Outstanding reporting, and a sobering reminder that all of us have opinions that someone probably paid a good amount of money to put in our heads.

Cancelled my monthly Shudder subscription and signed up for the $29.99 AMC+ annual deal, which still includes Shudder titles and also allows me to watch THE VAMPIRE LESTAT.

Our entire government is comprised of the people who used to leave me Jack Chick tracts instead of a tip.

Joined the X-FILES subreddit to supplement my rewatch of the series, and by far the most delightful outcome of this is learning just how many people have the hots for Walter Skinner.

I’ve worked out, I have a lunch date with the missus at a Portuguese restaurant, and then I’m visiting a comic shop and two game stores in South Philly I’ve never been to. Tonight I’m going to start in on a new horror video game. Life is good.

Finally finished James Tynion’s THE DEVIANT. I often joke about how hard it is to keep up with Tynion because he never finishes anything, but sometimes he does, and it’s perfect. What a beautiful and vibrantly queer Christmas slasher. A must-read for any horror fans.

I am rooting so hard for Kenny.

The Titans did a super low-tech schedule release video and people loved it The Cardinals used AI and they’re getting crushed Seems telling!

THIS MOVIE DOESN'T END THE WAY WE WANT opens September 15th from @titanbooks.bsky.social 📽️😈 Only four months until we go to the movies and never come back ... www.barnesandnoble.com/w/this-movie...

There is a lot to put on the watch list and play this weekend. Let us help you decide! Get the @butwhytho.net newsletter where we round up our thoughts on what's new this week, and what you might have missed! (It's also a totally free way to support us! <3) 👉🏽 butwhytho.net/newsletter

"Eli Roth?! Did you ever watch BORDERLANDS? It's a piece of shit!" OK, Uwe Boll, OK.

Life is simple: Find a good comic shop, set up a pull list, read comics, and just be good to each other.

Just paid $950.00 to my accountant to file the taxes for Certified Forgotten, which reported a $1,509.00 loss in 2025. Which means Certified Forgotten actually cost us $2,459.00 for 2025. Gotta love indie journalism.

Went to an amazing repertory screening tonight and chatted with the programmers afterwards. It's always a delicate little dance to meet other film people - sharing that I'm in the industry, but not overstating my importance, but not shying away from my accomplishments, but coming across as humble.

Cannes people! Help a fellow film critic👇🏻

Now seated for THE GREAT SILENCE at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute, pretty solidly my favorite theater in (or around) Philadelphia.

If you haven’t picked up OUT OF ALCATRAZ yet, it’s gorgeous and deep and very very sad.

Shoulda given Arozarena that fist bump.

EVERYONE SHUT UP ONE OF MY FAVORITE TV SHOWS IS BACK

It's not our official anniversary date - that is reserved for the day our inaugural episode went live - but today is the six-year anniversary of when we registered the @certifiedforgot.bsky.social domain and went from a podcast to a lil' baby media company.

And so begins Season 2 of THE X-FILES. Weird watching this show now, where fantasies of secret programs and covert extraterrestrial research require the kind of discipline and funding now extinct in federal government. From the Cigarette Smoking Man to a 25-year-old staffer placing Polymarket bets.

Have tickets tomorrow to see THE GREAT SILENCE restored and on the big screen.

It's here, it's here! Baby's first booklet essay, on Tyler MacIntyre's PATCHWORK! Thanks @donatobomb.bsky.social and @terrorvisionvids.bsky.social for letting me contribute!!

I bring this up a lot, but I’m still thinking about REKT by Alex Gonzalez. It follows a college student who joins an online community that mass-produces deep fakes of normal people dying and then bet on the outcomes. It’s the kind of slow societal collapse that would make Kiyoshi Kurosawa proud.

When I travel for work, this is EXACTLY the kind of shit I hope @donatobomb.bsky.social gets up to.

One good thing that entertainment journalists covering The Odyssey can do is never to ask Nyong'o, Page, or Nolan about this. When a prominent racist and transphobe says something racist and transphobic, go make his life miserable and leave his targets alone. They have nothing to defend or explain.

