HYPERTEXT WONDERLAND

I’ve been a gym member since I was 16, but only recently started going to classes. According to a 2026 fitness report , just under one in five people in the UK (19%) are gym members, with 41% of those regularly attending classes. That puts me in a surprisingly exclusive club of just over five million people who book onto them. This may explain why I now have to plan my workouts an entire week in advance! Numbers aside, the main reason I’ve warmed to classes is the social side. For years, I worked out almost entirely on my own – and I still do – but I’ve reached a point where getting out of the house and feeling like I'm part of wider society is appealing. I've found working out alongside others encourages chatting and is a great way to wake up my brain after a full day working from home (remote workers unite and take over). I suspect this feeling is widespread given how we're all navigating the complexities of a post-Covid world. It's becoming easier than ever to ...

Okay boring bit first. A couple of months ago I realised I wasn’t listening to much new music so I came up with a genius idea — make a playlist for any new song I come across and enjoy.  I’m tracking them bi-monthly which means I’ve created the grand total of two playlists so far. It’s a fun way for me to try and discover new music and doubly good because Spotify now recommends more things I might actually like. Yay \o/ This month followed a similar theme to last month in the sense it was dominated by indie female vocalists. No shame here but it probably explains why my Spotify Wrapped labelled my taste as 'Bubblegrunge'. The first song I added this month was Big Pink Bubble by Beach Bunny, which I’ll be honest… I now skip every time it comes on. They have better songs and I already added most of them to last month’s playlist ( Prom Queen , Clueless and Nice Guys ) . I then stumbled onto The Ratboys and added a couple of tracks — I Don’t Go Out at Night , Elvis in the Freezer...

Me and Majora’s Mask have a fraught history.  I first played it as a teenager via a ROM emulator and promptly broke the game by cheating my way into places I clearly wasn’t meant to be. I tried again in 2017 on the Wii U during my master’s degree and gave up somewhere around Snowhead. Playing — and finally finishing — it on Switch last week, I think I now understand why it took me so long. It’s a game of dazzling highs and deeply frustrating lows. If you’ve somehow missed the last 15 years, Majora’s Mask is the direct sequel to Ocarina of Time , developed in just over a year by Nintendo’s EAD studio. Link is pulled into the strange land of Termina, trapped in a repeating three-day cycle as a mysterious mask threatens to crash the moon into the world. That cycle defines everything, mostly for the better. Progress is built around rewinding time, meaning dungeons and quests unfold over multiple loops rather than one clean run. Key items persist, money doesn’t, and planning becomes e...

  I came across Dead Calm randomly watching old YouTube footage of Orson Welles where he mentioned an unfinished project called The Deep , based on a novel by Charles Williams.  It's a film that sat in limbo for decades before finally being adapted into something else entirely by Philip Noyce. While  not Welles’ vision it's a taut, nervy thriller. One I really enjoyed. The story follows a young couple, played by Sam Neill and Nicole Kidman, sailing across the Pacific in an attempt to escape a recent family tragedy. Their journey is interrupted when they encounter a sinking schooner and a lone man rowing desperately toward them. He’s sick, agitated, and quickly taken aboard. That, of course, turns out to be a mistake . Suspicion builds fast and before long he seizes control of the yacht, taking Nicole with him and leaving Sam stranded aboard a doomed vessel. From there the film splits neatly in two: Sam fighting to survive at sea, and Nicole trapped in a tense psyc...