Partially Reformed Content #8: We absolutely Guarentee (up to) (and including) (more than) (over) (there or there abouts) One year on…

Well, its quite a bit later than I would have liked (but then, when isnt it!) but 2025 has been grabbed by the scruff of the neck, thrown from my doorstep NEVER…to return again. And as is custom around these parts, as I welcome a baby faced, but somehow menacing looking 2026 into my front room and offer it a nice cup of tea and the plate of biscuits. Its time for me to once again take a look at the year that was and kind of give you guys a bit of a personal update on my life, the universe and all that nonsense, for the handful of folks who like to know about that kind of stuff (for which, Im eternally grateful that you care <3) 

2025 was a bit of a complex beast for me honestly, in the sense that, broadly speaking, not a whole lot really happened…But on a more micro level, there were pockets of time where it very much felt like everything and everyone was all happening at once. At the tail end of 2024, as has been the tradition now for over 20 years, I took my annual ‘reflective’ new years eve bath. A time for me to take stock of the year that came before, put to bed any ill wills, let go of the past and plan my hopes for the new year. And while soaking in that tub, after letting go of the pains of 2024, I only really had one hope for 2025, and that was for it to be particularly boring and uneventful. 

Its fair to say that the previous 2 years hadnt exactly been tranquil. With multiple close family deaths in 2023, and all the grieving and arrangements that come with it, and 2024 being the year we decided to buy a fixer upper house. By December ‘24, I wasnt just ‘wanting’ some quiet time, I frankly needed it. And while 2024 brought a lot of good times, joy and the framework for stability in place. By the end of it, I was pretty exhausted. 

Which leads me nicely to 2025, and…to be honest; I kind of got my wish. Broadly speaking, the year of 2025 was a pretty uneventful one. A bit of a blur year if im honest, as the months seemed to peel away faster than I could keep track of them, I wanted uneventful; and that was pretty much what I got…

Thats not to say that absolutely NOTHING happened mind, but that what did happen was typically done in small self contained pockets. 

Probably the biggest ‘struggle’ of the year, isnt really my story to tell honestly. That would belong to my partner. After the previous 12 months of heavy renovation work, paperwork and all the meetings and arrangements that come with that. I was tired and wanted to chill, SHE was fundamentally broken. When I say that by December of ‘24 she was essentially bedridden for most of the day; every day. Im not exaggerating. And over the last 12 months its been an incredibly slow and very painful emotional and physical recovery for her. While she acknowledged that us moving in together and making a go of things was pretty much inevitable, she wasnt really well enough to do it when she did, but a fear of her getting worse physically and mentally if she waited any longer was what pushed her through this. 

For the first 4-6 months of 2025, she pretty much lived in bed, coming out briefly (if at all) only if absolutely essential and I ultimately ended up handling most of her appointments/paperwork during this time. I did as much as I could to try and help her recover and around the 5-6 month mark she did begin to get up and out of bed a bit more often, and even began to do a few things she’d previously enjoyed with her art and video game work. 

The back half of 2025, she slowly began to become more involved in the house, getting dressed and going into our living room may seem like small offerings, but they were huge milestones in terms of her recovery, and by the end of the year, she’d even begun preparing some meals, and joining me on the occasional store trip when she was well enough. By the end of 2025, she still wasnt quite back to her old self, but she was beginning to get back into the swing of things. Which, I cant tell you how proud I am of her journey on this one. Its been a huge emotional struggle for her and at times its been stressful for both of us, but I think we’ve really turned a corner by this point. 

Outside of that, my first 6 months of the year was pretty much just, looking after the missus, keeping the house from falling into squalor, and trying to arrange for a few of the smaller ‘odd jobs’ that needed doing to the place to be arranged. In Mid spring, I decided to try and have a good go on the garden as we hadnt been able to touch it really since we got the keys. We had a LOT of junk from the reno in our garden as it got too cold to remove it by the time we were finished, so I hired a skip and got rid of all of that, chopped two trees and a black hawthorn bush down that were causing us some serious access issues (I understand now how Christopher Lees Dracula could die by those fuckers…they’re lethal.)

I did a lot of weeding, made some hanging baskets, bought a few garden ornaments, and just general scrubbed, seeded and cut back the lot. It looked a lot better for it and by the summer it was a wonderful little nook to scurry myself away to, to hang in a hammock, pop a beer or soda or three and just take in the sunshine. 

We also got our loft boarded and insulated, which was pretty much THE big project of the year for us. During January 2025 we realised just how cold the house could be when it was uninsulated. With one particular day when we woke up to the INSIDE of the house getting down to as low as 5 celsius with the heating on, being a bit of a wakeup that we needed to do something fairly urgently. So! In July, we boarded and insulated, its worked a treat so far, and the new storage space has allowed us to clear away a LOT of our things. Freeing up a small ‘guest room’ to be turned into a sensory room which we’re hoping will only help further my partners recovery and give me a space to zone out from time to time. 

Outside of that, theres really only been two other things that have happened this year that have personally impacted me in a distinct way, both of them medical. The first was that, after being on the waiting list for almost two and a half years, I finally got to the top of the list for an ADHD assessment. And I feel at this point I need to add some context for folks who may not know my history, so please bear with. 

I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was 7 years old. This was done through NHS services, and at the time the doctor told my parents that this was pretty much the most blatant example of ADHD that he had ever personally seen, so much so that he asked if he could ‘borrow’ me for an afternoon to show students going into the peadiatric support services exactly what a ‘textbook’ case of ADHD looked like more often than not. 

I was medicated for about 9 years, and I honestly blame that intervention for leading me to where I am now. Without it, I almost certainly wouldnt have made it through primary and secondary school with a qualification to my name. In retrospect, I do think I was probably overmedicated during a big chunk of that window. I felt ill a lot of the time, lost a lot of weight and was zoning out for most of the day. But it kept me quiet and focussed on the task at hand, so my parents were happy enough with that given that off meds I was positively feral. 

When I hit 15, the doctor who had diagnosed me to the service left his position and was replaced by a new to the area doctor who was strictly anti-medication. He believed that ADHD was better treated with therapies and accommodations, and thought that medications put a strain on the body and simply suppressed the underlying issues, rather than resolving them. And while I agree with the sentiment to a degree. The only universe where ADHD would be better resolved with therapies and accommodations, is a world that is welcoming and accommodating to neurodiversity. And thats a world that was positive fantasy when that doctor said what he said, and is an even LESS likely possibility today.

In either case, they asked me if i’d prefer to not be medicated, I said that the medications sometimes made me feel bad/unwell, but that the tradeoff of being able to focus, I felt was worth it. Which they chose to interpret as ‘I don’t want to be on meds’ and despite my parents protest, they informed us that, as I was soon to turn 16, they’d be discharging me from the childs services and wouldnt be renewing my medication prescription. They advised us to see how I got on without medications, and if I really TRUELY needed them, to go back to my GP, who would refer me back into the service with the adult team. That I wouldnt need to be reassessed, they’d just pick up where we left off. 

And so, it all came to a halt. But it did it probably at the best time it could have really, as I was about to start college, and I’d decided to pursue an education in film, cinema and art. (and English…because we stan STEM here.) Which worked out particularly well really. Being off meds released the full ADHD incoherency, and it turns out being able to generate a million ideas every 20 seconds, and wanting the quickest, most effective and laziest solution to a problem is JUST what the film industry thrive on. 

I spent the following 10 or so years pursuing a career in film and television, and ‘humble brag’ incoming, but with my ADHD running rampant, I was able to ace through college and make a lot of filmie friends in the process, cruise through university studying film and television at a ‘top 5’ rated university in the country, making even more filmie friends AND offering my services as an advisor on top of growing into a direction and editing specialisation. I got my first few film gigs, before finding steady work as an editor for a film company, where I quickly climbed the ladder becoming the head of the department in over a 3 year window. ‘Agile’ was the buzzword of the time, and if you were able to jump from project to project with absolute ease, you were golden balls. And my ADHD VERY much enabled that. 

Unfortunately; as these things tend to do, it wasnt meant to last, the company I worked for announced a relocation plan in 2017 that would see them moving out of my city by a good distance (significantly longer than I was willing to travel) they refused any chance of a remote working position, and essentially told me I either had to suck it up and do a 2-3 hour commute every day ON TOP of losing all the perks I was enjoying in the current location, for no change in pay, or I could leave. I chose to leave. 

In 2018, I ended up getting a desk job, and as I got bedded into the new company I picked up the swing of things, and by 2022 I was making double the amount I was making when I was leading the editing department. But the work had become overwhelming. I couldnt keep up and my focus was totally shot through. So; after some consideration, I decided to enquire what options were available via the NHS adult mental health services. After all; they told me I could just pick up where I left off, surely it would be a piece of cake right?

Well; no. it was shit honestly. I went back to my GP in mid 2022 and basically asked him if I could go back into the ADHD services, and explained what i’d been told previously. Only to be informed that the NHS (raided by cuts) didnt specifically HAVE a local ADHD service anymore in my area, and that 99% of referrals into the service now had to be handled by a 3rd party service. I said ‘Oh! Well thats fine, I really just want to talk to someone about what therapies/medications are available today, as it was quite rudimentary when I started. They said that wouldnt be possible. I asked why, and they said that, even though I had an ADHD diagnosis, and that it was in my medical notes. The 3rd party service wouldnt recognise that diagnosis. Instead; they told me I had to go into that service, essentially as if I hadnt been diagnosed at all. The real kick to the balls in all of this? I asked if their diagnosis would be recognised by the NHS once i’d got it again, and was told it wouldnt be, and that, essentially, if I ever DID need to access NHS ADHD services, i’d have to reapply AGAIN. Its unlikely I will need to given where I live. But at the same time, its frustrating. 

Anyway, they put me on the list and told me there wasnt currently a confirmed wait time. I shrugged it off…it took 2 years. I already had an ADHD diagnosis. And it took 2 YEARS for me to…not even get INTO the service, but just to get an email off them to confirm I was getting to the top of the list for evaluation. I initially spoke to my GP about this issue in September of 2022. And in LATE November 2024, I finally had my one (and to date only) session with a doctor, who assessed me for ADHD over zoom, in a call that lasted all of 15 minutes before she basically informed me that I definitely did have ADHD and that medication was likely the best way forward. 

I then got put onto ANOTHER waiting list. And in August 2025 I was informed that I was at the top of the list for titration (a 12 week window where they just…throw meds at you in different doses and see what sticks) and in late September 2025. I started that period on Methalphenidate. 

Honestly? It was a bit of a revelation. Going back onto ADHD meds as an adult, and being able to better describe how the medication impacts me really quite changed everything. 

A note at this point for anyone who hasnt taken ADHD medication before, but theres a common misconception that these medications are ‘focus pills’ and that they, somehow magically, zap your brain and force it to laser focus in on tasks without getting interrupted, and to slow your thoughts down so that you can focus on the task at hand. But thats not really how the meds work. 

See, they don’t so much ‘give you focus’ more, they take away the barriers that caused the loss of focus in the first place. For example; before meds I sucked at getting up in the morning, I was largely dependent on caffeine and it would take me at least 3 hours to even feel like I was in the room. Letalone be coherent. Id be chasing dopamine for most of the day through overeating junk food, or getting pulled into stuff I felt was ‘fun’ over stuff that actually needed doing. Worse still, once I was awake, I was then wired for most of the day I would stay up WELL into the night, going to bed at 2-3am most nights, even if I had to be up at 8:30am the next day.

The day Istarted, it was like a switch flipped, I took my first dose, sleepily, at 8am. And by 8:30am I was wide awake and beaming. I had absolutely no fatigue, I didnt touch a drop of caffeine, cruised through a full day of work without so much as TOUCHING a candy bar, I felt sharp, with the world and on top of things. That lasted for the better part of a week, before slowly eeking down. As with all meds, and particularly ADHD meds, after a while your body just…gets used to it and the benefits slowly start to creep down a bit. 

So, I had it doubled, and things seemed to perk up again…However after a few days, tolerance kicked in again and the fatigue started to creep in with it. So pushing it, they tried doubling it again. And its here things started to not quite go to plan. 

While the morning fatigue was gone again, the jitters i’d have for an hour or so in the morning on the previous dose now lasted for most of the morning. I felt nauseous a lot of the time and could barely eat, I was having quite bad ‘dry mouth’ through the day, to the point that there were times where I was struggling to swallow, and the worst of it was that, at this dose, I started to zone out quite a bit. Spending large chunks of the day a bit zombified, and around 4pm, the meds would wear off HARD causing me to completely crash out into exhaustion, with a beyond painful headache, absolutely STARVING for food.

I raised this to my prescriber, who informed me a lot of those side effects were normal, that my blood pressure and heart rate were still in normal range, and that, if they pushed further and doubled the dose again, That those issues may actually go away, due to the higher dosage. 

Now, its here really that I feel like I should probably mention the OTHER medical thing that was going on with me in 2025, because the two overlap at this point in the MOST horrendous way (and this is a big track change, so buckle up) For the better part of 10 years now i’ve been looking into getting a vasectomy. I’ve never wanted kids, im a fiercely independent person, they cost too much, I like my quiet time, and while im more than happy to be the cool uncle to my nieces and nephews, I find the best part of being an uncle is being able to give the kids back. There are other reasons beyond that from a medical perspective both on mine and my partners side of things that I wont go into here, but lets just say we both agreed that kids wernt for us, and we wanted to make sure it stayed that way.

2025 seemed like the perfect time to give it a go really, the planets had seemed to align. With the house stuff largely done, my job was in a bit of a holding pattern (I’ll get to that shortly) so they were more than happy to give me extended medical leave to recover for it, I had a lot of PTO stored anyway…But unfortunately; the week of my operation coincided with the 2 week window where I was supposed to go up to the higher dose on my ADHD medications…Which I didnt initially see as that much of a problem really. But that was because I, at that time, didnt fully understand how ADHD medications ACTUALLY worked. 

See; ADHD meds work by forcing blood from other parts of the body up to your brain, this in turn forces your brain to produce the amount of dopamine you need to regulate your body properly, which in turn causes you to feel less fatigued, and to not actively seek out dopamine hits. THATS how the focus works. 

Why do I mention this? Because the meds pull blood from EVERYWHERE. If it can get a line to your dome, its drawing it. And 7 days before my operation was set to take place, I went up another dose and my body just…NOPED the hell out at that point. The headaches i’d have at the end of the day on previous dose, basically became constant throughout the day and even more intense, I started HEAVILY dissociating through most of the day, barely being able to do much more than the barest of minimum work tasks, and my entire evenings post work, would be spent zoning out on the sofa, barely able to move, feeling like I was having an out of body experience watching myself veg out. 

I powered through with that for the first 3 days as I was advised that might happen and that, when my body adjusted to the tolerance, it would probably all quieten down. But dear reader, it absolutely didnt. By day 4 my mood had completely collapsed into a depressive episode, which has NEVER happened before, im a very positive person usually, and this mood swing was both unusual and unsettling. But it was Day 5 and 6 where it really came crashing down, as my body had decided that, in the absence of it being able to pull blood from anywhere else in my body, it would do so from my crotch and prostate area…I was thrilled as you can imagine…

 How did this manifest? SEERING AND UNRELENTING PAIN. It felt like someone had used my crotch area as a pin cushion, and for two days I could barely walk, go to the bathroom, or do much of anything other than sit there in severe pain. I Continued my meds into Day 6 before I put 2 and 2 together and realised that it may in fact be the meds that were causing this (I was zombified…self awareness wasn’t in my rolodex at this point)

So, I stopped. I halted the meds immediately and messaged my doctor to inform them of what had happened. They told me stopping was the best idea, and to stay off them till I felt better and then try to go back on them at a lower dose thereafter. But that kind of skittled my operation, as the lack of blood flow had triggered mass MASS inflammation across my whole body by this point, and when I stopped the meds, it only pushed the inflammation further. I ended up with Prostitis (inflammation of the prostate to you and me) alongside crippling inflammation all across my hips, lower back, thighs and shoulders.

I was essentially bedbound for a week in chronic pain with the accompanying all day headaches AND because of the prostitis, I had feelings similar to a UTI without it being a UTI. I had a very fun November as you can probably imagine. Now bearing in mind a Vasectomy is a routine operation, but they are clear to say that if you arnt 100% fighting fit before hand, do not go through with it. And they ESPECIALLY suggest not going ahead with it if you have any kind of prostate or urinary problems as that can significantly increase the likelihood of infection and permanent pain post op. 

As such, I had no choice but to cancel the operation and to try and recover. In total it took 2 weeks for me to feel back to my old self, that was a week of being pretty much entirely in bed, and a following week of slowly getting back into the swing of things. But the experience really knocked my confidence, and as of this year; circumstances at work have changed, meaning that, it may be a while before I can look into it again. Which im genuinely gutted about as I spent the better part of 4-6 months getting prepared for it. 

Back on the ADHD med front, 2 weeks passed, and I went back on my meds at the lowest dose, and this time. It was a bust. I don’t know if my body had developed muscle memory for the dose or what, but it did absolutely nothing for me for the week I was on them, after a week they doubled the dose again, Which reduced fatigue a bit (but not as well as it did the first time) and helped me focus during the day, but this time around, by 1pm it would wear off HARD and i’d wind up with a massive headache, falling asleep sitting up and craving a fridge worth of food. 

They suggested doubling the dose again, but I was a bit hesitant to do so, as going up to that level was where the problems started last time, and I didnt fancy severe pain for 2 weeks again…So, I suggested I DO go up to double the dose, but I split it out. Half the dose in the morning, and the other half in the afternoon when I felt it starting to wear off. They agreed. And…for now dear reader, I think we’ve found the sweet spot. Its not perfect. But its the best i’ve had since my first couple of weeks on these tablets, and its consistent. 

All in all? Despite the issues and problems along the way, now that i’ve found the right dose, the pros very much outweigh the cons for me. I’m losing weight, feeling sharp and able to actually sit and process thoughts, rather than feeling like im in some kind of hurracane state of mind. I have planned and agreed break periods in with my doctors to help keep the meds effective. And despite the teething issues to get to this point, I don’t really have any regrets in going back to medication…though as you can probably guess, I do wish the timing had been a little better. And I would encourage anyone reading this who is either considering looking into an ADHD assessment, or has been diagnosed and is considering medication to explore it. My experiences arnt the common pathway, and everyone has different pros and cons to the journey. But I can say that I’ve gained more than i’ve lost here. 

The meds are pretty much THE story of the year for me honestly. And given thats the most intense aspect of the year, I consider myself quite lucky. So…with that in mind, heres a quick annual breakdown of the other things going on  in my life. 

Work – 

On the job front, life goes on. At the end of 2024, I was temporarily moved into a new team due to some structural changes within the business that led me to not have a manager for a while. So they just…shoved me into a random team and told me they’d look after me for the time being…that ended up being an 18 month placement, and I was genuinely gutted to leave them, they were all super nice and very welcoming people who were very supportive. Work was a good balance during that time, not too busy, not too quiet and because everything was kind of mellowed on the work front, and my boss was very accommodating, it allowed me to explore the medical situations above without too much pressure to keep things chugging as normal. Life was pretty good, and after 15 months of being with them, I did start to wonder if this was just going to become the defacto situation, as I hadnt heard anything since I was told I was moving into that team as a temporary measure. 

Unfortunately; all good things must come to an end, and in mid November 2025, I had a random HR call put in my diary (this was while I was bedridden, so I damn near shat a tonsil stone) But it was to inform me that organisational changes were incoming and that they’d found me a new manager and a dedicated team that I’d be moving to in the new year. 

My boss was very apologetic about not letting me know sooner, but apparently she only found out when I told her about the HR call, 15 minutes before it happened. Being honest, it all felt a bit bungled really, as my (then) boss told me, on a wednesday afternoon, that i’d be leaving the team after Friday, but not going into the new team, because it wouldnt exist till January 1st. Instead i’d be moving to ANOTHER team, just for a month, that had 2 members who were ALSO moving to that new team in the new year, with the aim to get the three of us introduced and aligned ahead of the formal move over to the new world. 

Problem was, that when I moved, I only had 3 weeks till I went off for Christmas vacation, and the first week of me moving, the other 2 new team members were on vacation, the second week I had a couple of days leave and the final week I was up to my neck in sign off work before disappearing till the end of the year. So collectively the three of us spoke maybe 4 times before I left, and we didnt really get to learn anything about each other…other than we’d be working together in January. During this time I also didnt have ANY boss or manager, because they went off sick with the flu for 2 weeks of the 3…and the one week we were all together, she was busy with urgent system problems…basically, it wasnt very well planned out. 

BUT! Its now nearly the end of January, im in the new team now and…they seem alright enough, my new boss is new into the business (she is my 17th manager in 7.5 years…im now averaging a new manager every 6 months or so), so theres a lot of explaining things to her and trying to bring people up to speed. Only time will tell if im sat here 12 months from now saying how marvellous they are, or if im climbing the walls. All I do know is, that 2026 does bring with it some mild anxiety, because the structural organisational changes that caused me to BE moved into a temporary team for the last 18 months, was due to business streamlining, and this year its supposed to hit my paygrade…So…if you can pray for me for the next 12-15 months, i’d be very grateful. As I quite enjoy the whole ‘having a job and having money’ thing. 

Politics –

Outside of that? Well I normally have a bit of a daliance into politics in these blogs…But its all just quite depressing at this point isnt it? US politics is a hellscape at this point, so I can only hope for my US buddies that…’It’ will happen a LOT sooner than later and that politicians like Mamdani continue to not put up with this bullshit.

 On the UK front, Its just kind of exhausting honestly. Reform UK have been leading the polls for most of 2025 and the new year. A party that is now almost entirely made up of ex-tories, leading on a MAGA style policy platform, infused with a frankly prehistoric and wheezing sense of ‘british empirism’…Its disheartening to me that so many people are somehow being swept into this whirlwind that, if they vote to get these guys in, the current country wide problems will just somehow, stop. We’ll kick everyone who cant trace their families back to the UK in the 1500s out, and somehow the country will wind back to being a beer swilling, cigarette smoking, openly groping haven of 1950s/1970s sweaty anti politically correct nirvana. 

In 2025, reforms policies existed primarily in the form of ‘Whatever Nigel Farage’ pulled out of his arse when questioned. And his supporters decided the best thing to help the country work its way out of crippling economic and social debt, was to litter the streets of the UK with hundreds of flags, and to beat up anyone who tried to take them down…even if they were ordered to by the council. Which is the kind of patriotism that could ONLY come from Reform UK…

Beyond them, its all a bit naff really…I said in my last blog that Labour winning the election wouldnt really change anything because they were made up of liars and blair sycophants…and i’ve been proven right, the one or two good things this government have done for the country have been absolutely and totally eclipsed by the WALL of policies they’ve tried to force through that will lead to a surveillance state, decimated the social safety net and banned pornography. The only reason they havent been strung up from the lamposts at this point is because they’d get in the way of the flags…And when they arnt trying to actively install an all AI surveillance state…they’re trying to be a Reform UK tribute act…which has MASSIVELY blown up in their faces, as noone wants ‘reform lite’. They’ve essentially alienated BOTH sides of their core base, with the Labour right either moving fully over to Reform Uk, or the Lib dems…while the Labour left have shored up elsewhere. 

On that note, the Lib dems; who have been trying to stay relevant for the last 2 years PURELY through literal stunts via the head of the party Ed Davey, have drifted off into obscurity. I keep a pretty close eye on the news and I havent heard off the party since November last year, if not earlier…The conservatives are HEMORAGING support to reform at this point, and at the time of writing they’re getting seriously embarrassed because a lot of their ‘big name’ core MPs are in an arms race to move to reform, before Kemi Badenoch can sack them. 

Which leads me to the ‘left wing’ parties of the UK, which are the ‘Green party’, and ‘Your Party’. The former currently having a surprising bump in support due to its new leader and ‘normal bloke’ Zak Polanski, and the latter a party im bitterly disappointed hasnt been able to take off due to chronic in fighting and organisational issues, led by Jeremy Corbyn. 

At the start of last year I was all in on ‘Your Party’ I supported Corbyns run for PM through his time as Labour leader, I said he should have left and made a new party in 2019 when he still had the momentum of support behind him. But 2025 was not a good year for ‘Your Party’ as several VERY public spats between the co-owners of the party spilled out over newspapers and social media, ACTUAL lawsuits were threatened, and the party conference ended up heavily fumbled due to the ballot process being heavily influenced, and the decisions of those votes resulting in a conflicting and confusing set of decisions for the party. I still fundamentally agree with the principles the party stand for. But I cant at this point actively support them as, at this point in time its just a bit embarrassing that these organisational disputes are being aired so publicly. If they can get their ducks in order behind closed doors, and come back this year with a coherent and organised message. They’ll win a  lot of favour from me. But at this point I cant in good faith back them fully. 

By contrast, the green party seem to be on a role, with current polling suggesting they arnt TOO far off toppling Labour. They have quite a way to go to beat Reform at this point…But Whereas Reform have kind of capped out at 25% of the vote share, and for the last 6 months have hovered between 22-25%. The Greens are still growing, jumping in the last 6 months from 3% of the vote to 17% as of the time of writing, and seeing an absolute EXPLOSION of new members. Its unsurprising really, Polanski comes across as a genuine and charming gent. They’ve reviewed their policies and the new manifesto is streamlined and heavily focussed on social issues which is something I align with. And when the medias best challenge to him is to dreg up an article from 20 years ago when Polanski was a hypnotherapist is all they’ve got beyond just…not talking about him at all…I think, barring incident, that this year may be a VERY good one for the greens. Indeed, I agree with most of their manifesto, though I still disagree with them on their stance around Nuclear power…but given the other options. They’re the oasis in the desert that im clinging to for dear life at this point. 

Other than that though? I don’t really think theres anything else to say really…2025 was a bit of a nothing year, which I was tremendously grateful for. I desperately needed normality after the last 2-3 years, and barring a slightly turbulent close to the year, I got exactly what I wanted. As for 2026? My only hope is really for more of the same, light duty and regulated, boring, nothingness. I want stability; and beige…if I can have that this year. I’ll be happy. 

I was going to write something about the channel in this blog, but checking my wordcount, im already 11 pages deep…that and I have news on that front that I don’t want to lose focus on. So im going to do a final ‘off the cuff’ blog on that shortly…so stay tuned! But other than that! I hope you all had a nice 2025, I hope 2026 is kind to you, and I wish you the happiest of years.

