Realistically speaking I think the panel will be fine. They're trying to put a good face forward, as much as that's possible with GG—so far the panel includes two women (Lynn Walsh and Mercedes Carrera) and one man (Nick Robalik). Walsh is a journalist who's spoken on Gamergate-related panels about journalistic ethics…

Haha, yeah, I said this below, but—if we assume that his version of events is true, why the hell isn't he suing his boss? Somebody grabs a pop star's ass, forces you to take the fall for it, and fires you . . . And you decide NOT to sue that guy but instead to sue the pop star who you're not disputing got her ass…

It might have come into play if his defense had been that it never happened in the first place—but his defense is that it did happen, but that it was his boss who did it. So that takes the onus off of Swift to prove that the assault happened—no one is disputing that it happened.

Maybe she didn't want to put up with the hassle of pursuing criminal charges while she was in the middle of a tour, maybe she was embarrassed that it happened in the first place, maybe she didn't think it was bad enough to warrant potentially sending him to jail, maybe she wanted to forget it ever happened and it was…

I think that's intended to be the message, but there is so much weird shit going on in the book that I'm not sure that I would put it in even the top five actual takeaways.

Yeah, if we're going to assume that his story is true, then why wouldn't he sue his boss before suing Swift? His version of events is that his boss grabbed Swift's ass and then fired him so that he would take the fall for it. I mean, I know—you should go after deep pockets—but it seems weird to sue somebody who you kno…

Yeah, I mean, if you're basing your knowledge on a very limited sample of Taylor Swift's singles then you can make this argument. But "All Too Well"/"Begin Again"/a lot of the stuff on Red, especially, is at least as "emotionally satisfying" from an adult perspective as most of Adele's songs.

Clearly it worked!

Maybe they fired him because they wanted to replace him with a guy that they wouldn't have to pay three times the market rate.

Yeah, the problem is less that reasons are given for why characters act the way they do, and more that reasons (usually A Reason) are given for the characters' behavior that are overly simplistic and don't resemble real life in the slightest, thus drawing us out of the story and reminding us that it's not real.

Yeah, it seems like the author is conflating “pop psych” and “overly simplistic storytelling” here. I don't think it's possible to write a horror movie without employing popular psychology to some extent. If you're making a movie that requires understanding how and why we get scared, you're using pop psych! His issue…

By high school the goal isn't really "to create future readers," though. It's to get you to think critically about what you're reading, to be able to analyze it, and to develop your writing skills and vocabulary. It's totally possible to do all those things with modern fiction, too, but there should at least be a good…

They're way existential.

My parents forever regret showing me ET too young (circa age 4, I think). The ceiling lamp in my childhood bedroom was a tan oval with two light bulbs in it, and I inevitably spent an hour or two before bedtime screaming about how ET was sticking his head through our ceiling to come get me. (For whatever reason, the…

Oh god.

Did you seriously just try to make the argument that you've never witnessed any gender discrimination in your workplace aside from the sexual harassment? Is that . . . a real argument?

I like how at the top of the discussion we start out with these sentiments being expressed as a joke, and then as we scroll toward the bottom, gradually we see more and more of the exact same thing being expressed—only this time for real.

Film schools are about 50/50 gender-wise, so unless we're arguing that between graduating from film school and starting to work in the industry, women magically discover that they hate it and give up, it's discrimination.

They're two separate things, but I guess we could do both.

FIST PUMP