Video Village

This is a true story. In the year 2000, my parents took me and my cousin on holiday to Magaluf. I was five. By that time, I was already a voracious reader, as far as voracity can apply to the habits of a nipper. Thus, in the breaks between swimming, mocktails and ice cream, I turned my attention to penning my first work of fiction. A haunted house yarn, it amounted to an austere roll call of horro...

There are advantages to being late to a party. People are likelier to take notice of you, if you're into that sort of thing. It is easier to avoid falling into a maelstrom of sloshed groupthink and social inducement, sidestepping behaviours you may bemoan or words you may bewail. If anthropology or sociology or psychology tickle your pickle, the scene of the good time is laid out squarely for your...

Around two hours ago (at the time of typing), I sat down to rollick in the glorious Providence of Inspiration, invoking Its sacred hover with a can of zero-caffeine Coke Zero, a bit of a headache and the apparent disinclination to do anything about that. And that was two hours ago. Still I now sit, the water droplets from the Coke can having formed a gentle ring on the coaster. The headache has pa...

The looming axis of China, Russia and Iran threatens to destabilise the global order, such as it is. Populations across the world are continually immiserated under tyrannical regimes. The impending race for leadership of the free world orbits a pair of hoary ignorami whose antiquity and indeed place in history may best be described as "antediluvian". The abiding "we don't know" around artificial i...

Week last, I was listening to another (another?!) podcast that shall go unnamed because time and attention are zero-sum games. I'm not gonna direct any stragglers elsewhere. I'm Mr. Monopoly, mothershuckers*, and while I mayn't have a moustache, a top hat or any real estate holdings beyond personal space, I'm in the GETTING business... Admittedly, if this boutique whinery that Jordan and I operate...

According to most, it's a new year. According to us, too. And, to a near 100% certainty, to you. So why qualify at all? Who knows why people do the things they do⸮ Live with mystery. Loll in the penumbra of conundra. Sniff the azaleas without scrutinising the chemistry of olfaction or whatever. 2024 promises global unrest, the continuing degradation of any and all sense-making apparatus and some m...

Good mofterning, goofballs and goofaries! Welllll now, it really has been rather a while, hasn’t it? Has this been the longest “break”? Who knows?! If anyone IS keeping track, their identity is a mystery, cloaked as they are in the caligine of withheld praise, churning a bitter barrel of vitriol in the shared breast of his or her (let’s face it, his) content providers that will one day burst forth...

Sometimes, one is in no mood to make sense; in fact, the inferred obligation makes one ornery. This is one of those times. The drench of zest curdles evilly with a forthcoming mantis that defies strict adhesion, precipitating in its wake a tropical malaise whereby underlings systematically tackle totems in the hollow dispensation of minerals. Reluctantly, the meat-eaters vow frailty and condemn th...

Extract from Episode 70 of the Funfiltered podcast. A robot dyad trying yet unfailingly failing to blend into its surroundings speaks review-like ‘bout Transformers: Rise of the Beasts.

Extract from Episode 4 of the Funfiltered podcast. Full of beans, a huffy wad of gammon and an abidingly irascible egg (with a toasty slice of Eddie on the side) spar availlessly over the echelons of a full English upon a foundational non-consensus re: which echelons. You say tomato, I say tom-ah-to…

Konnichiwa, chumbuckets. "69" is very much the breakout character of the numbers. It has no right being anything more (or less) than eminently forgettable. Granted, as a year, '69 (19-, that is) conjures some salient iconography - Woodstock, Manson, the Moon... Beyond that, a bit of Bryan Adams and it's hermeneutically juiced. EXCEPT. It also happens to refer to some naughty symmetry. And so, in o...

Extract from Episode 69 of the Funfiltered podcast. A trio of twonks - a TRIO, by God! - sets sight upon the second installment of the fifth phase of the second saga of Article 0, Section F**k You; have a thought and your money back, the One MCU, the One, the ONE, the HOLY UN, Praise Its Fame, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3: Eccentric Boogaloo in Space.

