I blame season 4 for sticking with Close through all five seasons of Damages. With all this Glenn Close, there had to have been a pony in there somewhere.

Apparently so. I didn't notice either, but "showrunner" tends to be something that's hard to tease out of the usual welter of executive producer wallpaper, especially if the showrunner isn't the original creator.

If they're looking to laugh at well-constructed jokes, why were they reading Get Your War On? It's like reading Dinosaur Comics for the artwork.

With the rise of self-publishing and the moral collapse of the big-market publishers, I've given up on covers entirely. Since I read on a kindle now, it's not as if I'll be shamed by a terrible cover, not that I ever really let it keep me down for long; I usually toss the slip-covers for hardcovers anyways, they…

Oh, of course. It's why I say he's wrecked as a writer. He's been resisting the thousand-faces gag since the Seventies, but it's a hard pose to maintain - after a while the writerly idealism slumped into a lazy cynicism.

I don't know, some writers hit on a setting, and just dig in, deep. PC Hodgell, for instance, has been writing the same damn series for twenty-five years, and I've been on board the whole way, it's fun and not at all Tolkienesque, despite the presence of an elf-like race and a female protagonist trembling precariously…

Meh, say what you like about George RR Martin - and I have, I think he's wrecked as a writer and am on the verge of giving up on his bataan death march of a fantasy series - but he isn't one for Campbellian heroic arcs. Sometimes it feels like he's rolling dice to see where his plot takes his characters.

Ooh, Sunshine is a pretty good book, if you don't mind saintly teenage girl protagonists. Tim Powers is Tim Powers, regardless of genre - it's always the same basic story, whether it's about the Romantics and their deadly muses, Tesla, Houdini, or Egyptian time-travellers. I got tired of Powers' shtick eventually,…

I don't know about you, but the prospect of watching a TV series based on those awful books by the guys who brought you Smallville strikes me as exceedingly challenging. So much so, I think I'd rather schedule lasik surgery instead.

Eleven-year-old geeks will devour anything put through the Campbellizer. Hell, at that age, I loved David Eddings' fantasy-racist horseshit. I'm not pompous enough to claim that with age comes wisdom, but as I get older I lose my tolerance for writers' nonsense.

How do you tell the difference between "derivative bullshit ripped of from Tolkien strung together with bare-bones Hero with a Thousand Faces hackwork" and "self-plagarized bullshit from guy who has never written anything but Tolkien knockoffs hung over Joseph Campbell's flayed corpse"?

I kind of liked Wm. Mark Simmons' "Halflife Chronicles", if only because the first book got me reading Swinburne. But take that as it is - I *like* the original books that True Blood is half-assedly based on. I'm apparently easy when it comes to supernatural pulp, light on the horror. I'd probably *still* be…

So, series director and head writer/"series composition" are both Precure veterans. Neither has a background in the old Sailor Moon productions, which makes sense, as nobody's done anything on these lines in more than fifteen years. I can't speak to their previous work in Precure, as I didn't even finish out the…

I can't remember what Saul's new name for Omaha was - it wasn't William Pilgrim, was it?

And it ought to be "queen regnant", anyways. Regent is always a temporary ruler in English, the other usage is as archaic as "interrex".

And that apparently puts him "on the pile". OK. Do you think you maybe have a problem with de-humanizing people you disagree with politically?

You lose forever for quoting Chomsky. You've shamed yourself, your family, and your most recent educational facility. Take your ball, go home, and ponder where you've gone wrong in life.

I have to wonder how Blackadder II's title was justified, seeing as BAI's entire existence was written out of history by the former Duke of Richmond, and BAI clearly had no legitimate heirs, as his child bride was still very much a child by the inevitable Hamlet ending. It's almost as if Blackadders and Baldricks…

If you hang out in anime fandom long enough, you're going to get an earful of the Westermarck Effect, namely, how so few modern Japanese have siblings that they've never really absorbed the basic fact-of-life - your sister/brother just isn't sexually attractive. This theoretical disconnect might explain the peculiar…

They literally *put him on a bus*. I'm not sure how this got out of the writers' room, really. He shows up, flirts pseudo-incestuously with Felix, and basically just sits around soaking up screentime until they chuck him out the door and tell him to disappear. Honestly, the whole plotline feels like they were…