One of my dad’s favorite adages is, “If you’re young and a Republican, you have no heart, and if you’re old and a Democrat, you have no money.” I like that Charles Barkley continually proves him wrong.

Can't wait to vote against him.

Honored to share some pages with the absolute best in the biz and very, very proud to say that I have a piece about the transformative power of INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE: the book, the film, and the series.

I spend a lot of time rooting around festival titles from the 2000s and 2010s to find movies that deserve a @certifiedforgot.bsky.social write-up. END OF THE LINE was a shot in the dark, but I really ended up liking this one.

It's funny to me that conservatives are hell-bent on winning the AI arms race against China, but are doing everything in their power to lose the war with China that will really determine the next 100 years: solar and wind power and battery storage.

Had my annual physical today, and while nothing's wrong, I think it's fair to say that my body has come about as far as good genes will take it. I turn 42 this year, and if I want to stay healthy, it's now going to have to become an active endeavor, not a passive endeavor.

Reached out to a festival today about a virtual badge and got a "I love your work!" in response so I'm going to ride that high for the next three or four months, easy.

Whatever the specifics of this end up being, it's interesting to watch media companies who have weaned themselves off reporting struggle to poke holes in an announcement they clearly want to oppose. Live by the "Politician Says" headline, die by the "Politician Says" headline.

me after I sow:

this is an actual Bluesky Rule: if you have ever so much as exchanged a single like, you are required to hold up the book in the shop and say "hey my friend wrote this"

Cal Raleigh pissed off the baseball gods during the WBC, and now he's gone from baseball's biggest GOAT to baseball's biggest goat. Even in failure, you have to admire the poetry of baseball.

But $30 per person a year to have a postal service is a waste of taxpayer money.

Saw this when it was in D.C. There are two jump scares in the play that are borderline breathtaking, but we sat up close, and that was a mistake - it's a two-story set, so the best seats in the house will give you line of sight into the upstairs and downstairs sections. Might need to see it again.

If you're a fan of TTRPGs and mondo westerns, it looks like Free League Publishing is publishing the updated version of FRONTIER SCUM, @makedatanotlore.itch.io's absolutely delightful acid western. I'm hardly a veteran of the TTRPG space, but this is hands down one of my favorites.

I have a comic shop and a book store in my neighborhood, and I’m trying to funnel as much of my discretionary spending through them as possible. Only way I can make sense of the state of the world is to build community locally, and they are both rad inclusive third spaces, so it’s money well spent.

Why, I do believe I'm about to purchase my first @briannaduggan.bsky.social print.

I will never understand how Cuckoo was basically written off. It's SO good.

I've winnowed down my board game collection over the last couple of months - when I left Austin, I also left my regular group behind, so I'm being a bit more judicious about what I keep on my shelf - but I'll definitely be backing this EXQUISITE CORPSES game.

This was such a lovely surprise from the Ebert team ❤️🥲

Sometimes people ask me if I wish I'd pursued classic singing, and I always tell them this: when I moved to New York, the first musician I ever saw busking in a subway station was better than I could ever hope to be. If they couldn't make it, neither could I. Now it's my film criticism answer, too.

I had the pleasure of writing for @tasharobinson.bsky.social once, but her notes were insightful and made the piece a lot stronger as a result. I've also always been a huge fan of her writing - nobody nails the intersection of cinema and tabletop quite like Tasha. What a loss.

"BURY YOUR DEAD is not worried about giving you answers. Rather it prompts you to ask yourself why you believe in what you do." NEW at the site today: Brazilian filmmaker Marco Dutra's most recent horror feature is a thoughtful exploration and faith and death at the end of the world.

BEN FOSTER

NYC: I’ll be introing one of my all time favorite films, Tony Scott’s delirious and wild, Domino, on Saturday, June 6th at Roxy Cinema at 4:45pm. Don’t miss it and be sure to check out the rest of Heather Landsman’s “I Paused My Game to be Here” series