Really? I thought it was an awful performance

This episode provided us the only authentically adolescent moment in the show’s run, where the big brother whose name I forget, after extolling the virtues of freaks to his brother, completely ignores a cute Souxsie at the party in favor of playing Duckie (see, I do references too!) to a spoken-for Nancy. Freaks don’t…

This season’s really not coming together like I hoped it would. They didn’t learn their lesson about breaking up their ensemble into multiple meandering plot threads, which was S1's big recurring problem. The S2 plot with the teens feels particularly superfluous (btw, they knew their phones were tapped and scheduled a…

Motherfucker, you were smiling in group photos

And so the gaming press’ double standard between a certain games designer and the rest of the industry continues apace.

Fwiw this is an actual thing in particularly dense or rules-bound RPGs. Few hardcore gamers ever play on easy / “story mode” but someone who only plays every once in awhile due to family or whatever easily loses interest in that kind of game when it asks them to remember all the moving parts they were only briefly…

I think you’re misreading the intent of the mode title. It’s meant to be read as the game itself letting *you*, a good and doting father whose devotion to his kids leaves him a few hours a week to pursue solitary interests (if that), know that at this difficulty setting the roadblocks to progression are minimal.

Not for nothing that choice-focused game design in AAA products is more or less in its death throes. The market got spoiled on merely good-to-great choice based level design (DX sequels, Dishonored / Prey, Hitman) and has moved on to the next big thing - drop-in multiplayer raids on huge static maps. And you better…

Also, when a straight Yakov Smirnoff reference makes it into a finished piece, either the writer doesn’t care about the material or the editor doesn’t care about how the writer comes off. That stuff doesn’t work as a joke or even an anti-joke, it just lays on the screen like a bad tweet.

The event it’s based on is even more tense, but it was the Bill equivalent in the scene and in the prison instead of the hospital. Not-Bill came to interview at a different time than usual, hit the button to get the guard when the review was over, no one came. Kemper informs him that they ended during shift change and…

The first episode intro of the character was a little much but after that, Collins’ refusal to recognize her as a character became more than a little much

This is probably the first time I find myself hoping that a show changes reviewers between seasons (presuming this gets a second). I don’t really enjoy reading extended analysis of non-diegetic music choices that resembles analysis of inconsistent engine specifications on the starship Enterprise. The way it’s deployed…

Someone was butchering women in New Jersey not long ago. Serial killers have targeted streetwalkers since great old grandad Jack because nobody remembers them.

Did the axing of the AVC books section happen before or after the transition?

“Betty is Riverdale’s closer. Its finisher.” Its Stone Cold Stunner, if you will.

You gotta meet more sociology grad students. They’re all like this.

I wouldn’t consider it a big spoiler since it’s never revealed in this season. It’s not like there’s a narrative text this show judiciously follows, a curious viewer could look it up and it wouldn’t rob the show of anything.

It landed in a strange moment in our culture when outsized reverence the internet displays for seminal genre works somehow got translated into very expensive projects that didn’t land far outside their cult (see also: Twin Peaks)

I would totally be into this show if they switched out the Alice Coopers with no comment or acknowledgement, though. That includes Riverdale Alice Cooper becoming a shock rocker for old people

I’ve been away from this show long enough that I get excited when “Alice Cooper” gets mentioned for a second or two before I remember it’s not *that* Alice Cooper.