Stardew Valley is amazing. I pulled free after one relatively successful run through, but I can see how people get into it enough to do multiple farms, on different maps, with different spouses and so on.

Are we sure about that? I know that Gilead was sending "the children of Ham" out to the Dakotas in the book, which I took to be a border territory. Also, the regime was fighting rebel baptists in what sounded like Appalachia, which suggests to me that the hold on the interior and south was not all that firm.

That's possible, but I'd be very surprised if the process had involved much voluntary "choice," as that would run ideologically counter to much of Gileadean thought. The women sent off to the colonies were, I think, sterile or otherwise "useless." A woman too headstrong to be a handmaid, but too fragile to be a…

$39.99 go fuck yourself Hulu. TV sucked—I don't want anyone to be the "new television." I want content, at a reasonable price, with zero advertisements. In spite of how much I want to watch Handmaid's Tale, I still haven't, because it's on the world's worst streaming service.

Atwood has said some interesting things about this, along the lines you're suggesting.

I don't think they could have. When Moira escapes, she discovers that most people are ignorant of the existence of Aunts, let alone the Red Center itself. Not sure how the women taken there could have known about the ceremony beforehand.

Yeah, I've got to say, the regime ignoring science in the face of potentially catastrophic results for humankind seems somewhat more realistic today than it did in 1985 (though Reagan had definitely set the precedent by that point, anyway).

Major point for Atwood in the book. She wanted to make clear that no society could oppress women without the complicity of other women.

Atwood is a producer or something on this, and apparently on-board with expanding the universe of the Handmaid's Tale. The book is intentionally narrow and circumspect, but the postscript sketches out the world much more broadly. I'm not sure how you follow Offred for five or seven seasons, but you could certainly…

There actually appears to be momentum building towards an impeachment vote, so we may get the real conditions that would cause the Handmaid's Tale to exist inside of three years. All hail Commander Pence. I can see the post-war poems now: first he came for the Mulan cosplayers, and I said nothing, because fuckin'…

I saw a poster for this in the subway this morning. The picture was Offred standing in profile in her red dress and bonnet, head turned slightly to look towards the viewer. Someone had cut out her mouth—the whole lower part of her face, in fact, with a razor or knife. I couldn't tell if the irony was intentional.

I will always upvote Ravenous.

I haven't seen it yet, but if there's a Catholic Priest and someone with a "J" on them, then that wasn't a Jew. Jews in Gilead are hung with yellow stars painted on them—Offred explains how Jews were largely shipped off to Israel at some point during the coup because they were "Children of Jacob," and only those who…

I was wondering about this. Thanks for the info.

What is the "total delegation"? the support staff who visited?

Bush was teetotal, just like Trump. The only President this century who would have had a beer with the fellas was President Obama.

Is this actually an incorrect story? There were more people than pictured in the photo, but a bunch of Patriots expressly did not attend because they think Trump is terrible, and even erstwhile Trump buddy and Patriots QB Tom Brady skipped the event. I sincerely doubt there was something so pressing that Tom just…

Pick a different word if you want to get this precise. Feminism is not the property of Women's Studies departments or performatively ideologically pure types. It is a term describing a political movement more than a century old at this point based on the fundamental idea of equality of the genders. You can be a…

Tarantino should spend a summer living in Vince Gilligan's guest house or something and then make a spiritual successor to Death Proof. You've got to fucking love cars to make a movie like that really work.

If you think he can't lie about his actions and their repercussions, you're going to have a baffling next few years.