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  • Mattel, Hasbro Could Win As Toy Retailers Scramble to Stock Up for Holiday

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    Mattel, Hasbro Could Win As Toy Retailers Scramble to Stock Up for Holiday

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  • A Dominican Legend Known for Her Fried Chicken Rises Once More

    A Dominican Legend Known for Her Fried Chicken Rises Once More

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    At around noon on a Friday, chef and owner Miriam Montes de Oca hurried out of her restaurant, Morena’s Kitchen, and headed to Rush Medical Center. Her 26-year-old daughter, Tatiana, was giving birth to Montes de Oca’s second granddaughter, Hailey. “I ran to the hospital because Tatiana was supposed to have the baby quickly, but [Hailey] didn’t come until the next day at 8 o’clock in the morning,” she says.

    Hailey’s arrival coincided with the revival of Morena’s, as Montes de Oca had recently reopened the restaurant at a new location, 3758 W. North Avenue in Humboldt Park. She shut down the original restaurant — located about three miles west in Belmont Cragin at 5054 W. Armitage Avenue — three years ago.

    Welcoming a new granddaughter while restarting her business has been a whirlwind for Montes de Oca, but she’s enjoying the journey. Before the closure, for five years, Morena’s Kitchen served Dominican staples like sancocho, oxtail, and red snapper — and Montes de Oca’s famous Dominican fried chicken.

    Holding a piece of fried chicken.

    The chicken is legendary.

    The spice blend for that chicken hasn’t changed, and Montes de Oca guards the recipe with absolute secrecy. Diners can also taste that it’s been cleaned in the Caribbean way, with citrus or vinegar. Heated online debates over whether you should wash meat — the CDC says no, almost everyone with melanin says yes — fail to realize that most Caribbean, Asian, and African meat-washing techniques serve mainly as a brine to remove the gamy taste meat can often have, giving the dish a clarity of flavor, which Morena’s chicken — and their oxtail and lengua — have. “That fried chicken can’t go nowhere,” Montes de Oca laughs. “People love it the most.”

    Montes de Oca closed her restaurant in January 2021 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. “It was a hard time. There was not enough money coming in, so I preferred to close down before it was too late for me,” she says.

    A woman warming tortillas on a black flattop.

    Miriam Montes de Oca cooking in her new kitchen.

    Miriam Montes de Oca smiles while cooking in a kitchen using a pan on a gas range.

    Miriam Montes de Oca puts a plate of food on a steel case.

    She took a job with United Airlines at O’Hare International Airport to pay bills. With the extra time not running a restaurant, she was able to help Tatiana with her 2-year-old daughter, Catalina. Free airplane tickets also allowed Montes de Oca to go back to the Dominican Republic three to four times a year after not having been home for nearly two decades. “I was without my country for 16 years,” she says. “And when I closed the restaurant, I went back and I fell in love with my country again.”

    Montes de Oca got the opportunity to reopen Morena’s when Vladimir Rodriguez, the owner of a Mexican bar and restaurant called La Leña, found he could no longer handle the expenses. He offered the restaurant space to Montes de Oca, and she didn’t hesitate. Rodriguez kept the bar half of the space, connected to Morena’s through a sliding door that’s usually open with customers easily moving through both businesses. The partnership has been good. “We work together,” Montes de Oca says. “The clients that drink over there, they ask for my food. And when people finish eating here, they say, ‘Oh you got a bar next door?’ and I tell them to go ahead and take a look.”

    Still, when customers search Morena’s by name online, the old location still pops up instead of the new North Avenue location and La Leña comes up when searching by address. “I need to change it,” Montes de Oca says. “Everybody is confused. They ask me, ‘Are you La Leña’s, are you Morena’s? Are you Mexican, are you Dominican?’”

    A shrimp cocktail, a bottle of red soda, rice, and more on square plates on a table.

    Seafood and other Dominican specialties are available.

    The best way to find the address, hours, and special announcements is through Facebook and Instagram — Morena’s regulars will find the menu unchanged, with a notable new section. Although firmly a Dominican restaurant, Montes de Oca retained some Mexican holdovers from La Leña’s menu like tortas, tacos, burritos, and chilaquiles. She notes that keeping the items helps La Leña’s old diners with the transition, but they also sell extremely well because she offers less commonly served meats like tripe and lengua.

    Business has been good overall, with some ebbs and flows, Montes de Oca says. “To be out of the business for almost three years? I can’t complain.”

    Many of Morena’s customers have transitioned to the new location seamlessly, either through word of mouth, Facebook posts, or walking by and doing a double take when they see the old sign. “Three days ago, one customer came and said ‘More, I thought somebody stole your name!’ I was like, ‘No, it’s me, I’m here. I’m back in business.’”

    On weekends, Montes de Oca serves Dominican dishes like chivo guisado and rabo guisado (Dominican-style braised goat and oxtail). It can be hard to source specifically Dominican ingredients — especially Dominican oregano, which has a stronger flavor — but Montes de Oca gets many ingredients from a Dominican Chicagoan who brings it back from trips to New York. The restaurant also stocks traditional Dominican sodas, like the brand Country Club, in addition to more familiar brands like Mexican Jarritos.

    Other options included mondongo, or tripe stew, and sancocho, a Latin American meat and vegetable stew widely thought to have roots in the Afro Latino community, whose ancestors were forcibly brought to the Caribbean, South and Central America by Spanish enslavers. Montes de Oca is Afro Latina, hence the name of the restaurant and Montes de Oca’s nickname, More. Morena means “dark-skinned” in Spanish, often referring to Latinas of African descent. As for the nickname, Montes de Oca says it’s a positive thing, although many people ask whether it bothers her. “I say no. It’s sweet, not the bad way. And it’s true. I am Morena, and it’s my nickname in the Dominican Republic, too.”

    Cooked shrimp stuffed in a veggie.

    One of the more distinctive Dominican staples available at the restaurant every day are los tres golpes, meaning “the three hits” in Dominican Spanish — fried Dominican salami, fried eggs, and some fried cheese. Montes de Oca eats it with mangú, a cousin of Puerto Rican mofongo made from boiled plantain that she squishes like mashed potatoes.

    Montes de Oca tops tres golpes with a savory onion gravy cooked in oil and vinegar. The rotisserie chicken — which fans of Peruvian pollo a la brasa will find familiar. Served with plain white rice, it’s her oldest granddaughter Catalina’s favorite meal.

    Morena’s presence on the Chicago food scene is a relief for Dominicans in the city and surrounding suburbs since there isn’t much Dominican — or Caribbean — food in Chicago. Puerto Rican restaurants abound due to the large community here, but if you’re of Virgin Islander and Trinidadian descent like me, Guyanese, Bahamian, Haitian, or Dominican, the options get fewer and fewer. The Caribbean still maintains a presence on the dining scene in Chicago; Cafe Trinidad, 14 Parish, and Garifuna Flava are all great places.

    Montes de Oca says one of her customers recently came in and excitedly told her about a Haitian restaurant near O’Hare, called Kizin Creole. “I told him, ‘For real, they got Haitian food?’ And I want to go try it because when I’m not here, I want to try something different. I like to go out with my kids and eat different foods and support other businesses because right now we need to help each other.”

    A seafood cocktail with shrimp and octopus tendrils.

    Chicago lacks the abundance of choice diners might find in cities like New York, Miami, or Toronto, where clusters of Caribbean restaurants are within walking distance of each other. Montes de Oca says she would love for the options to diversify for Caribbean diners in Chicago and fans of our food, and she sees herself as part of that push.

    Montes de Oca, who has lived in Chicago for 27 years, says she sees that changing in the coming years as New York, home to one of the country’s biggest Dominican communities, gets increasingly expensive. “Lots of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans are coming [to Chicago] from New York now. I have family in who are like ‘I can’t afford the city anymore, I’ve got to go.’”

    Even though the Dominican community here in Chicago is small, Montes de Oca says they find a home with many of the Puerto Ricans in the city, both being from Spanish-speaking Caribbean countries, with African, Indigenous, and European influences, as well as other bursts of migration from South and East Asia and the Middle East. “We’re brothers and sisters. We eat the same thing with different names,” Montes de Oca says. For example, she’s happy to make jibaritos — a sandwich of meat in between huge slices of smashed and fried plantains — for her Puerto Rican customers, who represent a large portion of her customer base. Jibaritos are one of those Chicago staples that have become famous because of the Puerto Rican community here. But, it’s also a Dominican food — Montes de Oca says they call it patacón.

    A fried fish on a plated with salad and fried plantains.

    Whole-fried fish.

    Roasted chicken topped with red onion and red peppers, with a mound of rice and salad.

    There’s more than fried chicken.

    In some ways, Montes de Oca feels her new location is a seamless transition. In other ways, she feels like she’s starting over from scratch. Food costs were a particular shock, and she’s learning how to deal with inflation.

    “When I went to the grocery store [three years ago], my plantain was like $35. Now it’s $47,” she says. “My oil was $19. Now it’s $30.”

    Morena’s stays open much longer — until midnight most days, and 1 a.m. on Friday and Saturday — than most restaurants in the city. That’s despite restaurants rolling back hours during the pandemic due to labor and decreased business. At Morena’s, the longer hours are also an attempt to enliven the Caribbean dining scene here in Chicago.

    Chicago’s restrictions don’t support street or late-night food culture, between infrastructure that’s hostile to walkers and those who take public transit, cultural differences that encourage fast eating, and lowered profits coupled with rising food costs. But Montes de Oca is giving it a go.

    “I need to make this happen, and my people are happy with that because they say, after 7 o’clock, you don’t find any Caribbean food open,” she says. “You can’t find food from us.”

    Morena’s Kitchen, 3758 W. North Avenue

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  • The Definitive Ranking of Clowns

    The Definitive Ranking of Clowns

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    Here at The Ringer, Megan Schuster and I have spent years ranking things like movie monsters, sharks, and dinosaurs, all of which have a reputation for terrifying people. But we’ve never had a task as daunting as putting together a list of what are arguably the single-scariest figures in pop culture: clowns.

    In real life, clowns are meant to entertain children at birthday parties and circuses —to spread joy with laughter. In pop culture, however, clowns are primarily depicted as nefarious figures who torment and kill people. In fact, the biggest challenge while coming up with this ranking was trying to find good pop culture clowns. (Spoiler alert: It was slim pickings out there.) No wonder as much as 42 percent of Americans have at least a minor case of coulrophobia.

    Unfortunately, this ranking will not help the public perception of clowns as nightmare fuel—this exercise even led to many sleepless nights for your intrepid bloggers. (Clown-related trauma will be brought up at my next performance review.) Before we get to the ranking, a quick overview of the criteria: We capped the list at 30 entries, and if there were multiple interpretations of a character, they’d be roped together—also known as the Joker Clause.

    All right, Megan, time to send in the clowns. —Miles Surrey

    30. John Wayne Gacy

    Surrey: In the many years Megan and I have been doing these rankings, there’s never been an easier call to make for last place. One of America’s most notorious serial killers, John Wayne Gacy was responsible for 33 confirmed murders around Chicago, where he also performed at children’s parties as Pogo the Clown. (Remind me to never hire a clown for my nephew’s future birthdays.) Gacy’s atrocities have been covered in docuseries (Conversations With a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes) and film adaptations (Gacy), and there’s no escaping the fact that one of the reasons he’s received a ton of media attention is because he moonlighted as, of all things, a clown. Professional clowns already have to deal with bad PR from all the sinister characters in fiction; Gacy turned those fears into a terrifying reality.

    Schuster: The first time we’ve ever had a serial killer in these rankings—what a massive, horrible milestone.

    29. Happy Slappy, Air Bud

    Schuster: Happy Slappy’s real name (at least in the Air Bud–verse) is Norman Snively, and let me just say, the movie’s writers couldn’t have come up with a more appropriate moniker. Norman is a sniveling, creepy man who’s abusive to his dog, cruel to children, and all around a pretty terrible clown. He’s Buddy the golden retriever’s first owner, but after the dog embarrasses him at a children’s birthday party, Norman tries to drop him off at the pound. Snively only tries to get Buddy back once the dog has achieved local TV stardom for his play on the basketball court.

    Fortunately for all involved, Buddy winds up staying with Josh and his family; Norman is arrested; and, god willing, no one ever has to see the clown ever again. Though I admit I’ll continue to think about this thread from Norman’s Disney wiki page, in which someone earnestly asks, “If Norman hates being a clown, why can’t he just quit the job and find something else to do?”

    Surrey: This is the problem with getting a bachelor’s degree from a clown college.

    28. Jangles the Clown, Inside Out

    Surrey: A child’s mind is a place like no other, which Inside Out conceptualizes as a trippy workplace where different emotions take turns running the show. When Joy and Sadness enter a chamber containing the darkest fears of 11-year-old Riley, they encounter tree-sized stalks of broccoli and—gasp!—grandma’s vacuum cleaner. But the scariest sight of all is Jangles, a clown who traumatized Riley at her third birthday party and has been reimagined as a hulking, kooky monster. Jangles is the perfect embodiment of an irrational childhood fear, and in true Pixar fashion, he’s also got a wagon:

    Disney/Pixar

    Don’t shoot the messenger—I’m just calling it like it is!

    Schuster: Pixar, and Ross and Rachel’s kid in Friends: all about the ass.

    27. Binky the Clown, Garfield

    Schuster: In the Garfield comic extended universe, Binky the Clown is known for being loud and obnoxious and for having possibly the worst timing ever. In fact, in the show Garfield and Friends, Binky has a segment titled “Screaming With Binky,” in which his sole purpose is to disrupt situations that require precise movement or masterful concentration by screaming his signature catchphrase, “Hey kids!”

    Binky isn’t a particularly substantive character in either the original comic or the TV show—he’s more of a running bit, à la Itchy and Scratchy in The Simpsons. (Jon could be seen drinking out of a Binky the Clown mug at times, and Garfield once competed in a game show called “Name That Fish” that Binky hosted. Sidenote: how is “Name That Fish” not already a network show?) But Binky frequently serves as a comedic foil to Garfield, which is enough to get him on the list.

    26. Doink the Clown, WWF

    Schuster: Doink the Clown went through a number of iterations during his time in the World Wrestling Federation (now WWE). He was originally played by Matt Borne as a technically proficient heel—a sad-clown character who squirted children with fake flowers, attacked opponents with prosthetic limbs, and used tripwire in some of his many pranks. But over time Doink went through an evolution, and in later years he could be seen showing a kinder side: making children smile and teaming up with a miniature version of himself named Dink to battle WWE’s infamous villains.

