If nothing else, if not for the AV Club's Random Roles, there's a decent chance we'd never have had the opportunity for Curtis Armstrong to tell his story about working on the Gary Busey film "Quigley".

It’s one of my favorite days of the year! Here are my 50 Wonderful Things From 2025. Thanks as always to the editors who help wrangle this bear.

For the New York Times, I wrote about the creative implications of the potential Netflix/WBD deal, and why I hope Netflix learns more from HBO than HBO learns from Netflix (gift link): www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/o...

As it happens, I have experience with high-level government demands to stop an explosive, accurate story from running, and I also have experience with 60 Minutes spiking a story I was involved in, so I have thoughts about the travesty at CBS. If you want some journalism anecdotes, here are a lot:

This one. This is the piece I hope I'm remembered for. www.jezebel.com/when-surgeon...

I might need to frame this on my wall

I like to imagine that there is a rivalry between two top ham-sniffers: one, a meticulous keeper of precise traditions, the other a brash bad-boy with a colossal nose.

How aspirational is Pa'u Zotoh Zhaan? she’s a leading anarchist, she’s a sentient plant, she wears hella cool outfits, she’s bald, blue, a priest & assassin. Handy at healing & improvising bombs. If you’re leading a meditation retreat or fighting a war, OR BOTH, you want Zhaan on your team!!

By the way, I do not mean to imply that you have to skip any episodes of Farscape, but I partly did the selective-ish episode guide for folks that might wanna decide quicklike. In any case, there’s no wrong way to watch Farscape, the only wrong choice is not watching Farscape.

“Farscape is what you would probably get if Star Wars had a baby with Blade Runner in the middle of the Mad Max: Fury Road desert”

FYI, SF author @byzantienne.bsky.social chose to tell us about her love for FARSCAPE last year when she came as a guest on our film podcast AFTERIMAGES. You can listen to her very insightful take on the show at the following link 🙂 --> rss.com/podcasts/aft...

"WHY SO DIFFICULT???"

Murray Bartlett is in the very first episode of Farscape. Ben Mendelsohn plays a blue alien! Prestige TV my ass, get on Farscape’s level!!

I wrote a Your Guide to Farscape story a few years ago and I'm always so happy to see folks get into the show, which I love a lot. Talked to Brian Henson of Jim Henson Company for this as well. This was such a labor of love: www.ign.com/articles/201...

“It’s increasingly hard to care about the fate of an art world narcotised by money and self-regard. We had a chance to at least try and make a difference. We had a chance to not sell ourselves out. We had a chance, and we blew it.” www.equator.org/articles/how...

Get in loser, we're going west to diminish

It is about this: because so many people do not give a shit about romance, shit gets tried in romance first. You should pay attention to romance publishing news and care about it, because they will try that shit here first.

So I am going to say something about romance as a genre. A lot of people think that romance is ignorable because <insert thing they think about romance> and romance authors don't count because <insert thing they think about romance>. This thread is not about whether you have to like romance.

Bari Weiss, tireless champion of the overdog.

This might be the greatest insight about anxiety I've learned and is such a fantastic point here—that fighting anxiety makes it worse! It can be really hard to sit with it, but meditation has taught me that making friends with your emotions makes a huge difference in life

Makes me proud every time! Did you know we’re shipping whistles anywhere in the US? Email whistlerequests [at] proton [dot] me for your free 3D printed whistles. We’ve sent over 30,000 so far in December!

It's Day 19 of the ICE occupation of MSP. Today thousands of Minnesotans poured onto Lake Street to rally in support of our immigrant neighbors and against ICE. Take a moment to look at this crowd of you and your neighbors rallying in below zero windchill. 📸 @roblevine82.bsky.social

Because I've seen some confusion on this: The above isn't a link to the "60 Minutes" piece CBS pulled, it's a different piece on the same topic produced for "Frontline" on PBS. And on a related note: If you want to support PBS stations right now, here's a link to do that: adoptastation.org

Now seems like a swell time to point out that Frontline just released this excellent 11-minute mini-documentary about what happened inside CECOT.

