Best mail day ever. I was expecting to wait another decade for Helene Wecker to continue the Golem and the Jinni series, but THE GATES OF MIDNIGHT is already nearly here.

This is a tremendous tragedy. Marjane Satrapi's work remains so vital, so accessible, dark, funny, defiant, and educational. I'll never forget reading PERSEPOLIS and realizing I was getting a first-person window into an entire women's war I knew nothing about, one that was still being fought.

Oh wow, this would be a dream. And this is the best fundraising gambit I've seen in a long time.

This is absolutely bugfuck nuts. And it apparently only took Dropout fans a weekend to solve all of this. The people who design ARGs are insane. The people who solve ARGs are extra super insane. I admire them both, but this blows my mind.

Fuzzball, the furry butterfly-winged CAPTAIN EO character clearly designed to spawn a wave of merch, gets no respect. Stuck in a cage in STAR WARS: SKELETON CREW, stuck in a different cage in THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU. It's like modern Star Wars directors are commenting on how useless he always was.

Because I'm still as obsessive about book-to-film adaptations as I was back when I was writing an A.V. Club column about that, I picked up Leonie Swann's THREE BAGS FULL, the basis for THE SHEEP DETECTIVES. The book was *radically* different. And surprisingly, not nearly as fun! Short 🧵…

Technically the headline here should be "The science fiction and fantasy books coming out in the next three months that intrigue Tasha most, with a strong emphasis on standalone novels and weird, exciting high-concept ideas." But they tell me the Google SEO on that headline is pretty bad.

I've already seen people on my timeline comparing this to a Roland Emmerich or Paul Verhoeven movie, but c'mon, UFC at the White House is pure Mike Judge. I could see SOUTH PARK doing this plotline too, but they'd be dismissed as too over the top.

I had never read Jo Walton before the day I met her at a WorldCon kaffeeklatsch. Someone at the table brought up this book as essentially "Jane Austen if all the characters were dragons." I bought it that day, and it sent me on a tear of reading all her work. Immensely recommended.

These days I have udm14.com as the top bookmark in my browser tab and I use it instead of Google. It skips all the AI and sponsored results, and it takes a lot less time to find the results you were actually searching for.

Hey, look who's writing GAME CHANGER recaps for Vulture! This show continues to give me more joy than anything else on television, and the season 8 premiere is a really exciting statement of ridiculous purpose for this new season.

SPONCH SPONCH SPONCH

"And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'" --Kurt Vonnegut

Oh, this is a fun function of Libby that I'd never encountered before. I asked for a book that wasn't in stock, and it asked if I wanted recommendations while I waited. But instead of suggesting titles, it gave me descriptions, which wound up feeling like a modern SF/F trivia quiz.

,🎶 I always feel like... somebody's watching me 🎶

Sure, Cannes-goers are getting the first look at Jane Schoenbrun's TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA, but I just got an advance readers' copy of their first novel, PUBLIC ACCESS AFTERWORLD, which they said they want to be an LOTR-level exercise in world-building. So I can't feel TOO jealous.

WIDOW'S BAY really hits its stride in episode 4. The previous episodes are introducing so many characters and situations and horrors and legends and types of humor that they don't really have the clarity they need. Episode 4 strips it down to a single character and a single story in a perfect way.

Well, Friday was my last day at Polygon after a seven-year run. Wish I was surprised about being laid off, but with the current state of the media and economy, this has felt inevitable for a long time. So if you know anyone who needs a diligent deep-dive editor or writer, I'm on the market.

This is one of the stranger things I've sat down to in a family restaurant: a salad in a baklava shell, topped with shawarma. Kind of an Armenian take on a taco shell salad. At Libanais in Lincolnwood.

Here's a silly thing: I've been researching the George Miller/Chris Noonan clashes on the set of BABE for a @thenextpictureshow.bsky.social script. I kept running across juicy unsourced quotes about it. I finally tracked down the source. It was… me. From this 2012 A.V. Club interview:

Kane Parsons' BACKROOMS is the most deliciously unsettling film I've seen in a theater since WEAPONS. It's creepy as hell, accessible to people who've never heard of 4chan, creepypasta, or Parsons' viral YouTube videos, and full of images that are going to haunt me for a long time. Strong recommend.

This guide is deep, definitive, and comes from an incredible eye for image and memory for shot specifics. I can't wait for Marya to dig into the actual show.

It's been a while since I've been as nervous going into an interview as I was today talking to Dropout CEO Sam Reich for the first time. I admitted that while we were getting the tech squared away. He said "Don't you dare be intimidated, I'm practically Paddington Bear."

I was yesterday years old when I learned that ITV adapted C.S. Lewis' THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE as a TV series in 1967, with people in costumes playing all the animals. (Here's Lucy, Susan, and Aslan.) Apparently all but two of the episodes have been lost.