    Sadly, though, after Matt Borne’s death in 2013, his family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against WWE claiming that the culture of the sport led Borne to suffer “illnesses and injuries, including depression and drug abuse, which ultimately resulted in his untimely death.” The lawsuit was eventually dismissed in a U.S. district court, and Doink is only sporadically portrayed these days by other wrestlers on the independent circuit.

    25. Captain Spaulding, Rob Zombie’s Filmography

    Surrey: There are two things you need to know about Rob Zombie movies: He will put his wife in every single one of them, and they’re gonna feature some seriously fucked-up characters. One such figure is Captain Spaulding, the proprietor of a dinky gas station and roadside attraction who first appears in House of 1000 Corpses. Named after a Groucho Marx character and played by the late Sid Haig, Spaulding is, in Zombie’s own words, a “lovable asshole,” which is, uh, certainly one way to describe a sadistic killer caked in clown makeup. To quote a gas station robber moments before Spaulding blows his head off: “I hate clowns.” Hard agree.

    24. Loonette, The Big Comfy Couch

    Schuster: Millennials, this blurb is for you. If you, like me, were a child and a PBS viewer in the mid-’90s, then you may remember The Big Comfy Couch and, more specifically, the clown (Loonette) and her doll (Molly) who hosted it. Now, I’ll admit that I’m fuzzy on many of the show’s finer details—was it just … about a couch that was comfy? Why did a clown need to host it? And what was the deal with said clown’s Wicked Witch of the East stockings?—but I will always vividly remember trying to re-create Loonette’s clock stretch on the floor of my living room. (Spoiler alert: It never went well. And yes, I did try it again just before writing this.)

    23. Circus Clowns From Dumbo

    Schuster: It’s wild how many clowns on this list are cruel to animals. The clowns in Dumbo, for example, are largely silent creatures, but they humiliate Dumbo during a circus performance in which a clown dresses like Dumbo’s mother and encourages the elephant to jump out a window. Dumbo is hesitant at first, but another clown comes up from behind him and smacks him with a plank, forcing him to fall into a tub of random goop.

    Dumbo eventually gets one over on the clowns in the end by flying and sending their whole routine into chaos—serves you right, jerks!—but this crew gives circus performers a bad name.

    22. “Crazy” Joe Davola, Seinfeld

    Surrey: Seinfeld is many things; scary isn’t one of them. But the six-episode arc of “Crazy” Joe Davola, an unhinged writer who blames Jerry for his script being rejected by NBC, feels like something out of Mindhunter. When Elaine unwittingly dates Joe and visits his apartment, she discovers an entire wall of photos he’s taken of her—including when she’s showered. (Unsurprisingly, Elaine pepper-sprays Joe and gets the hell out of there.) Later, Joe dresses up as Pagliacci, beats the crap out of some hooligans in Central Park, and reminds Kramer of his childhood fear of clowns. For a network sitcom, it’s genuinely freaky stuff. This is what my sleep paralysis demon would look like if I turned on the lights:

    Castle Rock Entertainment

    21. Flunky the Clown, Late Night With David Letterman

    Schuster: Flunky was a depressed, chain-smoking clown who first showed up on Late Night With David Letterman in 1985 to help Dave answer viewer letters. In his original appearance, the clown is described as the “flunkie who actually reads these letters for Dave”—only for viewers to be introduced to a literal clown backstage played by longtime Letterman writer Jeff Martin. In the letter, Dave is asked whether the author (who also goes by Jeff!) should go to Europe for the summer. Flunky responds: “Yeah, I got some advice. Don’t go to Europe, Jeff, stay in school or you’ll wind up like me, a pathetic old clown reading somebody else’s mail.”

    Good advice for us all!

    20. Laughing Clown From Happy Gilmore

    Schuster: Deep into the greatest movie of all time, a.k.a. Happy Gilmore, our titular protagonist is struggling with his short game. Who among us can relate? So Happy’s intrepid golf coach, Chubbs Peterson, takes him to Happy Land, a miniature golf spot that looks cute and fun on the outside but is actually filled with impossible holes designed to break your will to live. There, Happy knocks a ball over a fence, breaks various signage, and disappoints Lee Trevino. And that’s all before he squares off against The Clown.

    I’d like to think all of us have been personally victimized by a mini golf hole at one point or another in our lives. But more than 20 years after seeing this movie for the first time, I’m still haunted by this clown’s laugh.

    Honestly, “You’re gonna die, clown!” is probably the nicest thing Happy could have said in that moment.

    Surrey: I have a clown question, bro: How do you even get past this hole? Happy was putting perfectly and the clown kept closing its mouth on the ball. I’m all for obstacles, but this clown ruined the sanctity of one of America’s great pastimes.

    19. Jack, Jack in the Box fast food chain

    Surrey: I had no idea a fast food mascot could have fascinating lore, but the titular Jack of Jack in the Box has been through it. In the ’80s, Jack’s clown head was blown up in a commercial in which a sweet old lady shouts “Waste him!” in a truly deranged bit of marketing. (Considering the decade, I can only assume ad executives everywhere were tripped out on certain … substances.) However, when Jack in the Box’s reputation took a hit from an E. coli outbreak in the ’90s, Jack was rebranded as the “CEO” of the company and sought revenge against those who’d wronged him. Jack walked so Heath Ledger’s Joker could run:


    I’m not sure committing domestic terrorism is a great way to promote fast food, but I’m invested all the same. Megan, just imagine what Jack would do to his employees if they unionized.

    Schuster: I like that the rebrand is supposed to make him seem more competent, and then in the end the suit just makes him look like a knockoff Patrick Bateman. Oh, to be a fly on the wall of that ad agency.

    18. Homey D. Clown, In Living Color

    Schuster: Homey D. Clown was an incredible invention from In Living Color. The character, played by Damon Wayans from 1990 to 1994, is on a prison work release program where he is forced to clown for children—all while getting his thoughts out about “Whitey” and The Man. Rather than my trying to explain the full magic of Homey, I think we’d be better served by reading and hearing a collection of some of his best quotes.

    Obviously there’s his signature catch phrase: “Homey don’t play that.” But there’s so much more. During a birthday party episode hosted at “Home E. Cheese,” Homey welcomes the group to a place “where a kid can be a kid—unless he gets on my damn nerves.” Then there’s the time he stars in a commercial for “Homey Wheats” cereal: “So remember, little childrens, do what The Man says: Go out and buy yourself a box of new Homey Wheats, the only cereal made from cookies, marshmallows, sugar cubes, and other nutritional pieces of candy.” And finally, there’s the episode where he’s reunited with his son, Homey Jr., and sings him this lullaby:

    17. Twisty the Clown, American Horror Story: Freak Show

    Surrey: I was already conditioned to be freaked out by John Carroll Lynch thanks to Zodiac, where he played the man suspected—but never proved—to be the infamous serial killer. But then Ryan Murphy cast Lynch on American Horror Story and had him looking like this:

    FX

    Even in a ranking consisting (mostly) of clowns that’ll keep you up at night, Twisty’s appearance is no laughing matter.

    16. Sweet Tooth, Twisted Metal

    Surrey: There are a lot of unsavory characters you’d want to avoid in the postapocalyptic wasteland of Peacock’s Twisted Metal, but Sweet Tooth takes the cake. With a clown mask, the body of professional wrestler Samoa Joe, and the disarming voice of Will Arnett, Sweet Tooth is nothing if not unique: a chaos agent who gleefully kills people as often as he invites them to attend his one-man show in the ruins of Las Vegas. (True to his name, Sweet Tooth also drives an ice cream truck.) For what it’s worth, if we put together a Royal Rumble and threw all the pop culture clowns into the ring, my money’s on this guy.


    15. Fizbo, Modern Family

    Schuster: One of the best scenes of Modern Family is the introduction to Fizbo. It’s midway through Season 1: Luke is having a birthday party, and Cameron oh so innocently asks whether a clown will be performing.

    Cam’s told that no, there won’t be that kind of entertainment at the party. And Mitchell begs Cam to let it go, saying that if Luke wanted a clown, his parents would have already hired one. But as Cam stares at himself in the mirror and gets ready to celebrate his nephew’s big day, he can’t help himself. He whips out the makeup, puts on a red nose, and says, “Hello, old friend.” Enter Fizbo, the attention-seeking clown.

    From there, things take a twist. Fizbo threatens a man who was rude to Mitchell at a gas station; unintentionally terrorizes Phil, Luke’s dad, who has a previously undisclosed fear of clowns; and eventually saves the day via a cake delivery to the hospital where Luke ends up due to a rogue escaped scorpion. Fizbo may not have been properly appreciated in his time, but we support him—one of the actually nice, benevolent clowns on this list.

    14. Clown Doll, Poltergeist

    Surrey: Before malevolent spirits attack the Freeling family in Poltergeist, viewers will notice a clown doll kept in the children’s bedroom. This is its face:

    MGM Studios

    You don’t need to be a horror movie expert to understand that this thing is bad news, and sure enough, the possessed doll ends up attacking little Robbie Freeling. (The clown’s cheery smile also turns into an evil grin, which absolutely traumatized me as a child.) In fact, the image of Poltergeist’s sinister clown is so iconic that the 2015 remake led with it in the promotional material. One could say Poltergeist’s marketing wasn’t … clowning around. Sorry, I’ll see myself out.

    Schuster: How dare you, Miles; we all know clowns aren’t things to jest about.

    13. Buggy the Clown, One Piece

    Surrey: In the fantastical world of One Piece, the popular pirate manga recently adapted into a live-action series on Netflix, there are “devil fruits” that, if ingested, give someone special abilities. The show’s protagonist, aspiring pirate king Monkey D. Luffy, can stretch his body à la Mr. Fantastic; meanwhile, one of the first villains introduced in the series, Buggy the Clown, is able to split his body into pieces. (Like all the major characters in One Piece, Buggy is a pirate … who just so happens to dress like a clown.) As you’d expect, having Luffy and Buggy square off using their respective powers—one guy stretching like a giant stick of gum, the other intentionally turning himself into sashimi—makes for cartoonishly entertaining television. A favorite of One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda, Buggy captures the series’ offbeat tone in a nutshell: a little bit goofy, a little bit disturbing, and unlike anything you’ve seen before.

    12. Zeebo the Clown, Are You Afraid of the Dark?

    Schuster: This may be a good place to explicitly disclose that I am a journalist and have a massive phobia of clowns. (A conflict of interest, you say? Too bad!) Zeebo the Clown is a big reason why. I mean, LOOK AT THIS:

    Nickelodeon Productions

    Not only is he a terrifying figure, but he also had the crypto-bro eyes before that was even a thing. Hardest possible pass.

    Surrey: It happened to me: I’ve laid my eyes on Zeebo, and now I’m afraid of the dark.

    11. Pagliacci

    Schuster: The Pagliacci meme has been around for decades—and its roots can be traced back to the 1800s. For those unfamiliar, the meme stems from the story of a man who goes to see a doctor because he’s depressed. The doctor’s suggested treatment? “The great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him! That should sort you out.” The man then bursts into tears and responds: “But doctor, I am Pagliacci.”

    The story was referenced by a number of comedians after Robin Williams’s death in 2014. But the meme took on a life of its own in 2022—to the point that Wired wrote a detailed story about it. Over time, the meme has spawned many new iterations on social media. For example:

    MAN: I’m depressed

    DOCTOR: ok we can try lexapro

    MAN: hmm I was hoping more for like a clown recommendation?

    Another one says: “Man goes to see Pagliacci, goes backstage. Tells Pagliacci he thought the show would cheer him up, but he’s still depressed. Pagliacci says, ‘Oh well I’m just a silly clown. Shouldn’t you go see a real doctor?’ Man bursts into tears. Says, ‘But Pagliacci,”

    The meme isn’t quite as prevalent today, but for nearly a decade, the sad clown was an important internet reference point.

    Surrey: But Megan, how could you omit the greatest Pagliacci reference of them all?

    I may or may not have spent years doing a Rorschach impression because of this. It may or may not have gone down well with my (former) friends.

    10. Art the Clown, Terrifier

    Surrey: You have to be a sick bastard to seek out the Terrifier movies, so naturally … I have. For the uninitiated, the Terrifier franchise follows the twisted exploits of Art: a psychopathic, potentially unkillable clown who revels in finding increasingly creative ways to murder people. The deaths in Terrifier 2 were so gruesome that people apparently vomited and fainted during screenings, which didn’t stop the movie from becoming one of the greatest indie success stories of 2022. (For any curious sickos out there, here’s a link to one of Art’s most iconic kills; be warned, it’s gnarly.)

    Art has done for on-screen deaths what Stephen Curry’s 3-point shooting has done for basketball: He’s changed the game. The Christmas-themed Terrifier 3 is set to come out later this month, and if Art continues to one-up himself in the killing department, we’ll have to consider moving him up the rankings. Seriously, Megan, we have to. I really don’t want to get on his bad side.

    Schuster: Can’t believe we got a Steph Curry comp in a piece about clowns. Honestly, bravo to us.

    9. Bozo the Clown

    Schuster: “The World’s Most Famous Clown” came into existence in the 1940s; by the late 1950s, the character himself had become a franchise and was appearing in television markets across the United States. Bozo became a touchpoint for a number of future TV clowns, and he was even the inspiration for Ronald McDonald—fun fact: The first Ronald McDonald was played by Willard Scott, who’d previously played Bozo on WRC-TV in Washington, D.C. (More on Ronald later!)

    8. Killer Klowns, Killer Klowns From Outer Space

    Surrey: I mean, the title speaks for itself. Probably the only film in existence that could be described as “clownsploitation,” Killer Klowns From Outer Space is set in a small town that gets invaded by—wait for it—extraterrestrial clowns who capture humans for sustenance. The killer klowns have all the (circus) tricks in the book: cotton candy cocoons, balloon bloodhounds, pies apparently made out of sulfuric acid, and popcorn guns. They might not be nearly as scary as some of the other clowns on this list, but the killer klowns endure as B-movie royalty. (Be sure to check out Killer Klowns From Outer Space: The Game, and yes, that is a real thing.) Also, they’ve got a theme song that has no reason to go this hard.

    No joke, I’d put this on my wedding playlist.

