Personally, I always associate Baum's work with John R. Neill, who illustrated all of the Oz sequels in a wonderfully lush and playful style, and whose designs Young drew from to great effect. Like this portrait of Ozma:

Oh, it's just a name. Like the Death Zone or the Zone Of No Return. All the zones have names like that in the Galaxy of Terror!

It's dangerous to go alone! Take this!

Well, I finished Day of the Tentacle Remastered and loved it to pieces, but I'm not sure what my next game will be. I'm not going to have a lot of time to play for the next week or so, so there's no sense of urgency. I may pick up the first episode of Telltale's Batman game, for professional reasons, believe it or…

Family-centric gatherings always bring out the melancholy in Hey Arnold!, which is unsurprising as it has maybe the most ambivalent attitude toward families of any children's cartoon. Sometimes they're great and loving and supportive, and sometimes they're the Simmons clan, or the Patakis the rest of the year. It also…

Woo, some kickass episodes today! "Cool Party" and "Arnold Loves Lila" are indeed the standouts. "Party" is just nonstop fun from beginning to end, with good bits for just about every character. It's the show's best argument for letting your freak (and/or geek) flag fly, and not letting others define your identity or…

We could just assume she was designed by a ten-year-old.

Constantly stabbing people isn't a bug, it's a feature!

She could pull them off, then throw them away in abject disgust. Then Amethyst would put them on just to bug her.

Ripped jeans. I think the very concept of intentionally damaged clothing would offend her on a deep personal level.

Pearl would have a promising career in education in front of her if she didn't have a shakier grasp of human society than most actual second graders.

You're right, pitting the two neuroses against each other was a brilliant move and kept things from getting too melodramatic.

Which reminds me, stop pushing baby birds out of their nests! That's only for actual Bird Moms!

As always, Futurama shows the way:
"Tunk look good. Me fat."
"No, you look good. Tunk fat."
Just add a crazy magic powers fight, and there you go.

Except for the word "insurance" that's essentially correct.

Good point. It's a tricky balance to strike, being both comic relief and a credible supervillain. Boomer at his best straddles that balance with aplomb. He's a Rogue for a reason, dammit!

I saw a werewolf drinking a pina colada at Trader Vic's.

How about War Room? It's a behind-the-scenes doc about the 1992 Clinton campaign, with a lot of footage of people like James Carville and George Stephanopoulos doing all the wonky strategizing and message-crafting that goes into a large-scale political campaign. I watched it as part of a college Poli Sci course and…

Hooray: Frogurt!
Fuck: Cursed.

I've been getting pretty steady responses to job applications recently. No offers yet, but several interviews, skill tests, and such. I had a short Skype interview yesterday and will have a "phone screening" later today with another potential employer, in response to an application that frankly I thought was a…