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“Isn’t technology wonderful?” says one of the inhabitants of Pallet Town, Kanto – your home in Pokémon Blue, and the root of every Pokémon game, and every Pokémon journey, ever since. It’s a statement of outright optimism from the dawn o[…]

This is a set of posts about the Pokemon series of games – one long post for each Pokemon generation.
I wanted to write about something my sons cared about – pop music doesn’t quite cut it yet. And also I had that critical itch you […]

Avengers #1-17; New Avengers #1-8 by Jonathan Hickman et al.
Marvel’s Avengers and New Avengers comics at the moment remind me a lot of Dragonlance-era D&D, where the whole plot had been worked out in advance and the PCs moved through it w[…]

One of the most important things I ever read was a tiny RPG fanzine called SNOWED INN. Actually it wasn’t even a fanzine in its own right. It was a bonus edition of a zine called ASLAN, which was – or so I was given to believe – the most contro[…]

Now That’s What I Call Music! 85 (Not A Review)

It’s no secret that Popular, my main feature for this website, and a project that’s now run through almost 10 years of my life, spent much of last year beached – only 6 entries in 6 mon[…]

I was reading this piece on Ernst & Young and it struck me – not for the first time – that growing up reading IPC comics was the best possible preparation for a career in BUSINESS esp. mergers and acquisitions.
Just look at the histo[…]

This post is my contribution to Harkive – an opt-in mass ethnographic record of a day in the lives of music fans worldwide. (A bit like Nick Southall’s Music Listening Day from the last couple of years). The post will be updated occasiona[…]

Commenter Nixon, on another thread, asked this: “we’re now past the 40-year mark, long enough for trends to emerge… do you think that the list of UK number ones, taken as a weird at-a-glance sweep of British music history, very broadly […]

We are now firmly into the BRITPOP YEARS on Popular, oh yes, so it’s time to consider its musical legacy in the only language we truly understand, viz. a ticky-box poll.

We have selected 32 bands who someone, somewhere, might possibly have o[…]