    7. Ronald McDonald

    Schuster: As ubiquitous as the golden arches themselves, Ronald McDonald has become a worldwide fast food icon. The hair; the yellow jumpsuit; his crew of Grimace, the Hamburglar, and Mayor McCheese—these are all things many of us have been exposed to since we were children running around in PlayPlaces.

    Now, whether it’s a positive thing that a clown has lured children into consuming fast food is certainly something we could discuss. (Seeing an image of Ronald McDonald still makes me crave a Happy Meal, like I’m one of Pavlov’s dogs.) I suppose we could just pretend that millions of us haven’t been conditioned over the years by a multibillion-dollar corporation. Yeah, let’s go with option no. 2.

    Surrey: Is it just me, or has McDonald’s marketing basically abandoned Ronald and his crew? I’m worried this is a Five Nights at Freddy’s situation just waiting to happen. (To be clear: would watch a horror movie about Ronald taking out McDonald’s executives—and a crossover with Jack from Jack in the Box.)

    6. Insane Clown Posse

    Surrey: I have only nice things to say about Insane Clown Posse—because I’d hate to incur the wrath of the Juggalos. Great hip-hop duo, totally normal clown gimmick. Crank up that “Boogie Woogie Wu.”

    5. Harley Quinn

    Surrey: Going back to her first appearance in Batman: The Animated Series in the early ’90s, Harley Quinn has long served as the sidekick and love interest of the Joker—a worthy supporting player, but one who’s always ceded the spotlight to the Clown Prince of Crime. But one of the (few) good things about the 21st century’s superhero boom is that it’s allowed Harley to become a star in her own right. On the big screen, Margot Robbie has memorably inhabited the character in the DC Extended Universe (RIP), bringing a chaotic, charismatic energy to everything from fight scenes to a romantic montage with a fictional South American dictator. (Lady Gaga’s Harley has big shoes to fill in Joker: Folie à Deux.)

    Not to be outdone, Max’s Harley Quinn animated series is a hilarious love letter to the Batman universe, full of misunderstood villains just looking for acceptance—title character included. (Season 5 can’t come soon enough.) Even as superhero fatigue sets in, the strongest endorsement I can give to Harley is that her antics are never tiresome. What can I say? When she’s not snapping femurs, Harley just knows how to hit your funny bone.

    4. Krusty the Clown, The Simpsons

    Schuster: Here is a brief (or not so brief) list of some of my favorite Krusty the Clown plotlines on The Simpsons. In no particular order:

    • The time he’s investigated for tax fraud and fakes his own death by crashing his plane into a mountain, only to return after Bart reminds him that he’s “more respected than all the scientists, doctors, and educators in the country put together.”
    • The time he offers up Kamp Krusty as a summer getaway for kids, only to allow it to be run into the ground to the point that the kids are starving, they revolt against the authoritarian counselors, and Krusty is forced to make amends—by taking everyone on a trip to Tijuana.
    • The running bit where Krusty will endorse anything so long as it pads his bottom line.
    • The time he has an Alaskan timberwolf on his show and is told the wolf is spooked by loud noises. “Loud?” Krusty shouts. “That’s our secret word for the day!” The wolf goes on to maul Bart before losing in a fight to Groundskeeper Willie.
    • The time Bart becomes Mr. Burns’s heir and the two pay Krusty $400 to deliver them a pizza while his show is scheduled to go live; Krusty airs a rerun, saying “no one will know the difference,” only for it to be the episode where Krusty talks about the Falkland Islands being invaded.

    Fox

    Krusty forever.

    3. Charlie Chaplin

    Schuster: Charlie Chaplin didn’t clown in the way many of us are used to. He didn’t have a crazy wig, or a red nose, or a flower that squirted water into unsuspecting faces. Rather, his character, the one he played throughout his silent films, was much more simple—but no less effective. “That character wore the same baggy pants, the same black hair and knotted suspenders, in a 1914 skating rink as it did on a 1936 assembly line,” wrote Alistair Cooke in a 1939 edition of The Atlantic. “In the intervals between a score of pictures, the same cracked boots have been preserved in ether. Chaplin’s creation is a clown, and like that of all clowns his make-up is ageless.”

    The makeup was indeed ageless, as was Chaplin himself. His legacy in the world of clowning remains strong.

    2. Pennywise, It (2017)

    Surrey: The titular monster of Stephen King’s It has existed for millions of years, can shapeshift into any form, manipulates reality, and preys on its victims’ worst fears. So what does it say about our collective coulrophobia that this ancient, primordial evil spends most of its time as … a clown?

    Pennywise is responsible for the most memorable moments in It, including the opening scene, in which the monster goads little Georgie Denbrough into sticking his hand down a sewer drain before chomping down on it. Pennywise draws power from the fear of its victims; as a reader (and viewer), it’s easy to understand why the creature has successfully terrorized Derry, Maine, for centuries. I mean, who wouldn’t be scared shitless if a grimy sewer clown was making eye contact with you from across the street?

    Warner Bros.

    The good news is that, for all its supernatural abilities, Pennywise does have a fatal weakness. In It: Chapter Two, the Losers Club defeats Pennywise by confronting their innermost fears and belittling it as “just a clown.” That’s right, Pennywise suffered death by shit talking. Kids, take note: Bullying works.

    Schuster: I know who I’m seeking out if I’m ever confronted by Pennywise: the teens. Save me, Gen Z!

    1. The Joker

    Surrey: Is anyone surprised? One of the greatest villains of all time, the Joker has spent decades as a cultural phenomenon, which has been bolstered by the many talented actors—and also Jared Leto—who’ve played him. He’s the ultimate foil to Batman, and what’s most unsettling about the Joker is how many iterations of the character are nihilistic, unpredictable agents of chaos. The Joker cannot be reasoned with, and you can’t appeal to his humanity. He is, to paraphrase The Dark Knight’s Alfred Pennyworth, someone who just wants to watch the world burn.

    Really, putting the Joker at the top of the clown ranking was a no-brainer; the bigger debate to be had is which actor has given us the best version of him. Cesar Romero was a campy icon, Jack Nicholson set the standard for comic book villains, Mark Hamill is the definitive Joker in the world of animation, and Joaquin Phoenix has an Oscar and the second-highest-grossing R-rated movie on his résumé. But for all these worthy contenders (and also Jared Leto), it’s tough to compete with Heath Ledger, whose Oscar-winning performance in The Dark Knight managed to be menacing and mesmerizing in equal measure. (See: the pencil trick.)

    No matter how many times the character is revived, we can’t seem to get enough of the Joker terrorizing the innocent civilians of Gotham—and so the cycle continues with Joker: Folie à Deux. As a result, the Joker isn’t just a mainstay in popular culture: He always gets the last laugh.

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    Miles Surrey

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  • Gene & Georgetti’s Tony Durpetti Championed Chicago’s Restaurants

    Gene & Georgetti’s Tony Durpetti Championed Chicago’s Restaurants

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    In 1997, Gene & Georgetti unveiled an expansion with two second-floor dining rooms that grew seating at the legendary Chicago steakhouse by 110. Owner Tony Durpetti paid big bucks for fire doors that separated the newly constructed building from the original that was erected in 1872.

    Durpetti would occasionally complain about the expenditure: “That’s $90,000 I’m never going to see again,” he’d tell his daughter, Michelle.

    The spend was worth it. In 2019, a kitchen fire raged through the restaurant, shooting up flames to the second floor. Michelle Durpetti recalls the conversation she had with the fire chief at the scene. He said they were lucky — the fire doors protected the 147-year-old building and kept the damage limited to the new space. The daughter waited until her father arrived to tell him.

    “I was like, ‘Let me talk about that $90,000 you thought you were never going to see again,’” Michelle Durpetti says. “And he’s like — literally — and this was my father, this was what he said all the time when something is, say, incredulous. He looked at me, he goes: ‘No shit.’ And that was him.”

    Gene & Georgetti Tony Durpetti poses in a second-floor dining room in 2014.
    Timothy Hiatt/Eater Chicago

    For 35 years Anthony “Tony” Aldo Durpetti had been an ambassador for Chicago’s hospitality industry, maintaining Gene & Georgetti’s iconic status after purchasing the River North restaurant from his father-in-law, Gene Michelotti (who died in 1989). Michelotti and Alfredo Federighi — nicknamed “Georgetti” — founded the restaurant in 1941. Durpetti and his wife, Marion, navigated Chicago’s turbulent restaurant scene with an eye on preserving Michelotti’s legacy.

    Durpetti died on Thursday, September 26, at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago from complications due to pulmonary fibrosis and Parkinson’s disease. He was 80.

    Durpetti’s customers included locals, politicians, and celebrities including Lucille Ball, Bob Hope, Mariah Carey, and Lionel Richie. Michelle remembers an evening drinking whiskey with Russell Crowe in 2000, right after Gladiator was released. Crowe was there for a gig with his band, 30 Odd Foot of Grunts. There are no photos — Durpetti believed in leaving celebrities alone and thought pictures might make them uncomfortable.

    Michelle Durpetti dances with her father on her wedding day.
    Gene & Georgetti

    Michelle says that over the last few days, the family has received messages of support from all over the country. Before the steakhouse, her father founded a national radio advertising firm that took him all over the country — New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, San Francisco, the Carolinas, and beyond. Born on February 1, 1944, he also served as a sergeant in the U.S. Army.

    The Durpettis have plenty of family in Italy and plan on livestreaming funeral services on Thursday, October 3, from Assumption of Catholic Church, located just across the street from the restaurant. Gene & Georgetti will be closed for lunch for a private reception and reopen for dinner at 5 p.m. Dad, who enjoyed Beefeater gin martinis, wouldn’t want to miss out on a lucrative dinner service, Michelle says.

    Working in advertising, Tony Durpetti embraced a flair for gimmicks. Michelle says her father would routinely overbook the restaurant, forcing customers to wait at the bar in waves even though they booked reservations. Online reservation systems didn’t yet exist, but a crowded bar area made Gene & Georgetti a hot spot. As Chicago’s oldest steakhouse, Durpetti took on the challenge of keeping the space relevant as more restaurants and steakhouses opened and provided more competition.

    A man posing in a photo from the ‘80s.

    A younger Tony Durpetti.
    Gene & Georgetti

    “If someone waited for like an hour for a reservation, he joked, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get you before breakfast,’” Michelle says, though she assures customers that the restaurant ditched this practice long ago.

    In 1994, Tony helped assemble a group of steakhouses across the country, forming an alliance called the Independent Retail Cattleman’s Association. The group would seek listings in airline magazines, grabbing the attention of business-savvy fliers who needed places to empty their business accounts. This was no ranking; they split the cost of the ads and would mix up placements every so often to avoid jealousy between restaurant owners. But the exposure worked, and the business drummed up by the “association” helped Durpetti pay off the loan for expansion within six months. That acumen helped make Gene & Georgetti one of the most successful steakhouses in the country, a fixture on Restaurant Business Online’s Top 100 Independents — a list of the independent restaurants that profit the most.

    Tony Durpetti’s philosophy was one of “mindful evolution.” During the pandemic, he briefly moved to Florida where the weather was easier for a senior citizen to manage. He would call in to check on the restaurant. His daughter and her husband, Collin Pierson, had quietly transitioned into running operations years ago. Michelle would joke with her father that she wouldn’t “jazz it up” too much, but the restaurant needed to evolve, and they would add more pasta dishes, leaning more into their Tuscan heritage. As his father-in-law was unable to fly due to his health, Pierson would drive him back and forth; the last trip from Florida to Chicago came in January 2024.

    A family of four in a cart.

    Collin Pierson with Tony, Marion, and Michele Durpetti.
    Gene & Georgetti

    Pierson manages the restaurant and recalls his father-in-law’s generosity. Years ago, while he and Michelle were in Barcelona, thieves stole nearly $30,000 in photography equipment, which would have doomed Pierson’s photography business if it weren’t for his future father-in-law’s immediate gesture to pay for replacement gear.

    A couple posiing

    Tony and Marion Durpetti posed outside their River North steakhouse.
    Gene & Georgetti

    Marion and Tony Durpetti on their wedding day.
    Gene & Georgetti

    Chicago’s restaurant world is in mourning.

    “He personified class and lived a daily life of hospitality. Watching him, showed us what this business should be. He set the bar for our generation,” wrote the owners of Piccolo Sogno, one of Durpetti’s favorite restaurants, on Instagram.

    Piccolo owner and chef Tony Priolo knew Durpetti for more than 25 years. He says when he first opened, Durpetti would walk around Gene & Georgetti’s dining room telling every table to visit Piccolo Sogno: “I would call him for advice and he was up always and there for me,” Priolo says. “He was an icon to our industry, he will be greatly missed.”

    Sam Toia, president and chief executive officer of the Illinois Restaurant Association, calls Durpetti a friend and icon and that “his advocacy of the restaurant industry was surpassed only by the genuine love and warmth he showered on his family, his team, and the countless guests he welcomed to Gene and Georgetti’s.”

    Durpetti was conscious of giving opportunities to women, using the phrase “glass ceiling” in conversations with his daughter. While he was the restaurant’s public face, Michelle’s and his wife Marion’s impacts could be felt throughout. “My grandmother (Ida Passaglia) was the first bookkeeper,” Michelle says. “This was a restaurant that was always run by women — it just looked like it was run by men.”

    Michelle Durpetti says that during the height of COVID, there were times when the steakhouse could have ceased operations. The establishment was evicted by its landlord in suburban Rosemont. Her father, who battled Parkinson’s for 15 years, would occasionally visit, boosting the morale of the restaurant. Michelle says her father didn’t realize but it was his meticulous financial planning through the years that enabled the steakhouse to survive the crisis the pandemic presented.

    As she recalls her father’s legacy, Michelle remembers being 18 and challenging her father at the restaurant. She didn’t care for his overbooking policy. He promptly fired her, telling her that she could only return after she accrued enough experience to bring something positive to the table. The ordeal wasn’t scarring; it gave Michelle Durpetti perspective, and in the end, Tony Durpetti trusted his daughter and son-in-law the same way Gene Michelotti trusted him to uphold the restaurant’s legacy.

    “Most people loved my dad,” Michelle Durpetti says. “If you didn’t like my dad, it was probably on you and not on him — and I don’t even say that because he was my dad. People just gravitated to him.”

    A visitation will be held on Thursday, October 3, at Belmont Funeral Home. A Mass will be held at Assumption Catholic Church.

