Eegah

And of course, Mark Millar stated afterwards that he had never intended any moral ambiguity, and just wanted Iron Man to be the one who was right while Cap was wrong. Because he doesn't have a MySpace page.

I was a bit disappointed that Zoe never brought up the best Atheist argument of them all: why should you need the fear of eternal suffering to refrain from evil acts? I'd love to hear Dre's response to that.

I took a special interest in this one, as I was a member of the inaugural eighth grade class of the Sussex County Charter School for Technology in 1997-98. And suddenly I'm quite conscious of how lucky I was that it turned out as good as it did. Plus, it let me meet Christine Todd Whitman shortly before she collapsed like a dying star, so I'll always be thankful for that conversation piece.

I call that character type the Stephen King bully myself, given that he clearly had some bad experiences with them in his childhood so that every time they turn up in his work they're cartoonishly evil serial killers in training. That's one of the '80s tropes I was hoping the show wouldn't tap into so much, though if you're going to go there you can at least give the message most shows don't have the guts for, that sometimes violence is the only thing that will drive them off. So kudos for that.

He never said a piece of trash blowing around was the most beautiful thing ever, which puts him rather ahead of the curve among those guys.

Seeing as Corey Feldman recently crushed our hopes for a second Goonies film, I'll definitely take this as a substitute. The kids are all fantastically written, talking like kids that age actually talk, and even when their actions are blatantly in service of stretching out the plot like hiding Eleven from their parents, it's believable as a dumb kid thing that makes sense to them.

I'm digging this so far. As a child of the '80s, I very much appreciate how much it nails the period, not just with the props and clothes, but even the soundtrack and credits to give the feel of something that actually could have been made back then. For that alone, I hope the Duffer Brothers can parlay this into a bunch more work.

I adored the look at ancient political debates, with both guys just spewing quotes from a beloved previous leader at each other (and the crowd loving both equally). Boy, we've come such a long way, huh?

So I'm the only one thinking Nergui has just gone nuts from guilt and is imagining the real Kokachin is still alive? Maybe future episodes will make it more clear, but from the start I was actively spotting how so far we've only seen her alone with Nergui.

I definitely made sure I had a full outline ready before writing a word, but also found as I went that I'd sometimes come up with a better idea for one story point which then had a domino effect on how the story afterwards could work. Plus I realized one particular event could come off as really homophobic once I actually started writing it out and promptly changed it. I still definitely recommend doing it, though with the caveat that it also shouldn't make you feel locked into it (the How I Met Your Mother problem, as I like to call it).

From what I've been able to find, Lloyd Alexander's own opinion on the Black Cauldron movie was pretty much "It's nothing like my story, but it's a pretty good story in itself." Mostly I was just outraged at what they did to Gurgi.

I finished a manuscript a while ago, and am currently going through editing. What I especially had fun with was throwing in little nods that people I know would pick up on, while also trying to give them a purpose beyond the inside joke (like Matt Groening, I named several characters after family members). The really hard part was anything to do with romance. I'm asexual and have no personal experience with those kinds of feelings, so I was mostly just taking stabs in the dark based on other stuff I've read. The major gimmick is that the central relationship of the book is a gay couple who hook up at the end, and their stories are structured just like a typical romance hero story, yet hopefully still subtle enough that people wouldn't pick up on it until the big confession (Legend of Korra was a big inspiration there).

I recently started this series, and I've been gobbling it down like popcorn. Lloyd Alexander had a true gift for dialogue, and even if the stories weren't as great as they are, it would be a treat just to watch these characters chat with each other. It's also quite fun to see how obviously Star Wars was inspired by these guys even if AFAIK Lucas has never cited it as such. I mean, you've got the farm boy, the more experienced fighter, the wise old master, the princess, the snooty complainer, the really hairy thing, and the smaller one who doesn't speak normally and carries important secrets. Highly recommended to anyone who hasn't read them, and I very much look forward to Disney's upcoming live action adaptations after their first attempt The Black Cauldron was such a disaster three decades ago.

Yeah, you can really feel the author struggling with the concept, where the whole joke is simply that the whole book exists. Though the follow ups Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, and Android Karenina, are both huge improvements with genuinely clever twists on the original stories to give them a more legitimate reason for existing.

That flashback is something season 1 could have used a lot more of. It really suffered from tell don't show as we kept hearing about what a bad person Danny was in the past, but all we actually got to see was him as a victim. The robbery makes it far more clear where the family was coming from.

The Season 6 premiere inspired me to take my very first stab at a Hitler rant video.

Good luck seeing Iron Man and Spider-Man together without thinking of this:

Season 2 of Daredevil adds on two more tie-ins with AoS: the Dogs of Hell, the motorcycle gang who Lorelei took over back in S1, are a major player as one of the main targets of the Punisher, and Frank Castle takes a disc labeled "Micro" that was hidden in a picture of his family, likely referring to Microchip, his hacker ally from the comics who AoS already mentioned as part of Skye's group.

Elektra's death here is basically a master class in how to kill of a female character without stuffing her into the fridge, as the popular saying goes. Even beyond how she's obviously not gone for good, the fact that she made her own choice to sacrifice her life, and the scene was entirely in the service of her own story rather than just to provide manpain for Matt was all amazing. I hope other writers of these kinds of stories are paying attention.

After struggling mightily to understand how Civil War can include Spider-Man without making it a weird "Didn't you know this guy's always been around" thing, it hit me that he could make his first appearance on SHIELD. Yeah, it's probably not going to happen with the determination to treat the show's as the 'verse's redheaded stepchild, but it could make things a lot more natural.

One really weird thing for me is that for most of the episode it seems like our sympathies are supposed to be with Saul, but then Samuel makes his prophecy about a new king that we know from the Bible (or maybe just Kings) is completely true. And given that ABC is explicitly trying to reach a Christian audience here, especially with the choice of commercials, are we actually supposed to be on Samuel's side here that God is never to be questioned even when commanding the slaughter of innocent women and children?

Not actually about the show, but everyone raise your hand if your heart skipped a beat at the death announcement of Beatles producer George Martin today.

Between this and the new BvS trailer, it seems DC has finally caught on that it's okay to not be completely grimdark all the time. This may be the first of their films I'll actually see in the theater.

Plus, before signing him they went to Ava DuVernay and F. Gary Grey, showing how much the studio respects that this movie needed to have a black director (I'm kind of surprised Antoine Fuqua never seemed to come up in discussion). After Coogler was signed, it hit me that this must be what it was like to watch Steven Spielberg's early career a decade before I was born. It's truly mind-blowing how quickly he's climbed the ranks to being an A-list director on sheer talent.

Or perhaps a more apt MCU character, Grant Ward. Ren actually resembles him quite a bit with his insane twisting of the facts to think of himself as the hero of his own story, and deliberately forcing himself past the Moral Event Horizon so he can have the comfort of choosing a side. I was very impressed with AoS for its refusal to ever seriously present Ward as capable of being redeemed despite all the fanboys pissing and moaning about it, and I really hope the same thing happens here. It is all Disney, after all.