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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…
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The Infinite Fantasy of The Dragon Prince
Happy quarantine, everyone. I hope we’re all staying safe and healthy and managing to keep our sanity. It’s a strange and scary time but at least we still have comforts and escapes to get us through. I, for one, have been re-watching a bunch of shows on my various streaming services these last couple weeks. Shows like Brooklyn Nine Nine, Bojack Horseman, Big Mouth, and Better Call Saul; all great ways to find a laugh or at least get your mind off everything that’s been going on (or you just finished watching all the shows that start with ‘A’). And I know for a fact, that I am not the…
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Avenue 5; or Something to Watch at the End of the World
I’ve been thinking a lot about panic lately. I doubt this will surprise people and I know for sure I am far from the only one. With everything that is going on right now, it feels like almost everyone is operating at this baseline of a low-level buzz of panic. Not enough to cause riots in the street or anything, just enough so everyone’s on edge, just enough that panic-buying toilet paper and hoarding food has become common. It does say something to me that so many American consumer’s response to a health crisis is to shop harder, but I can’t blame anyone for that. I shopped harder myself. I’ve…
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Onward and the Pixar Formula
Is it real heartbreak if you can see it coming from miles away? This was a question I couldn’t quite get out of my mind throughout the near 2 hour running time of Onward, Pixar’s newest film. Real heartbreak, at least in my experience, seems to require an element of surprise, some emotional tragedy that springs up at you from nowhere. Whether fiction or reality, foreknowledge always seems to ease the pain. And in Onward, from nearly the first frame (or at least from the moment the whole shape of the plot comes clear) you can almost hear the clock ticking down to the anguish the movie intends to inflict…
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We Get What We Deserve
Two warnings before we start today. This post is about politics. It is directly about political events that have occurred or will occur, not just me tangentially relating a very enjoyable sitcom–that I do honestly recommend–to my own political ideals. I believe politics is important and influences almost everything in our lives to one degree or another, but I also believe it is rude to just bring up politics out of nowhere without giving a heads-up. So there you go. You’ve been warned. I’m angry. I’m angry as I sit here and write this and I’ve been angry since I woke up this morning. So be aware going in that…
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Superstore; A Love/Hate Affair
Be warned. I’m about to do something a little stupid. I’m going to take a network sitcom very seriously. A few hundred words from now when you go ‘Wow. This dude needs to get outside once in a while.’ just know that I did try to tell you. Superstore started on NBC in November of 2015. While it has never exactly been a ratings smash, it’s always been successful enough to get renewed each season and is currently wrapping up its–very funny–fifth season and has already been scheduled for a sixth. I came into this show fairly late, catching up via Hulu just before the premiere of the fifth season…
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Mafia and Truth; The Irishman and Lies
I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank ‘The Irishman’ Sheeran and Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa by: Charles Brandt is an enthralling work of True Crime writing. I read it during this past busy week for myself and sincerely regretted being forced to put the book down every time other work or obligations–this whole trying-to-start-a-writing-career-from-fucking-nothing thing does take work and time–would draw me away. Charles Brandt’s prose is better than adequate, it’s actually quite smooth and readable and is less afraid of real emotion than you are led to expect from the beginning of the book. Frank Sheeran is an endlessly fascinating character who–while clearly a criminal piece of shit…