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    Ashok Selvam

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  • Inside This South Loop Supper Club With Food From a French Laundry Alum

    Inside This South Loop Supper Club With Food From a French Laundry Alum

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    Two years ago, Entree introduced itself to Chicago, taking over the South Loop space where the city’s only Michelin-starred restaurant south of Roosevelt stood. Entree delivered meal kits, searching for a sweet spot for folks fed up with fees and mistakes from third-party couriers and restaurant customers who missed eating out during the pandemic. As the business grew, its owners knew they had an asset in their dining room. They threw pop-ups and opened the bar area earlier this year while unveiling a new name for on-premise dining, Oliver’s.

    In late August the time finally arrived as Oliver’s dining room finally debuted. The added real estate will give Oliver’s chef Alex Carnovale more room to play. He’s already established a menu of favorites including roast chicken, a burger, and diver scallops. The French Laundry alum has shown his ambitions while developing the menus for Entree’s delivery side. With Oliver’s, Carnovale no longer has to worry about whether his food will survive a car ride.

    The space is warmer, with a supper club feeling that presents a departure from the modern vibe of the previous tenant. Specifically, Oliver’s was going for a 1930s speakeasy feel. It’s a comfy place to enjoy truffle gnocchi or tomato risotto. As the bar opened first, the drink program had time to mature under the leadership of Luke DeYoung who worked a Sepia and Scofflaw. A gin martini is garnished with caviar-stuffed olive. There are non-alcoholic options, and a deep wine list, too. Happy hour specials have already launched, and bar snacks include Italian beef popcorn, cheddar fries, and beef-fat griddled sourdough from Publican Quality Bread. The latter is served with whipped parmesan and steak sauce.

    Walk through the space below. Oliver’s dining room is now open.

    Oliver’s, 1930 S. Wabash Avenue, open 5 p.m. to 10 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday, reservations via Tock.

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    Ashok Selvam

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  • ‘House of the Dragon’ Season 2 Finale Breakdown: Has ‘House of the Dragon’ Spoiled Itself?

    ‘House of the Dragon’ Season 2 Finale Breakdown: Has ‘House of the Dragon’ Spoiled Itself?

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    Back in May, House of the Dragon writer Sara Hess said that the decision to scale back Season 2 from 10 to eight episodes “wasn’t really our choice.” Dragon’s audience didn’t have a choice either, but viewers have had their say since Sunday, and most seem to have sided with Hess. This season didn’t quite get to where book readers estimated it might end; Episode 8 would have worked great as the setup for a final couple of episodes, but it had way too many loose threads and half-fulfilled plot points to feel satisfying as a season finale. All in all, this was one of the more bizarrely structured seasons of TV I can remember—and unfortunately, the odd ending puts a damper on what had at one point been looking like a strong season.

    Nevertheless, we’re here to take a look at all the lore, big questions, and book implications we can. Here are my thoughts on “The Queen Who Ever Was.”

    Deep Dive of the Week: Everything Daemon’s Final Vision Tells Us About the Future of House of the Dragon

    I must admit to a growing fatigue about the extent to which House of the Dragon has used prophecy to create character growth and move the story forward. In a 2000 interview, George R.R. Martin explained his own philosophy regarding the use of prophecy in storytelling, saying, “Prophecy is one of those tropes of Fantasy that is fun to play with, but it can easily turn into a straightjacket if you’re not careful.” He continued: “One of the themes of my fiction, since the very beginning, is that the characters must make their choices, for good or ill. And making choices is hard.”

    But House of the Dragon is all-in on prophecy, and I’m grateful, at least, for the fodder it provides for this column. This week, we reach the culmination of Daemon’s Harrenhal arc, resulting in a rich vision in the godswood. Daemon gets glimpses of the future and even communes with Helaena, who herself has been rattled by visions from a young age. Let’s break down what it all means.

    Before Daemon’s vision even begins, he sees an antlered figure disappear behind Harrenhal’s heart tree:

    All images via HBO

    This is a deep cut. Harrenhal lies on the north bank of the Gods Eye, the largest lake in Westeros. In the center of that lake is a mysterious island known as the Isle of Faces. This island has ancient significance. It’s where, many thousands of years prior to the events of House of the Dragon, the First Men and the children of the forest signed the Pact, ending a long war between the two. Faces were carved into the many weirwood trees on the island so that the gods could witness the pact, giving the island its name. It’s said that, in the current day, the Isle of Faces is the only place in the south of Westeros where a significant population of weirwoods still exists (there’s actually a very clear shot of the island and its trees in this episode when Rhaenyra and Addam arrive at Harrenhal). All the rest in the south have been cut down or burned.

    In more recent times, a group known as the green men keep a “silent watch” over the island, per Catelyn in A Game of Thrones. “No one visits the Isle of Faces,” Bran tells us in A Storm of Swords. Thus, the green men are incredibly secretive to the point of possibly being apocryphal. Nursery tales claim that the green men have horns and dark green skin, though most maesters would say that they just wear headdresses of antlers and green garments.

    We don’t even know what the green men do. There are rumors that some children of the forest still live on the Isle of Faces, and are protected by the green men. But no one knows for sure.

    This particular green man is gone before Daemon—or we—can get too good a look at him. But for readers who’ve bought into the theory that Daemon may precede Brynden Rivers as the three-eyed crow, Westeros’s foremost greenseer, this sighting could cause a red alert. We’re very much in fan theory territory here, but this hypothesis seems much less far-fetched after “The Queen That Ever Was.”

    Speaking of Brynden, this is where Daemon’s vision really begins: with a silver-haired figure encased in a tree. His wine stain birthmark gives him away: This is Brynden Rivers, the same greenseer who mentors Bran Stark in Season 6 of Game of Thrones (though Thrones omitted the birthmark). The birthmark is what gives him the moniker Bloodraven.

    This is a vision of the future, as Brynden hasn’t actually been born yet. (He is also supposed to be missing an eye, a detail I imagine House of the Dragon omitted because it’d prompt some viewers to mistake him for Aemond). Bloodraven is actually Daemon’s great-grandson, and should appear in HBO’s forthcoming A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which is set about 100 years after House of the Dragon.

    Next up, a three-eyed bird flies in front of Bloodraven’s face:

    I’m not much of a bird watcher, but to my eye this is a crow. That’s a neat detail—Thrones changed the bird to a raven, probably to avoid confusion when the Night’s Watch is so frequently referred to as “crows.” But in the books, Brynden appears to Bran as the three-eyed crow, not the three-eyed raven, and this is a nod to that.

    Next up, a White Walker with an army of wights:

    I don’t think that one needs much explanation. I do wonder if this is more or less what Aegon the Conqueror saw in his vision. I’m surprised this wasn’t the Night King himself.

    Then, a couple of dragons lie dead on a battlefield:

    These two are difficult to identify. Book readers could guess, but then we’d get into spoiler territory. And there is more than one potential explanation, especially if the show tweaks some things from the books.

    Now, a figure walks through a battlefield littered with bodies:

    As with the dragons, there are many explanations here. I’m almost certain this figure is Daemon, given that the character falls through the battlefield as a transition to the next scene, where Daemon is drowning in a black abyss:

    Next up, the comet from Season 2 of Game of Thrones:

    This comet, which also plays a big role in A Clash of Kings, is one of my favorite features in A Song of Ice and Fire. In that second novel in the series, everyone has their own explanation for what the comet means; at least a dozen different interpretations are given. Some are flat-out wrong (I don’t think the comet honored the new king Joffrey, who would go on to die in the very next novel), but others are left ambiguous. Maybe the comet really did herald the return of dragons—Daenerys’s were born shortly before its appearance. Maybe it really was sent by the Undying Ones to guide Daenerys to Qarth—Dany did follow its path there. Or maybe it’s a complete coincidence. Comets just show up sometimes.

    We’ll never know for sure. But as a literary device, it provides a great signifier of how symbols and prophecies can be read in many different ways. It all depends on the character doing the interpreting.

    Next up, Daenerys’s eggs in a bed of fire:

    And then the dragon queen herself, emerging with her dragon hatchlings:

    Now back to the present day, and the current dragon queen. Rhaenyra sits the throne:

    And then, the trippiest part of this whole scene for me, when Daemon turns and comes face-to-face with Helaena. “It’s all a story, and you are but one part of it,” she says. “You know your part. You know what you must do.”

    At this point, it’s revealed that Daemon isn’t just having a vision of Helaena as she exists in his head: Helaena herself is communicating with Daemon in real time from King’s Landing. Here the scene shifts to Helaena, as Aemond emerges to once again try to convince his sister to fly Dreamfyre into battle. She reveals that she knows that Aemond burned Aegon and let him fall from his dragon, essentially leaving him to die.

    “Aegon will be king again,” she says. “He’s yet to see victory. He sits on a wooden throne. And you … you’ll be dead. You were swallowed up in the Gods Eye, and you were never seen again.”

    Aemond says he could have Helaena killed. “It wouldn’t change anything,” she spits back.

    Even casual viewers probably realize that Helaena has been right about pretty much everything she’s seen in her visions. Remember when she says in Season 1 that young Aemond will have to “close an eye” to claim a dragon? Yeah, she knows the future. And based on his facial expressions during this conversation, I think Aemond knows this about his sister.

    There’s a whole free-will dilemma being cracked open by Daemon and Helaena here. Maybe part of the reason Helaena has been so passive is that, in seeing the future, she’s resigned herself to it. Maybe something similar has happened with Daemon: When Rhaenyra warns him not to leave her again, he answers, “I could not. I have tried.” (Rhaenyra notes that her own lot in life was “decided for me long ago.”) That’d largely violate Martin’s philosophy—that prophecies must remain vague enough that characters can be free to make difficult choices—but it seems to be the direction the show is heading in.

    But let’s set the philosophy aside and ask a more straightforward question: Is the show straight up spoiling itself with these visions?

    I’ll let showrunner Ryan Condal answer that. In a virtual Q&A with press on Monday, he explained that spoilers aren’t at the top of his mind as he writes the show:

    “We’re not pretending that nobody has read Fire & Blood, and that there’s not a Wikipedia that’s there one Google link away if you want to find out what happened,” Condal said. “We dispensed with the idea that there were going to be surprises on that level right at the beginning and writing the series.”

    He also noted that it would have been silly to pretend that Viserys wouldn’t die at the end of Season 1—every viewer could see that coming from miles away. Granted, there’s a difference between the audience knowing the fate of the current king on a show that is clearly about a succession crisis, and the audience knowing the fates of characters who could potentially resolve that crisis. Still, Condal continued: “I will just say that, just because a thing is told to you doesn’t mean it’s going to happen exactly that way. And we’ve seen obviously in history and all that be misinterpreted before, both in the world of Fire & Blood, and in the world of A Song of Ice and Fire.”

    So maybe these visions will come to pass exactly as Daemon and Helaena have seen them, and this story will turn out to be about the journey and not the destination. Or maybe the visions aren’t as set in stone as we may think.

    Quick Hits

    Is this it for Nettles?

    After multiple episodes of teasing, Rhaena … still hasn’t claimed Sheepstealer, the dragon that has left Dragonstone to seek fresh mutton in the Vale. But it seems very likely that she’ll do so—and that she was probably meant to do so this season before the episode count was reduced—which surely has book readers curious and sad about a fan favorite character from Fire & Blood: Nettles.

    Nearly a month ago, Martin published a particularly cranky blog post. The post contained various thoughts on dragons, including a long defense of some of his dragon-related literary decisions. For example, Martin gave his dragons two legs and two wings because “no animal that has ever lived on Earth has six limbs. Birds have two legs and two wings, bats the same, ditto pteranodons and other flying dinosaurs, etc.”

    He also wrote a long paragraph detailing how his dragons are not nomadic and would never be found outside Dragonstone. He specifically said that they wouldn’t be found in the Vale. Here’s the relevant paragraph:

    My dragons are creatures of the sky. They fly, and can cross mountains and plains, cover hundreds of miles … but they don’t, unless their riders take them there. They are not nomadic. During the heyday of Valyria there were forty dragon-riding families with hundreds of dragons amongst them … but (aside from our Targaryens) all of them stayed close to the Freehold and the Lands of the Long Summer. From time to time a dragonrider might visit Volantis or another Valyrian colony, even settle there for a few years, but never permanently. Think about it. If dragons were nomadic, they would have overrun half of Essos, and the Doom would only have killed a few of them. Similarly, the dragons of Westeros seldom wander far from Dragonstone. Elsewise, after three hundred years, we would have dragons all over the realm and every noble house would have a few. The three wild dragons mentioned in Fire & Blood have lairs on Dragonstone. The rest can be found in the Dragonpit of King’s Landing, or in deep caverns under the Dragonmont. Luke flies Arrax to Storm’s End and Jace to Winterfell, yes, but the dragons would not have flown there on their own, save under very special circumstances. You won’t find dragons hunting the riverlands or the Reach or the Vale, or roaming the northlands or the mountains of Dorne.

    This commentary is so pointed that I have to think Martin had a heads-up about where House of the Dragon was going. In Episode 6, Sheepstealer showed up in the Vale and presented a deviation from Martin’s source material—and book readers started speculating that the show was replacing Nettles with Rhaena.

    In Martin’s book, a vagabond girl named Nettles claims Sheepstealer. All of the recent Rhaena action from the Vale has been a show invention, which seems to telegraph the direction the show is moving in. This is all a bit of a shame, as Nettles is unlike any other dragonrider in A Song of Ice and Fire. She’s a bastard girl born to a dockside sex worker in Driftmark. The book describes her as “black-haired, brown-eyed, brown-skinned, skinny, foul-mouthed, fearless.” And remember, in the books the Velaryons are not Black—they have typical Valyrian features: pale skin, silver hair, purple eyes. Nettles has no known Valyrian ancestry and no Valyrian features whatsoever—the only rider in all of A Song of Ice and Fire without so much as a hint of “the blood of the dragon.”

    Nettles is, apparently, one of Martin’s favorite characters. A couple of years ago, a fan asked Martin whether there were characters from Fire & Blood that he’d like to write more about. He answered Nettles, rhetorically asking, “Where does she come from? Where does she go to? What is her life like?”

