Those pinions are actually quite powerful - they’re among the few effective weapons against the likes of Juggernaut, and have been implied to be able to pierce Colossus’s armor and suppress Wolverine’s healing factor.

1. There’s no direct relationship, and I’ve heard of teams trying to use the large transfer fee they just paid as an excuse for not paying more salary, but players generally know that if their transfer fee is high, they’re worth a lot of money and make salary demands accordingly. I have heard of a few cases where a…

+1 Volk

Roman numerals are dumb. It’s high time we as a society got over them.

Triple double sawbuck

This. I can jump high enough to wave my hand over the center of the hoop, but getting up there with a ball and getting it to go in the hoop is another matter entirely.

I think it’s also worth pointing out that, as much as Leicester is doing things right, the usual suspects are also unprecedentedly bad this season. Chelsea mutinied, Arsenal still don’t have their footing, Man United has rapidly gone from “Haha, they narrowly lost out to their hitherto-unimpressive crosstown rivals in…

I’m criticizing the idea that it’s at all relevant whether or not the premise of a work of fiction can be eventually extended to a contradiction, if that contradiction has no effect on the plot. I mean, never mind the global conflicts; hiding Hogwarts from surveyors, engineers, and remote sensing platforms would…

There’s just so much about the modern world that doesn’t make any goddamn sense if magic secretly existed in the world - so I kind of have to assume that the Potterverse is an alternate universe where much of our own history never happened.

Graphic Design Against the Dark Arts

Oh, there are lots of things you could do with incomprehensibly weird rules, besides the obvious ones of influencing outcomes and selling more ad time during stoppages due to reviews. One is that bad or ambiguous calls get the fans more angry than anything else, so the public focuses on what a shitty job Ed Hochuli or…

Sports journalists: convincing rich people that developing countries are dirty and dangerous since 1896.

That I actually found believable, since there is a very big power for speed tradeoff in using corked bats. Power hitters want as heavy of a bat as they can swing effectively so they can transfer the most energy to the ball. It’s weak hitters with poor fast-twitch muscles that need corked bats just to get the bat over…

My long-standing theory is that doping isn’t used to protect the integrity of sport (money did away with that a long time ago) but to give organizers leverage against athletes. The small but nonzero chance that you could be caught doping (since everyone dopes) and the UCI/NCAA/IAAF/UEFA/etc has the ability to cover it…

This is the standard response for doping/cheating allegations in cycling, and I think sports in general. You cite your respect for the sport, admit that it looks bad and because you have so much integrity that you’ll take responsibility and accept the (minimum allowable) punishment, but (and this is the important bit)…

Actually, what’s fucked up isn’t just that advertising has become a lot like content, content has also become a lot like advertising. People talk about games, movies, and everything else with the same kind of marketing jargon the real ads use. If they like a game, they want other people to buy/download/subscribe - I…

Metaphor is being used metaphorically, dude. Get with the program.

Spring to Fall scheduling seems to work for Scandinavia. They’re not elite leagues like the Big Four, but they’re respectable and standout players catch the attention of managers elsewhere. I’m not really qualified to say the on-field skill is better or worse than MLS, but it’d be interesting to know what Klinsmann…

I like this. You can take a free throw, or you can take a free shot at the guy that intentionally fouled you. Since a lot of the targets of this type of play are big guys, it would add an element of danger to the proceedings.

It is shit, but more like “a load or crock” thereof, rather than “disturbing”. .NET is the primary application framework on Windows, and accounts for the vast majority of software errors because it accounts for the vast majority of software being run.