Loud
The half that decides what a playlist turns into by track six, no matter what I put at the start.
Off hours
The other
eight hours
Everything else on this site is what I get paid for. This is the rest of it, which is a great deal more of my life and considerably less of my CV.
Nothing here is ranked and nothing has a score out of ten. It is grouped by what I actually want the thing to do to me, which is the only honest way I know to sort a list of favourites.
01
Music
two scenes, same wiring
Rock, mostly, and this is the real list rather than a curated one. You can tell, because Taylor Swift is in it.
Loud, in Bangla
The same thing at the same time in a different language, except at home it is not a niche at all. These bands are what people are actually crazy about. Barely written about in English, which is the only reason you might not know them.
The ones that ruin the theory
Everything above adds up to a tidy story about a rock listener. This shelf exists to stop me telling it.
4 / 4
favourite albums by the same band. I wrote the list before I noticed, which is more revealing than ranking them would have been.
Hybrid Theory · Meteora · Minutes to Midnight · Living Things
Four albums, one band, and three fairly different bands inside that one. Anyone arguing about Linkin Park on the strength of the first two is arguing about a version of them that had already moved on by 2007.
Poth Chola · Aniket Prantor
Artcell, and the two I would hand anyone who has never heard a Bangladeshi band. The Dhaka rock scene they came out of runs deeper than anyone outside it expects, and these are the argument for it.
Carnival of Rust
Poets of the Fall, and currently the thing I put on when I cannot decide what to put on. It has been that for longer than is reasonable.
The Spotify profile, if you want the unedited version (opens in a new tab) Which includes everything I would not have chosen to put on this page.
02
Film
sorted by the evening, not by the rating
Fifteen of them, in three piles. The pile a film lands in says nothing about how good it is and everything about what I was in the mood for.
For when I want to be worked on
Long, deliberate, and they leave something behind. Almost never the right choice on a Friday.
For when I want nothing done to me at all
Watched far more often than the shelf above, which is the honest ranking and not the one I would put on a poster.
For when a film tries both
The hardest trick in the medium. Comedies that turn, or that quietly were not comedies.
4
Christopher Nolan films on this list, across two of its entries. I am choosing to read that as consistency rather than as a rut.
In Bruges
Sold as a comedy about two hitmen hiding in a small Belgian city, and for about forty minutes that is exactly what it is. Then it stops, and it never announces that it has stopped.
Blade Runner 2049
Slower than the film it follows and better for it. Almost nothing is explained to you, which is precisely why there is anything left on the second watch.
3 Idiots
Does the thing most comedies will not risk. It is funny for two hours and then asks to be taken seriously, and it has earned enough by then to get away with it.
03
Series
the long ones, and the ones that are just on
Fifteen of them, and they split differently to film. Not by mood, but by whether I am actually watching the thing or it is simply on.
Knew where they were going
Plotted towards an ending and then reached it. The shelf is short because doing this is rare and nearly everything else on this page is proof.
On while I do something else
Comfort viewing. The only shelf here where I could not tell you what happens in season four of any of them, and that is the entire point of it.
Watched, watching, queued
Everything that fits neither shelf, including one that sat on the first for six years before it lost the right to.
Dark
Three seasons of time travel in which every loop that opens is closed by the end. I have gone looking for another show that manages it and I have not found one.
Game of Thrones
Filed on the third shelf. It spent six years on the first.
Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey
The one I would put in front of someone who has just told me they do not like documentaries. It is not really a documentary; it is a very patient argument.
Your turn
there is a box on the contact page now
A page like this is only half a conversation. If something here is wrong, or something obvious is missing, I would genuinely rather know.
Contact has every way to reach me, and the one that gets read fastest is the email.
None of the artwork on this page is mine. Posters come from The Movie Database (opens in a new tab) and artist photographs from Spotify (opens in a new tab). Both are served from their own CDNs rather than copied here. The lists and the opinions are mine. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB. Artist photographs and links are provided by Spotify.
Next
There is a game
Three lanes, three ways to be stopped, and a generator that will not put anything in front of you that you cannot get out of the way of. It is the only page here you can lose.