgotten about, a shirt you haven’t worn in years. You exercise your creative muscles when trying to neatly place more items than a room can handle. You experience the bittersweet decision of throwing something away that doesn’t quite fit your new life. 

Unpacking takes you through different eras of a person’s life. We decorate their childhood bedroom, their first uni dorm, their first house, we move them into their partner’s place then back out again. An unplaceable emotion rises when noticing how some toys, clothes and stationary carry across from home to home, while others are left behind. It’s not as simple as happiness or sadness, it’s not warmth or anxiety, it’s the kind of thing that makes you say “that’s just life.”

Unpacking carries such awesome power, to be as satisfying a pastime as Tetris while having the depth most AAA games cannot achieve.

3. Kirby and the Forgotten Land

It’s freaking Kirby, man. The cuteness factor inherent to Kirby games makes for an undeniably fun experience every time, but the depth of mechanics and level design introduced in Forgotten Land made it a game that compelled me to sink my time into it. 

I am not someone who is good at games, so low difficulty very rarely a factor in me not enjoying one. I also believe that there are few genres more satisfying than the 3D platformer. Kirby’s first 3D platforming adventure is heaven for anyone into tight control and low stakes gaming. Kirby has such a great balance of making the main goals easily achievable while leaving bigger challenges for the optional collectables. I never felt like I was just steaming through the game because I was always missing something in each level. 

Additionally, Kirby’s copy abilities can be upgraded, taking you from being able to spit a little bit of fire to being a literal dragon who can glide across the stage, taking the souls of enemies as you do. It is so much fun. 

The way abilities are upgraded is really fun too. It wouldn’t be a Nintendo platformer without stages that take place in a nebulous void, and they designed these nebulous voids to be so damn fun. Each one focuses on a particular copy ability and sets up a series of challenges to complete in the allotted time. Using the ice ability to freeze enemies and slide them into switches or the gun ability (yes Kirby gets a gun) to hit distant targets while floating over a chasm provides such a fun feeling.

Forgotten Land is also in the running for the best looking game on the Switch. Areas can be boiled down to your typical grassy, sandy, icey zones, but there’s added detail in the design. The worlds are post-apocalyptic and each one has to blend with the ruins of a once thriving society. It’s far from a technical marvel, but it takes the fun, cartoony, relaxing Nintendo style to exciting places.

2. Outer Wilds

I wrote about Outer Wilds on my midyear list, and despite not having played it as much in the second half of the year, my attachment to it has only grown. I’ve been listening to the soundtrack a lot, especially the bare bones tracks that take the most iconic melody from the game to its core. The track “Travellers” is a particularly apt encapsulation of the feeling of Outer Wilds.

The game leaves you free to navigate a solar system as part of the Outer Wilds program. Leaving your home world of Timber Hearth, a small, grassy, woodlands-dominated land, for the raging seas of Giant’s Deep and the barely-sensical Hourglass Twins intills a feeling of danger, freedom and adventure. On these planets, moons and asteroids, you uncover the history of an ancient civilisation who crash landed in this solar system. Along the way, you come across other members of the Outer Wilds program, people who have set up a base camp on various worlds. Each of them passes the time by singing, whistling, or playing the main musical theme of the game, to an open, empty world. 

That’s what the track “Travellers” is formed from. The audio tracks from each traveller are layered on top of each other to form this solar system-wide synchronicity. Every time I listen I think about these lonely souls living out their days on unfamiliar lands, bonded by their solitude and their dreams of home. 

1. Pokémon Legends: Arceus

This was another one I wrote about in the midyear list, so no need to elaborate. It’s the game Pokémon fans have always dreamed about, the freeing open zones, the ease of catching Pokémon blah blah blah we know the deal by now. 

The biggest testament to this game is that it was the first thing I played in 2022 and it never left that number 1 spot. Even the actual mainline Pokémon game couldn’t dethrone it. Arceus remains special in the way that it innovated on the battle system, emphasised the need to hide and catch Pokémon from afar, the pace of the game, the satisfaction of the gameplay loop. 

