Counterpoint: the first book of the Stormlight Archive is fucking morally reprehensible in how it presents a coherent message of slavery being a horrible cruelty that people could escape if they wanted to, and the slavers being actually good people to work for if you just stop wanting to be a slave.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_and_Mormonism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_teachings_on_homosexuality_in_the_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-day_Saints
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigham_Young_University_LGBT_history

For a guy who makes millions per year and tithes a big percent of that to the Mormon church, maybe a catty article in Wired is the least he deserves.

I don’t know what’s happening here, the video seems pretty transparently a joke to me. It does not seem weird to make a joke that is “uhhhhh you had a very obvious idea that bears an extremely minor and passing resemblance to something I did once THIS IS MALFEASANCE.” It might not be sold in the most obvious way, but…

Satanic panic and/or the ritual suicide moral panic of the ‘80s, maybe? I’m totally spitballing, but the cartoon was canceled (after apparently only 27 episodes) in 1985, when Patricia Pulling was spinning up her anti-D&D/Satanism campaign and the same year that 60 Minutes aired a special trying to connect D&D to teen …

I’m not going to sit here and pretend that I’m the Arbiter of Taste or whatever, but I disliked Despicable Me. Not that I thought it was the worst thing ever, but I firmly did not enjoy it. And yeah, it’s probably the best Illumination production I’ve seen.

Funny you should mention! No, they weren’t blind, not in the way the video claimed. The video was titled “1000 blind people see for the first time.” He was paying for cataract surgery. These people had blurred or occluded vision and needed a brief but no, they weren’t seeing for the first time.

He’s not the only influencer. Do you really think that every other shitty YouTuber is assailed with accusations that they’re not being philanthropic? You really think these arguments just come down to “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” when what we’re talking about is creating a personally lucrative brand off of…

Illumination has never created a moviegoing experience better than “preferable to being kicked in the shin but still worse than doing nothing at all” and this gives me no reason to expect that this movie will be any different.

Adam Sessler trying to defend his comments by saying that people are being misogynist to criticize him for his racism is pretty fuckin’ rich. I’ve encountered the man once in my life, at an early PAX East, and he spent the five minutes I was near him harassing my spouse and their sibling over their cosplays. He asked…

This is going to sound like wild hyperbole, but it’s maybe as close to a perfect movie as I could want, a top-5 all-time movie for me. I think it literally made me a better therapist by helping solidify some of my thoughts about absurdism and human relationships, and how acceptance of the inherently meaningless nature…

This is not the first time I thought the show was very, very sad. But it is the first time where I felt like that sadness was kind of purposeless. It felt a lot more like it was just going out of its way to make the viewer feel bad than anything else. Nothing was communicated to me except “man, this world is just...…

No, they’re taking it out because the ESRB is a reactionary, puritanical organization that often tries to punish game makers it sees as trying to skirt their cryptic regulations.

My assumption was that the terrified backpedaling to make sure to remove it would be because the ESRB could re-rate the game as AO based on this, and it could become a Big Deal and force the ESRB’s hand because of the wide coverage. If it broke out of niche industry reporting and got a write-up where someone’s mom…

It’s deeply stupid. There seems to be someone at the ESRB who will have a stroke if they so much as hear the word “labia.”

It’s quippy in a way that wasn’t annoying yet, twenty years ago. People didn’t mind the orientalism. And the cast really was charismatic.

Anyone who is seriously still saying Firefly hasn’t actually returned to Firefly recently, especially not in light of what we know about Whedon today. It has an absolutely stellar cast using their incredible charisma to sell incredibly inconsistent writing. The weird Orientalism, the way it handles sex work, and oh…

This one was a favorite of mine.

After she left, I remember hating myself for driving her away. I was alone at home with the kid and I think I found my center in time. My partner was helpful, but I am not sure why I shut my partner out.