Le Journal

Thirty years ago, The A.V. Club made its debut on the internet, nestled within former sister site The Onion. In the years since, the site has become a premier destination for trenchant pop culture writing, expansive retrospectives, and insightful interviews, spawning generations of critics. To mark three decades of incisive discourse, we’re launching a subscription plan to help you make the most of the time you spend here. Our approach to subscriptions is best summed up as “yes, and” (don’t worry, that’s the last improv reference we’ll make). We want to offer subscribers all of the same great A.V. Club articles—TV recaps/reviews, film reviews, music stories, newswires, games/anime reviews, existing columns like Women Of Action, and our archives—that will remain free to all to read, as well as subscriber-only perks like ad-free browsing, an invite-only Discord channel for watch parties, and early access to live A.V. Club events, for just $5/month or $50 annually. You’ll also get a free baseball cap and/or T-shirt with our logo. Starting in February, we’ll begin to roll out our subscriber-only features, including a new installment of Film Trivia Fact Check. We’ll also welcome back legacy A.V. Club writers and introduce new talents to celebrate 30 years of exceptional cultural journalism, and pave the way to the next 30. Despite recent dispiriting trends, independent media is more valuable than ever. You can show your support for The A.V. Club by subscribing on a monthly or annual basis, which will help us continue to deliver our unique brand of genial expertise via TV recaps, games coverage, filmmaker deep dives, music features, and anime roundups. Here are a just few things on the horizon for subscribers: • A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms season-one finale watch party in our invite-only Discord channel • New installments of TV Club Classic • The return of Back Issues In the spirit of “yes, and,” we’re also asking you to fill out our 2026 reader survey—which is open to everyone, not just subscribers—where you can sound off on the site as well as what you’re looking for in a subscription. Thanks for reading, and here’s to the next 30.

Fantasy is a dominant genre in the tabletop RPG space. From Dungeons & Dragons to Pathfinder to Daggerheart, if players go to the local store and ask about playing an RPG, they’re probably going to be sold on big, epic fantasies about heroic characters in ruin-filled, magical worlds. The indie space is just as fantastical, with games like Mythic Bastionland and Dolmenwood taking their own unique turns at responding to the big fantasies with smaller, weirder ones. But what happens when players want to make fantasy worlds as much as they want to play fantasy characters? And what if they’re interested in post-fantasy—taking all the assumptions of fantasy and turning them on their head, playing with the influences, and injecting some friction into the typical swords-and-sorcery, plains-and-mountains worlds? They should probably play A Land Once Magic. Viditya Voleti’s A Land Once Magic, five years in development and recently released in both a regular and a prestige format by More Blueberries, is a world creation game for two or more players. It asks players to use a standard deck of cards to make a fantasy world from the ground up, and it provides a number of prompts and tables to ensure that those players make their fantasy weird, or at least outside of the standard fantasy usually found in the average D&D core rulebook. Veteran designer Voleti is explicit about this in the opening of the rulebook: the game is, in essence, a provocation to the genre, asking “how do we move fantasy in a new direction?” This movement is guided very directly by the game itself. It first asks players to create a palette of tones and flavors (paints) that can be invoked in the game. These are the things that will be returned to repeatedly in order to justify the shape of the world and to think through the implications of the cities and cultures that players place into it. The rulebook suggests things like raw, jagged, and cluttered, all adjectives that feel very different from the influence of fantasy stalwarts like Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films. An engaging idea, the palette does some interesting parameter-setting that’s more purposeful than the assertion-based game mechanics of worldbuilders like Microscope or The Quiet Year. Creating a palette is creating a series of purposeful limits about the aesthetic space of a world, and it’s easy to envision doing it in a profoundly limiting way that would produce some off-kilter fantasy: dead, unmoored, or drained, perhaps. In addition to the palette, the game explicitly asks for players to come up with touchstones that are outside of fantasy. It’s commendable when a tabletop game recognizes players are all coming to it with their own assumptions about the world. They’re chasing Conan, Earthsea, or whatever their favorite fantasies are, and most games are content to provide a list of films and books with the right vibe for the game and call it a day. A Land Once Magic mechanizes the contexts players bring to the game, and more than that, it encourages them to import entire aesthetic packages and translate them into the fantasy frame. The rulebook offers “Cowboy Bebop’s Jazz and Bluegrass soundtrack” as a touchstone, for example, and thinking about it for a few minutes can produce a host of delightful, nontraditional fantastical setups: “Heat’s crowded, amoral landscape” or “a lush, full sense of being hunted by a Predator.” Maybe “the smirking nihilism of a Vince Staples album.” Figuring this out, and getting everyone at a table to agree about it, might be the hardest thing to do for a random group of people playing A Land Once Magic, but also figuring it out, and applying it judiciously, is the thing that makes this game unique and grippy over some of the other worldbuilders in the tabletop space. The rest of the game plays predictably for anyone who has experimented in this space. Players draw cards from a deck, and they use those cards to produce prompts that players have to respond…