Though Scarlet & Violet boast their seamless open worlds and different towns, both things I absolutely love, when I think about the things I want Pokémon to hone in on, they’re all from Arceus. 

I love that the story takes place in a different time period, I love the revamped battles, I love throwing a ball, catching a Pokémon and advancing through the world without breaking my stride. Arceus was the first time in a while where Game Freak felt inspired and free to experiment, and that is far more exciting than a game that looks to settle into the status quo. I want Pokémon games to feel like this felt, like advancement, like I’m playing something that had thought and love poured into it. 

Thank you

For reading all this. I’ll leave you with that track from Outer Wilds, the song that spans space itself.

The themes, ideas and morals of the art we consume are shared across genres, time periods and even mediums. Movies, books, music and games all have the power to express the same ideas with completely different presentation.

The “in the world of” series will pluck one of those things from the zeitgeist and connect it to pieces from different mediums to show the universality of art.

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The subject of today’s piece is Tony Gilroy’s stellar show, Andor.

To label Andor as a show detailing ‘how an empire falls’ is to look at it through the completely wrong lens. That label assumes fault on the side of the empire. That internal mistakes led to its downfall. Andor is not interested in the flaws of the fascist party that rules the Star Wars universe, it instead captures how the oppressed find their breaking point and how revolutions are conceived.

The scope of Star Wars means we’re not focusing in on a finite group of people who organised within a single country, but pockets of revolutionary thinkers who exist across a whole galaxy. The average citizen who lost hope years ago, beaten into servitude. The senators who are taking the system down from the inside. The soldiers and warriors willing to put their lives on the line for the cause. Those stuck in between, unsure of which lines they want to cross. There are shades to revolutionaries, Andor does the most incredible job of expressing that.

We rarely go minutes without being reminded of who our protagonists are fighting for. The weight of a galaxy mired by oppression sits on top of every scene. We see spirits break and hope snuffed out. We see the injustice and brutality that oppression is built from. Andor details the role of policing and prison labour to uphold fascist systems, the way that people are treated like cattle, how little life matters.

These are the most general terms I can use to describe a show that is so precise and intentional with its every line. Andor is my favourite show of 2022 and is an energising rocket up the arse for anyone who is tired of our right-wing ass world.

A song

Tracy Chapman – Talkin’ Bout A Revolution

“Don't you know / Talking about a revolution? / It sounds like a whisper / Poor people gonna rise up / And get their share / Poor people gonna rise up / And take what's theirs”

– Tracy Champman

Need I say any more?

The soft soundscape of “Talkin’ Bout A Revoltion” brings this serenity to revolt, a poetry in the devouring of an oppressive system. We need that. We need to understand revolution as the staircase to equality rather than a muddy, morally questionable descent that leaves you just as corrupted as the oppressors you sought to take down.

In this sense, the song is in opposition to a lot of what Andor deals in, that being the grey areas and the lines between good and evil. Chapman removes herself from the chaos of that. She gives the impression of an oracle, certain of what’s going to happen, what needs to happen, as she simply waits for it to unfold.

The arrogance of an oppressor is something the two agree on. Nobody listens to the ‘whispers’ of a revolution because they think so little of us. When Chapman reaches her most energetic and sings “Don’t you know you better run, run, run, run, run run, run run,” she sings to the oppressors, too wrapped up in their perceived power to understand the potential of a society on the brink of snapping. Class structures are inhumane, it’s about time we rise up, take what’s ours.

A game

Inside

If “Talkin’ Bout A Revolution” is representative of the energising parts of Andor, Playdead’s acclaimed game Inside reflects the other side of the show’s coin. The accuracy with which Andor is able to depict the tools and effects of oppression is one of its biggest strengths. Inside is able to achieve that same feeling, but through much more abstract means.

You're thrown into a dreary, black and white, hostile, cold forest, the only colour on screen coming from the faintly red shirt of your player character, a small child. All you can do right now is run and jump, and you cannot stop running. You’re being chased by armed men, ready to gun you down without hesitation.

