Blasting NIN as a hot, androgynous goth kid in leather-and-mesh club attire rages out alone across the rooftops of a decaying cityscape is the most efficient iconography of the 90's I can think of.

Part of me was hoping she’d be super pink and pastel. Go against type, complain about her lame goth mom running around in all-black like she’s stage crew.

Right, obviously we want different things from it, which is fine. A dramatic take on this pretty high concept, about the existential toll of ghosts doomed to passively observe the world from a place of meaningless stasis, would be great; David Lowery’s A Ghost Story does essentially that.

TBH I’ve felt this way about several famous UK sitcoms. The central characters are these put-upon sad sacks who are punished for no reason, surrounded by incredibly off-putting or annoying personalities with few redeeming qualities who never change. I’ll watch an episode and find the whole experience mean-spirited or…

I think the show was doing something with Claire that didn’t hit for a lot of people. Because I do think she’s a slightly unreal dream girl, but only from Carmy’s perspective. Objectively, she’s a full person with an inner life, who parallels Carmy as another deeply ambitious person who way exceeded the low…

For real, though, why not just have this happen in House of the Dragon? Why is this pitched as a separate show when they already have a show about the dragon incest family?

Sure, but I can understand someone underestimating what that level of scrutiny actually feels like. Especially someone like Kumail Nanjiani: a man in his 40's whose career was mostly comedy prior to this point.

I think I’m done with apocalypse narratives. We’re all living in an apocalypse narrative. I don’t need to engage with fictional ones in my spare time for fun.

Launch vehicles are technically vehicles.

They say this quiet part out loud, frequently. The majority of young voters don’t align with them, nonwhite voters typically don’t, women typically don’t, queer voters certainly don’t. The only blocks where they do well are with non-college-educated white men and with the elderly. And those blocks are either actively…

Rightwing hatred of Taylor Swift is so unhinged. She’s incredibly inoffensive, “a Leftist” in almost no way. She is not a radical, and advocates pretty boilerplate centrist Dem positions. But the Right has become so insane that a woman they can’t bully pushing back even an inch is now the Antichrist.

Sucks. Because Echo is great. It makes me miss the Netflix Defenders shows so much.

The grandmother’s beef was primarily with the dad, but Maya’s recollection is that she was collateral damage, and her grandmother didn’t seem to make any effort to be present in her life after that. The grandmother also suggests it’s hard for her to even look at Maya, due to Maya’s resemblance to the dead mother, so…

The best part of the ad is how easy it’d be to re-edit to any song you wanted.

The incest really distracts from the “finally, real coffee!” said by a guy who just returned from West Africa. One of the best coffee-producing regions in the world.

Yeah, it isn’t all that complicated: this family-friendly movie derived from a children’s story, which cost half as much as The Marvels, is also leading into a weekend where that exact kind of thing tends to do well. The context and standard for what “success” looks like is very different.

I don’t understand why jettisoning the existing plot, to the extent there is one, is more exciting or preferable to just recasting the guy. Just finish what you started, right? Hastily pivoting to a totally different villain with a totally different gimmick sounds like it wouldn’t make anyone happy.

Yes, and it’s trivially easy to do so with Kang. The entire conceit is that thousands of variations of him exist under slightly different circumstance across the multiverse.

Yeah, people keep making the mistake of assuming land implies population. CA has numerous urban centers, not exclusive to LA and SF, and they are all solidly blue. 11M people voted for Biden vs. 6M for Trump, nearly twice as many, and that’s ignoring the realities of disenfranchised and nonvoting populations who tend…

The choice in “Deer Lady” to render the boarding school staff’s language as guttural nonsense was brilliant. A bunch of furious nuns screaming at you in some incomprehensible language really added a lot to how alien and horrifying this must have felt.