Sunday, July 31, 2016

@midnight Power Rankings (Jul 26-29)

Whew. That was a rough week. Kathryn Hahn was funny and Matt Mira was meta-deliberately-not-funny-funny, and everything else hit the floor with a splat, from the roast insults on Tuesday to the weird format on Friday.

  1. Kathryn Hahn (W)
  2. Matt Mira (W)
  3. Sarah Tiana (T)
  4. Chris Cubas (T)
  5. Tony Hinchcliffe (T)
  6.  Kevin Smith (W)
  7. Mike Birbiglia (Th)
  8. Gillian Jacobs (Th)
  9. Tami Sagher (Th)

Jesse Joyce and Brendan Walsh can't really be rated because of the weird format, but safely consider them around the middle of a weak, weak pack.

All the episodes are skippable, honestly. Wednesday was funny, Friday was informational if you're interested in a very obscure presidential candidate who says he can time travel and teleport to Mars, but other than that, oof.

  1. Wednesday
  2. Friday
  3. Tuesday
  4. Thursday

Friday, July 29, 2016

Weekly Wrasslin' Wroundup (Jul 24-27)

Jesus, there's a lot to cover. An entertaining PPV, and the post-draft era beginning on Raw and Smackdown. With the brand split, I'll be covering each show as a separate section, because Smackdown is no longer the Raw recap and rematch show, it's the show with most of the shitty wrestlers on it.

CERO MIEDO


Whar's this? Two months after the end of S2. 40 episoes?

Those of you who skip the Lucha recaps are gonna have to do a lot more skipping.

Tuesday, July 26, 2016

Ghostbusters


Ghostbusters is a very easy movie to review when you review it entirely on it's own merits.

I mean, it's a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster special effects comedy. So at the end of the day, it needs to look good, it needs to make a modicum of narrative sense, and it needs to be funny. And Ghostbusters succeeds on all three counts - most importantly, the third.

@midnight Power Rankings (Jul 19-22)

Last week's schedule was all fucked up, and presumably this week's will too, thanks to the conventions and the live Daily Show pushing everything late one night. Don't know why this would also fuck up Comcast's On Demand versions of @midnight, but they did. Will Sasso wins a week of strong performances, but I want to give credit to Milana Vayntrub, who grew on me over the course of Friday's episode and helped make the whole thing better.


  1. Will Sasso (W)
  2. Dan St. Germaine (Th)
  3. April Richardson (Th)
  4. Chris D'elia (W)
  5. Ramon Revas (Th)
  6. Lauren Lapkis (T)
  7. Dave Holmes (T)
  8. Jon Heder (W)
  9. Matt Besser (T)
  10. Milana Vayntrub (F)
  11. Neil Casey (F)
  12. Paul Feig (F)


Friday's incredibly loosely defined "cast of" Ghostbusters episode was the weakest of the four by far, but all the others have things to recommend about them, and Friday's wasn't awful, especially in the second half.


  1. Thursday
  2. Wednesday
  3. Tuesday
  4. Friday

Saturday, July 23, 2016

Quantifying Awesome (Trailer Edition)





I mean, come on. How fucking awesome is this going to be? ALL THE AWESOME THERE IS.


Thursday, July 21, 2016

Oh, The Metahumanity! (Jul 17-19)


Finally got back to knocking out some Powers, and Preacher enters the home stretch. With luck I'll be able to finish both before the CW shows come back, but not so much before that I find myself watching Supergirl.

Weekly Wrasslin' Wroundup (July 18-20)


Big-ass week for the WWE. A big match on Raw, the announcement of general managers, the Draft on the first regular live Smackdown on Tuesday, more Cruiserweight Classic on Wednesday, and Battleground on Sunday.

Motherfuckin' Lucha Underground! (Ultima Lucha Dos, Part 3)





If you ever need to explain to anyone why Lucha Underground is glorious madness, the first half hour of Ultima Lucha Dos Part Three should do the trick. I couldn't find it on YouTube this morning, so you'll have to settle for Dario Cueto goodness.



Sunday, July 17, 2016

Weelkly Wrasslin' Wroundup (Jul 11-14)


Big-ass week for the WWE. A big match on Raw, the announcement of general managers, the Draft on the first regular live Smackdown on Tuesday, more Cruiserweight Classic on Wednesday, and Battleground on Sunday.

Oh, The Metahumanity! (One Episode Of Preacher Edition)Pre

Hard to believe we're coming up on the season finale of Preacher in just a couple of weeks. I'm very glad it got picked up for Season 2, because I'm excited to watch these actors and these characters actually on (hopefully) the mission from the comics, or a version of it.

Preacher: "He Gone" (5% Stupid)

Jesse Custer's chickens are starting to come home to roost. This episode is almost entirely Jesse finally coming to grips with the consequences of and limitations to The Voice, with Cassidy and Sheriff Root forcing him to confront the truth of what he did to Eugene, and Odin Quincannon seemingly serving a very different god than Jesse intended.

Which is the part that makes the least sense, because if he meant a different God in church, then his compelled conversion wouldn't be necessary. But that's a nitpick.

Cassidy also reveals his true nature to Jesse for real this week. It's unclear what happened out there, and whether Jesse actually put Cassidy out or not. I'm hoping the particularls of that interaction are revisited, because it's a little odd the way they left it.

Comic signifiers this week include the first mention of John Wayne and a slightly recast version of "until the end of the world" that I'm fine with. Sure, The Flash technically beat them to "grew up in the same house like brother and sister, fell in love" thing, even doing the colorblind casting of the girlfriend first, but the nice thing about this being Preacher is that the most creepy thing in all of The Flash would still be the least fucked up thing in all of Preacher, so it works.

