It was always a soap opera with swords. From episode 1, it ran on big, gaudy emotions and simple psychological motivations. As did the books.

One of those throwaway moments from after the election: Thandie Newton, a daughter of a Zimbabwean immigrant, talking to Stephen Colbert about the wisdom of dialogue and compassion, not as moral activities but as political efficacies, and Colbert loading on a bunch of qualifiers, than quoting Nelson Mandela.

I checked out the review having watched the episode expecting to see it to get sliced and diced. When it wasn't, I expected to see it get sliced and diced in the comments. It's as bland as freezer scrapings.

Hillary Clinton will be the one to tell the Saudis "oil isn't worth this?" Maybe she'll say the same about the 750 billion dollars of US treasuries they hold or their denomination of oil sales in dollars.

It's not uncommon but it is irrational: it's an elimination game that, in every iteration, others are actively trying to keep you from winning. If you can't keep from spitting venom when somebody does to you what you intend to do to them, then maybe it's not the game for you.

It's hard not to imagine Samantha Bee nervously eyeing this one.

I feel sorry for her. She's pitched her tent on quicksand.

It's nice to be liked but it's better by far to get paid.

My point is the point I made twice: that Whedon's had an easier time of building a career for having family connections. If you want to slot that into some talent/respect quadratic equation, be my guest. I don't care to.

Whedon would not have the career he has had if his family wasn't connected. He found agency representation through his father had one of the most envied professional positions in Hollywood by his late twenties.

This is a really poor piece of writing, Sam. The first paragraph reads like it was written by a manic, increasingly apologetic eight year old; the word 'fancy' appears four times (three in one paragraph); the Swedish National Culinary Team invites the comment "sounds super cool" and nothing else; its totally unclear…

But is a show being Whedon's most morally complex significant of quality? He's able to do a lot well but he's a poor intellectual.

Photonegatively, I think the scrapped pilot is the best thing Whedon has written and the rest of the show is various varieties of bad, made more acutely so by how well realised Echo showed the premise could be.

That Peter Thiel link is some strained thinkpiecing.

The conclusion to the second season story was about as bad as television gets. It was outrageously dumb.

Not really relatedly: I watched Duet last week and while I don't watch enough television these days to say this with much force, I fear its compact episodic greatness is becoming a lost art.

Oh dear.

The disparity in the quality of the writing (prose, tone and thoughtfulness) between the reviews and the newswires has grown sufficiently wide that my brain has just started to regard the AVClub as two different sites. I'm not sure the poverty of one set of writers is enough to offset he value of the other but this…

He told a self-deprecating story about an audition he went to that may or may not have been for the Han Solo film and it's being retold like he's an egomaniacal dope who was torpedoed by his own incompetence. The only person who should be coming out of this looking badly is Danette.

It's an excellent spot to get an overview of what the best online resources are for a given area. My swimming and mandolin playing have gotten a lot better for the use of Reddit. I also get a kick out of dropping in on the ASOIAF subreddit to see what they're doing to keep themselves sane this week.