That's what a basic starter rate without internet was when I cut off of my cable in the midwest 5 years ago or so. Comcast claims their lowest, internetless rate is around $45 a month, but having dealt with cable companies, I freely concede that that's probably a bag of filthy lies. Still, even if it's $90, we can…

Right now, cable costs what, $30 a month? For 300 channels? So you're paying about a dime for every channel you get. Does anybody think there's a chance in hell that a per channel model would be 10 cents a pop?

Letting racial slurs stand as official names for things in contemporary society sends a couple of shitty messages. It tells the targeted group that a football team is more important than not dehumanizing them with historically belittling language, and it tells the dominant culture that that kind of casually racist…

"Oh, ghost of Pterichthys, are the armored ostracoderms and the arthognaths a single group of placoderms or distinct but superficially analogous groups?""

This is a universal problem with modern broadcast news, though, and in many ways news in general. The proper way to do journalism is to send whoever in without a time limit and make sure you have someone embedded in basically every nation on Earth, preferably overlapping with their eventual replacements so you've…

I enjoyed the description on paper, too, but it works like a goddam skull and crossbones for the actual film. I have an MFA in Creative Writing, and "A meditation on why girls won't date me and/or my relationships fail" is every third thing that an artsy 20-something writes.

Which makes the obviousness so much worse. Honestly, I'd rather the secret identity stuff just be a genre blind spot that's never examined too deeply. There are probably 50+ supervillians at DC who are supposed to be mega-geniuses, and to have only one of them connect dots that the internet could hammer out in forty…

Perhaps. But since for many, that's social media's primary function, I'll take some self-involved grandstanding that raises money for disease research than self-involved whining about it that achieves nothing any day.

Some of the response to this represents the apotheosis of internet self-centeredness and negativity. A bunch of people took 10 minutes to do something silly and raised $40 million over last year's funds for an awful disease charity. It seems like, bare minimum, the decent thing to do here is shut up about the…

"Affably evil" was two words more personality than he had prior to that.

It's a bold move, and one that tickles me. Barsanti gets at how this is possibly overcompensation for forty years of Aquaman jokes. Worried that people are going to make fun of your fish king? Well, considering the leads are Cavill and Affleck, just cast Aquaman as someone who could clearly kick Batman and…

C'mon, this kind of entitled crap brings me dangerously close to feeling bad for fantastically wealthy recluses. Watterson or Chapelle or whoever doesn't owe anybody anything. They made some great jokes. They were funny. I laughed.

I agree AoS took some nitpicky hits, but I think that's a function of there not being anything else particularly interesting happening. The show had huge narrative and character issues; pointing out minor, easily fixable dialogue problems was arguably being kind to it.

There's probably a line between that and "fan," though. I've read some Rand just because her philosophy has crept into American political discourse so heavily in the last few years, but I would never call myself a fan.

See, the problem with that is it's hard to train someone that camaraderie and bonding are useless weaknesses through camaraderie and bonding. Being fiercely loyal to evil for reasons of friendship is basically a contradiction in terms, and it's really something people mostly do on TV, not real life.

Kima and Mrs. Kima pass a bunch of times. Slightly fewer if you count boys as men. But I think the wire is the best show ever, and I even I have to admit it leans pretty heavily on its dude characters.

This is touched on up top, but I agree that the backlash might be less "sold out" or "one note" than it is that his movies just haven't been that great for a while.

This does kind of make me fauxstalgic for that non-existent time when the general public could handle watching more than one kind of thing on the same channel.

Also, the worst episodes of Buffy are way, way worse than the worst episodes of something like Breaking Bad or Mad Men. It's possible to make 22 episodes. It's a lot harder to make 22 winners, and even on some of the really great network shows, all the evidence suggests that some filler is inevitable. Cutting that…

Yes, but most of Keanu Reeves' work in movies sucks, ergo, he's worse than Hitler. (Cool story bro: My oddest celebrity near-encounter came when I was on a tour of an observatory, and a gregarious old SCIENCE! gentleman was talking about the time he had Keanu Reeves on a private tour. One of the staff apparently…