And tbh, it’s the only explanation for the spirit’s tea leaves augury / manipulation of Chester. What is its angle? Maybe it seeks to prevent the abortion to protect the Nakayamas. But the line about denied lives and potential during that conversation seems like it’s going to end up being a thesis for the season,…

My current theory is that the spirits are actually protecting the Nakayama family (whether or not they want it or asked for it). The herbalist is killed after providing an abortificient to the mother of a fetus with Nakayama blood. The herbalist’s husband is blinded after he menaces and bullies the mother. The racist…

idk man I felt like Terror S1 was actually a real patch on the book. I’m giving this one time.

It would make sense, what with Channel Zero folks involved with this production.

I always think about “It is every citizen’s final duty to go into the tanks, and become one with all the people.” as both a pretty good one-sentence story and a masterful one-line summation of an entire social ideology.

Anyway, if we’re talking, as I do, about the confluence of game design and writing, I would seriously posit Dark Souls or Bloodborne as being That Good, but in a minimal rather than maximal way. It’s not even about the economy of lore, or world-building, or whatever, but the way that the gameplay design is the story…

I don’t think it’s necessarily the quantity of the writing that makes Torment work the way it does, or even the quality of the prose itself. It’s the actual design of the gameplay as it relates to the narrative. They did something very clever and very difficult with RPG design. Most RPG player characters to that point…

I think a season 3 is pretty likely if there turns out to be a GOOP TV channel and Netlfix is willing to sell

I said “hey that blurry background guy has the profile of Walton Goggins”, and I was right

They could have, for example, given Big Mouth two new seasons, and T&B one new season

They may not actually be a high 9 figure family, but the Kroll firm was worth over a billion when it was sold, so they’re definitely in the money in any case.

Does the Boys also have a Bill Hicks self-insert fanfic issue?

Let this be a lesson to the Tuca & Bertie creators - next time you come to the negotiating table, try to have hundreds of millions of dollars in inherited wealth.

Stranger Things can be lovingly attentive to its core characters, but those on the sidelines sometimes feel like props or puppets, their behavior exactly as ominous or innocuous as the script demands. With her unflappable confidence and unstoppable wisecracks, Priah Ferguson plays Erica as a classic action-movie…

Most chilling is Mike’s casual solution to Will’s impassable D&D campaign: burning their outpost and sacrificing themselves to defeat a powerful enemy. As a last-ditch strategy to end a campaign, it’s sensible, even noble. As foreshadowing, it’s ominous. 

Case in point: Sega let the licensing for their flawed gem RPG Alpha Protocol lapse today. You can no longer buy it direct from Steam, and afaik it’s gone from the PS streaming rental library. It’s not difficult to imagine a game like that in an all-streaming environment just straight up vanishing. 

My main beef with Games as Service, beyond the timesuck aspect of open world and MMO games that I have (mostly) managed to avoid, is the problem that’s infected all other forms of content - we don’t own anything anymore, we buy the right to borrow things, and so we can lose access to anything we take for granted, at…

The direction was good enough that you didn’t notice how pedestrian the script itself was.

Can’t help but feel that with distance this show will suffer some from being one whose masterful direction gamely covered for what was, objectively speaking, not very good writing. True Detective season one all over again.

I have strangely poignant memories of taking my Xbox 360 to my grandparents’ house and playing one of those weird EA golf games in which you could give your create-a-golfer gold grillz and have them do the worm when nailing an under par round.