#freakytrigger

[thevidsarealright]

There's still time to get your votes in for the tracks of the year! Closing date is 23.59pm GMT - send us up to 20 tracks and we'll count down the top 40 in January. (Pete is also running a Film & TV poll! I have already voted for Gardeners World.)

[thepopcritic]

Such a great idea! Enjoy!

[tomewing-blog]

My friend Meg Hewitt did a stand-up talk at London's Geek Show, telling or re-telling the tall tales of Andy Kaufman's wrestling career. I'm delighted she put the text of the talk up on Freaky Trigger, under the nom de grapple Meg The Marauder. I was mightily entertained by this, as someone who knew these stories only as rumour back in my REM fan days.

[itschaosmagic]

...Instead what Young Avengers, and Hawkeye, and the more interesting end of Marvel Now! give us is a quieter, slyer, character based soft momentism – single- or double-panel vignettes that shed light on a protagonist. The last two issues of Young Avengers – a multi-artist jam about a new years’ party – are just full of them: Billy and Teddy’s dancefloor embrace, Loki’s flirting with David, America’s closing remark to Kate, and of course Loki’s photograph. Sometimes they reveal something new, even turn a character inside out. More often they’re just funny, or sad, or sexy. They give you feels.

Which brings us to Tumblr.

This is an incredible article by Tom Ewing that I only just ran into even though it came out way back in January at the end of the Young Avengers run. There is a paragraph from it that has apparently been making the rounds on tumblr for a while, but it leaves out the wonderful analysis of what Marvel's doing and how fandoms and fandom creators interact. (If stormingtheivory hasn't seen this yet, that should be remedied because there is a whole lot about the theory of how comics work and are structured and how that changes in reaction to fans and franchises.)

[tomewing-blog]

http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2000/07/pika-pika-chu-chu/

That post aintgotnoladytronblues reblogged made me dig up what I wrote about Pokemon back in 2000 on Freaky Trigger. I had bought Pokemon Blue in the airside shops at Gatwick before going on holiday, and found it an amazing stress reliever / beach novel type of thing.

This isn't the best essay I wrote back then, by a long way: there's a too-cool-for-schoolness about it, the analysis is pretty glib and sometimes just wrong, I sound like a 27 year old embarrassed to be into a kids' game (because I was).

Also I put the Pokes away at the end of the holiday since I had nobody to trade with, so I never even finished the damn game. I bought the new games as travel stress-busters, played them a bit and put them away unfinished when the holiday was over, but it wasn't until bravestofthepack bought me Pokemon Black for a birthday and I started playing it with my son that I (and he) really got hooked. It's now become what Doctor Who was for my Dad and me - a bit of shared cross-generational culture.

[tomewing-blog]

Finally got round to doing something I've been meaning to for weeks, i.e. putting all piratemoggy and my pieces about Young Avengers (including the earlier Kid Loki stuff) into one place as a series within the site.

Happy times, happy times. Hazel did some amazing writing here, I think they work well as a 'thing' all together, too.

[theladysuffragettes]

An excellent examination of two strains of pop, courtesy of one of my favorite critics.