The nice thing other than how totally awesome it is, of course.

In Vancouver, at least, you can definitely get away with cuts like that in business casual or even a dressier sort of formal. Generally, anyhow. And the nice thing about the cut is that it can be disguised pretty easily as something much more conventional.

I think it's a strength of the show that the plot clips along quite quickly. It means it stays fresh — it would've been way too easy for it to be stuck in base camp/survivalist plotlines (and backstabby politicking up with the adults) forever, and I think it's to the show's credit that it's willing to allow the basic…

I was pleasantly surprised by how good it got. The first couple episodes were alright, if a little CW-ey, but by episode 4 or so it starts to find its own voice in a big way. I like the overall sense of its pacing, too — season 1 we spent a lot of time with the core cast and origin story, season 2 looks,…

I think it's a fine device when deployed carefully, and done right it can be absolutely devastating. Remember Brothers In Arms at the end of the second season of the West Wing?

It looks like I am, though to be honest I didn't recognize the track — my exposure to Dire Straits is scattershot and I guess I've never given that last album a listen.

I thought this episode was pretty strong generally, but what the fuck was up with the soft-rock slow-mo softcore sex scene at the end? The one that introduced not one but two love triangles? (well, I'm assuming with the mayor, but maybe he was just jackin' it to the security footage, and who am I to judge?)

I had this whole little arc which mirrors what Scrawler and Space Coyote, among others, are saying. Watched the episode with my also book-reading partner, and we both felt gross and uneasy with the scene, mostly because it's a pretty stark departure from the book. Didn't really come to any conclusion, talking about…

I think it's a strength of the show, or at least a demonstration of its really deep bench of great characters, that there close to unlimited spinoffs that I would watch literally forever. I'm down with all one of the ones mentioned here so far, especially Arya and the Hound Solve Mysteries. Or a Fawlty Towers-style…

Follow-up thought: I think you're supposed to feel conflicted about the original as well. The whole costumed heroes fighting crime thing is supposed to be both awesome *and* a little sickening and ultimately pathetic. So I don't think that Snyder was completely wrong to sex up the action sequences (though the casual…

My take is that it was an aesthetically successful rendition of Watchmen, but a thematic failure. So by and large people who are more oriented towards visuals (and/or haven't read the original closely) like it well enough, but people who get concerned about themes and meaning are appalled.

Part of it was for the money. Poetry, even critically acclaimed, doesn't pay much. Part of it was simply that he'd always wanted to be a musician. He was also on a bit of a narcissistic kick in the 60s and had some drug-addled ideas about getting his words out to the masses, and music could obviously garner him more…

I hear ya. I grew up with Cohen, but a lot of his songs never really clicked until I heard more approachable covers. I've grown to appreciate most of his original tracks now (though I admit I have some trouble with Death of A Ladies Man, and I can't always handle the original or Field Commander Cohen recordings of…

I'm actually pretty fond of Tower of Song. There are a few stinkers on it — Bono, Peter Gabriel's 1/8th speed Suzanne, a 100% personality-less cover of Everybody Knows (which shouldn't even be possible to ruin, but there you go) from, I just looked him up, some dude from the Eagles.

I dunno, I use "partner" to refer to my (female) partner. Dunno why, really, it just feels most comfortable. We're not married, girlfriend feels diminutive, and I'm into partnership. Partnership is awesome.

Isn't the appropriate pronoun for a person whatever they prefer, within (a pretty expansive interpretation of) reason? I imagine TWINKS knows what his partner's feelings on the matter are and uses their pronoun of choice because he's not an asshole.

I don't have an issue with the outfit thing per se, though I'd really really prefer if they just stuck to calling them "classes", y'know?

Yeah, that's exactly it. My partner is a gamer and has played FFXIII, so she doesn't need to be sold on Lightning as a character, and we've talked about exactly this subject, which is probably why my thoughts are relatively well-articulated on it. But I guess the problem with LRFFXIII is that it has a strong…

The game does make some fun of some of the more ridiculous outfits (Lightning gets some sarcastic digs in about the cat-ear one in the screenshot above, though honestly it's not that bad compared to some), but for the most part the whole battle-underwear thing goes unexamined.

I like both XIII and XIII-2, but neither is perfect, and in a perhaps not great design decision they have very different strengths: XIII is lush, focused, serious, quite constrained in scope, XIII-2 is less polished, gigantic, and pretty silly in the way only a time-travel story can be. I've met a lot of people who…