I would have been 19 and I remember its reception perfectly, thank you very much, because it was a crap show that set the tone for the next decade that something was ‘prestige’ so long as there was enough on-camera sex and guts sloshing about.

There’s a directly line from the first season of True Blood being all ‘this…

THANK YOU it’s my key takeaway from this article no one is talking about what a weird lens on Asimov that is.

He’s... doing television?

“No one watching took it “seriously” like we were watching a prestige drama.”

That scene in the pilot where he give himself finger guns in the mirror while having sex with a girl is all Jason ever could or needed to be.

Shallow? Bazooka Joe comics have more depth.

Hear hear!

I talk about the X-men problem all the time. There’s literally a mutant rating scale of ‘who can cause the Apolalypse with their mind.’ There’s a Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Mutants have, in fact, tried to genocide all non-mutants multiple times.

THIS IS A BAD ALLEGORY FOR THE IRRATIONALITY OF OPPRESSION.

I mentioned this above but my recently-out friend was so hurt and angry that I said the anti-vampire people were clearly in the right (as were the anti-zombie ‘bigots’ in the British gay zombie allegory In The Flesh).

They kill people, Brian! Constantly! In really sick and brutal ways! I don’t care that they’re gay…

I knew people who took this show very, very seriously indeed.

It was weird.

True Blood and the slightly-later In the Flesh were two shows that really, really, really mattered to my recently-out gay best friend and he got so hurt that I wouldn’t take them seriously—and he got really upset that I thought they were shit allegories for queer oppression.

They fucking kill people, Brian. Brutally.…

“It’s like No Man’s Sky”

No Man’s Sky has both ground vehicles and even at launch allowed you to fly your ship around intra-atmosphere.

So, no, not actually like No Man’s Sky, then.

As non-American, your universal ideas of Christians being shaped by such a utterly narrow lens baffles me but I think speaks a lot to American viewpoints generally.

I imagine he mechanics have aged clumsily and I’m not pretending its a forgotten masterpiece that plays as well in 2023 as 2003—but narrative, the setting and stylings of the game are still vivid in my mind: it still feels so ambitious for 2002 in a way Skyrim doesn’t.

“You can almost feel the ancient bones of Morrowind and Fallout 3 poking through bits of the scenery and menus as you play.”

Except Morrowind was werd. morrowind was a weird setting where the local people did not like you and were actively offended that you might be their chosen one. Morrowind felt truly alien: its…

“can recite the names of all the world’s countries and capitals”

It’s been how many years since the outbreak in-universe, why is it that nation-states still seem to meaningful exist as some kind of useful touchstone?

Never heard of this show, which tells you how often I feel the need to check-out what’s happening on MTV.

The book is good but can be a little dense because it dives deep into the financial chicanery. If you’re good with that sort of thing, no problem, but I struggled.

That has to be incidental because SNW doesn’t use logic in its storytelling, though God I wish it would.

Wonder how late in the process someone had to remind the the designer that, yes, Resistance was real and wasn’t a false memory.