I am serious, and don't call me bacteria.

I found The Terror fairly compelling. Two ships stuck in the Arctic, 150 cranky sailors, maybe a dozen that actually have lines, and one super fucked-up hellbeast trying to eat them.

The following is a tremendously disproportionate analogy given that we're talking about a microblogging website, but I really don't think there's any better term for it:

It's really less like you're calling Twitter by its deadname and more like you're refusing to call it by its slave name. Twitter didn't come up with this on its own, some guy just rolled up and said "I'm changing your name because yours isn't cool enough." Like, fukken Kunta Kinte.

Again, very unfortunate that that's the only comparison that comes to mind but I'm really blanking on anything else. Jean Valjean, I guess. Maybe Darth Vader. Locutus of Borg.

honestly even just saying "shaped" is a bit of a stretch

See that's interesting, couple days now I've been having issues with anything past page 1 getting stuck loading indefinitely, and I'm on desktop; and now that you mention it it does only happen when I'm logged in. So whatever it is, it's not just you, if that's any consolation.

At least we can rest easy knowing that concept art was eventually repurposed for the Nightsisters, and there's no way anyone could ever sexualize a tribe of leather-clad magical goth lesbian amazons with spiky chain whips.

this is the weirdest political compass I've ever seen

I dunno, man. I don't think you can say "cinema was better in the fifites when there weren't all these cheap action movies and creature features and cash-grab sequels" as though On the Waterfront didn't come out within three weeks of a movie about giant radioactive ants and the fifth remake of Robinson Crusoe. And yeah, sure, last year people were double-fisting a sprawling biopic about the man that flung the world irreversibly into the atomic age and a movie about singing plastic dolls, and finishing it off with a talking alien truck fighting a robot monkey... just like how eighty years ago Casablanca came out the same year as The Invisible Man's Revenge and House of Frankenstein, sixty years ago people were just coming out of 2001: A Space Odyssey and turning right back around to go watch Charlton Heston punch a guy in a gorilla suit, forty years ago we got Amadeus hot on the heels of Police Academy and The Search for Spock, and nine years ago Spotlight and The Revenant were running trailers at the same time as Minions and Adam Sandler's Pixels. This is not a new phenomenon, the past only looks better because nobody talks about the mediocre movies from that era anymore. And I'm not even gonna touch the implication that mass-appeal entertainment is somehow devoid of merit with a twenty-foot pole, that's a whole other can of worms.

And even barring that, I really don't think you get to say "TV is doing cinema better than cinema these days" as though for every Chernobyl or Succession there aren't eight NCIS spinoffs, three Big Bang Theory prequels, a Celebrity Golden Bachelor, Keeping Up with the Alien Ghosts of Skinwalker Ranch, and - guess what, bucko - a show with a bunch of superheroes running around punching each other in the dicks, or whatever. The ratio of "high art" to "party time" is damn near identical, the movies just have a bigger ad budget.

So in the end, it seems all you've got left here is a guy starting a conversation about a new, topical thing and using that to segue into talking about a thing he made last year and how it's so much better than new popular thing, and you should watch that instead. Thanks, Brian, super glad we had this talk.

Thank god, for a second there I thought they meant "cracking down on people dodging Windows 11 by intentionally disabling TPM," like I've been doing. False alarm, carry on.

There have been several violent incidents in reaction to published depictions of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, which is strictly forbidden by some interpretations of the Sahih al-Bukhari, one of the major Sunni Islamic texts.

I'm assuming that's what's being alluded to here.

Fʀᴀɴᴋʟʏ, I'ᴍ ɴᴏᴛ ᴇᴠᴇɴ ᴄᴏɴᴠɪɴᴄᴇᴅ ᴡᴇ ɴᴇᴇᴅ ʟᴏᴡᴇʀᴄᴀsᴇ ʟᴇᴛᴛᴇʀs ɪɴ ᴛʜᴇ ғɪʀsᴛ ᴘʟᴀᴄᴇ. Sᴇᴇᴍs ᴛᴏ ᴍᴇ ᴛʜᴀᴛ's ᴊᴜsᴛ ᴀsᴋɪɴɢ ғᴏʀ ᴛʀᴏᴜʙʟᴇ.

"Djinn", specifically, being the correct word choice. We're way past fun-loving blue cartoon Robin Williams genies granting wishes, doing impressions of Jack Nicholson and getting into madcap hijinks. We're back into fuckin'... shapeshifting cobras woven of fire and dust by the archdevil Iblis, hiding in caves and slithering out into the desert at night to tempt mortal men to sin. That mythologically-accurate shit.