Tonight, Jesse seems to be willing to sacrifice Genesis to get Euge back from Hell, which of course needs to go all weird and badly.

Wednesday, July 13, 2016

Motherfuckin' Lucha Underground! (Ultima Lucha Dos, Part Two)


NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Look, I'm not gonna talk about the vignettes until the whole thing is over because, well, it's super-spoilery and super-awesome and super-sad. But damn.

Monday, July 11, 2016

@jmidnight Power Rankings (July 5-7)

Short week this week, going into an off week while The Daily Show preps for the Republican convention,. The big winners this week were Riki Lindholm and Ron Funches, but there weren't any horrible performances over the three days.


  1. Riki Lindholme (Th)
  2. Ron Funches (W)
  3. Marcella Arguello (W)
  4. Thomas Lennon (Th)
  5. Natasha Leggero (Th)
  6. Matt Braunger (W)
  7. Emily Fleming (T)
  8. John Ross Bowie (T)
  9. Jay Mandyam (T)


If you must choose at this late date, watch the shows in reverse order and stop after two if you run out of time. Nothing wrong with Tuesday's episode, really, but it was just OK.


  1. Thursday
  2. Wednesday
  3. Tuesday

Friday, July 8, 2016

Weekly Wrasslin' Wroundup (July 4-8)




NXT did the heavy lifting this week, with the main roster still mostly treading water and wondering where they'll end up on July 19.

Oldnerd Wondersadness

Today, I had an OLDNERD moment that can only be described as wondersad. It's wonderful how sad it is and it's sad how wonderful it is.

Like damn near everyone else on the planet, judging by the server load, I'm messing with Pokemon Go, the geographically-relevant, augmented-reality-augmented Pokemon mobile game.

Wednesday, July 6, 2016

Motherfuckin' Lucha Underground! (Ultima Lucha Dos Part One)



So happy to be wrong about 4 A Unique Opportunity being about Cage.

Monthly Free Games (July 2016)


Accidentally lost this whole goddamned thing, so I'm re-creating it from memory. We'll see how it goes. Basically, it's a great month for fans of long, unskippable cutscenes and mechanics so deep as to be obtuse. LThe rest of you can play Gat Out Of Hell if you haven't already.

Sunday, July 3, 2016

Oh, The Metahumanity! (June 26-30)

I need to get back to Powers, but hey, Im done with Daredevil Season 2 with plenty of time to spare before Luke Cage!

Weekly Wrasslin' Wroundup (June 27-30)

Main Roster:

The post-MitB status quo in WWE continues, with no significant plot developments on any front this week. Cesaro and Rusev had a one-show interaction over the US Title, but Rusev's gonna be back to Titus O'Neil tomorrow, so I don't know where that's going.

Sami Zayn and Kevin Owens are supposed to be settling things "once and for all" at Battleground, which could mean they're going to settle things until they decide to restart the rivalry down the road, or the kind of "settling things" where it doesn't get settled at all and the feud keeps going.

The Miz is back, but in no significant way. The Wyats-New Day feud is only interesting because they're doing a fun little thing where Kofi and Big E are doing the usual New Day schtick making fun of the Wyatts, but Xavier Woods is scared of them. But I'm not sure how this feud can resolve in a way that benefits either team.

Otherwise, nothing new under the sun. At least we have some solid matches and some entertaining promos, but we're clearly killing time until the brand split in two weeks.

NXT:

NXT this week was mostly about the tag teams, with the rivalry between American Alpha and The Revival at the top of things, Alpha getting beaten up by the Authors of Pain as a side thing, and Gargano and Ciampa poking their heads into the top tier.

Something similar is happening in the women's division, with Alexa Bliss defeating Carmella this week and facing Bayley next week to see who gets the next shot at Asuka.

But where the fuck is Samoa Joe? This is the same thing NXT did with Finn Balor - the shows are all about who wants to be champion, but once someone becomes champion, they vanish from television. You would think Joe would be interested in Finn Balor and Shinsuke Nakamura, but nope. No Joe, no mention of Joe. It's weird.

Friday, July 1, 2016

@midnight Power Rankings (June 27-30)

Someone send the booker a fruit basket! Goddamn, that was the most consistently solid week. Standouts include a seemingly effortless performance by Jim Gaffigan, another killer outing from Nikki "Wipe It" Glaser, and Morgan Murphy, always a personal favorite, who knocked me dead with a reference to Desiigner's "Panda". But nobody did badly, and Brett Gelman would have been a top-half ranking most weeks.

  1. Jim Gaffigan (Th)
  2. Nikki Glaser (W)
  3. Morgan Murphy (Th)
  4. Greg Proops (M)
  5. Mike Phirman (M)
  6. Jim Jeffries (W)
  7. Robin Thiede (M)
  8. Jade Catta-Preta (T)
  9. Jensen Karp (T)
  10. Adam Goldberg (Th)
  11. Paul Scheer (T)
  12. Brett Gelman (W)

Don't skip. In fact, maybe track down the uncensored uncut Thursday ep online. I think I'm gonna do that.

  1. Wednesday
  2. Thursday
  3. Monday
  4. Tuesday

Bibuta Food Truck

Right off the top, just so you know, shoutout to Billy Tserenbat, of SushiFix and now Bibuta. This little throwback to Forkbastard is for him, because he was sad I wasn't doing the food stuff much anymore, which is both flattering and weird. 

I didn't know Bibuta was Billy's deal until I got to the front of the line. Some of you know I can't see for shit. What happened was, I'd walked past Bibuta last week after already getting food somewhere else, and thought, "Huh, sushi burritos. I've heard of those. I approve of the idea. I'll have to try that." 

And then today I try it and today I find it's run by responsible for easily one of the top three meals of my life. and the best sushi I've ever had. So, yah, I got me a sushi burrito.