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I couldn't really get into Abercrombie's First Law trilogy. Think I got about halfway through Before They are Hanged before giving up.

Tbh, the only thing I liked about the books was Inquisitor Glokta, who's a really interesting and memorable character - I found all the other chapters - especially the ones about the fencing guy - fairly tedious.

How the character's written is less important to me than the stories writers tell. The modern Dredd adventures* I enjoy are essentially cop or cowboy action strips.

I posted something similar a while back on another thread. It's hard to really put my finger on - and maybe I'm off base here (as I say, I'm a little out of touch with recent stories), but my take is that some writers perhaps sometimes lose sight of the fact that Dredd strips tend to work best as variations on fairly simple tropes - ie 'Dredd is on the trail of a fugitive perp', 'a new craze sweeps MC1' etc.

Even when John Wagner was in the midst of a really dense, intricate mega-epic like Tour of Duty or The Pit, he'd always manage to elegantly wrap the continuity and world-building around otherwise self-contained police procedurals, and he's always had a real knack for writing propulsive episodic stories that never feel too 'plotty' or continuity-heavy. Does that make sense?

With the best Dredd stories, you can usually sum up their plot in a simple one-line synopsis, but with some of the bigger stories or plotlines by other writers that I've read in the past, I must confess I've sometimes felt a bit lost. I'm not sure I could really say what - for example - Trifecta was all about off the top of my head.

Personally, I thought the cameo in question was excruciating, and embarrassing for all involved.

Though I love GoT, since they started to diverge so drastically from the framework of the books* (around the end of season 4 by my reckoning) it's been a mixed bag. When it's bad, it's really bad - certain iconic book characters and scenes have been really sidelined and squandered imo, and certain plotlines have lost coherence and a sense of logic somewhat - but when it's good it's phenomenal (agree with the OP that, for example, anything with the Hound is generally superb).

*and I'm not so naive as to think a literal book-to-screen translation would be remotely possible. Though I've come round a lot on books 4 and 5 of the saga since rereading them, in many ways the show writers have done a very good job of taking two very unwieldy and arguably meandering tomes and curtailing/combining plotlines in a very skilled fashion.

I had no idea any of the soldiers were celebs - was there another one who's famous?

Not really, but one of them was played by Thomas Turgoose(?) - aka the instantly recognisable kid from This Is England.

[The Big Sick]

The Big Sick - semi-autobiographical rom com starring Kumail Nanjiani (Silicon Valley) and co-written by him and his wife Emily Gordon.

It's.... OK. Veered into mawkishness a little too much for my liking, and wasn't quite funny enough, despite some good lines here and there. I also don't think enough character work was to get the audience to invest in the two leads and their relationship.

Watchable enough, but certainly not the rehabilitation of the rom com genre it's been hyped up as in the reviews.

2.5/5

[did]

If I had to nitpick, something that slightly bugged me was that, for a period piece, the characters seemed to have very modern attitudes and speak in a very modern parlance at times - using words like 'fanboy' and 'fangirl' (which I personally never heard used before maybe 2005).

Although I'm certain it wasn't as common in the 1980's as it is now the term fanboy did exist then at least

Maybe, but as I say it was the whole way certain parts of dialogue was written - it just seemed to me to have a very modern sensibility about it - much more 2017 than 1985. For example characters quoting specific lines or moments from films etc like they're in a Kevin Smith movie - it just doesn't really ring true as something that happened in a pre ubiquitous home video, pre-internet world. These characters would have been born in the 1950s and 1960s, but seemed at times to be scripted more like Millennials. As I say, not sure whether this was a deliberate concession to modern audiences or not.

I'm very much in the same boat as the OP - my interest has certainly dropped off a lot since the high watermark of 2012, with the Dredd movie coming out, Dante and Day of Chaos ending and Wagner subsequently stopping writing much Dredd. Tbh those were the major things that anchored me to the prog. I tend to just pick up individual issues or graphic novels digitally that pique my interest nowadays.

I also, frankly, just don't read many comics at all nowadays. Since I moved to the US 3+ years ago my lifestyle has changed so much, and my interests and hobbies with it.

Having said all of that, I'll always love 2000ad, and my interest in it has always peaked and waned over the last 22 years, so I'm sure that one day I'll be fully back on board.

