Season 9 of Futurama feels like someone shook the old series like a snow globe and then forgot why they were shaking it. The glitter settles, but the shape underneath is… mush. Not terrible, not brilliant, but a sort of nostalgic shrug wearing a Hulu lanyard.

Across the board, the season has this uncanny vibe of being both too old and too new at the same time, like a millennial trying to join TikTok with BuzzFeed-era references. Half the episodes hinge on cultural trends that expired before the writers’ room Wi-Fi connected. NFTs? Beanie babies?? A book club where nobody reads??? The show is starting to feel like a time capsule curated by someone who intermittently wakes from a coma.

The One Amigo
A shrug in episode form. The whole NFT premise arrives years after anyone stopped pretending to care, so the plot just feels like an archaeological dig through stale internet fads. A couple chuckles, but mostly it made me feel like someone dusting off an abandoned blockchain server.

Quids Game
A sentimental gesture without the emotional scaffolding to hold it up. Fry reliving his eighth birthday could have sung, but instead it shuffles through contrived stakes and jokes that don't quite land.

The Temp
One of the rare wins this season. Fry gets replaced by a long-forgotten temp, and the story actually remembers how to have fun with Planet Express’s workplace chaos.

Beauty and the Bug
Bender becomes a matador, and everything about the plot feels taped together. His character beats flip abruptly, as though rewritten during the ad break. Middling at best.

One Is Silicon and the Other Gold
Leela’s book club turns out to be a wine club because nobody reads anymore. Painfully relatable if you’ve ever tried to run a real book club. Funny, grounded, and probably the most true-to-life episode here.

Attack of the Clothes
The Professor tries fashion design. I tried to care. Neither of us succeeded. It just quietly collapses under its own lack of energy.

Planet Espresso
A highlight. Hermes grows alien coffee beans, and the plot buzzes with lively momentum until it skids into a limp ending. Still, the ride there is enjoyable.

Cuteness Overlord
The most hilariously outdated thing I’ve seen in years. A beanie baby craze? In 2025? This could have aired in the original run. A Funko Pop parody would have made sense, but nope — straight back to the late '90s.

The Futurama Mystery Liberry
Three segments riffing on classic children’s mystery books. The Nancy Drew bit works, but the whole concept hinges on the viewer actually recognizing print literature — a big ask these days.

Otherwise
Shockingly good. Fry’s déjà vu spirals into alternate realities and ghost-ship doppelgängers, and suddenly the season remembers its own potential. A strong, clever episode that deserved equally strong company.

So like, I'm not an artist. I think we all dig that.

The last time I really tried to draw stuff was about 20 years ago, when I dropped out of high school and decided that I could give art college a try. Since then I've had, like, two decades of rust and non-attempts, but the fact that I've decided to attempt it is... well, it's an attempt.

Last night I decide to try uploading something I've sketched. Some crappy piece of pen-on-paper that I've been fighting with for the last two weeks, which I'm sure looks objectively better than FA's current banner but is still a thousand steps away from what I'd describe as 'good'. The limbs don't quite look good, because I don't know how shoulders work, but I lean into channelling my inner Jhonen Vasquez. It's not the best drawing, not by a long shot. It looks janky, like I said. The physics of it don't quite work; a character couldn't quite stand like that. I couldn't get a high-rez scan of the paper so it's a pixelated mess taken from a photograph made by my potato of a Samsung phone. And I'd been bludgeoning it with photoshop like a fur-trapper clubbing a seal in a desperate attempt to fix where I'd inked over small details by mistake, because again, I'm not an artist.

But y'know when 20 years ago you'd show your half-baked attempts at art and some chode would strut in and say shit like "Wow that's bad, you should be embarrassed to show that online"? Those boys have been replaced by self-appointed detectives who think their razor-sharp senses can detect AI-generated art at a mile's range, and they're desperate to let you know that they think your piece that you've been wanting to tear apart with your teeth for a fortnight was shit out by Chat-GPT. Thank you, furry mix of House M.D. and Poirot, whatever would we do without you?

I mean, aside from have confidence in something I've worked on.

Nah seriously whatever-your-name-was, Fluffy-Fuzz or whoever, you clearly know all about art because your gallery is full of 8 pictures of the same blue wolf. Hey, maybe your art is AI-generated because wolves aren't blue in reality, did you ever think of that? No? Nah, didn't think so.

If I actually DO upload this picture again, it'll be slipped discretely into my scraps folder for the first hour it's uploaded to keep it off the eyes of whoever is trawling the main page looking for YCH drawings of armpits to lick or whatever nightmare fuel this site's main page is made up of at the moment (honestly, never look at the main page here), and fuck the keywords because if you're not already watching me you've no reason to find it.

But y'know what? I've actually TWO pieces I've been fighting with. I uploaded the one that's giving me the LEAST trouble. The second one, in my infinite wisdom, is one I've been trying to COLOUR. Digitally. What a fucking nightmare that is! Okay so for context, I managed to get a clean scan, yeah, and do flat colour for the most part, but the lines, oh god, the lines... nobody told me that if you make the lines on a digital image all hard-black, they pixelate all the way to Seattle and back. The only way to avoid that? Weird grey outlines over them that I... can't... MOVE!!

I swear I decided to pick up a pencil at the worst time in human history, an era where everyone is a Dunning Krueger case and wants to make sure you know it.

So. I had a birthday last week. I am now officially SO OLD that if you listen closely you can hear my joints playing the Windows 95 startup sound every time I stand up. Like, we are DEEP into “mysteriously injure yourself while sleeping” territory. I swear I hit a new age bracket and immediately my skeleton filed for divorce.

But anyway — the day itself.

Me and my partner went to Southampton (city motto: “At Least We’re Not Portsmouth”) and we did the most delightfully unhinged thing imaginable: we shared a gigantic platter of sausages from the little German food bar. I’m talking a literal flight of sausages. A bouquet of bratwurst. A meat rainbow. A wurst-based sampler of the Fatherland. Every sausage had its own vibe — spicy, smoky, “why does this taste like Christmas?”, “oh god this one bites back.” It was glorious. I felt like some kind of Teutonic meat baron.

Then we went across the road to The Dark Arts Potions Bar, which bills itself as a “dark magic themed cocktail bar and escape room,” and unfortunately delivered mostly on the “dark” part, and less on the “fun” or “magic” part.

The host — who, to be fair, was clearly trying his best — was doing this wizard character like he was auditioning for a community theatre production of Dumbledore’s Nervous Breakdown. Just relentless. Overbearing. Talking over us. Narrating our existence. Sir, please. I simply want to drink and solve puzzles in peace, not be monologued at like I'm on the receiving end of a Skyrim side quest.

We were seated in a corner so dark it felt like a punishment. Like a medieval oubliette but with cocktails. They brought over a gigantic puzzle crate — basically a portable escape room — and honestly? It was cool! The puzzles were fun! Except… again… COULD. NOT. SEE. There were moments where I swear I was trying to assemble clues by echolocation. Half the challenge wasn’t the puzzle design, it was trying not to accidentally drink the UV flashlight instead of my cocktail.

But speaking of cocktails — OH. MY. GOD.

They were phenomenal.
Unhinged in all the right ways.
I was nourished.

We’re talking sparklers shooting out like I’d just won a low-budget Eurovision. Cocktails you have to mix yourself and they start fizzing like a Victorian science experiment about to explode. Drinks served in upside-down glasses that forced you to drink like a little goth bat. Drinks that looked like they were brewed by a cryptid. Drinks that tasted like plot twists.

The cocktails alone salvaged the night from “oh god why is Merlin breathing down my neck” to “okay fine this rules.”

Then my partner gave me presents because they are wonderful and also enablers of my book hoarding tendencies. I got:

- A book on Japanese mythology and folklore (hello, new hyperfixation)
- A collection of classic ghost stories (Victorian spookiness, inject it directly)
- An Elphaba keychain from the Wicked movie (gay rights)

And honestly? It was a good birthday. Quieter, yeah. More low-key. More “I am old and tired and crave warmth and beverages” than the usual “gather the queer coven and descend upon a bar like a gremlin parade.”

But last year’s birthday was the last time I saw one of my closest friends alive, before he took his life at Christmas. And… yeah. The idea of doing something big and festive and loud this year felt wrong in a way my bones understood before I did. So a quieter birthday, with food and puzzles and cocktails and a partner who loves me… that felt right.

So here I am: one year older, one year creakier, one year more convinced that birthdays should always include absurd drinks and meat platters.

If this is aging, then whatever — pass me another sausage and a cocktail that glows in the dark. I'm going down fabulously.

Guys, I have done a thing. The TV version of Doctor Who lately? It's … been okay, but mostly disappointing, like a birthday cake with no icing. So, instead of crying into my popcorn every Sunday, I’ve spent this entire year binging Big Finish audio plays like my life depends on it. And — plot twist — I’ve now listened to over 100 of them. (Yes, that is a lot. Yes, I have a problem. No, I don’t want intervention.)

Some of them are just wild. Others are heartbreaking. Some are philosophically insane. But the ones I keep coming back to — the ones that rescue my faith in Who — are the following. Here are my favourites, and a little snarky guided tour through why they’re so good (and so bonkers).