    I have to stop here to avoid spoiling Nettles’s story, which will likely become Rhaena’s story next season. This decision is prudent in some ways—combining characters is a classic book-to-screen adaptation move for a reason, and Rhaena is underused and often forgotten in Fire & Blood. But it does represent a dramatic shift in how each medium views dragonriders. House of the Dragon is taking Fire & Blood’s Broom Boy—its promise that dragonriding isn’t just for Valyrians—and is dashing it in favor of a character whose last name is literally Targaryen.

    Will this cause problems down the line? Not that I can tell based on how the plot unfolds in the book. But Martin ended his blog post by writing, “Ignore canon, and the world you’ve created comes apart like tissue paper.”

    Meet Sharako Lohar

    We knew that Sharako would appear this season thanks to casting news, and in the finale she finally makes her debut. Tyland and the greens think the Triarchy could be key to winning this war, and Lohar leads their fleet. So who is this mud-loving, polygamous admiral?

    Well, Sharako isn’t fleshed out much in the books. Dragon’s creators have swapped Sharako’s gender for the show, but in the books the character commands a fleet of 90 warships. It’s not clear exactly how many Corlys Velaryon has at his disposal, but as is made clear on both the page and the screen, Sharako’s fleet is powerful enough to at least challenge the Sea Snake’s.

    It also appears that the show is merging Lohar with another character, Racallio Ryndoon, who was part of the force that fought Daemon in the Stepstones many years earlier. The tip-off that these two characters are being merged is the detail that Sharako keeps multiple wives—an attribute that the book ascribes to Racallio. In fact, Racallio is one of the wildest characters in all of A Song of Ice and Fire. I just have to let Fire & Blood’s description do the character justice:

    Surprisingly little is known of his youth, and much of what we believe we know is false or contradictory. He was six-and-a-half feet tall, supposedly, with one shoulder higher than another, giving him a stooped posture and a rolling gait. He spoke a dozen dialects of Valyrian, suggesting that he was highborn, but he was infamously foul-mouthed too, suggesting that he came from the gutters. In the fashion of many Tyroshi, he was wont to dye his hair and beard. Purple was his favorite color (hinting at the possibility of a tie to Braavos), and most accounts of him make mention of long curling purple hair, oft streaked with orange. He liked sweet scents and would bathe in lavender or rosewater.

    That he was a man of enormous ambition and enormous appetites seems clear. He was a glutton and a drunkard when at leisure, a demon when in battle. He could wield a sword with either hand, and sometimes fought with two at once. He honored the gods: all gods, everywhere. When battle threatened, he would throw the bones to choose which god to placate with a sacrifice. Though Tyrosh was a slave city, he hated slavery, suggesting that perhaps he himself had come from bondage. When wealthy (he gained and lost several fortunes) he would buy any slave girl who caught his eye, kiss her, and set her free. He was open-handed with his men, claiming a share of plunder no greater than the least of them. In Tyrosh, he was known to toss gold coins to beggars. If a man admired something of his, be it a pair of boots, an emerald ring, or a wife, Racallio would press it on him as a gift.

    He had a dozen wives and never beat them, but would sometimes command them to beat him. He loved kittens and hated cats. He loved pregnant women, but loathed children. From time to time he would dress in women’s clothes and play the whore, though his height and crooked back and purple beard made him more grotesque than female to the eye. Sometimes he would burst out laughing in the thick of battle. Sometimes he would sing bawdy songs instead.

    Racallio Ryndoon was mad. Yet his men loved him, fought for him, died for him. And for a few short years, they made him a king.

    So yeah, get ready for more Sharako in Season 3!

    Where is Otto?

    For the first time since Episode 2, we get a glimpse of the man who did more than any other to put this entire war into motion. Way back at the beginning of the season, Otto, who’d been dismissed as Aegon’s hand, was supposed to head to Highgarden to rally the Tyrells to the greens’ side, as they had yet to formally declare for either faction. Then he disappeared, and we later learn that Alicent’s letters to him went unanswered.

    Now we know the reason for Otto’s silence: He’s in prison … somewhere.

    There are no book insights—and no book spoilers—to be had here. In Fire & Blood, Otto remains in King’s Landing after Aegon fires him. And he’s instrumental in winning the Triarchy over to the greens, though he does so by way of raven, not by mud fight. If the showrunners were determined to give Otto more to do, the obvious decision would have been to send him to Essos. At his age, he might not have been able to wrestle in the muck, but he could have been given some interesting scenes. Sending him somewhere unknown instead, and revealing he’s locked away, creates a big mystery. Color me intrigued!

    Total speculation: The most likely location for Otto is Honeyholt, the seat of House Beesbury in the Reach. We know that the Beesburys declared for the blacks after their lord Lyman Beesbury was killed back in Season 1. If he passed through Beesbury lands on his way through the Reach, they would have been inclined to take him prisoner.

    The problem with that theory? Honeyholt lies west of Highgarden. So if Otto met with the Tyrells first, he would have had to continue to Oldtown to cross paths with the Beesburys. And if he made it to the Tyrells, why not give him a scene or two at Highgarden?

    The other problem: Otto should be much too smart to get himself captured this way. It’d be out of character for him to attempt to march through territories that are openly at war with him. In the “Inside the Episode” video that aired after the finale, Condal remained tight-lipped about Otto, saying, “We don’t know quite where he is or what happened to him.”

    Finally, justice for the Tyroshis

    Book readers have long had a bit of a sore spot about how Game of Thrones muted Martin’s lively world. Especially in later seasons, a world that is full of color became a mess of grays and blacks. I’m talking about literal wardrobe choices and how Thrones slowly moved away from the bright sigils and eccentric outfits described in Martin’s writing in exchange for a dreary palette that was supposed to convey how dark and serious the story was becoming.

    Nowhere was this sort of change more stark than in the depiction of Daario Naharis, the Tyroshi sellsword who accompanies Daenerys for a few seasons. Here’s how Daario was described in A Storm of Swords:

    Daario Naharis was flamboyant even for a Tyroshi. His beard was cut into three prongs and dyed blue, the same color as his eyes and the curly hair that fell to his collar. His pointed mustachios were painted gold. His clothes were all shades of yellow; a foam of Myrish lace the color of butter spilled from his collar and cuffs, his doublet was sewn with brass medallions in the shape of dandelions, and ornamental goldwork crawled up his high leather boots to his thighs. Gloves of soft yellow suede were tucked into a belt of gilded rings, and his fingernails were enameled blue.

    And in the show, we got … two pretty-looking generic dudes (thanks to an actor change), one clean-shaven, one bearded:

    Well, the blue-hair enthusiasts got their wish this week. With Tyland in Essos, we see quite a few people who bear a striking resemblance to book Daario. I mean, just look at this guy:

    Heck, we got two blue-haired Tyroshis:

    Big episode for blue-haired representation and for everyone who enjoys a good splash of primary color.

    The Board Before Us

    The Triarchy is on the board thanks to Tyland’s prowess in the mud-fighting pit. That’s the biggest change to the map in a while, and it gives the greens the naval power to match the blacks. Though Aemond and Co. still have a major dragon deficit (and are facing a reunified Daemon and Rhaenyra), the greens made up some significant ground. Here’s how it all looks:

    Next Time On …

    That’s it for House of the Dragon Season 2. But we did get a full seven-second look at A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, coming next year:

    I encourage you to read Tales of Dunk and Egg, the three novellas that will serve as the basis for this next series. They’re possibly my favorite bit of writing in all of A Song of Ice and Fire. Just absolute delights. And they’re short.

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    Riley McAtee

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  • Just ranting

    Just ranting

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    Me just ranting.
    Well my day has been a complete **** show.
    A ******* tourists rat bastard dog just killed 7 of my lambs and tore off the faces of three ewes.
    And now I have to get more ******* paperwork and legal **** to get compensation from the owner for the cost of the dead lambs.
    **** MY LIFE.

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  • Delisted

    Delisted

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    Sony has delisted Helldivers 2 in more than 170 countries that don’t have dedicated regions in PSN, which was the main argument against the change. These countries no longer have the ability to buy the game or activate a retail key.
    Steam is refunding the game even with more than 100hrs of playtime.

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  • You really don’t know what you’re missing

    You really don’t know what you’re missing

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    Discworld is one of those strange series that you simply cannot explain to somebody who has not read it before. Sir Terry Pratchett was the greatest fantasy writer of his time, perhaps of all time, and reading his books while I was homeless was one of the few things that brought me enough joy to keep going some days.

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  • WrestleMania Weekend Recap: Big Takeaways, Why We Love Wrestling, and Why Cody Rhodes Is a Grrreat Guy. Plus, Rhea Ripley Has Beef With Troy.

    WrestleMania Weekend Recap: Big Takeaways, Why We Love Wrestling, and Why Cody Rhodes Is a Grrreat Guy. Plus, Rhea Ripley Has Beef With Troy.

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    Back in their home studios following an unforgettable weekend in Philadelphia, Rosenberg and SGG are ready to react to what some are calling the greatest WrestleMania of all time. Here’s what to expect today:

    • Intro (00:00)
    • Troy the Goy has a confession to make (07:41)
    • An update on the Cheap Heat T-shirts (12:18)
    • Why Rhea Ripley has an issue with Troy (14:58)
    • Where this year’s WrestleMania ranks among the all-time shows (21:56)
    • The Undertaker instead of Stone Cold Steve Austin (27:18)?
    • Rosenberg’s takeaways from hanging out with Cody Rhodes (31:59)
    • The second-best thing to happen this weekend (40:22)
    • Damien Priest cashing in (44:22)
    • Mailbag (56:38)

    And guess what? The video of last week’s LIVE Cheap Heat drops on Rosenberg’s YouTube channel soon. For other updates from the podcast, please follow @cheapheatpod on Instagram, as well as @rosenbergradio, @statguygreg, @thediperstein, and @troy_farkas.

    Hosts: Peter Rosenberg and Greg Hyde
    Producer: Troy Farkas

    Subscribe: Spotify / Apple Podcasts / Stitcher / RSS

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    Peter Rosenberg

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  • The Field House, the 33-Year-Old Lincoln Park Dive, Has Been Sold

    The Field House, the 33-Year-Old Lincoln Park Dive, Has Been Sold

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    While the ownership of the Field House — a home away from home for Cleveland Browns fans for more than three decades — announced the sports bar would be closing on Wednesday, February 28, the Lincoln Park dive won’t be shutting down.

    The co-owner of HVAC Pub in Wrigleyville, Nick Ivey, has bought the bar at 2455 N. Clark Street from Field House’s longtime owner Patrick Maykut. Ivey — who took over as co-owner and operator of HVAC in April 2022, partnering with 8 Hospitality Group (Hubbard Inn, Joy District) — says he won’t mess with the sports bar’s “essence” when he remodels the bar; it will stay closed for a bit while crews work. Ivey says he was looking to buy a new bar to give his employees at HVAC new opportunities.

    One of his bartenders at HVAC, Savanna Haugse, will be a partner in Field House, as will 8 Hospitality founder Carmen Rossi. Ivey calls Rossi a mentor — they met while Ivey was a bartender at Hubbard Inn. Ivey says he was looking for more of a management and ownership track.

    Ivey plans on keeping the bar closed until St. Patrick’s Day when they’ll open just for the holiday. Workers will then swap out the front door for a garage door and spruce up the space. They’ll also serve new cocktails. Ivey isn’t sure how long he’ll close the bar, but he’s not going to rush anything.

    “It’s a dive bar — we’re not going to turn it into a nightclub or anything like that,” Ivey says.

    The Field House had its quirks, as it would serve shelled peanuts, encouraging customers to drop shells on the floor. This was before society had a clearer understanding of peanut allergies. The bar adopted the slogan “cold beers and crunchy floors.” As Lincoln Park and neighboring Lakeview draw many recent college grads from Michigan and Ohio dying to meet people from the same state after moving to the big city, the Field House seemed inoculated from that scene while carving out a niche as a divey sports bar.

    The bar’s workers reportedly tried to buy the bar from Maykut. Maykut rebuffed their efforts, they say. These workers were blindsided by the news that the bar was sold. Staff was reportedly told of the sale over the weekend. An Instagram post called the news “a mix of sadness and surprise.”

    Meanwhile, Ivey calls the Field House a community meeting place and he wants to keep the momentum going. Taking over a dive is a complicated matter, and it’s easy to alienate regular customers. SmallBar in Logan Square was recently sold to Footman Hospitality, and Skylark in Pilsen was purchased by a group of the bar’s workers. So far, Ivey has been pleased by the response.

    “HVAC Pub is a late-night music venue,” Ivey says. “What we’re looking to do is totally the opposite.”

    Look for more news about Ivey’s plans for the Field House in the coming weeks.

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    Ashok Selvam

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  • Finally, Palworld lets me catch ’em all

    Finally, Palworld lets me catch ’em all

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    Catching Pokémon can be exhausting these days. At time of publication, there are more than 1,000 different species of the fictional monsters. Pokémon Scarlet and Violet don’t contain the full National Pokédex, but the base game has 400 Pokémon and hundreds more when you count additional monsters added in the DLC. Even when trying to complete the reduced Pokédex, the process of collecting creatures can be a slog. Now, playing Palworld, I can breathe a sigh of relief. For the first time in a long time, it feels I can finally “catch ’em all,” with under 150 Pals in the game.

    Palworld is a hit game from Japanese indie studio Pocketpair. Before it came out, many described it as “Pokémon with guns.” Now that the developer has released it in early access, it’s clear that the game goes well beyond just Pokémon influences. It has climbing and exploration reminiscent of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and mechanics common to survival games. However, one way that it is like Pokémon is its incorporation of creatures called Pals. As you explore its world, you can catch the cartoony monsters and register them to a digital encyclopedia called a Paldeck, similar to the Pokédex.

    My Paldeck contains 111 Pals (although there are alternate forms and might be more). Just from a numerical standpoint, that’s way fewer than Pokémon. There’s no need to robotically cycle through hundreds of battles to fill up the Pokédex like in a modern Pokémon game. On top of that, there are no “version exclusives” in Palworld. Every copy of the game contains every Pal, so it’s actually possible to find and catch every single monster without needing another player or setting up trades outside the game.

    If you do have friends who are playing, well, that’s helpful to the collecting process, too. While Pokémon does have multiplayer functionality, the online co-op in Palworld better supports playing the entirely of the game with friends from start to finish. Features like guilds allow you to group up with friends and share Pals easily on your settlement. These Pals won’t be registered as “caught” in your Paldeck, but it allows you to see more Pals and get an idea of which Pals you need to catch.

