So I finally got around to seeing The Revenant last night. I enjoyed it, maybe not quite as much as Birdman though (that said, it was clearly intended to be more of a crowd-pleaser than Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s big Oscar winner). As I often do when I see an interesting film, I decided to Google it to see what sort of conversation was still on-going around it. The first entry on Google’s news feed really caught my Read More

In case you haven’t been paying attention, we are now just past the IC2S Playlist’s 1 year anniversary. At 9 1/2 hours and 104 songs long, I find it quite enjoyable to throw on shuffle when I’m at work. I’m going to continue to update it irregularly from here on, but I don’t think I’ll write up big update posts like this anymore, mainly because I felt like they spammed the blog with useless posts Read More

I am 2 years late on this story, but my father told me about the Benham brothers, a real estate family-duo who had a reality TV show lined up with HGTV, but which was cancelled when it was revealed that one of the brothers was active in anti-LGBTQ protests. Someone had played a video about them at his Bible study, where he was saying they were pressured out of their TV deal by HGTV because Read More

So we’re now just a week short of the playlist’s 1 year anniversary, and the point where I’m probably going to stop updating it so regularly (or, at the very least, stop flooding the blog every week with Playlist updates that I doubt anyone actually cares about). The limited time is actually making it a little difficult to pick music, and I was actually going to pick some Impending Doom or Project 86… however, then Read More

This probably shouldn’t be a super controversial statement, but I rather like Kylo Ren. In my mind, he’s the Star Wars equivalent of John Maguire – a very confused kid who gets caught up with the wrong people because he never had any proper guidance and then, before he can really realize it, he’s in a terrorist organization. This is a rather fascinating, timely and even untraditionally tragic characterization to give to a villain, one Read More

So I recently got laser eye surgery, and it has been quite the interesting experience. Previously, I was quite near-sighted and couldn’t see more than a couple feet in front of me before the world started to turn into a blur. I was thinking about switching to contacts for quite a while, but then I did some number crunching and figured that laser eye surgery would be more cost effective in the long run. Plus Read More

This week’s selections have some moderately interesting stories behind them. First of all, Andrew W.K. is back in the news again after he officially registered his own political party, called… The Party Party. Because of course he did. Most people are thinking this is some sort of political stunt, but regular readers will already know that Andrew W.K. is one of the main personalities on The Blaze. Considering that he is insisting that The Party Read More

So, we’re going totally random this week. I have often wondered if rates of university education are going to nosedive in the next generation. The reasons I wonder this are many: Between my parents’ generation and my own, universities (and, in a related fashion, governments) have become increasingly more and more structurally-neoliberal. This has resulted in more business-like universities, which have had their tuition shoot up at a rate higher than that of inflation and Read More

Happy Easter everyone! Unlike Christmas, Easter seems to be that holiday which Christian conservatives don’t seem to shove the “true meaning” of into our faces incessantly, for whatever reason. Of course, to pick up the slack, the neo-pagans have to get their word in: Sigh… I know there’s a common conception that religious people are anti-intellectual and can’t accept facts, but it can be easy to forget that if you’re going to be pushing for Read More

Whenever I go on long periods where the blog is only updated with Playlist updates (like it is right now), I feel kind of bad. I’ve been quite busy lately though, juggling an increased workload due to taking on a new position and getting into exam time with an online course for my job. Even my leisure time is squeezing out writing opportunities as I had to paint up a couple dozen models in anticipation Read More

I’m absolutely loving Jim Sterling’s new podcast, the Spinoff Doctors, where Jim Sterling and Conrad Zimmerman skewer video game movies. The most recent entry was for the 2007 Hitman film, which was disappointingly terrible. However, in the process of watching it I started thinking “man, this feels like a Skip Woods movie…” For the uninitiated, Skip Woods is a screenwriter responsible for some notoriously bad films, such as X-Men Origins: Wolverine and A Good Day Read More

I’ve got to say, I have been looking forward to this playlist update for a while now. The reason for that is because I have REALLY gotten into Iron Maiden’s discography now and have been listening to their music pretty much every day lately. In fact, narrowing down to just one song from them this week was hard enough. In the end though, I decided to settle on the title track from arguably my favourite Read More

I saw The Witch in theatres this weekend, and it was a bit of a strange experience. On the one hand, it was really well shot and directed, turning the New England countryside into an incredibly dark and foreboding landscape. The horror elements also are very classically-styled, with long build-up and a tense score doing wonders to make the film’s horror-moments very unsettling. There were also some great performances, even by some of the younger Read More

It’s that time again – another round of The Rebuttal! I’ve had lots of content to pick through, but since I don’t want every installment of The Rebuttal to be about me making fun of the same men’s rights activist, we’re going to shake it up just a little bit. In honour of #OscarsSoWhite, I present this little gem: Hoo boy, I’ve got a few thoughts on this one. First of all, this feels like Read More