No one can explain the Reyes plot to you because the Reyes plot makes no sense. Everything about it is infuriating.

The facts of the allegation may be in question, but the terrible, terrible lawyering by Kesha's counsel is not.

The equivalent statute in New York does include gender and sexual orientation. See N.Y. Penal Law Art 485. Neither that law, nor the federal statute, were in issue in this case. Kesha was relying instead on a New York City ordinance that extends the statute of limitations for civil actions (i.e. non-criminal…

Yup. I kind of hate stories like this, because they cast an unkind light on people with whom I agree on a lot of things. If you're not for due process and reality-based thinking when rape is in issue, then you're not actually for due process and reality-based thinking.

I used to love Marvel Comics Presents, so I'm open to a Cloak & Dagger series. But jesus, that promo image.

This reporting is terrible. "Hate crime" statutes provide for more severe punishment of criminal actions that are motivated by special animus and intended to intimidate/attack a community. Think "burning a cross on someone's yard." Technically, that's trespassing, vandalism and, if the family is home, probably…

New York does have a hilariously Kafkaesque court system (this diagram actually makes it look more sensible than it really is), but it's also just bad reporting.

Actually, quickly reading the opinion (link) it looks like the only mention of "reasonableness" is in a footnote and is describing the court's reasoning in denying the preliminary injunction. Specifically "The court found that it is commercially unreasonable for the SONY entities, having expended more than $11…

This is correct. She also tried to argue that she was "incapacitated" by her sexual assault such that she couldn't initiate her suit in a timely fashion, because she was in rehab. Both arguments are legally tenuous, to put it mildly.

It turned out to be true after the fact that Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany were a bunch of top tier assholes, but propaganda was effective and accepted enough at that time that the truth didn't really matter. America also managed to largely do an about face on Stalin twice, from hatred, to camaraderie, back to…

I don't mean to be flippant, but they also drank. A lot. It really puts a lot of the strangeness of people in the mid-20th century into perspective when you remember that untold millions of them were veterans of the bloodiest war in history, and largely coping with it on an ad hoc basis, with no real support network…

Bay is so boring at this point that his explosions can actually lull you to sleep. He's the most toothless action director in America. It's sad, honestly.

It's true. I'm from New York, and still live here, and it's hard to really remember what the '80s and '90s really felt like. The numbers don't do it justice, but they're still impressive: in 1990, there were 2,245 murders in the city. Last year there were 352, even though the population has gone up by over 1…

Disagree, Superman is such a straight-forward inversion of the Moses story that it's hard to imagine it's by accident. A baby is placed in a basket and then sent away from its parents, only to be discovered by [royalty][honest working people] and then rises to be a champion of [his ethnoreligious tribe][the…

No, but it's a good platform for outrage, so fuck this guy who built his career on a show centered around a superpowered woman and has consistently included women with significant power and agency in his genre offerings.

It's a still-relatively marginalized (and formerly highly-marginalized) artistic endeavor where one person can, single-handedly, be a major force (e.g. Dave Sim and Frank Miller, who do their respective comics almost alone, and could do them alone if necessary). It's kind of tailor-made to accommodate eccentrics.

I think part of the issue, on the comics side at least, is that TDKR and Watchmen are both such technical masterpieces. Miller and Moore, particularly at that stage in their careers, were both masters of the form and obviously interested in demonstrating its power. In spite of the medium being so important to each…

Oh god, you were in England. No wonder McDonalds looked like food. My condolences.

I don't get it: if you were hungry for burgers, why did you go to McDonalds?

Notice, by the way, that Rorschach's last words are spoken in Kovac's voice. No wavy border around the speech bubble—it's normal (if shouted) speech.