    Image: Pocketpair

    Catching all the Pokémon obviously isn’t impossible — loads of people do it — and I get why it appeals to certain players. The repetitive nature of catching Pokémon after Pokémon can almost be relaxing, but it’s a massive time commitment. You have to fight and catch each and every one of them, and some require unique rituals to evolve them. For others, you might need to trade to get version exclusives and train Pokémon to prepare for challenging fights to catch stronger monsters. In the recent Scarlet and Violet DLC, you even have to grind in-game points to unlock the appearances of certain Pokémon in the wild.

    Don’t get me wrong — Palworld still contains its fair share of monster-catching grind. Depending on how common each creature is, you might catch up to 10 copies of each just to grind out the needed experience points to unlock items. You likely won’t just speed through collecting the Paldeck in a sitting or two. Barriers to exploration like your level or what kinds of Pal spheres you use will guide your overall journey. But so far, I have enjoyed the slow, meandering process of gradually exploring and discovering the Pals one by one to fill up my Paldeck in its entirety. At this rate, I might just catch ’em all.

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    Ana Diaz

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  • Lil Dicky Has Said Enough About His Dick—but He’s Still Got More to Say

    Lil Dicky Has Said Enough About His Dick—but He’s Still Got More to Say

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    Lil Dicky wants to be taken seriously. The rapper born Dave Burd released his first album in nearly a decade last week, titled Penith (The DAVE Soundtrack). As the name states, it doubles as the soundtrack to Dave, Burd’s TV show not-so-loosely based on his own life as a rapper. Together, the show and the music create a meta feedback loop. The FXX show chronicles Burd’s creation and promotion of an album called Penith. (“Penith,” naturally, is pronounced like “zenith” crossed with the word “penis.”)

    In addition to writing and starring in his own comedy, Burd also created the music for the show. Now he is releasing the songs featured in the show as a real-life album. Appropriately, he gave it the same inappropriate name from the show: Penith. It’s art imitating life imitating art imitating dick jokes.

    “I’m just over here redefining the alpha male,” Dicky raps on his new song, “HAHAHA,” a nearly uninterrupted three-minute verse intended to flex his rapping bona fides. Later on the album, on the song “No Fruits or Vegetables,” the chorus goes, “I don’t eat fruit or vegetables, no fruits or vegetable.” Burd is the alpha man-child. But Burd’s show is so good that the next phase of his career will be taken seriously.

    Dave has perhaps the best celebrity cameos in a television show since Entourage. At various points, the show features Justin and Hailey Bieber, Kendall Jenner and Kourtney Kardashian, and Megan Fox and Machine Gun Kelly. But the star power isn’t as impressive as the way it is used. In Season 1, Dave learns that a young fan of his has died, and the kid’s parents ask Dave to perform at the memorial service. But when Dave arrives, he sees Macklemore showing up to a hero’s welcome. The parents ask Dave to cancel because their son liked Macklemore better. In Season 2, Dave releases a song called “Kareem Abdul-Jabbar” and is elated when Kareem reaches out to talk to him about the song. But to Dave’s horror, Kareem ends up interviewing him about white rappers appropriating Black culture for a profile in Time.

    Burd’s greatest strength has been taking his weaknesses and making them his armor. His rap name is based on his insecurities about having hypospadias, a birth defect that led to a surgery that accidentally created a second hole in his penis. (When Burd explained that childhood trauma to The Ringer back in 2020, he explained that when he pees, he has to cover the second hole with his finger or it comes out “like a Super Soaker.”)

    On the show, Burd’s craven, shameless desire for fame is spun into an episode in which an internet rumor that he is dead goes viral. When he sees that he is the no. 1 trending person on Twitter, he decides to hide at a motel and wait an extra day for his songs to reach no. 1 on Billboard before announcing that he is still alive (even to his parents).

    With the help of Seinfeld writer and Curb Your Enthusiasm producer Jeff Schaffer, the show touches on a stunningly wide range of jokes and emotions. Burd’s friend and real-life hype man GaTa, who also plays himself, gives a genuine and stunning view into the relationship between childhood trauma and sex addiction. This is from the same show where Burd, who is Jewish, hallucinates a conversation where he teaches Anne Frank how to do the “Whip/Nae Nae” dance.

    Burd’s next trick is blurring the lines between his TV show and his music. At the end of the second season, Burd buys an ad on a billboard in Los Angeles to announce his (then-fictitious) album, Penith. His plan in the episode is to tape himself, practically naked, to the billboard as the “t” in “Penith” like Jesus on the cross. But Ariana Grande releases a single the same day, and nobody shows up to see him. The image is now the real-life album cover for Penith.

    (Incredibly, two years after that joke appeared on the show, Grande released a single on January 12, 2024, one week before Burd’s Penith album came out in real life. Art imitates life, etc.)

    Burd is hoping to do what his show did and defy genre. For white guys with white-collar jobs who love rapping Drake lyrics alone to themselves in the car, Lil Dicky is the embodiment of the American dream. He had an excellent career at the powerhouse advertising firm Goodby, Silverstein & Partners working on campaigns like the NBA’s legendary playoff commercials. But Burd quit a potentially lucrative and relatively creative job to become a rapper. Wear your weaknesses like armor, and you too can quit your job to be a famous rapper who writes a TV show about his own life and then convinces Brad Pitt and Drake to be in a season finale. We sat down with Dave to discuss his new album, cold-emailing Brad Pitt to be in his show, what comes next, his custom sex doll, and why he does not eat fruits or vegetables at 35 years old.

    What was the weirdest thing about making a show about your own life that you didn’t see coming?

    Probably just the amount of people asking, “Is this true? Is that true?”

    You want to do a rapid-fire true or false?

    Sure.

    Rick Ross lent you a chain, and then you got robbed. Is any of that true?

    No, no, no, it’s not true. I’ve never experienced anything like that, but GaTa has had a chain get stolen and has had to go through steps to get it back. So it’s like part of the details of that were inspired by stuff that GaTa’s gone through, but I’ve never experienced that.

    So do you have a stalker? Was that real?

    No, I don’t have a stalker, thank God.

    OK. Did you order an absurdly expensive custom sex doll?

    Yeah.

    What did it cost?

    I got the $3,000 model. There were other models that I could have splurged on. There’s a scene in the show where I have sex with the sex doll and very much based on—please, for all the readers, just know that I didn’t bring this up; I was asked this question, and I’m not trying to be intentionally vulgar.

    But the first time I did have sex with the sex doll, I just remember being shocked at how heavy it was. Literally. My favorite sexual position is girl on top. So I don’t know why I thought that that was the right thing to do with this 80-pound doll, but that’s where my head went for the first time I ever experienced it. Then it was so hard to get it positioned. I remember by the time I was actually in a position where I could start doing anything, I was so physically tired. The wig started to fall off of it. I remember thinking in my head as it was happening it felt so much like Ex Machina.

    Pre-nut clarity?

    I didn’t find the experience to be overwhelmingly positive. It was really tiring. But after that, I just immediately went and got on my laptop and started writing things down and details that I don’t want to forget. I remember thinking, “This is such a crazy scene for the show.” So there are times where I’m living life and I’m thinking, “Wow, this is a great scene for the show.”

    So you do that a lot? You’ve basically been chronicling this stuff for years?

    Even before I had the show, when I was just a rapper going on tour with GaTa, I was like, “I know I want to be a comedian. I know that this life that I’m living right now as I’m a rapper going around the road, it’s really funny.” I don’t have a great memory. I’m not going to leave it up to hoping I remember the insane thing that happened in Iowa. I just have to write it down. So I’ve been writing this stuff down for over a decade.

    Did you actually match with Doja Cat on a dating app?

    I have matched with Doja Cat.

    What happened?

    We matched, and we talked. She was very sweet, and we’re friends, but we matched during a time where we didn’t work out. It was always very difficult. I think I was shooting Season 1 or something, or I was just very much doing something and she was doing something. It just was friendly banter, but then I reached out to her for the show, and I was like, “Remember that time we matched?” She was like, “Yeah.” Then I was like, “I want to make an episode based on online texting.”

    On the show, you cannot ride a bike. Was that true? And have you learned?

    I learned when I was a kid. What’s the phrase? You can’t forget how to ride a bike. Well, I forgot. If you put me in a meadow and there’s a path, I can ride straight. I’m just not good at turning. I’m not comfortable on the road. I don’t know how people can ride. Then if there’s a stick, they get smacked by a car. So, no, I’m no more comfortable riding bikes. I’ve always been a Rollerblader. I’m still a Rollerblader. They always think Rollerblading is a bit or that I’m joking, but no.

    On your song “No Fruits or Vegetables,” the chorus goes, “I don’t eat fruit or vegetables, no fruits or vegetable.” When you say no fruits or vegetables, are we talking zero?

    I mean, look, 10 years ago, I hadn’t even tried fruits or vegetables.

    How old are you?

    I’m 35.

    Hmm.

    When I was 25, I had tried an apple, but I didn’t eat any fruits or vegetables. Today, I’ve tried—when I say tried, I’ve taken a single bite—I’ve tried a lot of them. But I don’t on a regular basis eat any fruits or vegetables. I will eat something like a Caesar salad or a kale Caesar salad. Besides that, no. There’s a lot I haven’t tried. I have never tried a cherry. I could really list endless things that I’ve never tried.

    Are you worried about getting scurvy?

    I worry about my health in the sense that I live a very high-stress life, and I know that my diet can’t be good. It’s not a good diet. So I don’t know if I worry about scurvy, but I worry about when I go and get my levels checked that they’re going to be like, “Oh my God. The inside of your body is like tar.”

    Why didn’t you try stuff?

    I think it’s a textural thing for me and my parents. I put this in the show too. I always blame them for not forcing these foods on me when I was young so I could grandfather them in and eat them today, but my mom always said it wasn’t worth ruining her own life. Apparently, I really objected.

    While we’re separating fact from fiction, you have a Coca-Cola commercial where you call Jordan Poole the best stealer ever. Do you want to correct anything on the record?

    Yeah. I didn’t write that line. I questioned it when it came out, and I just had to go along with corporate. I didn’t want to put up a stink. I think they only had so many players that could be featured. Of course, I was the guy writing these ads 15 years ago, so I empathize with their position. I don’t want to be the talent on set being like, “No,” but I didn’t write that line, and I know that he’s not. Blame Coca-Cola.

    You did a video with Benny Blanco where, among many other things, you ordered an unsliced bagel and said, “I’ll slice it myself.” Was that a bit for the video? Or do you actually want to slice a bagel yourself when you get a bagel?

    So I find that if you get the bagel sliced by the bagel place, they have that machine that goes like this [uses his hands to mimic a bagel-slicing machine]. The bagel ends up being very texturally flat. But if you use your own knife and you slice it in a human way, there’s a rigidity and fluffiness to the bagel that you wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. It’s not that difficult to slice a bagel. Whenever I order a bagel from a bagel place, I always say, “Untoasted, unsliced.”

    You want to create your own texture, map your terrain, create your own landscape?

    Right.

    Speaking of your own terrain, your new album doubles as the soundtrack to your TV show. Is this an album, or is it a soundtrack?

    I don’t know why it would have to be one or the other. I feel like it’s labeled as Penith (The DAVE Soundtrack) because the common theme of the music is they’re songs that have existed in the show. But my process for making music is whenever I get free time from the show, I then work really hard on making music. I make music to make music, and I think about it existing on an album one day. Or I think about various ways it could exist, and then it’s time to make the show again. The show is obviously about me, and I’m a rapper in the show. So there’s obviously a need for music in the show. So oftentimes some of my favorite work can get plucked up and put in the show.

    It varies in the sense that sometimes I make songs that aren’t for the show at all, and then I’m like, “Oh, OK, we’re making the show. We need music. What’s good music that we could build around and put in the show?” Other times I do make music directly for the show. I didn’t envision my second album being a soundtrack album, but I think this is the right thing to do because I love all this music and I want to get it out as opposed to just waiting to finish whatever’s coming next. I want people to have music, and it’s been so long.

    Why is the soundtrack to your TV show coming out eight months after the show ended?

    I wasn’t going to put it out during the writers strike. You can’t really promote it and do anything like that, and I just needed to finish. Songs will enter the show in this demo, unmixed form. Maybe there’s not a second verse on some things that I want to add a second verse to maybe. So it’s like certain songs had to get finished, and not only finished, but then mixed and mastered. It’s the whole process. And then we want to shoot videos for it. So it’s like we have to like them. We got to edit the videos, and there’s a little bit of a production timeline. You got to realize I’m working on the show every day up until four days before that episode. So it’s like there’s no time to do all those things that I just mentioned until after I wrap on the season.

    You cranked out a lot of TV in a very short amount of time. That’s in an era when people aren’t really doing that anymore. Meanwhile, you have not put out a huge amount of music. My editor always says, “Go where your effort takes you.” At this point, do you like making TV shows, movies, whatever more than the music?

    Well, look, I’ll bring it back to the beginning of my career. I always wanted to be a comedian, and that was my grand vision. I started making music with the hope of being found as a comedic presence. Then I fell in love with making music and began making realer and realer music that didn’t even have to rely on being funny as much and started doing real tours. Then my initial dream of being a comedian took a back seat for a few years because I was really rolling with the momentum of music and just going on tour and doing all these things, and the comedy thing had to be put on hold. Then the TV show happened, and it takes up all my time in that way. Then the momentum happened there, and it really started rolling. I had less and less time to make music.

    I think what happened was when the strike happened, I was able to finish this body of work, and I thought it was a really good idea. I designed this project to be the type of thing where even if you’ve never seen the show, you can listen to it and sit, and it flows really well, because I think it really is a real album. But in the process of doing that, I’ve re-fallen in love with music again. I’ve always been working on it whenever I can, but I’ve now really been able to start focusing on it without being pulled in all these different directions. If you’re asking me present-day today, what I’m focused on right now, it’s music today. Will that change? Of course. I’ve always loved film and TV, and I will always have a future in that.

    Season 3 of Dave ended in May. I know it’s up in the air, but will there be more of the show?

    I’m trying to operate under the mentality of focusing on one thing at a time. Like you said, I’ve put out just three seasons. The amount of work that it’s taken to get those three seasons to where it’s been, it has been so unbelievably strenuous to the point where I still feel like I just wrapped Season 3. I feel like I just finished that, and I’m sure, yes, eventually, the story of my life will continue. I’m not kidding when I say I’m really excited about being focused on music for the first time in a while.

