I know it *did* gloss over some stuff, but for a Hollywood hagiography, Rocketman was pretty warts and all. Certainly compared to that turd Bohemian Rhapsody.

I see the Ready Player One-ification of cinema continues unabated.

That recursive “This guy is terrible, but the next guy will be great!” thing is really getting tiresome. Now it really IS recursive, because they absolutely hated Davies as much as they hated Moffat. I’m actually not sure when Doctor Who fans have *liked* the show.

Emulated speed runs are legit but usually put in their own categories (assuming they’re not tool assisted). The big issue is that a computer/emulator’s processing speed is never going to perfectly match the original platform, and that means a runner on an emulator can potentially accomplish things marginally (or not…

Reminds me of this gem, but not played as straight, so to speak:

I remember being really bored by Reloaded, yet finding the Architect speech super compelling. It genuinely upends the movie/setting in an interesting way. I think issue is that it felt inorganic; they do set it up a bit, but plotting just isn’t the Wachowskis’ strong suit, and it comes off as tacked on. They also…

I caught that too. I wonder if he meant Past Masters, which does include Hey Jude.

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. See, televisions (TVs) with no active feed often display ‘noise’, which is gray, which is what the sky was. That is, it was overcast. The clouds where covering the blue part. Noise is a random dot pixel pattern of static displayed when no…

Oh, definitely. Snow Crash is mostly worth reading just for the intro sequence with the pizza delivery. After that it’s mixed , though I have to admit I have more patience than most people for naval gazing about Sumerian mythology and meta-languages. Maybe that’s what I was missing from RP1...

Ah, but there’s plenty of it in Armada.

Yeah, Scalzi does some similar things with pop culture nostalgia, but *well* and with self-reflection (Redshirts is the kind of novel Ernest Cline wishes he could write).

Weirdly, I would almost recommend Armada. Don’t get me wrong: It’s dog shit. But, like, it’s the work of a madman. It’s a book where the ostensive…

Incurious is (as Ernest Cline would say) the perfect word for it. I mean, this is a guy whose book is set in a dystopia that he never bothers to explain between excruciating, repetitive infodumps about the OASIS (which is ALSO vaguely defined, somehow). He’s also really obsessed with peak oil rather than climate…

There’s a certain symmetry to it, though. RP1 is bad Snow Crash, Armada is (very) bad Ender’s Game, and RP2 is braindead Neuromancer. He’s playing all the hits!

RP1 really is just Snow Crash but Stupid and Badly Written.

I just want him to take a single Creative Writing class. One semester. Hell, a weekend workshop on the fundamentals of storytelling. The man cannot sustain drama without immediately undermining it. He can’t even do basic setup and payoff. Like, hacky sci fi prose is fine; not everyone is William Gibson. But when you…

God, I just watched the MST3K version of Monster a Go-Go the other day, and even they couldn’t do much with it. It’s such a slog. Conversely, I find things like Manos: The Hands of Fate and The Room endlessly fascinating and watchable. That’s kind of the sweet spot: it has to be bizarre and sincere, but it can’t be…

Him freaking out about LeVar Burton is probably the funniest scene in the whole show. “You can’t disappoint a picture!!!”

Donald Glover really was the comedic MVP of this show. He’s just astonishingly funny. He brings such a transcendent sweetness/dumbness to Troy.

The headline had me thinking it was going to be “Devil Dinosaur”, because my pop culture literacy is veeeeery specific and stupid. But this also makes sense.

By sheer coincidence, I rewatched the original the other night; it truly does hold up. As noted elsewhere, the first scene of the brachiosauruses does look a bit rubbery, but nearly every other dinosaur in that movie — even the CG ones — looks a thousand times better than a lot of the shit we get now. On another note,…