Increasingly? I mean, that’s half of why I quit the show in the second year of Matt Smith!

Hot Take, based on an incomplete but sincere relationship to Star Trek:

If you’re talking about who I think, it’s been years, and I think part of how they do it is that they’ve used more than one name to resemble the authentic commenter’s, so I suspect they actually HAVE been banned, but they just make another hard-to-see change and move forward.

I agree. From what I’ve seen in other roles, Michiel Huisman is probably a better actor than Ed Skrein, but Skrein slid perfectly into the “vacant but lethal pretty boy” mold in a way that Huisman didn’t. Part of it for Dany is probably that Daario can be seen as a hollow echo of Khal Drogo, and part of it is that…

I thought about using Tyrion! I pivoted because the thing is that while book!Tyrion’s supposed ugliness (and eventual facial disfigurement) is easy to gloss over in print, it’s neither unimaginable nor unrealistic. You can make a calculated decision that a television audience won’t want to LOOK at that for 80 hours,…

Right. Part of this is that books can slather on details to cement an idea in the reader’s imagination without needing to live with the consequences of a literal representation. (One example on the top of my mind - Daario from the A Song of Ice and Fire books dresses very flamboyantly, and George RR Martin describes…

OK, so a couple of weeks ago I went through the first and most of the second seasons again, I haven’t gone on to the third, but I guess I’ll say that when I was watching the third season I felt like the show crawled up its own ass and started rotting. Like Brian Fuller threw all restraint to the wind and wound up with…

Hopkins in Silence is much closer to the vague physical outline of Harris’ Hannibal in age and size (Brian Cox was a little bulky for the book description) but nobody’s really tried to match the complete Otherness of Harris’ description, and for good reason: Hannibal has red eyes and six fingers on his left hand. This…

In general, yes, but in the specific case of Eddie Gallagher (and several others but he was the highest profile, because SEAL) the military took the accusations of war crimes seriously, held a court martial, found the accused guilty, and sentenced them to prison. On an official level they were saying: “these actions…

There are always going to be substantial simplifications or mischaracterizations involved in trying to view centuries-long periods as coherent “eras” juxtaposed against each other as well as progressing into each other, but I do think there are merits to the Renaissance as the transition into Modernity (in the broad…

In the ruins of the blogosphere we used to say “after 9/11 now I’m outraged about Chappaquiddick.”

I watched the whole show (including, for the first time, the Wells years) last fall, and I think our cultural memory of it has gotten warped.

Orchestras aren’t cheap and I know that was a separate cost, but there’s something hilarious about citing Clausen’s $12k per episode salary, because when we’re talking about a show that’s been on forever that Fox (and I guess now Disney) apparently still finds to be profitable while paying the core cast well into the…

“Do not let your sister die from pain or lose her baby because you are awkward with strangers.” Such a beautiful moment.

“Big Red Son” is so good! It’s the only one of the major essays collected in Consider the Lobster that I didn’t hate; the title essay, Up Simba, and Authority and American Usage were all big disappointments to me, though I liked a lot of the smaller pieces (having previously loved most of his nonfiction, though it…

I don’t think there’s a way to assess a single axis for “difficulty” in a reading experience, especially since a lot of what “difficulty” really means once we’re all adults who can parse a complex paragraph if we care to is something like “what do I have patience for”. That said, in my subjective experience, compared…

One of my favorite sketches with Jones in it is the house-hunting one with her and Liev Schreiber. What I really love is the concept and writing, it’s not like Jones makes the sketch or does anything incredible, but she was really good in it, in a part that doesn’t play off the “big black woman is intimidating thing”…

Che seems weirdly thin-skinned, but the last time any kind of creative person (who didn’t, themselves, also work as a critic) had anything useful or interesting to say about criticism was approximately never. No, writing about music isn’t like dancing about architecture, it’s like writing about architecture, a totally…

I don’t know if it’s actually true, but subjectively I appreciated that an episode of Burn Notice called this out - it’s not THAT easy for a female spy to seduce someone cold (particularly if the target is the type to be security conscious to begin with) because they’ve got a lifetime of NOT having gorgeous women…

I find myself stunned to be agreeing with the Broccolis on the direction of the Bond franchise.