Loups Garoux
Imagine the Fifth Doctor waking up one day and thinking wow, I really want to fight a werewolf, but make it philosophical and also send me somewhere hot enough to melt my celery badge. So off he goes to 2080s Brazil with Turlough who spends the whole adventure looking like he wants to file a complaint with HR because Pieter Stubbe keeps trying to make him a mid-afternoon snack. Then Rosa shows up, a teenage shaman who has an entire forest in her head, like she installed Skyrim mods into her brain and refused to remove them. The Doctor finishes the story by trapping the wolf man in the TARDIS and hovering above the Earth like a smug floating landlord because apparently werewolves need soil to survive. Soil. I cannot. Peak Big Finish madness and I love it.

The Natural History of Fear
Welcome to Light City, where the vibes are cult, the people are edited, and the Doctor is having an identity crisis for breakfast. This is Big Finish going full art-school theatre kid. The Eighth Doctor and his emotional support companions Charley and C rizz show up and immediately get sucked into a nightmare bureaucracy where everyone is called Editor or Conscience or Nurse which is exactly the kind of corporate rebranding nightmare the BBC would do if you left them alone for ten minutes. Nothing makes sense, your personality is optional, and fear is cultivated like some kind of artisanal farm-to-table anxiety. The ending is twisted and ambiguous and leaves you sitting there like what just happened and why do I feel like my brain got put through a blender. No monsters. Just vibes. Horrible, delicious vibes.

Master
This one is Doctor Who saying what if we invited the Master to a dinner party and everything turned into a therapy session from hell. The Seventh Doctor gets hauled to Perfugium which sounds like a scented candle but is actually a planet where the Master is trying to cosplay as a normal person. Spoiler, he fails. Hard. There is so much memory manipulation and philosophical bantering that at some point I genuinely forgot which Time Lord was gaslighting who. The whole thing feels like a very polite knife fight conducted over hors d oeuvres. And the chemistry between them is absolutely feral in that slow burn we are so tired of each other way. If you like your Doctor Who with brain cells and trauma bonding this is your moment.

Colditz
The Seventh Doctor and Ace land in Colditz Castle in 1944 and immediately get thrown in prison because that is the most Ace opening ever. The Nazis steal the TARDIS because apparently they have a sign on the wall saying please rob us. Then Elizabeth Klein enters the chat and suddenly knows more about time travel than anyone has ever been comfortable with. The whole story is grim and tense and full of moral dilemmas like should you trust this person or are they about to ruin the timeline while wearing terrible uniforms. And we get David Tennant playing a horribly smug Nazi guard before he became everyone s favourite hyperactive space dad. His performance is so nasty it is genuinely impressive. Honestly he should get a tax credit for acting that hard.

Jubilee
Oh yes, Jubilee. Political nightmare dystopia meets Doctor Who and somehow I am here for it. The Sixth Doctor and Evelyn arrive in a 2003 London that is superficially all bunting and party hats but is actually a fascist Dalek worshipping empire that somehow also thinks tea and corgis make tyranny acceptable. One surviving Dalek is chained up in the Tower of London like it’s a cute tourist exhibit and propaganda is slapped on every surface like graffiti from a very sadistically clever interior decorator. The highlight is the way Shearman turns Dalek ideology onto humanity and makes it look like we learned exactly none of the wrong lessons and also Evelyn navigating all this like a competent adult while everyone else is screaming about patriotic sandwiches. Creepy, smart, deliciously horrid fun.

The Chimes of Midnight
Imagine a haunted Edwardian mansion that decided to start a death-themed carnival and force you to work every shift. That is The Chimes of Midnight. The Eighth Doctor and Charley are trapped in a house where every time the grandfather clock chimes someone dies or something worse happens and time keeps hitting repeat like a sadistic Spotify loop. The highlight is how time itself is the villain and you start questioning everything you thought about reality, morality, and whether Christmas should be outlawed forever. Intimate horror? Yes. Absolutely terrifying? Also yes. Writing so sharp it could carve your soul out and serve it on a silver platter with a side of mince pie.

LIVE 34
If you want horror but hate aliens, LIVE 34 is your jam. The Seventh Doctor, Ace, and Hex get stuck in a dystopia that looks like Orwell wrote it after an espresso binge and then added a TARDIS for extra trauma. The story is entirely radio broadcasts and the propaganda, surveillance, and creeping sense of despair is so palpable you start checking your own room for microphones. The highlight is the Doctor going full truth-to-power mode on the final broadcast and then it just cuts to static leaving you screaming into the void like a proper Big Finish fan. Silence never felt so satisfying and horrifying at the same time.

Son of the Dragon
Vlad the Impaler as a history lesson that bites you in the ass. The Fifth Doctor, Peri, and Erimem land in 1462 and immediately realize diplomacy is not an option because Vlad III is simultaneously a tyrant, a visionary, and someone who really, really hates your face. The highlight is the performance of Vlad who radiates ambition, horror, and patriotism so twisted it makes you want to both bow and run for your life. Meanwhile Peri and Erimem are like two lost tourists at a vampire-themed Renaissance fair and their reactions are everything. Court politics with fangs never felt so absurd and yet totally real.

Davros
Ah yes, Davros. The Sixth Doctor somehow gets dragged into an Earth corporation’s genius plan to hire the most evil little bald guy in the universe for benevolent projects like famine relief. Yes, famine relief. The same man who built the Daleks is now designing charity programs and it is horrifying. The Doctor is naturally suspicious and spends most of the story squinting like, are you good or is this evil with sprinkles? The highlight is Terry Molloy doing his patented Davros thing where he swings from villainous rage to tiny hint of tragic vulnerability and you genuinely feel moral tension like someone shoved a philosophy textbook into your skull and set it on fire. It is not a villain story, it is a brain trauma character study.

The Fires of Vulcan
The Seventh Doctor decides that nothing says fun holiday like Pompeii 79 AD. Everyone is about to get roasted alive, so naturally he drags Mel along for a vacation filled with anxiety and volcanic ash facial masks. The TARDIS is apparently going to be buried for centuries, which means the Doctor spends the entire story having a meltdown about predestination and whether he himself is already toast. Mel is just desperately trying not to die while everyone else slowly turns into magma. The highlight is McCoy sounding like a caffeinated squirrel on the edge of an existential crisis as he runs from history itself. Absolute panic and brilliance wrapped into one very smoky package.

The Stones of Venice
Imagine Venice if it decided to collapse dramatically while also hosting a centuries-old curse and turning the population into characters from a gothic soap opera. That is this audio. The Eighth Doctor and Charley flail through waterlogged streets full of doomed aristocrats, cults, and more melodrama than any human should legally experience in one sitting. The Doctor flirts with every doomed noble like he’s auditioning for a gothic romance calendar while Charley tries not to drown in both floodwater and theatre kid energy. The highlight is the tone itself: half over-the-top gothic fairytale, half decaying romance novel that your gran hides under the bed with a stern warning never to read aloud. Deliciously absurd chaos.

Appointment for War
Big Finish woke up, had two espressos and said yes, chaos sounds good today. Enter conspiracy thriller mode with UNIT, time shenanigans, and political paranoia crammed into the Sixth Doctor’s personal trauma funnel. Peri and the Doctor stumble into a war plot so dirty everyone is lying, spying, or probably chewing nails while pretending to be nice. Someone clearly should have done a background check on literally everyone. The highlight is the moral murkiness. It’s Cold War cynicism filtered through Doctor Who absurdity and Peri continuously proving she is the only adult in the room with working neurons. Absolute tension, paranoia, and deliciously bitter tea for the soul.

Spare Parts
The Fifth Doctor and Nyssa land on Mondas right in the middle of civilization speedrunning its way to Cybermenhood and it is pure nightmare fuel. Everyone is freezing, starving, dying, or being upgraded into smiling metal monsters that cheerfully remind you that your soul is optional. The Doctor spends the story panicking like a stressed-out librarian trying not to cause the timeline he knows is coming while somehow accidentally creating it anyway. The highlight is the gut-punch moment where you realize the Cybermen didn’t start as villains. They were just humans trying desperately not to die and now they are your emotional kryptonite. Heartbreak in chrome plating, people.

The Year of the Pig
This is pure Sixth Doctor chaos and I am screaming. Evelyn and the Doctor arrive at a 1913 seaside resort and immediately meet a giant talking pig named Toby who is somehow sophisticated, tragic, and possibly an alien depending on your alcohol tolerance. There is fencing, melodrama, long-winded monologues, and a parade of absurd characters that make it feel like someone accidentally staged a fever dream in a hotel lobby. The highlight is Toby himself. He is ridiculous, heartfelt, and somehow wears a silk dressing gown in your imagination. Imagine Winnie-the-Pooh with unresolved trauma, possibly planning an uprising. It is both terrifying and adorable.

The Church and the Crown
The Fifth Doctor, Peri, and Erimem crash into 17th-century France and are immediately devoured by musketeers, swordfights, royal imposters, and more political nonsense than the BBC Parliament channel can handle. Peri ends up impersonating Queen Anne because of course she does. Erimem challenges half the French aristocracy to duels because why not. The Doctor mostly runs around yelling at people about diplomacy while chaos swirls like a caffeinated hurricane. The highlight is Peri’s absolute fed-up energy where she basically screams I’m American, I’m tired, and I’m not dying for France today. Peak iconic.

