I love how Rothfuss deconstructs myth while still keeping a lot more of the fantastical nature intact than, say, Martin or Abercrombie.
While I love both those authors, Rothfuss' slightly more optimistic worldbuilding is a welcome contrast to the unrelenting brutality of their respective worlds.

But requisite smart-assery aside, fantastic review.

The ecology is suspect? C'mon, Patrick, you're Canadian. Explain to me then why your nation's flag is an eagle and penguin head respectant?

Every once in a while I try and dig up old features just to see what the tone of old comments were. It's mostly parity with today's preponderance of non-sequitur snark, incredibly unsavory ruminations on the fuckability of the female cultural personality being interviewed/reviewed and a faint smattering of on-topic…

Indeed. In trying to process how I felt about the movie, the best I could devise was, I'm glad I saw it. I didn't enjoy watching it.

Dogville. Not necessarily for any story or thematic reasons, but as a viewer, the hilariously fiery conclusion was like a dirty punchline to the previous three hours of the stifling Kabuki theater of the damned.

Yeah, I just have one five year old, and if either my wife or I sit still for a minute, she bounces along and clambers all over us with feet and fingers digging into every possible sensitive spot of our anatomy. Anytime I'm trying to work and she just parkours over me, my mind goes to some reel of stock nature footage…

My toddler was very successful in the pursuit of that agenda, much to the expense of me, the beleaguered straight white male.

It's the accumulated leavings of the mass-exoskeleton sloughing of Kenosha of 2009.

It is one of the best Sesame Street skits. That it happened and that they decided to air it. Even adding in the awesome Cookie Monster graphic alongside the letters. It's a testament to the faith Henson had in the value of spontaneous and unplanned occurrences.
Also, that the girl never once acknowledged Henson. Just…

You think so? I enjoy the poetry of your description, but I always thought Liz Phair was just a straight-up cutie.

I used to put my own music on all the time. But now that games are so orchestrated and dialog-heavy, I rarely, if ever still do. The last time I remember sitting down for an extended period of jamming while gaming was about six years ago. I was doing some Final Fantasy XII grinding, listening to Liz Phair's Whipsmart…

I'll never have the time nor focus to get anything out of the Souls games, and I really wish there was a more exploratory, open-world rpg with the Souls aesthetic.
Wandering through that Goya/Bruegel-esque world just for the pleasure of seeing it and not having to fight for every inch of progress would be a delight.

How very cool. The guitar piece really reminds me of something Sesame Street did (does?) so well, which is to present something thoughtful and smart, without it having to teach a specific, or any lesson. Just present a cool little worldess vignette that gets the brain working and churning.
Between this and his stories…

Female video game award show hosts and nominees are too hard to render.

To commemorate, I'd like to provide my favorite quote ever written about Sesame Street from Joan Ganz Cooley, one of the founders of Children's Television Workshop, given about a planning seminar for the show:
"This was during the period of the Weathermen. There had been bombings and so on, and we knew there were some…

As I hoped to clarify above, plenty of games are great satire, or at least attempted satire, but the medium still faces the perception that it's incapable of presenting something so simple.
Five Grand Theft Autos into the series, and each new release is an opportunity for the proscribed conversation about violence in…

Allow me to clarify on my original post, I don't believe games aren't as capable of exploring ideas as other mediums. It's that they're still fighting that stigma. One that even developers can contribute to.

It also reiterates the idea of video games as a medium unfit for tackling even the light critical satire of the movie. Granted, it's for a twenty-five-year-old game for a system which sold almost entirely on the merit that it was portable, yet didn't look like a digital clock face.
But still, it demonstrates the…

I was about as hippy as I was going to get around my late teens, early twenties. On my twenty-first birthday, I went out and drank more than I ever have in my life by a wide margin. I haven't even passed base camp along the same mountain of drunkeness I climbed that night.
After vomiting and passing out in tandem a few…