Their extinction may not have much of an impact *now*, but that’s because their numbers have been so depleted over the last 500 years that there’s only a few left. Any species, no matter how important, can fall into that ‘well there’s so few of them left, lets not bother to protect them’ category if you kill enough of…

Yeah I think that’s ultimately the crux of the issue. Even if Garland had read the other books and wanted to cast an Asian woman and a Native American woman, would the studios have let him? Given Hollywood’s track record and the level of support they’ve given the film so far in dumping it on Netflix outside of…

Spoilers for Annihilation, Authority and Acceptance -

All three books were written at that point, though. They were published in quick succession in 2014 but they were submitted before that - probably at the same time. If Garland had access to the first before publication then there’s no reason he couldn’t have read the others if he wanted.

That’s the implication that I’ve heard - that Garland hasn’t actually read the other books and even though they were out there they didn’t factor into the creation of the movie. Which is fair, IMO, but still a bit annoying inasmuch as it’s kind of a lazy rationalization considering reading them and taking into account…

I think it’s sometimes a hard thing for Americans (and people immersed early on in their political culture) to grasp, since they very much have a back-and-forth dynamic that many other countries don’t have. Here in Canada, for example, the Liberal party (Justin Trudeau’s party) has been in power for something like 79…

Totally agreed, but I think it would be harder to pull off in terms of audience recognition in this era of CGI saturation though, especially with how subtle Area X’s uncanniness is. Any purely ‘practical’ approach risks coming across as muted or underwhelming in comparison. It’s hard to judge based on one trailer but…

Not redundant but it raises the bar as to what sort of setup and execution we should expect from an alt-history show that is not an adaptation of those previously written works, in the same way we couldn’t help but view a straight up alt-history show set in Nazi-occupied America in the light of TMITHC.

IMO what makes TMITHC stand above most others is the implicit critiquing and exploration of the alt-history genre packaged within it via the ‘Grasshopper’ book/movies. It’s not just a straight up ‘what if’ historical yarn, in the same way the Handmaid’s Tale is not just a ‘what if’ story about Gilead. That’s the…

I think that’s the thing there, though - the two creators very obviously want to ‘say something’ about current events but have decided to go about it in a pretty ham handed and unoriginal way. (see the fact noted above that the whole ‘Confederacy/slavery survived’ has been done many times and by far more talented…

It’s got a bit of that unreal low-budget feel that much-mocked Spiderman poster had, IMO. The weird lighting does it for me.

Well that’s not exactly a natural cycle - after all it’s been American policy since Monroe in the 1820's and particulary in the last 100 years to actively interfere in Latin American politics, usually through cultivating friendly regimes and actively working to destabilize unfriendly ones.

‘Lone wolf’ in the sense that they were probably operating out of any sort of direction or even advance knowledge on the part of Daesh. It’s part of their MO. Less organizing cells and carrying out directed attacks and moreso acting as an ideologcal beacon/banner for self-organized attacks carried out by individuals…

I’m pretty sure Daesh knows that there are probably Western intelligence assets embedded in their territory. They’re fighting a war against the West and its partners in the Middle East - kinda comes with the territory. A newspaper saying that much is really just stating the obvious.

Rise and shine, Mr. Freeman. Rise and shine...

Even if it is terrible I’d argue we as fans of video games have a duty to go and see it. Good or bad, if Warcraft makes money it encourages other studios to try and adapt other video games into movies, some of which will invariably be better than Warcraft.

If we were talking about the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and its related Oriental Orthodox cousins you would have a point, but we’re talking about countries where very recently imported Western brands of Christianity have largely been at the fore of discriminating against LGBT people.

Now there’s an interesting informatics project for some intrepid person out their; plot the distribution and patterns involved in racist commenters and comments on a huge social network like Reddit. Is it just a harcore contingent of dedicated posters that post above their weight class, making them seem more numerous…

Yeah. That’s the whole point of the show, isn’t it? They’re riffing off of tropes and archetypes and themes taken from the old 1930’s hardboiled crime fiction and movies. They did the same thing in season 1 (albeit with a dash of Lovecraftian flair) to wild applause but now that they’re sticking much more closely to…

Exactly! I love Robinson and share his politics for the most part, but he’s about as forward and unsubtle about his political views as a metric ton of regolith dropping on your head. How do you even read something like ‘2312’ and not pick up on any of that?