James: Junior year I was dating this girl, Betsy Cooke. Betsy was kind of like… she was kind of a prude, actually. Anyway, one day I was reading Shakespeare, and I realized I don’t really love this person. You know? It was one of the sonnets, “being your slave, what should I do but tend…
Dominion is a card game created by Donald X. Vaccarino in 2008, a winner of Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year, the most prestigious award in board gaming), and one of my favorite board games. It’s responsible for popularizing the “deck-building card game” genre. Deck-builders differ from “card-collecting games” like Magic or Pokemon TCG…
I have decided to break up the honorable mentions for my Top 100 Everything countdown into two parts: half to come one third into the list, half to come two thirds into the list. Well, we’re now a third of the way into the countdown, which means it’s time for the first half of honorable…
2009 was the best year ever for animated movies (2010 is the runner-up, but more on that later), and one of its highlights is Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. The movie was created by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, whose career credits are now 1) cult hit Clone High, 2) the second season of…
Chuck is a strange show with a curious but lovable collection of stories and tones. Josh Schwartz created it after The O.C. went off air. It’s strange to think that the creator of a teen drama would then jump to a spy comedy, but his chracter-based sensibility is what actually makes the show such a…
A lot of the reason I love Big Star is because I love the IDEA of Big Star. They’re an under-appreciated, long-forgotten (American!) band with semi-tragic story, a GREAT group name, three fantastic albums with a definite arc, a jangly power-pop sound, and — most importantly — a slate of great, emotive songs. Throw in…
I am a mid-twenties white male who reads about TV online, so I think it is assumed that I love Arrested Development. Certainly most of my friends do. My wife does. The entire freaking internet does. And I do, too. There have been times in my life where I would have put Arrested D a…
Electronic Gaming Monthly in the late ‘90s through the mid ‘00s was so far and away the best gaming-related publication of all time that I’m surprised it hasn’t gone down in more legend and myth. It was like LeBron James these past few years, effortlessly great and fun and trailblazing — but also like The…
In 2008, I was reading film news blogs daily, and I remember we all got a chuckle when Aaron Sorkin joined Facebook, announcing he was working with producer Scott Rudin on a movie about the site. It seemed like silly at best, crass at worst. Sorkin was (and is) respected, but not immune to indulgent…
I’ve mentioned in past articles that I feel a little bit underqualified or redundant when I try to encapsulate the greatness of some of the things on my list. Well, never will that be more true than for today’s entry. Grant is a bigger fan of U2 than most people are a fan of anything.…