Editor: You get that drawing of Char and the Azieru? Artist: Sure did boss, real fuckin sexy just like you asked. Editor: what

Speaking of making amends: here’s Favreau from Pod Save, probably the most vocal Platner defender I heard over the last year, on the day Mills dropped out (4/30) vs today. Not even a whiff of self-reflection for the gaslighting he knew full well was gaslighting just 8 weeks ago. Absurd behavior.

Got these new keycaps and oh my god they look so good. Didn't think they'd mesh with RGB but putting a little teal glow underneath makes them pop even more. Mechanical keyboards are fun.

Excited to share that Purely Academic and Japanimation Station will be celebrating July 4th by pledging our allegiance to the Land of Light, with an ULTRAMAN 60th anniversary episode where we discuss all the episodes by the franchise's greatest director, Jissōji Akio! Premiering this Saturday!!!

I was at a wedding today where I repeatedly introduced myself to people as “the groom’s sister’s husband’s brother,” so while Spaceballs is not my fave Brooks (that would be Frankenstein), this goody was on my brain all day:

Speak for yourself, I got Mamdani. I feel positively flattered. Look at that smile.

Heck of a ceasefire we’ve got here. What an amazing deal we made. Wow. Every moron who breathlessly reported on every fake agreement in this stupid fucking war is such a colossal rube I don’t know how they dress themselves in the morning. Boy who cried wolf but no one ever dares question the boy.

The commonality between MARIO KART WORLD and GTA VI being the only 2 games to broach $80 (so far) is that they’re both sequels to one of the 5 best-selling games in history. Makes me wonder if WITCHER 4 will be the next to break the seal, since it’s also in the top 10.

I collect animation storyboards - here's my shelf of Studio Ghibli collections - and one I think about a lot is Otsuka Yasuo's boards for Takahata's HORUS. It's just a blue pen on paper. Zero special equipment. You have those tools in your house right now. And they're utterly transfixing.

Naturally the JAWS exhibit also had a selection of those storyboards. Almost like a commonality of great movies worth giving museum exhibits is excellent, meticulous storyboarding.

They had a bunch of these for basically all his movies, including the original paper in some cases. Super cool to see. They also had a big screen playing side-by-side comparisons of the Parasite boards.

When I visited the Academy Museum in LA last month, they had a Bong Joon-ho exhibit, which included an entire room covered floor-to-ceiling in his storyboards for PARASITE. If you saw this and still thought "yeah, just let AI do that," you shouldn't be watching movies, let alone making them.

How it started / How it's going (These IGN articles were posted 12 days apart)

Part of this is they’ve seemingly set the whole film under cloudy, overcast skies. So you’re not getting any kind of dynamic natural lighting à la Raimi. But even if it’s a tonal thing - “Peter is sad” - you can do that and still have *some* color/tonality in the image, as in the end of SM1.

There are some shots in the BRAND NEW DAY trailer with a touch more warmth or dynamism, but it’s mostly doing the streaming TV thing of aggressive low-light + weak contrast where everything feels a little underexposed and very flat. I don’t see this and think “movie,” I think “HBO miniseries.”

The devil’s advocate excuse is probably “they’re trying to emphasize the red of the suit,” but I think it actually achieves the opposite (the overall gray makes the suit pop less). I mean look at how much stronger the suit reads against a variety of similarly industrial backgrounds in a Raimi film:

I’ve seen the new SPIDER-MAN trailer twice - on YouTube and on IMAX - and the amount the film’s color palette is just “80s USSR concrete parking lot” is genuinely depressing. The dominant color is “gray.” The drabness of it actually stood out even more to me on a properly calibrated laser IMAX.

To be clear she is still criminally adorable, just bigger and greyer. She turns 11 next month!

Post the best picture you have ever taken of your pet (if you feel like it) This is like the 3rd or 4th pic I ever took of Phoebe, 11 years ago, but it’s still crazy how criminally adorable she is here. Like this is her headshot to get a coveted puppy role in a big new movie.

An amazing historical coincidence I realized last night: When HOUSE OF THE DRAGON Season 3 premieres on Sunday, June 21st, it will mark the *exact* day when the wait for THE WINDS OF WINTER becomes as long as the distance between A GAME OF THRONES and A DANCE WITH DRAGONS (5,459 days). Holy shit

We’d be buying the soon-to-be-decommissioned Unicorn Gundam statue from Odaiba and replacing the Washington Monument with it. And then host a Gunpla building competition in the rose garden. And it would be a truly great day for our country.

Maybe my favorite gameplay moment in 007 FIRST LIGHT so far is when I was struggling with this melee fight so I decided to go full Jackie Chan/John Wick “break every fiber of glass you can find” and was rewarded handsomely for my efforts. This game fucking rules.

The previously announced DOCTOR WHO Christmas special has been cancelled. RTD is exiting the series, confirms no script was ever even written, and the BBC is putting the series out to “competitive tender” (shopping for new production partners). Oof. Oof oof oof. Oof.

Sharma correctly identifies the reason they can’t really do exclusives, but still goes back to this “becoming a platform” line. What are you talking about? Xbox has *always* been a platform. The issue is it’s become much less of a *viable* platform over the last 2 generations.

The business isn’t healthy enough to support exclusives, but we’re going to try some anyway, but we can’t do more until the business is healthy, which because it isn’t means exclusives don’t work. This is the kind of ouroboros logic you get when you base your business strategy on Twitter replies.

I keep a running list of games and release dates I'm interested in - with Not-E3 officially over, here's how it looks now. 2026 is one of the busiest years I've ever seen. Obviously I'll only get to a small fraction of these, but even then prioritizing is going to be difficult. Oof.

We recorded a Not-E3 2026 episode of PURELY ACADEMIC yesterday, just after the Xbox showcase, before we learned the Nintendo Direct was coming - so I'm releasing it a little early, tomorrow morning, before the Direct. Gotta keep things up to date! www.youtube.com/@purelyacade...

My favorite example of this is Nolan’s list of “demands” for Universal on OPPENHEIMER, which is just “a list of common sense things all studios should be doing for all tentpole movies.” It is the most “help me help you” move imaginable. No director should have to demand these things.

I did not know this and now I’m kinda obsessed with it. Where’s the Air Bud spin-off about his cousin who’s got a great nose and cares deeply about the sanctity of the democratic process? Ain’t no rule says a dog can’t safeguard our elections.