They were shocked, simply shocked that the console versions were in such a state.

Thanks for the Crack Cloud recommendation. You had me when you referenced Arcade Fire and Devo. I’m checking it out now, and it’s pretty great.

I’ve heard of similar problems at a Western company (I believe that it was Riot Games). It is probably more endemic at Eastern companies for sure, but it’s not unheard of over here, and with those sorts of general attitudes towards women, they probably have the general sort of sexual harassment that you hear about in…

It’s still possible that Nintendo has something bad going on behind closed doors, but if there is, I don’t think it’s solely because of Japanese culture that they would have been able to keep it hidden. We certainly know about workplace abuses from other Japanese companies (cough Konami cough), so if they’re keeping…

From what I’ve heard, Nintendo has a pretty solid working environment. They don’t have their workers work overtime if they can help it at all (there is nothin resembling crunch). They are way more willing to delay a game if it’s not working rather than work their employees to death.

I loved “Before the Flood,” (not quite sure why you’d dislike it. Other than a rushed climax, I had no issues with it) and didn’t dislike “Lie of the Land,” although it is probably Whithouse’s worst effort, and I can see someone with different tastes than me hating it more. As far as Whithouse’s efforts, “School…

Yeah, that wouldn’t be a bad choice at all. You could make him a rival of Reed’s from college or something, and it would be pretty quick to explain.

My point is that it basically has the same structure as a murder mystery. It’s written the same way even if there isn’t an actual murder. There is something happening done by an unknown perpetrator. Much of the plot is then spent trying to uncover the perpetrator’s identity. The fact that there isn’t an actual murder…

Lie down on the couch! What does that mean?

Yeah. I hadn’t heard of him other than Potter’s Puppet Pals and the Mysterious Ticking Noise (and I didn’t know who had done that). YouTube recommended Spirit Phone to me out of the blue one day, I clicked on it out of curiosity, and the one-two punch of “Lifetime Achievement Award” and “Touch-Tone Telephone” blew me…

Finally somebody else thinks Phoenix is the best one. It trims the worst parts of the book and does the best parts well.

Chris Columbus himself said that he wasn’t happy with some of the special effects in the first film. He deliberately shot the effects heavy sequences first in the second movie so that VFX artists would have more time to do postproduction work, something that he wasn’t able to do on the first one for scheduling reasons.

His album, Spirit Phone, is unironically my favorite album of all time.

You can kind of tell that Rowling was influenced by Gilliam. Any scene in the Ministry of Magic feels like it came straight out of Brazil.

They thought that American children wouldn’t pick up a book with the word “Philosopher” in the title. I am sadly not joking, that is the actual reason.

I honestly don’t blame Columbus for what happened with the Lightning Thief. He competently filmed the script that he was given. It wasn’t his fault that the script was awful.

With the exception of book 7 and sort of 5, all of them are basically murder mystery plots, although there is not always a murder, per se:

The early UFF art is indeed fine. I misremembered when Land took over (I thought it was much earlier than it was), so yeah, that was my bad.

That’s a solid idea. I’ve heard rumors that Namor was the planned villain for Black Panther 2, but considering everything about that franchise going on at the moment, who knows what Marvel’s plans there are.

Yeah, I completely agree with you on Doom. His comics backstory is complicated enough that I honestly think that you can make a good solo film with him. At the very least, he needs to be properly introduced in a film whose main characters are already established to do proper justice to him (although I’d be fine if…