    Last time we talked about how you have hypospadias. Just wanted to follow up and confirm: You did not get the corrective surgery?

    No, nothing as an adult, thank goodness. My dick still is fucked up in the sense that I am peeing out of two holes, but I shouldn’t be. So there is a surgery that could fix that that I could get. I’m just not trying to deal with that. I’d rather just piss on myself.

    How long were you friends with Benny Blanco until he was like, “I want to watch you pee”? Because I know he’s seen you pee.

    Oh, very soon [after meeting]. Me and Benny are just such instant soulmate friends that I feel like within four times of hanging out, our dynamic was that of best friend brothers. So I’m sure I showed him very early.

    You guys do seem like long-lost friends. In one of the early episodes of the show, you’re pulling gum out of his ass or something. For people who perhaps don’t have a relationship like that, how would you describe that bromance, why you and Benny are like that?

    Yeah, obviously it’s a foreign relationship to certain people, but I feel like other people can relate to it. It’s weird. I get stopped in the street, and some guys are like, “I got friends who were like that too.” Then other people would be like, “That’s the weirdest dynamic I’ve ever seen.” So it varies, but really it’s just we love each other, not romantically, but just as best friends. I’ve never met someone who I just hit it off with. So we make each other laugh nonstop. Then even if Benny was a plumber, we’d still be best friends.

    So to have your best friend who, when you meet this guy, you’re like, “Oh my God. That’s the guy who’s always meant to be my best friend in life,” and then he also happens to be the biggest music producer and best music producer in the world. It’s so fantastic to be able to work on this album with Benny, Penith. Literally, it’s like we’re finishing songs that I love while also sleeping over with your best friend. You’re not even a kid anymore, but it feels like you are. It’s really a joyous experience.

    You repeatedly have said, “I will be the biggest star in the world.” You’re also one degree of separation removed from Taylor Swift [Editor’s note: Dave’s friend Benny is dating Taylor Swift’s friend Selena Gomez.] Deep down, when you’re watching this Taylor Swift Eras Tour, is any part of you like, “Damn, I got to do that”?

    Not really. No, no, no. In my heart, I know that I’ll never be as big of a musician as Taylor Swift. It’s like ambitious, and she’s the biggest and best of all time. You know what I mean? So, yeah, I obviously have always believed in myself for sure. I think maybe 10 years ago or five years ago, we had our conversation, I would be more likely to say, “My desire is to be the biggest star in the world,” but I don’t even think that’s my actual desire anymore. I think my desire is to make the best stuff in the world and to feel really proud of the stuff that I make, and my desire is to be really, really happy in life.

    But there are certain things that come along with being the biggest star in the world that I have no interest in experiencing for my fame. You know what I mean? You got to plan every single time you go outside, and I like the comfortable life I live of feeling like I have achieved the things that I want to achieve while not feeling burdened by a toxic level of fame that is truly damning to your life.

    Some of Brad Pitt’s last words in the finale are explaining to you that fame is a prison.

    I think Season 3 in a nutshell is it’s under the umbrella of looking for love and romance and then the bait and switch of realizing when you’re living in this endless loop of validation seeking, and then you’re not even truly loving yourself if every single moment is based on how you’re being received and whatnot. So the end message is there’s more to life than seeking validation. I think that’s a real valid lesson from Brad Pitt.

    About the cameos: You’re just cold-emailing Brad Pitt?

    I did cold-email Brad Pitt.

    Will you send me a copy of that?

    I won’t send you a copy. It’s between me and Brad, but it was really well-written, and I took my time with it. I didn’t write it in 20 minutes. I wrote it, and then I reread it the next day, and then I thought about it, and then I trimmed it. You only get one shot of Brad reading your email. People always say, “How do you get all the people in the show?” It’s a combination of two things. One, pretty much at this point, anyone who I’m getting in the show has seen the show and loves it. When I didn’t have a show, and I’m trying to get YG in a pilot for a show that he’s never seen, it’s a much harder sell to be like, “Trust me, it’s going to be great.” Now it doesn’t feel crazy to me to email Rachel McAdams and Brad Pitt, the biggest stars of our time, and be like, “Hey.”

    Because what I find about the show is that it’s incredibly well-respected in the community of artists—I’ll say, the talent of L.A., the pool of actors, the musicians. It’s everyone’s favorite show, and I’m able to really sell them on it. Oftentimes that’s enough. But back in the day, I think when I moved to L.A. and I became friends with Benny, yeah, I think that it’s like our social circle, and I’m at a party, and I meet Kendall Jenner. I try to be a nice person whenever I’m meeting anybody. If someone likes you, they’re more likely to be like, “Yeah, I remember that guy. He’s cool.” But it depends. It’s just living life and meeting people when you meet them, but at this point, I really feel like it’s just the product speaks for itself.

    People like Drake and Brad and Rachel and Killer Mike and Usher, these people, they love the show. There’s really no better feeling than having that belief of these people who are just icons, even to the point where I’ve grown up idolizing a lot of these people. Now they’re so willing to come play in my sandbox and trust me. There’s no more gratifying feeling that I’ve ever had than being on set with Brad Pitt, giving him notes, and him respecting what I’m saying. I can tell that he was looking at me the way he would look at any other director that he works with. This guy’s the biggest star of our time, working with my favorite directors of all time. I think that feeling as a filmmaker was so gratifying.

    Last time we spoke, you told me the best day of your life was when you put out the video for your song “Ex-Boyfriend.” It was April 25, 2013. Ten years later, April 2023, you’re putting out Season 3 of a show about your life with Brad Pitt and Drake. So, with the utmost seriousness, I ask you, with everything you’ve done, 10 years from now, what would make you satisfied?

    The truth of the matter is 10 years ago, if you asked me this question, I would’ve listed out all the things that I have achieved. When I describe 10 years from now, I’m not listing out, “I want an Oscar.” It’s more like, “I have kids and a family, and I’m married. Life is as good as it possibly can be, independent of all the art that I create.” The tricky thing about me is I’m so aware that wrapping your whole identity up in the art that you create is a never-ending cycle. There’s always more—there’s always improvements, things to do—and I try to infuse that in the show. Trying to be that lesson is something that I try to deal with on a day-to-day level.

    Having said that, you’ve alluded to making movies next, including a screenplay about your childhood; you’ve said going through puberty with your condition was formative. Is that basically your next project? A movie about being a kid growing up with a messed-up dick?

    [Laughs.] I think that I’ve said enough about the dick, if I’m being quite honest with you. There’s other TV series I’m developing, and I have a bunch of other things at play for sure. The future, there’s so many other things I want to do besides just make the show Dave and even just make music. I feel like I’m only getting started. I know I’ve been in this for 10 years, but I do feel like the things that I’ve done for 10 years have all been setups for the future. I don’t think I need to make another movie about [my penis].

    I feel like so much of your stuff started with taking this insecurity about your penis and frankly wearing it like armor. Do you feel like you’ve grown up? Do you feel like you’re over it?

    I’m not saying I’m over it in the sense that it’s not an important part of shaping who I am. I just think that I don’t need to make art about the same material every time. Do I feel like I’ve grown up? Yes and no. I definitely feel like the things that I’m saying now are different than the things I would’ve said five years ago, are different than the things I would’ve said 10 years ago. Do I feel any more ready to have children today than I did when I was 16 years old? No, I feel like I’m still a kid at heart, but I think a lot of people feel that way even when they have kids.

    In 10 years, I’ll be 45 years old. My back’s starting to hurt. I want to figure out ways to make my back stop hurting. That’s one of my main priorities right now, is to fix my back this year. It’s not really answering your question, but do I feel grown-up? No, but I definitely feel like I’m actively growing up at all times. All you can do is just do that as things are thrown at you and as you live life. I don’t think I’ll ever feel grown-up until I’m dead. I think I’m about to enter the second half of my life. Maybe not half, but the middle of my life.

    Well, it’ll be the middle third of your life as long as you start eating vegetables.

    Yeah, I’m entering the second half if I don’t fix something.

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    Danny Heifetz

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  • Goodreads has too much power for its moderation to be this bad

    Goodreads has too much power for its moderation to be this bad

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    For the past week, I’ve been watching Goodreads drama happen in what feels like slow motion. Debut author Cait Corrain admitted to fabricating at least six Goodreads user accounts, and leaving negative reviews (including one-star ratings) of other debut authors’ books — many of whom were authors of color. On Monday, her publisher dropped her book Crown of Starlight, and Corrain posted a mea culpa on X (formerly Twitter).

    The coordinated efforts of fans and authors helped expose Corrain’s review bombing. Last week, Iron Widow author Xiran Jay Zhao tweeted a thread noting a series of one-star reviews on debut science fiction and fantasy authors’ Goodreads accounts, without naming any names. They also shared a 31-page document of unknown origin (which Polygon reviewed) that contained screenshots of accounts that added Crown of Starlight to a number of most-anticipated lists, and left one-star reviews on forthcoming books by Kamilah Cole, Frances White, Bethany Baptiste, Molly X. Chang, R.M. Virtues, K.M. Enright, and others.

    This once again brings Goodreads’ moderation issues to the fore. When reached for comment, a Goodreads spokesperson sent Polygon a statement: “Goodreads takes the responsibility of maintaining the authenticity and integrity of ratings and protecting our community of readers and authors very seriously. We have clear reviews and community guidelines, and we remove reviews and/or accounts that violate these guidelines.” The company added, regarding Corrain’s one-star reviews, “The reviews in question have been removed.” Goodreads community guidelines state that members should not “misrepresent [their] identity or create accounts to harass other members” and that “artificially inflating or deflating a book’s ratings or reputation violates our rules.” But it doesn’t explain how those guidelines are enforced.

    Goodreads also pointed Polygon to an Oct. 30 post about “authenticity of ratings and reviews,” which said the company “strengthened account verification to block potential spammers,” expanded its customer service team, and added more ways for members to report “problematic content.” The company addressed review bombing and “launched the ability to temporarily limit submission of ratings and reviews on a book during times of unusual activity that violate our guidelines.”

    Ostensibly, these measures were put in place after several especially high-profile instances of review bombing on the platform this year. But these new tools did not prevent Corrain from review bombing authors in November and December. The guidelines, including the October one, ask users to “report” content that “breaks our rules,” seemingly shifting responsibility onto the user base. It’s past time for Goodreads, which is owned by Amazon, to consider implementing more comprehensive in-house moderation — or at least more sophisticated internal tools — if not for the sake of its users, then for the sake of authors who are at the mercy of the platform.

    Goodreads is extremely influential. There are over 150 million members on the platform, 7 million of whom participated in this year’s Reading Challenge. The platform also has few barriers against these sorts of review-bombing campaigns, as any user in good standing can post a review to the platform, including before the book has been published. Pre-publish reviews are part of the marketing cycle, and they are expressly allowed on Goodreads. Publishers encourage authors to get reviews on the Goodreads pages for their forthcoming books, including during the lead-up period to release. Readers can access advance copies of books through official channels like NetGalley, or by receiving an advance reader copy from the publisher, but there’s no way to know whether a reviewer on Goodreads has actually obtained an advance copy or not. (Though Goodreads review guidelines require readers to disclose if they received a free copy, not all users follow those rules — basically, you can post your review regardless.)

    This is obviously not an issue that’s novel to Goodreads, but many other platforms require some form of verification before reviewing. Etsy allows users to review a product after they purchase it. Steam only allows users to write reviews of products in their Steam library, and includes “hours played” in the review. The closest comparison to Goodreads I can think of is Yelp, which allows people to leave reviews of restaurants and other establishments, and which also has to handle waves of negative reviews — often involving complaints about things that are entirely out of that business’s control. As far as fan-review platforms for entertainment go, there’s Letterboxd, a platform where users can track and review films. But it doesn’t hold a candle to the cultural chokehold of Rotten Tomatoes, a platform that aggregates review scores from professionally published critics (while it also aggregates audience scores, those are listed separately). Rotten Tomatoes has its own issues, but its system does mean reviews don’t tend to come from people who have not even consumed the media in question.

    As a casual peruser on Goodreads, looking for a book to read, how do you know if a reviewer actually read the book? I guess the answer, at least right now, is: You can’t. And as fans have become more sophisticated and coordinated on the internet, it’s become even harder to take the platform’s reviews and ratings seriously. In July, Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert pulled her forthcoming book The Snow Forest — which was set in Russia — after some 500 users, who had not read the book, left one-star reviews. Gilbert is much more established and better resourced than the debut authors Corrain targeted. She nonetheless made the decision to pull her book.

    These debut authors didn’t have the same power or cachet, and it’s painful to imagine how Corrain’s negative reviews could have impacted those authors’ book sales — and subsequently their opportunity to write any more books — had Corrain’s actions gone unnoticed. Publishing is full of enough hurdles as it is, especially for authors of color, without this huge one so close to the finish line.

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    Nicole Clark

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  • Why is Cyberpunk 2077’s metro so slow? An investigation

    Why is Cyberpunk 2077’s metro so slow? An investigation

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    CD Projekt Red fulfilled a five-year promise last week when it added a fully functional metro system to Cyberpunk 2077. While the feature does wonders to make Night City feel more alive, I was surprised to learn just how little California’s public transportation infrastructure has improved in the game’s alternate-reality future.

    Cyberpunk 2077 now includes five Night City Area Rapid Transit (NCART) rail lines servicing 19 stations. Every stop still functions as a fast travel point, but players can also use them to hop onto the subway and relocate, in real time, to other parts of the city. As movement is restricted while on the train, this is a mostly visual experience, providing folks with a new perspective on the sprawling mega-city as well as limited opportunities to chat with their fellow riders.

    During one trip, I noticed a screen indicating the train’s speed was consistently hovering around 43 mph, which felt awfully slow for futuristic transportation. The average speeds of modern-day heavy-rail systems in the United States range from the high teens to the mid-30s, but they’re capable of reaching much higher maximums. And that’s not even accounting for more developed public transportation in Japan and China, whose magnetic levitation (maglev) bullet trains zoom through major cities at hundreds of miles per hour.

    What the heck.
    Image: CD Projekt Red

    This fits with what the first Cyberpunk rulebook had to say about then-future transportation in 1988:

    Surprise, surprise. Contrary to expectations, the year 2000 has not yielded any staggering new developments in transportation. Years of economic strife and civil unrest have discouraged research into new ways to travel—in fact, the very act of travel has become very restricted. Expect the world of 2013 to be much like the 20th century—a network of crowded freeways, packed trains, and swarming airports.

