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‘Talking Dead’ is a plague on AMC’s Sunday night lineup

By Jake Smasal | Oct. 21, 2014

On Sunday nights the most-watched show on television, AMC’s “The Walking Dead,” airs. Immediately after it ends, a foppish blonde man—comedian Chris Hardwick—comes on screen and talks about the show for the next hour. Nothing else happens. Hardwick and whatever celebrity guests and/or cast members tell jokes, talk about what just happened and what possibly could happen. The most interesting part of this is that people watch it. Viewers stay tuned in to watch Hardwick and his weekly compatriots draw the interest of “The Walking Dead’s” fans.

COLUMNS

Column: Examining the NBA MVP race

By The Daily Cardinal Arts Columnists and By Rushad Machhi | Oct. 21, 2014

With the NBA season barely a week away from starting, it’s everyone’s favorite time of the year: prediction season! Now it’s my turn to make semi-educated guesses about the NBA before any actual action has taken place. Today I’ll look at the top five MVP candidates for the upcoming year.

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‘Deadly Premonition’ offers a case study in deep characters

By Alex Lovendahl | Oct. 19, 2014

Deadly Premonition,” a game inspired by “Twin Peaks,” remains one of the gaming world’s most underplayed entries. Released in the U.S. in 2010 as a budget title with mediocre box art, its often hideous graphics, and its mixed reviews running the gamut from “pretty close to perfect” to “awful in nearly every way,” the mystery-as-life-sim title has almost been washed from gaming’s history.

COLUMNS

Heisman Watch: Week 8

By Jim Dayton | Oct. 17, 2014

This is the fifth edition of the Heisman Watch, a weekly feature tracking the candidates for college football’s most prestigious award. To read last week’s piece, click here.

COLUMNS

Column: Stave remains Badgers’ best option under center

By Jack Baer | Oct. 16, 2014

Let’s clear something up: Joel Stave is a better passer than Tanner McEvoy by a chasmic margin. There seems to be a false equivalency in the minds of some Wisconsin fans that McEvoy and Stave are both bad passers, but at least McEvoy can run. Stop it.

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Gay audiences are interested in more than eye candy

By Conor Murphy | Oct. 15, 2014

If I see another article in a publication oriented towards gay men proclaiming how hot Nick Jonas is, I might scream. I get it, he’s packed on some muscle mass since the last time he was relevant—and it’s always nice to have eye candy—but his recent appearances at gay clubs in New York seem a little disingenuous.

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Season five breathes new life into ‘The Walking Dead’ series

By Jake Smasal | Oct. 14, 2014

Around this time last year, I wrote a column about how I thought “The Walking Dead” was the best show currently on television. I was wrong. In fact, I have rarely been more wrong. While still an excellent piece of television in its own right, the fourth season of what is somehow cable TV’s most watched program did its best to make me look like an asshole. While taking literally forever to finally wrap up the Governor’s storyline, it also spiced things up with what may go down as the worst ever use of a Mountain Goats song and one of the most heavy-handed “Of Mice & Men” knockoffs I have ever seen (“Just look at the flowers, Lizzie!”). However, things picked up again at the end of the season when our heroes finally reunited in Terminus, which of course turns out to be an old train station that a group of cannibal cultists call home. This new development left me tentatively excited for the new season, and when it premiered on Sunday night I tuned in for what I hoped would be a solid hour of Rick Grimes straight murdering the aforementioned cannibals.

COLUMNS

All hail the regent of horror, Stephen King

By Maham Hasan and Ryan Greenfield | Oct. 13, 2014

Once, I read somewhere that all Stephen King wanted to be from a very young age was scared. His immeasurably active imagination did not disappoint, and he was able to find fear anywhere and scare himself quite easily.

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How to be solitary at concerts and love it

By Brian Weidy | Oct. 13, 2014

To say I’ve seen a lot of concerts in my relatively short span of time seeing concerts may almost be an understatement. From AC/DC to ZZ Top, it’s tougher for me to name a band or artist I haven’t seen than it is to name the one’s I have—or at least it feels that way sometimes.