Other Lives
The Eighth Doctor, Charley, and C’rizz get stranded in Victorian London because the TARDIS has the emotional maturity of a toddler throwing a tantrum. The trio immediately get separated because of course they do. Charley accidentally gets engaged, C’rizz gets sucked into political revolution, and the Doctor becomes a star attraction at a Victorian exhibition like some kind of cosmic zoo animal on display. The highlight is the pure, human, chaotic messiness. No aliens, no universe-ending stakes, just emotionally panicked people in cravats trying desperately to survive their own bad life choices. Perfectly grounded disaster.

Ohhhhhh Firefly. The never-ending funeral dirge of the Internet. The fandom that died twenty years ago and still somehow haunts the digital wallpaper like a mould stain shaped vaguely like Nathan Fillion. Pull up a chair, babes — I'm about to get cancelled by Reddit circa 2009.

So. Full disclosure: I’ve never watched Firefly. Not because I “never got around to it,” or because I “missed the window,” or because I “didn’t have a crush on Mal like everyone else,” but because THE FANS WOULD NOT SHUT UP ABOUT IT. Every recommendation wasn’t a casual “oh it’s good!” — it was a cult initiation ceremony. There was chanting. There were testimonies. There was a vibe like: “Have you accepted Joss Whedon’s prematurely-cancelled space western as your personal Lord and Galactic Saviour?”

Any time I said “uhh maybe later,” three Browncoats would manifest behind me like Victorian ghosts whispering, it was cancelled too soon. Yes, Karen, lots of things were cancelled too soon — Pushing Daisies, Dead Like Me, my sanity — but you don’t see me turning every brunch conversation into a TED Talk titled “The Great Tragic Loss of 2002.”

Firefly fans had this energy where the show wasn’t just a show. It was a personality trait. A creed. A lifestyle. Like a religion but with more weaponised beige. And the evangelism? MY GOD the evangelism. People acted like watching Firefly was some kind of moral obligation, like recycling or not stabbing your coworkers. If I confessed I hadn’t seen it, they’d react like I’d admitted to drowning puppies. “You’ve NEVER seen Firefly???” No, Brenda, I’ve also never been knighted. Doesn’t mean I’m spiritually incomplete.

And the look. You know the look. That glazed, beatific Firefly Fan Expression™ — the wistful, far-off stare of someone who has seen the face of god and it was wearing a brown coat from a 2003 Hot Topic clearance bin. They’d quote “shiny” at you like it was a secret handshake that would unlock the mysteries of the universe. It just made me want to lie down in traffic.

Then came the inevitable, “OKAY, but you HAVE to watch Serenity.” Babe, the movie is a 119-minute grief-counselling session dressed up as a space opera. The entire aesthetic is “2005 Sad Beige.” I don’t have to do anything except drink water and die eventually.

And the fandom is still out there, still proclaiming from the mountaintops: “It was ahead of its time!” “It was stolen from us!” “If Firefly had survived, world peace would’ve been achieved and all mental illness cured!” Like… maybe? Or maybe it was a cool show that got cancelled because television executives are allergic to joy. But we will never know, because the fandom trauma-bombed the rest of us into avoidance.

Maybe the show is actually great. Maybe the writing is clever and the characters are wonderful and I’m missing out on a modern classic. But the mid-2000s Firefly fandom acted like multi-level marketers for cowboy space nihilism, and now every time someone says “shiny” I get war flashbacks.

So am I ever going to watch it? No. At this point it’s a matter of principle. Firefly can stay in that dusty corner of pop-culture purgatory where it belongs. Let the shiny remain unshined.

Okay so. Remember how I said this year could fuck off. Well. Here I am, doubling down, because if 2025 wants to throw hands I’m right here, shirt off, hair tied up, Vaseline on, ready to suplex it into a bin fire. Let’s take the scenic route through this hellscape, because if I’m going to melt down, we’re doing it in style.

So let’s begin with January. New Year. New Me. New Trauma. Literally days into the year, one of my best friends—my soft‑voiced chaos gremlin, my emotional support cryptid—kills himself over Christmas. And how does the news reach me? Through a city Trans Pride co‑manager who blurts it out with the tact of a malfunctioning foghorn. No preparation. No warning. No message to friends or family first. No… anything. Just “Oh btw he’s dead” dropped like a wet lasagne onto a stone floor. I swear half the fucking room got the news before I did, and I’m supposedly one of the managers. Professionalism? No. Compassion? Apparently optional.

Fast‑forward to July, when another co‑manager’s partner decides to flash their genitals at me like it’s the world’s worst show‑and‑tell. And when I report it? The co‑manager decides to protect her partner by discrediting me instead. Me. The victim. In a fucking trans organization that does children’s outreach. Like babes what are you doing. What are we doing. Why is YOUR solution “Let me smear Alison for noticing the sexual harasser”? The mental gymnastics would qualify for the Olympics if they weren’t morally repulsive. So I leave. I leave because my sanity said “girl. walk.” Of course she immediately makes it her side quest to spread rumours about me. Because accountability is scary but character assassination is apparently fun.

Meanwhile I’m bleeding friends. Grieving. Spiraling. Pretending I’m fine while my nervous system is doing the Windows XP shutdown noise.

And then—because life enjoys a theme—my tabletop RPG club descends into what I can only describe as administrative goth clown chaos. I appoint a volunteer moderator last year thinking “ah yes, enthusiasm, energy, love to see it.” No. WRONG. Turns out I hired the final boss of narcissistic micromanagers. This person bans people they had unsuccessful dates with, rewrites club rules behind my back, argues with every instruction like it’s debate club, and generally behaves as if being a volunteer gives them the divine right to act like a 2010s Tumblr tyrant with admin powers.

Then they have a messy breakup with their partner—also a volunteer—and suddenly I’m running a roleplaying club AND hosting a silent war between two exes who use Discord moderation tools like they’re throwing plates at each other. Eventually I tell them “don’t delete your ex’s posts.” Which triggers a seven‑paragraph meltdown that honestly should be in a museum. The Louvre deserves it. I seek advice from other community organisers because this is above my paygrade and also my will to live, and THAT becomes their “last straw.” They rage‑quit, accuse me of betrayal, then leave the club entirely because I dared replace them with someone competent.

Silver lining? Sometimes the trash takes itself out. But god, the smell beforehand.

Now let’s talk house buying. HAHAHAHAHAHA. Eleven months of my solicitor communicating exclusively in the ancient language of “we’re chasing,” a phrase that at this point should honestly be classified as psychological warfare. Every time we ask for an update they just summon the same stock response like it’s a Pokémon move. Mortgage agents demanding the same paperwork eight times like they’re trying to summon a demon made of PDFs. Every person involved gets replaced every two months and nobody seems to tell the next person what the fuck is happening. The entire process feels like trying to perform CPR on a glacier.

Oh, and publishing? Hilarious. My previous publisher drops my series because of “lower than expected sales” even though my books outperform half their catalogue AND I’ve been fighting them about the frankly heinous cover they slapped on book one. They also demanded I stop giving Patreon backers early chapters which… absolutely not. So now I’m re‑releasing a series while also trying to figure out what my Patreon is even for anymore. It’s like a creative identity crisis dressed up as admin.

And through all this, people wonder why I’m constantly vibrating like a microwave fork.

So yeah. That’s my year. A corpse‑strewn battlefield of incompetence, grief, assholes, admin illusions, boundary‑bulldozing queers, the death of my patience, AND the death of my will to ever trust a solicitor again.

2025 can pack its bags, call a cab, and fuck off into a ravine. I’m done. Done like the overcooked chicken at a cheap buffet. Done like a Windows update stuck at 3 percent. Done like a bisexual in a heterosexual marriage. DONE.

If 2026 doesn’t come correct I’m fighting it in the street.

Alright, strap in, because I am so done with this trend where Hollywood seems to have handed the writing pens to the “hardcore fans” who only care about nostalgia, Easter eggs, and patting themselves on the back for being ‘in the know.’ It’s like the entire creative brain has been replaced by a bloatware version of a Reddit thread. There are real writers out there, right? Or maybe they were just evicted.

Here's the deal: too many modern TV shows and films are not written to tell good stories, they’re written to trigger fan gasps. It’s endless callbacks, tired cameos, and cringe resurrection of characters just so studios can post Instagram mid-credits frames and sell merch. And guess what? It’s boring. Hollow. A gamble where the only winner is nostalgia, and even that’s getting old.

Take the Star Wars universe for example. These spinoffs feel less like actual stories and more like a checklist: did we bring back Ahsoka? Check. Did we mention Thrawn? Check. Did we blow up something iconic? Check. And yeah, maybe there was a “story,” but it feels secondary to the parade of fan-pleasers. It’s branding first, world-building maybe later.

Then there are the movie sequels. So many of them just exist to mash together every element from past hits, pretending they’re doing something fresh. But when your “innovation” is just rehashing the original beats or reviving the same old villains, you’re not pushing storytelling forward — you’re stuck in the same loop, re-gifting your fans yesterday’s Easter eggs in a shiny new box.

Look at something like Dark Phoenix. A classic X-Men arc, sure, but the movie feels like it was made for people who just wanted to tick a “Jean Grey powers up” box rather than explore the emotional avalanche that arc deserves. It’s cheap nostalgia at the expense of something that could have been raw, gutting, and meaningful.

Even in Star Wars land, fan service bleeds into emptiness: everyone’s shouting “look who’s here!” but the show rarely bothers with character growth, danger, or risk. We’re stuck watching familiar faces, instead of being surprised by wild new arcs. It’s like the whole thing is directed by someone who thinks “risk” is a brand offense.

