It’s an old joke, but still true: Rocky IV is almost like an art film, in that it represents a serious attempt to determine how much of a film you can turn into a montage while keeping a coherent narrative together. I’m pretty sure that you could cut the story itself down to a tight 15 minutes if you cut out all the…

One of the best things about the character of Doc Brown is how, as much as he is a “scientist”, he’s clearly influenced primarily by the Golden Age science fiction of the period, which manifested in a firm conviction that 1985 was a post-apocalyptic hellscape.

Agreed in full. There was no one moment where things definitively changed for big-budget action spectacles (though I’d peg the Rubicon as Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which grossed ~$400 million domestic on the strength of about 1/4 of a script thanks to the Writer’s Guild Strike and 3/4 Michael Bay’s…

Yeah, Michael Harriot is not wrong: this doesn’t look like a debate or protest. It looks like an abortive coup. And speaking as someone who is reflexively against rule-by-juntas, the very idea that this would happen in America offends me to my core.

Let’s recall, again, how peaceful protestors are treated when the target of the protests is, ya know, tuition increases that might push them out of school or drive them into perpetual debt?

Almost. It’s actually that all things as awesome as genetically-engineered dinosaurs share the trait of spontaneously transforming from male to female in a single-sex environment.

And the worst part is, none of this is even necessary.

Hanged. Mike Pence is not a tapestry.

I mean, the case in which the Supreme Court said that the government could restrict conduct if the conduct was prohibited for reasons unrelated to overt religious discrimination was literally the first Supreme Court case to address the free exercise clause.

*Sigh* Okay, once more for the Karen Contagions in the back . . .

Q: “So Belinda, how did you make heaven a place on earth?”

Diamond and Silk—who were not born Diamond and Silk but were apparently given better birth names, Lynette Hardaway (“Diamond”), and Rochelle Richardson (“Silk”) before taking on the stripper monikers—became a thing in 2016 when they were willing to be black champions for Trump.

Hypothesizing about aliens either seems to involve a weird over-reliance on anthropocentrism, or an equally-weird aversion to anything that might, however remotely, touch upon anthropocentrism.

If I may respectfully disagree, I think both 2016 and 2020 show in their own way that our political elite just doesn’t think well, if at all, in probabilistic terms. In essence, 2016 is a case study of how our political media looked at the unappealing specter of a Donald Trump presidency, read statistical analyses…

Well, not tremendous to be honest.

Well, good news is that, without spoiling anything, Season 4 of The Good Place is “pretty good, with just a touch of wheel-spinning to throw it off of Seasons 1 and 2 apex”, but its ending is sublime. Of TV endings I’ve seen, it maybe doesn’t quite match the nostalgia I have for “All Good Things . . .” on Star Trek:…

Charisma and Dexterity are my dump stats, so the best I can offer you is this:

Well, first of all, I’m really sorry that Lucy lost out on all that. No sarcasm.

In Upton’s defense, her prompt was to give the best possible imitation of a dictionary in a washing machine. And I, for one, think she nailed it.

Yeah, in all seriousness, if the Religious Right were actually interested in all the things they tout, like “the sanctity of marriage”, what they would oppose would be no-fault divorce laws. And I know that because once upon a time, they actually did.