It's absolutely not an excuse for the whitewashing and I hope I didn't imply that. It compounds it dreadfully.

I saw a post pointing out that Marvel's biggest market is actually China, and having a benevolent Tibetan mystic who is made powerful through traditional Tibetan arts might not fly well with the censors. Gotta get that yuan.

personally my favorite genius annotation for hamilton is the one in the middle of helpless that for some reason has embedded in it hamilton/laurens waxplay erotic fanart

I've started rewatching Arnold with my five-year-old sister and it's amazing how well it holds up. There's a kind of melancholy to it that I adore.

I'm a mild Macklemore apologist, because he's trying in a way that most other white rappers do not, but he's…not a good rapper. His flow is terrible and his lines are juvenile. I know it's not on the album, but I would like to open an official inquiry into what the fuck he was thinking when he recorded "Spoons."

An anthropology professor of mine showed up as an antagonistic archaeologist in an early episode of King of the Hill. I don't know if he voiced the character, but he was definitely the one being mocked. The TA once showed us a snippet of the episode and the look of fear on his face when the professor walked in…

Eco's essay on Ur-fascism is a great and always important read. Here are the most salient sections:

I'll have to check this out. Icelandic film is generally an undiscovered gem. I heartily recommend the coming-of-age movies Nói Albinói and Metalhead. Never before have I seen a movie wring so much pathos and humor over a bucket of blood on the stove.

Per IMDB, I notice that there are no Sherpas given high billing, and that Sandy Hill Pittman (at the time of the climb, an accomplished climber in her early forties) is played by a model in her early twenties, possibly to fill the Incompetent Rich Woman role. Krakauer did enough to trash Pittman in his book, and every…

My monster-ravaged kingdom for a competent adaptation of John Gardner's Grendel, or an adaptation that gets into the fact that Beowulf was textually the worst of the Geatish princes and was probably like seventeen and also there's a lot of incest raging around the Hrothgar legend.

I've had hákarl. It tastes like aged cheese. And then you swallow and it tastes like aged cheese marinated in the piss of a dehydrated man.

I went to Iceland a few years ago and men his height are not especially uncommon. One told me, with real sorrow in his voice, that all the trolls were dead except Grýla, the evil woman of the mountains whose sons bring Christmas presents and whose giant cat devours children if they don't finish their knitting. "No,…

I should hate nu metal but the thirteen-year-old xXxhardcorexXx child inside me resists. The adult points out that Korn is directly responsible for introducing me to Slayer and Jethro Tull, and that at least in the eara of nu metal we had some genre diversity on the radio. Sort of.

I am honestly surprised that this never happened. He had a habit of lending out his Led Zep vinyls to his students. Great man. Aside from the Reddit.

Be of good cheer - it was not.

Are you planning to apply or avoid?

True Detective is what happens if you ask a sophomore English major to write a daring cop show.

This heartwarming story does maybe end with a hospitalization at 11 after I drank a three-liter of Mountain Dew and went into ventricular fibrillation but details, details.

When I was nine years old, I attended a week-long summer sleepaway camp intended for children with heart disease. On the last night there was a talent show and another nine-year-old decided that his talent would be to play Albuquerque on a boombox and act out the plot in mime. I laughed uncontrollably until I fell out…

Eh, semantics, and I like it a lot, but Dancer in the Dark is a movie that happens to feature music written by Björk, not a musical about Björk and her rise from child star to punky staple of the Icelandic music scene to international byword for "weird experimental music." Could be a jukebox musical of her stuff.