Kristen Sinclair

Marcus Keeley has reinvented himself on TikTok. Comedian and veteran of the Belfast creative scene, you may know him from his detailed reviews of unremarkable places, from Homebase to Applegreen to the dump, narrated in his signature witty monotone. His most popular, a visit to Tesco in Newtownbreda, has been viewed over 584,000 times. “Occasionally [TikTok] would offer me these ‘aspirational’ review style videos of people going out for a fairly standard meal or spending a night glamping in Fermanagh as if it was a life-changing experience. I’m not denying folk having a nice time, but the express reason of these videos seemed to me to be to make it more than what it is. A lot of the time they come off as quite insincere too, which just led me to questioning why these videos were being made at all. From boredom these sorts of videos inspired in me, I rattled off a few clips of very mundane, everyday experiences but presented in the same style of an influencer. It turns out that going to...

I am 24 and have been type 1 diabetic for thirteen years. Throughout my student life, I worked part-time in the retail and hospitality sectors; roles in these high pressure environments are often unavoidable for young people balancing studies and paying rent. Throwing a disability into this mix only makes for even more of a challenge. Most people with a disability are sadly used to ignorant comments made in passing, but one particular incident has stuck with me as it is one of the few times I have ever been truly angered by a colleague’s remarks. Whilst on an evening shift in a busy department store, I had taken a moment to test my blood sugar and eat a snack in the staff room after a rocky shift plagued with low blood sugar episodes, or ‘hypos’. Feeling flustered from the drop in blood sugar and having already had to treat a previous episode on the same shift, my supervisor swung her head round the door and tutted.  “Have you not got that under control yet?” I was stunned. The ign...

An electronic patchwork of moving tiles and faces, some lifting a guitar up to the camera, some poised next to a microphone and all smiling, fill young girls’ computer screens across Ireland and beyond. This virtual band practice is the most recent incarnation of Girls Rock School NI. Founded at Belfast’s Oh Yeah Music Centre in 2016 as a spinoff of Ladies Rock Camp, Girls Rock is a summer music camp that gives girls and non-binary youth aged 11-16 the opportunity to learn an instrument from scratch, form their own bands, write their own songs and cut their teeth as burgeoning rock stars. Weeks of coaching, merch-making workshops and Q&As with the province’s leading women musicians lead up to the final showcase where the new-fangled groups take to the stage to showcase their original material to a live audience for the first time. Girls Rock NI was the brainchild of Sister Ghost frontwoman Shannon O’Neill back when she was a student. After hearing about a similar Girls Rock Cam...

Dua does Disco (Source: sharinapro.com) When we think of disco, we think Sister Sledge, the Village People and Michael Jackson, groovy basslines and shimmering synths – a call to dance with no regard for tomorrow, in the words of Martha Reeves. Its heyday may seem confined to the faded neon-emblazoned LPs of the late 70s and early 80s, but the enduring influence and appeal of this genre resurges every decade, be it through innovative sampling or retro-tinged production. Dua Lipa’s latest release Future Nostalgia is an essay in majestic disco pop and is spearheading its most recent revival; similarly, The Weeknd’s ‘Blinding Lights’ resounds with polished 80s disco glamour. A decade ago, Bruno Mars’ Unorthodox Jukebox and Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories gave a nod to the classic disco sound with a modern twist (and the latter with Nile Rodgers’ Midas touch). Back at the turn of the millennium, Kylie Minogue dabbled in nu disco on Fever , whilst the crate-digging DJs of t...

Edited by Birdy Francis The first dream I can remember having was a nightmare. I was confronted with a massively oversized skeletal spider, nearly half the size of my five year-old self, crawling slowly towards me in my bed. It was made entirely of bluish jagged bones and was eerily contorted as it crept along the duvet sheets. I woke up bolt upright in bed to my parents trying to quieten my screams. From then on, any bad dream I had was called a ‘jaggy spider’, and the term has stuck with me to this day. Whilst my life so far has been peppered with countless colourful and vivid dreams, with jaggy spiders few and far between, that specific one has made the most significant impression on me. I used to believe lots of strange things could prevent having a jaggy spider, like not eating cheese or Wagon Wheel biscuits before bed.   Much like I don’t know if there’s any truth in my remedies for bad dreams, scientists don’t know for certain why we dream either. There is a lot of ...

Source: fatgirlscanruntoo.ca Recently I asked my Mum if she wanted to have my copy of Elle as I’d finished reading it, and she took me up on the offer. Sometime later, getting into her car, I found it dog-eared and tossed onto the back seat. Being the complete neat freak that I am, I wondered how she could possibly have chucked it away like that, letting the edges of the pages tear and the covers bend. It cost a whole four pounds after all. The now slightly warped face of Kim Kardashian pouted up at me from the glossy cover. And this wasn’t a one-off encounter with a discarded magazine; battered, years-old stacks of issues of hairdressing periodicals and stereotypical women’s weeklies adorn the coffee tables of salons, waiting rooms and even houses worldwide. It has become a regular occurrence to be faced with magazines bearing a crisis-ridden Katie Price two husbands and four boob jobs ago whilst waiting to see the dentist. The magazine is a bit of a diminishing art form, ...