You know what NFL? You’ve lost me forever. I never cared about your “sport” anyway. I sort of cared about Madden because it at least helped sell video game systems during the holiday seasons. But now, you’ve gone too far. Yesterday, the NFL announced they’d be banning “nonstandard/overbuilt” facemasks.

This includes Oakland Raiders defensive end Justin Tuck’s mask that resembled that of Shredder from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Now I don’t know who that is but damn them for not allowing a Shredder mask. They have also announced that the similar Bane styled masks will also be a part of this ban.

Now what is funny is the reason for the ban: because they don’t live up to NFL safety standards. The group of gargantuan men who are doing everything they can to throw their body weight on top of each other as fast as possible is worried about safety? Meanwhile hockey lets people play with a rubber puck flying at their face with no protection. Makes a lot of sense.

Well now I have given up on ever giving football a shot. The best chance they have is stepping their game up and creating a hybrid of the XFL and whatever the heck futuristic version of the game that they play in Starship Troopers and when they do it’s Team Shredder vs. Team Bane vs. Team Casey Jones vs. Team Mysterio.

Until then, I say “Good day” to the NFL.

About a year ago, crowdfunding was the big buzz word. If you had talent but wanted to remain independent or you just weren’t big enough to make it to the desk of a major studio, developer, publisher or manufacturer, you would head to Kickstarter (or maybe Indiegogo) and put a call out to your audience and see what they could do to help get your project going.

Early on, there were some huge successes with millions of dollars going into funding. But then, you couldn’t escape it. If you were an entertainment writer of any kind be it movie, music or gaming, your email box didn’t go a week without hearing about “the next big thing… that just needs crowdfunding” and quickly that frequency has continued to increase.

If somehow it was possible to ensure that the projects being put on Kickstarter and then publicized everywhere were of a certain quality, this wouldn’t be an issue. But the more I hear about and see the bad ones, the less likely I am to check out the good ones. Now instead of going and browsing Kickstarter on my own, I only head over if someone has directly recommended one to me and that has to be someone I trust the opinion of.

This is especially evident in the gaming category. You have one or two higher profile titles and everything else is derivative and unoriginal fluff.

When did “Spoilers!” become a thing? It used to be understood that when a movie was in the theater you didn’t talk about the ending in a public place. It was also understood that if an episode of a TV show ran, it would be fair game at the water cooler the next day. But then habits changed.

Books became movies. Comics were sold as trades. TV could be DVR’ed or sold as a full season at a reasonable price. And then things changed and the way people behaved changed with it. And M. Night Shyamalan made Bruce Willis a ghost. (Oh, calm down! The title even read spoilers!)

Unfortunately, few things are kept sacred and spoiler free. Right now that seems limited to Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead comics. Even with Twitter pages and hashtags galore, these are still people who have been able to avoid what happens in season 3, episode 9 of Game of Thrones on HBO. Similarly, I was able to make it to the trade released six months after issue #100 of The Walking Dead without finding out the issue’s pivotal plot point.

But that seems to be where it ends. So the question becomes when is it safe to talk about what you’ve seen, heard or read?

After opening in select theaters in LA, NY, and San Francisco, director Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing will open nationwide on Friday, June 21. We have already reviewed the film but just in case that wasn’t enough to convince you to seek out this delightful adaptation, here are five reasons Much Ado is worth your time and money.

1. You’ll understand Shakespeare (finally). If you are hesitating about Much Ado because you are concerned you will not keep up with the Bard’s prose, you are not alone. Dogberry himself (Nathan Fillion) at first refused the project and then tried to back out of it for this very reason. But then Fillion, like all of the other players, immersed himself in the language, the setting, and the character.

The cast did the hard work of studying the text and translating it so you don’t have to. They do an excellent job of adding movement and clarity to Shakespeare’s prose so even if you don’t know what someone is saying, you know what they mean.

In the aftermath of the Sandy Hook tragedy, people have been looking for someone, or something, to blame. Back in January, I wrote an editorial in response to the NRA trying to place blame on the video game industry for the violence that occurred in Newtown, CT. In it, I didn’t try to place blame unfairly because at that point, and still today, I don’t know all the facts about the case, nor do I claim to be an expert in it.

What I do know, though, is the old school mentality of placing blame and trying to pass a law to put a quick fix on something isn’t the way to solve the greater problem. After a recent report claiming that the Sandy Hook shooter was a “deranged gamer”, United States senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) stated that it is the entertainment industry’s responsibility to tone down the levels of “obscene violence” in their games.