I don't know the age of the current crop of writers, but it's when all the people in their 30s and 40s left that the quality took a dive IMO.

I don't know. This site had great content when it was fresh and it wasn't nearly as well known or plastered with ads then. The writers couldn't have been doing that much better then.

Yeah, that was another one. If I had to put my finger on it, I was a lot more excited about this place when 'long form' meant the authors dove deeper into research and knowledge related to the topic at hand, not just deeper into their own opinions. Also it helped that the site as a whole was laser focused on media and…

This makes me want to go to a restaurant and get myself and all my kids chicken fingers and fries. I don't eat out often at all for money, health, and time reasons, but when I do I like to get whatever the hell I want. Before this article I hadn't thought about it at all but if it came up I would have thought what you…

Yeah. it remains my venue of choice, probably more out of habit than anything else. I don't think it was ever really revolutionary or anything but it was smart and focused, and dork-cool before that was really a huge thing and way before it turned into just another way to be an asshole. It brought a level of detail…

Serious question: is there a site that's like the AV Club was several years ago? By that I mean a site dedicated to in depth reporting on pop culture, and little else. I've noticed as the depth of reporting on movies, TV, books, etc. has declined, the quantity of reporting on things not at all related to those…

I had the same realization with the Karate Kid. Daniel is pretty much a tool, and Johnny is fairly reasonable, at least relative to the rest of the Kobra Kai.

1. It says Tom Cruise is in the movie, not that he's still flying. He could be a carrier CO or Admiral by now. However, given his personality, it's more likely he'd end up a defense contractor lobbyist who uses the clout and credibility from that one dogfight he was in like 30 years ago to cram all kinds of…

China's using the interest on our loan payments to buy a modern air force, complete with several types of modern fighters that are clearly designed specifically to fight us.

Having been the guy in the plane and worked very closely with the guys operating the UAVs (technically we don't have a lot of drones; drones are autonomous, where UAVs like the Predator and Reaper depicted in this film are continuously controlled by people, albeit remotely) , the only real moral difference in my mind…

Love this movie. As a Navy flier, I think it's great that Top Gun is the least absurd movie about my profession to come out in my lifetime. We've got Top Gun, Stealth, … Battleship for the surface guys … and a bunch of at least pretty good submarine movies. I guess there's something about submarines that inspires…

I'm thinking about it, and how many war movies that have gotten a major release in the US in the past thirty years have been completely uncritical of some aspect of the conflicts we've been involved in? A lot of movies that focus on the tactical level action like Black Hawk Down get maligned (I think unfairly) for…

I don't really know, but I don't think he was like that when he was in. I knew his platoon commander from what I believe were his second and third deployments pretty well. One of those trips was at the time talked about as one of the most action packed SEAL deployments of all time, and Kyle (I didn't know his name…

Gardens of Stone is pretty much my all time favorite war movie for this reason. Most war movies understandably show scenes of actual combat, and it's almost impossible to show combat without it looking kind of awesome, no matter how much grit and despair and blood you put into it. Which it is. It's every single…

That is true, except it sounds way worse when you say it like that than how it was in the book.

Funny you should mention the football helmets. When we (Navy) kicked "Cal"'s ass in the Aloha Bowl in 1996 despite being a 14-point underdog (glory days, oh, they'll pass you by…) it didn't even occur to me that "Cal" was in fact Berkeley. Thought it was some whole other school in California. I've never seen a…

I am and I have no idea how that matters. Does a maker of fantasy violence movies (everyone I know who was in Vietnam classifies Platoon as fantasy, and drawing from my own experience I tend to agree, though to be sure 'Vietnam' was a long and diverse conflict and Platoon might be representative of some units'…

Even now the Yamato is pretty much legendary in Japan. Last year I went to Kure on a side trip to my visit to Hiroshima; Kure is where Yamato was built, and the museum there is pretty incredible. It includes a 1/10 scale model of the Yamato that's over 40 feet long and 11 feet tall. The ship's silhouette is pretty…

@randys_donuts:disqus that's really funny.  I've heard the H-bomb (Harvard), the S-bomb (Stanford), the D-bomb (Duke; I didn't know that one rated a x-bomb, but this was in NC) in addition to the Y-Bomb, which I presume is Yale, in the same context you describe.  I'm such a snob-hater, I feel like I'm being snobby…

We don't know he didn't give a debrief to Starfleet or Federation leadership.  In fact, that could be how they knew to look for Khan & Co. in this timeline in the first place.  Old Spock just says he doesn't want to interfere in New Spock's life, he doesn't say anything about what he's telling anyone else.  Since the…