When I was vacationing in Edinburgh, I was trying to figure out why people kept taking pictures of the front of the building I was staying in.  It turned out the flat we were renting was over the coffee shop where JKR wrote the first book, and tons of people would come by every day, basically on a Harry Potter…

Yup - enough new kids are discovering and reading the books that my niece had a Harry Potter themed party this summer.  I think it’s still going pretty strong.  

Well, I was never a Harry Potter megafan, but there’s bits of her books that always bothered me - the bankers are a whole bunch of anti-Semitic stereotypes rolled together, a lot of the wizarding world relies on slave labor (which is evidently ok because the slaves like it??), and lots of people seem to think that…

Not to mention the fact that the wizarding world is, as a whole, totally ok with using slave labor, and Hermione’s attempts to reform are consistently used as a source of humor.  

I mentioned above, for me there’s a couple different elements. For starters, I can listen to most of that music and never think about the problematic elements (although there are some songs I definitely skip quickly), but Ender’s Game was really tainted for me, specifically because there were bits in the book that…

For me, it depends on how separable the artists’ issues/faults are from their art.  Like, it seems impossible to separate Woody Allen from the dozens of movies he’s made about neurotic older men and the attractive younger women who fall for them, but tons of LGBTQ+ kids saw a message of acceptance in the HP books, so…

Someone made a reference to Dobby on some youtube show my husband was watching, and I had to explain the reference to him, which basically ended with “and everyone seems to still be mostly ok with it, but I don’t really get how?”

I enjoyed the books, for the most part, but it wasn’t a huge part of my identity or anything, I think because I was already a reader. The impression I get is that the kids who really bought in were the ones who hadn’t read much fantasy prior to HP, because for them all this stuff really was new, whereas I had other…

Ok, so that guy in the center of the screen shot *isn’t* Sebastian Stan?  

I’m expecting civil charges against him, the armorer, and the producers, because all 3 failed in big ways to make the set safe and clearly placed a low priority on safety.  

Given the age, couldn’t he just say “I’m old and my hands hurt”?  Is this a pride thing, that he wants to pretend it’s something else?

Netflix pulling the show doesn’t prevent him from doing his act, it just removes their endorsement and distribution of said act. 

But, why is it wrong? It’s a business deal between Netflix and Chapelle, wherein they are implicitly endorsing his content by distributing it and being the platform people view it on. If they think what he’s saying is too offensive, or even if they think it’s bad for business, it’s entirely within their rights to…

I hate it when I can see the writers pulling the strings so clearly, and that’s what’s happened with these last couple episodes re: Roy and Keeley.  It’s particularly annoying because they were doing so well writing the characters up until now.  It’s like how shows like Brooklyn 99 will blow up their premise at the…

Thematically, this episode could have done something really interesting, and I hung in until the end waiting for that to happen, but it never did. There were some fun moments, but overall we learned nothing new about Beard; no actual character work happened here, which made the whole thing a massive missed…

Hey! Just wanted to counter all the vitriol by saying I’ve enjoyed your reviews! I was entirely here for a fun anthology series of standalone stories, and I really enjoyed Captain Carter and T’Challa Starlord.  Then, they lost me when it started being all doom and gloom, but I liked being able to check in and see if…

Brandon Sanderson said he’d eventually take his Mistborn books into a present-day ish setting, and then something futuristic, only with magic, but no idea when those will happen.  He’s got *so* many projects, and takes so many detours, but he also writes so fast I’m kind of convinced he’s really a team of clones or…

Thanks! Kidney numbers have stabilized, so that’s all in a much better state now. Working on developing better ways to cope, and all that.

Heck, I didn’t even watch the first Borat movie, because Borat looked so much like my dad looked when I was a kid. It actually *being* my parent would be a whole other thing.

I also learned, when I was single, to make sure that boundaries were clearly defined - like, when someone asked me if I wanted to go to X, I’d make sure I found out if this is a group thing, or just us. Sometimes people would be cagey or vague about things, and I’d show up to something expecting a group and just find…