While AoS has gotten a lot better, it's still pretty pants at utilizing its ensemble and it feels very, very whedony.

SHIELD has procedural elements and it involves things that basically work like magic. The fact that people have weird powers because of superheroes or technology doesn't really matter IMO. It's set-dressing.

If you're looking for a solid adaptation of the comics, this isn't going to be it. It takes storylines from them, but the stuff that made the comics interesting doesn't really translate to network television.

I had a whole joke worked out about the fibres that TOTALLY AREN'T JUST MY SWEATER RUBBING OFF ON MY LESIONS YOU GUYS grew into marionette strings for Big Pharma but then my browser crashed and it disappeared.

Belgium uses black people instead.

I used to love For Better or for Worse, until I learned more about Lynn Johnston, who is a very bitter woman. Now it's just kinda sad.

No Porkins,no sale.

See, on the one hand Morgellons isn't real. But on the other hand, not everyone who has it has delusional parasitosis. I was listening to… I think it was No Such Thing as a Fish, and one of the Elves brought up a Morgellons sufferer who turned out to have Guinea Worm Disease.

Does the Morgellon Parasite Worm count as a cryptid?

Eh. No one's gonna catch you torrenting and Brooker himself is on the record saying that piracy is A-OK with him because he's not Amish or primitive.

Charlie Brooker actually endorses piracy because he's a new media goon-a-ma-dork who gets that the internet isn't terrifying.

It was originally written as a Nathan Barley but it didn't cohere into anything other than GIT OFF MAH LAWN rambling, so Brooker and Morris spiked it.

YOU DOUBLE FUCKING HITLERS

You'd think so, but not really. Public Radio isn't so much leftist as it is institutional. It's about consensus, balance, that sort of thing.

It makes more sense if you know where Koenig fits in politically. Like a lot of people working in Public Radio, and on This American Life in particular, she's a center-right neoliberal. She's like the Planet Money guys. She's done sympathetic reporting on insurance companies, for instance.

Yeah. At least he acknowledged that in the apology rather than just being sorry for the offense.

Yeah. They're kids' books and he frequently uses words above their reading level and then defines them in an aside what starts with that phrase.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure it is. Laurie had already started shifting his career to the other side of the Atlantic by the time that Iannucci's TV work was getting anywhere.

Yeah. She started as a greenhorn because she's our POV character. She's the closest to normal, the derpy hacktivist. Yeah the others had to bail her out. Not just in terms of combat, but also in terms of secret agent culture (whenever they dealt with the broader SHIELD hierarchy) and also nerd shit whenever Fitz and…

Sarah Vowell actually has an excellent essay on this subject. Which, of course, she framed as advice for Al Gore. She talks about the notion of the American Nerd as self-deprecating and witty and clever as opposed to being, well, bland and boring and stiff. Willow was one of her key examples, contrasted with Giles and…