I’m holding out hope that this is about Batman literally trying to find his footing. As in two hours of slapstick where he keeps almost falling off the top of a wall, accidentally taking two stairs instead of one in the dark, etc.

I won’t argue this any further after this comment, because clearly I’m not very good at getting across what I’m trying to say. Just so people don’t think I’m a total idiot though, I will try to clarify one last time: 1. I was not at all trying to imply that communicable disease is not still very bad. 2. I was replying…

It seemed pretty clear to me that War’s power isn’t smirking, it’s that her presence makes people more likely to kill each other. That peace conference went south awfully fast and I don’t think it was just because we’re in a satirical novel. Can’t remember if this is spelled out in the book.

Btw, if anyone really likes to nerd out on this stuff, I’ve been doing a Swamp Thing reread blog - I’ve gotten up to 1989 so far. There are some links in it to other people nerding out in even more detail.

To me the joke wasn’t that Pestilence quit because pestilence is totally irrelevant now, but because it pissed him off that humans did something to shut down a large chunk of his business, when he’d never had to deal with any serious opposition before. Previously, he was second only to Death as far as how little…

They also have pretty much every Swamp Thing comic, if Swamp Thing is your thing. I’ve been working my way through it and not all of it is good, but it’s interesting to see how it evolves.

If anything, “Abigail Arcane” is a slightly more plausible name once you get rid of the idea that she’s from Romania (or, as one of the comic writers briefly had it, “Bavaria”).

It seemed to me like you were arguing that the invention of penicillin wasn’t really a significant change, because there were still a lot of diseases in 1990. What I’m saying is that 1990 (and 2019) is like an unimaginable paradise, in that regard, compared to most of human history.

I think you’re seriously underestimating how bad infectious disease has been for most of human history.

I appreciate that there’s a link to discussion of factual issues in the movie (“accurate or otherwise”), but it might be worth mentioning that the original book is legendarily inaccurate, as described here. It sounds like the movie does away with some of Preston’s hyperbole, but not all (if they actually show someone…

Even shorter version: Along with the fuel, you have to put in some easier-to-find stuff that wouldn’t normally be usable as fuel but will turn into fuel. So Mike’s summary “creates more fuel than it consumes” is only true if you narrowly define “fuel” to mean “stuff that is ready to generate power right now”.

Well, Colin has a job. I feel like there was a line once about how he’s the only one who has money and that’s basically why they’re willing to live with him.

That line plays very differently depending on where you live. In the rest of NYC, or in many other big cities these days, it’s like “Holy shit, what a great deal!” But on Staten Island, depending on the neighborhood, he’s being somewhat ripped off.

A minor thing, but: “The show implicitly suggests that Drogon is able to avoid the spitfires because Daenerys is guiding him”— I didn’t get that impression. Dany just had a better plan this time, diving out of cloud cover at an angle that didn’t allow them to all fire at once, and then staying low and burning…

I really like this piece, and I’m looking forward to reading the book. Still haven’t read Skim but it’d be hard for me to say enough good things about This One Summer, by which I mean it’s real good.

Eh... I never thought there was any big mystery to the Mad King’s final freakout. He’d been getting paranoid for years and playing with fire, and he liked to burn his enemies— that’s how Ned’s father and brother died. He’d already set up a plan to blow up most of the city with wildfire if things didn’t go his way. Now…

It’s pretty unclear whether a Baratheon, even if Gendry were legitimized, would have a claim to the throne at this point. Robert’s claim was basically “There aren’t any more Targaryens (except Viserys but who cares), so you’ll have to go way back up the family tree, and I have a relative on a branch up there. Also, I…

Yeah, this is a little clearer in the books than the show but the Targaryens weren’t like a whole civilization or anything, they were just a small family from Valyria who decided to live near the east coast of Westeros about 400 years ago, bringing some dragons with them. Something bad wiped out Valyria shortly after…

If you think your favorite SF/F authors did not use historical or literary references, you might be in for an unpleasant disappointment. I mean, I know you’re just trying to pick a fight with Martin fans there, but you picked a pretty silly way to do it.

I thought she might mean “are all werewolves Indians in the U.S.” (assuming she hasn’t run into any on Staten Island before; it seemed like she was meeting this crew for the first time). I get the feeling that the vampires are pretty unfamiliar with North America despite having been here for a while.