Extract from Episode 45 of the Funfiltered podcast. In a world of meaningless, annoying and otherwise poorly-written lyrics, two dopes take aim at a really rather mid-level offender and end up somewhere really rather low-level profound. Perhaps this was the artists’ intention all along... It wasn't.

Extract from Episode 47 of the Funfiltered podcast. A coupla unorthod-ox heifers ruminant over a low-steaks hypothetical, moosing with typical veal and udderly milking the nothing burger with a load of old bull. Got beef? Cow stuff. Teehee.

Extract from Episode 12 of the Funfiltered podcast. A nitwit triptych takes the Cat by the whiskers and almost certainly (who has time to re-listen to these things?*) tests your patience for feline-themed puns. This is our review of Cats. The film. Not the beast. And I'd bet that joke was made withon, too. Enjoy! *EDIT: Well you of course YOU! dear dear you please ❤️

Extract from Episode 2 of the Funfiltered podcast. Two overweight men in their late twenties chart the frontier of the trivial, plumb the depths of psychic affliction and engage in an altogether next to nothing something. Can nebulae “happen”? This did. As did the vapour from which this anti-galaxy was drizzled. Enjoy.

'iya. If there's a certain frisson about Funfiltered today, it's not just because it's the mating season (reputably or otherwise simply elsewhere). Last night, the FF team +1 (a 50% mark-up) placed first in a local pub quiz and that has understandably and very probably created a sexy whiff around our social media presence. Knowledge is power. Power is an aphrodisiac. And the £25 we bagged divided...

Extract from Episode 68 of the Funfiltered podcast. A gruff man's man and a little girl wandering a post-apocalyptic landscape have a chinwag about the first season of HBO's The Last of Us.

Alright? Sam here. It's been a while. It's always been a while. Perhaps it will always be a while. While while while. While E. Coyotes, that's us. And that's either an eminently disposable rap lyric or an utterance pregnant with the possibility of laboured metaphor. If you understand anything about the man who now writes to/for/really, AT you, you'll know the latter was never in peril of neglect....

'S'appening, travellers? Sam here. While true that we haven't spoken since November, I'll yet refrain from conveying a "Happy New Year." Not necessarily (though not necessarily NOT) out of dispassion, but because it's February now and shops are getting the Halloween stock in, thereby promoting such platitudes from banal to vulgar. So I'll just ask, y'a'right? ...I know this isn't actually a conver...

This episode clocks in at 98 mins. Skirting reasonable compassion for your concentration as this does, I was compelled to scour the back-catalogue to confirm my suspicion that this 65th instalment was indeed our pithiest discharge. On the contrary. It would appear that being so fervidly unfiltered and consequently dragging your patience through a kind of psychic Takeshi's Castle has created a Mand...

Greetings, earthlings. There's no reason that noun should be alien copyright, is there? "Earthling" is a great leveller. Anyway, that's enough diplomacy for this week. Hmmm, content, content.... Have you seen The Banshees of-- oh yeah, we talk about that in the episode... It's a trifling juggle, negotiating this relationship between blurb and podcast. Can't really write about the aural cargo - if...

Producing regular video descriptions is rife with self-erected hurdles. If one is to avoid delving into the substance of the content or indeed the content of the substance which is sometimes substance itself but more commonly spontaneous piffle - superior to rehearsed piffle - and scantily-cloaked prejudices, overt in their implications but by inference suggestive of an irony whose being is implic...

Sam “speaking”. It's a strange sensation, this... being on-schedule. An abiding struggle has become... LIKE a job. I don't need no tirades about a fortnightly podcast holding no candle to Alaskan crab-fishing or hostage negotiation, alright? I'm talking about a consistent routine, not exertion, OKAY?! Though you try filling silence for three hours with no water. And yes, that's my choice, but why...

Sam “speaking”. It took us XLs LX episodes to get here. A solid place. By no means is that to fling dusk at Lord Eddard B. No, I refer to the substance/subtext of 98% of our written output - the Stygian quagmire of what would strike any observer as divinely-ordained techno-shambles. We've had all the luck of a Nobbly Bobbly between a pair of straighteners. The candied pebble-dash may suggest forti...