This is a good point. The assigning of certain stereotypes, and nearly immutable personality traits more broadly, to certain races is a widespread issue that affects most of speculative fiction. Tolkien, Star Trek & Wars, Dr. Who, DnD, folklore, fairy tales, and mythology, Marvel and DC comics — things that are often…

The definition of porn is so vague that it’s largely at the judge’s discretion, but we’re talking about the cover art to the 25th-35th bestselling album of all time. Approximately 1 in 27 Americans bought a copy. Declaring images of the Sistine Chapel child porn would arguably cause fewer problems. It’d be an insane…

I’m shocked — shocked! — that this judge didn’t find 30 million people guilty of possession and distribution of child pornography 25+ years after the image regularly appeared on t-shirts worldwide.

Agreed. I can see a need for a new term to distinguish a geologically active moon from a dead one, but calling them planets is just needlessly confusing.

We’ve recognized rogue and exoplanets for a while now, so “orbits the sun” can’t really be part of the definition.

There were people on the last article guess it was a publicity stunt. I’m not sure that makes sense if there’s no movie with both of them, but it’s fundamentally tame enough that it still seems plausible.

“Nevertheless, he imagines it as the ‘antithesis of what Fast And Furious movies generally are,’ which sounds like something.”

A leisurely golf cart drive amongst casual acquaintances?

The biggest issue with the movie isn’t that the ending is more open-ended than what’s described here; it’s that Sersi, the emotional heart of the movie on paper, is the most poorly defined of the main characters and is not really elevated by the acting. Ajax has more personality, and she’s technically dead before the…

In fairness, it’s a lot easier to solve crimes when people drop the one piece of relevant information they had from a decade ago in a three minute conversation about an unrelated case.

I can’t speak for everyone, but I never click on C/B reviews for movies or shows I wasn’t already interested in. But I’ll check out a pan or a rave just because they suggest that something happened to get the critic excited, and that passion is infectious.

Outside of the context of a review, I can’t imagine reading a…

Yeah, I think I fundamentally disagree with the idea that critics should write about what’s popular just because it’s popular. We already have a lot of thinkpieces that feel like some undercooked ideas got pushed out into the ravenous content maw of the internet. Now imagine that sites demanded those writers talk…

Whether or not sex addiction is a valid condition is irrelevant here. Most people accept that alcoholism is real, and while it’s not illegal to get drunk at your house, it is illegal to get drunk and plow your car into a crowd of pedestrians. At a certain point, you’re responsible for keeping yourself out of…

Yeah, I hope the show figures out soon that excessive empathy for the characters kinda ruins it.  Their lives are horrific and mutually abusive, which only isn’t a complete bummer to watch because it’s all treated so lightly and most of the time they deserve it.

Between the Happy Madison regulars/Mike Myers/Will Ferrell and the Tiny Fey/Poehler/Sudeikis/Rudolph/Kenan eras, I think you’re going to find just as many people citing those eras as golden ages. I basically agree that the show is wildly uneven, but I think we underestimate the fluctuations within seasons and even…

Yeah, I feel like a lot of current and former cast members are going to get floated because that’s who viewers have the best sense of, but more likely it’s going to be some producer with NBC or Broadway Video whose name the average person doesn’t know.

The problem is that it’s a relatively complex and nuanced take on who Longbottom is, both explicitly and by implication. He’s a man who chose quick success based on a fraud over real human connection and a difficult opportunity for growth. His flair and bombast is an overcompensation for the fundamental insecurity he…

Not all of Doom Patrol totally works for me — some of the conflicts are clumsily or anti-climatically resolved; its color palette is unnecessarily drab, fo one thing — but their commitment to off-the-wall shenanigans gives me a lot of affection for it.  If you’d told me ten years ago that we were getting a live action…

I like “Backstory!” in a vacuum and found Brener grating mostly in the way the character is supposed to be, but it’s undercut as part of the larger show by having this apparently lifelong, character-defining schism completely resolved in the next episode, an issue repeated with Poppy and Grimm’s rift. MQ is doing…

I’m willing to buy that it’s the best episode of the Bachelor ever.  I’m unconvinced that that puts it in “best show of the year” territory.

Legally, I don’t even think they can be, except in the vaguest of terms. Disney has the rights to the characters back and can hire whoever they want to play them, but Netflix presumably still owns the rights to the shows they actually made, which is why you can only watch them there and not on Disney+.