Having grown up in east PA, I agree that even though it’s obvious it wasn’t actually filmed there, they did do a pretty good job of portraying that feeling and I had the same sense that these could’ve been people I knew (including Michael Scott, who is basically a hybrid of three or four actual people I can think of,…

Black Books did have some good office scenes though, when Fran got hired for a generic office job (as a favor to some gangster’s friend) and no one ever told her what her work was, and she ended up having to give this presentation:

Thank you—I was just scrolling down to say the same thing. I’ve been working in open-plan offices for about 7 years, and I’ve never met anyone who likes them and doesn’t wish for at least a small cubicle wall. Open plan may have worked in the 40s when desks didn’t have much on them except a typewriter and people were…

The “many” in your sentence makes it not very meaningful. “Y2K panic” came from a fundamentally correct understanding of how many other computers handled date and time info. Mostly (but not only) legacy systems that were important in finance and industry.

I think that was an editing error in the previous article that they linked to, based on a table in the original National Urban League document that wasn’t labeled in a very clear way. The 6.1% figure wasn’t “% of employees at Facebook who are black”—it was the ratio of black employees to white employees. Those two…

I haven’t seen either of these movies, but I’d just like to say that “many of the specific racist incidents portrayed were fictional” in no way supports the idea that it’s overstating the level of racism in this country. Overstating the level of racism in this country would take much more effort than that.

About Jonathan’s “don’t save people” thing: while I have a lot of problems with the movie, I’m actually completely fine with the idea that Pa Kent might say that. The story isn’t about convincing us that he’s right, and Clark doesn’t actually take his advice in the long run. Jonathan is behaving in what I think is a…

I’m a little surprised this didn’t include Notgeld. Wikipedia has a pretty good article on it, but other sites have more examples of the wilder designs, for instance here.

I honestly loved this movie, and it definitely wasn’t *just* because it has good intentions socially (although of course some people will never stop saying that that’s the only reason you loved it; can’t be helped). The writing, acting, direction, and cinematography are great, it’s unusually good at making Internet…

There’s a guy who seems like he’s probably a rapist, and he grabs the main character and tries to abduct her, but fails. Another guy is a stalker who is just generally disturbing but doesn’t do anything violent.

“how Wolverine could possibly have enough spare time to go on, like, eight different adventures per month, showing up in everyone else’s comics”

Agreed. I also really like the moment during the big battle when Hawkeye shoots an arrow at Loki’s eye (as he specifically promised to do), we follow it with an implausible zoom lens, Loki somehow catches it at the last moment and flashes a shit-eating grin, and then it explodes because Hawkeye wasn’t taking any…

It’s dumb, but that’s been the standard way to describe Dune to the press since about 1977. It’s not exactly an easy book to describe without making it sound off-puttingly complicated.

I’m not too attached to the physical description of Rabban in the book, although I think you’re right about how he and Feyd were meant to reflect the Baron. The main thing about him in terms of how he’s actually used in the story is that he’s a real asshole and he’s not too bright. I’m curious about how that would…

I agree but I think it’s worth keeping in mind that Split was made for a little over *one tenth* the budget of Unbreakable. Literally, and not adjusting for inflation. So I’m not sure “aspiring to spectacle” was really an option there.

I don’t know if you were really looking for a response, but: “most people in London are white British” is only true if by “most” you mean “slightly less than 50 percent.” That number may have changed somewhat since 2001, but having been there a few times in the last 20 years I’d say it’s not by much. It’s a nice…

Don’t know if you’ll see this reply on an old post, but I got a kick out of you showing up in the comments here and I wanted to say I really, really liked both Resolution and The Endless a lot (I wrote this about the latter). Still haven’t seen Spring. Looking forward to whatever you guys do next.

I remember it, I’ve got it right here, and it’s creepy as hell (though sometimes pretty funny, e.g. the kid knows he’s supposed to be a farmer so he flies around plucking people’s heads off and throwing them in a grain silo).

But the earliest “Superman-ish person minus the ethics” story that I’ve seen was Alan Moore’s…

People in New York weren’t particularly fond of him even a year after the attack. His idea that he ought to stay in office after the end of his term (for vague “it’s still a crisis” reasons) was very unpopular, it was increasingly obvious that his pal Kerik was super corrupt, and people had had more time to think…

I lived in NYC then and I’ve never understood it. What he did after the attack was 1. his basic job, i.e. making sure city agencies were doing all the things you’d expect them to be doing after a disaster, and 2. being on TV a lot, talking about how we were going to be OK etc. I think the first part only partly made…