Till next time

Dan x 

A word on J.K. Rowling

Im just going to be honest here, Im not writing this to virtue signal or to try and catch clicks or views. I’m writing this primarily as an explanation. Because I consider myself an ally to the LGBTQIA+ community, and I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea or impression of my beliefs. Because Its all but inevitable that I will eventually have to talk about this author’s work. So rather than be on the backfoot, or be in a situation where I’m having to defend my position on the spot. I figured it would probably be easier to pre-write and publish this article ahead of time, so when that inevitably happens, I can at least directly link people querying me to this article. Rather than trying to badly phrase or half explain myself when asked.

I don’t like JK Rowling. Prior to the mid 2010’s I was among the many people who considered her a progressive person who was helping destroy hate in all its forms and reconnect children with reading in an age where the television and computer had all but obliterated most attention spans.

Obviously, her biggest and best known works are the ‘Harry Potter’ books, and despite their huge success at the time they were published, I was never really a die hard fan. I read the first 3 books as they came out and thought they were fine enough…a bit of a time killer, but not something I was entirely invested in. Aaaand then the 4th book came out and had the same thickness as a shoebox, which I baulked at as someone who struggles with even the lightest of paperbacks…and then they only got thicker from there. So…I just decided the series wasnt really for me. And to this day I haven’t read a single one of those books since the first time I read the first three. 

Jump forward a few years and they start making Harry Potter FILMS. Now!, this is something a little bit easier to digest. I again watched the first 2 as they came out in cinemas. I enjoyed the first film, thought the 2nd film wasn’t quite as good as the first, but was still alright. And then life had a way of lifing, and I didn’t get around to watching the 3rd film until around 2010. And when I did, I didn’t really like it. You’d think being a sucker for sci-fi elements, the book that involves time travel as a key function would have captivated me. But the problem with introducing Time travel into a series that isnt inherently known for it (such as Doctor who or Back to the future) is as SOON as the time travel element is introduced, the entire series gets undercut with ‘well…they could just go back in time and do this differently.’ The 3rd film also goes a bit darker and moodier and teen angstier than the first two films, which wasnt my thing either…I just came away from it feeling like it wasnt the best adaptation of the book it could have been. And kind of feeling like i’d seen all I needed to see from this film series.

Then in the early 2010s, I met my partner. And for her sins, she (was) a Harry Potter fan. Loved the books, had seen all the films in the cinema as they went out, and had plenty of merch (mercifully she NARROWLY avoided a Harry Potter Tattoo). She’s also Autistic, and as became apparent quite quickly, Harry Potter is a comfort series for her. She has all the books as audio books which she listens to before bed, and she enjoyed rewatching the movies regularly.

Now, since the revelations about JK Rowling’s horrendous views on trans people and supporters of trans rights have come out, my partner has essentially ‘shunned’ the franchise. What does that mean in real terms? It means that since around 2015/2016 she hasn’t bought any new Harry Potter merchandise, she hasnt seen any of the newer films or had any business with ‘The Cursed Child’. She has no interest in going to the Warner Bros. set tour, she doesn’t accept gifts of Harry Potter merch. Her original Harry potter books are stored away, and the only things she has left, are digital copies of the Harry Potter Audio books which were fully paid up versions from 2012 that she has tried to move on from, but her particular brand of autism wont let her quite yet. And the films. 

Which leads me to myself. I obviously wanted to appreciate my partners interests, and despite not exactly being the biggest Harry Potter fan in the world, I at least wanted to try to make the effort to actually understand the franchise a bit better, and maybe try to see what she saw in it. So, around 2015, I grabbed a bluray boxset of all of the Harry potter films and decided to sit down and finally go through all of them with her over a christmas vacation, to see if she could open it up a bit better for me. 

And, I will say that after catching them all and having my partner fill in gaps from the books where applicable, I did get a bit of a better understanding as to why the series was as popular as it was. I still wouldn’t say I was a fan really…But I could appreciate the craft that went into making the films, I enjoyed a lot of the performances and came away from that marathon happier about my life choices than when I went in. I even ended up grabbing a couple of the audio books myself when they were on sale around this time, in part to FINALLY try and get through the 4th novel in a way that didn’t seem like active waterboarding, and in part as an insurance piece on the off chance my partner didn’t have her phone with her when she came to stay with me and needed her ‘white noise’. 

Then, around 2016, after a couple of years of questionable comments, J.K Rowling basically went full on, mask off anti-trans and anti womens rights…a slippery slide she has only continued to fall down since then in increasingly toxic and unpleasant ways. And, a bit like a fart during a tender moment, my enthusiasm for anything she’d ever done was sucked clean out of the room and a sense of shame was the only thing left behind. Around this time both me and my partner realised we couldnt in good faith continue to support someone with such vile ideological views. And that pretty much takes us to the present day, and the main reason im writing this blog. 

As mentioned, one of my partners coping techniques is to watch the Harry Potter movies, things have to be particularly bad for that to happen these days. J.K Rowlings awful opinions actually forced my partner into developing other coping techniques that made her feel better.  But roughly once or twice a year, the black dog comes barking and she needs to shut the world off for a couple of days to try and self right. She does this via my boxset of the movies to ensure that Rowling gets no money from her suffering. But its the only thing that breaks her out of a bad funk. In the last 5-6 years, i’ve not generally been around when those moments have happened. Or if I have, i’ve been too busy with other things to join her. But now that we live together, the odds of me rewatching the Harry Potter films have risen significantly, purely for the fact we now are both under the same roof. 

In particular, it seems to be an autumn/winter thing for my partner to crack the boxset open, and as I log everything I watch on Letterboxd…no matter HOW depraved or deranged. Its looking increasingly likely that i’ll probably end up watching these films over the new year at some point. Hence, this blog. As I wanted to make it as clear as possible that, should I log the Harry Potter films in my Letterboxd at any time, Its because theres a very depressed lady who just wants to spend a couple of hours detached from reality with someone who cares about her. And thats something I am more than happy to do for her. 

To reiterate, I have no strong love or admiration for the series, J.K Rowling and her estate haven’t seen a penny from either myself or my partner since 2015/16. And we dont accept any Harry Potter branded merch, nor do we support any of the ongoing franchise works or live events, including the upcoming TV series and audio re-adaptations, and nor shall we. 

My reviews of these films, when they happen. Will be purely grounded in how well I feel the director captured the spirit of the series, and how well the cast brought to life these characters. The more questionable aspects of the Harry Potter franchise (such as overtly racist names and stereotyping) have been covered to death by better pen owners than me, but I both understand and fully agree with the observations these people have raised that the series is deeply flawed and frankly problematic in that regard. I probably wont go into detail too heavily on that front in my reviews, purely because I feel it should be taken as a given that it would be something i’d detest (especially given this blog post), and that its insane to me that even in the late 90s, that kind of offensive bluntness was prominent in something so massive. 

My honest hope is that I’ll write about these films once, and then never have to speak about them again honestly. That would be a small mercy to me. The ability to watch the movies WITHOUT then having to spend 50 minutes dissecting them would be a tremendous weight off my mind. I appreciate that what I’ve said above won’t resonate with some people. And that, just by the mere act of viewing or listening to anything in this series, I’m committing an affront. And I do welcome discussion on that front, I can’t say it’ll be particularly productive because i’ve basically said everything I can and want to say about my feelings towards this here. But hey, I’m open minded.

All I do ask is for the understanding of why im doing what im doing, and that, should you see my letterboxed profile slowly fill with 2-3 Harry Potter ‘rewatches’, that you know that im out there, trying to help a very depressed woman through the worst of it.

Top 10 Films I discovered in 2025

After a couple of MORE than turbulent years, the only thing I really wanted when it came to 2025 was a bit of predictable, uneventful normalcy. With everything from globe stopping pandemics, family deaths and renovation work eating up 2020-2024, All I wanted of 2025 was to finish off a few home improvement projects, get a few videos out on youtube, but otherwise, I just wanted to slow down, not do anything too risky or cavalier, and to just…TRY to get a semblance of a normal life back in the room. I ached for the mundane, just…an 8-12 month window where the worst it got was maybe them forgetting my onions on my fast food order. 

And, in many ways 2025 DID deliver that, a fairly pedestrian 12 months with a few nice things thrown into the mix and only one or two more sucky elements tossed in to remind me that life is fragile, delicate and that at any moment we could all die in horrible and painfully ironic ways. Im honestly pretty happy with how the year shaped up more or less, and anything that DID irk me along the way, was either too small to really leave a lasting mark, or something of a ‘wild card’ situation that I was kind of already vaguely aware could happen, so I was pretty much ready to accept and take on that pain when it did hit. 

And once again, walking side by side with me along the way, I had my old friend Cinema telling me jokes, ghost stories and showing me fantastical worlds along the way. And; as has become a somewhat annual tradition at this point. Ive gone through my years viewings (322 films if you must know!) and whittled it down to a ‘top 10’ of the cream of the crop. As always; I should say that these are in no particular order, and they arnt year specific. These are simply 10 films that I saw for the first time this year and loved so much that I wanted to share them with all of you, in the hope that you find a new favourite, or just appreciate the craft at work in the same way I did. So! Put on your dancing trousers, because we’re about to boogie!

Everything, Everywhere All at Once:

The day after new years day was a pretty uneventful one, after partying till the wee hours the night before I was crusty, headachy, the room was drab and full of the fugg of booze, vape smoke, popped balloons and half eaten remnants of leftover buffet food. All I really wanted to do was crash out in my office and catch a movie that was engaging and unique enough to hold my interest but unserious enough that I could relax into it and not feel like the film was shaking me to make me pay attention. It was there that I landed on ‘Everything, Everywhere All at Once’.

I had been recommended this movie a couple of times throught he previous year, and I thought it had a fun enough ‘wibbly wobbly’ premise, so I decided to take a punt, and I was so glad that I did! An, at times mind boggling plot that beautifully crafts multiple layers of narrative storytelling into a parcel that brimming with enthusiasm and utterly unashamed to show it. 

At its core, this is a family drama, but the fantastical storytelling, intense visual effects, decent contrasting balance of comedy and pathos all congregate together into an absolute feast for the eyes. It absolutely zipped by, even at 2+ hours long and my afternoon got a LOT brighter from there! With fantastic performances, a killer score and a kind of sincerity I rarely see in modern, more mainstream movie releases. Its a film I wont watch often, but I absolutely wont forget, and will relish on a revisit. 

The AGFA Mixtape Release:

This one is a little bit of a cheat, as it isnt necessarily for a singular film, but rather a boxset of releases from the boutique label that just keeps on squeezing my wallet to dust, AGFA. Last year I listed their ‘Hey Folks! Its Intermission time’ set as one of my favourites of 2024, and this past year, they came out with hit after hit, but the crowning gem in my eye was the release of something i’d wished they’d done for YEARS. A comprehensive release of *most* of their AGFA Mixtapes to date. 

For those not in the know, AGFA are a charity specialising in film preservation and the celebration of cult, and US Regional film offerings, they cover near enough all genres from as early as the 20s and as late as the present day, releasing everything from long forgotten 1920s cult gems through to modern day underground hits, counterculture documentaries and everything in between! 

Their ‘mixtape’ line is one I particularly love, these, as the name would suggest, are a mixtape of random ‘off air’ tv recordings from mainline TV channels around the world and public access, random commercials, ‘youtube poop’ style remixes of older media and more! But up until 2025, only 4 of them and a christmas special had been widely available to the public via Vimeos ‘on demand’ platform, with the rest being available only as bookable ‘events’ with digital or print copies provided by AGFA at great cost. 

Well this year, AGFA took 5 of their numbered mixtapes PLUS two of their more ‘seasonal’ offerings and packaged them together in one release, which I pounced on the second I got my chance to! And I absolutely was not disappointed! The obvious gem in the crown for me is the ‘AGFA Special Christmas Special’ a release I’ve now turned into an annual tradition to try and watch every christmas AT LEAST once. Its the perfect blend of seasonal silliness, genuinely lovely counterculture artistry and frankly bizarre glimpses of christmases past. 

But thats really just the tip of the iceberg, while the first couple of AGFA mixtapes are (in my opinion) a little rough around the edges, from ‘Mixtape #3’ onwards things just go from strength to strength with the absurd and daft meeting the genuinely strange. But easily the highlight for this set (and the thing that made me list this as a ‘first time watch’ were the two TOTALLY previously unreleased mixtapes, the ‘Stairway to Stardom’ mixtape and the ‘Lost and found’ mixtape. 

The former, is a collection of clips from the public access show ‘Stairway to stardom’, think ‘Americas got talent’ but the budget is (roughly) $20 and the vetting process seemed to begin and end at ‘Can you get to the studio in the next 20 minutes, and will you bring beer?’ and you’ve landed on fried gold my friend, a relentless free fall into the world of people who think they Mariah Carey, but are actually Mariah from the gas station in town. 

The one two punch that made me love this set is then followed up by the ‘Lost and Found’ mixtape, which is essentially a very VERY early example of youtube poop in motion, a supercut extraviganza of strange online media and lost television footage, remixed and repulped into a perfectly timed selection of alternative comedy gold. 

If I was being honest? I think this whole set would likely be my favourite release of the year. And i’d wholeheartedly recommend it to ANYONE with even a passing interest in the ‘otherworldliness’ of the 20th and very early years of the 21st century. An absolute treat of a set thats seldom left the top of my bluray player since it came in. 

Louis Theroux: The Settlers:

The current genocide happening in Palestine is a scourge on humanity, and the fact that theres a not 0% likelihood that the people currently enabling it will never see ACTUAL justice just about boils my piss. Seemingly; it also annoyed britains calmest and loveliest man Louis Theroux, who returned this year with a new documentary revisiting Israel some decades after his last trip out there to try and get a better understanding of what is going on amongst the people of Israel at this time, and more importantly to try and see what actual real people are living through on both sides of the conflict as incursion and eviction of Palestinians ON THEIR OWN LAND continues and Israeli settlers move in, claiming the land to be theirs. 

This one isnt the easiest of watches, and there are times when Louis himself cant quite believe what he’s seeing or hearing. Im really not kidding when I say that Louis is probably one of documentary films calmest and affable people, and yet there are multiple points in this documentary where he loses composure, or flat out fears for his life. And that ISNT a Louis problem. Thats the bizarre situation a certain subsection of Israel find itself in in the 2020’s. Fear, manipulation and blatant racism runs rife as the documentarian braves being shot at, and even briefly ‘black vanned’. Its an unsettling picture of the middle east at this time. 

Unflinching in what its trying to show, by the end, even Louis doesnt seem to know how this situation improves. But if you’ve been following the ongoing conflict, as I have, you’ll absolutely not want to miss this one, as im certain it’ll be shown in history classes for years to come as probably the most honest and real look at this deepening crisis shown on mainstream television.


Def by Temptation:

One thats been on and off my shelf now for the better part of 20 years, ‘Def by Temptation’, in the UK at least, has one lasting reputation, and thats that it was typically grouped in with 3-5 other movies and released MULTIPLE times through the late 90s and early 2000s as part of ‘multipack’ sets bundled with DVD players to shift units. A treatment I feel was ultimately quite undeserved given those bundles usually contained the kind of movies I review on my channel while wincing. 

In the 2024 black friday sales, I nabbed Vinegar Syndromes release of this film as it was almost out of print and going for a good price. It had drifted on and off my shelf in it’s multipack form, and I figured if VS were giving it a legitimate release, maybe I’d been missing out on something. Turns out, I had. 

Positively OOZING early 90s kitsch, ‘Def by Temptation’ is a cautionary tale wrapped up as a quasi erotic horror film, featuring two friends on different life paths reconnecting and falling into a deadly game against a seductress who may have a LOT more going on than meets the eye.

A Rich and sumptuous piece of 90s cinema, this was made on a shoestring, but feels every bit as professional as a mid budget feature. The fact that the studio that distributed this made every effort to push the fact Samuel L. Jackson is in this film as the main selling point (he has 2 cameos in the whole thing totalling less than 5 minutes) is, in my opinion a tremendous disservice to the craft and work James Bond the 3rd put into this production, the fact this was pretty much his one and only feature (and acting) work, and that he didnt really do anything with his talent past this is frankly mind boggling to me. 

Gorgeously lit, well shot, and boasting a solid set of performances and a nicely bubbling plot that starts by gently guiding the viewer, before slowly fully enveloping them into this world, not to mention a killer soundtrack and some razor sharp editing. This is a seriously underrated horror, and one that definitely needs a lot more love and attention by the horror and film community at large. Definitely one for the horror fan looking for something a little more off the beat and path. 

Vegas in Space:

The tragedy of ‘Vegas in Space’  still to this day lingers in my mind whenever I think about it. An ultra campy, rough and ready pop art vision in sequins courtesy of Doris Fish and Phillip R. Ford, the deaths of two of this films key stars, financiers and producers mere months before the films completion is frankly devastating to hear. Especially considering how unique and fun the film ultimately is. 

I covered this one on my youtube channel towards the back end of 2025 after trying to get my hands on a copy for the better part of a decade, and it was a very rare moment of my preset expectations being not only met, but surpassed. 

Feeling like Joel Hodgeson and Tom Rubnitz collaborated on an all drag space opera, theres very VERY little I dislike about ‘Vegas in Space’. Its colourful, vivid, unflinchingly funny, catty, well paced, well shot, well directed with fun and funky set designs and performances that are both unrelenting and unflinching. The synthy soundtrack only really seals the deal further for me on this one. 

I appreciate this film wont be to everyone’s taste, but in a sea of ‘by the numbers’ productions where I can essentially watch them while doing other things and still fully understand whats happening without missing a beat, Vegas in space had me hooked from the moment the title sequence began, till the moment the last of the credits scrolled off the screen, and thats a very rare thing these days. 

Since my initial viewing, i’ve made it my mission to show this one to as many people as I possibly can, and given currently its availability consists mainly of a Troma DVD thats regularly in ‘clearance’ sales, in some cases i’ve even bought copies of the film for folks to watch when I personally haven’t been able to show them my copy. If you have any appreciation for the counterculture LGBTQ, whimsigoth and Daisy age movements of the mid 80s to early 90s. You’ll no doubt love ‘Vegas in Space’ and should seek it out as soon as possible. 

The Night Stalker:

I had NO idea what or who ‘Kolchak’ was before I was introduced to it by fellow youtuber Mack Lambert. Who kindly invited me to talk about the pilot TV movie ‘The Night Stalker’ on his channel (a video im still desperately trying to assemble but will hopefully be out sooner rather than later). I have to say, I was quite impressed honestly. 

The whole premise of ‘Kolchak: The Night Stalker’ is probably best described as a kind of proto ‘X-files’ meets ‘Columbo’. Carl Kolchak is an investigative reporter who specialises in ‘the unknown’ and particularly in cold or dead end cases where a supernatural or otherworldly presence may in fact be the cause of the incident. 

The Night Stalker was the first of two feature pilots for what would go onto become a 2 season tv series. And it introduces us to Kolchak, who he is and what he does, as he arrives in Las Vegas following up on a series of bizarre murders that have baffled police, but may in fact be caused by non other than a Vampiric entity. 

I wont say anything more than that as I feel that’ll spoil the movie. But this was absolutely one of my favourite murder mysteries that i’ve seen in a LONG time. Gorgeously shot, 70s TV does this film no justice compared to the crisp and vibrant HD scan of the original film elements I watched. Razor sharp editing, lovingly crafted lighting and sequence work, rock solid compositional work and a script that is the perfect blend of mild humour, genuine mystery and the kind of gut punches that make a guy wanna go take a long hard middle distance stare out of a window. 

I utterly fell in love with this world building, and found it quite upsetting that both this film and its follow up are in fact in ownership of a completely different studio to the TV series, AND that both the films and the TV series have had independent releases in the US only, that are now all LONG out of print and going for stupid money. Meaning theres a pretty good likelihood that my chance of nabbing all of these on physical media is about as good as me randomly finding £200 on the street. 

Definitely one i’d recommend for science fiction fans or people with a passion for proto noir cinema. I had a really good time with this unique piece of television history, and I hope you will too!

China O Brien:

With Vinegar syndrome releasing both of the ‘Chian O’Brien’ movies in a deluxe boxset in 4k in late 2024, I just had to check it out as my rothrock filmography has been frankly woeful. And while I could take or leave the sequel, the first entry in this series is everything I love about a good action martial arts movie and then some! 

It all ultimately comes down to Cynthia Rothrock as a personality, if she wasnt the star of this film, this would likely just be another middle of the road slightly goofy action movie. But Rothrocks charisma, charm and the downright fun action sequences in this one really kept me on board for the full duration. It was enjoyable enough that, purely off the back of this one, I went and grabbed a few more Rothrock films to spin this year. 

The 4k scan looks great, really bringing to life the rich neon colours and vibrant surrounding greenery of small town USA in the mid to late 80s. Theres some really nice deep cinematography in this one, which when combined with a punchy synthy score and a light and punch packing script, really sold me on this one. One best enjoyed late night with a few beers on standby, ideally with friends. If you havent seen China O’brien and your into action as a genre, you don’t want to sleep on this one. 

The Fog:

Towards the back end of the year, I tried to focus my attention on checking out a few more mainstream hits that may have passed me by, just to see if i’d slept on anything truely spectacular, and during Halloween 2025, I decided to check out John Carpenters ‘The Fog’…In many ways I was kind of kicking myself from the off as to why I hadnt done it sooner. I mean, its pretty much slap bang in my favourite era of Carpenters work, just after he’d released ‘Halloween’ and ‘Assault on Precinct 13’ just BEFORE he’d work on ‘Halloween 2’, ‘Escape from New York’ and ‘The Thing’. Its basically THE era most people know for Carpenters work, and yet ‘The Fog’ just never quite made it into my rotation. And I really wish it had a lot sooner!

A key thing about Carpenters direction and vision around this time is a seeming relentless urge to slow boil the plot, in lesser hands this could come across as boring, but Carpenter and Deborah hill do such a wonderful job of crafting unique and interesting characters and building a fully flesh and blood world for them to inhabit, that you become engrossed in the towns goings on…So much so that the actual horror element almost takes a back street to just…some absolutely astounding character pieces. 

Its just at the point where you begin to wonder if the horror element is even going to be all that intense with this piece, that it lands with the thud of a sledgehammer, and the whole film kicks into overdrive, taking these well crafted characters and thrusting them into a life or death situation where, because of all the careful setup, the audience IS genuinely invested in ensuring that as many of these people live as possible. 

That is only a small part of what makes this film so brilliant of course, the cine and direction are utterly delightful, the creative vision is precise almost to a surgical fault, and with a star studded cast including Carpenter regulars such as Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Atkins, Adrienne Barbeau, Janet Leigh, Charles Cyphers, and Hal Holbrook. The only thing more stunning than the visuals are the performances throughout. A cozy ghost story of a movie, its perfect viewing around Halloween and the colder months of the year, and guaranteed to have you twitching your curtains if you live near the coast!

Miracle on 34th Street:

When it comes to Christmas movies, I have a serious problem, and thats the fact that, due to the nature of the season, I very rarely find the time to make it through a whole movie in one sitting during the holidays. I mentioned this in my recent review of ‘Santa Claus Conquers the Martians’ but it can frequently be the case that I put a movie on, get 10-20 minutes in, and then get pulled away to either help set up Christmas decorations, to ferry family to holiday shopping or festive events, to visit family, to go buy christmas food, to wrap presents, to send out christmas cards. And it can quite literally be the case that i’ve seen a movie maybe once in its entirety, in 5-10 minute chunks across a 5 year window. 

‘Miracle on 34th Steet’ was very much one of those movies, a film uniquely placed in the painful spot of ‘famous enough that I feel I really should have seen it before now’, but not SO important in the holiday schedules that I felt the need to sit and watch this thing from start to finish annually. I can say i’ve seen pretty much all of the 90s remake in dribs and drabs over the years. I’d seen small bits of the 50s TV version over the last 20 years. But I can honestly say, barring maybe 1-2 minutes worth of clips. I’d never seen ANY of the original 1940s version. So! Armed with a rum infused hot chocolate and the missus, I decided to actually, consciously sit and watch the original to really get to the nub of why this film is so fondly remembered and revisited. And I totally get it. 

Edmund Gwenn as Kris Kringle here is positively radiating across the runtime, bringing a level of warmth and openness to Santa that I feel makes all other on screen appearances feel positively pale in comparison. The scripts super tight with a good, but gentle humour to it. It steadily builds up a good ‘festive feelgood’ pace until the final act when it fully unleashes unrelenting seasonal cheer on the audience. With goodwill and jokes that still more than hold up and feel relevant to this day. 

With a grand sense of cine and direction that feels revolutionary for 1947, there are moments of this film that to 2025 sensibilities may seem a bit…off colour, I think its fair to say. But these are mercifully few and far between and what we ultimately end up with is a film with a sincere and upbeat cast, a fun and lighthearted plot with some nice contrasting moments, and probably a less puritanical antidote to ‘Its a wonderful life’ a film that revels in the season and the meaning of Christmas, maybe a touch commercialised? Sure thing, but as Kris in the film protests, this season isnt about the toys, its about the people, and making sure everyone who can, is able to get what they need. This was a first time watch for me, but I could easily see it entering regular christmas movie rotation. 

Sonic the hedgehog 3:

I’ve been a fan of the ‘Sonic the hedgehog’ games since the first one reached UK shores, I’ve played pretty much every mainline title up to date, i’ve watched all the TV shows, read a decent chunk of the comics, kept track of the lore and even given part of my brains capacity over to the Chris Chan extended universe. I have a soft spot for the ‘Blue Blur’. 

And while I was MORE than apprehensive when they announced they were producing a ‘Sonic the hedgehog’ movie, to the point that I actually decided to give the first film a miss just, purely because it seemed set up on purpose to not really be made for me. I decided that, before 2025 rolled to a close, I’d finally give the 3 ‘Sonic’ movies a go. In part out of genuine curiosity, and in part because the latest entry ‘Sonic the Hedgehog 3’ had gained quite a positive critical reception AND it was loosely based on one of my favourite Sonic games ‘Sonic Adventure 2’ 

And I honestly came away really quite impressed, this is quite the anomaly in the the film industry, a franchise that gets better with every sequel. I was already kind of surprised when the first film wasnt quite the dumpster fire I was expecting, but when I actually found myself more than enjoying the 2nd film, I was thrown for a loop, but then the THIRD film!? Well that was a whole other kettle of fish. 

