Joshua Rivera

Joshua Rivera

@jmrivera.bsky.social

writer for hire. bylines at Vulture, Slate, The Ringer, and Vanity Fair. movies and tv and games and books and drop me a line: jriverawrites@proton.me

8K followers2.4K following11.5K posts

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Joshua Rivera
@jmrivera.bsky.social

Oh I never did an intro post. So: I’m a writer interested in pop culture and how we make meaning from it. I was entertainment writer at polygon, and before that had stints at EW, GQ, and freelanced everywhere. Stories saved my life and I want to help people understand them, and each other, better.

Joshua Rivera
@jmrivera.bsky.social

ZINE ZINE ZINE

Nathan Grayson@nathangrayson.bsky.social

with another inside baseball week comes another subscriber drive! 5,800 is imminently achievable and unlocks a goal I’m extremely excited about: an annual, physical zine of our best stories aftermath.site/aftermath-su...

Joshua Rivera reposted

Riley MacLeod
@rcmacleod.bsky.social

"Why don't you go to the bathroom in more survival games?" is a joke that came up during our podcast over the summer. I reached out to developers about it, and their answers were complicated and fascinating, from spiraling design issues to the deeper meaning behind where to put the toilet

Aftermath@aftermath.site

Why more survival games don't let you poop aftermath.site/survival-games...

Joshua Rivera
@jmrivera.bsky.social

aw man this is cool

Austin Wintory@awintory.bsky.social

Mass Effect was my ultimate white whale, my all-time dream project. For the last couple years I'd been in discussion w/ BioWare & EA to take on the project & as part of that I wrote close to 20 minutes of music to explore where the franchise can go next, may as well share it!

Joshua Rivera
@jmrivera.bsky.social

I think there’s been a deterioration in the relationship between editors and freelancers, or the business has broken down so much that these relationships cannot be maintained. for me it’s less about an easy assignment and more “so do any of you trust me or what”

rax ‘levon honkers’ king@raxkingisdead.bsky.social

i'll tell ya one thing i miss is FREELANCE ASSIGNMENTS. i have never been a good pitch-er but i can pretty much write whatever someone tells me to and i used to have a stable of editors who liked hurling ideas at me and seeing what i came up with. the salad days of $300 assignments from MEL lol

Joshua Rivera
@jmrivera.bsky.social

seeing Latinos in media did and continues to mean a lot to me but you know what means more? Seeing my people in my field, more senior and junior and contemporary to me. I will not settle for diverse toys.

Joshua Rivera
@jmrivera.bsky.social

Many of the rules of composition are there to reinforce the illusion of depth, to make you forget you’re looking at a flat screen. Video games’ visual priorities are different, you don’t have to work as hard at depth when the player will simply venture forth into the scene

Joshua Rivera reposted

Mark Harris
@markharris.bsky.social

In fairness (sorry), the film flatlined the second it expanded from 4 to 472 screens. It's not You Can See Everything; it's four hours, with good but not great reviews, about someone who's already in our faces 24/7. But I do think we should watch for how easy, or not, it becomes to stream or rent.

Brandon Friedman@brandonfriedman.bsky.social

This seems like a big deal

showbiz411.comControversial "Musk" Documentary Pulled From Almost Every One of 472 Theaters After One Week by Newly Sold Bleecker Street Films - Showbiz411Alex Gibney's "Musk" movie is pretty much gone. Released October 9th to four theaters, it expanded to 472 last Friday. And now, one week later it's gone
Joshua Rivera
@jmrivera.bsky.social

lmaoooo

Kotaku@kotaku.com

Xbox Reportedly Bungled $500 Million Netflix Exclusivity Deal To Develop Movies, Shows Based On Games https://kotaku.com/xbox-reportedly-bungled-500-million-netflix-exclusivity-deal-to-develop-movies-shows-based-on-games-2000749336

kotaku.comXbox Reportedly Bungled $500 Million Netflix DealAccording to industry insiders, newly appointed Xbox CEO Asha Sharma overplayed cross-media potential with recent Netflix exec Peter Rice to the tune of $800 million
Joshua Rivera
@jmrivera.bsky.social

this is funny to me because if I was to describe Nathan Fielder to someone who’s never seen him I would say something like “so you know what a pervert looks like? now imagine a Canadian one”

CNN@cnn.com

Since its release, "You Can See Everything" has taken pop culture by storm — and Nathan Fielder is emerging as the documentary's unlikely sex symbol. https://cnn.it/4yB7lsY

Joshua Rivera
@jmrivera.bsky.social

kind of bewildering to me how much conversation about you can see everything is about Liz Holmes when the movie spends so much of its time trying to deal with Billy Evans’ supervillain shit

Joshua Rivera
@jmrivera.bsky.social

also kind of annoying how the movie is continually reduced to “who do you believe” when the whole film is an excruciating exercise in the futility of knowing the objective truth of a person. multiple people who believe their job to be getting the truth grapple with the inadequacies of their method!

Joshua Rivera
@jmrivera.bsky.social

genuinely insulting how studies and surveys routinely find how paying for basic human needs has no downsides for both governments and businesses and both routinely plunge their heads in the sand as it rots around them

Semafor@semafor.com

Employers might be overestimating the downsides of offering paid parental leave and underestimating the costs of losing employees by foregoing it, argues economist Emily Oster in a new report. Read more from David Lim: www.semafor.com/article/10/2...

semafor.comExclusive: Paid parental leave doesn’t strain most employers, survey findsA survey of employers in four states without public-sponsored leave programs found that 55% of employers reported no additional costs from offering it.

Joshua Rivera reposted

the babahuck
@tylerhuckabee.bsky.social

"mystery actor"

Kaiser @ Celebitchy@kaiseratcb.bsky.social

The narrowed James Bond shortlist: Jacob Elordi, Jack Lowden & a mystery actor www.celebitchy.com/1003512/

celebitchy.comThe narrowed James Bond shortlist: Jacob Elordi, Jack Lowden & a mystery actor – Cele|bitchyThe summer months were full of speculation about the “James Bond shortlist.” Amazon-MGM finally got their hands on the James Bond franchise last year, and the A
Joshua Rivera
@jmrivera.bsky.social

I do wish video game people had less affection for studio names and more familiarity with people’s names. I feel it does BioWare a disservice to collapse the entire studio to what it was in 2010

Joshua Rivera
@jmrivera.bsky.social

Some misread this as a call for auteurism, like it’s better to assign a game to a single person. That’s not what I mean at all. I just think it’s good to know names like Mary Kirby, who wrote a lot of Varric Tethras — one of the only characters stitching together three wildly different games.

Joshua Rivera
@jmrivera.bsky.social

oh this is gonna be huge

pilot@pilotv.bsky.social

btw From is on netflix now if you're looking for a creepy mystery series about people being stuck in a nightmare town (and it stars my fav, Harold Perrineau!!). it was hidden on epix/mgm+ but i promise it's very good and now you don't have to wait two excruciating years between seasons

Joshua Rivera reposted

PC Gamer
@pcgamer.com

To honor one of the studios that defined PC gaming, we've republished more than 20 articles about BioWare today. The pcgamer.com homepage is dedicated to interviews, retrospectives, and making-ofs about some of the best RPGs of all time.