If this means more Nancy Birch in my life, I am delighted. I don't even need to watch the show (though it is excellent). Sometimes her cheekbones just show up on social media and my soul is made better for it. Thanks Hulu!

Warwick Davis! I lived in the same village as him when I was a bit younger. He seemed a good natured guy, at least when kids were around, and more importantly having him around meant the tiny local primary school got Tom Felton to judge their talent show once.

It also has a lot to do with gender roles and health care and other opportunities afforded to trans people. The fact of the matter is that during most of the 90s and early 2000s, for a gender non-conforming young person, the military was often considered the "best" option. Either it would "toughen you up" or it was…

Edit: And that's for a completely different thing. No, it was a blog post so I probably couldn't track it down if I tried, but a lot of people have said similar things. Multi-era story telling makes for some interesting stakes.

Chief at least seems to have been confirmed to be a pretty major native american demigod in his own right. (Napi, a trickster and creator) so I'm really hoping we can get more Eugene Brave Rock.

I'm mostly appalled that they felt the need to put David Thewlis in thick layer of finest CGI when they could have just left him in a suit. The jokes about armchair generals write themselves! And it would have made his stache a bit less obvious.

War and religion can definitely make for good cinema if you're willing to cinematize it, but such a big part of Tolkien's entire vibe was that he was just another Englishman. He didn't really struggle with his religion, except in terms of how he could put it in his books best, and he wasn't a priest or anything. World…

In the true spirit of Tolkien, the whole thing will come with a thirty page appendix with linguistic notes (WW1 English isn't too hard to translate but some concessions have to be made for American viewers) and detailed notes on how the calendar works and what exactly happened to Stuffins the teddybear after his scene…

The Boy Scouts have definitely made progress, but they still take a lot of money from religious groups and have strong ties to Mormonism especially. Given how recent some of those changes have been, and how strong the ties of the overall organization still is to those same groups, it comes across as a shiny coat of…

The Girl Scouts have higher standards than to let him speak at one of their events. I still resent all those sewing and dance related badges I had to do, but their history when it comes to basic civil rights is a lot better than the Boy Scouts. The Girl Scouts are LGBT positive for years, business backed and more self…

There is nothing less tasteful than a badly done exploitative derivative drama preying on the pain of millions while pandering to a base of bigots.

You have my respect for that, Darth. My family hails from Florida and it gets nasty down there.

Just barely in the South, but mostly just really in the suburbs. Every once in a while though, in the parking lot of BJ's, there will be a pickup truck with an uncomfortable number of flags. Just to remind me where I live.

I meant more in comparison to Netflix. Nobody's got the money for HBO. Amazon Prime is either something you get for free shipping, as an old lady to watch Downton Abbey, or because you're a student and know how to make fake email accounts (and you need to watch Downton Abbey). The people I know who watched The Man In…

Not sure what you mean by source article, there are quite a few in there including one from the New Yorker that mentions all the contracting companies by names. It's not a peer-reviewed essay, I'll admit, but I picked it because it had lots of links to other sources.

It is a little too conspiracy theory-ish for a grownup documentary, even I'll admit, but in this age of conspiracy theories turning out to be right on the money, why not? Ms. DuVernay probably wanted a more moderate look at the subject, but there's some really ridiculously horrible stuff if you care to look for it.…

Good questions! It depends on whether you're counting the costs of prisons (significant, mostly coming out of taxpayers pockets) or the extra money the companies make using their forced labourers. Corrections alone costs us billions a year. It's harder to say how much revenue the prisoners themselves generate, since…

Ava Duvernay's 13th could do you a world of good friend. In short the thirteenth amendment, though it bans slavery, makes an exception for work of prisoners. This loophole was then used to arrest thousands of black men after the Civil War, often on trumped up charges, and put them to work on railroads or even on…

A hot take from Tumblr, land of the more extreme reactions to this news really got me thinking. The Man in The High Castle clearly wasn't a ground shaking drama. It was apparently good (according to some people) but it didn't impact the cultural landscape even half as much as Game of Thrones did. People who watch…

And doing so, while undoubtedly well backed up by science, probably wouldn't end well. No force of man or god is going to stop teenagers from getting it on once the hormones are flowing, all you can do is damage control. That being said, I do think we as a society need to be more wary of older people who make a habit…