Many have compared the feeling of playing Inside as looking to replicate the constant fear of being Jewish in Nazi Germany. You can barely stop to think, danger is constant. You don’t seem to have a destination, you simply run away and survive.

As you progress you find that the other people of this world, the other people like you, have been subjected to a form of mind control by whoever runs this land, a clear comparison to the way fascist systems rob you of your individuality and weaken you into compliance. The game is depressing and confusing, purposely so. Andor is populated with characters just like the protagonist of Inside. Not sure where they’re going and why, but convinced of this world’s hatred for them.

Thank you!

for reading this! Can you think of any more pieces of media which line up with the values and goals of Andor? Drop me a line on twitter if so!

There is no way to hide the cutting of corners and the lack of investment in quality raw materials when making boba. There are specific signifiers, apparent from before even walking in the door, to spot if this particular boba-branded establishment actively desecrates the sanctity of Taiwanese tea. Too many amongst us are unaware that they are being hoodwinked on the regular, or hold resentment towards the beverage because of the 25% sugar, 50% ice lies they were served. As someone ultimately unfamiliar with everybody’s local boba store rosters, I will refrain from dishing out specific recommendations. Instead, I aim to equip you with the tools to highlight and weed out inferior product and dangerously entitled imposters to curate the ideal boba tea experience.

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The Name

As with many things ported over from East to West, there is a level of sanitisation which certain boba places undergo in order to not offend the tastes and sensibilities of the white people. Be wary of such places. Often, lesser quality cafes will opt to use the word ‘bubble’ in the title, an unmistakable announcement of their wares for the uninitiated audience.

In reality, that word signals a willing westernising for the seasoned boba veteran. A good boba place will have some level of ambiguity in regards to its intentions to the white passer by. They must approach with intention and curiosity in order to have it revealed to them that this is, indeed, a boba shop.

The Smell

The sweet, yet herby notes of a good boba shop are some of the great manmade delicacies themselves. The scent originates from a boba shop’s tendency to also produce bubble waffles, an extravagant dessert which maybe one out of 100 customers will actually buy.

Their presence is not important for the pursuit of profit but for the sensory indication for the customer that this place is special, holy even. The production of bubble waffles is world-building, adding to the atmosphere of a house of culinary delights. The mere existence of bubble waffles on the menu is a signifier that each time you visit this establishment, you may leave with a completely different combination of products.

The Toppings

The association between boba and the ‘popping ball’ is not unwarranted but, I believe, overblown. The novelty of the popping ball as a tea topping is what many places play on in order to attract white audiences. Though they are a completely valid option, the trend of these being the only options alongside the traditional tapioca is a misrepresentation of the versatility of the boba topping.

A toppings list of ‘tapioca, apple popping ball, strawberry popping ball, lychee popping ball..’ is not to be trusted. Coconut jelly, flavoured pearls, grass jelly, pudding, fresh taro, these toppings offer such a range of experience which swapping the flavouring of a popping ball does not. Part of the boba experience is a moment of being overwhelmed by options, which brings me onto my next point.

The Selection

If the menu is not definitively split into at least three different types of teas, run. If their selection of milk teas is smaller than their selection of fruit teas, run. If there is any clear bias towards a bog-standard fruit tea, get out of there. This is an indication that their tea is not of a good enough quality and needs an overpowering of artificial fruit flavouring to be anything close to enjoyable.

Also be on the lookout for places with cream crown/ cheese crown teas, these are shops that have put in the extra effort to expand the boba sensory experience. Shops with limited menus that stick to McDonald’s milkshake flavours need to be dodged.

The Matcha Milk Tea Test

I have experienced struggle before. I have seen the glowing, heavenly light of a boba cafe in a desert of coffee shops and fast food mediocrity. I have approached that shop and seen my ol’ reliable on the menu, the matcha milk tea. I order. I pay. Expectation of satisfaction swells within me. I will experience home.

The reverie is shattered and stomped on before my eyes as I receive my order, convinced there had to be a mistake. My matcha milk tea… was white. White as milk. White as the inside of a coconut. I take a sip and the distant whisper of a single matcha molecule has their cry for help heard by my searching tastebuds. A cry of loneliness from being the single speck of green amongst a sea of white.

