Oh dear. You just made me realize that someday, today's younguns will be nostalgic for PewDiePie.

'Mastermind' reads more like a position - he's the one from whom the vision sprang - is a good ridiculous fit with the movie. 'Cinematic game-changer' is accurate enough and fits with thematically with the movie, but crap - do we really need to build up The Spielberg with adjectives?

So it's more like early-2000s era Dreamworks, with the slight bit of creativity in 'lazy reference to other property' compressed even further into 'eh, we just licensed the thing outright'?

The whole idea that subject matter should be off-limits based on the demographic of the maker is ridiculous. I share your concerns below that the show could become a "masturbatory, self-satisfying fantasy" for armchair activists, but art is about what you do with it.

Clarification: I actually like Ennis' needy God, it's more that the characters' capacity to accuse him rings a little hollow. I'll have to check out that episode of Lucifer, though!

I think you're onto something there. I would say the distinguishing features of a 'think-piece' are:

I'm perfectly happy with seeing a flawed guy confront a flawed Creator. The more 'perfect' Jesse seems, the more his gripes with God read as wish fulfillment for a sort of Dawkins / Hitchens New Atheist take on theodicy, which is neither nuanced nor dramatically interesting and was one of the less interesting parts of…

When he's pissed at Tulip, he takes out his anger physically on other people in the vicinity.

I grew up in Iowa (Hoover's birth state), and teachers generally emphasized how he was *unfairly* blamed for the depression. The blame generally went toward not-terribly-well-described 'socio-economic factors'.

As someone who was perfectly satisfied with the first season and is a fully-grown adult who guaffed heartily at the scene of Eugene attempting to pull a Bad Taste fix with Tracy's brain, I'm not sure where I fit in around here re: all the things people don't seem to be satisfied with!

Any good sources on how that line was received, rather than remembered? I mean, aren't you supposed to 'go on again' in a debate? Were people (who hadn't drank the Republican kool-aid) saying 'yeah, Reagan was lying - but Carter was wrong to press him. This is a debate after all.'

Crap, man. I started high school in '99 and it was Columbine, then 9/11. In retrospect I think the public response to the former was a dry run for the latter. Everyone freaked the hell out when violence punctured the 'safe' suburbs and high-rise professional workplaces - backdrops to the sorts of lifestyles we were…

Ah, yes. That site is work of art, an intense attempt to objectively quantify very, very specific moral standards.

Couldn't the logic of 'ethical defense' you outlined for lawyers just as equally apply to publicists? If they're not going to resign, they have a professional obligation to do a good job.

Yeah - that scene is amusing enough to stick with me. 'Look at me! I'm drinking wine!'

Look, just because you're into eating human flesh doesn't mean you know how to prepare it.

Even without the plan for future nostalgia, that was a good creative choice to contrast iconic visions of the youth culture of both eras. Whatever it read at the time, though, now it mostly reads as 'that was the 80s'.

Soul Calibur 2 was when I stopped playing fighting games. Brilliant reviews and (what I assume) was a complex fighting system, but in practice amounting to a massively steep hill between 'just press all the buttons' and 'informed strategy'.

I've written it before and I'll likely write it again: why hasn't Alex Jones been sued for harassment or defamation of character? His walking back on the Pizzagate conspiracy theory claims could suggest legal action was threatened, but why hasn't someone taken it all the way?

This is starting to sound a lot like Dancer in the Dark.