“Wave the specter” is pretty hilarious, in part because it makes me imagine Bezos LARPing as a necromancer, waving a scepter and raising a specter.

Even at the time, I’m not so sure. I thought it was the dreaded female nipple that was the issue, not an exposed breast otherwise (and, of course, the nipple was not exposed).

Word.

The nipple guard was more aesthetically interesting than a piece of red lace would’ve been. I remember it as being a piece of jewelry, basically, not a utilitarian item that wasn’t meant to be seen.

The weirdest part to me is that they still claim it was an accident. It clearly correlated to the lyrics in both meaning and timing, and I thought this was obvious to everyone. I assumed that they claimed it wasn’t planned because they didn’t expect the backlash to be as bad as it was. It was a cool moment (as cool as…

Yeah, it’s weird. I feel a labor solidarity with those workers, but they’re ultimately the people who made the AV Club what it is today.

This is a half-educated opinion, at best, but it seems like you might be more likely to have a heart attack while exerting yourself, but exerting yourself regularly over the span of your life is much more likely to keep you alive to the point that everything else starts to fail before ever having that “I’m coming,…

I really need to figure out a way to put up some sort of “Are you sure?” blocker when I habitually check the AV Club. It’s a habit that dates back to the early 00s, and it’s definitely responsible for me sticking it out this long. This place used to be amazing. People were erudite but unpretentious, both staff and…

I’ve been friends with so many shit-starters (and subsequently gotten involved in said shit) that I kind of wish there was a rapid “we’re just going to rumble for a minute here” clause that precluded frivolous assault cases. They mostly end up in two or so people being held down while a lot of shit is talked, and I’m…

She loves goblins and wants them to be safe, but she carries forward a legacy of bias, however well meaning.

While I was watching this, I thought a lot about COVID-19. After I watched it, I thought a lot about climate change.

I’m generally a fan of your volunteer work, here included, but the second one is debatable. The “try and” construction is pretty old and pretty common even in situations where you and I would think “try to” would be better. I looked it up a few years back because an AV Club headline writer uses it pretty consistently,…

I think we often confuse explanations for excuses, but people also frequently provide explanations as if they were excuses, too. It’s tricky enough to try to explain the bad behavior of other people without people feeling like you’re trying to excuse it. It’s so much harder when it’s your own bad behavior, but a big…

This is the attention to detail that we need in a VolunteerProofreader.

Yeah, I know we’ve kind of doubled down on the Aziz thing. I think it did open up discussion about a broader range of male shittiness, but I really think the only line that can be reasonably drawn, given the variety of human experience, is violating consent.

I agree with you that lynching has become a term that specifically refers to racially motivated mob justice, but “witch hunt” has a long history of referring to a particular kind of behavior during all sorts of moral panics. I would argue that it’s a bad term for what actually triggered the movement, but it’s a…

I don’t think you’re putting the best form of the argument forth here, but a lot of it’s because you’re using terms and anecdotes that will definitely cause most readers to take your point badly. I get that you’re using the term “women’s rights” in a general sense, but you’re literally talking about the right for a…

Yeah, I almost edited it to “sentencing” just to be clear on the only part I agreed with.

I was just trying to parse what they meant by calling Smollett a racist, which didn’t make any sense at all. All I could think of was that they were saying Smollett was being racist by framing people from “MAGA country.”

It reads like a Trump tweet (especially the need to cry reverse racism), but the sentence seems reasonable. I’ve noticed the random capitalization of words in my older relatives’ writing a lot.