I learned to play the guitar while I was into metal, so my guiding principle was "faster = better." I'd been playing for years before I realized that I hadn't practiced rhythm at all. So hopefully that's improved in the last ten year.

It made a strange sound when you knocked on it - I assume the body was just a pile of Ikea shelves pressed together.

I don't remember why I replaced mine - you could change the color of the LED to whatever you wanted! And I think it had a little program where you could write your own ringtones.

Will the foreman read the verdict?

Method acting? Nah, I wasn't in character, I just felt like that moron had it coming. [Million-dollar smile]
- Opening statements, The People v George Clooney

*phone rings*

I was super excited that the guitar had 24 full frets, although above 20 they were pretty hard to play.

You know how the Disney Channel has these awful, bland three-camera sitcoms with mugging, bland stars and canned laughter, which tweens enjoy because they have no idea about the diversity of entertainment available to them and are still too naive to realize how stupid and dated things are?

When I was in high school I had a Warlock, but it was a cheapo model with a flat black finish and terrible pickups. How terrible you ask? They would fall out - the entire pickup would just fall out and dangle if I held the guitar at the wrong angle.

Finding that Rogue action figure was a big moment when I was ten (right up there with stumbling - literally - over an entire shipping container full of Star Wars figures right when they release the Power of the Force collection back in 1995 or 96). I never got a Storm or a Jean Grey.

For me that anxiety was completely cured a few years ago when Amazon recommended Predator 2.

My wife and I watched about ten minutes of "Haters Back Off" on Netflix. After we turned it off in a mixture of confusion and vague irritation, I noticed that most of the positive reviews contained the phrase "I loved this character back in middle school." It was a nice reminder that a) we're getting old and b)…

It's less a Holocaust revenge movie and more a movie about movies about World War II - the ostensible morality of Jews killing Nazis is part of a larger theme about how movies represent violence and how much we as the audience are willing to tolerate a movie lying outright (for example, rewriting the end of an entire…

If she leaves it like that long enough it'll be fun again, right?

I read about a woman in Arr…

It bothered me that Ultimate Alliance gave up some of the X-Men Legends gameplay concepts - like the way that only tanks could drag heavy objects, certain characters were needed to past certain obstacles, even silly shit like equipping items. Also, Iron Man was stupid underpowered. But it had Daredevil and Moon…

But I don't want in-universe continuity, I just want to play the Rogue-Wolverine-Colossus-Nightcrawler combo that always worked so well with my action figures!

I rewatched the original Matrix recently, and it really does hold up - the bullet-time effects and the fight choreography haven't aged (even after decades of knock-offs). What's really striking though is some of the dated technology (what's a flat-screen?) and how much of the movie is shot on sets with physical…

Too bad Eli didn't give her some pointers - like how to bug out your eyes and raise your eyebrows every time you say a line. Taut neck = drama.

I saw the Gift a few years ago - it's fine. I don't remember much except for one well-staged creepy vision in a bathtub. For me the movie's real legacy is David Krumholtz reacting to it in Harold and Kumar.