This isn’t just me whining about “kids these days.” There is value in fan service when it’s earned and when it’s woven into something greater. But these days, it’s the default crutch, not the spice. Real creativity is being overshadowed by the bottomless need to placate every ever-lurking, Reddit-level “hardcore” fanbase.

And guess what? That cheap pandering sells. That’s exactly why it’s everywhere. But it’s not making stories better — it’s turning them into comfort food for people too afraid to demand more from their franchises.

So yes, I am bitter. Yes, I want better. I want original ideas, real risks, and not this constant conveyor belt of callback content. Because at this rate, the only thing being resurrected is the corpse of good storytelling.

Okay so… Season 8 of Futurama finally slurped its way out of the streaming pipeline and onto Hulu like some resurrected fossil that REALLY wants you to know it still “gets” the internet. And as someone who has spent literal decades letting this show rent space inside my brain, I dove in hoping for, if not brilliance, at least some of that vintage Futurama zing. Instead I got a season that felt like a half-empty packet of crisps you forgot in a coat pocket two winters ago. Occasionally delicious. Mostly stale. Sometimes suspicious.

Let’s break this chaos down.

The Impossible Stream - Hulu looked at Futurama and said “please mention us a LOT,” and the writers responded with an episode that basically screams WE ARE SELF‑AWARE PLEASE CLAP. A few good bits, sure, but it spends so long parodying its own existence that it circles back around to accidentally reminding you of When Aliens Attack, which is like saying “Remember when this show was MUCH better? Anyway here’s diet imitation.”

Children of a Lesser Bog - Amy and Kif’s swamp‑babies are here… and they have the collective personality of wet cardboard. Leela and Amy squabble a little. Continuity happens. That’s it. That’s the episode. It has the emotional impact of a lukewarm bath.

How the West Was 1010001 - It’s bitcoin jokes and Wild West jokes. Yes, it’s EXACTLY as dated as it sounds. The final 3D shootout is cute but the rest is tumbleweeds and ennui. Futurama has never been good at Wild West aesthetics and this one rides that tradition straight into a ditch.

Parasites Regained - Dune parody but in a litterbox. If the new Dune movies didn’t exist, this might’ve forced the writers into originality. But alas, they exist, so instead: cheaper references. Mild chuckle if you’ve seen the film. Maybe. If you squint.

Related to Items You’ve Viewed - Finally, something GOOD. Bender joins Space Amazon, the corporate nightmare expands until it basically becomes the entire galaxy, and everyone just shrugs and keeps living inside hyper‑capitalist hell. Peak accurate. Peak depressing. Peak Futurama. One of the strongest episodes.

I Know What You Did Next Xmas - HOLY CRAP ANOTHER GOOD ONE. Time travel shenanigans! Santa recalibration! Zoidberg and Bender bonding! Jokes that actually land! An episode that feels like it was written by people who remembered the show used to slap.

Rage Against the Vaccine - The Covid episode. In 2025. Babe, the moment’s gone. Hermes goes to New Orleans for voodoo antiviral magic because… reasons? It’s like opening a time capsule only to find old memes that already felt stale in 2021. Second weakest of the season.

Zapp Gets Canceled - Zapp goes to sensitivity training, Leela gets harassed by groping aliens, and everything resolves via durian. A fever dream but not in the fun way. Third weakest. Tries to joke about “cancel culture” but lands squarely in “please stop trying.”

The Prince and the Product - THE WORST. Hands down. Someone said “What if the cast were toys?” and the writers said “Oh cool, three unrelated shorts, zero jokes, zero purpose.” Wind‑up toys! Toy cars! Rubber ducks! All of them aggressively unfunny. This is what you show prisoners of war.

All the Way Down - Finally something that feels like Futurama again: simulations, simulations inside simulations, ontological dread galore. Starts slow but ends with a philosophical punch in the face that actually WORKS. A proper finale‑ish finale.

Season 8 is basically: two bangers, one genuinely strong episode, a couple of okay ones, and then a parade of reheated leftovers pretending they’re a meal. It’s not terrible—it’s just… aggressively middling. Watching it felt like seeing an ex you still care about try really hard to impress you but accidentally trip over a curb and faceplant.

But hey. At least we got a few good laughs out of the rubble.

Okay gather round kids, I'm gonna tell you the story of How My Innocent Little Tabletop RPG Club Accidentally Became A Stage Production Of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf But With More Dice And Significantly Less Marriage Counseling.

So picture this: two years ago, I bring in this volunteer couple. Cute, right? Like a little GM power duo. One’s sweet and chill, the human equivalent of a comfort NPC. The other… is a “high charisma, NAT 1 WIS” situation. Enthusiastic as hell, sure, but also radiating the social energy of a pissed-off blender. Together they balanced each other out. Like a barbarian/teddy-bear multiclass.

Then comes the slow-burn villain origin story. Aggressive One starts small: “We should change a few things.” Okay, fine. Sure, we can implement a No Under 16s rule because I’m not trying to babysit someone’s Fortnite-addicted nephew during Call of Cthulhu night. Whatever.

But then they start dropping bigger bombs. “Ban my old D&D group pre-emptively because their GM is abusive.” Mind you, none of these people are even in my club. They just wanted to swing a dramatic hammer into the void. But fine, okay, noted, filed under “We’ll see.”

And, look, I kept them around partly because they did actual useful work, and partly because—confession time—I wanted another trans person in the club. Representation matters, etc. Except oops! Turns out being trans does not magically prevent you from being a nightmare with admin permissions. Who knew!

Anyway suddenly this person is demanding everything go their way. Constant arguing. Complaining. Snapping at anyone who dared express the tiniest “hey maybe don’t explode at the newbies?” And then—this is the part where the soap opera writers started taking notes—they leave their partner. Not like “we need space.” Not like “let’s talk.” No. Packed their bags while the poor quiet one was out and just vanished. Like a rogue with trauma and a grudge. And guess who becomes the emotional support GM? Me. I’m basically holding this weeping cinnamon roll while also trying to run a club where Big Volcano Energy is erupting hourly.

Then it escalates. Oh boy does it escalate.

New game shop wants to collaborate. I say, politely, “Forward me the details so I can email them.” And they reply with the enthusiasm of a toddler who’s been told it’s bedtime. “DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO.” Bro. I am literally the manager. My job is to tell people what to do. That’s like yelling at a bard for singing.

Then they BAN SOMEONE. On their own. No warning. No explanation. Turns out they’d gone on A Bad Date with this person and decided exile was the appropriate response. Peak admin abuse, 10/10 villain move.

Communication between ex-partners hits the floor. Aggressive One deletes a message the quiet one posted. I step in (as adults do) and say: “Please don’t delete each other’s messages.” And get a SEVEN PARAGRAPH ESSAY about why my simple boundary is oppression incarnate. I have never seen someone weaponize Google Docs energy in a Discord DM so violently.

Meanwhile the quiet one is telling me horror stories—stealing their old D&D group, telling people about the death of their cat without permission, basically speedrunning the list of “How To Be A Toxic Ex In 30 Days.”

Okay so let me just add the missing flavour packet to this cursed soup, because the whole situation wasn’t just “one volunteer was a nightmare.” No no no. This person had this incredible reflex where ANYONE they didn’t like was “abusive.” Like a Pokémon cry. Someone disagrees? “Abusive.” Someone has a personality? “Abusive.” Someone exists in a way that makes them slightly uncomfortable? “Oh wow look at that horrifically abusive monster over there.” It was a giant, wobbling, fluorescent-red flag visible from orbit. If this were a Call of Cthulhu scenario, the players would be screaming “WE LEAVE. WE LEAVE RIGHT NOW. I DON’T CARE IF THE PLOT IS HERE, WE RUN.”

But I tried. I honestly tried. Because here’s the thing no cis person will ever understand: being the One Trans Person In The Room gets exhausting, and when another trans person shows up you get this little spark (lol) of “Oh thank god, maybe this won’t be as lonely.” And gods, I wanted more trans folks in the club. I would love a whole rainbow legion of us. A beautiful flock of disaster lesbians, stressed-out enbies, and trans nerds with dice and too much emotional lore. I want that so badly.

But holy shit. Trying to find trans people who aren’t carrying around a backpack of untreated mental health catastrophes is like trying to find a shiny legendary in the tall grass. Without repels. While the grass is also on fire. I swear half of us are held together with masking tape, trauma, and spite. And that’s fine—mental health issues aren’t a sin. But when your issues start exploding outwards and hitting other people, that is where Spark’s patient, delicate little soul goes “nope” and curls back into its gothic chrysalis.

And Aggressive One? Oh they had The Aura™. The “everyone who’s ever challenged me is secretly evil” aura. The “my ex-friends, my old club, my previous GM, my former group, my partner, random NPCs on the street — all abusers.” When someone tells you every person they’ve ever interacted with is abusive except themselves, what they’re really saying is “Hi, I am the common denominator in every fire I claim to be escaping, and also I brought a lighter.”

So I, in my infinite hubris, ask other community managers for advice on mediating a breakup between two admins. Totally normal thing to do when your club becomes a battlefield. Didn’t name names. Didn’t give details. Didn’t even vaguely describe them beyond “two volunteers who broke up.”

Aggressive One loses their entire mind. Sends a massive DM accusing me of betrayal, condescension, doxxing, war crimes, idk. The point is: they realized I wasn’t manipulatable. And that’s when everything snapped.

