I have a confession: I’ve been half-assing for a while now. — Back in 2019, I wrote a piece for the New York Times in which I discussed how apps like Duolingo can help, and how they can’t. My credentials to make such an authoritative claim? I had a Duolingo streak of over 500 days. Well, now I’m nearly at 1,500. And…

Most movie studios are too scared to just do the bizarre shit that constantly makes them money. — Everyone should watch Sorry to Bother You. Not because everyone will like it — in fact, there’s a certain subset of people who will actively hate it — but because it’s a weird, experimental movie and you’ll walk away wanting to unionize your workplace. But when I say I want…

Persona 5 Royal is a long game. I mean loooong. A typical playthrough of the year-long high school sim/supernatural psychological RPG can range in the hundreds of hours of play time. …

The problem isn’t that Thanos’ plan was bad. It’s that the heroes didn’t have a better one. — If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a thousand times. “Thanos’ plan makes no sense! If you kill half of everyone, the population would just double again soon! Why not just double the resources instead?!” All good points. Well, actually not really that good. We only really know how…

Expensive phones may have ditched it, but for more affordable phones, the headphone jack is indispensable — In the long and stories history of hardware features that have been deprecated to loud public outcry — the floppy disk, the CD drive, and a parade of various ports — few have stuck around as long as the headphone jack. …

Take a look. It’s in a book. Wait this book is faaake. — Lord Ravenscraft is a video essay series created by Eric Ravenscraft. You can watch the latest full episode on YouTube. It’s a little hard to make reading a book cinematic. Not the content of the book, mind you, but literally the act of reading text on a page. I had…

I might have spent more time on the opening gag of Animorphs III than the entire rest of the video. — Lord Ravenscraft is a video essay series created by Eric Ravenscraft. You can watch the latest full episode on YouTube. For the intro Animorphs III, I wanted to do something more elaborate than I’ve done before. I’ve made an intentional point to use these essays as an excuse to practice…

The Nickelodeon Animorphs TV show wasn’t a very good adaptation. But maybe it wasn’t meant to be. — Lord Ravenscraft is a video essay series created by Eric Ravenscraft. You can watch the latest full episode on YouTube. In 1998, Scholastic Entertainment produced a live action adaptation of the Animorphs book series to be distributed on YTV and Nickelodeon. …

There wasn’t much time to get good at Flash when it was alive. But no one did it better than Homestar Runner. — Lord Ravenscraft is a video essay series created by Eric Ravenscraft. You can watch the latest full episode on YouTube. Flash may have died an extremely timely death at the end of 2020, but it deserves more credit than it gets at times. It enabled a generation of artists…