I’ll be honest, its quite an investment to sink into getting to this entry, all the films are quite interconnected and they arnt exactly built for audiences to just ‘hop on or off’. You need to have seen the 2nd one to get the most out of the 3rd one, and you need to have seen the first one to get the most out of the sequels. So I don’t begrudge anyone giving this series a miss given how much time is needed to get up to speed on it. 

But I can say, I had a really good time with this one, while they toned down some of the darker moments from SA2, they did keep a LOT in that I thought would have been chucked, theres some really nice references to SA2 for things that didn make the cut as well. And as this series goes on, it feels like the film makers are having more and more confidence in bedding in references to the games and extended media universes, which helps create a more uniform vision. 

Keanue Reeves is Shadow the Hedgehog here, and I think he does a really solid job. Would I have preferred a slightly campier Shadow, more in line with his Gamecube and PS2 era persona? Absolutely. But even with those edges sanded down I would struggle to say I disliked the new approach. 

With striking visuals a fun and engaging script that isnt afraid to take a family movie to darker and deeper places, and some genuinely well written characters. ‘Sonic the hedgehog 3’ may have some low brow humour and a lack of clarity holding it back from truely being the best it can be. But I cant deny that as the credits rolled, I was raring to go on ‘Sonic 4’ (coming 2027) and I think that the franchise, and this film specifically, would MORE than make a big splash on any family movie night! Whether your a longtime fan of the games, or just morbidly curious like I was. I’d say this one was definitely worth your time!

And with that! We draw 2025 to a close! I don’t think theres anything here that would surprise regular viewers/readers. But I hope if nothing else that you take a chance on at least one of the films in this list, and if you do, please do let me know! I’d love to hear your thoughts! But for now! The wide open plain that is 2026 is ahead of us, and I’ve got some movies to spin!

Take Care!

– Dan

Partially Reformed Content #7: We absolutely Guarentee (up to) (and including) (more than) (over) One year on…

Well, hello there!

If your reading this, then its time again for my annual “How my year went: In review” blog, which started as a monthly(ish) way for me to try and focus more on honing my written skills, and annually as a way to try and condense a whole 365 days worth of feelings into one unweildy long blog, and…then I discovered ‘Letterboxd’ so…now its just a fun annual bonus. and to be honest; when it came to 2024, I debated whether to write one of these at all…

Not because it was a depressing year or anything. But moreso that, everything thats happened this year has basically been at the forefront of my social media presence. So I feel like putting it all down here seems a bit pointless…Anyone who’s invested enough to read a multi page “Year in review” blog from some random English guy on the internet, is probably invested enough to have read the various community posts I’ve done on youtube, the updates i’ve posted in my Discord group, or the actual shout outs i’ve done about progress on the various live streams i’ve done through the year, or in my reviews themselves.

But, I figured it would probably act as a good ‘end point’/’epilogue’ to cap off the year with an overview of what my last 12 months has been like on all fronts. Mainly so I can just link people to this if they ask how my year went, rather than having to bust out the ‘lore’ guides!

So! 2024! a year essentially swallowed by life events. and not much else! We bought a house! and its time for me to tell you the ‘full’ story!

Belive me; It gets WILD.

So, I suppose a little bit of back story is required for this one. I’ve been with my partner now for around thirteen and a half years (tweleve and a half where this story begins) and about 4 years ago, I took part in a project at my workplace whereby they garnish (upto) £300 from your monthly salary for either 3 or 5 years. and, assuming you dont touch it for the duration of your investment period, they not only guarentee the money they take, but they’ll add onto it an extra 20% if you sit out the full 3 or 5 year period. Its a bit of a scam because my workplace has a LUDICROUSLY high turnover rate, but 3 years seems like a not unreasonable amount of time to have a job for. So I decided to take part in it. and, in March of 2024 it came to fruition.

Now, me and my partner had been talking about finally biting the bullet and getting a place together for a number of years. But, if your a long time reader of these blogs (god bless you <3) you’ll know that my partner has several disabilities, both mental and physical that meant that looking for a place was a bit of a non starter for a while, and while my job keeps me comfortable, it wasnt really good enough to save up ‘deposit on a house’ level income…Not without basically giving up every other thing I enjoy in the process…So this investment piece at work seemed like a good way to save a bundle, without having to worry about my sticky fingers dipping into the jar (seriously, its a pain in the ass to end it earlier, and im WAY to lazy to fuck around trying to close an account early.)

So! in December of 2023, with just 3 months left on my 3 year plan. I went to my partner and suggested that 2024 was probably going to be the best chance we’d have of making a go of living together. There were other factors as well, my partner had become increasingly unhappy in her living arrangements, she had a nice apartment space, but it was rented, the decor hadnt been updated in decades and had literally just been walloped with white paint when she first moved in 6 years prior…so it was looking shabby…But more importantly, she wanted a change, she wanted more space, a garden, a nice community to live in that wasnt constantly being reported to the police (In the 6 years she lived there, the complex had had the police called out for (in no particular order) 3 counts of arson, 2 murders, AT LEAST 3 suicides, several car thefts/damages to cars and a dozen or so public assault charges…and thats only the stuff we SAW/know happened…GOD knows what went on behind closed doors.) As you can imagine, being mentally and physically unwell in that kind of an environment wasnt ideal.

The Police were always friendly though!

So. We agreed. The plan was to start looking from February of 2024, with the rest of December and January basically being used to tie off all the fucking DREADFUL business that happened in 2023, and to inform folks that we were officially looking to move in together. Christmas ’23 went about as well as it could have gone given the circumstances, January was all a bit of a blur really, I spent a good chunk of my time trying to get as many youtube videos for the channel over the line as possible ahead of February, because I knew that once we got stuck into house stuff, I wasnt seeing the light of my editing console for a WHILE.

We started planning up what we were looking for in a property, putting hard lines in on what we would and wouldnt accept in a house, and around the second week of February, we started looking. We ultimately only went to around 4-5 viewings. most were unremarkable honestly. 3 of them were basically just not the right fit for us, whether it was rooms that were too small or that the work involved in getting them to a standard we’d want to live with would cost too much. Our 2nd to last viewing was VERY promising, it was a 2 story semi detached house that was home to a young couple who both ran small businesses, She worked in organic vegetable productiona and homeopathy, he was in a successful local band and did production work on the side.

Why am I telling you this? Because the garden on that place was HUGE, and they’d converted the loft (attic) space into a fully fledged recording studio. It was a match made in heaven…Until we made an offer and got laughed out of the room by the real estate company selling the property, because when they put ‘offers in the range of’ on the listing. APPARENTLY, that means ‘We wont accept less than the listed price. and to be honest, adding ten grand onto whats listed on the site wont win it either.’ It was already kind of out of our budget. But that basically FULLY took it off the table. Which in some ways was for the best, because the next (and final) listing we checked, turned out to be a perfect fit.

At the end of February we landed on the home we were ultimately looking for. imperfect, but absolutely fixable. leading up to it, my partner had been considering widening our net and travelling further afield to find bigger spaces. But a hard line I had is I didnt want to go *too* far away from my family. We’ve always been quite close and after everything that had gone on last year, moving 30-45 minutes away by car from them was a bit too far for me. Things did get a little tense for a while until…well, the place im typing this now from showed up.

It was about 10-15 minutes away by car from most of my families places. But equally it was only about 15-20 minutes away from my partners families homes too. meaning it was really handy for keeping in touch with folks and being able to help out if needs be. It also meant that we were both only about 5-10 minutes away from where we were both living at the time too! Which made moving a LOT easier, AND meant we could loop the family in to help if we were running thin on the ground.

It was located in one of the more ‘prestige’ parts of the city, with two main roads not far away meaning we could basically go anywhere in the city in 20 minutes or less, without having to take shortcuts or worry about getting stuck in traffic.

Moreover, the place was on the market at a bit of a discount because it was being sold as a ‘fixer upper’, but not because it had huge holes in the roof, or asbestos carpet or anything like that…it was just VERY very old, had no modernisations and needed a bit of love and attention to help really drag it kicking and screaming into the 2020’s. It seemed like an ‘intermediate’ gambit. The kind of place where, we wouldnt be able to move in right away, but the level of skill required to ‘fix’ it seemed like it would be something we could have a genuinely good go at. With the possibility of ending up with a really cozy and welcoming place, that *could* in theory net us a tidy profit in the future if we DID decide to sell up (modernised houses in the area were selling for between 45 and 60k more than what we were potentially going to pay)

We spoke about it for a week, went to a second viewing, and decided to go for it. and after a little bit of haggling. The offer was accepted and this…well, this is really where things got a bit ‘nutty’.

When people ask me and my partner how we found going through the house buying process, my partner, without hesitation will say that its been the single worst experience she’s had in her entire life…and given that at LEAST a year of that lived experience includes multiple attempts to end her own life and half a dozen stays in a psychiatric facility…I sincerely hope that puts across just how MUCH she has hated the last 12 months. I on the other hand will jokingly say that I’ve had a really nice time with all of this, it’s just my partner thats been the problem! #redflag.

In all seriousness, my partners mental health issues effect her particularly when it comes to ‘Autonomy’, basically the idea that someone else is telling her what to do, at what time and how it needs to be done, makes her spiral into angry outbursts, deep depression, anxiety and…theres no other word for it, a deeply sad despair. And the one thing you probably should know if your going to buy a house is that for AT LEAST 4-6 months of the process, your life isnt your own. Your life belongs to the banks, the real estate agents and any tradespeople/surveyours/solicitors that happen to find you along the way.

By the end of the first week of the process, my partner was burnt out. We still had 5 months of paperwork, meetings, mortgage securments and more to talk through. NON of which could be done solely by myself because we were co-buying the place. During her calmer moments, she would tell me that she knew this all needed to be done, and that we were ultimately doing the right thing. But, without fail, every. single. time. ANYTHING. would come in that required actions from both of us, even if it was just signing a letter that we didnt even need to read, or even just saying ‘yes.’ on a phone call. My partner would death spiral, cry, scream, hurt herself, shut down. refuse to engage or co-operate. And it was hard, because…Banks, solicitors and real estate agents DONT fuck around unless its them doing the fucking. they’d set hard dates, threaten to call the whole thing off if we didnt provide evidence/information by set dates. and…all I could really do is essentially DRAG my partner over the finish line by hell or high water, sometimes with just minutes to spare.

It was a VERY difficult time for both of us, I was simultaineously my partners best friend, and the person she dreaded most for a while because she knew whenever i’d call her, it was because I needed her to sign off on something. The process seemed endless, and things went TRUELY off the rails in a BIZARRE moment when, 4 months into us doing paperwork, the owners of the property basically rocked up, shrugged and said ‘hey, y’know the deeds to the place you want to buy? yeh. cant find them lol.’ Let me tell you now, I thought I was raging, my partner was bereft. But the email from our solicitors AND the real estate agents (Who are supposed to be on THEIR side) that basically amounted to ‘Well, you better fucking find them dipshit’ was border unprofessional…and they were one of the more reputable solicitors, estate agents in the city. they. were. PISSED. Because, in the UK, if you cant find the deeds to the place you want to sell, it basically means ANYONE could rock up and claim to own the place, and if they had enough evidence to back it up. the law would be on their side. Insurance companies wont insure houses like that and it would have made the property value basically a moot point. We wouldnt have bought it without the deeds because it was WAY too much of a risk.

That email seemingly put a nuke up their asses because less than 18 hours later, their ‘What can ya do rofl!’ attitude turned REAL fucking quickly into ‘We’ve torn the house apart and found it, please dont pull out of this deal.’

And! it all worked out, the last of the paperwork was completed on July 1st, we were given a ‘key handover’ date of the 12th! and with the extra couple of weeks we had between the last of the paperwork and the start of the renovation work I ploughed every free hour I had into getting as many youtube videos for the channel for between September and December done and out the door (because again; when the FUCK am I gonna find time to do them after July?!)

It looks like this!…Well…no it doesnt…but it COULD do! (No it couldnt…)

Now for the plot twist, remember how I mentioned earlier that the house was a ‘fixer upper’? Well. We assumed that would be some minimal work, ripping down old wallpaper, taking up old carpets, replastering, minor electric and gas works…We had a budget of 24k from 10 years of on and off savings to work with. We figured we’d underspend given what we could see…We were wrong.

Because y’see, construction on the house began in 1963, It was put on the market in 1966, was purchased in 1970 and the same couple lived in this house from then, until their unfortunate passing at the end of 2023. In that time almost NOTHING had been done to the house to modernise, improve or safetify it. What does that mean in real terms? Well. it means the electricity was installed in 1968, there was no fuse box, just a wall of random black boxes all along the cloak room with bright yellow DANGER! stickers attached to them, best we can see they were last checked in 1992 and hadnt been checked for safety since.

It meant that the gas feed into the house was installed using lead piping that curved in several places (apparently a major no no as lead erodes over time making a gas leak VERY likely), It means some rooms didnt have radiators, they had gas line fed heaters that we were assured by our gas technician ‘Would kill anyone who struck a match near them’.

And it meant that almost all of the rooms were in some degree of degredation. Its a 3-4 bedroom house and the most modern room in the whole place was the kitchen (which we *think* was refreshed at some point in 2002/03) followed closely by the bathroom which we think was 2000/01. All the other rooms had either been decorated twice (once in the early 70s, and then papered over in the mid to late 80s, with just a lick of paint going every decade or so to keep it ‘fresh’) or, in some cases, it had NEVER been redecorated past its initial wallop (what is now our bedroom, literally was plastered, painted eggshell blue in the early 70s, papered in the late 80s and then wasnt touched again till we got to it)

Putting a 2000’s ribbon across the top of the wall wont hide that this is ’90 wallpaper, ’94 carpeting and mid 80s mirror tiles…Still…I think this has potential…

The oldest room in the house was probably last touched in 1987 (based on what evidence we could find) and compounding the issue, it looked like, for at *least* the last 15 years, anytime anything broke, or ripped, or needed repairing; it was stuck down with blutak, if it wouldnt STAY stuck down, they’d nail it down, and if THAT didnt work they went for the cheapest, lowest quality possible fix to just, get the job done in a way that meant it couldnt be said that it was STILL broke.

All I know about the previous occupants is that they were elderly (80s), didnt leave the house much and had vision issues. I dont want to cast aspurtions, but what we found made me feel quite sad honestly…

But, back to the main story. So we got the keys on the 12th of July, we got in, looked around, started to plan and the next day we had an electrician drop in because, we didnt want to do ANYTHING until we KNEW the electrics were safe to use. Friend, when I tell you I havent heard a cackle HALF as dirty as that electrician gave when he looked at our setup. He looked at it, stood back agog. went in for a closer look, touched it with a pen to test live wiring, cackled multiple times and said ‘you didnt have any plans to move in soon did you?’

It turns out that the ENTIRE house and garage was live. as in, you touch the socket the wrong way, your gonna meet Jesus. NOT helping matters, it seems that the husband had a passion for doing his own DIY electric works, and had just run live, unsheilded wiring ALL OVER THE HOUSE AND GARAGE STRAIGHT FROM THE MAINS. We laugh now, we could have died…or at the very least burned the house down. In short, the entire house needed to be fully rewired, that involved getting all the wallpaper and carpets up ASAP, for work that was estimated as taking (roughly) 2 months to complete (it ultimately ended up taking 3 months) and for a month and a half of that we would be completely without power or heating.

Dear Reader, they put LIVE FUCKING WIRES…behind wood pannelling!…EXPOSED! I CLAW HAMMERED into this…

On top of that, we also had to bring in a gas engineer and plumber to remove 2 gas powered heaters from rooms in the house because of gas leak risks AND we had to have him disconnect an old 80s gas fireplace from the living room as it TOO was apparently set to either gas us, or blow us up (it hadnt been used in decades). This guy ALSO had to install radiators all through the house, because someone at some point had smashed up all the thermostats on them, meaning they were permanently stuck on the highest setting. AND mangled all the pipes so they were leaking…Not to mention that the radiators themselves were AT LEAST 35 years old, one of them was at least 40.

So. we began work, My partner was basically comatose after the paperwork, so I largely led the ‘tear the fucking house down’ side of the work, every day after I finished at my job, i’d go down to the house for 4-5 hours with a hammer, a chisle, a wallpaper steamer, a scraper and a box cutter, and i’d hammer the absolute fuckery out of the place. This was my life, every day for (at least 4.5 months). On the weekends, if she was well enough, my partner would join me in trying to clear some of the rooms, my mum and sister very kindly offered to help too. we amassed a bowl full of blutak, a bucket full of nails ranging from the 60s through to fairly recently, I bled, sweat and damn near killed myself AT LEAST 3 times stripping this house back to the brickwork and floorboards. But by the end of August, we’d just about done it. Which then revealed other problems.

It turns out that, while the house had been decorated once or twice in its 60 years of existence…it hadnt been plastered since 1969. As a result, every single room we went into, the second we tried to take the wallpaper off with the steamer, the wall would just collapse into a sheet of smashed plaster, revealing the bare brick behind. It was a mess. But, it also meant the budget we had allocated for plastering works skyrocketed. That combined with the other unexpectedly high cost of having some bricklayers come round to brick up a large front window, a small side window and to fill in some gaps in the brickwork in our attic basically SUPER drained our funds in ways we didnt really expect.

In late August, the rewiring work began in tandem with the gas and plumbing works. we went into september with no power and no heating. Work continued. we focussed our attention on rubbish removal, taking five 5 TON skips worth of rubble and household waste away. Which was another cost we’d underestimated.

In this time we’d also booked in a plasterer for a weeks work to resurface and skim the entire house. Which in turn led to another issue. Y’see, the thing about plaster is, once it goes on the wall, it needs a warm, dry environment in order to properly dry out so that you can paint or paper it. This is England in mid September, we have no heating or power, the weather is cold and raining 95% of the time and the humidity doesnt drop below 78%. So now, on top of being cold and only being able to use hand tools, the air is wet to the point of tasting chunky and we CANNOT dry the house. No matter what we try to do. This then starts pushing things back. We cant get the plumber back in to finish the radiator works because the walls wont dry, the electrician cant finish the works till the walls are at least dry enough to not pose a safety risk.

By early october, after 3-4 weeks of DESPERATELY trying to dry the place, we manage to get it 75% of the way there, or at least dry enough that the electrician and gas/plumber man were happy to just finish up their works. And by mid to late October, we had the power back on and…no heating still…the main reason being that we wanted to paint the walls before the radiators went on, because we knew we wouldnt have the bandwidth to do that during the winter…so we agreed to leave getting the heat back on until we painted all the radiator walls which we estimated would take about 2-3 weeks.

What we DIDNT know at the time, was that apparently the plumber HAD set the central heating unit to give us hot water…However, because the previous owners had got someone in who wired the boiler up incorrectly, we ended up not having heating OR hot water through this entire process. and let me tell you, the only thing worse than having to work in a house approaching freezing tempratures…is having to clean 3 brushes 3-4 rollers, 3 paint trays and all manner of mixers, stirrers and smaller brushes in ICY cold water for sometimes up to half an hour at a time because wall paint doesnt come off easily in ICY cold water.

Entering the painting stage, my partner decided to re-enter the ring. And, it was abject torture for her, a sensory nightmare, she couldnt stand being cold, she couldnt stand being up a ladder because she doesnt like heights. She didnt like the threat to her autonomy for having to paint 9 walls in two weeks. She didnt LIKE painting walls (she initially agreed because she liked painting, but found house painting to be completely different from the canvas) She felt ill through the entire experience, she had multiple mental breakdowns, one so severe she basically dissapeared from the project for a week and I had to rope family into fill in the gaps. This was arguably her lowest point, im grateful for the work that she did because she really pushed herself well beyond breaking point, and had their been any other way, i’d have told her to stay out of it. But we were at a crunch period. we’d burnt through 22k of our 24k budget up to this point and there was still TONS to do.

So, we kind of broke ourselves a bit to get it over the line. And on the 30th of October, with only 6 hours to spare, we finished it. Got the plumber in to get the radiators on and we dissapeared for Halloween…The radiators wouldnt work. The plumber left us saying they were working, and they were! until they didnt. I damn near killed a british gas agent when he kept me on the phone for 90 MINUTES promising me an emergency gas repair man would come out to us ASAP to resolve the issue at a £300 charge (+ parts and £60 an hour labour) only to THEN be told that ‘ASAP’ here means 3-4 business days even though we had someone in the house who was disabled and effected by the cold. Seriously FUCK British Gas. and we had to rebook our plumber in to fix it (at cost) with a week and a half wait. On the phone to our plumber, he mentioned that we definitely should have hot water, So I got our electrian back in who THEN revealed that YES! we COULD have had hot water for the last 2-3 months, but because of the botched wiring job on the boiler, we didnt! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA*Cries*

Through a sheer act of kindness, he agreed to rewire the boiler correctly at no charge, and then, it all came together. the radiators randomly kicked back in, we had hot water in the taps. it was early November and we quite literally were cooking with gas!

The rest of November was the home stretch, I spent most of it painting ceilings and block rolling the walls with paint while my partner cut in on the edges. we had a joiner come in to fit all new doors downstairs to replace the ones with holes punched through them and door handles missing that must have been there since the late 80s. As we started to wrap up, I made my partner take more rests while I doubled down to try and get stuff over the line. The carpets went in in mid November, followed immediately by our new bed. and this leads us to ANOTHER b-plot.

See, While all the house crazy was going on, from September through to the end of November I helped my partner move all of her stuff from a 2nd floor apartment with no elevators to a storage locker 2 miles away from the apartment, and then from that locker into our home. the staircase at my partners apartment complex was outdoors, with no covering, it was mossy, tight and given this was the tail end of August through to mid October, it rained. A LOT. I got soaked through on many an occasion, my partner (who was already in the midst of a breakdown over the paperwork) was basically dying on her arse at this point, there’d be days where she could advise on what needed packing where, what needed to be thrown away, and what order to pack things…And days where she’d basically gesture at a room, scream cry about it being ‘too much to think about’ and she’d just leave me to it to get it gone. Honestly, thinking back, im amazed she was able to do so much in her condition. and im even more amazed at just how much we got done in such a narrow window of time.

Why is this relevent to the story? Well, because the landlords who rented the apartment to my partner were part of a charity network that aims to offer housing to vulnerable people. my partner qualified as a vulnerable person, and it was around the middle of September we encountered an issue…y’see, it turns out that this charity had NO policy in place for people wanting to leave their apartment…the assumption was if you were there, you were there till you WERNT there (if you catch my drift). and they basically had no system in place for someone just…moving out. the default position was that if you told them you had bought a house, you had 24 hours to pack your shit and leave. and we just couldnt work to those timelines as, as you’ve probably figured from this blog entry. My partner basically started self harming if she was asked to confirm her identity on a phone call just so that I could deal with the ACTUAL reason for the call. it would have been impossible to clear an entire apartment completely out in 24 hours even if we were BOTH fully able bodied and mentally well. I wont go into detail about how managed to circumvent this rule. But I will say that we had some very good people on our side, and that human kindness is a rare and wonderful thing these days.

it was the last week of September, we were exhausted, but we emptied the apartment into the locker, and my partner came to stop with me for what was initially supposed to be 4 weeks (it ended up being 6) My apartment was TINY. big enough barely for 1…nowhere near big enough for 2. and given the high pressure we were coming out of. as you can imagine. it was not a fun time. BUT! we tried to smooth things over with plenty of movies through October and clinging to the idea that this would all be a distant memory come December.

And lo! by mid November, the bed went in, and my partner agreed (somewhat reluctently) to go down to the house for a week or two to try and settle things in while I began to empty MY apartment.

Late November to me was an absolute blur. my average day would be spent working 8:30am till 5:30pm then spending 2 hours packing my own stuff up, having an evening meal, bringing my stuff down to the house, then heading over to the locker for 8:30pm to cram AS MUCH stuff as I could fit into my car, into my car. before getting back to the house for 9:30pm(ish) where i’d spend till 1-2am unloading boxes from my car into the house and trying to find their appropriate home. I’d get home between 2-3am where i’d have to tie off my own shit, before getting ready to wake up at 8:30am the next day and do it ALLLL over again, while my partner started unpacking and moving some of the boxes around during the afternoons (she was very much trying to recover from burnout during this time). The weekends were considered a blessing, because it meant I could do multiple trips to the locker AND bring more of my stuff down to the house, uniterrupted between the hours of 10am – 3am. IT. WAS. NUTS. and I hope to GOD I never have to do it again, or I swear it may ACTUALLY kill me.

I moved out of my place on the 28th of November 2024. my partner had been living at the house for just over a week and a half by this point, and essentially between the 29th of November and the 19th of December, we were unpacking. We did the essentials first, furniture, heavy stuff like sofas and hard wood storage came in first, we had a joiner come in and put us all new doors upstairs and a full set of shelving for my office room to house my film collection. Once that was in place I was able to unpack my movies (which you can watch LIVE right here!) and then it was basically everything else, as and when we found things. on the 19th of December, I swapped from unpacking, to cleaning, we wiped all the excess plaster from the windows, sweapt and mopped all the floors, we got a TV mounted to the living room wall, along with several sets of curtain poles fitted. Me and my partner both agreed that after the 23rd of December, we’d down tools for the year, and that would be that.

And. On the 24th of December. We did just that. We didnt touch a goddamn THING till the W/C 6th of January this year. and honestly, that 2 weeks break was frankly lifechanging. I have NEVER appreciated rest so much in my entire life. I have done FUCK ALL since the 24th of December other than occasionally doing a bit of cleaning and trying to get my office/film room setup even more perfect. and I have ZERO regrets on that. My partner needed this even more than me, she’s still not well, it’s…going to take some time for her to fully recover from this, but she’s better than she was.

Ahh…I KNEW I saw potential…The Reviews have a new home ❤

And thats…kind of where things have been left, current status is ‘Big jobs have all been done, we’re about 75% of the way unpacked, we still have some small random jobs to do to the place in the immediate future. but otherwise, we’re prettifying the house now until it gets warm enough to tackle the garden.

We ended up going about 2 grand over budget ultimately…I mean, when it comes to house reno work, where do you even stop the tally? technically we have works that still need to be done, but they arnt anywhere near as urgent as ‘get power to the house’ or ‘get rid of that gas device that could blow the houseup’…So we’ll deal with them in time.