GLOW is great! The first show in a long time where Bea and I have burned through a couple of episodes a night. Have no previous experience of Mark Maron or Alison Brie, but they're absolutely brilliant in it, and the rest of the cast do a great job too. Witty and funny, but can hit you right in the emotions at times. Characters I liked immediately I went onto love, and even characters I was worried would grate over a season I ended up pretty attached to.

Believe it or not, Maron has no previous acting experience other than playing himself in his own comedy series for a few years. I was already predisposed to like him as I'm a huge fan of his WTF podcast - I've found him grating in the past, but he seems to have mellowed a lot in recent years as he's found success in his career. His recent hatchet-burying interview with Kumail Nanjiani and Emily Gordon was especially heartwarming.

Alison Brie is amazing - I don't know if you've seen Mad Men, but you may or may not recognise her as Pete Campbell's wife Trudy, and she also played Annie in Community. GLOW is one step closer to getting my girlfriend to finally give Community another chance - I've been going on about how great the Community cast was for years, and she now loves half the cast members from their subsequent projects (Donald Glover in Atlanta, Gillian Jacobs in Love and now Brie in GLOW).

It seems to have awoken our childhood love of wrestling too, just after we watched the last episode we took a free trial of WWE Network, threw on an old Royal Rumble and were whooping at the TV cheering on our old favourites like kids again. Felt good. It seems to have awoken our childhood love of wrestling too, just after we watched the last episode we took a free trial of WWE Network, threw on an old Royal Rumble and were whooping at the TV cheering on our old favourites like kids again. Felt good.

I've never liked wrestling, but even I appreciated how respectful the show is of the form. It felt like the writers and actors had really done their research, and it never felt like they were mocking or belittling it.

Had no idea initially that it was a true story, but there's a doc on Netflix about the original tv show, which I'm not keen to watch yet in case it spoils any of the show's arcs.

I'm assuming that the premise of GLOW will be 'based on a true story' in the same way that OITNB is - ie that they take the basic premise of real events, but then quickly spin it off into 100% fiction from there.

If I had to nitpick, something that slightly bugged me was that, for a period piece, the characters seemed to have very modern attitudes and speak in a very modern parlance at times - using words like 'fanboy' and 'fangirl' (which I personally never heard used before maybe 2005). Also, there was quite a bit of characters being very pop culture aware, making geeky references to stuff in a way that, to my mind, wasn't really very common until the late nineties. It kind of broke the illusion of the period setting a bit, which they had put a lot of work into elsewhere in the production. There were a fair few examples of this, and I couldn't tell if the writers did this deliberately or not.

It gets better as it goes. We just finished the last ep and trust me - it'll leave a huge smile on your face. My girlfriend was literally whooping and cheering.

What a cast - everyone in it is great, but Maron steals the show - perfect casting.

Another smash from Netflix.

[GLOW]

GLOW on Netflix - 1980s-set comedy drama about female wrestling starring Alison Brie (Community) and Marc Maron, from the makers of Orange is the New Black.

As with OITNB, it's a little goofy but extremely watchable and very well-made. Good stuff!

I feel very conflicted about Preacher, and still haven't finished season 1 yet...

I thought it started very strong and I really want it to be good - I love the cast and there are flashes of demented brilliance throughout, but.... to say it's first season was 'uneven' is putting it mildly.

I'm prepared to give season 2 a chance. The trailers look pretty amazing.

Not many kids would agree with us that "repetition and pattern learning" really sound like much fun.

What is Call of Duty if not repetitive?

Broadly, I agree - I think retrogaming is mostly about nostalgia. I think the vast majority of old games don't hold up. But I also think - as with movies - there are a handful of titles that are genuinely timeless - and a good deal of them are in this 21 game bundle.

You won't find many Metroid fans who rank any of the subsequent 2D games above Super Metroid. I personally think there hasn't been a 2D Mario title since Super Mario World that can hold a candle to it. I like some films that I know objectively are not well made purely because of how much I loved them when I was a kid. Plenty of games too. And I think I'm perfectly capable of discerning how much nostalgia is playing a part in my enjoyment of them and how much is down to clever design and brilliant art direction.

If this stuff would still sell then they would just re package it.

