I loved everything they did with Titus and Tina Fey's character last season - all the material about Kimmy starting to actually face what happened to her was gold, I thought.

My number one necessity in a book is good characters. They have to act like real people, and do things because that's what that person would do, not because that's what they need to do in order for the author's plot to happen. Without that, I can't really bring myself to care about the story. Beautiful writing is a…

I like Scalzi, but he never does quite what I was hoping for with the premises he sets up, so I usually end up being disappointed. The only one of his that I've read where that didn't happen was Redshirts.

That's part of why I don't get around to reading a lot of the classics of the genre. There are exceptions, but usually more recent classics, like Forever War.

I remember thinking that the gender politics in The Stars My Destination were pretty weird (but not the particulars at this point), but I could definitely see why it was such a classic.

That's what happened when I last tried to read Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Nothing offensive, and I wasn't actively upset or disliking it, but I was far enough in that I should have cared about someone or something in the story and I didn't, which made finishing it not worth my time, in my opinion. So many…

This reminds me of the "Tom Cruise Crazy" Jonathan Coulton song:

I was just rereading Holly Black's book, Tithe, which has a couple well-used Milton references in it ("Nor from Hell one step more than from himself can fly."), but also the line "And malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man," which is what originally led me to my favorite poem (Housman's Terence,…

Mostly rereading, but I read the first two books in The Paper Magician trilogy (free on Amazon Prime! Yay!). I like the magical system, and mostly enjoy the characters (except for when the heroine goes and does something ridiculously foolhardy for no reason), but there's one aspect of the setup that bugs me. No one…

I learned the word "coulrophobia" from the Popup Book of Phobias.

You're now kinetically gay?

Wasn't at least one of these guys in an "old guys pull of a heist" movie not too long ago?

It's all in how you build that syntactic tree, right?

I want to feel bad about rejecting a present that he clearly put a lot of effort into making, but really, he should have known better.

My grandparents had terrifying hobo clown pictures hanging in one of their guest rooms, so my sister and I would always fight over who had to stay in that room, then insist they all get taken down before bed time.

Well, I suppose the "Awareness" part is awfully ambiguous. Maybe "Prevention" would've been a safer wording… (but that implies that it's a bad thing that the esteemed president would like to see happen less often)

They all take shifts trying to distract him with shiny things or by jingling keys in front of his face, but occasionally he still gets himself on twitter or in front of a microphone.

Not quite the same thing, but Frank Oz was talking at sxsw about why the dark ending worked for the Little Shop of Horrors play, but not for the movie. What it boiled down to was, at the end of the play, there's a curtain call, so you get to see all the characters alive and well again, whereas with the movie, the…

This is definitely exciting news, but I never really thought that long form storytelling was a strong point for Zim. Do we think they'll come up with a good 90 minute story? Of course, I remember thinking that about Spongebob, and that movie is pretty solid.

The thing I never get over is how gross and grotesque the Zim version of Earth is.