I had assumed it was just that the original actor they cast happened to be black, but looking up the other actors who’ve played the role in various productions, it seems like they’ve regularly cast black actors as Hermione. I’m guessing because no one wants to be the production that looks like it’s caving to idiot…

I mean, the whole point of that storyline is that despite everyone finding Hermione’s activism annoying, she’s actually right, and the wizarding world’s narrative of the magical races living in harmony with humans is a self-serving falsehood. “The fountain we destroyed tonight told a lie. We wizards have mistreated…

The best gaming subtext is in the scene at the bridge in the Underdark: The DM has set up an elaborate environmental puzzle, but one of the players immediately ruins it up by fucking around and rolling a critical fail, so the DM has to decree that the party has been carrying around another way to cross the whole time.

Oh man, that’s one of my favorite DVD commentary riffs of all time. I love how halfway through GDT gets distracted from his hatred of horses and starts ranting, apropos of nothing, about how he also hates cows.

I believe it’s a variation on a common misunderstanding, which stems from an item you can find when you play through the hospital sequence at the end of the game. As you run around as Joel gunning down Fireflies, you can find a tape recording in one room in which Ellie’s surgeon reviews her case, saying, “The girl’s…

When does this happen in the game? I don’t remember anything like that.

He actually does have a glove on when he fires the gun. There’s a quick shot where you see his gloved hand in his pocket behind the holster, just before he reaches into his pocket with his other (ungloved) hand for the switch to turn out the lights.

Yep, this. I work in publishing, and every once in a while, something goes tits-up at the printer and a small number of books get shipped out with some of the pages in the wrong order. It’s incredibly embarrassing to everyone involved, but it doesn’t happen because the editors didn’t exercise enough quality control,…

Interestingly, my feeling about that revelation was exactly the opposite. The series has leaned so hard into the idea that the fungal apocalypse has caused people to cling to old desires and values or fall into old patterns of oppression and violence, so it was refreshing for it to finally acknowledge that it would…

That doesn’t seem contradictory to me. He gets off on dominating young girls, not being humiliated by them, so he only likes the fighting when he knows he’s going to win.

It’s the same principle, though. The argument against debating Republicans on the issues is that it makes them more popular by exposing their lies and nonsense to a wider audience. But when general audiences see Republicans go all in on their most awful ideas, even without the pushback of a debate, they hate it and…

I’m not familiar enough with Oklahoma State Senate election dynamics to know whether that’s true or not, but it’s beside the point. The value of Stewart’s piece is not that it will bring down Dahm in particular, but that it exposes this type of Republican argument to well-deserved ridicule and increases the chance…

Nathan Dahm is a state senator. He doesn’t need his opponents’ help to convince people that he’s a viable option. And his extreme pro-gun views have been given the stamp of approval by numerous politicians and jurists, right up to the US Supreme Court. They’re “viable” right now whether we engage with them or not.

I don’t think you understand; they are only calling this a “moral victory” because the right doesn’t care. The conservative/GOP/right wingers will make shit up and when called out on making shit up, will make up more shit. They don’t give a shit about facts or debate. They think whoever screams the loudest wins.

Yeah, I don’t know what we’re meant to think about that bit. Charlie only hears a few scattered words of their argument, so it could be that a) it’s too disjointed and she’s too distracted for her to get a good reading, b) she senses dishonesty but assumes it’s because they’re drama queens saying things they know…

It’s a little iffy in that the pilot made it seem like a mostly visual thing, like subconsciously reading body language or something, but as the subsequent episodes have fleshed it out it seems to be almost entirely auditory: if she hears someone make a statement of fact, she can tell by something in their tone of…

Cordyceps only evolved to infect humans twenty years ago, and the current crop of bloaters are probably the first generation ever to exist. So I don’t think there’s anything unusual about them being just a weird evolutionary dead end where the subject’s aggression and physical bulk outgrew its effectiveness in…

It wasn’t great, but it did have that one moment of jet-black comedy that perfectly embodied the stupidity of COVID-era populism (purely by accident, since season 1 was shot pre-COVID): the scene where the passengers mutiny to blow themselves out the airlock.

Wasn’t Mason somewhat more disreputable in the earliest novels, tampering with evidence and such? I can see how, extrapolating back from that, you could get to a point prior to his known law career where he’s even more loosey-goosey.

I think one of the themes of the episode is that when people lose everything, they still reach for the closest match for what they used to have (hence the reference in the title of the episode: “Alone and forsaken by fate and by man / Oh Lord, if you hear me, please hold to my hand”), so maybe the idea is that…