Which they do. Constantly. Especially Nintendo, who understand the quality of their back catalogue. As a counter to your example, a colleague of mine is currently playing through Super Metroid and loving it. He had barely been born when it was released and has no nostalgia for the 16 bit era.

Kirby is one of my Nintendo blindspots - never really played any of them.

There's an extra level of complication for me trying to get one, as I'm based in the US but ideally want a UK model, the US SNES being the bizarrely ugly, boxy, mauve monstrosity that it is.

I suspect it to some extent depends on your era, though, and how likely someone is to allow for creaky visuals. Robotron, for example, remains one of the very best twin-stick shooters, but it looks basic and is hard and nails. Would it appeal to that many people who weren't there at the time? And the same's probably true of quite a lot of SNES fare.

The platformers, though, tend to have a kind of timeless quality about them, as, to some extent, do the RPGs. I can't imagine that many kids having a lot of fun with F-Zero, though, despite how ground-breaking it was at the time.

To some extent, yes, but I still maintain that games reached a much higher level of sophistication in the SNES era, and hold up far better as a result. I think a large part of that is the wider implementation of the battery backup, which allowed proper saving (rather than having to type in passwords), which allowed for games that were much richer home console experiences and less arcadey and trial and error by design. Definitely agree on platformers and RPGs having aged the best, though - can't imagine anyone having much fun with something like Star Fox coming to it fresh nowadays.

On your example of F Zero, tbh I always found it quite basic even at the time. It was essentially a proof of concept for (the far superior) Mario Kart, in any case, whereas I totally have seen my young relatives playing and enjoying stuff like Super Mario World. And there's a solid case for A Link to the Past being the pinnacle of the Zelda series - it's not just fueled by nostalgia.

Still not sure why these retro minis generate so much excitement, you can set up a Retropie with a SNES controller for next to nothing and stick as many SNES games as you want on it. 

Imo it's because emulators just don't offer the same experience. For one thing, the controllers on this thing will be authentic and perfect, not some cheap knock-off. Also, every emulator I've ever used has been glitchy as hell, with sudden crashes, inconsistent frame rates, input lag, graphical and audio bugs etc (especially running the likes of Star Fox, Mario Kart and Yoshi's Island). They also tend to have universally ugly, and poorly designed UIs. I've always had to juggle between various emus to see which runs which game better. There's a lot to be said for having everything in a neat, streamlined and beautifully presented package and a smooth, polished UI experience, not to mention the aesthetic, tactile appeal of the unit itself.

The nostalgia of old games machines is always more appealing than actually playing the games.

The SNES is my most fondly remembered games machine, and I instantly want to buy this DESPITE still owning my old snes and all of the games that are on this. Besides that I have a great snes emulator on my pc with every snes game ever released.

The reality however is that I put something like secret of mana on (one of my favourite games) or chrono trigger, play it for abot 15 minutes, then go back to something like PS4 Skyrim, or Fallout, or Doom, or Tomb Raider.  I loved F Zero and played it for hours and hours, but it doesn't exactly stand up by today's standards.

The games that fare the best are the platform games. Those games can still play as well today (super ghouls is great) or the side scrolling shooters (super probotector). But they can be fiendishly difficult and very frustrating. Over the last couple of decades games have become almost childishly easy in comparison to snes games.

Anyway, nostalgia, it's not what it used to be.

I'm with you up to a point, and that point is the 16 bit era. Even the NES - probably the most universally beloved console ever made - to my mind only has a handful of titles that hold up today (Mario 3, basically). Without the rose-tinted spectacles (I never owned a NES), even apparently iconic games like Mega Man 2, Duck Tales and the original Zelda I personally find pretty much tedious and unplayable now.

I think the SNES is a different beast though. Just look at the lineup of titles for this thing; Mega Man X, A Link to the Past, Super Mario World, Final Fantasy III (VI), Street Fighter II Turbo, Super Metroid, Contra III (Super Probotector), Yoshi's Island...

These are phenomenal games by any standard. And it's not just nostalgia saying this - for example, I've only really properly played Super Metroid, Mega Man X and Yoshi's Island in the last five years and they hold up superbly. Imo, these games offer a much deeper and more satisfying experience than anything on the NES (which I would argue offers more of an occasional five minute blast of nostalgia).