My first thought was Magister Illyrio Mopatis.

It seems like you could make the same argument to excuse anything a business owner did that threatened the health or well-being of his/her workers, as long as consumers didn’t know or didn’t care about it. I tend to think that a business owes its employees, freelancers, etc. a certain standard of safety, respect, and…

The complication there is that Louis CK’s violations were directed at other comics, not audience members, so it seems odd for the acceptance of the audience to be the only deciding factor. I mean, if you ran an office where your star salesman was always showing his penis to coworkers in the elevator, would you keep…

Looked like it to me. I always think of him as Neelix, though the last thing I saw him in before this was a recurring role in the final season of Girls.

I’d probably chalk it up to reverse escapism—comfortable middle-class people wanting to feel shitty, precisely because everything in their life basically feels blandly, superficially positive and it’s sort of stifling.

Wow, Jackée is actually on record here at the AV Club regarding this very topic:

So that’s why Dawn just disappeared in the last few episodes of Mad Men. She saw the agency going down and was just like, “Eff this.” (wrinkles nose) (vanishes).

That’s very possible, though “Das Bus” was one of the last Simpsons scripts credited to David X. Cohen before he left to develop Futurama, so it doesn’t seem to be a “new guy slagging the oldsters” issue in this case.

Deep thoughts re: Teletubbies:

I’m very much an outlier in that I find self-aware gags like that more obnoxious than funny. Simpsons writers are lazy hacks, say Simpsons writers! Well, maybe try not being lazy hacks instead of reveling in it? (See also the earlier episode “Homer Loves Flanders” or—and this one is the real hot take!—the early Angel…

Dunham’s word-vomit earnestness offers plenty of legit fodder for mockery, but I’ll never understand why people constantly trot out this quote in particular in order to make fun of her. It’s a line she wrote for Hannah, the desperate and pathetic character she played in Girls. And even Hannah immediately realizes she…

I guess that seems contradictory to me—to believe on the one hand that when Indy calls on Shiva and something supernatural happens, clearly it’s the result of Shiva’s divine intervention, but on the other hand that when the Thuggees constantly invoke Kali to wield dark powers, we can’t assume that Kali is actually the…

Yeah, and I guess the idea was supposed to be that it’s, like, ooh, the cult is so crazy that even its food is crazy! But when the movie is set in this exoticized foreign culture and the crazy cult is like 90 percent of the representation of that culture, it’s hard to separate what it’s saying about the cult…

I’d say the biggest reason the Thuggees are so offensive is because they’re shown to literally be empowered by an actual Hindu deity. It’s one thing to suggest that some small group of cultists are into bad shit; it’s another to imply that they are doing so with the explicit blessing of a major world religion’s…

Good call. Every once in a while John Goodman’s portentous speech explaining the school pops into my head, and it cracks me up every single time.

“That machine was almost too good,” one of the Neff managers tells Jimmy about a copier he fondly remembers. “Counterfeiters used it to make color copies of $5 bills.” Bet Jimmy’s filing that idea away for later.

“There ain’t no John Galt, kid. Never was. . . . The name’s Frank Fontaine.”

If we’re meant to think it’s more persuasion than control, though, why would the technobabble about the inhibitor chip even be necessary? Why start Ock’s heel turn with him going operatically murderous in the hospital? Clearly, on a deeper level Octavius’s story is supposed to represent a good man being tempted to…

As much as everyone praises Spiderman 2 I actually prefer the 1st one, the tone is more balanced.

CODES DO NOT WORK THAT WAY! GOODNIGHT!