The School of Everything Else Archive

[School of Everything Else 2010] This is a compilation of the first six audio articles I created back in 2010, before Digital Gonzo was even a thing. Digital Cowboys, my first podcast (begun in 2007) was going strong, but I wanted to start doing more solo material with a tighter focus. These would be shorter game analysis, think-pieces, social commentary, amusing skits, whatever I had knocking aro...

[School of Everything Else 2020] Part 2 of 6 The second of three shows on Season 1 of Gravity Falls. Season 2 will be covered in 2021. We return to one of the best animated series' to grace the TV screen. A rich, hilarious, fast-paced puzzle-box of twisty mysteries and subversive, genre-savvy capers. Tween twins Dipper and Mabel Pines are staying with their Grunkle Stan for the summer, at his comb...

[School of Everything Else 2018] I go back to the console everybody is talking about, but rather than making this all about the micro PlayStation Classic I endeavoured to find the alternative best way to play specific games I remember and love as well as a mix of some I missed before. It's nowhere near as easy as you might think, to just pick up and play. This is an account of what happened. Games...

[School of Everything Else 2017] This is the first of several episodes on the fantastic Netflix animated show Bojack Horseman. Next week will be an episode on seasons 2 & 3 and at some point we will probably do season 4. It starts off as a black adult comedy about show business and Hollywood and you could be forgiven for lumping it in with Family Guy, however, it quickly establishes itself as a dr...

[School of Everything Else 2017] A five hour, retro RPG with a story that will stay with you. We recommend everyone play the game before listening.  It's kind of like a fun Inception. Laura Kate Dale joins us for a very textured, emotional and personal discussion about this extraordinary experience.  This show was commissioned by Emanuel Matius, Sean Lyons Burke and Nick Grugin. Patreon supporters...

[School of Everything Else 2017] A commissioned show from Mark Lucksch. First thing I said when I saw the art was "No anime." Mark assured me that with its writer based in the west and Korean rather than Japanese artwork, as well as lack of animation that this text-adventure available on Steam was not, in fact, anime.  After many hours of playing through this tale of an intelligent, female conscio...

[School of Everything Else 2017] A commissioned show about a 2003 two-part TV miniseries wherein Christopher Eccleston plays a regular bloke from Manchester who suddenly realises that he is the son of God. The story is about how the world takes this news and how it affects his close friends. Also there are demons. This is new Doctor Who creator Russel T. Davies' hot take on religion. It made Sharo...

[School of Everything Else 2017] This is a Vertigo comics series which ran for 60 issues from 1997 to 2002, written by Warren Ellis and drawn by Darick Robertson.  It is set in a non-specified future where cities stretch out across the planet, filled with bored tech-fetishists all looking for the next distraction. Spider Jerusalem is an infamous gonzo journalist who returns to the otherwise unname...

[School of Everything Else 2017] We've had several requests over the course of our show to cover THE ENTIRETY of Doctor Who, or even just "Everything since 2005". Eventually one commissioning Whovian named Andy Nattan came around with a suggestion that would neatly incorporate our knowledge of the Doctor into a discussion about one fairly hilariously bad TV movie made in 1996. It also constitutes...

[School of Everything Else 2017] In 2013 a brand new Marvel character was introduced to the world, one who is very reminiscent of classic Peter Parker, a goofy, hapless, sweet-natured teenager who just wants to help people. She's also the world's premier, headlining Muslim superhero, and very much due a movie or TV series to bring her to mass popularity like those who came before her. In tonight's...

[School of Everything Else 2017] This is the third show I have put together about the Legend of Zelda series. The first was back in 2010 for Digital Cowboys when we covered most of the games in the series. The second was in early 2012 on Digital Gonzo when we covered the contentious Skyward Sword on the Wii (This episode is now available exclusively through Patreon). This time we're looking at a b...

[School of Everything Else 2017] Welcome to a show which explores why, after decades of producing consoles and video games, Nintendo feels special in a way that the others do not. More than two dozen people have recorded their memories and insight and sent them to me to arrange. A picture begins to emerge of a troubled relationship with someone capable of amazing creative endeavours and baffling b...