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Column: Westbrook finally gets chance to prove his worth without Durant

By Rushad Machhi | Oct. 13, 2014

When Oklahoma City Thunder “point guard” Russell Westbrook woke up to the news that his superstar teammate and reigning MVP Kevin Durant had a Jones fracture in his foot that could sideline him for approximately two months, the tune of LMFAO’s “Shots!” rang through Westbrook’s head, except the shots he was dreaming of were a little different than what is being referenced in the song.

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Column: Love/hate matchup is guaranteed in World Series

By Jim Dayton | Oct. 13, 2014

It’s time to start mentally preparing for next week’s World Series, because my God, that is going to be one physically frustrating and stressful final week of baseball.

COLUMNS

#GamerGate is a damaging blemish on gaming community

By Alex Lovendahl and Tony Schultz | Oct. 12, 2014

A war on the people who have the audacity to make budget-priced or free, independent games that represent characters other than grizzled white dudes has been ongoing since August. Their games push back against the idea that games must be power fantasies, whether the power in place is the ownership of a vehicle worth millions or being an individual assassin striking terror in the hearts of the orcs of Middle Earth. Most, if not all, of these games are pretty easy to acquire, run on your college laptop, and cost $20 or less.

COLUMNS

Heisman Watch: Week 7

By Jim Dayton | Oct. 9, 2014

This is the fourth edition of the Heisman Watch, a weekly feature tracking the candidates for college football’s most prestigious award. To read last week’s piece, click here.

COLUMNS

Column: Rankings don't necessarily indicate team superiority

By Jack Baer and Kyrie Caldwell | Oct. 8, 2014

The transitive property: If a > b and b > c, then a > c. It’s one of the most basic tenants of mathematics and an idea that every person on Earth has used at one time or another, whether they’re aware of it or not. For our purposes, let’s talk about its use in the college football rankings, or at least in how the rankings are perceived.

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Column: Savor the chaos last Saturday brought to college football

By Grey Satterfield | Oct. 8, 2014

The roller coaster and college football are my two favorite childhood memories, and it’s days like Saturday that help me realize just how related they actually are.

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‘Twin Peaks’ revival breeds skepticism and excitement

By Jake Smasal | Oct. 8, 2014

On Monday, it was revealed that David Lynch’s acclaimed psycho-drama “Twin Peaks” would come back after more than 20 years for a third season on Showtime. Lynch’s sprawling vision of a northern town and its seedy (and mostly psychotic) underbelly failed to live up to lofty ratings expectations in its second season and has since become a cult classic, gathering legions of new fans as the years have gone by.

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Column: Poor red zone playcalling, bad quarterbacks doom Wisconsin offense

By Rushad Machhi | Oct. 6, 2014

Madison, we have a problem. For the first time in distant memory, that problem is the Wisconsin Badgers’ offense. It looked anemic in a 20-14 loss at Northwestern, breaking a streak of 17 straight games of 20 or more points.

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Riveting horror novels to get you ready for Halloween

By Maham Hasan | Oct. 6, 2014

Happy October folks! We have officially transitioned to what only the Wisconsinites call “fall,” rife with pumpkin spice lattes, a multitude of other pumpkin cliches and the countdown towards what will be my first official Halloween! I did not grow up dressing up in costumes to celebrate Halloween or go trick-or-treating; therefore my experience on that front is abysmally little.

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Steve Winwood shines in pantheon

By Brian Weidy | Oct. 6, 2014

Quick, name a better rock singer than Steve Winwood. If you answered anyone other than Bob Seger, you’re dead wrong.

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‘Tomodachi Life’ offers comic blending of gaming and reality

By Alex Lovendahl | Oct. 5, 2014

I’ve been playing Nintendo’s new life sim, “Tomodachi Life,” since a couple weeks after its release in June. To summarize, the game gives the player use of the Mii creation system—the same one used to make the avatars who populate Wii Sports—to create residents in an apartment complex on a resort island. The game encourages you to create your friends, your family, or your favorite celebrities. A handful have signed on to provide their likenesses; official Wayne Brady, Zendaya and Christina Aguilera Miis are easy to find online, and a commercial displays Shaq and Shaun White Miis tasting some of the food in the game.