And then… the heavens opened… the stars aligned… the trash took itself out. They stepped down. Left the club. Probably off to tell the world about how we’re all abusers and they’re the misunderstood tragic protagonist.

And honestly? Good riddance. I did not sign up to run a TTRPG club and emotionally referee the end of someone’s villain arc. Let them monologue elsewhere. My players have dragons to fight. So yes. They stormed off. Declared themselves the tragic misunderstood protagonist in a story where they were, in fact, the dragon. And honestly? Bless. Let them go set fire to someone else’s castle. My club has suffered enough boss fights for one decade.

And maybe someday I’ll get another trans volunteer. Maybe one who doesn't set off my “oh no this one’s a walking disaster zone” alarm. One can dream.

Society feels like it’s running on 3 percent battery and the charger is on the other side of a locked door guarded by a demon with a clipboard. Everywhere you look, people are dragging themselves through the day like they’ve been living inside a slow-motion disaster movie for years, and honestly? They have. We all have. You can practically hear the collective groan of an entire population that hasn’t had a proper rest since before the world went weird. I open my eyes and the first thought isn’t even a thought, it’s just this limp little Windows XP shutdown noise, like doooooooonk. And then I just lie there, staring into the void, waiting for my consciousness to buffer like my entire head is a mid-2000s YouTube video trying to load over dial-up. And then I crawl onto the internet, thinking “Surely everyone else has their shit together,” and guess what? NOPE. Every single person I know is also staggering around like they haven’t slept since 2019. Everyone is fried. Everyone is hollow. Everyone is held together by caffeine, vibes, and some kind of increasingly unhinged spite that’s running out of batteries. We’re all walking around like NPCs whose idle animations are glitching.

And the wild part is we’re still expected to function like the world isn’t on Hard Mode with Friendly Fire enabled. You walk into a shop and the cashier’s eyes have that dim little flicker of someone who hasn’t felt a genuine spark of energy since the Obama administration. You sit on a bus and the passengers look like cryptids caught in daylight. That it’s perfectly reasonable for an entire civilisation to be burnt to a crisp emotionally, mentally, physically, spiritually, cosmically. Like we all stepped into a massive global fatigue pit and instead of climbing out we just set up little flatscreens and folding chairs and said “yeah this is fine I guess.” Every workplace, every community, every institution is staffed by people who look like they’ve been emotionally tasered.

And no one has the bandwidth for anything. You try to organise something and half the group disappears into the wind like exhausted tumbleweeds. People don’t cancel plans, they just evaporate. Whole friend groups are communicating exclusively in sighs now. Parents look like they’re one PTA meeting away from ascending to a higher plane out of sheer sleep deprivation. Students are doing assignments with the dead-eyed intensity of someone performing emergency surgery while also flatlining. Meanwhile the elderly are like “how can you all be so exhausted?” and everyone under 50 is like “Maureen, the world has been on fire for a decade.”

And the economy? Oh my god. Entire industries are wobbling on their little stilts because society collectively lost the plot. Customer service workers operate at the same energy level as NPCs who’ve had their AI switched to “minimal.” Managers are burnt out. Teachers are burnt out. Healthcare staff are burnt out. Artists are burnt out. Teenagers are burnt out. Toddlers are probably burnt out. Dogs might be burnt out at this point. We’re a species that has emotionally sprinted headfirst into a brick wall and now we’re all lying on the ground like “ugh why does my face hurt.”

And the worst part is the pretending. The big collective “we’re fine :)” performance that’s so brittle it might snap if you breathe on it. Society is exhausted, and everyone knows it, but there’s no off-ramp. There is no end to it. There’s no magical reset, no fairy godmother who’s going to wand-wave everyone back into functioning humans. It’s just… this. Forever, apparently. A whole civilisation doing its best impression of a dying Tamagotchi. We keep hoping the next nap or the next weekend or the next holiday will fix it, but no. The exhaustion sits there, like a smug little gremlin, picking its teeth with your remaining energy.

I keep waiting for someone to admit it out loud: that things broke somewhere along the way. That our brains and bodies weren’t meant to run in this perpetual disaster mode. That everything is too much and too loud and too endless. But instead we all just keep limping along, clutching our coffees like emotional support potions, pretending we’re fine while our eyebags develop their own lore. There’s no crescendo to this. No hopeful twist. Just a civilisation yawning its way through the apocalypse, held together with caffeine, denial, and that weird resignation that hits when you’re too tired to fight anything anymore.

That’s it. That’s the mood. A planet full of people who need a nap and are never going to get one.

I swear every time someone in the community says “You are trans enough” my whole soul does that Windows XP error noise. Dunk dunk. Because like… sweetie, angel, babe, comrade in gender misery, I know you mean well, but have you met me? I am the human equivalent of holding down the power button on my gender identity until the screen goes black because I got confused by the menu again.

And the thing is, everyone online talks like it’s universal. Like transness is this soft, cozy duvet you can just curl under and boom, that’s it, sorted, you’re tucked in. But my duvet is made of wet newspaper. And also it’s on fire. And somehow it’s my fault for not knowing how to sleep correctly.

I scroll past trans girls who knew when they were four, who have spreadsheets of dysphoria moments, who can recite their egg-cracking memoirs like slam poetry. Meanwhile I’m in the corner like “Hi, I’m Spark, and I discovered one (1) feminine urge at age thirty and freaked out so hard I tripped over my own pronouns and face-planted into a puddle of self-doubt.”

And do not get me started on transition milestones. Oh my sweet summer children. If the community has a timeline, I’m being graded on a curve so steep it’s basically a vertical drop. People are out here collecting achievements like they’re playing gender Skyrim. Hormones. Voice training. Cute outfits. Visible joy. Meanwhile I’m like “Achievement unlocked: I didn’t spiral about my reflection today because I avoided all reflective surfaces like a medieval vampire. Poggers.”

Every time someone says “You’re trans enough,” I feel like they’re handing me a trophy for a race I absolutely did not run. Like I’ve wandered onto the track mid-marathon holding a Tesco bag and a coffee and everyone’s clapping like “You did it!” and I’m just standing there confused because I was actually looking for the toilets.

The internal monologue is worse. Because there’s this voice, this wonderfully charming gremlin that lives rent-free in my skull, chewing on the wires, going “Girl? Really? You? That’s adorable. You can’t even commit to a hairstyle. You switch aesthetics like a bored deity playing The Sims. You think you get to have identity?? Lol ok.”

And look, I get the community angle, I do. Trans enough is a shield. It’s supposed to keep people safe from the crushing weight of gatekeeping and shame and all the bureaucratic hellfire of existing while gendering incorrectly according to society’s stupid little rulebook. But shields are heavy. And mine keeps slipping out of my hands because I don’t feel like I’ve earned it.

Everyone else seems to have this inner certainty, like something glowing softly in their chest. And mine is… I don’t know, a dying phone battery? A novelty lamp flickering in and out? That little red light on a smoke alarm that’s definitely malfunctioning? Whatever it is, it doesn’t feel like enough.

It feels like I’m playing gender on “guest account” mode. Like any moment someone is going to tap me on the shoulder and be like “Hey hun, love the chaos, but the trans club is for people who know what they’re doing” and I’ll vanish in a puff of glitter and confusion.

So yes, the community says “You ARE trans enough,” but I am not the community. I am the creature running laps inside my own head, tripping over my shoelaces, insisting I’m not even in the race to begin with.

Not today. Maybe not ever.

And honestly? Maybe the worst part is I want to be. I want that certainty. I want that glow. But wanting and being are two different things, and right now I’m stuck in the space between them, clawing at the walls, waiting to see if I ever make it out.

Sometimes I sit there like some melodramatic tarot witch staring into the void and thinking about all the little sliding-doors moments in my life. All the people I could have clicked with if I’d just swallowed the weird feeling in my throat and gone “sure babe let’s trauma-bond over nothing”. And for like two seconds I wonder if I missed out on a thousand possible universes where I’m less lonely, less guarded, less… me.

But then I remember the actual reason I bounced. The specific moment someone said a Thing or did a Thing that set off that tiny internal klaxon that goes “honey no”. I remember the micro second of ickness where my brain quietly pushed the big red button that says “do not engage” while my heart was still trying to understand the vibes. And I’m like oh. Right. There it is. Pattern recognition. The universe’s little built-in bullshit detector chirping like an angry smoke alarm.

People act like instincts are some flaky woo-woo nonsense but no. Feelings are just the emotional subtitles for what the brain has already clocked in the background. The vibes are the message. My subconscious sees the shape of the behaviour before I’ve even poured the tea. And every time I’ve ignored that weird shiver of nope I’ve paid for it in emotional blood and stupid regrets. Every single time. My gut has a better track record than any man I’ve ever known.

So yeah sometimes I think maybe I should have been softer or more open or tried harder to connect with whatever lukewarm goblin energy someone was serving that day. But then someone does something off, even a little off, and that feeling slams back into me like oh sweetie no you were RIGHT. Throw more walls up. Stack them high. Cement them. Install a moat. Stock the moat with crocodiles. This is not cynicism. This is survival.

Because the truth is I don’t step back because I’m scared of connection. I step back because my brain is doing advanced calculus on the fly and whispering hey babe we have seen this species of disaster before. We know how this goes. And the older I get the more I trust that instinct. Not everyone who gives you a weird feeling is a villain but every villain gives you a weird feeling.

