Welcome – about me

Welcome to ChristopherCableMedia.com

Who am I?

My name is John (Christopher) Cable. I am in the last few weeks of my final year studying BA (Hons) Film Studies at the University of Portsmouth and will be continuing my studies next year with MA Media and Communication.

I enjoy most science fiction and action, specifically Star Wars, Star Trek, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (I have the words “DON’T PANiC” tattooed in large, friendly letters on my forearm) and Indiana Jones. For television, situational comedies are of a particular interest and I am currently writing about power relations and superiority theory within Blackadder for my final year dissertation.

Growing up with film

The first film I saw at the cinema was A Little Princess (Cuarón, 1995) – though I don’t remember as I was just a toddler! I have fond memories of the Warner Bros. cinema in Basingstoke, a venue that is to blame for a couple of light-hearted bias: The Phantom Menace (Lucas, 1999) and Pierce Brosnan as Bond. I saw my first Bond, Die Another Day, (Tamahori, 2002)  and Star Wars films at that cinema, but I was about the right age to start appreciating film and explore subtext and meaning behind them with Iron Man (Favreau, 2008).

Literally growing up through my teens with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in my opinion, offers an interesting perspective on the films, compared to someone who was an adult when they first hit cinemas. Tony Stark’s death in Avengers: Endgame (Russo & Russo, 2019) still chokes me up, an emotion I’ve found only one other film capable of producing from me, which is the death of Spock in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Meyer, 1982) .

For my A-Levels I studied Film and Media, but was unable to afford to go to University, so am thrilled to be here now. During college I joined the customer support team at FreeForums.org, then the number one free forum host and I was keen on forum development, but social media has all but destroyed the BBS and I no longer have the time to dedicate to running a community of enthusiasts.

My higher education

I started my higher education five years ago, at the age of twenty five, by taking an Access to Higher Education course in Science and entered my first year of BSc (Hons) Biology at the University of Portsmouth in September 2019. Something I will never forget is Professor Joy Watts telling us, just before the Christmas break, to “keep an eye on what’s happening in China”. Fast forward a few months to the second COVID lockdown and I decided Biology was not the right course choice for me. It interested me, but I was not passionate about it, and I was also at risk of failing my first year – the disruption caused by COVID lockdowns and distance learning were only partly to blame.

The change to Film Studies was the best choice I have ever made and I am eternally grateful to those at the University who allowed the switch, in particular Dr Emma Austin, who has been instrumental to my education as my final year dissertation supervisor and personal tutor. I set high expectations for my work and Dr Austin has helped me develop my academic skills and realise my potential.

Projects

In my second year in Portsmouth, I started the website https://www.twolinepush.com, which was dedicated to sharing news and leaked development secrets for the game World of Tanks (Wargaming, 2010). It was the main game I was playing at the time, and I found I was getting frustrated by other leak-orientated fan sites simply copy-pasting each other’s articles. I vowed to write original content and went on to publish several stages of a statistical analysis into the game and had a good working relationship with a Wargaming content manager. Heading into my final year, I decided to step away from that project to focus on my studies, but it did provide an interesting insight into fan studies, which is a current topic in my module Media Fan Cultures, led by Professor Lincoln Geraghty. (An interesting insight, alas not particularly helpful for my essays!)

I have created this website to, essentially, mark the start of my academic career and intend to continue my education, but also to write about areas that most intrigue me – this website will act as a hub to quickly access it all. Having returned to playing the game Eve Online (CCP Games, 2003) which is fondly nicknamed Spreadsheets in Space, I have been slowly working through some mammoth spreadsheets I share at https://www.nosympathy.space (named after my character name). I expect to consolidate the most important content from both websites into this one in the near future. APA7 referencing has been drilled into me over the last few years, so expect to see a lot of it!

Moving forward

For now, ChristopherCableMedia.com will stay fairly dormant and empty. During down-time I plan to work on website design and functionality, and over the summer to start populating with researched articles. I can’t make promises for activity, but I will always aim to provide researched and detailed articles surrounding Film and Media. If you’re here in April/May 2023, do let me know how you found the site!

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