Cosplay at the HAZBIN HOTEL sing-along was lit.

This only happens to you once

So... It's all about putting on an elaborate show for him, and she has no choice in the matter?

Is the open goal here to have Austin entirely staffed by robots by 2030? Why is "You might have to say hi to another human being" an unbearable burden?

Welp, I did it. I booked an autonomous car ride back to the hotel after my last #FantasticFest screening. And it was creepy.🧵

Tried to water the baby asparagus but the spout was blocked so I tried to shove the blockage down into the can but the thing inside shoved back. Computer…enhance. #garden #gardening #oopsfrog

It's Fantastic Fest's 20th anniversary, so all week, we've been getting preshow screenings of wild events from past fests, and it had me wondering where this year's over-the-top stunts were. Well, tonight's secret screening was Yorgos Lanthimos' BUGONIA...

Well here's a creepy-ass thing just hanging out behind the scenes at #FantasticFest.

Chris Colfer is at #FantasticFest for RESTORATION AT GRAYSON MANOR, and he has SO much pompadour going on.

What movie do you consider perfect?

Huh, just realizing as I'm writing that "a lot of elements at work" and "a lot of elements in play" mean fundamentally the same thing. Seems like they should be opposites.

Ubering back to my hotel. Driver is listening to the title song from PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. Me: Oh, cool! Is this the movie soundtrack? Him: No. Me: Oh. Okay. One of the stage versions? Him: No. Me: Ohhhh...kay? What is it then? Him: [Ignores me, starts singing along with Christine]

Thanks to the premiere of THE STRANGERS - CHAPTER TWO, this is what the whole evening at #FantasticFest has looked like.

Getting an Uber back to my hotel at 2am after V/H/S HALLOWEEN, the app offered me a ride in a driverless autonomous car. I freaked out a little and said no, then regretted not trying it. Except I had a *fascinating* conversation with my eventual driver about the rollout of driverless cars in Austin.

The existence of goat cheese implies the existence of mid cheese and the existence of cringe cheese.

I do not recommend watching 13 hours of movies about evil slaughtering demons, witches, and possessing ghosts, then returning to a hotel room where you're staying alone, where you need a shower, and where the shower door is poorly balanced and will slooooowly open on its own every time it's closed.

Back in Austin for #FantasticFest, which this year has a medieval theme: Knights in armor marching around, ladies in Ren Faire skirts and elf ears, a D&D expo game, faux candles and baskets of gold coins and polyhedral dice on all the bar tables. I feel like my streams have crossed.

At Disney Animation Studios in LA on a junket for ZOOTOPIA 2, which I can't talk about yet. What I am allowed to talk about is getting emotional walking into this building for the first time, and then running around it gawping at all the art artifacts and displays.

If you could use a small, dumb laugh today, I highly recommend this video of a useless box with more personality than this kind of toy has ever had before.

in 2019 i wrote a piece that was like "uhhh world of warcraft has a world-ending threat every year in its timeline? pretty improbable lol!!!" and I would just like to say: I'm sorry for that particular take. History has humbled me there

While researching for our podcast, accidentally found out that just last year, OZ creator Tom Fontana made a 15-minute OZ sequel short called ZO, where Ryan O'Reilly gets out of prison and resumes contact with Tobias Beecher. It was billed as a possible route to more OZ content, and it's on YouTube.

Can we please just talk about how last night's premiere of Dropout TV's CROWD CONTROL featured someone wearing a hat they made out of cucumbers, and how this person self-identifies as Xandiloquence Bizarre, and how they have a whole channel about cucumber-hatmaking? www.youtube.com/@xandiloquen...

This is the first prose novel from the creator of NIMONA and showrunner of SHE-RA AND THE PRINCESSES OF POWER. I read it via an ARC earlier this month, and people are not ready for how simply it starts and how much of an expansive, wild world he's created by the end. Hugely recommended.

Today, Worst Cat tripped me as I was trying to go upstairs and made me spill my popcorn, which mostly landed in a spiderweb. Then he promptly pushed his face into both the popcorn and the web. He's been naggy and needy all day, and he um he's such a he ...well dammit, this is hardly fair.

The local PR team repping THE LONG WALK in Chicago brought in a local professor with a doctorate in horror to moderate an audience discussion about the movie afterward. And it was really welcome, because there were a LOT of things I wanted to hear a variety of opinions on.

