Literally nothing about latter-day Simpsons can vindicate one’s feelings about classic-era Simpsons, since everything about the show has been incoherent and terrible for nigh on twenty years. Any connection to the show it once was is well and truly severed.

Because no writer should parse their own work for other people, because it’s tacky?

Yeah, it seems like that was one of the main things geek culture was always pushing toward—the idea that you shouldn’t judge other people for deriving enjoyment from things you think are silly. As a way to simply have fun, geeking out on pop cuture references is no less valid than watching sports or listening to music…

I was always drawn to structuralism and good old-fashioned New Criticism and turned off by the postmodern stuff; I never really saw the point of working very hard not to come to a coherent understanding of something. I’ve been out of college nearly twenty years and haven’t kept up on the scholarship since then, so I…

Yep. I remember watching classic-era Simpsons as a teenager and thinking that all the pop culture references made it so smart and sophisticated, but looking back now it’s hard for me to see why I thought that, say, Smithers spiriting Mr. Burns out of Town Hall with a grappling hook like Batman was especially clever.

I think Stavos is Greek rather than Russian. He’s the one employee of the travel agency who’s been with them from the beginning, and occasionally we’ll get hints that there might be more to him than “generic background character.” (For instance, he has a few lines about a male roommate early in season 2 that make it…

Three strands most commonly, right? I always took it as a reference to the old Infocom text adventure Trinity, another trippy game about time and the atomic bomb and God knows what else.

Yeah, the more I think about it, the more dodgy it sounds that he’s claiming to have entered into a business agreement with the Duffers because he talked to them about his story idea at a party. Since ideas can’t be copyrighted, only their expression in a permanent form, you better be really fucking sure you’re doing…

That was the big change here in the dynamics (aside from the “Dead Hand” counter-strike system).

I saw this special live at the Chicago Theatre and it’s typically great. Mulaney’s material about Catholicism and Chicago always speaks to me, since I was raised in the Church and have lived in the city for more than twenty years, but this time he’s got an extended run about an obscure Chicago figure that I found…

Well, what they’re alleging is that the production company did not inform them of the fire, and also that they informed them of the fire but told them it had been extinguished, which are two incompatible claims.

Magneto’s powers would disable Bender’s inhibition unit, so the fight would come complete with folk singing.

Per the original article, Roseanne saw Arnold and Metcalf holding hands at an early cast party and gave him a lecture about how writers should never date actors. Who knows if it was actually going anywhere, but Arnold seems to be implying that the interest was not purely hypothetical.

Hmm, that does seems possible, though I also wonder if it’s just a situation where “legitimate source” doesn’t necessarily mean “truthful story.” No doubt there are crazy conspiracy theorists within the entertainment industry just like everywhere else, so you could certainly have someone with legitimate insider…

I mean, it’s a real place where rich, elitist pricks can get their freak on, but it’s not a satanic cabal that conspires to determine who becomes president and all the other stuff conspiracy theorists like to claim.

I don’t know what to make of Crazy Days and Nights nowadays. It’s the weirdest combination of clearly well-sourced insider dirt and the most hysterical kookery about government conspiracies and Bohemian Grove and whatnot. Enough of their scoops prove out that it’s impossible to discount them entirely, but it’s often…

Ugh. Even a good review makes this sound fucking unendurable. Gaze in awe at the imaginative mindscape of these daring young dreamers, who steal meaningless fragments of other people’s coherent work and mash them together in the most thoughtless way possible!

Yeah, in the seasons where Martindale shows up for five minutes in one episode and still gets a nomination when no one else does, it becomes really clear that she’s being singled out because the voters like her and have heard good things about the program, not because they’ve watched the actual fucking show.

Heh. If that’s the ending they came up with back in 2014, I think some people in dark suits are going to want to have a word with them.

It’s not some secret conspiracy. They have financial and organizational support from various politicians and progressive activist groups who share their goals, including MoveOn.org and the American Federation of Teachers. That’s how protest movements work, by connecting passionate individual supporters with a support…