I dont think I fully anticipated the ups and downs of renovating a home, and home ownership for that matter. I knew it could be intense at times, but I didnt *quite* realise just HOW intense it could be. I get a comfort in knowing that the monthly payments I make now will ultimately mean this place will be ours by the end of it.but in the same breath, I have a ‘to do’ list on this place longer than the gangees honestly. But! I have a lifetime to do it in…so…yay? I guess?

In all seriousness, despite the stress, HUGE financial cost and struggles, Im incredibly grateful to be as privilaged as we were in being able to buy this place, and i’d say if you can, do it. But be prepared, because even the nicest places could have HUGE things going on just underneath the walls…

I know I usually go here, there and everywhere with these blogs, but this house has basically been my last 13 months or so. Thats been my year, one big lifechanging event for good (I hope) that has really taken the sting out of a bastard of a year that was 2023. I will however for prosperity do my other usual updates.

On the Job/Work front, theres not been a whole lot to report. When I last spoke to you, i’d just been introduced to a new manager and I was still trying to find my footing to figure things out. Well; January to September could best be described as ‘tepid’ on that front. my manager seemed to think I had some kind of confidence issue (despite me telling her I do this in my spare time) so she decided to put me forward for any and all speaking opportunities within the business..Whether I wanted to do it or not. See, the thing is, I can speak enthusiastically about something I love. I can put the razzle dazzle on, no trouble. But I cant fake it. So her putting me up to talk about projects I had NO love for, that actually were likely to cause me a lot of trouble in the form of either MORE work coming my way, OR things that would overcomplicate the job I already do…Well, as you can imagine I was having a ‘great.’ time.

I also started to hear murmured rumblings from my boss trying to encourage me to (voluntarily) return to the office one day a week. Which I tried to bat away as much as I could (my job literally has no function that would benefit from an office presence…Even before covid I worked from home 3-4 days a week because I just, wasnt needed on site…)So that added to the anxiety a bit. The worst part of it came when my boss decided I needed to raise my profile to HER boss, so she started making me present all my projects to her, whether they were ready to go or not…she made it sound like me NOT getting my face in front of her boss was the difference between me keeping and losing my job. Made all the worse, when her boss got the wrong end of the stick on one of my projects and thought I was doing something externally to raise the companies social media presence. So I suddenly got propelled into senior manager meetings where they wanted to hear all about my ‘social media tips & tricks’…my guy, I suggested setting up a ‘workplace’ group page for our team to raise awareness of what we do…Im not Kylie Jenner.

Yes my dear friends, Im an Idiot…But I can be YOUR idiot!

It gets even better really, because just over a month after than instance, in early October, my boss announced she was leaving the business, and HER boss announced she was taking early retirement and leaving the business also. Thus rendering my March – October of trying to butt kiss up to people who literally didnt give a shit, when *I* literally didnt give a shit, but was made to. Ultimately pointless…There was no point building ANY of those false relationships and a whole year at work near enough was ultimately for naught 🙂 *Scream*

Well! Things do have a happyish ending I guess. In November my Boss left her role, I was assigned a new manager who ONE day before she was supposed to take up the reins, suddenly couldnt anymore…So I got ANOTHER manager who had me for a whole TWO WEEKS, where at least a week of that, I was on vacation…Before I got back to find it had been decided without consulting me to move me COMPLETELY OUT of my current team, into a whole new department, with ANOTHER new manager…But I was keeping my existing job role, title, pay etc…For those of you who have been keeping track over the last few years. Not including managers who had me for a day or less (theres been a couple of those now…) That makes my latest manager, manager #11…in 6.5 years…That works out at near enough 1.7 managers a year at this point…or VERY nearly one manager every 6-7 months. I swear its not me…Honest…

I’ve been with the new team now for coming up to 3 months, and its been kind of unremarkable, but nice. for the first time in a LONG time, im surrounded by neurodiverse people who gel with my vibe, which, I dont think i’ve had that kind of working relationship now in AT LEAST 2-3 years…they’re essentially a bit of a crisis team, when the bat signal goes up, they’re first on the scene. But that suits my style quite nicely and…So far at least, if this is how its going to be, I could get used to this quite nicely! Though, as always my place of work is renowned for sudden mass redundancies with no rhyme or reason and everyone on the chopping block…Soooo…as with every year, if im still here by this time next year in the same conditions, I’ll consider it a BIG win.

Has there been anything else significant to me and my world this year? I got into the Youtube Partner programme after 7.5 years of making movie reviews. Im honestly super proud of that. Yes im making (approx) 0.10p-0.30p a day and at this rate it’ll be 3 months before I get my first paycheque of £60…But Y’know what? anything that takes money OFF youtube and puts it into MY hands is alright by my book…

We had 2 elections…one a bit shit, in the sense that it kicked an evil EVIL group of bastards out of office…but replaced them with a group of people who’s idea of a ‘significant revolution’ is taking welfare away from disabled people and forcing the mentally ill into caring roles…

And the other?…well…we all know about the other…so the less said about that the better.

Im not gonna lie…the political landscape is FUCKING bleak right now…It can at times feel all a bit hopeless, but im trying to pull back and think of the bigger picture, that im here, and then gone in the blip of an eye. nothing matters *ultimately* other than the here and now, so as long as I ensure I have a tomorrow. Im sure as hell going to have a today. and I advise you do the same.

Oh! and for those of you who read of my tales of woe in 2023 with my sinuses, the medication worked, and continues to work! am I 100% back to how I was and pitch perfect in every way? No. but i’d kind of prepared for that…But! the sore throat stuff now only happens if I well and TRUELY TRY to run my throat into the ground, my sinusses are much less inflamed, I can breath freely and in the last few months, I think the swelling has reduced significantly, as my partners commented that i’ve stopped snoring. So…y’know! I’ll take 90% cured over whatever the hell happened to me in ’23!

And that…rather simply, was 2024…the year of ‘house’. What will 2025 bring to the table? I couldnt even begin to guess in my wildest ravings…But heres some things i’d like to do.

*I’d like to get back into pacing out making my show on youtube how I used to do the show between 2017 and 2022. Where production is slow and year round, the last two years, its been just cramming as much editing into the free time I had as possible, it takes the fun out of it. So this year? I want to use the fact I have a lot more space and free time to take my time in making the show, get a good backlog going and hopefully have fun with it this year.

*I’d like to FINALLY release my ‘After Dark: Volume 2’ set. I wrote those scripts in October/November of 2023 with the hope of getting it out there in time for Valentines 2024…THAT didnt happen! So its the first thing to tackle on my dock right now…In fact, by the time you read this (and with a bit of luck) it should already be underway! I’d also like to write and possibly even record my next audio book for a 2026 release this year. it wont be erotica, but im not firmed up on what I *would* like it to be just yet.

*I’d like to do more collaborations if I can, every year I try to work with as many folks as I can, but I always feel like I can do more! So if you have a video in mind, feel free to hit me up!

*I want to try and get on top of the garden this year, with all the ‘in house’ stuff going on since we got the keys, the garden got TOTALLY neglected. we tried to hire a gardener in in September to try and tame some of the more aggressively grown plants…but they basically kept cancelling on us and ultimately went radio silent from the end of November…essentially; as soon as it starts getting warmer in March, I want to be out there trimming, pruning, mowing, junking and jetwashing the crap out the garden because, to my next point…

*I want to have an enjoyable summer. Thats probably my biggest hope for this year, last summer I was sweating my tits off steaming walls in 36 celcius weather, with no home comforts and every day was a work day, or a job day. This year, I want to get all our jobs out of the way as soon as possible, so that I can spend the summer lounging in the back garden in my hammock, going for decent walks with the missus, racking up some decent hitters on ‘Pokemon Go’ and i’d like to go on a few daytrips too if I can find the time…Nothing astounding, but It’s been a year or two now since I’ve been to the beach, and last time I went it was raining…It’d be nice to go again in good weather.

and, as a final LONG range forecast…I’d like to have a chilled christmas next year. This year we were hammer and tonging it until 10pm on December 23rd…and while everything after that was nice and chilled out, we missed basically all the pre-gaming leading up to christmas. The decorations were thrown up in a rush, the christmas food shop was done in a panic, we didnt get much time to watch many christmas films until after christmas because we had so many jobs to do. Hell, I didnt get my film collection back until the morning of the 19th of December…I usually enjoy baking around christmas, making pumpkin pies, cookies, nice treats to give as gifts, I like to buy new decorations and spend time crafting the christmas ‘look’ for the house…This year it was whatever was available to hand + a lot of panic shopping, hell, because we went over budget on the house, we couldnt afford gifts for anyone…which was upsetting…So December 2025? I want to have the MERRIEST fucking christmas this side of lapland!

So! yeh! that was 2024, By no means a bad year…a stressful one, a busy one, but ultimately a rewarding one. As far as years go…i’d say this one was up there, and I can only hope that my 2025, like your 2025, will be a fun, pleasent, safe and happy one.

*TYTDan x

Top 10 Films I Discovered in 2024

2024 was almost certainly an ‘event’ year for me personally, one where I kind of put my hobbies and enjoyments on hold for 12 months in order to do a bit of ‘personal growth and development’. It was one of those years where 10 years progress was done in 12 months, and Im hoping (FINALLY) after 2 years of life changing significant events, that i’ll be able to (FINALLY) settle back into the nice, comfortable life I was leading pretty much right up to the start of 2023…How likely that is to happen however has yet to be seen ultimately. 

Im sure many folks are bored BEYOND death about me talking about me and my partner buying our first house this year. I fully promise that the next couple of blogs on this site will basically be the end of it. But that has kind of been my year. 4-6 months of paperwork and trying to keep the momentum up, followed by 4-6 months of heavy renovation work, moving, re-moving, re-re-moving and finally unpacking and getting set up. And even now, as of Jan 4th 2025 we’re still not FULLY done…We’re basically just unpacked and set up enough that we can start to lead a normal day to day life without feeling like we’re on a building site or living out of boxes. But we still have a bit of a journey to go. 

I mention this because its had a detrimental impact on my movie watching this year on multiple levels. For one, its meant i’ve had to make all my youtube content up front (basically all the videos you watched this year, barring collabs were written, recorded, edited and uploaded between December 2023 and April 2024, With the last video going up around July time). So I’ve kind of been out of the loop this year on that front. But the other knock on is that during the actual process of home buying and DIY-ing, i’ve been WAY too busy and consumed with getting the place habitable to even THINK of cracking open new movies. Meaning my year in film basically reads:

January – June:  A few New movies mixed in with some firm favourites

July – November: Barely ANY movie watching, and if there was any it was nostalgia heavy favourites to try and keep my brain on side. 

December:  A rushed mixture of trying to cram in as many new movies as I could on top of as many christmas movies as I could, While ALSO doing MEGA late christmas planning because I ran out of time and money.

Its been. A. Year. But certainly a rewarding and enriching one!

And now its 2025! And im ready to let the rubber ACTUALLY hit the road, im delighted to be back and keen to get started on making new videos, hanging on streams with folks and getting back into the swing of things. But before I can really TRUELY get started…Its become a bit of an annual tradition round these parts to look back over the last 12 months and spotlight the films that I caught for the first time last year and shine a light on them to highlight just how awesome they really were! 

This years list was a little easier than most years, as there wasnt *as* many to choose from, but I still had a good time shortlisting 20 films out of the many new titles I did watch and then whittling them down to a top 10. As always, these films are in no particular order. These are just 10 films I caught for the first time last year, that I think you’ll really get a kick out of if you choose to check them out! So without further ado! 

Pufnstuff: 

Prior to 2024 I had only a very limited knowledge of the works of Sid and Marty Krofft. Other than show titles, I hadnt really seen any of their work and had you asked me my opinion on them before last year, I’d have probably just written them off as wannabes who jumped on the psychedelic movement of the 60s and then spent the rest of their careers riding the coat-tails of Jim Henson. 

But then this year, I saw Pufnstuf. And well, i’ve never really quite been the same since. 

This, VIVID. Offering landed at just the right moment when I needed some surrealist hyper colourful silliness without the sneer, and it quickly won me over without much of a fight. 

The plot of ‘Pufnstuf’ in and of itself is a bit surreal telling the tale of a lad who finds a magic talking flute and moments later a fully functional talking boat that takes him to a strange island full of felt folk who are just happy to have new visitors. This is all short lived however when the film introduces Witchipoo, a local witch to the island whos spotted the magic flute and wants it to allow her to do exceptional magic AND to show off at the annual Witches convention. 

The relentless happiness, and bizarre imagery this film conjures up across its runtime left my jaw firmly on the floor at multiple points, and when I showed the folks on my discord page the movie, they too were equally beside themselves with laughter and confusion as to what the hell they were actually even watching…But in a good way, not a confused ‘call the police way’.

With solid direction, fun and interesting characters, the BIZARRE plot, vivid and creative script and set choices, a superb cast and memorable music numbers. ‘Pufnstuf’ may actually be one of the few films on this list that I could really solidly recommend to just about anyone with even a passing interest in surreal and strange cinema. Put it this way, Im not ranking these films on this list. But if I were, ‘pufnstuf’ would be a top 3 contender no doubt about it. 

Hey Folks! It’s intermission time mixtape!: 

I’ve been on a bit of a journey with boutique labels over the last decade or so, when I first got into active collecting back at the turn of the 2010s, it was ‘Arrow Video’ that acted as a gateway to strange and surreal cinema and opened up a whole world of film to me. Around 2018/2019 however, I began to notice that more and more ‘mainstream’ titles were entering their release schedules and the types of films that had previously been the backbone of the company (The Beast Within, City of the Living Dead, Inferno etc…) were increasingly becoming rarer to see on the slate, eventually sometime around 2019, Vinegar Syndrome made their international shipping options MUCH more palatable, and I became a devout Vyn-Sin connoisseur. For a good 4-5 years I bought pretty much anything they’d put out, I went through their back catalogue and tried to mop up as much as I could. 

And while I CERTAINLY wont be throwing stones here, they’re good people. I have to say that, while those 4-5 years were good…by the end of last year, I was kind of tapped out. 

I’d basically bought everything I was interested in, the stuff I didnt already own, but wanted, was skyrocketing in price due to VS’s ‘once they’re gone, they’re gone’ way of distributing films. They too have slowly been releasing more and more ‘upper end’ studio pictures (show girls, roadhouse, The Tenant) and that combined with there just, not being as many titles released that im fully interested in owning, and the fact that they seem insistent now in releasing the majority of their titles in 4k (at 4k prices) has meant i’ve spent a lot of the year drumming my fingers with Vinegar syndrome, hoping that their next month of releases has maybe ONE film i’d actually be interested in, and could afford once it hit sale prices…and then being somewhat disappointed when that didnt happen…2024 in that regard has been a bit of a washout. 

But, while Vinegar Syndrome have kind of been off my radar this year, AGFA (American Genre Film Archive) have, for the last 3-4 years now, slowly been warming up to becoming my new favourite boutique label. The organisation, which heavily promotes the preservation and proliferation of VERY deep cut productions, has been on a bit of a roll in recent years with barely a month going by where they havent released SOMETHING that i’ve absolutely fallen in love with. 

In recent years, they’ve tackled the works of Barry J. Gillis, re-released two Ed Wood classics, astounded with movies like ‘Final Flesh’ and ‘Video Diary of a Lost Girl’ and slowly, but surely, their library has basically become my film collection. 

Probably the most exciting news to come from them over recent years has been their increasing closeness with ‘Something Weird Video’ a similar preservation company that started in the late 80s and ran through most of the 90s, 00’s and 10’s before becoming an archive and resource streaming service as of 2025. Something weird is responsible for saving a frankly obscene number of movies from falling quite literally into non existence. Films like ‘She Freak’, ‘Bat Pussy’ and ‘The Curious Dr. Hump’ would either only exist in incredibly rough prints, or not exist at all if it wasn’t for the work of ‘Something Weird’. And 2024 would see the release of what I frankly considered a ‘grail’ offering up until now. 

‘Hey Folks! It’s Intermission time’ was a series of curated compilations from ‘Something Weird’ totalling 6 volumes of cinema intermission trailers, usually the stuff trying to convince you to go spend money at the snack bar, or general notes from the theater themselves, either welcoming you to the theater, offering friendly advise of services the cinema offered, telling you of upcoming events, or trying to help raise money for charity.

They’re quirky, interesting little remnants of a by-gone age. With most screens in the UK at least now having highly polished, mass distributed pre film screens. I find it fascinating to see just how home grown and unique  a lot of these little trails, that were widely seen as disposable, ended up being. 

Which brings me to the ‘Hey Folks! Its Intermission Time Mixtape’ the main feature on a set released this year from AGFA that upscales, restores and re-releases all 6 volumes of Something Weirds original compilation series. But also offers a unique remix of some of the more memorable and interesting intermission trails, turning it into a mind melting 70-80 minutes of psychedelic and trippy re-editing that I feel offers an entirely new viewing experience to these decades old stings. AGFA have been doing remixes like this for likely coming up to a decade at this point, their ‘Horror trailer show’ and ‘Cult of AGFA’ releases, not to mention their ‘Special Christmas Special’ all showcase some superb editing and its clear they have a talented and creatively minded team fronting these ventures. 

‘Hey Folks’ is another fantastic entry in this style of presentation. And Frankly this was likely my ‘Bluray of the year’ honestly. Given thats a year that ALSO included another grail of mine ‘The Dragon Lives Again’ FINALLY getting a correct aspect ratio release for the first time ever. Thats an incredible feat. a set I personally think is an essential, if you havent checked out ‘Hey Folks! Its Intermission time’ absolutely take some time to fix that! Its a great set, and it makes an even greater gift!

Last House on Dead End Street:

An unexpected entry on my list this year, I came so close to NOT seeing this film, its actually quite bizarre. So, I had heard of ‘Last House on Dead End Street’ over the years as being a particularly gruesome picture that, most notably, Vinegar Syndrome had been working on remastering for a number of years. I figured i’d likely check it out when they put out the cleaned up version, until one night while doing some research for ‘The After Dark Collection: Volume 2’ (Coming 2025) I landed on a reddit thread discussing Vinegar Syndromes ‘Adult’ movie releases, and found out that *apparently* hidden in the menus for their release of ‘Corruption’ was a ‘grindhouse’ style HD scan of ‘Last House on Dead End Street’ and just by chance, I had only recently VIEWED my copy of ‘Corruption’…So! I popped it into my player, messed around with it for a bit, and *boom* I had a copy of ‘Last House on Dead End Street’ in my hands. 

And I really wasnt disappointed with this one. as billed, its a particularly unpleasant, seedy and graphic depiction of psychopathy, and the rawness in the performances and actions (given its about making snuff films) left a long lasting impression on me. Reading in to the behind the scenes on it only made me despair even harder as I read of the struggles the writer/director had to even GET the film out to the public. Not to mention the fact that, by the time it actually DID get a wider showing, he had NO idea it was even happening. Its…got a BTS thats somehow even crazier than the film itself honestly. 

I think if this DID have a wider release in good quality, it would likely be held in a much higher and respected regard. As it stands, all I can personally say is. It is NOT for the squeamish, but if you enjoy films like ‘Bloodsucking Freaks’ or ‘The Sinful Dwarf’ you will almost certainly love ‘Last House on Dead End Street’. 

Hundreds of Beavers:

At the complete opposite side of the spectrum from ‘Last House on Dead End Steet’ we have the indie darling of the year, and a personal favourite of this years movie crop ‘Hundreds of Beavers’. A film that got recommended to me AT LEAST a dozen times within the first couple months of it doing the indie circuit. So much so that ‘friend of the show’ Triv of Trivial Theater, managed to cop a screener, and essentially pulled me out of the reno work to make it clear that this WASNT something I should sit out on. And damnit if she was absolutely right. 

The plot follows a fur trapper attempting to collect ‘hundreds of beavers’ to sell the pelts of in order to win the heart and hand of a merchants daughter, the whole film is shot and framed like a kind of hybrid between Fleisher era animation and a ‘Loony Tunes’ short. With PLENTY of references back to Buster Keaton, The Stooges, The Marx Bros and many more silent movie icons. 

Its clearly a labour of love, it looks fantastic, astoundingly so given the budget, its brimming with creative slapstick ideas, and barring a couple of moments that are a *smidge* (and I mean a *smidge*) more ‘adult’ oriented, this could easily be a family movie. I’ve kind of made it my mission this year whenever anyones asked me for recent film recommendations to send them over to this one. 

Its got a good heart, a good soul. And I like that its playful and not afraid to be self aware without trying to be openly controversial. I had a real good time with this one, and could happily recommend it. 

Xanadu:

If theres 2 things that ‘Xanadu’ is known for, its the frankly stonking soundtrack by ‘ELO’, and its for being the butt of pretty much every late night comedy show from 1987 till about 2003. ‘Xanadu’ was and still kind of is seen widely as a laughing stock of a movie. But this year, someone I very much respect, Frank Conniff made a lengthy twitter/bluesky post essentially admitting that, after years of using it as the aforementioned butt of several jokes through the 90s, he still hadn’t actually *seen* ‘Xanadu’ and recently decided to change that…And to his shock and horror it actually wasn’t a cringe worthy terrible musical, it was maybe a bit overlong, but he actually really liked it. Issuing something of a public apology for dunking on it for all these years. 

Well; that was enough interest raised for me to go out and grab a bluray copy of the movie to see ‘whats what’. And What WAS what is that ‘Xanadu’ IS in fact a quite fun little 80s musical. Is it ‘Grease’ memorable? Absolutely not. But its a charming and warm little musical about never giving up on your dream and realising that you don’t have to be young to still go after what you really want in life. 

Obviously, the ELO soundtrack IS what makes the movie fantastic, but it cant be overstated just how good Gene Kelly is in this, playing a weary property developer who yearns to return to a simpler life playing in a big band, when life was less complicated and he had something to strive for. 

The film does get a little tangled up in trying to make Olivia Newton John the personification of ‘your dreams’. But I find that musicals largely trade on vibe, and a few mixed metaphors and some 2nd act pacing issues arnt going to come between me and this campy and funky little movie having a fun time. 

‘Xanadu’ wont be for everyone, I know that. But I honestly would say, if you do enjoy musical cinema and have been put off by years of people dunking on this one, without ACTUALLY having watched this. I’d say give it a go, you may be genuinely surprised…At the very worst, you’ll have still listened to a pretty awesome ELO score. 

Cecil B. Demented:

The Number of John Waters films I have yet to watch is slowly becoming a dwindling pool. I had seen almost all of his earlier works, but his later works are a little scattershot to come by in the UK. I had been hoping to wait for ‘Cecil B. Demented’ to get a proper Bluray release in the UK. But Criterion have now been quiet for a couple of years on that front, and it looks like Kino Lobar are picking up the slack on 90s ‘Waters’ movies…So I threw in the towel on waiting this year and just decided to hit it up on Tubi. And I absolutely loved it. 

Im less enamoured with Waters ‘studio’ era. Basically everything after ‘Hairspray’ to me feels a bit forced and self referential. Cry Baby didnt really move me, Serial Mom is a much loved fan favourite, but left me cold. And Pecker just felt too safe for me. But Cecil B. Demented has a rogue twinkle in its eye that suggests to me theirs life in the old dog yet. 

A film largely attacking BOTH the mainstream studio system and ‘puritan’ indie film makers who go WELL above taste and decency for their art. I feel like this was a return to form for Waters work, that would continue into his next production ‘A Dirty Shame’. 

What we have here is a film that pushes the boundaries of studio cinema more than his previous studio works, but doesnt go AS far as his early films (Female Trouble, Pink Flamingos, Multiple Maniacs’ and it manages to hit a nice compromise of being a clear, concise and well structured picture, that equally has a tenacious ‘daring’ quality to it. The feeling of the old Waters pictures where anything could happen, and sometimes it actually DOES! 

I really enjoyed seeing this one for the first time this year, I would highly recommend it to any Waters fans who maybe jumped off at ‘Polyester’ or felt like he lost his bite a bit post ‘Hairspray’ as I really do think this and ‘Dirty Shame’ were steps in the right direction. And with rumblings that a new John Waters film could be just around the corner. I sincerely hope it continues on this trend!

Oh…and on the off chance someone from Criterion is reading this, don’t leave us hanging, PLEASE for the love of GOD release ‘Desperate Living’. You cant just release all of John waters early work and leave out the film bridging ‘Female Trouble’ to ‘Polyester’ I NEED more high definition Mink Stole rants in my life thank you very much!

Batman 1966:

I imagine some will be surprised that, until this year i’d never seen the 1966 ‘Batman’ movie. Indeed, I myself felt some shame at having not gotten to it sooner, given that I love the original TV series and had a great respect for Adam West. 

But sometimes, things just don’t line up properly, sometimes there just isnt a good bat-time or a solid enough bat-place to fit a movie in. But this year, I made it a point (having been invited to talk about it on ‘Friend of the show’ Jon Norths podcast) to FINALLY crack it open. And I had an absolute blast with it. 

Honestly, I don’t have a lot to say about it, its a feature length take on the TV series, it feels like a long TV episode with a slightly bigger budget and thats about it. It absolutely should have done EXACTLY what it did do, it looks great, sounds great and the extra funds really help take things to the next level. Having all the classic villains from the TV series appear as the baddies in the theatrical outing is a great ‘raising of the stakes’ and the 60s campy silliness is still here in full force delivering an end product that hilarious, charming and just an utter delight to sit through. If you’ve never seen ‘Batman ‘66’ this is a great starting point, and if you enjoyed the TV series, but havent seen the film. You really need to fix that. 

Beetlejuice:

Another one im sure will surprise some people, but again. Sometimes things don’t align when you think they *should* have, and instead align at the strangest times. I had seen the beetlejuice TV series MANY moons ago. But I’d just never got around to the movie. But, with ‘Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice’ going down a storm at the box office, my partner was horrified to learn i’d not seen the original and made me watch it pretty much as soon as she found out.

And it was great fun! Barring a slightly rushed ending I thought this was another creative powerhouse, delivering surreal visuals and fantastic performances one after another after another. I came away very pleasantly surprised, and while im sure the vast majority of you have already seen ‘Beetlejuice’ as someone who hadnt, it really endeared me to the concept…Though, it did make me wonder why their was such pressure for a sequel for all those years, given the film ends pretty conclusively…I dunno!, in either case I really enjoyed this one. Its probably the most well known film I saw for the first time this year and i’m going to have to try and dig out the sequel relatively soon!

Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl:

One of the more unexpected offerings of the year, I had no idea that Aardman had been working on a new ‘Wallace & Gromit’ film, letalone that it was another ‘feature’ outing for the pair, but! On Christmas day, the BBC released ‘Vengence Most Fowl’ a sequel to ‘The Wrong Trousers’ that sees that rogue criminal ‘Feathers McGraw’ trying once again to steal precious gems, AND trying to get revenge on the popular pair who put him away!

Meanwhile Wallace is back in debt, and, as a way to try and get out of it, has built the worlds first ‘Smart Gnome’ a little gardening fellow who’ll do any job, no matter how big or small. It all goes wrong as you can imagine! But it was a nice idea while it lasted!

I LOVED this special, it was probably my second favourite broadcast of the day (outside of the Gavin & Stacy finale) While I don’t *quite* think they match or surpass the complexity of animation seen in ‘The Wrong Trousers’ The film is still genuinely funny has the warmth and familiarity that makes the ‘Wallace & Gromit’ films so enjoyable and was a definite improvement over their last outing 2008s ‘A Matter of Loaf and Death’. 

The comedy was superb, with several gut busting laughs throughout, the animation is still superb and the character have some nice set pieces that tie the whole thing together, including some excellent celebrity voice cameos from Peter Kay, Reese Shearsmith and Diane Morgan. A christmas highlight. If your looking for laughs and something a bit light hearted, you cant go wrong with this. 

Singing in the Rain:

With only 2 hours to go before the year officially ended, I had watched 299 films, and to finish the year off AND claim my 300th film watch, I decided to take a look at a film that ‘Siskel & Ebert’ literally COULD NOT shut up about through most of their ‘Holiday Gift Guide’ specials. 

‘Singing in the Rain’ has often been cited as ‘the greatest musical ever made’ I honestly wouldn’t go that far. But what you have here is a genuinely sincere, surprisingly self aware for 1952 and warm ‘smile’ of a movie that documents the cinematic shift from silent era productions to ‘talkies’ in 1929. 

Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds are a tour d’force here, without them the film would have fallen flat I feel, with them, its a match made in heaven. And even though Kellys behaviour off screen was horrific to say the least. It cant be denied that this film oozes charm and joy, and I defy anyone to watch this without cracking *at least* a smirk once or twice throughout. 

With some astounding and colourful visuals on hand, a whole host of iconic and culturally significant musical numbers and some of the most complex and tightest dance routines you’ll likely ever see. ‘Singing in the rain’ was a fabulous way to see the old year out and ring the new one in. I’ll almost certainly try and poach a physical media copy at my next convenience and if you havent got around to this one yet, all I can say is, it definitely needs bumping up your list. A great script, razor cine and direction, killer performances and a bloody ASTOUNDING score. 

I also only realised the next day after watching this, that as of 2025 all works from 1929 (when this film was set) are now in the public domain. Making it a particularly poigniant watch! 

And! That was my top 10 of 2024! Not a particularly controversial list…But then, they rarely are! I hope you decide to look into some of these as I had an absolute blast watching them, and as i ease back into more regular ‘new film’ watching. I can only hope that this year is as kind to me with astounding features as I hope it will be for you. 

Take care!

– Dan 

Partially Reformed Content …#6 (Upto and including) (More than) (Over) One Year On…

Well…this years been a fun one hasnt it? Honestly; i’ve been kind of reluctant towards writing what is quickly becoming my version of The annual ‘Kings Christmas Speech’. Usually writing these is a kind of cathartic release, a way of sitting down, taking stock of the good and the bad from across the year, summing up my feelings on where I am now and what i’d like the next 12 months to hold…I usually try to be optimistic, but realistic about circumstances…But this year?..Well; honestly its probably been the worst year i’ve had in a VERY long time, and continues a somewhat worrying trend of each progressive year being either worse than the last, or neutral. 

Because so much has happened this year, and because i’ve only really talked in dribs and drabs about it across multiple different social media sites. Im hoping that in writing this years blog, i’ll now have a single place I can refer people to in trying to explain exactly whats been going on with me for the last year, and equally; im hoping this will draw a line under everything so that I don’t really have to explain 12 months of lore to people who’ve been asking me ‘where I went to’ or ‘How come i’ve not done any new reviews recently’?

So kicking things off, around the time I was writing last years ‘end of year’ blog, I had just come off the back of a huge recording session for episodes of the show that made up season 13. And; as has generally been the case previously when I’d sit and record 8 scripts, non stop, back to back, over a 2 day window. I had a bit of a sore throat. This was actually kind of normal given the amount of recording i’d do in a single sitting, but heres the kicker; about a week after my last script recording…My throat was still sore…and if anything, getting worse. 

Being a big dumb idiot bloke, I assumed i’d maybe just picked up a cold from somewhere and that my already raw throat was just experiencing amplified pain as a result of it…but 3 weeks after THAT not only had I realised that it wasnt a bug, but i’d gotten to the point where I could only softly talk for about 5-10 minutes conversationally, or sing or speak at room level for between 2-5 minutes before i’d be in such tremendous pain that I had to basically go mute for up to 2 days in order to just about recover back to the point where I could speak softly for 5-10 minutes again. 

After a while (and my partner nagging me to go and get seen because my moaning was annoying her) I went to the doctors who, within 2 minutes of seeing me, diagnosed me with having a throat infection. They put me on antibiotics for a week, I took them, felt a little bit better, and booked in a follow up appointment to say ‘they worked a little bit…but not really’. So they gave me another weeks worth. I took those, they did nothing. 

A week or so after completing that round, my throat got significantly worse…It turned out that on top of the throat pain, I now ACTUALLY DID have a throat infection, it was so bad I ended up at the hospital, where they gave me some significantly stronger antibiotics and wrote a note to my doctors asking them to investigate further.

I went back to my local doctors again about 2 weeks after that incident and this time they changed tact. Telling me I’d got oral thrush and THAT was why my throat was sore. So they gave me some anti thrush medication. That LITERALLY did nothing, but they were adamant I 100% had oral thrush and couldnt be budged on it, so they gave me a stronger version of the thrush medication. I took it, it did NOTHING. I went back again, and rather than them try something different, they doubled down AGAIN on the thrush diagnosis, instead telling me that because Im fat, I must be diabetic and thats why I couldnt get rid of the thrush. I told them I absolutely wasnt diabetic as my partner IS diabetic and she checks my blood sugars semi regularly (because when you’ve been in a relationship for 12 years…it helps to pass the time) which have always been a *tiny* bit elevated, but well within safe levels, if not pretty bang on. 

Still, they insisted I HAD to have diabetus. There was literally just no other explanation (bearing in mind, I went in for a chronically bad sore throat) So…because they wouldnt budge. I took their blood test, waited another week or two, got the results back, my blood sugars were perfect. And the doctor I was assigned basically washed his hands of me. No further testing, no further explanation. He was literally just like; “Your not diabetic, you DEFINITELY have thrush, the medication isnt helping…I don’t know what to do with you…if it gets any worse than it is now…call back in, otherwise you’re just going to have to live with it.” Which…y’know…great job there NHS…

I left things for about a fortnight after that before ending up back at the hospital again for more industrial strength anti biotics for the throat, when I told them the thrush incident they checked me out and told me that they thought it just looked like something called ‘Geographic Tongue’ and advised I go back to them again, they also wrote another note basically saying ‘Dear mr. doctor…YOU’RE A DOCTOR…dont fucking abandon your patient just because the results you wanted didnt magically turn up’.

A week or two after that I went back AGAIN, I was given a different doctor, this one wanted to put me on antibiotics again, By this point i’d probably been dealing with this issue collectively for about 4-5 months it was coming into spring. I’d been on antibiotics or thrush medication of one kind of another for over 2 months at this point. And when this lot didnt work, I went back again and basically said bluntly ‘I’ve now had over 6 different courses of antibiotics. Non of them have worked. Other than checking my throat with a torch, I havent properly been investigated by ANYONE. Could I maybe please be investigated a little more thoroughly, because im concerned about antibiotic resistance. And I don’t believe this is the only treatment for a chronic sore throat.‘

By this point, I was pretty solidly convinced I had chronic tonsilitis, or tonsil stones and that, basically I needed my tonsils out if I was going to see any kind of improvement. The doctors eventually relented. And booked me in for an appointment with the Ear, nose and throat specialists at the hospital…with a 2 month wait…and in that waiting period, they wouldnt prescribe me anything. They instead advised a throat numbing spray as a temporary workaround…which did kind of work…but that then created the problem that I could talk for longer, but my recovery time was STUPIDLY longer…if I talked for 15 minutes and felt fine on the spray, it’d be a week before I could talk again. 

So…I waited, and I was finally seen by ENT. Who told me they were going to ‘scope’ me (basically a long thin camera was going up my nose and down the back of my throat) I later found out that in the states they anaesthetise you before they do that because of the discomfort it can cause…Not in the UK! Over here I was just told to breath very slowly and while they didnt advise closing your eyes, I found it kind of essential to keeping calm. Y’see, if you don’t keep calm and breath slowly and deeply, your body suddenly realises theres a foot long camera LITERALLY half way down your oesophagus and decides it doesnt like that, in short…choking, contractions, and in some cases vomiting. 

I will say this, it isnt painful, it does feel weird though…kind of like you’ve got phlegm at the back of your throat thats slowly dripping down, but you cant cough to clear it, unpleasant, but not painful. I luckily managed to get through my scoping with no major issues, right up until literally the point where the nurse pulled the scope out at the very very end. She was slowly retracting it, and it must have hit my uvula or something, because It triggered my gag reflex, and THEN my body realised ‘oh shit! Theres something in his throat!’ Which led to contractions and retching. But all that was over a 2 second window as the nurse basically yanked the camera out of my face to get it gone ASAP.   

Anyway, she told me the results would be in in about a fortnight or so and to call the doctors to get the results…so I waited…2 weeks passed, I called up…No results…I waited to 4 weeks, called again, no results…I waited to 6 weeks. Called again, no results…at 7 weeks I booked in another appointment with my doctor because nothing had come back. He told me this definitely wasnt right and called the hospital to chase…10 weeks after the scope happened they FINALLY sent something through…and it said that ‘because of my chronic migraine pain, an ear operation was the only answer’…these were not my results. These were someone elses…they’d messed up.My doctor called them back, they apologised and said they’d get my ACTUAL results to me asap.

4 weeks on from THAT. My results were in! I didnt have cancer!..That was it. It turns out that that was the only thing they were checking for… they didnt bother to investigate anything else from the scoping, noone at ANY point told me they were ONLY running a cancer screening. I had been led to believe they were doing this to check for a range of things. But apparently not! 

They basically just came back saying ‘its not cancer’ and then my doctor was like ‘Well…its not cancer! So…we’ve done everything now!’ I was bereft. 

I took a month off the cycle and just lived with the pain for a bit, but it was too much, and in either case I couldnt really live, because by this point my communication had basically slowed to monosylabic quiet grunts and very little else. By this point we were coming into June/July time. And I booked back in at my local surgery and had arguably the worst experience of all the visits i’d done up to this point. 

At this point I was about 99% certain I was going to need my tonsils out, they were riddled with tonsil stones, swollen, I did the the thing of asking Dr. Google my symptoms and all of them aligned near perfectly with chronic tonsillitis and having now at this point been on 7-8 lots of antibiotics across an at least 6 month window, I was starting to get to the stage where I felt that a tonsillectomy could be something reasonably discussed. 

The doctor I spoke to, first of all told me tonsil stones don’t exist (you can google the term ‘tonsil stone’ and you’ll find plenty of articles about them…) this guy told me they were ‘calcium build up’s’ and said it in such a way that made me feel like I was an idiot for even BEGINNING to suggest you could get stones in your throat (I…I don’t really give a shit what they’re called. We were both describing the same thing.) 

He told me my tonsils literally had to be black and touching for it to be ‘tonsilitis’, so I couldnt be in THAT much pain. Mine were a little swollen, but not THAT bad. He told me that he didnt think I had ANYTHING wrong with my tonsils/throat, he said he thought it was ‘Oral Thrush’. When I told him to check my notes because, we’d already danced this dance about a month or two ago and they’d confirmed not only was it NOT oral thrush, but I definitely didnt have diabetes either. He said that his diagnosis was Oral thrush fed by diabetes, and told me he’d only be willing to give me more oral thrush medication and another blood test for diabetes. 

I held my ground, arguing that I really didnt think that was appropriate and that, realistically, I wanted one more bout of antibiotics (because you have to have had 7 documented interactions with a doctor about repeated throat infections in the last 12 months, before a tonsillectomy would be discussed, and I had 6 cases.

He eventually relented, issued me with oral thrush medication, antibiotics and a blood test. 

Surprise surprise, a week later, I felt as shit as ever and my blood tests confirmed ONCE AGAIN that I wasnt diabetic. I went back and saw the same doctor, who this time told me that I was basically making the throat pain up. And that ‘Thrush doesnt cause that much pain.’ 

…im ashamed to say I lost my temper a little bit at him after that, I *politely* told him that i’d now been on antibiotics for over 6 months, id had 2 doctors tell me I had thrush, and 4 doctors (INCLUDING this doctors BOSS)  tell me I definitely DIDNT have thrush. I told them I believed I needed to have my tonsils out, that i’d now met the minimum threshold to have that conversation with a specialist and that i’d like to speak to that specialist now please.

He resisted. But when I told him that i’d rather the opportunity to be told im wrong, than to risk completely destroying my immune system with an 8th or 9th batch of antibiotics (this same doctor told me that taking 1 batch of antibiotics was theoretically enough to make me immunocompromised) he eventually relented and re-referred me back into the ENT team but only on the condition I did one more week of thrush treatment. Which…I’ll tell you now, did fuck all. 

SO! It’s now early August, i’ve been in horrific pain for coming up to 9 months. I’ve been on antibiotics for *at least* 5 of those. My ENT appointment lands, and its a week from when I spoke to the doctor, August 10th. Which is MUCH better than the 2-3 month wait i’d had previously. I head over, the first thing I say to the specialist is ‘I felt a bit duped honestly, because I came to you guys in April/May time and was told I was going to be thoroughly examined, but they basically just did a cancer screening and nothing else. We now know it isnt cancer, I’d like a bit more of an involved check, because I think im going to need my tonsils out based on what i’ve read online’ 

The specialist was honestly one of the nicest doctors i’d dealt with up to this point, he apologised that things hadnt quite gone to plan, and told me he’d do a full inspection of my tonsils, nasal cavity and throat right there and then…via scope. Which…was unexpected because they normally give you a bit of prep warning…but I wasnt complaining.

He scoped me, this time it was a bit more difficult to keep my composure. But within 30 seconds of the ‘scoping’ beginning, he pretty much immediately identified a problem…’You have Chronic Allergic Rhinitis…I don’t know how this wasnt picked up sooner.’

Yes! Boys and girls, it turns out that due to several boobs on behalf of over 10 doctors across a doctors surgery, a hospital and a specialist facility. They’d all overlooked a particularly common issue that was causing a particularly problematic side effect. 

Rhinitis is basically an inflammation of the nasal cavity and throat. Sometimes theres a trigger, other times it can just be your body mis-reacting to environmental stuff. Hay fever is apparently seen as  a very acute form of rhinitis. And can usually be treated and resolved within 4 weeks of antihistamine treatment. 

I was diagnosed with very chronic allergic Rhinitis. Basically an extreme form of the acute side of things. Where SOMETHING either externally is irritating my sinuses, or my body is fucking up and self  inflaming my nasal cavity and throat REALLY badly and causing them to swell and feel discomfort. Theres no cure for this, the specialist basically told me to try and find out what may be triggering it, but that realistically; given how long i’ve been dealing with it for, it could be an internal issue with my body just badly reacting to the world around me. So he prescribed me a nasal spray, told me to try it for a couple of months and see how I got on. 

Within 2 weeks I could talk again at room level. Within 2 months I could hold long conversations again, and as of the time of writing, While im not 100% better, im around 90% and feeling so much better for it. I had a follow up with the doctors around the end of september/october time where they basically told me, this is a permanent thing, if I stopped taking the meds, it’d go back to being as bad as it was before, and that, how it was by the end of the year, would pretty much be how it’d be for the rest of my life. I can live with this, its manageable. But I do wonder just how much time was wasted by the 8 months of being dicked around…This is the best outcome I could have hoped for. But I regret the lost time on multiple levels.

For me personally; that was the BIG issue of the year for me, i’ve never been in chronic pain before…it’s not fun. Would not recommend. 1 out of 10 experience honestly. But this one issue ended up being compounded by other awful awful shit that this year seemingly decided to shoot me in the face with. 

In early May, right around the time my throat was at its worst and I was fresh off being ‘Scoped’ My grandma fell over, broke her hip and passed away in hospital due to a complication arising from an infection. That whole event happened over the space of 2 weeks in May. It devastated the family who were totally blindsided. Shit was cruel honestly. It was bordering on the surreal at times because, not only could I not mentally articulate my feelings about it, but I couldn’t PHYSICALLY do anything because of my throat. 

My grandma was a much loved member of the community and a devout elder of the church, her funeral was a bit like a ‘who’s who’ of the UK christian circuit. It was a grand celebration of her life, and because I have a degree in film and worked as an editor for over 5 years. It was decided to turn her funeral into a mixed media event showcasing her life. I was put onto editing some videos for the event and organising the running order of stuff. The funeral went about as well as it could have, but understandably my mum and her brothers, even now, are still very upset about it. 

That was bad enough, but then the real slug in the gut happened. Since December of 2022, my dads quality of life had slowly begun to decline…seemingly without reason. My dads health had always been shite, he had chronic COPD, they were debating putting him on oxygen for the longest time because he could never quite catch his breath and struggled with even gentle walking. He lost an eye as a kid, and in his 20s (being a big blokey bloke that he was) he shattered his kneecap and broke his leg hopping a fence on a shortcut home…and DIDNT go to get it looked at…so it healed wrong, leaving him with chronic leg pain and making him use a walking stick whenever he stood up for the rest of his life. 

In the last 10-15 years, he ruptured a nerve in his back (picking up a cushion off the floor of all things) which left him in severe pain 24/7, he had 2 operations on it which were unsuccessful and resulted in permanent nerve damage and was on a cocktail of pain killers throughout that time. Add to that chronic arthritis, severe depression, PTSD and I firmly believe he was autistic and in burnout (he refused to get checked)… He wasnt a well man. 

For a couple of years leading up to December, my dad had developed 2 new issues, he’d started falling over a lot, and he’d started slurring his words. My mum thought he might have had a mini stroke. By December 2022 however, the falling over had become much more commonplace, the slurring had gotten pretty bad and he’d started having random bouts of personality changes. One of the most memorable I can recall happened at christmas of last year when he was adamant there were some decorations we’d not bought down from the attic…and…SOMEHOW, he managed to climb into the attic by himself, trash the place and then got confused and couldnt get back down without help. 

Anyway; we took him to the doctors on and off across early 2023, but he didnt like going and quite often just point blank refused because he thought it was a waste of time. In either case, they advised that it could be oxygen starvation effects on the brain (which reopened the ‘putting him on oxygen tanks’ discussion) they argued it could be early onset dementia or it could be something as simple as a urine infection. 

There was a lot of words exchanged…but not a lot of action. In april 2023, my dad was really REALLY unwell, and ended up in the hospital for a few days, where they told us that it was an enflamed pancreas. they gave him some antibiotics and sent him home. 

In early June, pretty much immediately after my grandmas funeral, my dads speech had more or less ground down to nothing. We’d find him on the floor more than we’d find him stood up or sat down. He looked white as a sheet and clearly wasnt all there After a particularly bad weekend, my mum made the decision to call an ambulance for him…he passed away 2 weeks later. As of the time of writing, we’re still waiting to find out EXACTLY what it was that killed him, all we know at this point is he had a high level of toxins in his body and his liver was particularly damaged. The best answer we have at this time was that the painkillers he was on wernt *supposed* to be long term permanent medications as they could cause liver damage. But the doctors never checked in with him, and my dad wouldnt willingly go to the doctors for medication reviews, he also wasn’t supposed to take them with alcohol, which he did irregularly. 

This was both absolutely devastating and totally unexpected. I mean, his health wasnt great, but…and I say this with sincerity…he was driving 2 weeks before he ended up in hospital. He was able to have complex conversations a week before that. To see him essentially crash out over the course of a fortnight was heartbreaking. Im still lost for words on how I feel about the situation because of how unexpected it really was. Its now been over 5 months since he passed and there isnt a day that goes by where I don’t think about him, where I don’t miss him and wonder what he’d make of the world even so soon after he left. 

Somewhat hilariously (and morbidly) 3 things happened in the space of 3 months of my dad passing that held significance for me:

*The ‘Caramac’ bar got discontinued (literally his favourite chocolate bar)

*Top Gear and the grand tour got cancelled (literally his favourite TV shows of all time)

*The Israel/Palestine war kicked off big time (My dad was a lifelong supporter of Palestine…I know for a fact he’d have had extra TV’s wheeled in to the living room to see as much of the news as possible had he lived to see it) 

I’ve quipped that my dad didnt want to live in a world without Jeremy Clarkson and Caramac…its dark, but you’ve got to find light where you can honestly. 

My biggest regret through all of this was that I wasnt really able to have those final conversations with either my Dad or my Grandma, apart from the fact that both of them passed in states where conversation would have been impossible realistically. But the throat pain made even light conversation impossible. I hadnt properly spoken to my dad in months because of my throat. And while I had no baggage with either of them, things ended with no unresolved issues, I had healthy and happy relationships with both of them. I do just wish that I’d been able to not have had one more conversation with them where I didnt have to keep stopping or think very carefully about what I was saying because of how much I could talk.

Obviously; the side of this that you dear reader are likely to be aware of is the news that came out of my youtube channel around the time. That i’d lost a couple of family members and that I was struggling with throat pain, so I had to pause the channel. Initially that wasnt going to be the case. Initially the plan was to do a ‘long play’ on production. Write up all the scripts, record a script a week starting WAY earlier than I normally do, and the plan was that hopefully i’d have a diagnosis on the throat stuff in by May/June time. I was hoping to be be on the mend by August (bearing in mind I started planning for the September season in January) meaning I could have SOME episodes ready for September and October, AND be ready to batch record again in September/October for November/December episodes. 

Then, when my grandma passed in May, I figured…’Okay. Im going to have to stop channel work for about a month. Not the end of the world, but I may have to drop a couple weeks in september ASSUMING I get a diagnosis on my throat soon’. Then when the results came back messed up, I was like ‘Fuck…right…Okay, no, I can still make this work, I’ll drop September completely, we’ll come back in October and go straight into Halloween episodes and I’ll pool the september scripts over into Feb 2024 for season 15. 

Then my dad went into hospital, and a week after that the prognosis was NOT good. My throat was still like razor blades and i’d basically been told I was a lost cause by the doctors and put back on antibiotics… It began to become glaringly apparent that I absolutely wasnt going to be good for a September launch and October was looking about as unlikely too. I really wanted to make it work, but…I was at a very low point by late July. the last straw on things surprisingly was something totally unrelated. 

I craved summer this year, I desperately wanted that time to sit in the garden, enjoy the heat and maybe even do some daytrips to make the most of the weather…Then we had one of the wettest, dankest, darkest summers on record. We had approximately 1 week of sunshine in a 12 week window, with the other 11 weeks were mild, grey, overcast, and around the time of my dads passing we were going through the bizarre circumstance of it being mid july with 3 ‘weather warning’ level storms battering the UK for the better part of a month. It was tropical floods, thunder and lightning for almost the entirety of summer, you couldnt go anywhere, you couldnt do anything. It was miserable. 

That was the last straw, i’d lost a lot of good people this year, my voice was fucked so I couldnt record even if I wanted to, and with the weather being SO god awful, it meant I didnt really get to do anything I wanted over the summer vacation other than sit in doors with a lot of mourning people, while I myself was mourning too. It was at that point I realised i’d basically be busting a gut, bottling up my own feelings and possibly doing myself some physical damage to try and force the show out to meet what was becoming and increasingly improbable deadline. So…I made the decision to pause the show till the new year. Both because, at the time I made the announcement I still wasnt entirely sure how long it was going to be before I got a diagnosis for the throat stuff, but also I didnt know how long recovery would take, AND I was feeling very low. 

I took 3 months out from mid july, I watched some movies, tried to make the best of an awful situation…I may have done a livestream or two around this time. But that was the top end of my channel stuff. By mid to late september, my voice had started to recover thanks to the medications, and I was able to go from recording 1 script a week broken down to a page a day with several days recovery after the fact, To doing a script a day. Through september and October, I began to pick things back up again. I slowly started to record all the scripts I’d written in Feb/March that SHOULD have been for September. By the end of October, i’d  recorded 12 scripts. And had started writing the last few scripts that I’d not gotten around to. 

It was in late October/Early November that, after speaking with some of my fellow content creators, I decided things needed to change. The amount of content i’d been making for the channel was widely considered to be a LOT more than I needed to make. I’ve been running weekly uploads since 2017 and as time had gone on, more and more time was being required to make these videos, alongside all the live stream appearances, podcasts…all that good stuff. It was putting a strain on my partner who would go days without seeing me, it was putting a strain on my personal life, and it was straining my health. 

So I made the decision to roll back the number of episodes I made in a year. Starting with the next season. Season 13, including the September special totalled 23 episodes, its commonplace on the channel that the Feb-July schedule is usually between 21 and 23 videos depending on how the days fall. With Sept-Dec generally being between 16 and 19 videos. Add in the (now annual) audio only CD releases which are another 7-8 audio reviews a year, and your looking at the max end of 50 reviews a year…not to mention letterboxd or having to run social media accounts like twitter, discord, insta…Its a LOT of time. 

So, because my voice isnt as strong as it was, Im still really working through the deaths and for the benefit of my relationship with my partner AND helping her deal with her chronic health problems. Season 14 is currently going to run for 16 episodes. With a 17th being debated depending on how quick I work. Im not going to lie…its a big drop. But I feel like doing this is going to help keep my voice in check and give me some time back to work through things and help better support my partner. Season 15 (Sept-Dec 2024) is currently looking to run for 14 or 15 episodes, and we have an audio release planned for the summer of 7 more reviews there…bringing the total down from 50 to 38 or 39 videos for 2024. A reduction of around 11 or 12 videos…which I estimate *should* in theory give me back almost 2 months worth of afternoons and evenings across the year. 

