Penny Arcade

As a spectacle, as a meticulously engineered media experience lensed through the twin magnifications of IMAX and 3D, James Cameron's Avatar is absolutely - I am confident in saying this - a film. It didn't really stick with me. I was at Disney World a couple years back, and they had a whole fuckin' Avatar, like… zone, and I was surprised. Like The Matrix, I think it provided a tool to get at some existential concepts a youth informed William Gibson had already formatted me…

Loki is like Wandavision in that it's a kind of puzzle, which is the sort of show I like best. It's also the most optimized use of Disney+ as a platform, because now the hook is set and I sorta have to stick around to find out what this shit is about now. I go hog-ass fucking wild for a Primer, or a Memento. Or even a regular Mento. I should buy some Mentos. I don't surf the Internet correctly. For one thing, I either ronically or i-ronically still use the term surf. I tend to go…

I genuinely don't know a lot about He-Man, although my friend Damon had a Battle Armor He-Man whose inner workings perpetually mystified me. You could strike the breastplate, and every time it would reveal a progressively more damaged version until it was perfect again. What a terrifying foe. Strike your enemy dead in the chest three times to… perfect him? I'm not fucking fighting this guy. That explains the raft of robots, weird snake guys, and bipedal insects he's has to…

The main thing you have to know about streaming platforms is that their dynamics are such that it's too rich for Microsoft's blood. Microsoft. After squeezing to the tune of millions and millions of dollars, they determined that the volume and quality of the juice hadn't been worth it. Which is too bad, because it was… kinda good. The latency was really low; it felt like you could have real conversations with chat almost. It had a built-in studio you could use to…