I’m right there with you. I enjoyed a few scattered moments of this show, here and there (pretty much every time David Pasquesi got to speak), but was constantly baffled at how utterly atrocious the writing was.

“Successful” pop culture very often isn’t good pop culture. And you should honestly know that. Yes, Favreau made a VERY popular show in “The Mandalorian”, largely due to the cuteness of the puppet as opposed to any of the actual writing.

I’m still giggling about that comment comparing the lead to Toshiro Mifune. Uh huh.

Then there’ll be the ballet spinoff, Men in Tights

“Men 2 1/2" will really redefine horror in new and exciting ways.

I applaud their restraint for not scoring the trailer to a slow, pensive rendition of “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” played out one note at a time on a grand piano.

When I did a semi-pointless creative writing degree at uni, we’d get the odd Comp. Sci. or engineering student take a few of our third-year subjects as an elective - they thought it’d be easy marks because, as we all know, arts aren’t real, and thus difficult, subjects.

Just spitballing how the pacing could have gone:

I think if I read a book with that opening sentence, I’d stop right there. It’s clearly not going to top that.

The Futurama audio commentaries alerted me to the existence of Harry Stephen Keeler, a bizarre sci-fi author who would pen ridiculous plots that never reached the minimum word count his contract required. To get around this, he’d have his main character pick up a book and start reading it, and then insert the text of…

It’s also got that painful scene where he tries to dissect thought leaders who are being mean by pointing out that second-gen Waterhouse had plenty of advantages in gaining early access as an internet programmer, while second-gen Waterhouse smugly thinks they’re all “hobbits” and he’s a “dwarf” because he actually…

Even the MMO stuff stank of “author has never actually seen an MMO, just heard of the concept” because it did all that “This one person is the best MMO player in the world and has secret stuff they’ve unlocked that only they ever can or will” which describes no MMO that has ever or will ever exist.

I finished Fall out of a morbid curiosity about whether the story would ever go anywhere interesting (spoiler: it doesn’t). I was a bit annoyed by the supposition that all of this computing power could be supported by a rapidly dwindling world population that was somehow generating infinite money via high-speed stock…

I like to think of it as a complete novel with an appendix of 150 pages of obsessively detailed world-building notes for Stephenson’s homebrew TTRPG campaign set in the Seveneves universe.

He usually whiffs the ending—and while it’s annoying, it’s never bothered me that much because I’ve enjoyed everything else so much—but not the entire last third of the novel. Seveneves was a special case because (UH, SPOILERS, DURRR) it has a significant time jump at the 2/3 mark and the rest of the story follows a…

Stephenson has that problem in general. He has great concepts, writes tolerably well, but usually can’t land an ending.

Seveneves rules and could make for an incredible 3- or 4-season series.

As much as I love Stephenson, doesn’t that describe most of his work?

Seveneves was a great two-thirds of a novel, then a really boring third of a different novel.