Warning: incredibly hypnotic viewing.

When I reached out to a Mini Museum co-founder to ask how and why you chop a WALKING DEAD katana or a bloody baseball bat into 5,000 pieces for an art project, I was just looking for quick quotes for a news piece. What he told me was so fascinating that I transcribed and posted the whole thing.

Editing my umpty-jillionth interview where a filmmaker talking about their very specific, personal experience on their film goes off into second person. Why do people do this? "So you're on the set, setting a giant tentacle monster on fire…" Like that's an experience that of course we all shared.

Martha Wells is about ready to wrap up the Murderbot series, she told me yesterday — not with PLATFORM DECAY, the book coming out next week, but with the untitled book after that. She only has one more book currently contracted, and she feels Murderbot's story is reaching a natural end.

Oh WOW. I sure sympathize with anyone who feels it's disrespectful to revive the one published Octavia Butler novel that she hated and kept out of print — but I found a copy of SURVIVOR at a used book store long ago and read it, and I actually really enjoy it. I'm happy others will have the chance.

I get why critics are bristling at Andy Serkis' update of ANIMAL FARM, with its rap sequence and overextended fart joke and upbeat ending. On the other hand, those things make it more of an accessible kids' movie than a humorless straight adaptation would be. I talked to Serkis about it:

How To Live A Good Life #oldknees

This Is Just To Say I have turned off the AI features that were in the update and which you were probably hoping to monetize Fuck you they were stupid so unnecessary and so annoying

So excited for the return of GAME CHANGER, and particularly excited by this trailer, which makes it clear they're doing "Rulette" again. That episode sold me on subscribing to Dropout, the streaming service that's easily brought me more joy over the past six months than any other entertainment.

I had no idea this movement had gotten so much traction with states. Here's hoping.

Recently rewatched the animated 1973 CHARLOTTE'S WEB movie and realized for the first time that Wilbur is whiny and needy because he's coded as a kid facing death, and Charlotte is the adult helping him survive childhood. Yeah, it's an unbalanced dynamic: Kids aren't expected to raise their parents.

Big fan of EXIT 8, the movie, as a theatrical experience and as an efficient expansion/elaboration on a basically plotless video game. Director Genki Kawamura told me some interesting things about editing this movie specifically to "manifest" it getting a Cannes screening slot.

I have a whole dyspeptic rant I go on whenever someone like Mel Brooks or the cast of THE BREAKFAST CLUB says "You couldn't make a movie like our movie today." This post and every gag in the comments is a better, brighter response to that cliché, and I need to remember all of these.

Ah yes, the vaunted "Cooked low, Served fart" restaurant.

Say what you want about THE DRAMA, but after our screening, dozens of people were standing out in the lobby in big clumps, VERY ANIMATEDLY discussing what they'd just seen, and I'm in favor of anything that can provoke that kind of reaction.

The Moon: oh wow you guys decided to come back Artemis II crew: earth’s haunted

I love Dropout's improv game show MAKE SOME NOISE, and I particularly hoped this prompt would make it to YouTube. The idea of a kids' cereal mascot having a humiliation kink around being denied the cereal is deeply squirmy, but it tracks. And now I see the Trix rabbit et al VERY differently.

The gap between these two trailers is deeply odd. So is the idea of ANIMAL FARM as an upbeat, chase-driven, manic kids' comedy.

Made It to Beyond Fest at @musicboxtheatre.bsky.social for OVER YOUR DEAD BODY and FACES OF DEATH, and it's definitely the closest thing I've seen to Fantastic Fest in Chicago, from the vocal, enthusiastic crowd down to the creepy movie-specific decorations. Excited the Fest will be back next year.

You love to see it.

Researching for our podcast @thenextpictureshow.bsky.social, I ran across a frankly nuts interview with SFX legend Douglas Trumbull, talking about working on 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, from its use of a rotting, fake dead zebra to the awful original script, and its 20-foot green alien. It's a must-read.

This morning our AI proofreader told me a sentence I had written was unclear because I didn't point out that zebras' skins are covered with spots, therefore the apes in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY are eating zebra meat.

!!! I'm immediately thinking Bong Joon Ho's first animated picture may look like FINDING NEMO from the outside, and feel a lot more like the messy, traumatizing parts of OKJA. I'm on board for that.

I love write-ups of studies on animals being clever, crafty, or intellectually curious. This one's especially good reading because it acknowledges that raccoons' drive to solve puzzles might have survival-related causes beyond "They like it!" (But the scientists are open to "They like it!" too.)

FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC. To this day I can't believe how many V.C. Andrews books I read as a kid. I'm not even sure how I found out about them. Also, I literally learned about oral sex from reading a Sidney Sheldon novel as a tween. (They're enough alike that I couldn't begin to tell you which one.)