I think I’m done with this website. There’s a difference between unabashed fandom and straight shilling for megacorporations, and I don’t think io9 knows where that line is anymore. So many of the articles I’ve seen over the last few weeks would not read any differently if they were written by their subject’s PR team.…

“Tolkien had a limited imagination” is not a fair critique! Come on. The guy invented epic fantasy as a genre of literature. He was low key one of the most influential fiction authors of the 20th century. I think it’s fine to take a critical lens to his treatment of gender and gender relations in LOTR, but I think…

Did you motherfuckers make a slideshow to try to sell branded content to your audience? Jim Spanfeller truly has no shame. What a piece of shit. 

Ok - the context is that Tolkien was an English professor who focused on medieval poetry and epics, and so LOTR was written in the style of a medieval romantic epic. That means it is primarily focused on men’s heroic journeys and the platonic love between men, and where women are involved at all it is primarily as…

Cut the skits and banter. Just have one of our myriad late night hosts do 10 minutes of lightly roasting the nominees at the top of the show and then go right from one category to another. If you want Channing Tatum and Sandra Bullock to come onstage together to present best cinematography that’s fine, but just have…

Chief O’Brien or we riot.

Had it not been for the editorial mandate that Magneto become the big X-Men villain again at the start of the Claremont/Lee X-Men book, I think you’d be looking at 40 years since Magneto was really a straightforward villain. Once Claremont made the decision to write him as a sympathetic extremist in a world in which…

For me the sketch about infant onesies that assume the baby is gay was made by Bowen Yang’s reactions. Like yes, it’s gross that so many baby clothes project adult concepts of heterosexuality and romantic love onto babies and it’s funny to point our how absurd it is with baby clothes that project homosexuality onto…

Yeah I was gonna say, SNL’s problem with Trump was that their writers suck at political comedy and they stuck with a deeply unfunny Alec Baldwin impression for 4 years, not that they were afraid to cover current events. 

God it must be fucking awesome to make that much money.

Yeah it would not have been an issue at all if he pulled Rock aside at some point later in the evening and said “your unfunny joke was really hurtful to my wife and you owe her an apology; maybe in the future you should think twice before you make a lazy joke about someone’s appearance.” Grownups use their words when…

I think my favorite thing about the two Zach Snyder movies winning the poll and getting spotlighted at the Oscars is that his movies are extremely poorly made. Like setting questions of how the Oscars should interact with blockbusters or the artistic merit of superheroes, Snyder’s movies are on a purely technical…

It almost certainly won’t happen, but I would love to see this story (or any Star Wars story, really) grapple with what exactly falling to the Dark Side means.

That’s the plot of every event story where superheroes fight each other! Come on, man! I really like Kieron Gillen and I think he’s one of the few writers working today who at least has a chance of making a tedious summer event book fun (for a certain brain dead value of “fun”), but you don’t have to uncritically…

Funnily enough I just finally got around to watching The Eternals last night. It was definitely shot in a more interesting, naturalistic way than most Marvel movies, so it has that going for it, but overall it’s just not a well-made movie. The CGI is noticeably bad throughout, the plot is boring, and only a couple of…

Whenever I read modern Daredevil comics and he growls about being the protector of Hells Kitchen I like to imagine him just mercilessly beating a group of 20-somethings for having too many mimosas at bottomless brunch and getting drunk and disorderly.

Not really. Most of the downzoning over the past 50 years (e.g. making it impossible to build apartment buildings in some neighborhoods or impossible to build apartment buildings that have more than 4-6 units in them) has been primarily driven by homeowners who want the value of their homes to increase to absurd…

Gotham is a rundown city that is overrun by crime and where most people have no hope that things will ever get better. It needs to be this way for Batman to work, because there is no need for Batman in a city that has a super low crime rate and whose problems are entirely related to economic inequality. So, yes, to…

Is it though? I remember feeling like the book ends kind of abruptly and that there’s a lot that makes you want to jump right into the next book. What is Paul going to be like as emperor? For all of the realpolitik about the great houses’ relationships with each other and the throne, what’s going to happen when one of…

Man the carry-on ones are just tips on how to be an asshole. Buy an appropriately sized suitcase that fits in the overhead bin (or check it if it doesn’t), learn how to pack efficiently, board the plane with minimum fuss, and be on your way. You are a gigantic prick if you’re trying to game the system to bring on…