absolute nonsense

Pei Yen, 33, Malaysian. (she/he/they/他) Mainly into British Comedy but I post a lot of other stuff too.  Inbox is open if you want to chat or w/e

[oxymoronish]

a pinned post

my other pages  

• Ask A Comedian! - britcom ask blog that i (used to) run • radiospeakeasy - radio show blog on dreamwidth • britcomcom - british comedy dreamwidth community 

important tags!! 

• my art tag • my gif tag 

[radiqueer]

Human relationships are not transactional but they are reciprocal, which I think many of you with your ‘i don’t owe anyone anything’ shtick are too happy to forget

[billiamdoor]

how else was he supposed to drink it?

[oxymoronish]

Monthly Highlights: June 2026

tired, very tired

TV Shows / Movies:

Zero Stars - Series 1 (2026) If there's one thing I love, it's to watch comedians Hang Out and Be Friends. This show is basically just Sara Pascoe and Roisin Conaty being silly in various places around the world, with the premise of checking out tourist attractions that have previously been given 1-star reviews online. The bulk of the fun is just watching them playing off one another.

Smoke (2025) Taron Egerton-led drama about an arson detective, based on a true story apparently. Very intriguing, nail-bitingly tense at times, goes completely mad in the last episode but I can't even complain (I am trying hard to be very spoiler-free in this description). That last shot of Taron's character was just. wot? I mean I get it but also. what a twist lol. Anyway immediately after I finished this show I had to autopsy a charred up body. Spooky.

The Way Out - Series 1 (2026) See above. This was the epitome of watching comedians dicking about with each other and having fun, this time in an escape room format. The cast absolutely makes this - Nish Kumar and Ed Gamble as team captains, with Amy Annette and David O'Doherty(!), Lou Sanders and Chloe Petts on their respective teams. 100% bangers, especially knowing how good friends (and in Nish and Amy's case, long-term partners) they are with each other, plus the fact that Gamble and Petts are insanely competitive and do escape rooms together for fun. Praying this gets renewed for another series.

September 5 (2024) Dramatization of the 1972 Munich Olympics where Israeli athletes were taken hostage, told from the point of view of an American sports TV crew who were broadcasting live from the event. From a journalistic and technical point of view, this was absolutely fascinating - everything from the little roles of everyone in the studio, the technology of live broadcast at the time, the total unprecedentedness of the entire thing ("Can we show someone being shot on live television?") But good lord the optics of this was. not good lol (I had to triple check that the film was actually released in 2024). Very much simplifies the underlying political conflict that led to the events in the first place, not to mention the dehumanization involved (which I guess may be the point because... that's what breaking news has done to us, hasn't it? the unrelenting news cycle reducing everything to headlines and coverage..) Anyway, an interesting watch for sure.

The Sheep Detectives (2026) I cried wayyyyyy too much at a movie about CGI sheep. Fun little family-friendly cozy crime thing with a cast list that retrospectively made me go 'what?'

Late Shift (2025) The stress of what I assume watching Uncut Gems is like, but taking place in a single late shift of a nurse on a surgical ward. Can attest that I think this very truthfully depicts a busy healthcare worker on shift; the rising tension and unrelenting anxiety building up over a course of a night while you pray that everyone just makes it through alive in time for next shift's handover. God I'm glad I don't work nights anymore (but lol and lmao if this isn't just what everyday is like on the wards now, with critical manpower shortages)

Radio Shows / Podcasts:

Comedy Club Extra: Comedy Catalysts - Series 1 & 2 (2019) Harriet Kemsley talks to various comedians about one person who inspired them in their career. I'm mainly amused that Josie Long chose David O'Doherty.

(new toy... a Xiaomi portable photo printer :0 perfect for silly little stickers for my journal asdfsadfsd)

Books:

A Particular Nasty Case - Adam Kay

A/S/L - Jeanne Thornton

All This Could Be Different - Sarah Thankam Mathews

Refusing Compulsory Sexuality - Sherronda J. Brown

Not that I needed an excuse, but pride month book picks were all queer-themed. A Particularly Nasty Case was very Adam Kay, the joke count is almost obscene but it was a light murder mystery that also picked at hospital bureaucracies and imperfect doctors.

A/S/L felt... liminal? It's about three (trans) teens who met on IRC (nostalgic! i have never used this btw. I was an ICQ/MSN/AOL generation kid) who form a game company and how their lives split and merge again across the years. It's funny to think about how every decision made as a teen feels so ambitious and life-altering, and how much the online friendships of our youths affect us personally. This book made me miss the old internet. I want to stay up late on a school night to watch shit with my friends, and I want to code stupid webpages again.

