Leaving June 10

Unfortunately Netflix’s film selection is... garbage.

This film is worth tracking down. The backstory of Mishima’s financing and release is strange, but the film itself may be even stranger. Schrader crosscuts between Mishima’s early life, the day of his suicide, and his fiction and simultaneously shifts between black and white, muted color, and color so saturated that…

I only have Sigrun left and I hate her with the passion of 10,000 firey suns. She keeps handing me my ass. I am missing components to upgrade my armor, and I don’t want to grind in Muspelheim to get them, so God of War and I are on a break. I downloaded Tomb Raider because it was on sale for $9 and I had not…

This show is such a mixed bag. Its running commentary on reality television has always felt too obvious to be surprising or cutting. And its moral dilemma — Rachel feels for the dupes on her show but gets an addictive rush out of humiliating them —becomes static fast.

If you sort of want to get leg up on beating the valkyries before you could try doing what I did by accident, which was battle away at the valkyrie in the fire realm first. She is the hardest of the non-queen valkyries in my opinion. If you can beat her, you will find the rest are not so bad. The queen is pretty…

There’s one you can even turn around to nullify her fly up attack because it’s sight based. I was so excited when that worked.

I need to go take on the Valkyries, haven’t even approached one yet. I’m genuinely concerned for how badly I’ll get smashed on my first attempt.

Ooh. I took a break to play Donkey Kong, but I need to go back and deal with the queen of the Valkyries. I like the way that the game rewards exploration with some end-game challenges that make most of the campaign feel tame.

I had mixed feelings about this series. I like the way that Stavely focuses his world-building around a series of mysteries so there is a sense of urgency to piecing together the lore. And the characters participate in the process, making new discoveries as they learn their craft.

Conceptually, I’m not sure how I feel about this...but Acuna can sell me on just about anything, so I’m in.

I did all of Priest’s run and still couldn’t figure out what the hell is up with the story in Coates’s stuff. Maybe they could have had an experienced comic-book writer explain to him how comics are different than long essays on culture?

Don’t let Phil Collins contribute, I tried his “In the Air Tonight” trick on New Year’s Eve and the timing was WRONG

I hope this service has at least a couple of entries where the countdown is completely wrong. “Hmm. This says that the monster shows up in a mirror in two minutes and seven seconds, so for now I can just sit back and re— OH GOD NO I JUST PEED THIS IS SUMMER CAMP ALL OVER AGAIN!”

Chris Morgan’s departure may be an elaborate prank on whoever writes the next one. (Just think of the comic-book scribes who impishly frag the continuity on their way out the door.) Now that the series has dropped cars from an airplane, rained cars down from a parking complex, and sent cars skidding after a nuclear…

Fair enough! My point is that there was more going on than “silly anger” when that movie came out. The arguments about whitewashing were about more than the bizarre decision for the film to hash out the controversy in its plot.

Because they took a controversy about white washing and made it a plot point, without that it’s just a meh movie not the source of all this silly anger.

Let’s hope the movie sheds the portal-fiction setup somewhere along the way. There are plenty of non-horrible stories about characters pulled from their humdrum lives into a vibrant fantasy world, but for a film based on a game that formula edges uncomfortably close to a toy commercial.

I get why a certain kind of fan is disappointed to see Blevins tone down the sailor talk. Part of the charm of platforms like Twitch and Youtube is the weird sense of down-to-earth intimacy between streamers and their fans. That feeling has always been a mixture of fact and performance. Successful streamers find the…

Perhaps this mentality is alien to me because my background is in literary studies. There are weeks when you will be faced with a stack of periodical fiction from 18XX that may or may not tell you something useful, and the challenge is to find a way to stay interested long enough to know the things you need to know.