If Cerulean Salt is an A (and I think it is), I'd give Ivy Tripp an A-, and this a B+. There are some good songs on it, but quite a few also just kind of blend together for me. Cerulean Salt and Ivy Tripp had more variety. This album is all rock all the time and the production is kind of dull. I actually liked the…

I think Theon will live to the end. He has a major character arc still brewing. Yara might die, but Theon will probably end up lord of the Iron Islands.

"Everything Now" is a straight disco album, from start to finish. Like it could have been released in 1978 and not been out of place. Enter knowing that, and you might not be disappointed.

Show Euron barely exists. They haven't defined him enough to be a character. He's more a "type" and a costume.

They altered so much from books 4 and 5, though, that I don't think it matters much if GRRM told them what he planned on doing with the characters in the books. There's a lot that's happened this season and last that I doubt will play out the same way in the books (I doubt Arya will kill the Freys, I doubt Stannis'…

I actually think the show's decision to send Jamie to Dorne was brilliant and would have solved the book's problem of suddenly dumping a million new characters on you that you don't care about. Jamie really didn't have much to do in A Feast for Crows, so GRRM sending to him to Dorne would have been interesting.

This show feels so weird now. It's like all of the character arcs completed in previous seasons, so now it's just all plot all the time. Who really has any sort of character arc left? Maybe Arya. But it seems like everyone else is in character stasis, just moving the plot forward. Once great characters like…

You don't use a whip against swords, period.

R. Kelly has Aziz Ansari, though, who devoted like 50% of his first two specials to "R Kelly is awesome!" jokes.

The cases have been litigated enough already, but I don't think there's any comparison between Cosby and Allen. One was a serial rapist with dozens of women coming forward to corroborate the story, the other was accused by his partner of molesting his kid in the middle of a very contentious separation in his 40s,…

Especially since there's a great deal of doubt as to whether he did it or not.

It was all about the art style. The games that were deliberately cartoony or abstract hold up much better. The games that went for realism, though, don't hold up well at all.

I think the show starts out really rough. Especially early on, there are drastic shifts in tone and character inconsistencies. Sometimes it seems like they are trying to give McBride some depth and intelligence, while other times they just depict him as a sort of Kenny Powers rehash.

I don't really get your objection. Mainly because (1) white guys destroy black peoples lives all the time in reality so this show isn't terribly far fetched (and the show definitely isn't siding with the VPs) and (2) the principle is a very well done and nuanced character of the sort that black actresses rarely get…

Yeah that makes sense to me. I guess I just didn't think playlists were popular enough for that to be worth the effort, but maybe they are. I never listen to Spotify's playlists unless they are created by an external source (i.e. Stereogum, Pitchfork, etc, etc).

Someone explain why Spotify would want to produce a bunch of fake music just to pay themselves? I don't see how they benefit from that. Maybe if their fake music took up enough listening space that people started listening to it over real music, but that seems very unlikely to me.

It's a bit odd to dismiss the entirety of pop as a genre. It's such a vast and varied category that the category itself doesn't even really mean much. It's like saying, "I dislike dramas."

I really dislike "I Want you Back." It's really catchy so it sticks in your brain, but it's also totally generic and awful in a mid-1990s adult contemporary pop song sort of way. The radio here has been playing it a lot, so I started to recognize it without really being aware of it at first. But when I first…

There are some things that having a disability precludes you from doing. That's just a fact and I think denying that just inadvertently erases the experience of what living with X or Y condition is like. That said, I don't think blindness precludes one from being an actor, depending on the role. There are deaf…

You're right. If only they would stop making this very niche brand of underwear, gays would stop doing drugs forever.