Years before the World Wide Web was even a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye, Gary Larson created a comic that would perplex and delight the internet for decades to come. Titled “Cow Tools,” the 1982 The Far Side comic depicts a cow standing in front of four hard-to-identify objects. For many readers, it wasn’t immediately clear what the joke was, which gave the comic a massive second life when it took off on Twitter from 2012 on, as Know Your Meme documents. But perhaps it was never a joke; perhaps it was a prophecy. Yesterday, The Guardian published an article entitled “Back-scratching bovine leads scientists to reassess intelligence of cows,” led with a photo of Veronika, a Brown Swiss cow, apparently using a stick to scratch her back. The article documents Witgar Wiegele’s, a farmer and baker from Nötsch im Gailtal, Austria, discovery of his cow Veronika’s “extraordinary intelligence.” Videos of Veronika using a stick or a broom to scratch her back eventually made it in front of researchers at Vienna’s University of Veterinary Medicine. As Dr. Antonio Osuna Mascaró says, “It was a cow using an actual tool… We got everything ready and jumped in the car to visit.” Dr. Osuna Mascaró’s enthusiasm was echoed on Bluesky, especially among the “Cow Tools” community. The account “Cow Tools Daily” had an especially good day with the discovery, writing, “to be a gary larson is to be cursed with being correct too early.” Dr. Osuna Mascaró also got in on the action with the account, writing, “We have lived alongside cows for nearly 10,000 years. We breed them and exploit them. It is now, only now, that we have discovered THEY CAN USE TOOLS.” Place your bets now for which Far Side comic will become a reality next, and in the meantime, you can see Veronika picking up the broom with her tongue in The Guardian‘s article.

Channing Tatum’s Magic Mike Live is coming to the land of off-brand Elmo impersonators and competing chocolate megacorp stores. No, not Las Vegas—it’s already been there—but Times Square. After stops in Vegas and London, Tatum shared on Instagram this morning that the stage show he created and directed is coming to New York City. Performances for the New York edition of Magic Mike Live are scheduled to begin on October 8 with an official opening of October 22. Broadway World reports that the show will take place in a custom-built and newly renovated venue one block from Times Square, though it doesn’t name the space specifically. “This all started as a crazy idea 10 years ago and look at it now,” Tatum says in a statement shared with the site. “When we were coming up with the concept for our original show, we first came to the streets of New York City where I hid in a secret confession booth we set up in Midtown and asked women what they really want. Not just in a show, but in life. They shared some deeply powerful things. That insight helped us create our shows in Vegas, London and all over the world. With 10 years of experience and surrounding ourselves with a team of strong and creative women, we’re now coming back to where it all started in New York.” Magic Mike Live is billed as a “next-level, 360-degree live experience inspired by the hit films” blending dance, athleticism, comedy, and music, seating the audience in the middle of the venue while a cast of dancers performs around and above them. Tickets for the show start at $59 with VIP packages starting at $249. Sebastian Melo Taivera, who appeared in Magic Mike’s Last Dance, will star as Mike in the New York production, along with a large ensemble of dancers. If Mike can make it here, he can presumably make it in most other major markets!