“Thanksgiving’s always been a little bit bewildering to me because it’s not a religious holiday,” Mystery Science Theater 3000 creator Joel Hodgson recently told me. “When your family gets together, there are a few things that you do, but most of the time it’s about food preparation.”

This week’s entry: Qiu Jin

A 2013 article in The Atlantic asked a very good, non-rhetorical question: “Why is Sweden so good at pop music?” The fascinating article outlined some potential answers—prioritization of melodies, government support of artistic endeavors, a supportive community, embrace of cutting-edge technology and sounds—but missed…

It’s easy to forget in the age of Rick And Morty, Too Many Cooks, and Family Guy reruns, but the original Adult Swim lineup was almost entirely based around plucking characters from Space Ghost: Coast To Coast or obscure Hanna-Barbera cartoons and dropping them into new TV genres. The Brak Show was a family sitcom, …

This week’s entry: List of entertainers who died during a performance

1. Kim Carnes, “Bette Davis Eyes”
2. Diana Ross & Lionel Richie, “Endless Love”
3. Kenny Roger, “Lady”
4. John Lennon, “(Just Like) Starting Over”
5. Rick Springfield, “Jessie’s Girl”
6. Kool & The Gang, “Celebration”
7. Hall & Oates, “Kiss On My List”
8. Eddie Rabbitt, “I Love A Rainy Night”
9. Dolly Parton, “9 To 5”
10. REO…

This week’s entry: Robert Smalls

Underneath all the melodramatic cutscenes and ornamental belts, even today’s flashiest JRPGs are often built on a skeleton that ages back to Dragon Quest and the genre’s emergence. The game starts and something pushes your main character into a journey. They leave their home and travel to a new place, probably…

With new games of all sizes filling real and digital shelves every week, it can be near impossible for anyone to keep up. So during the first week of every month, we’ll be here to help with a curated selection of new, notable games we think should be on everyone’s radar for the month ahead.

Note: This interview discusses plot points of Mission: Impossible—Fallout.

Bionic Commando was a game that flew in the face of its own era. When it reached Nintendo’s Famicom on this day in 1988—first released in Japan as Hitler’s Resurrection: Top Secret, the heavily altered home version of a 1987 arcade oddity—jumping had already become the definitive verb of the time, the thing most…

We turn today to Toad. He is some sort of mushroom man? This is about as legit a description as exists in Super Mario’s candy-colored nightmare of a video game series. It’s worth noting Toad is both a named character and also the name of a species of Toad-like people. This surreal synecdochic quality is shared by…

The venue’s security checked the guest list one more time. HG Locks wasn’t on it. It slowly began to sink in: No one was expecting him to perform; he had been scammed.

Playing the recently released remastered—excuse me—“re-mars-tered” edition of Red Faction: Guerrilla hammers home just how radical that 2009 cult classic was all those years ago. At that point, big-budget games had barely explored their ongoing obsession with open worlds, a design style so uniquely predispositioned to…

I asked some friends to help me piece this together—or at least, make a reasonable guess for a song like this. Get ready: I’m using a small amount of actual data, and I am a little psyched about it. “Sweet Emotion” did 9,695 units in “consumption” last week, according to Nielsen, a figure based on track sales, audio…

1. Wings, “Silly Love Songs”
2. Elton John & Kiki Dee, “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart”
3. Johnnie Taylor, “Disco Lady”
4. The Four Seasons, “December, 1963 (Oh, What A Night)”
5. Wild Cherry, “Play That Funky Music”
6. The Manhattans, “Kiss And Say Goodbye”
7. The Miracles, “Love Machine”
8. Paul Simon, “50 Ways To Leave Your…

When 2015’s Ant-Man arrived in theaters after a notoriously tumultuous production process, there was a lot of speculation about which elements of the superhero heist film came from original helmer Edgar Wright and which came from his replacement, Peyton Reed. Although many automatically credited Wright with the film’s…

With new games of all sizes filling real and digital shelves every week, it can be near impossible for anyone to keep up. So during the first week of every month, we’ll be here to help with a curated selection of new, notable games we think should be on everyone’s radar for the month ahead.

The Cinepocalypse film festival descended once more upon Chicago’s Music Box Theatre this past week, providing seven straight days of movie madness, ranging from grisly horror to gonzo action to outrageous camp. While we weren’t able to see every film that screened during the festival—even die-hard genre fans…

The condemned: Scorched Earth (2018)