TWITTER| Elections are boom season for Twitter parody accounts, and few are more necessary than ELI KIRBY (@TheLearningKirb), an account that mocks the data-assisted bloviations of wonky nerd-pundits like Nate Silver and Ezra Klein. "My Uber driver has zero familiarity with The Niomachean Ethics and is voting Trump. This is the problem," one tweet reads, while another highlights the strengths of his unique polling model: "The latest, massively unstable UltraNow Fast-Twitch calculations show Clinton as a 123% favorite to win."
TV SHOW| In the past few years, TV's weirdest tendency has been to turn everything into a cop show. The movie Limitless, about a drug that makes Bradley Cooper brilliant? Turned into a cop show. Grimm's Fairy Tales? Turned into a cop show. But maybe the strangest is iZOMBIE, a comic book-inspired show from the creator of Veronica Mars. A coroner-turned-zombie eats brains, which give her flashes of the memories of the murdered brains she's consumed. The premise is loony, but the poppy banter and an additional twist — the zombie also adopts the quirks, tics and personality of the victims whose brains she's snacked on — gives the show the power to pull it off. The second season is now on Netflix.
COMPUTER GAME| Don't Starve gave us a Tim Burton-esque spin on survival games, with your tiny little cartoon avatar scurrying about trying to chop enough wood, pick enough berries and murder enough rabbits to make it through another deadly night. DON'T STARVE: SHIPWRECKED, an expansion to the original game, gives the whole thing an appropriate castaway feel, complete with sailing ships, palm trees and active volcanoes. Once again, it's the little touches that make the game so compelling amid moments of aggravation. Chop down a coconut tree, and on occasion a coconut will fall from the branches, smacking you on the head and injuring you. ♦