I am also hoping to bring back game streams next year. How regular they’ll be I cant say for certain at this point, but im looking At Feb as being a starting point. AND im equally hoping to get back into collaborations, podcasts and appearing on other peoples streams…so if you want a weird cult film guy on your stuff. Reach out, I AM very much interested. I’ll be scaling back on some of my other social media presences too, insta is probably going to be scaled down because…well, meta have screwed the pooch on this one and you now see more adverts than you do ACTUAL content on the site. so…I don’t see much point there, Letterboxd has been going quite well in recent months, so im going to be continuing to write reviews on there. (seriously; if somehow you havent had enough of me, head over there. I usually manage to write 2-3 additional reviews a week at minimum on there) 

Theres an official TYTD facebook page, thats been automated for years and wil continue to be so. Im basically waiting now on Bluesky adding DM’s so that I can leave the hellscape of Twitter (Or, at the very least, im hoping Twitter gets bought out next year by someone who ISNT a total dickhead so I can be on there without having to see so much awfulness) 

 I’d like to try and continue to grow the TYTD discord server, which has been arguably one of the best things to happen to me over the last 18 months. Theres some wonderful people on there who quite honestly have  been BEYOND supportive. 

What else has been going on in my really fucked up bad year? Well…when we last parted ways, work was on a downward turn, I’d been part of a rather successful (but slightly imperfect) team that had just been dissolved and I was now with a first time manager, in a part of the business I didnt like, and I was being told (not asked) that my role was going to be changing and to expect a bigger workload. 

12 months on, i’ve changed managers AGAIN, my previous manager (the first timer) is now a coworker with me in this bigger team, and things are about as shit as they’ve possibly been in my entire 6 years with the company. This is because, while I was on bereavement leave. The company decided that EVERYONE needs to be standardised. That means everyone needs to do the same training, everyone needs to be able to do everyone elses job (no matter how far removed it is from the ACTUAL job I do)…its a mess, my boss, my bosses boss and my bosses bosses boss are all ladder climbers, who have no interest in the staff they manage, they just want to do big changes that look good on paper, but don’t work in the real world. I currently have a weeks worth of time every month wasted on stuff thats been deemed ‘mandatory’ even though it has ZERO relevance to my job. 

I’ve moved from an environment where we were encouraged to speak up about ‘low/no value’ time killers and to have open and frank discussions with managers about ways we could improve efficiency, to a model where theres no room for discussion, no option to push back. Everything is dropped on us WAY after the fact, when its all been pre agreed and theres no way to challenge it. And if you do raise a query about how useful it is to your day to day job, you’ll either be met with ‘Its not fair for everyone else to do it, and not you…so do it.’ (casually overlooking there that 90% of ‘everyone’ ALSO don’t need to do it really…Or you’ll get greeted with a ‘Its mandatory, not doing it will get you a disciplinary or worse’…again with no context or reasoning

I’ve also been told in the new year that they’re going to start loading me up with work Im really not keen to do because one of my co-workers is the bosses friend and he wants to ladder climb too…so they’re basically going to take all his shit work, give it to me so that he can do something grandstanding. But non of that matters because theres also the VERY real possibility that I wont even HAVE a job by March/April time next year because of various ongoing company issues…Put it this way, if I go in March/April/May time…I wont be surprised…if I manage to hang on till October/November, I’ll actually be kind of glad because the payout will be a bit larger. 

Theres also some rumblings about me returning to the office…which is literally the worst thing I can think of right now on multiple levels that I wont go into here, mainly because it hasnt happened yet, but also because we’re already 10 pages in to this blog…So yeh…works about as bad as it can be right now…not as bad as the last place I worked where my boss literally called me ‘Slime’ for having a union rep…but yeh…this year has not been my finest hour…its not great right now…

What else, what else…OH! My very elderly cat passed away in August after developing a neurological condition…he was 19. Very old boy…that kind of got lost in the whole ‘death of my father/grandmother’/’work is literally a bag of dicks’/’I cant talk anymore’ part of things…but yeh…

Politically? Not much has changed. Last year I lamented that I felt politically homeless with a tory party creeping ever closer towards outright fascism, and a labour party that was essentially promising to just ‘be the tories, but one click back on the evil scale’ This year? Its still much of the same, the tories are now literally just ramming through as much shit as they think they can get away with without causing an outright civil war (basically scoffing down the cookies before they’re pulled away for a spanking) and Labour have somehow become more cuntish and are actually out-torying the tories on some issues.

Theres rumour swirling of a May general election next year. And at this point (as has been the case now for the last couple of years) im basically staring down the barrel of spoiling my ballot on the day unless theres a green candidate…and even then, it would depend on the green candidate…. I cant in good faith vote for any of them. The UK kind of have it easy in some regards with this upcoming election…choosing between a right wing government thats going to fuck us over or a REALLY right wing government thats REALLY going to fuck us over isnt really a complex issue. 

The US by contrast is looking at Trump/Biden round 2…thats…thats a hornets nest I don’t wanna play with. Realistically Biden is the lesser of two evils. But we’re at the stage now in american politics (and UK politics really) where constantly picking the least shit option isnt acceptable anymore. Both the US democrats and UK Labour have rigged their internal systems now to the point that NOONE with a shred of integrity or a slight leftward lean can get anywhere near frontline politics. 

We’re currently in a system where people are voting for politicians who are aware of the public interests. But have ZERO interest in voting in favour of them. We have representatives who now actively not only don’t represent their constituents. But actively work AGAINST them, largely in negative ways for lobbying money. And I don’t know how you fix that because they arnt going to regulate themselves and you better believe they’re going to be co-dependent on the other political parties using fear tactics to keep them in power…so I can only really offer the unconstructive approach of ‘spoil your ballots’ and try to dismantle the system with every opportunity you get. 

We’re now over 11 pages into this ‘end of year’ blog and its been a bit bleak…so I am going to end on the LITERAL SHREDS of light that landed on me this year, Stopping me from going to the nearest bridge and tossing myself off (careful). I hit 1k subscribers at the start of the year! That was a hell of a milestone and I want to thank each and every single person who joined me on the journey so far and supported the channel, you guys have been utterly amazing to me over the years and ‘thank you’ is honestly too small a word. I only hope I continue to improve as time goes by. 

My relationship with my partner has become more sturdy this year than it has been for a good while, after 12 years routines tend to set in, but given all the awfulness thats happened this year, and all the downtime i’ve had, i’ve really had chance to spend a lot more quality time with the missus, and I think we’re in a place thats the best its been in a couple of years at least. I should stress we wernt in a BAD place before hand…but its like we’ve gone from an 8 out of 10 to a 9 out of 10 recently…which has been lovely. 

I had a wonderful day with her at an Aquarium for her birthday, which is a much treasured memory of this year, and one thats really got me through a lot of the harder times. I also achieved the goal I most wanted to do this year, I WENT TO THE BEACH! After 3 years of longing to go back to the seaside, in august, I packed the car up and took the missus and my mum on a daytrip. YES it rained and blew gale force winds for almost the entire time we were there…BUT I DID IT!

Me and the missus have also started the VERY early work of looking to buy a house together. Nothing will be happening till the summer at the absolute earliest…but its a start! We also started work on a project to turn my Dads old tool shed (which…in the nicest possible way…was a rat infested, hoarders shit tip) into a fulyl functional workshop. So far plans have stalled a bit as we keep having electricians bail on the project (we’ve been ghosted now 3 times) but hopefully next year that’ll finally get its grand opening!

And obviously the continued outpouring of everyone around all the awfulness this year has been honestly more helpful to me than words could ever say…SO many people have reached out to check in on me, Trivial Theater in particular needs special thanks, not only for checking in on me almost every day, but for sending me goodies in the mail which honestly made my year. All of you have been so supportive and caring, and it really helped restore some of my faith in humanity…so from the bottom of my heart..thank you. Even small acts of kindness have been immeasurable. You really don’t know the good you guys have done here. 

OH! and because I usually write a little bit about christmas here too…Im writing this now on the 29th of December, having had my christmas vacation split in half (I had from the 15th to the 26th of December off, I was back at work for 3 days, and today was my last day in…im now off again from the 30th till the 10th of January) thanks to another ‘improvement’ from my new boss and management…Christmas 2023 was, i’d say, above average. Given everything thats gone on, my mum and my sister were adamant that this christmas was going to be rather ‘bleak house’ but I went and stopped with them (along with my partner) from the 22nd till the 27th and whenever the mood took a turn, we made a point to try and pull it back. Which we did rather successfully.

In a break from tradition, we decided this year to have Christmas Dinner on Christmas Eve instead of the day itself. Which I actually think worked rather well all things considered. It meant that Christmas Day wasnt quite the mammoth marathon it has been in previous years…everything felt a lot more chilled out, spread out and we could actually enjoy the days more fully…

After last years mini disaster of winding up 3 days before christmas missing MOST of the christmas food, this year me and my partner got onto my mum in late September to start planning now to avoid a repeat of previous years…Which god bless her she did! we had it budgeted and a list made by early November, we started buying bits and pieces in from the first week of December and, barring literally 1 item (a big pork pie) we managed to get ALL our christmas shopping done with 3 days to spare! No fuss, No muss, it was lovely.

So yeh…on the whole, while It was a bit of a brief one (normally I take a full 2 weeks of at christmas and get the full benefit of that weird 23rd December – 31st December ‘No mans land’) This christmas was actually one of the better ones i’ve had, AND it turned out a LOT better than it could have.

And…I think thats about it for 2023. A shit fucking year thats EASILY the worst one i’ve experienced in 15 years (and im including 2009, the year I genuinely considered killing myself in that ranking) It cannot fuck off harder or fast enough, I want nothing more to do with it, and im glad its in the bin.

But what does 2024 bring??? well…At this point my expectations are through the floor quite frankly. I feel like my jobs going to get worse before it gets better. Two HUGE elections with awful outcomes no matter how you square it (varying degrees of pain)…But I do have some positive stuff to look forward to. With a bit of luck, we’ll open the workshop in time for summer. Theres obviously the start of house hunting, which will (hopefully) be fun and not a nightmare. The channel will be back up and running from January which im PROPERLY looking forward to getting back into that…

The summer of 2024 frankly cant be any worse, short of some kind of mass extinction event and more tropical storms…So…theres that…I’d like to try and hit the beach again…but in better weather…and im hoping this year that the channel will continue its upward momentum as we hit 1.2k subs as of a few days ago..so getting to 1.4 or even 1.5 by this time next year would be astounding honestly…

I suppose thats really the mantra im carrying going into 2024…’Lifes what you make it’ im really hoping for smooth sailing (or at least…a calmer year than 2023) but who can honestly say? Personally i’ve craved stability now for the last 2 years…if I can manage that as a base note for 2024…I’ll be happy. 

To 2024, a year of the unknown. I wish you all the best, the safest and the brightest of futures.

  • TYTDan x

The Best of the ‘First Timers’ – 2023

As another year winds down to a close, I decided this year to do something a little bit different. Last year, at the end of the year, I put together a letterboxd list of my ‘Top 10 films I’d seen in 2022 for the first time’. They didnt have to BE films made in 2022, they just had to be movies that, to me; were a first time viewing. And I quite enjoyed the experience honestly. It made for an interesting journey back through my Letterboxd diary list for that year to shortlist out the films i’d watched for the first time, and to see which ones, thanks to the passage of time, had matured into something I’d genuinely enjoyed. 

There were movies i’d loved on the first watch, but had soured over the months since checking them out, by contrast there were films I thought were absolute stinkers for which, the passage of time had actually mellowed my views and given me a new affection towards them. Movies like ‘Flesh for Frankenstein’ and ‘Thriller: A Cruel Picture’ were no brainers, but the likes of ‘SGT. Kabukiman: NYPD’ genuinely caught me off guard! 

So! With 2023 only 2 days away from completion, I thought i’d do it all again and pull up my ‘Top 10 First time watches of 2023’. Frankly; given theres still 2 days left of the year, im a little bit concerned even at this point that I may get one final amazing movie land in my bluray player before the years out…But! We do have to cut these things off at SOME point… Some may surprise, though I reckon anyone who’s been paying attention to my Letterboxd and youtube channel will probably have a pretty easy time guessing which movies made it into this list.

They wont be in any particular order, there isnt really a ‘best film of the year’ situation here (thats not how we roll) Instead, these are just 10 films that left a profound impact on me that I absolutely would recommend you guys, gals and NB sweethearts check out at your next convenience. SO! With that out of the way…

Elvis (2022):

https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/elvis-2022/

Starting things off we have a film that I *very* nearly watched this time last year before life got in the way and it *just* slipped back into the first couple of days of January. ‘Elvis’ was one of the first 4k discs I picked up and I was absolutely blown away by both its lavish and sumptuous attention to visual detail, AND the script itself. Dancing a very fine line between campy TV movie and a visual feast. ‘Elvis’ is probably one of my favourite Baz Luhrmann films to date. A kaleidoscope of golds and reds. 

This truely felt like a film pushing the boundaries of the medium itself (as of 2022) in places, and it made me very excited of what lies in store for us in the coming decades. While it absolutely can be accused of boiling down Elvis to ‘just the basics’, with some moments of the film bordering on ‘Dewey Cox’ levels of simplicity. I found that aspect of the production charming and it only further enhanced the campy elements for me. With it shooting well past the 2 and a half hour mark, it unfortunately wont be one I have time to sink into again in a hurry, which is in fact one of the only bad things I have to say about it. Had it been closer to 90 or even 120 minutes, i’d have been much more likely to rewatch it. But even so, this was a delight. 

Paperhouse:

https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/paperhouse/1/

A film that was recommended to me by a viewer on my youtube channel, i’d vaguely heard of ‘Paperhouse’ before being asked to cover it, but I thought a lot of the promotional work looked a little bit uninspired, so I put it in my ‘to watch’ pile and essentially relegated it to ‘When I have a gap in the schedules’ status. Little did I know that arguably one of the best movies of that season was quite LITERALLY under my nose the entire time, a fact for which I apologise to whoever recommended this one to me for delaying it for so long. 

Paperhouse, from a marketing perspective looks like some kind of drama, maybe with some very light fantasy elements (think ‘Celia’). But if you cut through the promotional materials, theres a much richer complex story being told here, One that strongly reminded me of the works of Guillermo Del Toro’s better offerings…Though miraculously, this one came first. 

A dark and moody fantasy dealing with themes of abandonment, puberty and the ups and downs of life in working class England. ‘Paperhouse’ mixes bleak and gritty cinematography with an abstract fantasy edge to create an end product that Bernard Rose should be VERY proud of. It still blows my mind quite honestly that this thing is trapped on DVD. a 4k release of this film seems like a total no brainer, and I have to assume its caught in some kind of rights limbo because, other than a *slightly* shaky ending, the only other thing I could honestly pick fault with was the DVD presentation starting to show its age. 

Definitely worth checking out if your smitten with young adult-esq fantasy fiction, ‘Paperhouse’ was a film I took for granted, and I regretted doing so every day after watching it.

Beyond the Seventh Door:

https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/beyond-the-seventh-door/

Another totally pleasant surprise for me this year, this one was recommended by friend of the show ‘Triv’ from Trivial Theater, who brought it up during a podcast recording this year as a film she’d recently checked out that she thought i’d really quite like. And she ABSOLUTELY wasnt wrong! 

‘Beyond the Seventh Door’ is a bit of an oddity, a Canadian SOV film that looks and feels like the kind of thing you’d have seen in the 90s as a physical gameshow on TV, such as ‘The Crystal Maze’ or ‘Legends of the Hidden Temple’. 

Its an oddity also in the sense that…for SOV…80’s SOV…It actually looks really bloody good! We have crisp and sharp video footage that feels right around broadcast quality, the set work is superb with spaces that have lots of moving parts, intricate detailing and interesting small details…This is a low/no budget SOV film that features a scene where our main characters have to solve a word puzzle that built into the floor ‘hopscotch’ style, and when they DO solve the puzzle one of the tiles on the floor starts lowering like an elevator. I have seen HUNDREDS of SOV flicks in my time…I’ve never seen one do something like that!

Littered with small references to the place it was filmed in, ‘Beyond the Seventh Door’ is pretty much the best SOV flick i’ve seen this year. And thats not even BEGINNING to mention ‘Lazar Rockwood’ who’s performance here is absolutely insane and only pushed this thing even further up my ‘must see’ list. If you have any good feelings towards SOV cinema at all, this is a must see in my opinion. A short but sweet fun little romp that has genuine passion behind it and hits all the right notes.

Saw X:

https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/saw-x/

Towards the end of this year, I finally decided to plug a big gap in my horror knowledge and took the plunge in checking out the ‘Saw’ franchise. Part of this was down to the fact i’d only ever previously seen ‘Saw’ 1 and 2. Part of it was down to the fact that Shudder announced they would be streaming the first 7 films on their platform…and I figured at £4-5 for a months subscription, this would probably be the cheapest way to catch all of them, short of doing naughty torrents or paying £25-£45 for the privilege of a boxset. 

‘Saw X’ is the latest entry in the franchise (coming out this year no less!) and it isnt so much what this film DOES, but rather what it DOESNT do…Set in between ‘Saw’ 1 and 2, ‘X’ breaks from the formula, doing the one thing i’d wished ALL these ‘Saw’ films had done in the first place. It tells a largely self contained story, in an interesting way that prioritizes character development over gory visuals. 

This isnt a film where you need to remember the ‘lore’ of 8 other movies for it to make sense, and it isnt trying to essentially be a glorified ‘snuff’ film as the latter entries in this franchise ultimately ended up. ‘Saw X’ gives Jigsaw and Amanda a LOT more room to explore there own morals, hang ups and humanity. In such a way that NON of the other ‘Saw’ films have really bothered with. Its script is razor in it’s execution, flexing wildly between getting us to sympathise with Tobin Bells character, who ultimately believes that what he’s doing is morally sound. While not failing to remind us that he IS ALSO responsible (directly or indirectly) for multiple people now missing limbs or not being alive anymore. 

Thats not to downplay the kills in this film either however which are some of the series best, with over the top gory slayings that dance a VERY fine line between being quite campy in there execution and downright unsettling. 

With rock solid performances, some fantastic camera work, the sharpest script the franchise has had in *at least* 15 if not 20 years, and a score that felt oppressive and perfectly timed. ‘Saw X’ left a solid impression on me that didnt leave for quite a while, I almost feel bad I didnt get to catch this one in theaters. 

Idiocracy:

https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/idiocracy/

Another one that I’d put off for years through a mixture of split opinions on what its trying to communicate, AND the shocking fact that this thing hasnt yet made the jump to HD. I caught ‘Idiocracy’ with my partner over the summer for the first time, and while it’s now seen as fairly trite to say this film was supposed to be a warning, not a documentary. I couldnt help but laugh in a somewhat worried way at just how many things mentioned in this film could, entirely realistically, happen in the real world in the very near future. 

I appreciate that, by the time I have gotten to this film, the moment for it has well and truely passed. But as someone who went into this thing only knowing the absolute barest of plot points (a guy gets frozen in the early 2000’s and wakes up in the far FAR future in which humanity has almost entirely out bred and outpriced the intelligent from the planet and created a ‘coddled’ version of society that doesnt know why things are the way they are, but wont question it either) I honestly just found it quite funny. Yes its a bit sneering in places, yes it does dabble in Eugenics talk in places (largely the first act) but once it gets underway and it boils down to ‘average intelligence guy is basically the only ‘Einstein’ on a planet of idiots’, It falls into Mike Judges specialty area. Dumb humour. And from that point on, its just gut buster after gut buster for me. 

Its a largely professional end product as well, which was a nice surprise. Given the budget and how easy it would have been to just turn this into a cheap and nasty ‘dumb people be dumb’ movie. It DOES at least attempt to add a bit more complexity and scathing commentary on society into the mix to bring it up to the next level. I think it’ll be interesting to see how this film ages over the NEXT 20 years…because if the 20 or so years between this film and now has made it feel THIS close to reality. Lord knows where the next 20 will take us. It’s not for everyone, but I personally had quite the soft spot for it.

Deadstream:

https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/deadstream/

A genuinely pleasant surprise to stumble on, I found ‘Deadstream’ literally at random one night while flicking around on Shudder looking for something to kill 90 or so minutes, normally I don’t tend to watch ‘Shudder Originals’ as my past experience with them hasnt been the best. But the marketing made this sound like it was some kind of ‘found footage’ horror film about a social media influencer livestreaming his time in a haunted house for clicks…and that sounded kind of neat for me…well…neat enough to take a 90 minute gamble on it. 

Then the comedy hit, and I totally fell in love with it. Comparisons to ‘Evil Dead 2’ are kind of obvious with this one, I honestly wasnt expecting this to be a horror comedy, and a GOOD horror comedy at that! Its all presented as if your watching a livestream take place, and while some of the plot points are a *little* bit dubious (our main character has half a dozen ‘go pro’ esq cameras that he sets up around the haunted house that he can control, cut to and generally use at ANY time with NO interruption thats simultaneously able to be controlled by an Ipad, BUT ALSO has a wireless direct feedline to whatever software hes using to stream…thats a big mental leap for me to make honestly) 

In some ways, the simplicity of the execution is kind of what draws me to it, I feel like had this been a much more polished affair, it wouldnt have the charm. Its that rough and ready, rogueish element that really quite won me over. Our lead character is charismatic, has a deep history that gets pooled into across the runtime leading to a nice slowburn release about his character. 

Most importantly, its a movie trying to be a livestream, that ACTUALLY feels like a live stream! Which an astonishing number of movies really quite fail to achieve (its a similar problem that plagues scenes where actors play video games in movies…either they don’t look like they’re *Really* playing the game or the game looks less like a game, and more like an animation…

In either case, Deadstream is a big goofy and surprisingly well made feature that I feel would pair wonderfully with something like ‘The WNUF Halloween Special’ and is absolutely worth your time.

Django Unchained:

https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/django-unchained/

I can often be accused of being ‘late to the party’ on some movies. In many ways I prefer it that way because it means I rarely get swept up in the ‘hype’ that often comes with new releases. But it does then have the negative consequence of having to find the time to play catch up with the rest of the world. 

This year, I decided I wanted to try and plug a gap in my Quentin Tarantino knowledge, at the start of the year i’d seen just under half of his movies, and (broadly speaking) I do have a soft spot for his work. ‘Resevoir Dogs’ and the ‘Kill Bill’ movies did a wonderful bit of upcycling in taking awesome moments from B-picture exploitation flicks and transplanting them into larger budgeted, studio driven productions…Part of me kind of resents that because I feel it downplays the importance of the cult source material…but then…part of me knows had he not ripped off a ton of exploitation pictures, audiences likely would have never appreciated them, or even known they existed…

My Tarantino gap was really everything after ‘Kill Bill Volume 2’, I’d seen ‘The Hateful 8’ but that was about it. So…as you can imagine, when I found out that Tarantino had gone MASSIVELY grander in his visions for his films post 90s…I quickly got quite invested. And by the time I got to ‘Django: Unchained’ well I just about lost my damn mind frankly. 

Doing what he did with asian cinema, and the cult B-pictures of the drive in ‘Django’ takes the exploitation era spaghetti westerns and pulps them into a 2+hour long visual feast, arguably not just one of his best movies, but one of the greatest westerns of the 21st century (which…being honest, isnt THAT hard of an achievement…but it sounds cool…so im going to roll with it)

An Acidic anti racist script laced with scathing commentary on American culture and slavery. Django is unflinching in what it sets out to do, and it does what it sets out to do really bloody well. 

With rich colourful visuals, an astoundingly powerful script, some of the strongest direction Tarantinos ever committed to film and a score that makes my hair stand up on end. Im getting to a point in life where I feel like I could say ‘Django’ is my favourite Tarantino film. Its almost certainly a peak for him as a creator that he hasnt *quite* managed to scale again since. But if you only catch one of his movies. This or ‘Reservoir Dogs’ are essentials. 

It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World:

https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/its-a-mad-mad-mad-mad-world/

Making it onto the list by literal DAYS. It was a total accident that I wound up catching ‘Its a Mad Mad Mad Mad World’. I decided while on my Christmas Vacation that now would be a time to try and sink all the 2+ hour movies I had because I really don’t have the time to watch anything that long (or longer) while im working. This had been near the top of my ‘To watch’ list for a while, so I gave it a chance and didnt regret it for a second. 

Essentially, it feels like the film makers got their hands on a list of every US comedian or entertainer from 1930 to the present day of 1963 who wasnt dead, called them and asked if they’d be interested in starring in a movie…and seemingly most of them said ‘Sure!’ 

Its SO densely packed with now LEGENDARY comedians you barely get a second to catch your breath before the next madcap scene is taking place. Its a non stop barrage of every single type of comedy you’d care to think of. And while I cant say there was much in the way of total gut busting laughs. It did have a consistently good hit rate for jokes, enough to keep you smiling and chuckling from beginning to end. 

Everyone involved seems to know the tone this thing is working towards, Everyone seems to be having a really good time on set, the direction and cine are astounding for the time with grand comedic set pieces looking utterly effortless for the most part, the script is damn near perfect, the scoring perfeclty suited and highly memorable. This things slow burn, but very VERY rewarding. By the time the end credits came around, I knew i’d just sat through something quite special and I really cant wait till I next get an opportunity to watch it again. 

Barbie:

https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/barbie/

‘Barbie’ was arguably my most anticipated release of the year, i’d been ready and waiting for it from the moment the very first ‘early preview’ trailer for it launched back in 2022, based on that trailer and the handful of set photos that had come out around it, I knew that there was something special going on behind the scenes with this one, and I absolutely was NOT disappointed. 

They really don’t make movies like ‘Barbie’ anymore, an ultra colourful, seemingly harmless on the surface big dumb adventure comedy movie, the last time this kind of thing had a resurgence was in the 80s with films like ‘The Goonies’ or ‘Pee Wees Big adventure’ only…those films were ONLY really there to entertain. ‘Barbie’ has an added layer to it, which is beyond the bubblegum pop aesthetic and ‘head emptiness, is an acidically self aware script that directly attacks toxic masculinity, attempts to teach progressive feminism in basic terms both to a very young audience or to people who may not entirely understand the fundamentals and not only does it shine a light on those traits, it inverts them, inviting men to question their own flaws and women to question the very purpose of their own personal existence. 