    A subsequent expansion, Welcome to Night City, indicates light-rail maglev trains with ground speeds of 200 mph existed in the eponymous metropolis as far back as 2013, the year the first Cyberpunk adventures were set. Every book since makes some mention maglev trains as a staple of Night City travel, and 2005’s Cyberpunk V3.0 even noted an improvement in their top speed to 300 mph despite the apparent destruction of the intercontinental maglev line during the Fourth Corporate War (which took place from 2021 to 2025 in-universe) between the world’s ruling megacorps.

    (And just to cover my ass, 1990’s updated Cyberpunk 2020 rulebook makes it clear that NCART and the light-rail maglev trains are one and the same.)

    It’s here that Cyberpunk 2077 does something clever by expanding the consequences of this conflict. Rather than only putting rail travel between continents in flux, the game describes the Fourth Corporate War as debilitating the entire maglev system, as explained by the following database entry:

    Maglev trains cruised at high speeds via tunnels and on the surface thanks to the advent of electrodynamic suspension technology, allowing fast and comfortable travel from Night City to other cities, including Kansas City, St. Louis, Atlanta and Washington D.C. Unfortunately, this new era of transportation didn’t last long. The social unrest and armed conflict of the 4th Corporate War brought with it an economic crisis that soon crippled the entire system. Currently inoperational, the abandoned Maglev tunnels are used by the homeless and various gangs.

    The destruction of the maglev system and the slow NCART speeds exhibited in-game lead me to assume the local government was forced to revert to pre-2013 tech to ensure NCART remained operational, a massive downgrade from the bullet trains that once transported residents through Night City and beyond.

    Various futuristic passengers wait patiently in a subway train.

    Hurry up and wait.
    Image: CD Projekt Red

    While researching this situation, I couldn’t help but see darkly hilarious parallels between the difficulties facing the fictional California depicted in Cyberpunk 2077 and the actual state in which I live.

    Despite being one of the largest (both in terms of land and population) and richest states in the union, California has long struggled with plans to build public transportation on par with the bullet trains of eastern Asia. A lot of that is due to politics, as even ostensibly supportive legislators are wary of spending the billions of dollars necessary to complete the project. And let’s face it: Americans are just way too devoted to their cars.

    All that said, there’s one very simple explanation for Night City metro’s relatively low speed: The developers didn’t want NCART rides to happen in the blink of an eye. What good would the long-awaited subway experience be if players didn’t actually, you know, experience it?

    A trip taken at 300 mph wouldn’t provide any time to people watch Night City’s eccentric residents or take in the view of skyscrapers surrounding the bay outside the train’s windows. The entire point of the subway system — and a big part of why folks clamored for its inclusion all these years — is to give players new opportunities to role-play and experience the visual splendor of Cyberpunk 2077’s setting and its over-the-top aesthetics.

    I find it hard to fault CD Projekt Red for playing a little loose with established Cyberpunk history if it makes for a better game in the end.

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    Ian Walker

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  • The ‘Vanderpump Rules’ Season Trailer Has Dropped! Plus, Confrontations in ‘Southern Charm’ and ‘Miami.’

    The ‘Vanderpump Rules’ Season Trailer Has Dropped! Plus, Confrontations in ‘Southern Charm’ and ‘Miami.’

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    ‌

    Chelsea and Zach are back to talk about the news of the week and recap both Southern Charm Season 9, Episode 12 and The Real Housewives of Miami Season 6, Episode 6. They start today’s episode reacting to the drop of the new Vanderpump Rules trailer (01:41), before starting their recap with a discussion on the Page Six article drama in Southern Charm (09:28). Then, they transition over to Miami to chat about the awkward room-sharing situation (33:12).‌

    Host: Chelsea Stark-Jones
    Guest: Zack Peter
    Producer: Ashleigh Smith
    Theme Song: Devon Renaldo

    Subscribe: Spotify

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    Chelsea Stark-Jones

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  • Hasbro to lay off more workers amid toy sales slump

    Hasbro to lay off more workers amid toy sales slump

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    Hasbro Inc. is cutting about 900 jobs as the company is facing a slump in toy and game sales after a boom during the pandemic.

    The cost-saving plan will result in “the reallocation of people and resources,” including early retirement for some employees and layoffs over the next two years, Hasbro
    HAS,
    +0.39%
    said in a filing late Monday.

    The Wall Street Journal reported the layoff plans earlier Monday, citing a memo it had viewed.

    The maker of My Little Pony and Monopoly launched the plan in January, and at the time announced the layoffs of about 15% of its workforce.

    It has booked about $94 million in expenses related to severance, stock compensation and employee benefits, and expects to book an additional $40 million, the company said in the filing Monday.

    Hasbro in October missed third-quarter earnings expectations and slashed its full-year outlook, citing a “softer toy outlook.”

    Shares of Hasbro and rival Mattel Inc.
    MAT,
    +0.05%
    fell about 4% and 3%, respectively, in the extended session Monday, as the Wall Street Journal report also cited “early data points to another weak year” for the toy industry following the a boom during the pandemic.

    Mattel in October reported a better-than-expected third quarter, thanks in part to its wildly successful Barbie movie.

    Shares of Mattel have gained 6% this year, which contrasts with a 20% drop for Hasbro stock. Both stocks, however, have underperformed in relation to the S&P 500 index
    SPX,
    which is up about 20% in 2023.

    In a February filing, Hasbro said it had about 6,500 employees worldwide as of the end of 2022.

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  • ‘Slow Horses’ Has Found a Formula That Works. Plus, ‘The Curse’ Episode 3.

    ‘Slow Horses’ Has Found a Formula That Works. Plus, ‘The Curse’ Episode 3.

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    Chris and Andy talk about the decision to run Only Murders in the Building on ABC this January and compare it to a similar move to run Andor on cable channels (1:00). Then, they talk about the first two episodes of Slow Horses Season 3 and how the show has found a formula that works (24:48), before discussing the third episode of The Curse (39:34).

    Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald
    Producer: Kaya McMullen

    Subscribe: Spotify / Apple Podcasts / Stitcher / RSS

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    Chris Ryan

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  • The Remedy Connected Universe is my MCU

    The Remedy Connected Universe is my MCU

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    It’s been two weeks since Alan Wake 2, the sequel to Remedy Entertainment’s 2010 cult action-horror game, was released, and I can’t stop thinking about it. Between the introduction of protagonist and FBI profiler Saga Anderson and the mystery-board storytelling mechanics of the game’s Mind Place system (not to mention a forthcoming new game plus feature and DLC slated for next year), I’m obsessed with Remedy Entertainment’s latest game — much in the same way I was with its last new release, 2019’s Control.

    That obsession has only grown after puzzling over how the events of Alan Wake 2 might relate to the upcoming Control 2. I’ve even started a new playthrough of the original Control in my search for clues I might have overlooked. The Remedy Connected Universe has me excited for the possibility of intertextual storytelling in video games at a time where I otherwise feel fatigue over multi-franchise crossovers. Whether it’s the MCU, DCU, or Star Wars, I’m just over how labyrinthine most of these fictional interconnected universes have become. I don’t feel that way about the Remedy Connected Universe, though.

    Image: Remedy Entertainment/Epic Games Publishing

    I think I know why: An interconnected universe on this scale has never really been attempted before in video games. What’s more, Remedy’s games have so far been self-contained enough to be enjoyable as their own experiences. Finally, by virtue of being video games, which are extremely time-intensive and tricky to make, there’s not a new one to play every few months.

    Shared-world storytelling, while compelling when done right, is approaching something of a nadir in popular culture. A recent report by Variety about the internal turmoil of Marvel Studios in 2023 paints a picture of a studio that, through a combination of several box-office disappointments and an oversaturation of streaming TV releases, has come to a crossroads in its otherwise unimpeded path of commercial success. There are, as of this writing, 33 films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and nine streaming series recognized as canon.

    Jesse Faden floats down a purple hallway that’s shaped like a pentagon in Control

    Image: Remedy Entertainment/505 Games via Polygon

    That’s a lot of “homework” for anyone who wants to stay up to date with the latest Marvel developments. Remedy Entertainment’s shared universe doesn’t suffer from this same level of fatigue-inducing scale — as of this moment, there are only three games (Alan Wake, Control, and Alan Wake 2) to play in order to be caught up with what’s going on (leaving aside the many subtle connections to and Easter eggs from Max Payne, Max Payne 2, and Quantum Break). And for those that really couldn’t give a toss about the interconnected plot threads between Control’s corner of the Remedy Connected Universe and Alan Wake’s, the two series are still distinct enough that you could easily enjoy one or the other on its own merit.

    For instance: Did you know that Freya Anderson, the mother of Alan Wake 2 protagonist Saga Anderson and daughter of Old Gods of Asgard member Tor Anderson, was first name-dropped in a collectible FBC document in the AWE DLC for Control, three years before the release of Alan Wake 2? Or that Sheriff Tim Breaker and Jesse Faden, who are played by Shawn Ashmore and Courtney Hope, are implied to be alternate-reality versions of Jack Joyce and Beth Wilder, the protagonists of 2016’s Quantum Break, who are also played by Ashmore and Hope? Probably not. Could this be important to the future of the story of either Control or Alan Wake? Sure, maybe — but only for those who care. The point is to reward those players who like to dive a little deeper in order to draw out those lesser-known connections. Best of all, these kinds of Easter eggs don’t come at the expense of what’s unique or enjoyable about either Control or Alan Wake.

    Alan Wake points a flashlight and pistol at a group of shadowy figures on a rooftop in Alan Wake 2.

    Image: Remedy Entertainment/Epic Games Publishing

    Earlier this year, Remedy Entertainment announced its transition to a multi-project studio, with over five games currently in production, including a sequel to Control, a four-player player-versus-environment co-op game set in the world of Control, and a combined remake of Max Payne and Max Payne 2, each roughly scheduled to come out with a year between one another. Even if each of these releases were to be a touchstone in the Remedy Connected Universe going forward, audiences would only need to play one game a year, at most, in order to keep up with the evolving narrative of either Control or Alan Wake.

    I totally get the trepidation at the prospect of following yet another shared-universe narrative, especially when there’s no real stated end goal at this early point in the Remedy Connected Universe. Will Saga Anderson cross paths with Jesse Faden at some point in the future? Maybe! Will Quantum Break at some point be retroactively acknowledged as a canon part of this shared fictional universe? Who knows? For now, I’m just along for the ride — and as long as Remedy continues to iterate on its past success, and continues to develop idiosyncratic games with interesting characters and compelling storylines, I’m more than happy to follow the developer down whichever narrative rabbit hole it goes down next.

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    Toussaint Egan

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  • Overwatch 2’s Mauga always had two guns — but it took time to get them ‘just right’

    Overwatch 2’s Mauga always had two guns — but it took time to get them ‘just right’

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    Blizzard revealed the latest hero to join the ever-growing roster of its shooter Overwatch 2 at Blizzcon 2023. During an interview at the convention, Polygon got more details about Mauga, what players can expect from him, and the process of creating a new tank.

    “Mauga is a damaged-based tank, and how he sustains himself and his team is through damage,” said lead hero designer Alec Dawson. He was designed based on his weapons, with his abilities centered around doing as much damage as possible. The designers hope this focus on damage will make him more appealing to new players.

    The team wanted to ensure his abilities felt good when using both chain guns, but they also wanted to make sure players couldn’t “wipe people out immediately.” To combat that, Mauga has a big spread on both of his guns. At the same time, this makes him a threat in close quarters. “You don’t want to play with Mauga up close unless you know you’re going to take him out,” said Dawson.

    Mauga’s Overrun charging ability makes him virtually unstoppable, even against sleep darts. “He uses it to get where he wants to go,” said Dawson. For a nice cherry on top, whenever Mauga directly hits an opponent while using Overrun, he’ll slam them to the ground, stunning them while other nearby opponents will be sent flying.

    Image: Blizzard Entertainment

    Mauga’s ultimate, Cage Fight, creates a zone that traps opponents and blocks healing from the outside of it. What makes his ultimate even more dangerous is that Cage Fight stays active even if Mauga dies. Support hero Lifeweaver can pull Mauga out of the ultimate, but the enemy players will still be trapped inside until the ability runs out.

    Even though he’s a tank, Mauga can do more damage than some DPS heroes, said Dawson. To counter that, opposing teams can attack Mauga while he’s reloading or has burned through his abilities. “He’s such a big body that he really needs support. He needs a high healing output to keep him up at times.”

    When it came to creating Mauga, the dev team worked closely with a culture consultant team to ensure the studio displayed him in a way that would be respectful to the Samoan community. “We worked with a traditional tattoo artist from the Samoan culture to guide us. We tried to get as authentic as possible and as close to real as our engines could handle. And it turned out great,” said hero design producer Kenny Hudson.

    Tank fighter Mauga stretches out his chest and flexes, his yelling face upturned towards the sky

    Image: Blizzard Entertainment

    When Mauga was first being tested, the team originally had one iteration where his right gun only dealt critical damage to enemies in the air to help tanks fight flying-based heroes. As time went on, the team scrapped that, and now the right gun deals critical damage whenever an enemy is set on fire first with his left gun. But the idea to have him use two big guns was something the dev team always intended to do. “We always kinda knew that he was going to be a tank with two big main guns, and we wanted to make them just as important and just as useful to players as the other one. We didn’t want one to outshine the other,” said Hudson.

    One of the challenges the dev team faced was making the visual cues noticeable to players when Mauga uses his Cardiac Overdrive ability, which allows Mauga and his team members to heal whenever they damage an opponent. So the dev team revisited an old idea where Roadhog’s ability would heal everyone around him. This helped them find the “sweet spot” of not overwhelming the player with too much going on screen. “We don’t like throwing things away. Even if it doesn’t work out for a certain hero, it can come back later on for another one,” said senior test analyst Foster Elmendorf. To help further prove their point, Elmendorf explained how Mauga’s ultimate was originally D.va’s, which involved her making “a dome of lasers.”

    The team has been working on Mauga for some time. Originally, he was supposed to be released in season 2 instead of Ramattra, “but the team really wanted to take some more time to get the kit just right,” said Dawson. Pushing Mauga back allowed the dev team to polish him up and ensure his abilities played smoothly with one another.

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    Luis Joshua Gutierrez

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