It should go without saying, but a matcha boba should be green. Forest green. Any place with the nerve and lack of trust in their own materials to serve a virtually matcha-less matcha latte boba does not respect you.

The Fruit Tea Test

Does it taste like the actual fruit or like fruit flavouring?

Actual fruit → good boba

Fruit flavouring → bad

Simple

pls don’t take this seriously

This is no attempt to gatekeep boba, do enjoy what you enjoy and please do alert me to any exceptions from my established ‘rules.’ This was more a chance for me to share my experience in the hopes that just one person may move towards a better boba-sipping life.

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Pictures:

Boba: https://www.imperialsugar.com/recipes/boba-tea

Bubble waffle: https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/bubble-waffles

Grass jelly: https://christieathome.com/blog/grass-jelly-brown-sugar-milk/

Matcha: https://www.proportionalplate.com/matcha-boba/

Your character, a humanoid extraterrestrial, less than a foot tall, looking to find the point of origin for his species. Your sandbox, an average Earth house taken over by bugs. Your mission, to convince each race of bugs to hand over a household item which they consider sacred in order to build a vehicle capable of exploring the world outside the house.

Before diving into a game, a show or a film, some of us have started asking the question, “will this be worth my time?” Now that I have helped an ant bake a cake using an army of multicoloured gremlins, I can safely say that my 8 hours sunk into Tinykin was well worth it.

Branded as a Pikmin-like with platforming elements, my experience with Tinykin saw that phrase turned on its head. The strategy and time-management of Pikmin are what defines the series mores than having an army of little guys, in my opinion. The joy of Tinykin came from the steady addition of platforming tools to your arsenal and finding creative ways climb couches and surf down bannisters. As well as the fact that you get to organise a party for insects.

More Nintendo influence is felt in the perspective of the game. Being shorter than the width of a book is reminiscent of the worldview of Chibi-Robo, another household exploration game. Despite these influences, I struggle to conjure past experiences of games that are just like Tinykin. The leisure at which you’re allowed, and encouraged, to explore along with the unique sets of challenges using the quirky abilities of your Tinykin stop your brain from making constant comparisons to other titles. There’s also such charm to the writing and concepts which can be difficult to find coming from Nintendo first parties. There’s an ant who just shouts “BOO!” at you wherever you go. It’s awesome.

Tinykin is an elite-level time killer. It feels great to control and affords the player defined goals but with great expanses of freedom to experiment and wander before completing them. A game that holds relatively low difficulty that still feels rewarding is so hard to achieve but if done well can charm even the most staunch FromSoft fanboy. Tinykin doesn’t need to boast its technical accomplishments for you to get why it’s great. It just feels good to play.

Something To Read!

Anything. Read anything. A novel, an autobiography, a wikipedia entry, the back of the packet of ramen. Literally anything.

Something To Watch!

You have so many options. I promise BBC1 is not the place to be. We have the greatest achievements in cinema at our fingertips. Please just watch anything but that funeral.

Something To Play!

Balan Wonderworld? Sonic 06? The bloody E.T game that tanked the entire games industry?? All better than the funeral. Play them instead, play anything. Your first month on gamepass is £1. Go do something productive. You don’t even need an Xbox go to xbox.com/play and just make something of your time.

Something To Listen To!

Anything to fill your ears with something that isn’t monarchy propaganda. You got this. You can do this. Don’t feel any obligation to sit and stare at a coffin all day. There is more to life.

The themes, ideas and morals of the art we consume are shared across genres, time periods and even mediums. Movies, books, music and games all have the power to express the same ideas with completely different presentation.

The “in the world of” series will pluck one of those things from the zeitgeist and connect it to pieces from different mediums to show the universality of art.

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The subject for today’s post is Jordan Peele’s third feature film, NOPE.

(minor spoilers)

If you listen to any interview with Jordan peele about NOPE, the word “spectacle” will be one of the first out of his mouth. The theme is strongly in the DNA of the movie, with the opening images containing the word used in a Bible verse with a negative connotation. This is contrary to how we view spectacle in the modern day, as something desirable and exciting. The idea of being a spectacle ourselves can sound an exhilarating concept, with fame and celebrity being so sought after.