Traditionally; if I go to see a film in theaters, i’ll go once and then pick up the bluray/4k if I really liked it. I went to see Barbie twice in theaters, bought the streamable copy as soon as it became available and as of the time of writing I have the 4k release winging its way to my doorstep courtesy of Amazon. 

Its a truely astounding work of our time that not only something like this would be released internationally, but that TWO major companies would have greenlit this given the film attacks those companies as ‘part of the problem’ amongst its many MANY other axes to grind. Im still kind of in shock the film got made at all letalone released, and its a testimony to it’s uniqueness in a sea of ‘Marvels’ and ‘Star Wars-es…’ that this became one of the highest grossing films of the year. A title I feel it rightfully earned. 

While I will admit, sometimes it can get a little heavy handed on its messaging, i’d also suggest that…some people need that level of detail BECAUSE this kind of content is so alien to them. It can be a bit patronizing to people who get it, but the fact it boils things down to SUCH a simple level that even kids can understand it, I thought was honestly quite wonderful. 

I was sold on the aesthetic of this thing before it even hit theaters, but to be hit with SUCH an ‘out of left field’ revelation that this film was smart, and wanted YOU to know it was smart…was the thing that absolutely made me fall in love with it. 

Easily my favourite film released this year, My only concern now is the glut of ‘sanitized’ movies that’ll be coming in 2025 trying to do what ‘Barbie’ did, but in a safer…more studio friendly way…*sigh* ah well…the world probably needed a ‘Hot Wheels’ Movie that deals with gentrification anyway…

Dr. Caligari:

https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/dr-caligari/

And last, but certainly not least. We have ‘Dr. Caligari’ probably my most anticipated purchase of this year, I nabbed it from Mondo Macabre last Halloween and it arrived just in time for me to include it in my youtube channel, where it (quite rightfully) took the season finale slot. 

Its an 80s neu wave explosion in a paint factory of a movie thats *suggested* to be a sequel to the german expressionist film (maybe even a remake) but realistically…shares a name and a couple of plot beats, but not much else. And I absolutely adored it. The mashing up of the german expressionist movement and the 80s new wave movement was a totally inspired decision, the film looks unique, handmade and fairly lavish given the minimal set scenery (most of this takes place in a void with bizarre props and set pieces in the foreground) 

The script is nuttier than fruit cake, but has a lot to say about the medical industry of the US, the characters are all eccentric, over the top, camp tastic and utterly delightful to be around. The direction is very considered with a rock solid edit, razor cine and scripting and a killer score. This is everything I want out of an art house movie and more, and it’s really put me on to Stephen Sayadian in a big way (my kingdom for ‘Nightdreams 4k’ 

Its just such a delight to sit through honestly, with not a single dull moment, I utterly loved this movie. And with news that ‘Cafe Flesh’ is also making its way to 4k in 2024. All I can say is…I look forward to talking about Sayadians work again this time next year.

Partially Reformed Content #5 (More than) (Over) One Year On…

Well! It’s that time of year again when I remember I have a blog section on my website and curse myself, yet again for promising to be more regular, then completely failing to be regular. I wouldnt mind quite so much, but I initially planned to make this a christmas blog, then it became an end of year blog, then it became a “New year” blog and now as it’s the week of my birthday, it’s kind of just a “This is a special time of year, I havent updated in a while. So I better do an update of some kind” blog. Happy whatever! Lets get started.

So my last blog was September 2021 and things were ticking over at that time, but what happened in the the mysterious gap between then and now? Well…in some ways, a lot. In others…not so much. I suppose it makes sense to break it down into sections rather than go through the year as…well, that’ll get a bit messy. SO! With that in mind, im drinking Amaretto…lets go!

Youtube:

Kicking things off, the channel continues to go from strength to strength. 2022 was a HELL of a year online in almost every possible way, for a starters this really was the year where my friendships and relationships with my fellow creators really flourished. I made quite a few appearances on other channels and podcasts, which was an absolute blast. We produced 40 reviews for the channel, We started uploading in 4k for the first time plus we nailed a TON of commentaries (which also got a 1080p boost) AND at least one or two special documentaries…Oh AND in the last few days of December 2022 we hit 1000 subscribers after roughly 5 and a half years of uploading content and over 6 years of the channels existence. 

Honestly, even after a few weeks to get over it, im still kind of lost for words, Waaaay back in 2017 when I first started uploading content, I only set myself 3 goals:

*To inform, entertain and educate while being fair

*To hit 100 subscribers

*And to hit 1000 subscribers. 

Its a weird feeling to be here at this point now, I genuinely and sincerely never thought i’d get here, I figured youtube would terminate the channel before i’d get there or i’d just stay small forever honestly. I appreciate i’ve been going on about it now for a while, so Im hoping this is the last time I get to say it, but THANK YOU to everyone who’s supported me over the years, commented, shared my videos and helped support me, even at my lowest points the comments and kind words you guys have left have been honest to god lifechanging. It makes me think, if one person can enjoy what I have to say, maybe I should keep going. So thank you for that.

At the same time however, I do kind of feel a bit of a sense of loss. Like a dog chasing a garbage truck, i’ve spent the last 3 years at least searching for my white whale, and now I have it harpooned and mounted on my mantle (I have a big mantle) I honestly don’t really know where to go from here…the next number in my head that I’d consider a recognisable milestone would be 5k, which im not hitting anytime soon. So im left with a bit of a calmness that im not really used to. 

Where do I go from here? Well, im working on the new season as we speak. Thats taking up quite a bit of my time. It’ll be a little while till I hit 2k subs, im just over halfway towards getting the watch time I need to get into the partner programme…but other than the ability to directly contact someone at youtube, at this point the monetisation isnt really worth it…that and I don’t think they’ll even have me on the programme…so theres no point in shoooting for that…I dunno..I suppose all I can keep doing is meeting my deadlines, getting the weeklies out and continuing to enjoy my time with all the cool COOL people i’ve had the pleasure of hanging with recently.

Other Online Shenanigans:

While the channel has been going from strength to strength, I feel its also kind of appropriate to quickly run through a few other changes that have been happening both on the channel and on the wider internet. Some good! Some…not quite so good.

First and foremost! I started using Letterboxd properly! I set an account up at some point in 2021, but completely forgot it existed/couldnt be bothered with it until around Summertime in 2022, when I figured I might as well give it a go. I’ve REALLY enjoyed it! While I don’t go anywhere NEAR as in depth as my actual video reviews. It’s a really great place to just get immediate first impressions nailed down (AND a good excuse to post the transcripts of my video reviews online in text form from time to time) I post under the same name as my youtube channel, so if your on there and want EVEN MORE reviews from me EVEN MORE often. Then yeh, head over there and drop me a follow. Im currently in the midst of a first time watch through of the original “Twilight Zone” and im ranking them on there at the minute alongside the occasional film when I can get round to it. 

On the less so good news. 2022 marked the start of an indefinite hiatus for “The Comedy Dining Experience” which was a bit of a blow. When we first started the show, me and Ben would record whenever we had availability and it was a bit of an odd treat to sit down and take apart a movie, have a laugh, eat some good food and drink some good drinks. At some point around 2019 we swapped to monthly uploads and the party continued from there. We had guests on, we started to cover TV and PIF’s. It was a good time. 

Unfortunately though, a few things have come up that makes it increasingly difficult to get together to record. Around late 2021, Ben found himself in a new role at his job, which made his availability VERY fragmented. The amount of editing the commentaries were taking was getting longer and longer each time, to the point that I was spending almost as much time editing the commentaries as I was editing full feature reviews (I originally started the Comedy Dining Experience as a quick and easy way to get longer form content up on the channel when I didnt have time to edit full blown reviews). 

Which wouldnt be a problem if it wasnt for the fact that the commentaries were ALSO getting significantly less views than my fully edited videos. If a weekly review gets 60 views in a week, a comedy dining experience episode would get 15. The Comedy Dining experience was always put out more for the love of doing it than the reception it got. But it got to a point where I just couldnt justify sitting editing non stop for 5-8 hours (not including actually prescreening the film, or the recording time itself both of which could easily add anywhere between 4 hours and 7 and a half hours depending on the movie)    

For a time, recording the commentaries online seemed like a sensible solution as we could do it whenever we were both free, we didnt have to arrange travel and it allowed for much easier editing as we had separate audio tracks to work with. But due to spotty internet and varying kit quality, sessions could become a little frustrating (try recording a commentary for 2 hours and then having the film reset randomly because of an internet issue AND the audio go AWOL because our recorders crashed) Ben equally didnt seem as keen on online recordings as in person ones, I cant speak for him, but I think he preferred being in the room with me over talking to a blank screen. I

In either case, Availability for recording time for the commentaries started to get thinner and thinner as 2022 went on and it kind of got to a point where we both ultimately ended up too busy to organise getting together to record more. As such, our last commentary was recorded in the Summer of 2022. It was part 2 of our “Drug stories” series, it was released around September 2022 and an edited version combining parts 1 and 2 is releasing late in January 2023. This does rather raise the question; Whats going to happen to “The Comedy Dining Experience”? 

Well…The honest answer is, I don’t know. At the time of writing, Bens still incredibly busy on his end, Works got me by the balls (more on that later) and at this point the only thing I can say with any certainty is, I don’t think we’ll be going back to monthlies any time soon. I can tell you what i’d like to happen with the show going forward. I think it would be nice to maybe treat them more as “Specials” that happen throughout the year that  occupy the times when im “off air” with the main reviews (I figure maybe 2 or 4 in the summer when im on a break, 1 or 2 when im off during January and maybe another 1 or two randomly dropped in across the year if we get time) But at this point…I cant honestly say. I can tell you with relative confidence that “Drug stories part 2” wont be our last episode (we AT LEAST will be finishing the classic bond run at some point) I just couldnt tell you when our next one will be. So if you are one of the 15 people who support the Comedy Dining Experience…this isnt good bye, this is GREAT bye. 

This of course did somewhat create a bit of a scheduling black hole for the channel. Mercifully, around that time, Triv from Trivial Theater invited me to help her co-host a couple of live streams she was planning (a games night and a commentary) and seeing how easy and fun it was to do, it got me into it! We now host (at least) one monthly “games night” stream on both of our channels where we shoot the shit, have a bit of a laugh, hang with the audience and just have some fun. It’s a decent time! And a really fun way to let off some steam at the end of a busy week! Its so much fun to connect with people who watch the show or who have similar outlooks and want to just chill and chat. I’ve really gotten into it! Not to mention it’s SIGNIFICANTLY easier on the editing front (basically whats broadcast, is broadcast…no edits necessary) Which leads me onto my final piece of news.

We opened a discord this year! For those unfamiliar with it, Discord is a bit like the old message boards of yesteryear, the only difference is theyre a bit more curated and built a bit like an instant messenger than the old way of forum posts. I put off opening one for ages through fear of it not really bringing anyone in, but we’ve built a rather small but brilliant community over the last few months, on there we talk about a wide variety of things, from music and film to strange youtube videos,ongoing movie sales and discussion around the channel. We host watchalongs periodically AND it’s the base for our games night streams. So if you ever want to join in live on our games nights, or just hang out, share some music and talk about the subtleties of “Nukie” be sure to head over to our Discord and introduce yourself! We’d love to have you aboard! 

Work: 

Outside of the internet, probably the most hectic thing going on in my life at the minute is my work life, it’s the thing thats eating up most of my time and causing me the most frustration…and it hasnt always strictly been this way. When I last blogged Work was a bit turbulent, but was ultimately manageable. I cant go into too much detail about what I do, but at the time of writing in my previous blog I was working in global communications and it was kind of a “wavey” time for lack of a better word. Sometimes it would be quiet and very pleasant, other times it could be very intense and a bit overbearing. But I was being paid an alright amount of money, the team I was in was both supportive and decent and most importantly, I was part of a respected area of a larger business who were noted for their excellence. It was never perfect, but it was a fantastic position to be in.

Well, less than a month after that blog was published I was informed by management that they wanted to move my skills to a new area within the team, rather than working in global communications, they wanted me to take a look at improving their current global training processes. I had been working on several optimisation projects that had gone quite successfully and they basically wanted to apply what i’d done to their training portfolio to see if I could improve it any. 

What followed was a period of around 8 months that I (at the time) playfully described as “Stepping on landmines” the process I inherited was fairly straightforward on the surface but LITTERED with idiosyncrasies that basically meant that unless every single item submitted to us was scrutinized intensely and heavily there was a constant risk of things going very VERY wrong very VERY quickly. We would regularly get requests that would be like “This item of training can only be delivered on the 3rd and 4th week of any given month, and only on mondays or wednesdays, but maybe sometimes on tuesdays after 2pm if staff are available. Unless its a monday in an odd numbered month in which case it needs to follow a completely different set of guidance, and if you don’t follow this exactly for the next 18 months the whole thing is going to go to shit” You’ve got to imagine, as a newcomer to the area…having to deal with half a dozen to 2 dozen live examples of that kind of bollocks on a near continuous basis was stressful and made me feel quite uncomfortable.

Not helping matters, my boss at the time didnt want me to do any changes or optimisation to the process unless I could demonstrate that I was competent in the field. Not a particularly unreasonable request. But when I was pulled in specifically to optimise the process, spending 8 months having to deal with the mine field was beyond difficult for me to stick with. In fact I spent most of October ‘21 to May ‘22 quite unhappy with the situation, while also being continually pushed to stick at it.

Then, around May/June 2022 the boss finally let me get onto improving things, and between then and October ‘22 we really went from strength to strength. There was still the occasional issue here and there, but for the most part, I kind of hit a level of serenity. If something had been bothering me, I just improved it, binned it or reworked it to make it as least painful as possible. It was an intense 4 and a half months or so. But we moved mountains in that time and really made a difference. It was a nice feeling. 

It actually kind of upsets me to note that this was only a very narrow window. The company that I work for was rocked with several issues through October of 2022. First and foremost was a large dip in the stock market and the second was the impending cost of living crisis. After consultation with the companies shareholders. It was decided reorganisation and restructuring was required in order to streamline the company as much as possible and to maximise profits to the shareholders. 

As a result, the area of the business I worked for was dissolved, my boss was unceremoniously made redundant and our award winning team was essentially dissolved and split up to be merged in with other teams. I found myself moving from a team of 7 down to a team of 2 (myself and one other member of my team) with a first time manager and almost no sympathy for the situation and the best we could be told about our futures was that “we were safe…for now.” and between late October ‘22 and the present day, well…it’s been unpleasant. Thats probably the best way I can describe it. 

The new management are surveillance types who have a VERY specific way of running things and frankly, I don’t feel comfortable in my skin. I’ve gone from a job where I was a key recognised player in my field, with the freedom to work on and develop projects freely, to have open collaboration with other teams and the freedom to be flexible on appointments and meetings (basically only attending things that I felt NEEDED my attention) to a role where I don’t get to do project work, where im being called on randomly at no notice to run around like a headless chicken for missions to make the boss look good (and thats it) told what to do constantly, often with little to no notice and constant monitoring. Where changes are happening weekly with little to no notice and no consultation either and im being forced into unecessary meetings that add no value to my day. Essentially; I’ve gone from a job where I was leading active change, to a  job where I have no certainty, no security and no choice in the matter. It sucks. 

Now, at this point it could be an idea to consider a career change. At the end of the day, whether the job was pleasant previously doesnt matter, its crap now…so getting out makes sense right? Well…it’s complicated. Y’see, the company I work for have an initiative for employees in which they can offer up some of their monthly salary and get it converted into shares in the company. They do 3 or 5 year stints and basically when your times up, you can either close your account and take whatever pot you have, or you can claim in back as shares meaning when the price is good, you can offer them up and not only get your cash back, but a tidy profit too. 

Well…Im currently in one of those, its set to expire relatively soon. And I don’t want to miss out on that “tidy profit” part of the deal. So regardless of my feelings on the issue. I’ve basically got to play nice for the next few months at least and hope I don’t get fired/let go between now and the tail end of THIS year. I also want to AT LEAST make it to June of this year without incident as that’ll be my 5th anniversary with the company which would also mark the longest job i’ve ever held down. Which given how turbulent everything is, is very much easier said than done. Basically, im asking for your thoughts and prayers on this one until at least around October time. After that I should be in the clear no matter what happens. 

At this point, Work is probably the most stressful, difficult part of my life. Which wouldnt be *so* bad if I wasnt stuck there 5 days a week for 7 hours a day. I really REALLY hope it improves because this is the first time in around 5 years that I’ve felt properly *pit of my stomach* unhappy at this place, a feeling I didnt think I’d feel again after my last job ended up hyper toxic and I left by any means necessary to get away from it. But here we are. Hopefully by this time next year when I do another blog there’ll be good news either way on this front. 

Home Life:

My home life over the last year and a bit has best been described as a mixed bag. Since my last blog I’ve had 2 christmases. Christmas 2021 which I would consider one of the best christmases i’ve ever had, and one of the most peaceful and relaxing ones to date. And Christmas 2022 which was pretty much a split room, with everything leading up to christmas being an anxiety ridden stressful and awkward time generally, and everything christmas day through to new years being surprisingly relaxing and “enjoyable enough.” So kind of meh and a bit underwhelming all things told.

I bring that up initially because I think it’s the best doorway to sum up where things are on the home front, for most of 2022 things have been kind of sort of okay, but in decline. On the downsides, both my Dad and my Mums physical health has deteriorated quite badly in the last 12 months. My dads not been the healthiest person in the world for a VERY long time now. And for most of 2022 he’s slowly gotten worse, his speech has deteriorated, he’s been falling over (a LOT) and he just seems constantly out of sorts. Which is very disheartening to say the least, my mums also having a few health issues and over christmas this year, at her job, a large number of unexpected absences due to covid basically left her on the line for 3 staff members workloads AND her own right up to more or less Christmas day. 

How does this tie into me? Well…apart from it being a rather unfortunate situation, it also meant that pretty much the entirety of my families christmas this year fell to me and my partner to sort out. We spend 3 days with my folks over christmas and despite repeated warnings against it as early as October this year, because of the health and job issues mentioned above, my family decided to “Put it all on red” and tried to go entirely for an “online” christmas this year, they ordered all the food, all the presents, the decorations…pretty much everything online. Aaaaand as predicted by me and my partner, on the 22nd of December we got a phone call off them panicked because all their decorations had been delayed due to postal strikes and *almost* all of their online food shopping had either been substituted for items that didnt cut the mustard, or were refunded due to being out of stock entirely. It meant that basically for most of the time between the 16th and 21st of December I was helping to sort mine and my partners christmas stuff out, then the 22nd right up to 11pm on the 24th of December me and my partner were basically on all day hunts for everything from christmas lights to sprouts.

We did it, just about. But it meant ultimately everyone at my place over christmas was either exhausted, unhappy, irritable, or a combination of the three. We shalnt be doing it again this christmas…I can guarantee that. 

BUT! This year wasnt purely a year in decline on the home front! It was actually a pretty good year for my partner, who after years of various mental health issues and a severe case of “not wanting to be alive anymore” was actually fully and formally diagnosed with EXACTLY what it is thats been causing her severe issues over the last 17 years or so. Shes receiving medication now and we’re hoping for some further treatments across 2023. Shes seen a MASSIVE quality of life change, and while we’re FAR from being out of the woods on that front and there still very much is a struggle. Shes at least feeling and functioning day to day better than she has in years. 

Its a kind of a given that with drastic changes on that front that there would be a little bit of tension here and there while things settle into a new routine, but it’s really given her a new lease of life and made things a lot stronger for it. 

Outside of the above however, lifes been pretty quiet on the home front. With the pandemic still raging (We’re apparently at the ‘Oh get over yourself’ stage of it now as hundreds continue to be hospitalised and die daily from it and China is staring down the barrel of a predicted 6-8 million deaths incoming) I’ve not really been up to all that much other than online stuff, going for the occasional walk (it’s good to touch grass sometimes) and at a VERY rare push, a trip to the cinema if I can find an empty enough screening. 

Part of me hopes that things will pick up over the next couple of years…part of me thinks it’s all about to kick off again…only time will tell. As for how things are right now. I find myself in a tremendously serine place honestly…like, where I am, for better or worse Im happy and comfortable. And have the means around me to remain so for a while yet *hopefully*

Technofear:

The only other thing really thats happened on the home front since the last blog is that 2022 really was kind of the year of the upgrade. With an impending recession/financial crash/technocratic dystopia on the horizon. I figured now would be the best time to upgrade as much of my regular kit as possible because, well…after the year thats just gone. Theres a distinct feeling of uncertainty in the air, and I’d rather tackle that with kit thats as up to date as possible, than go into a recession and potentially see the prices spike (or production slow) to such a point that I lose the chance to upgrade for the better part of another 3-5 years (being GENEROUS) 

So! To that end, I upgraded my TV, jumping from a 50 inch 1080p set I bought in 2019 to a 55 inch 4k bastard that can cut glass, I FINALLY retired my old PS4 after 6-7 years service, it made a noise like it was taking off and the controllers battery life was *roughly* 35 seconds on a full charge, but replacing it was a proper dedicated 4k bluray player, and a region free one at that! So importing movies? Not a problem anymore! This was the year I also finally took the opportunity to refresh my desktop. Which was a particularly sentimental moment. 

I’ve had a bit of an iffy relationship with computers for most of my life. The first computer I had was  LONG out of date and heavily used windows machine that was basically good for word processing and MAYBE playing the occasional CD on a good day if the planets were aligned. I was with Microsoft for the longest time, mainly on desktops for most of the 90s and 2000’s before finally moving on to using laptops around the mid to late 2000’s and almost every single ONE of them was absolute dogshit in terms of capabilities. The absolute worst being a 2007 Medion laptop I was gifted 2nd hand in 2010 which lasted (approximately) 12 months before it basically became impossible to use. When powering on, it sounded like an exploding jet engine. The boot up took AT LEAST 20 minutes. Long enough to go for a shower, make a cup of tea and have a good long stare at a wall. After about 3 months in university, random keys on the keyboard stopped working, meaning I had to copy and paste letters I was missing for a time and use “l33t” shortcuts where possible (My ‘I’, ‘O’ and ‘T keys all stopped working) it couldnt connect to external hardware (even when plugged in) it had to be wired in for internet access because the wifi card died, and after about 1 hour of solid use it would start making an alarm sound that was piercing before switching off for (at minimum) 15 minutes because it had overheated. But! I had no money at the time…so it was basically the best I could do (fuck using the university library computers) 

The reason I detoured so hard there was because it leads me to my actual point. Which was that as soon as I started to make actual money…like…money where I could actually go and buy things and DIDNT need to immediately spend it on rent/bills/food. The first thing I wanted was a reliable machine that WASNT absolute dogshit. So I saved solidly for around 7 months and picked up an imac. It was a 2013 model, at the time it was a decent little runner. I didnt go fancy with the customisations, but it was more than enough for what I needed it for. I used that imac for 7 years solid, battering it pretty much every day with everything from complex edits to live recordings and everything in between. And after 7 years of VERY heavy use, it still ran pretty decently. I mean…it was slow compared of the machines of today, edits would take over an hour to export for full reviews (and anywhere between 4-6 hours for commentaries) but; it worked. There was nothing fundamentally wrong with it. It just started to show its age a bit on what it *was* capable of. 

Which was why, this year, I decided to retire it. In part because of the above mentioned oncoming dystopia, and in part because I won a competition where the prize was £350 of apple store vouchers. SO! I grabbed one of the newest apple mac studios, and a decent 4k monitor to match, it BLOWS past edits. It can turn out fully cut reviews in under 25 minutes in 4k and it can do commentaries in as little as 45 minutes. I also grabbed a full license for Da Vinci resolve in the process. So barring incident or accident, I should in theory be set up now for the next 7 to 10 with a bit of luck. 

The last of the upgrades came over christmas when I decided to grab a new bed (I went for an ottoman bed, SO much more storage!!!) and I finally decided to retire my old 2nd monitor, which was a very temperamental 720p TV/DVD player combi machine that my sister gave me, free of charge which she herself had had since 2014. I swapped up to a huawei 1080p slim monitor that has MORE than done the job so far! As it stands I probably wont need to update anything else now until the end of the decade…which is a surprisingly nice feeling.

Politics:

Lets not go there shall we? I’ve never been a fan of saying “They’re all as bad as each other” but at this point, there isnt even a hint of one of the main parties pulling ahead on taste or decency, we’re burning through PM’s at a rate that could be registered in MPH, The bloody Queens Bloody dead, the conservatives are basically on death row and trying to rince the public purse as fast and diligently as a fat cat scarfing down as much of the christmas turkey as it physically can scarf before the family find it and eject it from the house via a boot to the arse from a 2nd story window. And the best the opposition can do is try and be as close ideologically to the conservatives as possible while occasionally somehow managing to out-Tory the tories. 

Theres a general election on the horizon (at some point in the next 12-18 months) and I literally have no idea who Im going to vote for at this time. In my area theres never really ‘Green party’ representation, not that im particularly pleased with them housing transphobes. But they’d be the ones i’d feel most confident going for given the current shower. Instead; in my area the representation will no doubt be: A Tory, Labour, Lib dem, UKIP, Reform UK and a smattering of independents who range from “Britain first” supporters to absolute loonatics who want to bring back public square executions or ban radio broadcasting because it turns people gay. 

Generally; when general elections come up, I’ll factor two things in, who is my local representative and who is my national representative. If I don’t like the national rep, i’ll vote on behalf of the local candidate and vice versa. In this election NON of the national candidates are suitable and while the local ones havent been confirmed yet, all the people who ARE currently listed as being the local reps for their respective parties are the same ones who ran at the 2019 election. And they were pretty much all a shower of shite as well. 

So at this point, im genuinely staring down a rather desolate barrel of either voting (somewhat reluctantly) for the greens (IF they bother to field a candidate in my area) OR spoiling my ballot (which is currently my most likely option) The only certainty in all of this, is that no good can come of this, and the next few years are going to be fairly interesting if you have to interact with it. 