I read All This Could Be Different whilst on vacation and enjoyed the ride (despite my usual low tolerance for unlikable protagonists LOL). It's a book of contradictions - being societally aware vs needing to comply to capitalist ideals to make a living; being your best queer self vs the need for filial piety in an asian family. I liked the descriptions of food (these people sure dine out a lot) and the unapologetic use of hindi without condescending the reader.

I'll be honest, I've been reading Refusing Compulsary Sexuality for AGES and it has been slow-going because I found it a very densely academic text, not to mention depressing in many places. Related recommendation would be for Angela Chen's Ace.

-

Not much to update life-wise other than work work work. I have a conference-adjacent vacation in a couple of weeks which I am looking forward to a lot (get to hang out with all my work besties in one place!)

Have a good month everyone 😭😭

[puncertainty]

a leap of faith !

[jackabbot]

LOOK AT THESE CUTIES I AM SCREAMING

[titsay]

how are you?

[rylandgraces]

PROJECT HAIL MARY — 2026, dir. Phil Lord, Chris Miller

[cheap-slaw]

Learn to walk again

[oxymoronish]

Does This Radio Host Really Know Everyone in Wales? (The New York Times, 22nd June 2026)

[peach-pot]

being anti-amatonormativity in a romance centered world is like watching half the people you know put all their eggs in one basket and then drop the basket and all their eggs break and they’re crying and swearing they’re never gonna do that again and then a month later they have all new eggs in a new basket and they tell you the problem was they didn’t have a strong enough basket or fresh enough eggs and then they drop the fucking basket again.

[peach-pot]

(this post is about putting all your time, energy, and care into one relationship, about staking all your happiness on a romantic relationship, effectively making the entirety of your joy and stability dependent on one person who could exit your life for any number of reasons no matter how great the relationship seems. it’s about the societal expectation to build your entire social life around one long term relationship, putting all your eggs in that basket, so to speak, instead of tending to larger social network and maintaining a variety of strong connections so that even if one very important relationship comes to an end, you won’t be losing your whole social life in one fell swoop.)

[quietwingsinthesky]

friend is trying to convince me this is a common experience and I do not believe her, so

Do you expect to be paid back if you pay for something for your friend while you’re hanging out? (I.E. a ride, a meal, a trinket.)

Yes, always

Yes, but only if it’s above a limit of money

No, never

I don’t buy things for my friends.

bald button

Voting ended onJun 19

For a more illustrative example, say you go to the movies with a friend and you buy them popcorn, do you expect them at some point to send you money back via cash or through an app of some kind? Will you be upset if they don’t?

[chalroe]

From Lost In Translation by @quekerahkerah (which is so fun, go read it rn!!!)

[shrugsinchinese]

Dude, your glasses

[estro-boi]

we gotta get back to torrent distribution, i just watched someone eat eight grand in bandwidth charges because they ran a direct-download piracy site with local file hosting through cloudflare. torrents were invented literally for this exact reason

[estro-boi]

torrents work like this

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

please learn to torrent

[macleod]

How to Use Torrents (with Pictures) - wikiHow

An expert guide to get started using torrentsTorrents are one of the most popular forms of file sharing on the internet, accounting for over

always use qbittorrent, do not use bittorrent or utorrent.

[90108s]

i commend your body to the stars [ get it as a print here! ]

[ID: A Project Hail Mary illustration. The artwork consists of a 5x7 grid, with smaller illustrations inside the squares. The smaller illustrations include: the xenonite Tau Ceti system; the Hail Mary drawn across three blocks; Grace’s bicycle helmet; Adrian’s green auroras; the Blip-C capsule; the crocheted Earth; the small xenonite figure; Rocky drawn across three blocks; the Petrova Line; the rainbow from Grace’s blanket; the shoreline on Erid; the Taumoeba collector; the green Skittles pack; and Astrophage as seen through a microscope. The squares differ in background colors. There are “empty” squares that reveal Grace on a red-orange background from beneath the small illustrations, only his side profile visible. He’s smiling softly. The overall artwork has an off-white background. The text above the grid reads “PROJECT HAIL MARY” and the text below it reads “LIFE IS REASON.” There are stars at each corner of the artwork. END ID]

[puncertainty]

<3