So, I love this show, but one of its problems in recent seasons is that you often can’t tell whether the show is making the useless characters useless on purpose. I guess there could still be some greater purpose for Bran, but I’m afraid the writers just forgot to give him anything important to do. 

The writing in the last season was kind of awful, especially in two instances (spoilers ahead, obviously):

So who wound up getting the 25,000 jobs instead?

I think you are drawing more of an equivalency than there really is, which I think plays into the hands of the alt-right folks who cooked up the campaign against Gunn. They were looking to punish Gunn for his political views; they weren’t actually offended by his old pedophilia jokes, whereas I doubt anyone is…

Critic-trolling is a cool marketing strategy if your movie is like, Death Race 2000 or something—something truly trashy and provocative that dares you to be too uptight to love it. For a poorly-received mobster flick that honestly looks kind of boring, it just seems like a Hail Mary from a studio that couldn’t find…

If Obama had misspelled “smoking,” we would be hearing about it to this day.

Trump and W are catastrophic presidents in entirely different ways. In terms of pure human and material cost, Trump has a long way to go to catch up to the bloodthirsty heights of Bush’s neo-con government. In terms of damage to American institutions and the American public psyche, Trump is in a league of his own.…

Said it before and I’ll say it again: Trump is missing a piece inside. It’s not just that he’s a dumb asshole, though he is certainly that. I mean he lacks the core spark of humanity that most everyone else has that makes us understand that we are the same thing as other people. On some deep fucked up level, he…

A big source of Shapiro’s popularity is the misconception that if an argument is difficult to refute, then it must be a good argument with a correct conclusion—ergo, if whatever random person who asked him a question doesn’t have a snappy comeback queued up as soon as he gets done talking, then Shapiro has DESTROYED…

I mean, I wouldn’t say I’m an expert in Shapiro studies, but I’ve seen enough clips of him “owning the libs” to feel like I have a good grasp of his shtick. It’s my perception that his reputation as a master debater comes from his talent for making arguments that are difficult to respond to—not because they are such…

This isn’t all that hypothetical. There are numerous sites that run made-up news articles, but have a disclaimer somewhere on the site that it’s “satire.” However, the articles don’t actually read as satire—it’s literally just fake news presented with a straight face and no visible attempt to be humorous or provide…

I think it’s pretty telling that praise for Shapiro’s intellect always seems to focus on his ability to win some contest. It’s never just “he’s a smart guy with a lot of persuasive ideas,” it’s always “he would DEFEAT you.” This fixation on how he would perform in a debate is constant, to the point that it seems to com…

lol no you didn’t

Ben Shapiro is the epitome of a particular type of conservative personality. I know plenty of Ben Shapiros in real life: overconfident blowhards who believe themselves to be indifferent agents of Facts and Logic and treat that as their personal brand, based on a core conviction that they are Very Informed and Logical…

Probably for the best, since that’s an extremely dumb way to think about it. 

I for one love the cryptic, open-ended nature of the game. I love that it hides away substantial content and just lets you either find it or not. Yeah, I’ll probably miss a few things before I finish my playthrough, but the fact that you can miss things makes it so much sweeter when you stumble across something…

Having taught college English myself, I was often stunned by how dumb my students thought I was. I always had a day-one plagiarism spiel to the effect of: “Don’t even think about it. You cannot outsmart me on this. I will spot the plagiarism with my naked eye as I’m reading your paper and it will probably take me less…

jfc. Giving the plagiarist a pass for basically the single most unethical thing you can do as a professional writer is bad enough, but blaming the people he stole from is the actual worst take of all time. Quit while you’re behind, dude.

It’s not like the game as released is unplayable or missing features. Much bigger companies regularly put out games with much bigger problems at launch, so it seems kind of shitty to harp on a small independent developer making the call to ship a finished game but continue to work on optimizing it. 

Uh, Swiss Army Man is great and the final scene is probably the best fart joke in movie history.