Also there are things that become relevant but they’re not what you predict here. And we still finish up the season with some shaky characterization and plot holes.

They definitely pulled a reverse Luke Cage because at this point the show gets quite good, and that’s almost entirely on Ritter and McTeer elevating the material.

They did that with Defenders and still somehow managed to waste SIGOURNEY WEAVER. No, at least with 13 episodes they get enough bullshit out of their systems to produce at least a few episodes of engaging TV

And he’s responsible for the Alias handle! Pure fanfiction

Also I kind of feel bad for Janet McTeer what with her natural face being used as “catastrophic burn victim reconstruction”

A very generous review for an episode that establishes the permanent Jessica / Alisa rift - a rift between a daughter who always needed a mother and the mother who was kept from her! - not on any of the carnage we already know Alisa’s responsible for but on the death of a character we knew for less than an hour.…

I’ve been caught up with the Magnus Archives since last Podmass, and while the VA can veer into tabletop dungeon master territory and the metaplot gets heavy toward the end of seasons, the quality control is really extraordinary, especially considering their weekly release schedule.

I’ve heard from a spec fic-adjacent person I trust that he bears it privately. I’m also told he went off on a public convention panel about bad Florida fantasy without actually naming names, but that it was obvious who he was talking about. Anne VanderMeer is apparently quite lovely. Jeff, not so much.

I think they’re combining the tower and the lighthouse, which would make sense if they’re not doing the whole trilogy

Vandermeer apparently holds a ridiculous petty grudge against Karen Russell because she also writes about Florida. But I guess when somebody does your job better than you do on just about every metric that matters, you get resentful

There’s a tractor-beam fascination to the storytelling. It gets you hooked on the promise of some big-bang revelation, on the trust that its enigmatic parts will blow minds when they finally cohere. With Garland, that can be a sucker bet: He’s much better at setting up intriguing premises than paying them off—even,…

Turns out there’s bad news today https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/02/16/system-shock-remake-development-being-refocused/

I’m replaying Fallout: New Vegas as a laser wielder. My hope against hope is that somewhere down the line, the game gets remade with a better engine, because Gamebryo didn’t look good in its day and has only gotten worse since.

I think that’ll be awhile. IIRC they made the decision to switch engines from Unity to UE4, which will put them back a ways.

Certainly cool. I think Jeff Vandermeer sort of masks his lack of facility with character in the book’s plain debts to Lovecraft (he likes to flatter himself by comparing to Kafka instead, which is dumb imo. Also JV is a dick). For that and other reasons I wouldn’t hesitate to call it “unfilmable”, at least in big…

Going after Annihilation over whitewashing presumes the story features characters, which is not really the case. Formless bags of words and behaviors can’t be said to have ethnicity

and that’s not even getting into older psychedelia / space rock.

Drugs can and do affect sounds and scenes. This might be less true in rock and pop, which have less of a codified nightlife element in the way that rap and dance music do. Rap and dance are often extremely and explicitly influenced by a specific kind of drug in a specific place at a specific time that everyone,…

As for whether a guy with a philosophy background would be teaching Biology IRL, mismatching of teaching material and expertise actually happens quite a lot in my experience. That’s not even getting into things like football coaches teaching sociology (poorly in the extreme, obvs) so the school can justify keeping…

BR2049 owns, friend