Last night, before combining The Last Airbender with Rifftrax, I made the mistake of watching it without the sarcastic commentary. Surprise! It truly earned its 6% rating at Rotten Tomatoes. I was fascinated, though, with why it’s so eye-bleedingly bad.
There’s been a lot of discussion about the whitewashed casting and how it undermined the setting [...]
Chris Crawford is a visionary game designer. He began his career at Atari and created some of the earliest computer-based wargames. He founded the Computer Game Developers’ Conference and The Journal of Computer Game Design. In 1985 released his best-known game, Balance of Power. In it, you played either the President of the US or [...]
This weekend at GMX I met George Willis, who took part in a reality series called The Colony. The conceit is that a group of people must survive a global catastrophe — in this case, a viral outbreak. They dumped ten people in a Louisiana town near New Orleans that had never been rebuilt and [...]
My friend Eugie won a well-deserved Nebula1 for her novelette Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast. If you’ve not read it, Apex Magazine reprinted it online for free. You can also listen to an audiobook version of it courtesy of the Escape Pod podcast.
1The Nebula Awards are given by the Science [...]
It’s no secret that I’m a fan of supercuts, where someone takes every instance of a phrase they can find in a TV show or movie and smushes them together. The first one I ever saw was just about every instance of Buster saying, “Hey, Brother,” in Arrested Development.
After that there were all of the [...]
INT. GENERIC GAMESTOP – DAY
STEPHEN and his six-year-old son ELI enter. ELI is instantly captivated by Super Mario Brothers Wi-hee! on the Wii next to the door.
STEPHEN
Hey, Eli, are you going to stay here by the Wii?
ELI
Look, I’m moving Mario all around the map!
STEPHEN
I’ll take that as a yes.
STEPHEN wanders over to the Xbox games. [...]
Here’s the thing: I very quickly figured out what Digital: A Love Story was on about. I could see where the story was headed. I suffered through some sketchy story mechanics.
None of that mattered. In the end, Digital: A Love Story told an affecting story superbly, bolstered by its evocation of a specific moment in [...]
It’s been a snowy mess here lately. I jokingly said at Christmas that it snowed all the time here, so I think the universe decided to prove me right.
While it’s been too cold to even stick my toe outside, I’ve been stitching and listening to podcasts. I blame Alex at The Gearheart for addicting [...]
Huh. So that’s how Dollhouse ended: with a jumbled, unfocused episode that epitomized many of the show’s shortcomings.
It didn’t help that Misty and I watched Epitaph One right before the finale. Epitaph One was the first season episode that only showed up on the DVD release, at least in the US. It was set ten [...]
