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Masterpieces in Some Other World: Mac Miller’s Circles and D.F.W.’s The Pale King
I finished reading The Pale King by David Foster Wallace yesterday. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. For those of you who don’t know, The Pale King is an unfinished novel. David Foster Wallace had been working on it off and on for about ten years, and while he had hundreds of thousands of polished and publish-ready words set aside in a neat stack, it remained incomplete when he succumbed to his depression and killed himself in September of 2008. His longtime editor, Michael Pietsch, was given the task of putting the book together using the stack of manuscript Wallace had set aside, other chapters and…
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Tinder Conversations in the Time of COVID
Tinder sucks. This is a fact, not an opinion. It’s something that anyone who has any experience of the app knows is true in the same way we know gravity pulls things down to Earth, water is a requirement for life, and the Eragon movie is a tragedy beyond imagining. It’s an awful, shallow app that magnifies all the worst parts of yourself while destroying any shred of self-esteem you might have had lying around. All of which might be why it’s so popular. It’s an almost perfect analog for all the ways normal IRL dating make you feel. All from the convenience of your phone, just a swipe away.…
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Mortal Kombat, Castlevania, and The Last of Us. Solving Video Game Adaptations.
A couple days ago I watched Mortal Kombat (1995) for the first time with my roommates. We’ve been watching a ton of movies during quarantine recently, as I’m sure many of you are as well. It’s been fun. Honestly, one of the small pieces of silver lining from this whole pandemic, for me, is how pleasantly surprised I’ve been by almost everything I’ve watched lately. Even re-watching The Hobbit trilogy for the first time since theaters was more enjoyable than I expected. Mortal Kombat still sucks though. The story has so many plot-holes it might as well be a piece of Swiss Cheese handled by an overeager four-year-old with a…
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How the Artemis Fowl Movie Really Came to Be
One of the first book series I can remember choosing for myself and absolutely falling in love with is Artemis Fowl. I was nine years old when I read the first book in the series and it blew my little fucking mind. I had never read a book with a character like Artemis, essentially an evil genius and yet he was the main character. Kids books didn’t do that before. It was “Die Hard with fairies” but the main character was a young Hans Gruber with a more marketable accent. What’s not to love? Then, a couple weeks ago, I saw the abomination of a trailer for the movie adaptation,…
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The Doors of Stone and Everything Else We Want
You heard it here first, folks! Patrick Rothfuss, acclaimed fantasy writer and full-grown garden gnome, has announced The Doors of Stone will be released in physical and eBook format tomorrow. Apparently, the long-awaited novel has been finished for years, with Rothfuss delaying publication to build up fan anticipation for his work. “Yeah, this book was finished by like 2014,” says Rothfuss, whose gnome beard is now longer than he is tall, in response to questions. “I just didn’t want to be one of those boring writers pushing out books every other year. Who wants that? I figured a nine year wait would be the perfect amount of time to stack…
