I think Snoke *sounds* fine, it just looks dumb in writing. I’d have spelled it Snowke or something.

$27 million opening day, not weekend. I had the same confusion the first time I read it.

Ebola’s an odd case, though - it’s actually the sort of disease that’s *least* likely to cause a massive pandemic. A few years ago, no one thought an Ebola outbreak could ever get bigger than a few hundred people. It took a lot of things going wrong for this one to get so big in the first place (which isn’t to say it…

<And just because all these characters are in the movie doesn’t mean that they will all have their own character arc.>

Yeah, I think hollywood just assumes all French accents are the same, but Cajun vs France is not even close.

I’m not sure the relative firepower is too much of an issue, since presumably they’re not trying to kill each other. Action scenes will probably be built around achieving an objective, rather than simply trading blows. And for that kind of thing, I’d rather have Ant-Man and Scarlet Witch than Iron Man and War Machine.

Reading between the lines, it looks like this is what happened:

I’m waiting to find out how it ends before deciding if I’ll read it or not. On one hand, it can’t be more painful than the last trilogy’s end. On the other hand... this is Robin Hobb, so it probably can.

I wouldn’t worry about that *too* much - until a few years ago, conventional wisdom said that movies could only hit it big in the summer or over Christmas, so a spring release meant the studio was expecting a flop. But that’s not true anymore - movies have been hitting it big year-round, and studios have realized that…

But 2001 A Space Odyssey has just as ridiculous an ending as Interstellar did - it goes completely off the rails. That’s where the “Interstellar billed itself as hard SF” argument falls apart for me. There’s a long and storied tradition of hard SF that veers off into “sufficiently advanced technology” at the end.

It’s such a bizarre stunt. The whole “visit a children’s hospital in costume” thing only works if the movie *has actually come out*. Why should children care about meeting the stars of a movie they’ve never seen?

Some places really do have secret menus, official or unofficial. When I worked at Jamba Juice back almost a decade ago, we had a sheet of paper with some handwritten recipes that we taught to new employees. The most popular were the “white gummy bear” and “red gummy bear” ones that were made by mixing together all the…

You can only fight in the UFC at 135 lb and under? That seems crazy to me - tons of women can’t make that weight while still having enough muscle to be at top form in a fight.

I’ve definitely been stabbed by the cabbage-looking ones before. Unless there’s more than one variety and on some the pointy bits are soft? You can see the thorns in the photo...

Half of the plants in that picture have spines?

Between this and Interstellar I’m starting to wonder if a lot of people on io9 just don’t like father-daughter stories. Or maybe I just really like them? Both films are centered around two father-daughter pairs that I found really compelling but that apparently left most people cold.

The reasoning behind TNR is that it gets the general populace on the side of cat population control. People like cats, so if you tell people “trap a feral cat and we’ll come kill it”, people aren’t going to trap feral cats. They’ll just secretly feed them and the cats will breed like bunnies. If you tell people “trap…

Nah, spandex flexes just fine - it’s designed for that. Dancers wear it sometimes:

Declaring a show ruined based on a casting announcement?

That’s such a sad might-have-been. Del Toro was exactly the right choice for adapting the Hobbit, his dark fairy tale aesthetic is much closer to the book than Peter Jackson’s epic fantasy one. (The Hobbit may have a light tone, but there’s a lot of creepy in it: Mirkwood, Gollum, Beorn, Smaug)