Author: Matt

Six Damn Fine Degrees #275: Two visions of one city

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Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

As a teenager, I read a lot of genre fiction – but, perhaps more importantly, I read a lot of bad genre fiction. Not only: I loved the likes of Lord of the Rings or the iconic novels of Arthur C. Clarke (mind you, his prose wasn’t always brilliant and his characters often paper-thin, but the ideas were fascinating), but I’d read whatever I could find at the library that had spaceships and aliens, or dungeons and dragons. I think that, even at the time, I was aware that much of what I read in the realms of fantasy and sci-fi was generic and derivative at best, pulp designed to be mass-produced and sold to kids like me who wanted their reading matter to transport them to other worlds. But, hey, those books did transport me to other worlds, even if those worlds seemed a lot like Middle-Earth or a galaxy far, far away, just with the serial numbers scratched off.

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Criterion Corner: Brazil (#51)

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Here’s how you make a Brazil: You start with George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the iconic dystopian novel about totalitarianism and mass surveillance. You mix this with the monumental aesthetics of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Blend in some Franz Kafka, ideally The Trial. For flavouring, add a healthy dollop of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and a pinch or two of Federico Fellini and Jacques Tati, and finally sprinkle the resulting mess generously with bureaucracy. As the waiter might say: Monsieur, Mesdames: Bon appétit!

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #272: Live, Die, Repeat

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Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

Time loop narratives are almost always power fantasies. Sure, there’s a comical element about them, but that’s part of the fantasy: the protagonists of time loop stories are caught in an existentialist Looney Tunes short, but whenever they step on a rake or have a bomb blow up in their faces, they go back to start with added knowledge: if they cut this wire instead of that one, if they push this button rather than pulling that lever, if they jump to the right two seconds after they hear the car horn, they’ll survive. And thus, step by step, they master their situation.

In that sense, time loop narratives are the kind of power fantasies that are typical for video games.

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The Five Stages of Backlog Anxiety

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There was a point in my mid-40s where I realised: I have so many games purchased on Steam, I will not live to play all of them, at least not unless I start going through them one by one… and not unless I stop buying a single additional game.

And, looking at my collection of films on physical media? The same may be true. I have a bit more of a fighting chance: my library of games on Steam is in part so large because once a game I’m even just mildly interested in is on sale for US$10 or less, I tend to buy it. Films still cost more, especially those highly addictive Criterion releases I can’t seem to do without. Still: I buy films at a higher rate than I watch the films I’ve bought. The same is definitely true for books.

And, frankly: when I realised the extent to which my backlog would survive me? I felt an unsettling sense of vertigo. (And, embarrassingly, I briefly hoped that by the time I’m old, there’d be a way to upload my consciousness into the cloud, where I would then spend eternity working off my backlog.)

This is fine.
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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: All singing, all dancing

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Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.

In this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Sam wrote about Netflix’ adaptation of Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper books – and the importance of normalising LGBTQI+ romance that doesn’t need to adhere to limiting tropes and clichés. You’d think that we’d be further in 2026, but, sadly…

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They create worlds: the melodies of Silksong

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One of the things that video games can do magnificently is create worlds. These posts are an occasional exploration of games that I love because of where they take me.

In 2017, a small Australian studio called Team Cherry released Hollow Knight. The game, an action adventure set in a world of insects, was well received by gamers and critics, and its reputation grew over the following years, as much for its challenging gameplay as for its melancholy world and atmosphere. Over time, Team Cherry aded to the game in various ways game – but the main expansion they originally promised, which was to feature Hornet, one of the game’s characters that starts off as an antagonist only to become an ally of the player character, proved too ambitious. As a result, Team Cherry announced in 2019 that Hornet’s adventures could not be contained in an add-on of the original Hollow Knight but instead required their own game: Hollow Knight: Silksong.

It would take another six years until Silksong came out.

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That was the year that was: 2025

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Let’s be honest: it’s no big secret that 2025 was a shitty year in many ways, so much so that at times, as if we’d woken up in an episode of Black Mirror, it felt like reality itself had installed a doomscrolling plugin. You no longer have to take out our phone or tablet: just walk around with open eyes and the rest will take care of itself.

And yet: not everything is bad. Whenever I hear or read someone going on about how culture, originality, cinema and TV are dead, I can’t help but roll my eyes – because there is so much out there that is pretty damn good: fresh, engaging, challenging, riveting.

See exhibit A:

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #265: Poisoned pages

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Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

If you had asked me in the early aughts about my favourite writers, it’s very likely that Neil Gaiman would have been one of the names I mentioned. Like many I know, I first encountered him via Terry Pratchett, when I read Good Omens (1990), co-written by Pratchett and Gaiman, and fell in love with it. Next came the short story collection Smoke and Mirrors (1998), with its tales that ranged from urban fantasy and horror to stranger, more meta fare, and shortly after, I got into The Sandman (1989-1996), arguably Gaiman’s magnum opus in a big way. Once I’d made my way through the ten volumes of that series, there was a phase during which I bought almost everything Gaiman wrote. (Ironically, not his anthology comic Endless Nights, which is what furnishes this post with its link to last week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees.) I recommended him to friends, even to some of my teachers at university. After I graduated and started teaching at Uni myself, I did an introductory course on comics, and one of the texts I had my students read was issue 19 of The Sandman, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. Yes, I was that kind of fan.

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The Loneliness of the Hollywood Superstar: Jay Kelly (2025)

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Hollywood, the Dream Factory – it is actually quite silly, and none are more silly than Hollywood superstars. Drop them in the real world on their own, without their entourage, and they wouldn’t survive five minutes. They’re shallow, self-centred and vain, they barely have a personality of their own, which is probably why they choose acting in the first place. But then, they bring joy to all our lives, so all is forgiven. We love you, Hollywood superstar!

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Here they come

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Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.

Our ongoing chain of associations, Six Damn Fine Degrees, arrives in 1989, with Julie’s entry on the BBC mystery series Campion, starring Peter Davison (who’s also played various kinds of doctors, and Doctors, throughout his career) and Brian Glover (who, among other performances, provided a particularly memorable death scene in Alien 3). And, unexpectedly, there’s even a trailer for it!

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