See, I would think it and the Pop Culture Happy Hour (also missing this week) are highly reviewable, because their quality depends so heavily on what the particular segments were. They're much more variable than, say, the various "How Stuff Works" podcasts, which are much more consistent, even when the topics change.…

I would argue that Judy Budnitz's "Guilt" (about the guy who's pressured to donate his heart to his dying mother), Ira Sher's "The Man in the Well," and most of the Etgar Keret pieces are all fantastic segments.

I think part of my criticism of the Flophouse is that they obviously possess deep reservoirs of nerdiness, and I feel like those are better tapped when they actually tear into particular bad plot points or ridiculous acting choices or what have you — or rhapsodizing on the pleasures of certain forms of trashiness or…

Yeah, having heard Pop Culture Happy Hour's segment on Smash a few days before hearing the Gabfest's segment, I found the Gabfest segment to seem almost completely vacuous in comparison. I still listen to it because they occasionally hit on other kinds of culture that I don't pay much attention to (gallery shows,…

While I love The Flophouse, I think over the last few months they've had several installments where they barely even talk about the movie. Sure, the riffs are funny, but I'd prefer riffs rooted in the constraints of pulling some little insight or criticism about the movie rather than just non sequitur gags. On way too…

I'm not going to dispute your on-the-ground experience (though I don't know that either of us is qualified to really push the "more than" argument). But I will point out one feature that shaped my impression.

Take it up with Wikipedia. And he is at least from the British Isles, albeit not Great Britain. [By which logic Canadians are Americans, which is perfectly fair, right?]

See, my impression is that relatively few British comics do straight stand-up. The comedy mode seems to be more focused on doing characters and sketches (even when solo) and songs and all the other more theatrical kinds of things you would expect to see on an Edinburgh Fringe billing. I'm not saying that's inferior —…

Authority certainly has something to do with it. In the RadioLab piece, they point out that the "following orders" conclusion usually trotted out is based only on the baseline study, but that Milgram also did a huge number of variations on the experimental conditions. One of those was having two experimenters in the…

The most recent full-length episode of the radio show/podcast RadioLab had a good segment on the Milgram experiment where they explained that despite the fact that the experiment is often presented as showing that people will do horrible things in the name of "following orders," what Milgram found was quite different.…

Alternatively, rather than just reading him as a fame whore, you could see his doing the monologue on Leno not as just taking the very next booking offered to him, but rather as a deliberate act to make Larry look like more of a jerk for chickening out on airing the episode. That is, it's done punitively as much as…

Well, the mistake there is assuming that pop music is about music (or, at least, that "pop music" as it's discussed on this site and in most other pop criticism media. Pop music is performance art. The music and the recordings are only one component of the total artistic performance, which does include the attitude,…

What, the rigorous scientific methodology of Ghost Hunters and Paranormal State and Ghost Adventures is good enough for you? They have fancy measuring devices and acronyms and night vision and everything!

I'd add a wish that non-digitally-assisted gaming in general (p&p RPGs, grown-up board games, etc.) were more popular. I don't see a good reason why they shouldn't be, other than our technology fetish.

Hey, I mentioned it way back on p. 2, along with The Adventures of Willy Beamish.

This is a story of interest to probably nobody, but reading the Gamasutra piece dredged it up for me. When I was a kid, my parents decided they'd buy me some stock as a birthday present (this was around the time I was getting my first savings account and such, so there was some kind of push to increase my financial…

Yeah, I was going to do more with the CD-ROM point and just never got back to it. What I was going to say was that CD-ROM started introducing another genre of adventure game (frequently based on integrated video) that was designed to show off the (then) enormous capacity of CD-ROMs. So you get games like The 7th Guest…

Agreed. I said more on this below, but was stupidly scrolling backwards up the comments and missed yours to reply to.

I actually still prefer the original graphics. There's something very aesthetically appealing about the pixelated animations — there's an artistic skill evident in the rendering facial expressions and gestures while under such heavy constraits that's really impressive. I think Scumm Bar (and the seagull eating the red…

Thirded. As a nerdy teen, biker culture was anathema to me, but I got Full Throttle as part of a big LucasArts box set (including Loom and older titles like Day of the Tentacle). I installed it without much enthusiasm, but was blown away by it. It was easily my favorite of all the games in that set. Monkey Island,…