Starting with Anakin as an adult who’s already a talented fighter pilot fixes all the issues. He’s someone who’s already had success, but discovers he can have yet more by learning to use the force. It also helps make Yoda’s “he’s too old to begin training” from Empire make a bit more sense than the “you have to start…

Oh, boy, I literally just watched Cat Ballou for the first time this week, and… I’m gonna have to give you a “hol’ up”. As a historical artifact, it’s an interesting piece, but it’s so busy going for really tired jokes- jokes that were tired in the 60s, mind you- that the charm never really gets past it. There’s a lot…

“Simic Hybrid? What’s that? Oh, this reminds me of the campaign where the DM said ‘everything breeds with everything in this world’, so I was a half-octopus sahuagin mutant, which meant (in water) I had four claw attacks, a bite attack, two tentacle attacks, and two rake attacks. My only mistake was playing a…

I think the fundamental problem with those ads, is that John Hodgeman was just goddamn adorable in those ads. No offense to Justin Long, but standing next to Hodgeman, he just came off as a charisma vacuum.

Steam is an anticompetitive tactic. Can I delete my Steam account and still play the Steam games I own? No. Can I run the games without the Steam launcher installed? No. Epic’s shitty, but Steam is also shitty. It’s just the shit you’re used to.

Quick survey: how many PC games have been Steam only? I’m no expert, so I only look to GoG for comparison, but I strongly suspect that this number is non-zero.

I look forward to when a game gets “Netflixed out” of the Stadia library.

He’s going ahead and on-ing!

The biggest frustration I have with Valley is that it was so short. The LEAF suit is really, really well scripted. The movement feels like nothing else in any game. The game around it feels very thin, overall, but boy, that suit.

Oh, thank god, I’m not the only one who loathed the tiresome navelgazing of Birdman. Great soundtrack. Fancy filmmaking with the synthetic single-take. Boring, stupid, self-indulgent movie that has far less to say than it thinks it does.

Or, not to go all Keynseian, but maybe there is no magic number, and tax rates and brackets have to constantly be re-evaluated based on broader economic conditions.

I played Holesseum. It wasn’t very good, but the novelty of it was enough to put in the dollar. A whole fucking dollar! In an era when machines were still largely $0.25.

Well, it requires that we believe the current state of border security is insufficient.

If I’m tool cool for both, what do I get? Oh no, it’s an ironic love for a Nic Cage movie, isn’t it. Can’t win for losing, I suppose.

See, I gotta be honest: the idea that your life and your actions have no meaning is, to me, incredibly liberating. And I don’t just say that because studying the existentialists was my favorite part of my college philosophy courses. Yes, nothing I do matters in any deep, broad sense. This means I am free to act in…

It’s frankly not really about the money. I paid way too much for a laptop with a decent graphics card to mostly play point-and-click adventures. I don’t really do mouse/keyboard, because I prefer sitting on the couch. It’s about the quantity of stuff. I don’t want more stuff cluttering up my house. Not to sound like a…

I have no idea if it left any mark on RDR2 (stupid console exclusives- give me a PC port!), but no conversation about Westerns is complete without A Bad Day at Black Rock. It’s not a pure Western- it’s set in the 1950s, and brings noir elements into the story. But the bones are Western- a stranger rolls into town, and…

The movie choices were mostly top notch. The riffing ranged from passable-to-great. The host segments were consistently bad, specifically anything to do with the mads. I know Felicia Day and Patton Oswalt are busy little bees, but did it have to be so painfully obvious that they were on set for the duration of a long…

You want to extend the tradition of white imperialist nations giving African nations really shitty trade deals?

Good thing I only listen to Howard Beale as a fictional role model. He’ll never lead me astray!