It’s still Pride month for another week, so you best BELIEVE I’m going to milk that for everything that I can get so I can bend your collective audiencal ears into listening to me rant about queer shit.
Well, it’s summer, allegedly. And that means that we’re all reclining into our requisite summer viewing: light comedy, twenty-minute snippets that we can finish up quickly at the instigation of an impromptu beach ukelele party or something. Is that what people do in summer? I’m Scottish, I honestly couldn’t tell you if summer is some sort of elaborate joke at my expense and has been this whole time. Is it? Mail your answers on a postcard to my cat’s litter tray.
Alright, y’all gay-ass (and other queer-adjacent terminology-ass) motherfuckers: it’s Pride month, and that means I’ve got to squeeze in some LGBT content amongst my searingly incisive deep-dives into how shit Gotham is. I mean, I already have, just a little, but there’s always room for more.
For me, and for everyone else I know who’s had to do it, coming to terms with and coming out with your non-straight, non-cis-ness is usually a long, drawn-out, painful, exciting, scary, affirming dream-nightmare of a process. So I thought I’d give you a little poke around my own self-serving fascination with storifying my own history to indignantly boring effect everything that led to me coming out! I’ve covered some of my experiences previously here, but this time I just want to get stuck in to all the weird little details that turned me into the unstraight I am today. Let’s get to it!
I’ve written a lot about Youtube before. As one of the primo video streaming platforms on the planet, it’s an almost unavoidable part of popular culture. And, for my money, it’s been changing the way we interact with major facets of the media – from Petscops’ horror to Shane Dawson’s, uh, we’ll call them documentaries, Youtube is hacking its way through the undergrowth of the curious, still relatively new place it holds in pop culture.
Some shows just aren’t made to go back to. I have no doubt, for example, that Riverdale is going to be looked back upon with bafflement and as a cosmic glitch in the space-time continuum – but today (for once) I’m not talking about Riverdale. No, I want to take a look at some of the shows from yesteryear that just don’t stand up to closer inspection – okay, some of these may not be that old, but I think it’s time for me to jam my nose into them and get down to some good snarkin’ anyway. To the list!
Well, I got you there with that clickbait title, didn’t I? This isn’t actually going to be a guide on how to self-harm, because I feel like my desperation for views hasn’t quite dipped that far yet. But I do want to talk about the stuff you may not know about self-harm, and why it doesn’t necessarily work the way you might think it does. Trigger warning for discussion of self-harm and suicide.
Lots of shows have come for the crown of The Simpsons. And what a crown it is – after running for nearly thirty years, The Simpsons is one of those pop culture mainstays that started out critiquing the media around it before it became inexorably absorbed, an indelible part of the pop culture landscape and the reigning champion against which all other animated comedies shall be compared. It found a sugar-sweet spot between unbelievably sharp comedy, social commentary, and a warm good-hearted attempt at showing, in some way or another, what life was actually like for regular working-class families, and, as I’ve said before, is one of the shows that more or less invented television in my universe.
Trigger Warning for discussion of anorexia, bulimia, and general eating disorder behaviour.
“Don’t watch “Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes” alone. Trust me on this one,” Netflix US tweeted out at the start of the weekend, when their latest true crime documentary hit screens. Directed by Joe Berlinger, and based around the interviews conducted by Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth with Bundy before his execution in 1989. Promoted like a lurid horror film and breathlessly trailed as a fascinating look into the mind of a brilliant, sadistic murderer, I already had my doubts about it before I so much as sat down in front of the first episode.
So, I’ve been sober for a year.
This is my cat, sitting on me as I write this, high off her face on treats and superiority.
Just over a year, actually – at about ten to eleven the New Year’s Eve before last, I drank half a glass of really bad red wine that stained the inside of my lips and gave me a headache. And that was the last time I drank alcohol.
