I'm shocked. I fucking loved it. What didn't work for you?

Yeah, but that's a whole unfortunate trend people are mocking. The man's original idea for it was sovereign; not his fault if it's been copied without cause. Sometimes simplicity is the best: his Joker theme has to be, with condolences to Jack Black, the greatest one-note composition of all time.

Fuck. Yes.

Are we…are we dissing Hans Zimmer now?

I fear I dislike him because my own prose is purple enough to cause ugly feedback. I don't know that I'm purple, but I fear it. I'm damn sure no Leonard.

I recognize all these terms, and I'm confident you know what you're thinking about, but I don't know what you're trying to say.

I think you think you're making cogent arguments that you're not actually making. Insinuations and declarations of fact with the assumption that the fact is inherently corrupt are not really arguments.

I would accept a Mieville defense at some point. I liked City & City okay, but found several others, including Perdido, unfinishable. The prose just couldn't stop sucking its own dick. In my equally humble opinion. I'd love to be wrong; I'm hungering for great non-Tolkien fantasy.

I think Gaiman's great flaw is his insistence on making all storytelling about storytelling. I get that you're an artist, dude, and such things should be thought about. But the meta feels awfully precious, and then like a crutch.

True. Shit is shifting. Not a lot of Area X miniature games out there yet, though.

I don't know. I'd like to see documented evidence one way or the other. Certainly some arguments I've seen for why, say, trolls in Shadowrun have to have a lower IQ cap than humans sound an awful lot like eugenics arguments from a hundred years ago.

Maybe right around the time white fantasy authors lived in a world as free of black people as Native American myth-authors did. Which was never. Or maybe when there's no need or point to look at the developing history of the west and its subcultures, including how people were impacted by race. Which will be never.

Minority geeks: if you were mocked by your own culture or people for your geek appetites, what was the nature of the mockery? I ask out of interest and compassion, and also now in part because it has bearing on a book I'm writing and I've been collecting stories about this kind of thing.

It's not an accusation. It's an observation that points to why, even though geek shit is supposed to be a refuge for geeks, it often is only a comfortable one for white geeks. That can be due to no nefarious intent and still be true.

The band Earth's name is a ripoff of the third planet from Sol, in an outer wing of the Milky Way. The name, and the idea that floral and grotesque things happen in close proximity there, are identical.

Where are the classical conservatives that will take back their political name? You know, the ones distrustful of governmental money management and fond of a bit of personal good governance—instead of the ones that deem examining our national conscience over our treatment of the environment, women, diverse sexualities…

I like how you presume that ABC either had no idea what they were agreeing to make eight years ago, or else experienced a sudden executive-wide conversion to the liberal 'lock-step' since then. Really, the idea that a major network is driven by moral stances at all. It's adorable of you.

I would like to say, as a very straight dude and deeply faithful Catholic, that this episode felt God-given in its beauty and tenderness and smoking hotness. I can't even imagine how many gay Muslim men are going to pole vault on their own johnsons when they see it. It felt magical and good, like it made the world…

Yes.

You really only have to be one lesson ahead of them. The unit on Run-DMC probably went great.