Wrap up (predictions):

SO! Thats everything thats been going on in my world for the last 12-18 months. In some regards it’s been a pretty mundane run. I havent really gone anywhere, I havent really done anything and outside the world seems to have all but gone mad and collapsed. Into civil unrest and war. 2022 was a bit of a mixed year for me, with the opening half starting mixed to positive, moving to pretty much the perfect balance by the middle of the year, before slowly declining into stress and absurdity into the new year. 2023 almost seems like the mirror of this, starting, at first peacefully before getting a stress sledgehammer to the nards when I returned to work…Who knows how this year is going to turn out? Honestly, at this point? I havent a fucking clue. From where im sitting, 12 months from now I could be in a completely different situation, discussing completely different topics and non of this will matter. Equally I could be here 12 months from now saying everything stayed the same. 

Whatever 2023 brings, the only certainty is uncertainty, but…I hope that regardless of what happens…That both you and I find ourselves in the places we need to be, doing what we need to do and enjoying what time and freedoms we have while we have them. The one thing thats been on my mind now for the last few months is, this summer, I’d like to visit a beach. I havent been to the seaside in well over 2 and a half years at this point. I miss the sea. I miss the sand, I miss the change of scenery. Im hoping this summer to correct that. 

Whatever your hopes are for this year, go for it, start today if you can, and you’ll almost certainly succeed. A belated Happy new year to you all and, see you on the other side.

Dan.

Partially Reformed Content #4 – (Over) one year on.

Its been a while. Just over a year or so in fact since my last blog (whats a couple of months between friends eh?) The honest answer is I promised I was going to try and do at least quarterly blogs after publishing the last one. I wrote at least a couple around the renovation project I had on at the time involving my work room. But despite writing at least 3 different versions of the same blog none of them really felt suitable for the blog or interesting “Man decorates room” could be fun. but it just didn’t really sit right with me. Then life gets in the way (as it often does) and because I spent so long writing those blogs that never got published I was left with the feeling that I’d only recently updated the blog (even though I hadn’t) so I decided to focus on Channel stuff over updating the website. 

Then I forgot the blog existed entirely at some point around November as home life, work life and personal life took over and it was only really around June this year that I remembered “Oh Shit! I have a blog on my site that I haven’t updated since I did my Room renovation blog!” then I actually checked the blog section of my site and went “OH SHIT!  I NEVER ACTUALLY PUBLISHED MY ROOM RENOVATION BLOG!” and; since June every few days or so I’ll be hit with a mini pang of guilt that I haven’t given you guys that sweet sweet 1-2-1 time that I really should. 

So to newcomers who’re maybe reading these for the first time. the “Partially reformed content” blogs are basically personal blogs, just mainly focussed around stuff that’s going on in my life, or been going on in my life. thoughts. Feelings. Its kind of the “Spam” of blog types. It’s everything from tail to snout with Now’t taken out. 

So; whats happened over the last 15 months or so? well; If we’re filling in gaps I finished the renovations on my property around September time last year, had a catastrophic hard drive failure that almost wiped Season 8 of my reviews clean off the face of the earth. My partner got quite unwell again and ended up in hospital a couple of times. I ended up more or less looking after her property for a good portion of time while she was in the hospital, which led to a massive backlog on the review front. Which all culminated in a mad Christmas dash in which I simultaneously lost my voice JUST before a big recording session where I had to nail 12-15 scripts in 5 days. which was fun…Basically I sounded like Tom Carvel for most of Christmas as a result.

The Family had its first Covid Christmas. Which; surprisingly, was much MUCH more enjoyable than the usual Christmas routine. Both me and my partner have VERY large families and I always try to book 2 weeks off at Christmas. which generally means week 1 is spent visiting all her relatives, half of week 2 is spent visiting all of mine, 2-3 days are spent cleaning and if i’m lucky I get a day to actually relax before im due back at work. It’s pretty intense and honestly, for quite a while it was basically kind of an enforced thing rather than an enjoyable thing. Don’t get me wrong. I like my family and I like my partner’s family. But there’s something about “Annual Get togethers” that just kind of irks me. it feels enforced, with the expectation being that you MUST go and you MUST have a good time and if you don’t pretend that your having the best time of your life you’ve ruined Christmas, and if you say your not going half the family won’t turn up and you’ll be responsible for ruining Christmas. basically; the option is go and fein interest or I’ve ruined Christmas. The only reassuring level of comradeship being that my partner feels exactly the same. Only she has anxiety so the feelings I’ve listed above are 10 times worse for her than me. 

But last Christmas? that all changed; instead of mass cleaning operations in expectation of “The family”, Instead of travelling up and down the country ticking people off our list and trying to be civil when uncivil opinions presented themselves, instead of spending hours adrift in other people’s houses not really having much to say, getting overheated and watching that precious leave time slowly ebb away. Instead. There was nothing. Silence. peace. Oh don’t get me wrong some members of both of our families kicked up in a “Covid or no Covid! It’s Christmas!!!” Kind of way. But I’m not even going out now. I’m double vaccinated. I certainly wasn’t about to go and sit in other people’s houses unvaccinated with 16-20 people who all have varying morals on what is and isn’t okay to do during a pandemic. 

Instead; last Christmas we had a bit of a general clear out which lasted about a day. My partner and I went to my parents house on Christmas Eve and stayed there till the new year. just us, them and my sister for a week of pigging out in front of Christmas films, drinking various flavours of booze and the occasional party game. On Christmas Eve me and my partner agreed to visit her grandparents for a “Garden Visit” (Basically we stood in the garden and they talked to us through the conservatory while my partner collected some home bakes and presents that all her family had dropped off at the house) we stayed for about an hour and caught up before letting them crack on. and on our side we had a rather successful Christmas zoom call with all of our households online for about 2 hours, where we did a secret santa, some party games and just chilled. In total what was previously a two week endurance marathon of cleaning and catching up became collectively about 3 days of light housework and distanced meetings with a handful of relatives with the rest of the time being an absolute breeze. I think it’s probably the best Christmas I’ve had in at least the last decade, and equally one that’s given me some of my most fondest memories. 

At the start of the year we launched season 9  of our reviews! Which was really good fun and around the same time as the launch my workplace got in touch to tell me that I would be working from home now on a full time basis. Essentially; working from home had proven so effective to work/life balance and morale that they decided that about 2/3rds of the workforce could do it permanently. Now I work from home full time and Im required to go into the office twice a year to both make sure my work equipment is as up to date as possible and to speak to my team manager face to face (basically to double check I haven’t outsourced my job) this was probably the best outcome I could have asked for.

 I’m generally quite an introvert around people i’m not too familiar with (im happy to be a weird and crazy dickhead with people I care about and people who’re in my “Scene” but strangers? Normal people? they give me the fear) I was in the rather unfortunate position when I used to work in an office where my entire team barring me got made redundant which meant, in an open plan office space where people hot desked. I’d quite frequently be with people who I didn’t know, who didn’t really care to know me either. I don’t miss the hustle and bustle of office culture, I don’t miss the morning or evening commute where I would spend 50 minutes travelling 2 miles. I certainly don’t miss having to defrost my car all through the winter at 7:30am every day from November through to February. In fact. the only thing I really miss is there was a goats cheese and Beet sandwich they’d sometimes sell in the office canteen that was just…*mwa* perfection. And…being honest. While the office itself was actually a really nice place to be. I’d take working from home and having the freedom and flexibility to work how I want hands down every single time.

And that really was the last big change in my life, and that happened way back in February. Being absolutely honest, during the pandemic has kind of fundamentally changed my relationship with time. This year has frankly evaporated. And I know before the pandemic I was prone to saying that. no. this shits not normal. I literally can’t believe we’re only roughly 3 months away from it being the end of the year. Summer was non-existent (collectively 5 weeks or so of blisteringly unbearable heat in high humidity. 4 of which happened between May and June and 1 of which happened in September) and a spring I literally can’t remember it was that uninteresting. I just…this years vanished. But it kind of goes a bit deeper than that. 

I have no evidence to back this up other than anecdotal ones but it feels like everyone’s aged about 10 years as a result of the lockdowns, the being stuck indoors, the uncertainty. My grandparents were thriving outdoorsy types who used to go on long walks semi regularly and there was barely a weekend that went by where they weren’t in some part of the UK exploring the towns and cities. In 18 months they’ve gone from up and attem sluggers to needing canes to walk any further than the bottom of the garden, unable to hold long conversations and irritable. My own parents have softened a bit themselves. from the “Can do” any job any time type to being trapped at home for the most part with weak joints, and just simply, a lot less able to do stuff. this isn’t just old age. And if it is then it’s positively collapsed on most of my family in the space of 12-18 months. these were fully functioning, sharp members of society and now; well…they look weathered. They look tired. And it’s quite upsetting to see honestly. 

I thought lockdown was going to be harder on me than it has been. I mean; I was an introvert shut in before the lockdowns happened. So when they came into effect I wasn’t exactly affected all the much. Basically the only thing that changed in terms of my lifestyle was that I ended up wearing a mask outside, I already washed my hands TONS before the pandemic (because people are dirty) but now I just wash them a little bit longer and a little bit more, and pre-pandemic I’d rarely (probably every other month) treat myself to either a trip to the cinema, a trip to the theatre, a meal out with the missus or in the summer a weekend getaway. And that’s really the only thing I miss genuinely is that freedom to just go “Right; Im taking my partner out for a nice dinner” or “Ooh! That films playing! I can’t wait to go watch it!” even now im fully vaccinated I STILL don’t feel comfortable going to these places. Because; if it isn’t the risk of catching covid from wherever i’m going that bothers me, it’s the idiots who won’t get vaccinated who continue to put everyone else at risk who do. 

Evil comes in all shapes and beardy sizes…

For me? Being vaccinated means I can go to the supermarket and not feel the need to bring a cattle prod to zap people getting too close away, it means I actually feel comfortable attending doctors, dentists and hairdressers appointments. It means I don’t feel *Quite* as fearful of killing my elderly relatives who’re also fully vaccinated. That doesn’t mean i’m hugging and kissing them you understand, it just means that I feel comfortable enough to be inside their house without it being a massive risk. 

But restaurants? Gigs? The cinema? Actual holidays? As long as the cases and deaths continue to climb steadily and idiots continue to protest their right to not mask up, to not get vaccinated and to not bother being responsible for their kids safety, I can’t engage in that part of society anymore…and that does upset me somewhat. So…for the most part I remain indoors, hoping that either cases start coming down or we finally hit a level of vaccine coverage that makes it less risky to do more public driven events. 

I mean; I say that like I hate being indoors. I do need to clarify. I am VERY happy to be a shut in! All this extra free time has saved me a nice amount of money, introduced me to some wonderful people online and it has allowed me to really focus on the channel and this website in a much more meaningful way than I did before. I now actually have a production schedule. a roadmap and projected plans. None of this would have happened pre-pandemic…hell this new blog wouldn’t exist if the pandemic hadn’t happened. So in that regard I’ve flourished.

And on that front, if we’re looking for positives with my co-host, partner in crime and best buddy  Ben being vaccinated not too long after I was, it meant that in August we were able to meet up and record commentaries for the first time since November 2020. And that was a quite wonderful moment. We’d dabbled with remote recording as early as May 2020 but it was a difficult job due to ropey internet connections and lack of kit. In November, Lockdown lifted briefly so we were able to get together for a one off  session to record 3 commentaries back to back. And in January 2021 we finally sorted out a way for us to remote record in decent quality with *minimal* interruption. We recorded regularly from Jan to Jul and in August we met up to record 2 new commentaries, have a catch up, play some Mario kart and drink a few beers. It really was quite lovely! I don’t know how often we’ll be doing face to face meet ups but I’d like to think irregularly regular would work for me! 

Over the summer I worked hard on our newest season of the show, I set myself a summer checklist and I achieved all but 1 of them which was put on hold. Basically with this being our 5th anniversary year (This is the 5th year of us uploading content and the 6th year of the channel’s existence) I wanted to try and do something a bit commemorative. So I decided I wanted to publish a book in an INCREDIBLY limited number compiling some of my favourite reviews from the last 5 years, with updated thoughts, extra behind the scene info, a few new exclusive reviews and all that good stuff. and that book is pretty much all but finished. Like; literally barring proofreading I reckon there’s probably about another 3-4 weeks work there just in putting the last few touches to it and adding in a new review or two more than the ones that are already there and it’d be good to go. I scoped out the cost of publishing and found a decent enough looking publisher within my price range, but then, just before reaching out to them to inquire about getting a short run on these books, they hiked their prices. And my “Expensive but understandable” initial quote suddenly became JUST out of my price range. So…the projects on hold. I have a few other things on the boil at the minute anyway so I’m not exactly desperate to get this done. it may come out soon, it may be another couple of years. But for now at least. It’s paused while I rethink my options. 

And that pretty much takes you to the present day. the new seasons been running for about 2 weeks at this point and has had quite positive feedback (thank you to everyone who’s taken the time to subscribe to the channel, comment and like my videos. It genuinely is very much appreciated and helps me keep the lights on and the fire burning) and hopefully you’ll enjoy the rest of the run as we go on! Im hoping this half of the year will be relatively quiet, Halloweens just around the corner and I genuinely can’t wait to do what we do every year there (Drink, get diabetes, watch horror films till the sun comes up) and i’m equally hoping for a quite quiet and chilled out Christmas! there’s a few irons in the fire that’ll be announced in good time around other projects I worked on over the summer, but for now lifes pretty reasonable. 

In terms of this site? It’s almost always a source of “Oh God I should update this” type facepalming. So, while I do try my best to keep things up to date. Don’t be surprised if the next blog isn’t a million years from now! I really hope to get the time to pick up my alternate history of cinema articles again at some point and of course I do enjoy a good politics grumble. But for now at least; all I can say is. I hope you all have a very safe rest of the year. I hope you’re all keeping well and I wish you all the very best. 

See you in time x 

Partially Reformed Content #3

So…It’s been a quiet year so far eh?…alright alright; it was an obvious gag but fuck me if we dont need SOMETHING a bit lighter going on around here…Jeez. between a worldwide pandemic, riots in the streets, murder hornets, waves of cicada’s, an almost super majority Tory government, the rise of white nationalism and the complete collapse of the economy. I find a lot of us are on the verge of a full blown Clark Griswold style meltdown…and at this point frankly; I dont blame anyone who does. We are quite literally the closest to the threshold of hell than almost any other generation currently alive. We’re a pressurised tank of pain and anger and at the time of writing (the 3rd of June 2020) and we’re on the verge of a full blown explosive outburst (If that hasnt happened already by the time this actually gets published.)

(VENT! BY GOD IT’S SO HEALTHY!!!)

So given that my last Blog was in February, a rosier time when the pandemic was barely on the radar (If it was on the radar at all) I thought now would be as good a time as any to flip my chair around, grab a beer and catch up with you guys via a good old fashioned “Partially reformed content” blog. To new comers (As I realise my site has had a bit of a spike in viewers of late) these blogs are a little bit of everything. Just a verbal stream of consciousness where I let you know where we’re up to with the show, whats going on in my life, a little bit of politics, a little bit of film making stuff…it’s the SPAM of blog posts, a bunch of shredded up loose threads compressed together into a solid slab of meat.

(It’s rich in mystery meat goodness…)

So! Kicking things off! Channel News! And Season 7 is almost over! Assuming this blog goes live when I intend it to then our newest review of “Sleepaway Camp” should have gone live on Friday! It was one I was particularly happy with and I think we’ve had a really solid run of Red Triangle episodes this season. In fact looking at the analytics this season has arguably been the most successful season I’ve made since I launched the channel back in 2017 and we’ve still got another 3 weeks or so to go! So thank you so much to everyone who’s supported me through the good times and the bad. I really genuinely could have done non of this without your continues support and love. It helps make every difficult edit, every multi day recording session, every stagnated upload totally worth it.

https://media.daysoftheyear.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=cover,f=auto,onerror=redirect,width=866,height=434/20171223125340/thank-you-thursday.jpg

(And I really genuinely and sincerely mean that!)

 

The season is set to end at the end of June at which point we’ll enter a 2 month hiatus while I continue to work on new material and for other reasons I’ll get into shortly. In the mean time work on Season 8 continues to pick up pace it’s looking like a 17 week run at this point (With scope for a couple of collaborative “off channel” reviews also scheduled in pending the current global crisis.) running from September to December. At the time of writing I’ve completed 15 of 17 scripts (Plus 2 collab scripts) and im hoping to write one of the final 2 scripts over the next fortnight. The 17th script is a bit of a bigger scoped project than usual…but it isnt due until the end of November so for now. That ones on hold while I work on other things.

Of the 15 scripts I have completed 14 have been recorded and of the 14 recorded 10 at the time of writing (15 by the time of publication) will have been fully audio edited and processed. Meaning I’ll be spending a good chunk of June and July video editing September and early Octobers content. Honestly? This seasons been one of the hardest to write for. It’s been quite ruthless and relentless just purely for the amounts of “Fixed” content I’ve had to work on. With the March to June run the whole things on me; I can choose what I want to watch, when I want to watch and how. September to Decembers a bit different as we have Halloween and Christmas demanding fixed content, thats 8-10 weeks worth of episodes (10 out of 17) that I had very little say over in terms of film selection or genre. Its arguably the only truely hard part of doing this channel, having to watch movies of a specific genre that you just arnt “Feeling” at that time, while also trying to maintain a level of professional critique.

(Not feeling the movies you need to review IS SO NOT A VIBE!!!)

Watching Christmas films in June or freebasing 5 Halloween themed movies one after the other can be seriously draining at times, but it’s a necessary evil, doing them now gives me time to make sure they’re super polished for release. PLUS it means I greatly appreciate the chance to talk about the genre movies I want to when the opportunity arrives. So while at times writing the newest season has been hard. I hope ultimately it was worth it as there are some absolutely KILLER titles coming up!

(Spoilers)

In terms of the Comedy Dining experience; Lockdown has been both a blessing and curse to it. On the one hand we’ve been able to record more commentaries during this lockdown than at any other point since we began working on the show (We now have commentaries lined up right the way up to December). The downside is that Ben (My cohost) is unfortunately a 70s bohemian by nature and as such doesnt really have/use a lot of technology. He has a laptop that by his own admission is over 10 years old at this point and overheats/switches off after 30 or so minutes use…he has a smart phone…thats about 5-7 years old with minimal to no features and the biggest issue? His internets shocking in terms of connectivity.

(Like this…but MUCH less Hipster-ey and MUCH more in tune with 70’s Dayglo)

 

As such while we’ve been able to record around 6 commentaries together over the last month, only 3-4 have actually been usable. Mainly because of drop out, bad mic quality and the fact that I’ve had to rig up a seperate machine on my end to record both mine and Bens conversations as He cant record any of his audio on his side. So as of the time of writing we’ve kind of put a bit of an unspoken hold on recording anymore until we can find a more solid work around. Though we’ve been talking about some new film ideas while this hold has been going on so as soon as we’re back up and running we’ll be hitting the road with wheelspin! Also; to close. Even though the latest Season of TYTD finishes at the end of this month, The Comedy dining experiences (Amongst other goodies) will continue to be published throughout July and August to help tide you guys over! So keep an eye out for them!

So thats the formalities out of the way; Dan! What have you been up to since the last time you spoke to us properly on December 31st 2019!? Well; Im glad you didnt ask! Home life’s honestly been a bit dull really; I was told by my place of employment to stay at home and to “Stay the fuck away from the office” in early March and about 2 weeks after that the country entered lockdown meaning other than shops and pharmacies everywhere is shut. As my parents and my partner are all classed as “Vulnerable persons” I’ve been spending most of the lockdown juggling work, the youtube channel and making sure they’ve got food, medicine and anything else essential they may need. That hasnt stopped my Dad (who’s arguably the most vulnerable of all my family) from regularly flouting lockdown to go to the shop himself…but I’ve warned him as much as I can and he’s chosen to take the risks. There isnt much more I can do there.

I’ve been trying to help out the wider community also while all this has been going on, helping provide shopping to the elderly and making sure that vulnerable people are not suffering in isolation. While I havent done as much as I’d have liked. I’ve done what I can. And now that the governments botched the lifting of lockdown restrictions my help is seemingly no longer needed…well not until the next wave flares up inevitably…

(He’s been warned…They’ve all been warned…ahhh…Goddamnit.)

Anyway! In terms of other events in my life, as regular readers may recall my partner is unfortunately not in the best of health. This was one of the reasons season 6 and 2019 ended up the way it did as I spent a large chunk of that year in hospital waiting rooms. Well so far this year she’s been holding relatively steady. There have definitely been ups and downs and right now we’re definitely in a down. But the extremes have definitely narrowed and she seems to be managing things at least a little bit better…which im incredibly thankful for. While we’re nowhere near getting her back to her old self at this point and the lockdown has definitely been quite detrimental to her progress in some regards. Theres a distinct feeling right now that things are moving in the right direction. Equally! We have a hamster now! His name is Newt and he joins our cat Zelda as being the joint 2nd cutest thing in our house (just behind me obvs.)

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(Just look at his lil face!)

Apart from DESPERATELY wanting a haircut (Seriously; I only have a few things that make me feel uncomfortable and during this lockdown i’ve learnt that long hair is one of them) everything else has been relatively stable. I’ve spent a lot of time catching up on my “To Watch” pile and working on the show. It’s been a bit like a mini vacation really as I havent had nearly as many people trying to drag me away from the things I love! In fact i’ve finally had such an abundance of free time I’ve finally been able to pull the trigger on a massive project that’s been at least 3-4 years in the making. My media room is getting upgraded.

(And Sweet merciful Jesus it’s about time!)

Im going to do a separate blog at some point documenting the transformation (And Im even hoping to stream some of the sorting through my films, records and books when It comes to repopulating the room) but the long and short of it is the room itself hasnt been totally ground up renovated since the 1970’s and hasnt been redecorated (Repainted) since 1998 because of the 70’s aesthetic I’ve always kind of been reluctant to do anything major with the place (As…well it’s 70’s aesthetic design…why on EARTH would I want to) but having now spent the majority of 2020 in here, It’s become clear to see that the place REALLY needs to have something done to it, faded wallpaper, holes in the wall, mould, burn marks, dust, dirt and cobwebs are just. EVERYWHERE. And the current layout and tech choices in here are dated to say the least. So from the middle of July I’ll be completely stripping the room back to the brickwork and over July and August we’ll be completely renovating the place both to modernise it and to make the place more film and media friendly. Im SUPER excited about getting started on this project as it’ll mean I’ll finally be able to pull out a good chunk of my stuff from storage and after 5 years of false starts and umming and ahhing I’ll finally have a room thats a bit more “Me”. I have no idea how long it’ll take to TOTALLY turn the room around and have it finished but the bare elements should all be in place by the end of the first week in August, Im ETA’ing that everything should be totally finished by early October. 2nd pandemic and lockdown permitting.

So thats everything personally relevant to me, what else….hmm! Well politically im starting to feel evermore homeless! Thats always a good feeling (Aside; it’s not) after nearly 5 years as leader of the opposition Jeremy Corbyn finally stood down as the leader of the Labour party in December 2019 after an election defeat so monumental it pretty much handed the keys to the country to a load of alt-right fascists for the next 4 years…seriously; they were just shy of a super majority based on the results and at this time there is NOTHING that anyone can do. Even if all the opposition parties united against the conservatives all it would result in is a comfortable victory to the tories…thats how fucked we are collectively right now. At the time of the defeat a majority of the reports claimed it was Corbyn himself and his radical lefty ideas of treating everyone as fairly as possible and not letting people literally die in the streets that led to the monumental defeat. Though it’s clear at this point that Xenophobia and Brexit were the main things that led to this defeat. In the interim while a new leader of the opposition was being selected a report was released into the antisemitism claims that have plagued the labour party since 2016, and while the report itself was kind of “Meh” in terms of actually saying anything we didnt already know. What WAS absolutely damning was that between 2016 and 2019 it was revealed right leaning members of UK Labour worked against the leader and the left wing of the party to purposfully throw the vote. This includes ringfencing members membership fees in order to run anti Corbyn propaganda and purposefully throwing the local and general elections in areas they had control in order to try and shake Corbyn off.

(…)

Yes. you heard me right; one side of the labour party, tried to purposefully ensure the other half lost and guaranteed a Boris Johnson victory because they didnt like the idea of a socialist government. When this document was released I was apoplectic. Blinded by rage and this hasnt been resolved even now nearly 3 months after it was initially revealed. And thats partially due to the fact that the new leader of the labour party was Keir Starmer. A member of the more right wing side of the labour party who CERTAINLY wasnt going to rock the boat over this because: A: He won and B:he needed to keep the people who got Corbyn out on side or else they’d do the same to him. As such we’ve now got a limp labour party that seems to be agreeing with the conservative party more than opposing it. Which at any other time would be horrendous. But NOW…JUMPING JESUS ON A POGOSTICK…its a wonder I havent become an alcoholic.

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(Pictured: Sir Keir Starmer QC)

At the moment theres been a lot of people banding about the idea that because of the lockdown Starmer hasnt really begun to flex his muscles…and some even bigger cretins who are actually trying to make out that he’s an effective leader of the opposition (Despite not getting his own house in order yet OR doing anything to actually oppose the current government charnel house.) I promised I’d give him a fair crack of the whip before giving up my membership. He’s got till September for me personally…so far. Im going to be saving quite a bit of money year on year if he carries on the way he has been. I certainly wont be voting for my local labour MP in the next election if he’s standing as the leader. Fuck that noise.

And that pretty much leads us back here to June 3rd 2020. The worlds on fire. Racism has been unbottled and we’re on the brink of a civil war which may or may not have gotten underway at the time of this publication. The whole situation is tragic, awful and barbaric. But ultimately not surprising. 400+ years of systemic oppression was eventually going to boil over at some point. People can only be held back, degraded and kicked for so long. And under a Trump presidency 4 years was the perfect catalyst and combination of elements to lead to these riots. To my US readers. I say support the protestors where possible. Donate money if you can, and do ANYTHING you can to take down the fash. Here in the UK I’ve resigned myself to the fact we’re a lost cause. 50k+ deaths, a know lying, philandering, racist, homophobic PM and 300+ MPs’s who are nothing but wadding to support the unsupportable have shown me over the last 12 months that the UK population is either too dense to accept change or too malicious to want it. But you guys in the US, with this act you’ve just rolled the dice. And I REALLY hope that meaningful proactive and positive change is born from the ashes of this horrible moment. Until then the world continues to burn, I continue to work…and well…im hoping that by December SOMETHING good will have come from all this.

 

Till Next time.

(The 12″ Mix of this has been stuck in my head now for the best part of 3 months…if I have to suffer; so do you…enjoy the middle 8.)