Labyrinth... of Bureaucracy

“Lin-Manuel Miranda (doing a heinous Cockney brogue as an ostensible allusion to Dick Van Dyke’s famously bad accent work in the earlier film)“

that’s the same as wanting no part in it

Yeah, I like threats. Especially as they age.

I go with the: “In life, unless you’re born rich, you have to work to pay the rent and keep the lights on.”

If my son doesn’t do his chores I take all of the power cords for his shit away and lock them in the “locked closet of doom.” Then, I tell him if he wants the power…

Yeah, the line “make a task into a game and kids will do whatever is expected of them” is a dead give away. 

Hell, I remember whenever an adult would say “Let’s play the Quiet Game!” I didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about, so I didn’t participate.

“She does the same thing as any parent worth their salt, and gets rambunctious youngsters engaged in daily drudgeries by refashioning the quotidian as adventure. Make a task into a game, and kids will do whatever’s expected of them.”

You... aren’t a parent, are you?

Turning chores into a game works for about 30 seconds…

It’s not really steampunk, more diesel-punk.

I’m hoping for something watchable on a cold February night when this hits streaming.

Do try the books - the first quartet is stunning, and if you can keep from sobbing as you finish the final one, you’re a hardier soul than I.

Speaking of randomly criticizing people... why did you separate “professional” and “writers” like that? I think “professional writers” would have been better, or honestly, no quotation marks at all.

Dan Neilan is, in fact, a professional writer. He gets paid to do it.

Go back to grammar Nazi school.

The entrance to their realm lies not far from the terrors of the Hidden Valley.

“...and hoards of pirates...” 

Their trade agreement with the Burgher of Inandout was a canny move that helped them gather the multitudes to their cause.

“the green-skinned fish people of the Thousand Islands.”

I hear they make the finest salad dressing the world.

That’s amazing and spot on. Wade isn’t really raging against the spiritual zombies and is really more of the prime example of them. He’s so unappealing for that reason. He’s a groupie, just eating up everything there is to know about Halliday, obsessing over everything Halliday obsessed over, and thinking he knows…

A friend of mine lent me the book (her boyfriend’s copy, thank God) and I managed to get to the part where Acererak challenges the protagonist to a game of Joust before the urge to punch strangers became too great. How in the name of Christ did that man ever get published?

I mean, Spielberg is a good enough filmmaker that anything he produces will clip along well on a moment-to-moment level. But he’s doing it in service of a juvenile power fantasy with shallow characters and unexamined gross themes.

I thought Spielberg was able to salvage RP1 into something forgettable but not out-and-out awful. Although as someone who doesn’t play video games my internal monologue for most of the movie was “holy shit you fucking nerds are ridiculous.”

Seriously the movie’s marketing reeked so much anti-intellectualism you'd swear it was promoting a Zach Snyder movie.