I'm a fan of the weekly pinball newsletter This Week In Pinball, and one of the things I really like about it is the decision to open every newsletter with a song of the week, which is a cute way to provide some music you can stick on in the background while you read the newsletter (or not, if you've already got something on, or you just love silence.) Well, I'm nicking the idea, as a low stakes way to share some music I like when I feel like it.
This month I've been voting in the People's Pop Poll's "Pop World Cup" on Bluesky, which has been a really fascinating way to get exposed to music from a lot of countries that I just otherwise wouldn't—or to try and push deeper cuts from the more ubiquitous Western countries on other people, like I did by nominating Secession's The Magician. Rather than pick that though I thought I'd share this absolutely joyful bit of... uh, to be honest, I'm not quite sure what it is, but it's from Cote D'Ivoire, a country I doubt I've ever heard a song from, and it's great fun. If that's not your speed, I'll also highlight the Austrian entry, Dani Lia's schwindelig (omgomgomg) which I just can't stop listening to. Feel free to check out the whole playlist though!
My highlight of the month—of any month—is when they let me on The Insert Credit Show, and I'm slowly earning those credits so one day I can force the panel to play a game on the Amstrad CPC or something.
This was a tough one to write, because I really wanted to like this so much more than I did, and the state of the industry these days really can make you second-guess yourself as a critic. But better to be honest.
Technically a hat-trick of Taito releases, unintended but with the sad passing of Yoshihisa Kishimoto it felt right to share these pieces, even if in at least the second one I'm hard on Double Dragon. It really is close to unplayable in 2026 though.
As the Famicom version hit Switch Online, I thought it was worth sharing my coverage of the original and its Famicom version, because the game is simultaneously incredibly important and utterly baffling to the uninitiated. It's more a game that's for learning about rather than playing—at least, don't feel like you have to complete it. There's a reason I've only done it the once...
exp. Du Cinéma
Can't embed direct from the NFB ;_;
An unusual month in which nothing I saw graduated to front page status and I avoided writing about a few movies that I didn't feel like I had anything particularly useful to say about. So why don't I share Ripple Rock, which I watched on the NFB's website, which informed me that once in Canada they used over a thousand tons of explosive to blow up an underwater mountain, and reminded me that the NFB is an incredible resource that Canadians including myself mostly forget about but which should be cherished.
"~6000 words (and lots of images) on the 90s games that shaped my gender identity, including windows 3.1 amazons, sapphic crpg romances, and my own teenage fetish games."
And Finally…
Click through. It's worth it.
I think this might be the greatest piece of writing in the Onion, ever. I laughed so hard I couldn't breathe. It's just a masterpiece of tone and phrasing.
Relatedly, I didn't realise you could subscribe internationally for no additional postage costs. I should do that when I'm not skint, especially to support their great work making Alex Jones even more of a laughing stock than he already is.
Next week on exp.: The first vertically scrolling shooter?
Happy Halloween! Unless you're reading this on November 1st, in which case happy All Hallow's Day, because technically Halloween is All Hallow's Eve, as part of the three day Christian festival of Allhallowtide (this is why we get Day of the Dead celebrations on the 1st and 2nd of November.) So you don't have to give up the spooky season yet. Or ever. This Month's Soundtrack For the second time in a row I'm selecting a song I first heard in one of my buddy Justin Decloux' 24 hour movie mind...
Oof, late one today because I fully and completely forgot it was the end of the month. Still, October next month! Means I'll be dedicating the entire month to spooky games! Something to look forward to. This Month's Soundtrack exp. Magazine: we work for you. At the end of August my buddy Justin Decloux did one of his legendary 24 hour movie mind melters, and late in the evening he played Anders Häger Jönson’s Places That Were Anime To Me, a beautiful video essay of critical nostalgia about...
This Month's Soundtrack Well, it couldn't really be anyone else, could it? This isn't exactly the kind of song that's supposed to accompany you on the reading of a newsletter, but for better or worse my taste is largely sad bangers only, and this is such a perfect, fragile, heartbreaking object. This Month On exp. Subscriber Posts:Titanium Court (Thomson, 2026)UFO 50 #8: Planet Zoldath (Perry, 2024)[subscriber exclusive] My Titanium Court article was a real challenge to write. It took me a...