Twenty Eighteen, A List (i) 1 Jan 2019 This list was inspired by Brad Nelson in another place, and their excellent idea of just smushing together the things which stood out in 2018 regardless of media or format…
EMINEM - "Without Me" 14 Sep 2017 Eminem produced “Without Me” himself, and the sound of this song is the best thing about it, a thick, soupy, snaky bassline and a brutally four-square beat. Ironic that this…
The Freaky Trigger Readers' Poll 2015: #40-#31 3 Jan 2016 "Hi there kids, I'm an anthropomorphised visualisation of the online streaming service Tidal. This year has been a veritable whirlpool of activity for me, trying to remind people that I…
hullo clouds hullo sky -- but answer came there none 30 Dec 2015 Some time during my father’s last summer, I sat with him in his garden. It was late afternoon: the sun, bright and warm but no longer overhead, was hitting the…
The Freaky Trigger Movie Poll 2015: #40 - #31 5 Jan 2016 "Hi I'm Harrison Ford, the silent movie star with a somewhat unusual name, welcoming you to the first ten films in the Freaky Trigger countdown of the top movies of…
The Freaky Trigger Movie Poll 2017: #20 – #11 30 Jan 2018 Hi, I'm Lori Quaid, just an ordinary boring housewife living my suburban life, doing housework and maintaining my 80's hair. 2080's hair of course, its 2084, the future where I…
Omargeddon #20 / #21: ¿Sólo Extraño? / Nom de Guerre Cabal 23 May 2021 Since the beginning of his solo career, song reworkings and rearrangements have appeared frequently across Omar Rodríguez-López’s oeuvre. Samples and sequences recur on most of his electronic music, and many…
The Inaugural FreakyTrigger TV Poll: #12 – #1 10 May 2018 "Hi, I'm the Ghost Of The 1979 ITV Strike, and I am here to resurrect and complete the somewhat delayed (due to strikes probably) Freaky Trigger TV Poll. Imagine if…
About the Author
Tom invented Freaky Trigger on a bus journey in the mid-90s. A page about what he's up to can be found here
10 Jul 2000
The Pokemon Phenomenon This piece was going to be an unabashed paean to Pokemania, explaining what a cracking game it was and how the mass tweener hysteria which greets every fresh Pokegame, cardset, pillow-case, or doily was a good thing inasmuch as ten-year-olds are natural obsessives and it wasn’t like they were wasting their time […]
1 Jan 2002
British Bubblegum Pop 1968-1972 “Sunday morning, up with the lark, I think I’ll take a walk in the park, Hey hey hey, it’s a beautiful day …” Daniel Boone, “Beautiful Sunday”, 1972 British bubblegum pop, circa 1968-1972 – as distinct from its more worldly and sophisticated American equivalent – is a pure insight into a […]
3 Mar 2005
stick with the beasts we got plz #1: the CENTAUR centaurs are classically portrayed as noble and amazing (if occasionally super-horny): but i have always found em ANNOYING!! i. look at them they are top-heavy at the front = when they gallop they will fall on their faces ii. they have TOO MANY LIMBS = […]
17 Oct 2019
Hi all – We know some of you have had serious issues with the FT comments, both in terms of logging in on existing IDs and creating new ones. This is because of something being imposed by our hosts to stop continued spam comment attacks. We’ve taken the actions requested (updating wordpress etc) but there’s […]
25 Jul 2006
Or: Games I Have Known. For the sake of my patience and yours, I have mostly restricted this to games I either owned or played – ones where I read a friends’ rulebooks and only dimly remember have been ignored, with a couple of notable exceptions. If you want to know more about any of these, […]
1 Jul 2013
This article by Laurie Penny on the pervasiveness and persuasiveness of the manic pixie dream girl trope is really good. I’m the same age as Laurie Penny, so was plagued by the same cultural stuff as her- I don’t know if it’s just egocentrism for my own timeline but I feel like the 90s marked […]
14 Apr 2007
Plenty of words have been written about the seminal Sex Pistols’ seminal gig at the seminal Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1976. There has even been a whole book about it! Everyone knows that the gig was really very important indeed and that everyone who attended became a very extremely important person. HOWEVER does everyone know exactly […]
1 Oct 2002
Introduction It was about 2 in the morning and I was trying to get a handle on Alexander the Great. I had a final exam coming up and I’d missed half the syllabus – and something else was missing; a way into the man’s head. Alexander had single-handedly destroyed the world’s largest Empire and put […]