Many of the characters in NOPE exhibit this desire in different ways. The desire to be known for something, the desire to profit off something, the desire to attain the accolades which may come with making the world a better place. Cleverly, the film sets itself in Hollywood, the home of spectacle. Imagery resembling screens and cameras is frequent throughout NOPE, a comment on how we experience reality in an internet-dominated and content-abundant age. NOPE depicts our attachment to spectacle, in all its forms, as something of an abusive relationship.

One of the many ways this is exemplified is through the film’s relationship with animals, and how the exploitation of natural life has historically been used in cinema to create spectacle. Animals were never meant to be on movie sets, in zoos or used for our capitalist exhibitions, yet we’re addicted to forcing them to fit into that box.

An Album

Because The Internet – Childish Gambino

The route connecting NOPE to Because The Internet is less a winding path and more a rigid, straight motorway. Though the album is leaning much more into commentary on internet culture (or at least what it was in 2013), it relates to the film through the idea of witnessing reality through a screen and searching for spectacle.

In no track is this more apparent than in “II. Worldstar.” Gambino raps from the perspective of someone with similar motivations to Keke Palmer’s character in NOPE. Both witness spectacle, both have the first thought ‘let’s film it and get paid.’

“Yeah, motherfucker, take your phone out / To record this, ain't nobody can ignore this / I'm more or less a moral-less individual / Making movies with criminals, tryin' to get them residuals / When it all go crazy / When I hear that action, I'ma be Scorsese”

Diving further into the album rewards you with a picture of a character hooked on spectacle to the point of being lost in it. The album’s seven-track-run between “I. The Worst Guys” and “I. The Party” describe a life of braggadocio, love affairs with multiple women and the overall lifestyle of an overprivileged child. All seems well until the claustrophobia of “II. No Exit.” The industrial instrumental and monotonic delivery is paired with a description of mundanity, something which Gambino’s character is just not equipped to deal with. The trappings of a normal life lead him down a spiral which plays out through the remaining tracks.

While NOPE looks to capture a few days of a life consumed by spectacle, Because The Internet attempts to capture the whole thing.

A Book

The Veld – Ray Bradbury

A bit of a cheat, I know, this being a short story rather than a book. It’s still something to read though, and it’s themes are really close to NOPE’s, so work with me here.

At the start of a Black Mirror-foreshadowing sci-fi anthology called The Illustrated Man, Ray Bradbury placed The Veld, a story surrounding the invention of VR technology that transforms a room in the home into anything you can imagine. Following a family who come into ownership of such a room, Bradbury tracks their initial fascination and steep slide into obsession.

A particular image they return to is one of an African plateau where the family can observe the exotic wildlife. This relationship they build, one that simulates the sensation of human-animal connection but at a safe distance mirrors the Hollywood treatment of animals commented on in NOPE. We’re fascinated by exoticism due to our fear of it. Given the choice of witnessing the veld through the VR room and witnessing it in real life, you’re sure that this family would opt for the room every time.

To witness reality through a screen is a dream to those too scared to witness reality as it is. A dream can only last so long. Bradbury’s story sees the walls between what’s virtual and what’s reality become blurred in a way that makes for uncomfortable living for the family. Being published for the first time in 1950, The Veld goes down as an ahead-of-its-time cautionary tale.

Thank You

For reading that is! Can you think of other pieces of art that also follow these themes? Let me know, and also let me know if this is a cool kind of article I should do again.

until next time

ARTICLES & TIMESTAMPS:
Brandon's Pick - (2:08) "Black Thought and Danger Mouse break down Cheat Codes, their hip-hop two-hander" By Todd Gilchrist
Ryan's Pick - (22:09) "‘People haven’t taken me seriously’: where the music and media industries have failed, whisper networks have provided solace and community" By Jumi Akinfenwa
Miki's Pick - (41:06) "Why Are Music’s Power Players Moving to Miami?" By Katie Bain

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