Gods of terrible movie merchandising have pity on me, I'm actually kind of tempted by the Jaws-themed popcorn buckets.

please be good please be good please be good please be good please be good

This was a great conversation, as always when talking to Sam about game design. We explore the parallels between sexual consent and GMless game consent, how systems model the former via the latter, and what makes a good RPG romance, fraught romantic storyline, or system for RPG sex.

What's all this about elevated grocery prices? Sales like these are practically giving food away!

Really great news from a group of Polygon veterans: A new creator-owned site with a very apt name and a very timely philosophy. It's great to see so many familiar names on the roster and on the bylines.

There's been a lot of disheartening stuff going on with Worst Cat lately. He has a colon condition that's disrupted the whole house. So it's almost nice to see him back up to his stupid nonsense today. First he pried open a box of donuts, stole one, dissected it, and left its corpse in the kitchen.

Actually, Frankenstein is a doctor success at the Venice film festival

Always love talking to Macon Blair about his work. He's frank, he has a sense of humor, he's endlessly enthusiastic. And I had to talk to him about how an anti-capitalist, pro-environment dark comedy plays under a pro-capitalist, anti-environment administration.

she looks nothing like him

Best thing I learned at my KPOP DEMON HUNTERS sing-along: Someone I interviewed afterward pointed out that in the final concert, the guy who keeps switching T-shirts to switch band allegiances isn't wearing the expected Saja Boys shirt, he's caping for Gwi-Ma the demon king. (I want this shirt.)

Haven't done an old-fashioned scene report in quite a while, where I just went to a thing, then grabbed some people afterward and talked to them about their experiences. These were fun conversations, but also really unexpected in a lot of ways.

Did not know we had legitimate Charles Dickens characters living in the neighborhood

One thing about being older and wiser than I once was: I miss the days when an interviewee would say "Oh, that's a good question!" and I'd think "I'm a great journalist! I impressed the talent!" instead of "Dahaha, you don't have an immediate answer, so you're stalling while you think."

Saw Ron Howard's EDEN last night on a whim, and it's easily my favorite Howard-directed film since 2008's FROST/NIXON. Terrific performances (I can't believe this is the same Sydney Sweeney who starred in MADAME WEB), a compelling story that's an invitation to read up on the real-life events.

Psyched for the HAZBIN HOTEL sing-along, but disappointed they're just screening the first 4 eps instead of a song-focused supercut, so no "Hell's Greatest Dad" or "Finale." ("This place reeks of death/There's a chill in the air...") Still, looking forward to a roomful of "Loser, Baby" belting.

I always feel a little begrimed when I put an actress' name into a search engine and the autofill immediately tries to give me "[actress] feet." But I remember when it was always "[actress] topless," so I guess this is progress? Will we eventually meet in the middle with "[actress] bellybutton"?

Interviewed Spike Lee for the first time, specifically just zooming in on HIGHEST 2 LOWEST's take on social media, online toxicity, and online discourse consistently getting reality wrong. But I also learned one reason he's on social media himself.

Sea shanty sing-along group is off on a new adventure this month.

HIGHEST 2 LOWEST pushed me to finally read KING'S RANSOM, the Ed McBain book that inspired Akira Kurosawa's HIGH AND LOW. A fascinating thing: The big moral dilemma around the ransom, the heart of both movies, is barely in the book. The mogul says "I'm not paying that," and never budges.

Every time I head to the IMDB to fact-check something in a STAR TREK: STRANGE NEW WORLDS write-up, glowering puppet Anson Mount is staring at me, and I hate it. I'm normally entirely fine with Muppet-esque characters, this one just feels uniquely uncanny to me.

How do you even KNOW it's a predatory evil corporation willing to turn its employees into literal food if it doesn't have entire rooms full of wet chains, I always say

Re: all the debates about how to interpret/unpack WEAPONS, @thesaintoftous.bsky.social pinned it down best after our screening, when he pointed out that one of the movie's central metaphors is a parasite that affects ants, and one of the movie's scariest characters is an aunt who's a parasite.

If you're looking to fall down a particularly random internet research hole today, I recommend reading up on Korean jakhodo art, and how K-POP DEMON HUNTERS' weird blue tiger and three-eyed bird are referencing a centuries-old tradition of paintings where tigers confront magpies.

If you're in the mood for something small, strange, warm, and restorative, I highly recommend the time-loop oddity RIVER, which touches on half a dozen subgenres while breaking the rules on most of them. Just a really charming small movie.

I got early access to this episode because of something Sam and I were recording together, and for those of us in the TTRPG space, it's an amazing thought-provoker. A really thorough, engaging look at how different games turn sex, love, and romance into numbers in different (not always great!) ways.