So no I shouldn’t have lowered the walls earlier. I shouldn’t now. I shouldn’t in the future. I am not meant to be wandering into every social circle like some wide eyed anime protagonist learning the power of friendship. Sometimes the pattern is the warning. Sometimes the discomfort is the wisdom. And sometimes the best thing you can do for your own safety is listen to that gut voice saying babe please I am begging you put up a fuckton more walls.

So, we went out for lunch today. Big mistake. Huge. I’d heard good things — glowing reviews, local buzz, the kind of place your aunt on Facebook insists is “a hidden gem.” Lies. All lies. I don’t know who’s running the hype machine for this place but I hope they’re being paid handsomely in grease vouchers because holy hell, that’s all I got.

My partner got a burger. I went for the bacon roll. We got potato pieces to share, which sounded innocent enough. You know that little thrill when you sit down somewhere new and think, oh this could be nice? Yeah, that lasted right up until the smell from the kitchen hit us. You ever smell something so unpleasant you start negotiating with yourself? Like, maybe it’ll taste better than it smells? Maybe someone just set fire to a napkin? Maybe hope is real? Spoiler: it wasn’t.

The potato pieces arrived first. “Pieces” is generous. They were more like the ghosts of potatoes, haunted by the faintest whiff of seasoning. I took one bite and instantly knew they’d been cooked from frozen. You could taste the freezer burn. The only flavour came from the dipping sauce, and even that was like ketchup that had given up on life.

Then came the main event: the bacon roll. One bite — one — and an entire splash of grease just fell out. Not dripped. Not oozed. Fell. Like it was trying to escape. The bacon itself was this tragic mix of burnt and slimy, somehow both overdone and undercleaned. The whole thing tasted like someone had cooked it in a deep fryer filled with the ashes of their dreams. There was this weird, sour tang to the grease too, like it had been sitting in the pan since 1997. I’m not saying the kitchen was dirty but it tasted like neglect.

My partner tried his burger and gave me that look. You know the one. The “I’m going to eat this because I’m too polite to die here” look. He said it had the same rank aftertaste — that awful clingy kind of grease that sticks to your tongue and won’t leave even after water, gum, or prayer. I managed two bites before I felt physically sick.

So I took it back to the counter. Politely, mind you. I said, “This bacon’s inedible.” They just stared at me. Like I was the problem. Like I’d personally offended the gods of grease. I asked about the potatoes — they cheerfully confirmed they were cooked from frozen, as if that somehow helped. I asked for a refund and they pointed to the bin. The bin. I’m not kidding. So I threw it out, like my dignity, and went to find lunch somewhere that didn’t smell like despair.

I was sick for hours afterward. The aftertaste kept repeating on me, like a culinary trauma flashback.

So yeah. Definitely won’t be back. Unless they start offering exorcisms with the meal, in which case maybe I’ll stop by just to lay the ghost of that bacon roll to rest.

So Guillermo del Toro just dropped his Frankenstein, and of course it’s got me spiralling about names again. It’s loud, theatrical, gloriously unsubtle — a gothic fireworks display that somehow manages to feel both reverent and aggressively modern. Del Toro gets the source material in ways most adaptations don’t; it’s emotional, messy, and obsessed with creation itself. You can feel the stitched-together contradictions humming in its veins. Which, fittingly, is exactly what the Frankenstein myth has always been about.

Okay, so let’s start with the obvious: Frankenstein’s Monster isn’t actually the name of the book. Or the movie. Or anything official, really. It’s just what the collective internet (and, like, every Halloween costume aisle) decided to call him. It’s shorthand. It’s convenient. It’s how people differentiate “the green guy with the bolts” from the “miserable Swiss nerd who made him.”

And we all know the stock take by now. Cue the know-it-all voice: “Actually, Frankenstein is the doctor, not the monster.” Yeah, yeah, thank you, commenter number 12,746. You get a gold star and a haunted lab. We know. Victor’s the creator, the Monster’s the creation, and the whole moral is “science bad, hubris worse, fire scary.”

But here’s where it gets fun. Let’s actually look at that phrase people love to throw around—Frankenstein’s Monster. Because it’s not just a label. It’s a linguistic ouroboros.

At surface level, it’s obvious: “the monster that belongs to Frankenstein.” Possessive form. Easy grammar. But names aren’t just ownership—they’re inheritance. Family trees, bloodlines, “junior” scrawled on birth certificates. If Victor Frankenstein is the Monster’s creator—his father in every mythic, godlike sense—then that name passes down. The creature, nameless as he is, still carries the lineage. He’s Frankenstein too.

And that’s where the title quietly flips inside out. If the creature is Frankenstein, then “Frankenstein’s Monster” no longer means “the monster that Frankenstein made.” It becomes “the monster of Frankenstein.” The monster belonging to Frankenstein the son. And who’s his monster? Who shaped him, abandoned him, cursed him into existence? The good doctor himself.

So suddenly, the phrase eats its own meaning. Frankenstein’s Monster becomes a mirror that turns around and points at the creator. The Monster’s monster is Victor. The child inherits the name, then uses it to accuse his father. “Frankenstein’s Monster” becomes “Frankenstein’s… Frankenstein.” A poetic glitch. And del Toro’s new film, in all its noisy splendour, feels like it understands that. It’s not trying to untangle the chain between creator and creation; it’s wrapping them tighter together until you can’t tell which is which. The creature is the echo of his maker, the maker is haunted by his creation, and the horror isn’t that life was created — it’s that the child always inherits the sins of the parent.

It’s funny, because this isn’t even textual canon. It’s just something culture cobbled together, a nickname that stuck. But that’s what makes it delicious—the unintentional poetry of it. This little accidental phrase manages to sum up the entire tragedy of the story better than some academic essays do. The child becomes the father, the father becomes the monster, and everyone ends up wandering through the cold, muttering about who really deserves the name.

So no, Frankenstein’s Monster was never the name of a book or a film. It’s just a label we made up to point at a fable we only half understand. But I kind of love that. It’s proof that the myth lives in our mouths — that every time we say it, we’re still retelling the same story of father and son, creation and guilt, mirror and reflection. And maybe, as del Toro’s film reminds us, the reason the name still carries so much weight is because deep down, we all recognise ourselves somewhere in that chain. In the end, “Frankenstein’s Monster” isn’t just an error we correct. It’s the story eating itself alive. A title nobody wrote, accidentally telling the truth.

I Am Gothic-Punk and This Is My Funeral for Normal

Look, I wear black because everything else betrayed me. I stomp through rain-slick alleys in boots heavier than regret, and my reflection sneers right back. Leather straps, safety-pins, velvet stained with coffee and midnight secrets. I’ve traded pastel branding for rust-coloured rebellion.

Goth gave me sorrow, velvet, moonlit statues and how to whisper to gargoyles. Punk gave me boots, razor rhythms, spit-flying fury and the joy of “why the hell not?” I’m the cathedral echo and the smashed-glass encore. I’m lace clutching a chain, roses wilting under barbed-wire, a body soaked in dramatic flair and chaotic truth.

Everything else in the world wants you rubber-stamped and bullet-point ready for Instagram. I want the ruin. I want rust. I want to feel the edges cracking. My life isn’t a clean feed; it’s a cassette played too loud, scratched, rewound, skipping on the chorus you thought you knew. I’ve got eyeliner that’s smeared from laughter and fights and late nights. My boots have seen desperate gigs and endless apologies and the first time someone looked at me and shrugged as if I was just glitching again.

Gothic-punk means I’ll dress up and crash things. I’ll quote T.S. Eliot then kick down the windows. I’ll be romantic and I’ll be feral. I’ll do velvet gloves stained with coffee and ink. Because I’m not here to belong.

So when you see me in the bar, 2 a.m., half‐feral grin and leather jacket, know this: I didn’t choose gothic‐punk. But even so I carry it like a weapon, like a hymn, like the only truth I’ll ever fully trust.

And yeah, if you don’t like it? Watch me keep dancing in the ash anyway.

It’s Samhain tonight. Yeah, that night. The one with the bone-deep quiet. The one where the air feels like static and ghosts start live-blogging in your dreams. The one that isn’t Halloween, not really, though the world’s glued plastic to its face and called it that. No, this is older. Wilder. The dark has teeth tonight, and it’s hungry.

Samhain is the moment the year exhales and dies. The sky forgets how to smile. The last leaves give up their green and fall like drunks into gutters. And I, ridiculous creature that I am, stand outside barefoot, freezing, pretending I can feel something ancient humming in the mud. (Spoiler: I can.)

You ever notice how everything feels thinner on nights like this? The world’s membrane stretched like old film, light leaking through from somewhere that doesn’t belong to us anymore. The Celts knew. They didn’t need apps to tell them the veil was thin. They could taste it. The smoke, the rot, the whispered maybe of something watching from the treeline.

The modern world dressed that up as “Halloween,” a party for sugar and irony and trauma in cheap polyester. But underneath, the bones are still there. You can feel them if you sit still long enough. That deep-rooted pulse that says something’s ending. And for once, we don’t have to fix it. We just… let it die.

Tonight, I light a candle for every version of me that didn’t make it through the year. The one who tried too hard. The one who said “I’m fine” when she was a crater in a hoodie. The one who fell in love with someone who treated her like an optional side quest. They all get a little light. A shot of whiskey. Maybe a tear if I’m feeling cinematic.

