I think the pendulum has swung a little too far towards assuming that entertainers need to be decent people by dint of their celebrity. There were downsides in the old model for sure, but it was rather comforting to know that there were sectors of a modern society where assholes could go fuck off and…

Holy shit, another Life fan in the wild. Honestly, the show’s serialized arc never really wowed me, but the two leads (and Donal Logue!) were so charismatic that it was nevertheless appointment television.

That’s just it, though: they can’t rule out the possibility that the Federation’s immense political and economic power is what made somebody burn them. While they might not face another genocide-level disaster, they could just suddenly wake up to find their piggy bank exploded out from the inside.

Not bad. I’d say the Corona-bombed final episodes of the Chuck endgame were much worse, only because they were rushed and didn’t properly sell the jackus ex machina. It was whiplash to bring so many actors back as pathos fuel and rapidly-discarded pawns, and then it was whiplash-upon-whiplash to go from a Chuck that…

Well, the show’s explicitly staked out that finding new dilithium is a dead end until they can figure out the burn, because if it was some kind of superweapon/sabotage, it could just happen again once the Federation gets too big for its britches.

I still can’t justify Death Star 3.0 in any way, but TFA still stuck with me because its actors, characters, and performances were such a refreshing repudiation of the prequels’ (read: Lucas’s) wooden dialogue and hackneyed exposition. Boyega and Ridley were downright electric in the Falcon dogfight scenes, and that,…

It’s amazing how many interesting ideas Lucas had that would’ve worked so, SO much better if only he’d had one or two editors and punch-up people with real clout. The instant reaction to the movie (and the trilogy, really) is that it sucks, sure, but when you start taking it apart, it ends up looking more like a…

They should pretend to give him one in a wildly ambitious ceremony that starts off banging and then descends into confusion and chaos and ends with everyone forgetting to actually give him the award.

You can try to justify “are,” but it’s pretty tortured. It relies on “set” being a weird word and English being a weird language. “Is” is very clearly correct.

To your first comment:

Maybe Legion’s biggest plot twist is that you’re actually playing as Albion and culling the herd.

Dude, we get it, but you need to ease up a little. You’re pushing the polemic into “obvious false flag” territory.

I can’t tell if you’re talking about the potential customers or the capitalists. I guess maybe I hope that if you were talking about the capitalists, you’d mention the relentless labor abuse too.

And to think, Batwoman season one, right near the end, finally lampshaded how terrible it is to include a highly yankable and twistable point-of-vulnerability in your superhero costume.

I can’t claim any level of expertise here, but I suspect that Disney narrative rollercoasters don’t smack little kids with the “you’re a gullible fucking idiot” dildo-bat over and over again. That doubles down on the dissonance we’re discussing.

With all the scaling and normalization they do, it’s amazing they haven’t figured out a solid solution: divide an item’s hidden ilvl by character level, throw in a modifier, then output a visible power level. They could then perform all manner of sneaky squishes in the background occasionally that players would never…

I think literal rollercoasters would become pretty annoying if some ass-clown popped out every time you were about to hit a downslope and screamed “HA HA I TRICKED YOU INTO CLIMBING THIS GRAND INCLINE, ONLY FOR IT TO ALL COME CRASHING DOWN AROUND YOU! HAHAHA, YOU FOOLS!”

You chose to narrow the scope of the discussion down to exactly the soundbyte that wouldn’t sound evil. I expanded. You’re obviously not going to like that.

Because Victor von Doom’s legal team makes Disney’s legal team look like... wait, actually, no, they’re now the same legal team. Which makes a lot of sense.

It’s not like the entire foundation of intellectual property law has wrestled with the tradeoffs between private and public goods for hundreds of years or anything. Nope, black and white. Don’t use my property, which isn’t tangible, which cannot be “stolen” in any traditional sense, which can now be copied infinity…