For me, the internet has always been tied to videogames. It's not quite so simple, of course, but using the internet has always been an inescapable part of the medium—to find and discuss them, and to play them. And for a long time, that meant dealing with Adobe Flash. As you might have heard, Adobe's […]
Sean Baker didn't want a star. The director and co-writer of 2015's indie hit Tangerine was struggling to find the right actress for his follow-up, The Florida Project, about the hard-luck denizens living in an Orlando-outskirts motel. Thanks to Tangerine's critical success, Baker could easily have landed an established performer to play Halley, the impoverished […]
Sonic Mania, the latest installment of Sega's venerable franchise, churns with the improvisational energy of a jazz ensemble. It is something of a remake of Genesis-era 2-D Sonic the Hedgehog games, with refurbished stages you may remember and new ones that pay tribute to those of the past. At first glance, it looks like an […]
Shortly before Donald Trump was elected president, Hulk Hogan and Gawker Media ended their months-long legal battle over the wrestler's sex tape. The case may seem like a media law footnote, but as director Brian Knappenberger argues in his documentary, the fight over Gawker's decision to publish the footage irrevocably shifted the media landscape. In […]
When television networks resort to adapting books that haven’t even been written yet, it’s time to start looking for new source material. Luckily, salvation might be as close as their smartphones. As the supply of books and comics ripe for adaptation dwindles, TV producers are looking to podcasts for fresh material—and finding stories with audiences […]
Let me get this out of the way up front: I am terrible at Tumbleseed. Like, are-you-an-infant? terrible. A few hours in and I've made stunningly little progress. Each screen of progression takes lives upon lives, and by this point I know this world better than I know some members of my family. Every time […]
In the beginning, George R. R. Martin created A Game of Thrones—words printed on paper and bound into books sold in shops around the world, to be read by a moderate but mighty number of fantasy fans. That was 1996. Fourteen years and four books later, HBO said, "Let there be a TV series!" And […]
The local comics shop—LCS in the parlance of us adherents—remains the place for a certain breed to get our fix. In the last couple of decades, though, troubles have set upon the LCS like the Legion of Doom coming hard at the Hall of Justice. Digital comics, trade paperbacks, distribution difficulties, and a persistent and […]
Videogames have never really gotten death. They're full of death, of course, but only as a conceit, a shallow reading of a much deeper concept. Death in games is a punishment, a roadblock, a temporary setback, an opportunity. It's not a real end; it's mechanical, never philosophical. Gaming, as a medium, struggles to understand death […]
John Houlihan's mission seemed impossible. The music supervisor for Atomic Blonde had to win over George Michael, New Order, and Public Enemy, with nothing but a little bit of cash and the promise that their music would be playing as a backdrop to Charlize Theron doing badass spy stuff in 1989 Berlin. As someone who […]