Hi.

I wrote about Bari Weiss doing the hard work of defending the rich and powerful www.thenation.com/article/soci...

Floptologist in chief

In case you missed it Canada changed their citizenship laws recently. If you have Canadian ancestry you may be eligible for citizenship by descent. I need to look into it some more but this is amazing. immigration.ca/claiming-can...

If the season and inflation hasn't completely fleeced you, someone has set up a Go Fund Me for PJ's widow and children. www.gofundme.com/f/supporting...

Floptologist in chief

The instrument that one would use to measure this level of failure is called a Bariometer

Breaking: Marion County agrees to pay out $3M for newspaper raid, express regret kansasreflector.com/2025/11/11/m...

Parents everywhere are terrified that their teens’ sudden need to download the forbidden 60 minutes story is a gateway drug to wanting even more news

The federal government indicted the Broadview 6 in a hugely significant case. Five work in politics. One is a garden store worker who sings and was randomly swept up. @tesskenny.bsky.social explains what happened and why it matters in this must-read story www.chicagotribune.com/2025/12/21/b...

The conditions at the Broadview ICE Processing Center are INHUMANE, UNSAFE, INAPPROPRIATE, INADEQUATE.  We will be back. And we will continue the oversight work until we hold Noem, Homan, Bovino, and DHS accountable.

After months of trying to conduct oversight of Broadview Processing Center, I finally gained access. The conditions are inhumane. We must hold DHS and Secretary Noem accountable for the pain and terror they are inflicting in our communities.

so thank you, Bari, for streisanding this so hard that a bunch of terminally online 38 year olds who haven’t watched cable television since saturday morning cartoons are glued to fucking 60 minutes you monumentally incompetent goon

Exactly this: the administration’s concentration camps should be a howling, daily outrage, a scandal of historic proportions.

HIRING: We're looking for a statewide editor at Free Press Indiana! Job posting here: www.freepressindiana.org/jobs/statewi...

I firmly believe we're going to survive this era -- broken, hobbled, with decades of rebuilding that will not be finished in my lifetime -- but we are going to survive and every asshole who collaborated in the effort to destroy this country will forever wear the stain of it.

CBS paid the president of the United States millions in bribe money and now they censor news reports so it does not annoy him. I don’t know how much plainer we can put this.

The Olivia Nuzzi story and the Bari Weiss at CBS story are the same story, which is that the upper echelons of legacy media are absolutely rife with people who worship power and don't feel burdened by any sense of responsibility to their profession or the public.

if bari weiss had tried to do 9/11 there'd be three towers now

A good pal designed this gorgeous "Protect Trans Kids" logo. Also available on a shirt! siler.printful.me

The full spiked 60 Minutes CECOT package, clean & subtitled. 1/5

The one response that has been genuinely effective has come from community members—ordinary residents who have come together, trained one another, and connected across neighborhoods to form groups like the Southwest Side Rapid Response Team. trib.al/kahpgf2

I was already pretty exhausted with the Game of Thrones hyping and pop culture saturation. By sheer luck I stumbled onto Killjoys, and it's what I was following ardently for the duration. Representation, an actually interesting sense of story and world building, humour, trauma - all earned! And fun!

yes. she investigated the case of why everyone at the new york times hated her and discovered that it was because she was too smart and too brave.

“These men risked their lives to speak with us. We have a moral and professional obligation to the sources who entrusted us with their stories. Abandoning them now is a betrayal of the most basic tenet of journalism: giving voice to the voiceless.”

Armchair, by Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867–1959) Metal Office Furniture Company (now Steelcase, Inc., American, founded 1912) Grand Rapids, Michigan 1937–39 More info: https://www.artic.edu/artworks/38881