There’s a part of me that still wants to go full witch. Bones, herbs, chanting, the whole moody Pinterest aesthetic. But honestly, I think Samhain magic is quieter than that. It’s the silence after the last laugh fades. It’s standing outside and admitting you’re scared of the dark but you love it anyway. It’s looking the abyss dead in the eye and saying, “You’re not so big.”

So yeah. Tonight’s the funeral of the year, and I’m showing up overdressed, black eyeliner, half-feral grin. I’ll toast the dead and the nearly dead. I’ll let the cold crawl under my skin until I feel something real.

Happy Samhain, my sweet decay-addicted weirdos. May your ghosts be kind, your candles stubborn, and your heart just a little bit haunted.

I don’t know when it happened exactly, but one day I woke up and realised the internet stopped being funny. Like, not “haha memes” funny. I mean the kind of stupid, delirious laughter that comes from staying up until 3AM talking to strangers about nothing and everything. The kind of laughter that feels like community, like magic, like being weird together in the dark.

Now everything feels like it’s been pressure-washed by a brand consultant. All the corners sanded down. Every post, every joke, every image perfectly optimised to fit into a square. You can feel the algorithm breathing down everyone’s neck, whispering “more engagement” like a needy demon. The whole place smells of reheated content and self-conscious irony.

I scroll through my feed and it’s just… sludge. People pretending to be human for metrics. People pretending not to care while caring so much. Everyone’s selling something, even if it’s just their personality. The vibes are gone. The ghosts have moved out.

Sometimes I miss 2006 so bad it hurts. I miss bad graphics and glowing text and stupid quizzes like “which obsolete operating system are you?” (I was Windows 98, obviously. Crashing constantly but with charm.) I miss the chaos, the anonymity, the messiness. You could be anyone back then. You could reinvent yourself nightly. Now, everything’s archived forever. Every bad joke is a scar that never fades.

The internet used to feel like a haunted house built by weird little goths with too much HTML and not enough sleep. Now it feels like a shopping mall haunted by influencers. There are still echoes, though. You hear them in the margins sometimes. In a forum that somehow hasn’t died. In a meme that’s too niche to be monetised. In someone’s blog post where they accidentally sound real.

Maybe that’s why I still write here, yelling into the void with my whole chest. Because sometimes, if you scream long enough into the static, someone screams back.

And for one fleeting second, it feels like 2006 again.

You.
Yes, you. I know what you did.
You think I wouldn't find out? Well, we're going to have to have a long talk about this, aren't we?
Go and fetch the belt.
What, you think I'm joking? After what you did, I'm going to have to discipline you, aren't I?
Aren't I?
Exactly. Now, go and fetch the belt. Then get your pants down and bend over. Yes, all the way down.
Look, you've only got yourself to blame for this. You know I feel about it when I have to discipline you, don't you?
Now, enough talking. It's time for your bottom to feel it. Now go and get the belt.
Now!

So. I’m ninety stories into the Big Finish Doctor Who Monthly Adventures. Ninety. That’s a lot of polite screaming at malfunctioning TARDIS doors and villain monologues about the futility of humanity. You’d think I’d have stopped at, like, number ten, when they still sounded like someone recorded them in a broom cupboard with a cheese grater. But no. I kept going. I’m in too deep.

For those who don’t know, Big Finish have been making official Doctor Who audio dramas since 1999, which is practically prehistoric in internet years. These aren’t fanfics with delusions of grandeur. These are real, BBC-licensed productions, with the actual Doctors and companions and some of the most deranged plots ever committed to magnetic tape. The early ones were cheap and weird and full of heart, and then they got more ambitious, more confident, and sometimes just completely incomprehensible. And I love them for that.

Why am I reviewing them? Because I have brain worms. Also because I’m fascinated by this bizarre, sprawling corner of the Whoniverse that’s been chugging along for over two decades, outliving most TV shows, and somehow maintaining this charmingly unhinged tone. I love the messy ambition, the failed experiments, the accidental brilliance. I love how it all feels like the fandom grew up, got a job, and decided to make its own playground.

I write these reviews in my usual Spark way which means they’re half essay, half existential crisis. I overanalyse sound design, I thirst over minor characters, I yell about time travel paradoxes, and sometimes I just get emotional about the Eighth Doctor being too sad and too pretty at the same time. It’s basically a full-body experience.

If you want to read them as I go, I post the new ones over on my social media here: https://tinyurl.com/4383yt9h

And if you want to catch up on the older reviews, I’ve collected them all neatly on my website here: https://tinyurl.com/57s8eb6r

I’ll be posting new ones regularly as I descend further into the infinite void of audio drama absurdity. Pray for me. Or better yet, press play on The Sirens of Time and suffer with me.

So I rewatched A Boy Named Charlie Brown last night thinking I’d get some nice soft nostalgia vibes, you know, Guaraldi’s cozy piano and maybe some comforting cartoon sadness. Instead it kind of cracked me open like a walnut. This movie isn’t cute. It’s like an emotional mirror that politely asks, “Hey, remember all your failures? Let’s sit with those for ninety minutes.” It’s gentle, but it hurts in that slow, quiet way that sneaks up on you.

What really hit me this time is how the film doesn’t make a big deal about failure. It’s not some huge cinematic meltdown moment. It’s just part of life. Charlie Brown loses the spelling bee and it’s not tragic or inspirational. It just happens. The silence that follows is the real gut punch. He stands there, small and awkward and still. No music, no crowd reaction, just a wide shot that basically says, “Yeah, that’s it. You blew it.” And then he goes home. The sun’s still out. People are living their lives. Nobody even cares. That’s the part that kills me. The world keeps spinning like it didn’t just collapse on him.

And then you start to notice the pattern. Every little failure in the film is another football moment. The baseball games, the kites, the dumb spelling bee, it’s all the same loop. Build-up, hope, fall. Cut to silence. Then back to normal. The movie trains you into that rhythm until it feels almost holy, like a meditation on disappointment. Schulz basically made a film that says, “You can’t escape losing, but you can learn to breathe through it.” The pacing, the pauses, the weirdly flat tone is all makes failure feel ordinary. Not this horrible rupture in the universe, just something that happens because that’s what life does.

But what I love is that it’s not cruel about it. There’s no cynicism. Charlie Brown’s pain isn’t a punchline. The movie never tells him to toughen up or try harder or manifest positive vibes. It just lets him exist in the ache. Like, yeah, you failed. That’s okay. The world’s still here. You’re still here. That tiny bit of kindness buried in the melancholy is everything. It’s so real I could scream.

By the end nothing changes. No happy montage. No miraculous win. Just another morning. Another sky. Another try. And somehow that’s the most hopeful thing in the world. Because the real magic of Charlie Brown isn’t in ever kicking the football, it’s in the fact that he keeps running at it, every damn time, knowing full well what’s coming. That’s what the film’s really teaching: how to make peace with the fall, how to keep your heart open anyway. The world doesn’t stop for your mistakes. But the music keeps playing, soft and sad and weirdly warm, and you get up and try again. And maybe that’s what grace looks like.

Hey, so just so you know... some guy on fetlife asked me to send him a picture of my bottom.
So I sent him a screenshot of you.

So I’m on this forum, right? A bulletin board. Yeah, those—digital fossils from the early 2000s, where you posted and waited, and then maybe someone replied six hours later if the stars aligned. It’s about kink (don’t you dare ask which one; the answer is “none of your business and also too embarrassing”), but that’s not the point. The point is that once upon a time, this was a thriving community. We had actual discussions. We had art. We had weirdos, sure, but human weirdos. The good kind.

And then came the flood.

Look, I don’t care if someone wants to use AI art for their own private weirdness. Go wild. Have your robot paint your dragon wife in seventeen poses, knock yourself out. What I do care about is when people use it as a shortcut for effort and taste—especially when they use it to advertise, monetise, or scam their way into clout they didn’t earn. There’s this smug assumption that “creating” means pressing the generate button and dumping 40 JPEGs of melting faces into the void. Spoiler: it doesn’t.

But my forum’s mods? They didn’t ban it. Oh no. They just shrugged and said, “Eh, give it its own category.” Like a zoo enclosure for digital chimps. The problem is: the chimps escaped.

Now the “AI Art” board gets thirty posts a day, minimum. Each one packed with dozens of low-effort, same-face, twelve-fingered nightmare collages that look like what would happen if DALL·E had a stroke while browsing DeviantArt. No curation, no quality control, no editing—just raw, industrial waste, flung straight from the generator into the feed. And the worst part? The posters get applause. “Wow, AI has come so far!” they cry, as if they’re marvelling at a newborn child instead of a jpeg of a woman with seven elbows and a haunted expression.

Meanwhile, the rest of the site is dying. The fiction boards—once full of actual writers—are now cluttered with people “testing out AI story prompts.” The photo boards? “AI-enhanced videos.” The general discussion? “How do I make ChatGPT write better porn?” It’s like watching a zombie outbreak, except the zombies are made of code and hubris.

And what’s left of us—the flesh-and-blood posters, the ones who actually make things—we’re ghosts. We post, occasionally, out of stubbornness or nostalgia, and the silence echoes back like a mausoleum. The bots aren’t coming; they’re already here, and they brought their audience of sycophants.

This is why people call it AI slop. Because it is. It’s reheated, textureless, mass-produced slurry masquerading as creativity. And sure, you can say “oh but it’s just one corner of the internet,” but I’ve watched enough corners turn to dust to know that’s how it always starts.

