Writing about games kicks ass because I'm putting a column together about Meccha Chameleon, which means right now I'm trawling academic papers about the sociological and psychological research into hide-and-seek, a game that exists in basically all human cultures.

I do not know why you would watch the new "government mandates sex and romance" movie when you could just watch The Lobster for the 20th time instead

David Ellison thinks you're stupid! The New York Times thinks you're stupid!

Erik Adams@erikadams.bsky.social · 23h ago

"No amount of spin can sugarcoat the utter disaster of layoffs, creative consolidation, and sheer mediocrity that awaits if Richie Rich runs roughshod over the industry he claims to love so much." Get 'im, @mcastimovies.bsky.social!

The internet is great because you'll be watching an older movie like The Amazing Spider-Man, have a thought like "Uncle Ben basically deserves what happens to him in this," and then find a reddit thread where someone said the same thing in 2015 and people have dropped by every few years to agree.

I've been watching more YouTube clips lately so I thought I'd once again try one of them "video essays" you hear about from that guy who did that pretty good takedown of Beast Games and holy shit within minutes I was trapped within Cinema Sins hell.

I think it's interesting that in 18 years "superhero has an illegal and invasive surveillance net across the city" has gone from The Great Unpardonable Sin in The Dark Knight to "Tee-hee, aren't I a scamp, and isn't it useful?" in Spidey: Brand New Day.

I do still think Holland lacks a certain self-pitying misery that I consider fundamental to Peter Parker - a low-key whiny, woe-is-me attitude that makes his decisions to nevertheless soldier on and take that next punch so heroic. (This is why Jake Johnson in Spider-Verse is the best modern Peter.)

Nice to see Tom Holland finally make a good Spider-Man movie! And then another 40 minutes of a more boring Spider-Man movie that felt weirdly similar to the climax of another Marvel movie from like a year back, but still: Much improved!

Nice in Portland today so I set up the hammock chair in the backyard and watched Predator: Badlands. (Dumb but real fun; wish the script respected the audience's intelligence a little more but I love a Death World.) Kickass way to burn through a Sunday afternoon

Hired a new model to help me show off the official A.V. Club merch

Streaming tonight at 8 pm, we're going to try Meccha Chameleon, the weird hide-and-seek painting game. Viewers welcome to join in, and hopefully it doesn't all end in tears

For some reason we were throwing around Buddhist bumper stickers/biker T-shirts on the stream last night and I'm still riding high on "If you can read this, the bitch transcended"

Now that I'm back in Portland, we'll be picking up the regular streaming schedule tonight. Join Des, John and me for what will probably be the end of the Trine 2 DLC, but not the end of rampant me-bullying, at 8 p.m. PST at twitch.tv/Plumberduck!

Plumberduck - Twitch

Staff Writer for The A.V. Club, co-host of Everything To Guppy on the Duckfeed podcast network, certifiable completer of Cliff Johnson's A Fool And His Money. Streams are archived at youtube.com/Plumb...

twitch.tv

that's credits on The Mermaid Mask, a wonderful follow-up to Tangle Tower. a slow build, but worth it for the exciting untangling of its final hours. cannot recommend it enough for mystery fans eager for something to solve, and its hints system makes deductions as head-scratchy as you want.

Wrote a new column in what has turned into a pretty long series of articles where I try to talk about what makes great detective games great - in this case, how they test for the all-important question "Do you know what the fuck is actually going on?" www.avclub.com/game-theory-...

Why is it so much easier to explode a video game character's head than figure out what's going on inside it?

Why is it so much easier to explode a video game character's head than figure out what's going on inside it?

avclub.com

The sinking horror when you realize a genuinely emotionally satisfying Swan Boy arc is going to end with a bit predicated on a factoid about Dilbert's sex life you learned from an annotated Dilbert collection when you were 12

Dreamboat Branny 🦢@bransonreese.bsky.social · 5d ago

swanboy.com/comic/my-din...

The best part of having now watched most of Slow Horses is annoying my wife by referring to all of the characters as "Slorses"

We need to come up with a good name for a type of movie you only see because the person sitting one seat in front of you and one seat to the left of you on a plane is watching it. Did you know "Reminders Of Him" sets its big dramatic life-changing car crash to "Yellow" by Coldplay? In 2026!

Still thinking about Hoppers and what a spineless thing it is to make for children in 2026. The initial villain is a politician who lies and cheats to destroy the environment for political gain. The film's moral is that getting mad at this is immature and counter-productive. Vile shit!

Back from Indiana, so here's The Shit I Watched On A Plane review Mountainhead: More clever than funny and I wished it went a little harder/crueler but Jesse Armstrong is unbeatable at writing this kind of hyperrich insecurity

Wilson has some strong points on Nolan's Odyssey (its muddled themes, its neutering of Calypso) but she massively undervalues its women. In no world is Nyong'o's fierce Helen a "repentant adultress," and the rage Hathaway lets boil over in Penelope's big scenes are the sharpest parts of the film.

Been watching Slow Horses while at my mom's and it's been a real boon for the "Annoyingly pointing out when someone was on The Thick Of It" industry

One of the nostalgic things I try to do when back in Indiana is do a White Castle run, on the grounds that I can probably survive one salvo of Gut Bombs per year. Which is how I met Julia a few days ago. Julia is White Castle's drive thru AI. I wish Julia had a head so I could smash it with a rock

"I'm DJ Chef and I'm the president of DJ Chef, the chef that rocks. I spin the beats while cooking the treats" -- DJ Chef

On vacation at my mom's this week and we played through Mermaid's Mask together. Really nice time! Puzzles break up the talking nicely, characters are all fun to talk to, and while I could maybe use SLIGHTLY more rigor in the overarching mystery it was a pretty good solve

I've had a lot of "C'mon, don't be an asshole, Will" thoughts about The Odyssey, but the meanest is that it's the first thing Tom Holland has been actually good in since Civil War

No streams this week, contemplate the silence!

The Odyssey is fascinating because Nolan clearly wanted to turn the "This is mostly a story about idiots fucking themselves over" factor as low as he could and there's still so much "Nah, fuck it, I'll listen to the siren's song for shits and giggles" stuff

Nolan's obsession with men wrestling with the aftermath of their flashes of destructive geniuses is wild because it now runs the gamut from "the atom bomb" to "tricking extremely gullible idiots with a big horse"