'It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas' is the "getting real Boss Baby vibes from this" of Christmas songs.

For the Manson Family, maybe.

All writing rules become useful if preceded by the word "sometimes". Sometimes, show don't tell!

Alexander Pope decried the cruelty of cooking lobsters alive in 1713. 313 years later the practice will finally be banned. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/d...

One of the interesting / alarming things about @keezyyoung.bsky.social's HELLO SUNSHINE is that, at a glance, you can see there's dark-edged pages coming up so you know something bad is about to happen...

An excellent graduation present. (I think I have more copies of this series than any other! Black and white, colour, now these collections...)

Not the point, of course, but savvy students will now realise all they need to do in an essay is talk about Jesus and no one will be allowed to fail them.

Just say the F-slur if you want to so bad.

Responses to danger include Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn, or Fixate On The 1987 Pet Shop Boys Album 'Actually'.

Americans having to bootleg broadcast news about our government’s offshored concentration camp is a level of fascism that immediately precedes democratic societies dropping leaflets on us from weather balloons.

"Why should I be ashamed of things my ancestors did?" I mean, okay – but then you can't be proud of things your ancestors did either.

Ace's results came back: it was cancer, but it was local and the vet is confident they got it all, which is a huge relief. (As is being cone-free!)

The Australian government is extremely concerned about (certain kinds of) hate speech! It will not stand for (these particular examples of) hate speech any more!

I won't defend AVATAR 2 that much – it had "watching a videogame but not being allowed to play" vibes – but I thought AVATAR 1 was hugely satisfying.

This is definitely true of depression. Past Martyn has a lot to answer for!

Bari Weiss heard the old saying "news is what somebody does not want you to print. All the rest is advertising" and thought "oh, great! Advertising!"

"The fact that being a callous bully scans as 'cool' is familiar to any queer who’s survived high school; the fact that bigotry exercises cultural power is familiar to any marginalized person, period. We’ve all heard enough about 'rainbow capitalism' to know that corporations make fickle allies."

"In 2024, annual overdose deaths fell nearly 27%, the largest single-year decrease ever recorded. [...] That is why it is inconceivable that instead of expanding these health solutions, the government is gutting them."

A frightening number of people think "a summary of events that take place in a movie" is just a more efficient version of "actually watching a movie".

Surprising no one, conservatives spell grief "grift".

Why would anyone cite a paper they hadn't read? You don't know what it says! Flames on the side of my face!

Do you think the Smurfs and the Moomins know each other?

Encouraging the world's worst people to think they're good at boxing was a long con – but it really paid off!

Who is the best Batman villain outside of the classics, and why is it definitely Doctor Hurt?

Movie development is usually obsessed with cutting "anything that doesn't move the plot forward"; whereas scenes that are just vibes are usually the audience favourites!

The whale in MOBY DICK could still be alive today, meaning there's a decent chance it finally got around to reading it.

You can make the argument that AI prompts are art. Maybe a new form of flash fiction? But I still don't need to see the output.

World's saddest circle.

I love it when Christians tell queer people "you can't have the rainbow! That's our symbol for the fact God promised not to murder millions of people with a flood again!"

Rowdy Roddy Piper takes off his glasses and realises he's just been punching a random dude for 25 minutes.

What happened to Jake Paul should be a lesson for all podcasters. Hard to talk about MailChimp with a broken jaw, isn't it?

What's the oldest movie you think of as "new"? I just realised I think WALL-E is "recent Pixar".

Watching THE PRINCESS BRIDE for the first time in decades and realising how deeply it is burnt into my brain. About the only thing that really dates it is that the score sounds so tinny!

I'm mostly an AVATAR defender – as the old saying goes, never bet against James Cameron! – but this new one arrived and I barely noticed.

A shapeshifter who can only turn into, like, parallelograms and rhombuses.

Horror is a genre I love, but since starting in mental health work I do struggle with some depictions of madness – especially films set in psych wards and asylums. I know, I know, it's fiction. It's a wet blanket side effect, but it's there.

When I read, I read...

My favourite thing about Paul Williams isn't that he wrote 'Rainbow Connection', but that he looks exactly like someone who would've written 'Rainbow Connection'.

As a huge fan of ███████ I feel gutted right now. Just an absolute betrayal of everything I thought ███████ stood for.

This made my day. You can read my piece that noted critic Isaac Butler is referring to right here!

As my post about movie writing has gained me some new followers, a little about me: I'm a writer in Melbourne, Australia. I have a PhD in Creative Writing. Some screenplays, just finished a novel, and a bunch of pop culture commentary. Check out martynpedler.com for more!

Well, there it is: NSW Premier bans protests, blaming the Bondi killings on pro-Gaza marches.

I will say that while my graduation ceremony was pretty boring, of course, it was really nice to see so many young people so excited about learning. (This just made me sound a million years old, didn't it?)

Writing an article about how we should all ignore the Epstein files a week before it's revealed you're in the Epstein files is genuinely hilarious.

When you get a PhD you have to wear a funny hat. IT'S CALLED FASHION OKAY?

There's a special pill in the original Pac-Man that lets him devour you, the player.

Your husband called me Buns just last night.

In 2026, I'm setting my phone to fight-or-flight mode.

I have now seen the final cut of the movie I wrote: ask me anything! (No seriously, don't, I'm still not allowed to talk about it.)

Bing Crosby and Bob Hope's ROAD TO... movies, except they're always on THE ROAD by Cormac McCarthy.