Steven Universe is a show known primarily for its bright colors, fantastic music and handling mature themes about love, gender and consent with a surprising deftness for an action cartoon series aimed at a young audience. But when folks are listing the Cartoon Network hit's virtues, there's one that doesn't get nearly enough attention. A lot of Steven Universe is about presenting how its characters deal with grief. Throughout the Crystal Gems' adventures, their familial foibles and attempts to relate to the humans around them, there is a continuous, quiet acknowledgement of loss. The empty space left when their former leader Rose Quartz "gave up her physical form" — died — in order for her half-human son, Steven, to be born, is ever-present. To Steven's family members, Rose was a...

When Spider-Man came out in 2002, I was enthralled with it. Like most people, I thought Tobey Maguire was a great Peter Parker and a pretty good Spider-Man. When Spider-Man 2 hit, I enjoyed it, but it didn't capture the same kind of movie magic that I loved in the first one. By the time Spider-Man 3 came out, my fatigue with the character had begun to set in and I left the theater feeling disappointed and, more than anything else, okay with never watching another Spider-Man movie again. Fast forward five years from 2007 to 2012. Sony has decided to reboot the Spider-Man franchise following the disaster that was Spider-Man 3. They've brought in a new Peter Parker — played by the charming, boyish and English actor Andrew Garfield — and things were beginning to look up for the studio that...

Getting the Oculus Rift into retail locations like Best Buy and trusted sites like Amazon is an important part of making sure people feel comfortable buying the technology. The fact that skeptics will soon be able to try the hardware for themselves, even scheduling their demos up to a month in advance so they don't have to wait in line, is huge. There just isn't a way to believably explain the quality of the experience without trying it for yourself. So the news that Oculus is expanding the ways you can try and purchase a Rift is great for the virtual reality industry as a whole. But the idea of giving up any of the hardware's inventory before they've fulfilled their first pre-orders feels actively hostile to the most dedicated fans, the people who were the first to buy into Oculus'...

Bungie released its big spring update for Destiny on April 12. With this patch, Bungie has made some welcome improvements to several of the game's most flawed mechanics, but at the same time, introduced some troubling new problems to annoy Destiny's loyal but long-suffering players. What's good? Well, for starters... The new loot system Before this update, loot drops in the hard-mode King's Fall raid could have Light levels ranging from 310 to 320, and every drop was rolled randomly. So anytime you got a particular item, you only had a 1-in-11 chance of getting a perfect 320 Light score. That meant that players had to farm the raid for months if they ever wanted to reach the maximum Light level. I did the raid every week on three characters, starting with the first week the King's...

The collective internet seems to be completely outraged by the fact AMC Entertainment head Adam Aron suggested it may be OK to text during a movie. His argument was actually based on a question of how to grow or even maintain the business. What's the best way to make sure people still see movies, or see more of them? "There does seem to be a consensus that there are pockets of consumers who do not see as many movies as other segments of the population and that we can be doing more to attract those people," he told Variety in an interview. "Millennials come to mind. We need to reshape our product in some concrete ways so that millennials go to movie theaters with the same degree of intensity as baby boomers went to movie theaters throughout their lives." Those pesky millennials,...