The thing about Grimace is that he’ s the McDonaldland character you need to leverage the least in order to make him work. His whole deal is “Grimace is weird and offputting, and you don’t really understand why they’re calling the purple thing ‘Grimace’.”

I don’t see any reason that the Magic 8 Ball movie couldn’t work as like a “low stakes horrorish thing for the high school set”.  Like the basic premise is “the Magic 8 Ball tells the truth* and it portends doom”.  This doesn’t seem to be a thing where you actually need to worry about the target audience of the toys,…

Shazam II wasn’t a “bad sequel” in the tradition of Bad Sequels from the 80s and 90s (Robocop II, Jaws: the revenge, Highlander 2, Son of the Mask, etc.) It was a perfectly acceptable movie. It was just... insubstantial- the sort of movie where you forget everything that happened in it on the way out from the theater…

There’s probably a GWS/Culinary Anthropology thesis about how “Girl dinner” is composed, austere, and minimalist whereas “Husband Dinner” is deranged, hedonistic, and potentially scandalous.

As someone who is old enough to buy booze, cigarettes, and pornography- and also to rent a car or run for president- there is absolutely no way I am allowing the video game machine to take pictures of my face. This would only ever work as an opt-in thing where the kids have access to the console or whatever, but the…

Why should anybody at Twitter care about Tesla?

I mean, there’s lots of words with an x in it. There is no actual need to invoke “sexy” in a business context. Like “AuXillary”, “AnneXes”, and “AntitoXic”, and “ChatterboXes” are words you can use in a business setting that are less likely to get you sued.

X can be anything, including Geese.  Advantage- Birds.

I mean, most social media sites would kill to have something as deeply entrenched in the popular lexicon as “tweet” and “retweet”. They may have to keep those, which will just be incoherent without the bird theming.

I mean, it’s abundantly clear that Barbie and Oppeheimer are not succesful because these are brands people feel the need to keep up with, but because these are good movies made by talented people.  Nobody wants the “Manhattan Project Cinematic Universe” and the less the various “Mattel brand movies” have to do with…

One good thing about the rebrand is that it makes it very easy to distinguish between “Twitter, when it had good parts” and “twitter- the dumpster fire it is now.” There’s even a helpful mnemonic in that birds are nicer than X.

Yeah, movie theaters are happy to take people’s money to buy a bunch of tickets for “theoretical people that would want to go see the movie for free” so that gets counted in the box office totals, but I bet the conversion rate for “tickets sold”  to “butts in seats” is pretty low.

I think with a time crunch involved in making a big AAA game, it’s reasonable to focus on “key features involved in actually playing the game” even if that comes at the expense of “additional details in the ending.” I have to imagine they didn’t want to go with slides since it didn’t really jive with the production…

I mean, it’s pretty clear that AMPTP is not negotiating in good faith when the guild proposes things like “update the penalties for ‘not having a lunchbreak’ or ‘not paying people on time’ because these haven’t been updated since 1961" and the studio’s response is basically “nah.”

I honestly think that a lot of the blockback about the Mass Effect 3 ending was a bad faith effort to read between the lines in terms of “what the ending didn’t tell you.” Stuff like “what are the Turians gonna eat” and “what are we going to do without Mass Relays” should be filed under “it’s not in the text, so…

In the spirit of compromise I propose being against carjacking old ladies, and robbing liquor stores at gunpoint, but propose that “cussing out a cop” or “stomping the flag” are things that people should be allowed to do, if they want.

Amazingly, CATS was the better film of its matchup.  Ultimately less successful financially, but it’s the one of the two I would watch again.

Clearly the worst food to eat while driving is “soup”.

I mean, if I was going to go to Times Square and eat at an expensive place that is not in any sense “of New York” I probably would want to “maximum kitsch” anyway.  Like give me the most brash touristy trash on earth please.

The Elder Scrolls are niche compared to things like Minecraft, Call of Duty, Madden, and FIFA. Those are the sorts of games that people with minimal knowledge or interest in video games buy. Whoever owns them is best off just making them available wherever so as to remove as many hurdles as possible from the most…