They say the future is artificial intelligence.
But from where I’m sitting, it just looks like the end of taste.

Once upon a midnight dreary (or maybe a Friday night in a musty basement), some brave fool decided that dice and dread could coexist. Horror in tabletop roleplaying didn’t start with elegance. It started with a gelatinous cube that scared you not because it was horrifying, but because it ate your +3 sword. Early D&D flirted with fear — monsters, madness, cursed items, “fear” as a spell effect — but it was all mechanical. A saving throw versus terror. A stat check to not soil your chainmail. Horror existed in the margins, as something to roll against rather than something to feel.

Then came Call of Cthulhu (1981), the big bang of tabletop horror. Chaosium’s masterpiece whispered, “What if the real monster is your mind slowly fracturing like a dropped teacup?” and gamers everywhere went, “Hell yeah, let’s die scared and insane!” It taught us that dread doesn’t come from a hit point loss — it’s from the realization that you never had control in the first place. It birthed a cult of cosmic despair and gumshoe tragedy. You weren’t a hero anymore. You were lunch for an elder god. A delicious, screaming appetizer.

Then TSR decided, “Okay but what if Dracula was a property we could monetize?” and we got Ravenloft. Gothic horror for sword-swinging murderhobos! Castles, curses, tragic vampires with eyeliner before it was cool. It’s horror filtered through fog machines and velvet capes — melodrama meets dungeon crawl. For all its camp, Ravenloft mattered: it gave players permission to be scared on purpose, not just because they failed a Fortitude save.

Fast forward to the ‘90s: enter World of Darkness. White Wolf said, “You are the monster,” and half the tabletop world said, “Finally!” It was horror draped in leather, neon, and existential angst — vampires, werewolves, mages, all crying beautiful gothic tears about lost humanity while chain-smoking clove cigarettes. It turned horror inward, made it personal, made it sexy. It was nihilism in a trench coat, and every player wanted to be the brooding antihero whispering poetry about blood and loneliness.

But beyond the aesthetics, World of Darkness cracked open the door for a whole new audience. Suddenly the dice tables were filled with goth kids, queer kids, theatre kids, philosophy majors — the beautiful freaks who wanted feelings in their monsters. It wasn’t about killing the beast; it was about being the beast and asking why the hell the world made you this way. It was a revelation: horror could be poetic, political, even romantic. You could tell a story about damnation and have it mean something about identity, grief, or desire. It was messy and melodramatic and alive.

White Wolf’s legacy isn’t just eyeliner and trench coats; it’s the moment tabletop horror stopped whispering from the shadows and strutted onto the dance floor with a manifesto. It told players that their pain was worth dramatizing, that monstrosity was a mirror. And that shift — from horror as punishment to horror as self-recognition — changed everything that came after.

The 2000s brought the indie scene, where horror got weirder and sharper. Games like Don’t Rest Your Head, Dread (with that anxiety-inducing Jenga tower), and Ten Candles turned horror into an emotional endurance test. No more rolling for fear — you felt it. You watched your candlelight die one by one, knowing it mirrored your characters’ doom. These games understood that true horror is intimacy — sitting in a dark room, breathing the same stale air, listening to someone whisper, “You’re not going to make it.”

And now? Horror has diversified and splintered into a smorgasbord of nightmares. You want folk horror? There’s Vaesen, all runes and repression under the northern sun. You want deep-space nihilism? Mothership has you covered, where the only thing colder than the void is the corporate indifference that sent you there. Craving urban decay and psychological rot? Liminal Horror takes cosmic corruption and filters it through the lens of existential dread. Or maybe you want cinematic panic — Alien: The Roleplaying Game is industrial horror in motion, dripping with claustrophobic sweat and capitalist despair. The menu has never been broader, the flavours never more specific. Every new game has a different flavour of panic to offer — rural myth, cosmic insignificance, body horror, found footage despair, posthuman contamination, even the delicate dread of things almost normal but not quite right.

Alongside that creative boom came the rise of safety tools and calibration mechanics — X-cards, lines and veils, consent check-ins. The sort of scaffolding that keeps the players from actually losing their minds while the fiction gleefully dismantles their comfort zones. These aren’t corporate red tape; they’re the ghost lights that let us perform terror responsibly. Modern horror gaming understands that the goal isn’t to punish the players or test their endurance — it’s to let them dance with dread and walk away with all their limbs attached. Today’s horror RPGs don’t just tell stories — they orchestrate controlled emotional implosions. We descend into darkness to find the light switch, not to die screaming in the void.

But let’s be honest: horror in TTRPGs has always been about the vibe. From cursed dungeons to doomed investigators, from fog-choked castles to flickering flashlights, it’s the same impulse — to stare into the abyss with friends, laugh nervously, and roll a die to see if the abyss blinks first.
So yeah, the monsters have changed, the mechanics have evolved, and the dice are fancier now — but at the heart of it? It’s still you, your friends, and that giddy little whisper in the dark that says, something’s here with us. And we keep playing, because deep down, we kind of hope it is.

Ah yes, another rapture. Another apocalyptic weekend that came and went with the same fanfare as a wet paper bag in a wind tunnel. I swear, I’ve lived through more ends of the world than Doctor Who at this point. Every few years, someone gets out the prophecy calculator, plugs in some random numerology, and declares that this time, it’s really happening. Spoiler: it never does.

And it’s always the same people. The same preachers with thousand-yard stares and thousand-dollar microphones. The same audience clutching their Bibles and canned beans. The same cycle of panic, repentance, and sheepish silence the morning after. You could set your watch by the disappointment.

The cultural part of this fascinates me — because this whole Rapture thing? It’s so American. Like, apple pie and AR-15s American. Outside the U.S. (and the places where U.S. missionaries went on their little “convert the world” field trips), the Rapture isn’t even really a thing. It’s a uniquely American brand of religious theatre — a mix of end-times paranoia, self-importance, and capitalism with a halo. Everyone’s so sure they’re living in the special generation that God personally decided to nuke first.

I remember reading the Left Behind books about twenty years ago out of sheer morbid curiosity. I’ll admit, I was impressed — not by the theology, but by the marketing. Those books were an empire. Movies, video games, spin-offs, merchandise — the holy trinity of apocalypse profiteering. You’ve got to hand it to them: if Jesus doesn’t return on schedule, you can always sell another deluxe box set.

But honestly? After all these years, I’ve stopped laughing at the absurdity and started marveling at the consistency. These people never learn. The predictions get debunked, the math gets proven wrong, the sun rises like it always does — and yet a few months later, someone new is online explaining why the next date is the real one. It’s like an infinite subscription to disappointment.

At this point, I’m convinced the world will end someday — and half of these people will still be too busy live-streaming it for clout to notice. The sky will crack open, fire will rain down, and someone on TikTok will be shouting, “Guys, this is crazy — like and subscribe if you’re still here!” Meanwhile the rest of us will be rolling our eyes and saying, “Finally. Took you long enough.”

People think writing is easy. Like, *insultingly* easy. As if the act of pressing keys on a keyboard automatically transforms your inner monologue into art. As if everyone with a laptop and a caffeine addiction is suddenly a fucking wordsmith. Newsflash: just because you can type doesn’t mean you can write.

There’s this weird illusion that writing is the most accessible of the arts because the tools are everywhere. Paint needs brushes. Music needs instruments. Film needs equipment and people. But writing? Oh, anyone can open a Word document, right? Just spill some thoughts, slap in a few metaphors, and—boom—art. Never mind craft, tone, pacing, rhythm, emotional precision. Nah, just vibes.

And here’s the kicker: in making writing *more* accessible, we’ve somehow made people *hostile* to the idea that it’s a craft. Like, if you dare to suggest that good writing takes study, discipline, or (heaven forbid) editing, people look at you like you’re gatekeeping. As if saying “learn how sentences work” is some kind of elitist attack on creativity. Everyone thinks they’re a writer now, and that’s why so much of what’s out there is just... shit. Empty words dressed up as profundity. Plotless, rhythmless, heartless. Because nobody wants to do the work anymore. They want the dopamine rush of *feeling* like a writer, not the long, boring grind of *becoming* one.

Being a good writer isn’t about inspiration or word vomit; it’s about skill. Study. Precision. You have to *read*. You have to tear apart other people’s sentences until you understand why they make your bones hum. You have to write badly, over and over, until you start writing less badly. It’s a learned artform, like any other. But people hate that idea now—they want it to be effortless, as if depth and clarity are things that just happen when you’re “authentic.”

And because of that cultural rot, writing as an artform has become undervalued across the creative industries. Everyone wants content, not craft. They want dialogue that sounds like improv, narratives that can be written by committee, scripts that are just vehicles for CGI or branding. Writers are treated like replaceable parts—because, hey, anyone can write, right? Just feed ChatGPT your outline and get a screenplay by Tuesday. Who needs a human who *understands* language?

Writing isn’t easy. It’s not disposable. It’s not “just words.” It’s architecture. Every comma is a gear. Every sentence a vein. And when you stop respecting the craft, when you stop *learning* how to write, you end up with the creative wasteland we have now—where everything looks shiny, sounds clever, and means absolutely nothing.

Writing is a form of madness dressed up as discipline. It’s not for everyone—and that’s okay. But pretending it *is* for everyone has cheapened it beyond recognition.