He didn’t “luck out”, what the fuck are you talking about?

A very obvious one is Iceman, who always had massive gay vibes, and which were basically completely clarified in 1994.

Certainly since Claremont’s run it’s very obviously, even heavy-handedly, including LGBTQ+ people in the minorities the X-Men are stand-ins for, and I don’t think that was vague. Even as a child it was obvious that the Legacy virus as an AIDS analogue, for example.

It absolutely is much older than 30 years. Tremendously ignorant of you to say that. If you want to argue with me, for an easy example I would point to the usage of the word queer in the Tales of the City series of books, written by Armistead Maupin from 1978 onwards (also some of which were made into an early and…

“My argument is that if that were going to happen we should be seeing signs of that happening already, as it did with both of those two properties, and that one of those aspects is a significant and durable fandom.”

“Source? I don’t remember that at all. Like you said, that would have been suicidal and regulators would have eaten MS alive so I don’t see why they’d ever make that obviously empty threat in the first place.”

I’d have to see it again to be sure, but having last seen it in the ‘00s sometime, it was clearly still a cut above the superhero movies of that era, so whilst it might not deserve to be on “best” lists, it also probably shouldn’t be on any “worst” lists.

Let’s not rush to praise Sweden’s centralized health care too much.

I think it’s because even with that muddled focus, the performances, the set design, and the direction mean it’s more actually more enjoyable than a vast swathe of utterly generic and forgettable superhero movies.

Yeah I idly watched the first one expecting to probably turn it off, but Hardy’s performance is pretty amusing, and even the inferior second movie is still broadly within the “dumb fun” band of movies rather than “ugh fuck this” (which even some MCU movies drop down into, hello Eternals and Far From Home - but very…

“Just for fun, I looked at the linked exemption for the Boeings that took place in 2020, and it refers to a Jennifer Iversen in Colorado as their manager of flight operations regulatory compliance who was their contact for it. I then looked at her LinkedIn. She left United in 2022 and now works for the Regional…

It’s dropped hugely in Europe overall too, but it’s more regionally specific and often it was dropping from a higher initial value. Like in the UK, it’s around the same as the US, about 12% of people smoke (and yes more older generations than younger, that’s universally true), whereas in Germany it’s still 15% but was…

Having Krasinski getting rapidly killed off as various alternate versions of characters would be a pretty good running gag, I admit.

“I’m pretty sure MS’ OS and productivity software divisions have always been more profitable than the Xbox division, even back in 2001.”

Kids don’t have “fandoms” - they have brief fads and obsessions - Star Trek, for example, was never either. You’re illustrating my point about you not understanding the issue as it actually is. You want something that is practiced by specifically nerdy adults. All “fandoms” are primarily adults, often people in their…

At least we know what happened to JFK now.

There was absolutely a good reason to enter the console space.

I think that’s pretty revisionist. The initial Xbox and Xbox 360 seemed like fairly smart moves in the context of the gaming and software environment of the time, and didn’t seem like curiosities, rather a trend that started with Sony getting into games with the Playstation. The same “all these other businesses that…

Yeah I loved “We’ve been fighting this war for nothing.” - what an incredible thing to say in public. I mean I’ve been in some very stupid arguments on the internet, but that is truly on another level entirely.

The sheer terrible-ness of Google and its profound inability to find anything which isn’t super-mainstream, from the last five years (or less!) and/or SEO’d to hell and back is increasingly making me think about earlier search engines. There was a period, which lasted until maybe as late as 2014, when with really…