[School of Everything Else 2017] This is yet another very special episode. We get swept up in the Broadway musical phenomenon about one of America's relatively unsung founding fathers, presented to modern audiences as a hip-hopera. It was created by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the songwriter for Moana. It is amazing. It is available to hear all over YouTube and the soundtrack (which will almost certainly...

[School of Everything Else 2017] Recently the excellent YouTube series Every Frame a Painting asked members of the public if they could hum any of the music from the Marvel films. Unsurprisingly they couldn't come up with anything. There are a few reasons for this, that I go into on the show, but this presentation right here is crafted to allow everyone to explore the music that has come so far. W...

[School of Everything Else 2016] We're bringing this classic show format back after three years away (somehow it skipped over the entirety of Digital Drift). This is the prologue to our 90s Disney Renaissance series of podcasts. Since the songs get so much love and attention and are going to be showcased on our podcasts anyway I brought in James Batchelor to pick with me, pieces of music from the...

The bestselling novel of 1986, this is a story set across two time frames 28 years apart. In the small town of Derry, Maine the locals enjoy relative success, their harmony only broken every three decades when children go missing. Something is lurking down in the sewers, and it is hungry. Seven childhood friends, calling themselves The Losers pledge to find out what this being is and if they can,...

[School of Everything Else 2016] This is an interview Sharon and I hosted with Ryan Estrada, writer, artist, producer of many many different projects, the latest being Big Data. (It was originally published in two parts and now, in its complete form it is patreon-only content) *There are seven keys to the internet, what if each in turn was stolen? Could our repository of information and primary me...

[School of Everything Else 2016] This is a deep dive into the very first Resident Evil game, as well as the GameCube remake and the HD remake of the remake. By no means the first survival horror, but a definite landmark in the genre and a stone cold classic that is somehow better today than it was in 1996.  Far from the clodhopping buffoonery of the movie series the first game is a deceptively sim...

[School of Everything Else 2016] The second collection of clips from my shows, this time covering the period between 2013 and 2016 when Sharon became my co-host, Digital Drift and School of Movies. They are pulled from fewer overall episodes but they are more meaty and substantial with some of the funniest, sustained moments and memories. You'll also hear from my guest spots from That Awful Sound...

[School of Everything Else 2016] Alex's 500th Podcast.   I've been at this game for almost a decade and produced and hosted  four media discussion shows, Digital Cowboys, Digital Gonzo, Digital Drift andSchool of Movies.  What we have here is a collection of highlights from the first few years. This celebratory episode ended up as two, simply because there was so much to choose from. So Episode 50...

[School of Everything Else 2016] This week's episode is all about one of the first wildly popular toy and animated show tie-ins. Emerging in 1982 the Masters of the Universe toy line was hot on the heels of Star Wars and (thanks to the repeal of certain laws about ethics in programming) was able to advertise its products to the child during the commercial breaks as they were watching the show. And...

[School of Everything Else 2016] This one has been a long time coming. Maybe the most significant animated series of my childhood, Thundercats (1985) was, for me, age 6, the promise of adventure. Seven cat-people escape the doomed planet of Thundera and find a new home in the lush, expansive new world of Third Earth. But then never bargained on their old enemies, the mutants pursuing them and form...

[School of Everything Else 2016] This show (which is one of the best individual podcasts we've ever put together) is all about The Hero's Journey. It explores the monomyth, the idea that nearly all of the tales that we embrace as a species are telling the same story.  Carl Jung theorized with the collective unconscious that our brains are all roughly the same shaped organ, with very similar emotio...

[School of Everything Else 2016] Mirroring our Lord of the Rings Prologue recorded all the way back in 2012 and leading us into the Peter Jackson and Weta Middle-earth series, this is the bookend that marks its closing. Less of a celebration of the immense achievement pulling off this second trilogy was (for that you can listen to the individual review shows), this is instead a post-mortem where m...

[School of Everything Else 2016] The second half of the session with The Mana Pool (Following on from Vol. 4 these were previously combined into the frankly-too long Vol. 6) More rotten reviews from the terminally unreasonable. Special focus is given to an art print of British personality Paul Ross, an ancient Gaelic retelling of Star Wars and the magic testicles of the most beloved lion ever. Joi...