Yeah, if they required an employee badge to unlock from the bike stand, this whole problem would mostly go away. Especially if the employee was required to check them back in to another Google bike stand within a certain time frame.

Why would they not have been locking them from day 1??? Anyone with an ounce of sense could have predicted exactly this outcome if you just leave hundreds of bikes unsecured all over the place.

As long as you don’t go for blackface, you should be fine.

I haven’t seen anything either. We may get something once the move’s released, though.

Really? I saw the trailer before Thor: Ragnorak, and found the like 2 minutes of BP trailer at least as exciting as the entire Thor movie (and that was, IMO, the best of the Thor movies). I think it looks AWESOME. Even the movie theater posters look great. I’m a white woman FWIW, so this isn’t “go my team”.

That will also be impactful, but in a different way. This article was about the message that these ads have for black kids - “you can be the hero, someone that looks like you can be the center of the narrative, not just the sidekick”. Ads with white kids playing BP will tell white boys “you can relate to this hero’s…

We see right away that he’s living in a remote place, but we don’t see how much he’s cut himself off from life, how he’s basically punishing himself. At first, it seemed to me like he was testing Rey to see if she was serious about studying the Force. The more his hermit thing went on, the clearer it was that this…

Maybe I’ve insulated myself from some of the crazy these days, so I’m not seeing the worst of it, but there were definitely people upset years ago about ships or fic of this or that nature. Old-school fanboys being very angry that shipping existed at all, folks being upset over ships involving characters of different…

That’s certainly true. A bit of a downside to using checks. When I was growing up, one time somebody got those numbers and somehow had fraudulent checks printed up that had my parents’account & routing # on them. This would’ve been before online banking, so IIRC they’d spent a lot of money before my parents even…

Oh yeah. Marvel too, lots of people wanting Loki to be a good guy, or Doctor Who with the Master.

Not in the US, at least not if the person drafting the money has an ACH account. As background, while I’m not a banker or anything, I do auto-draft (ACH) or auto-charge (credit card) most of my customer base (about $150k annually, FWIW). While I do have them sign an agreement giving me permission to do that, that’s…

To be fair, though, the audience needed some time to grasp Luke’s character development since RotJ, while we all saw Kylo kill Han and have had 2 years to think about it. Seeing Luke get upset about it doesn’t do anything to advance his character. It’s not like Luke was going to be surprised that Kylo was on the dark…

I think there’s a... certain appeal, for a *lot* of people, to the idea that a conflicted bad-boy or bad-girl can be redeemed, and particularly that they can be redeemed by the love & support of the noble hero. I’ve found I have less & less patience for this the farther I get from 18, since realistically that would…

I personally haven’t seen that, but I also don’t really engage with online fandoms that much anymore; I just follow fan creators I like. I had found that I had less patience with juvenile cattiness (also, juvenile writing) than I used to, but I think that’s more about me maturing rather than fandoms becoming worse.

Forever Knight omg. That takes me back.

That’s not really a new development. There were epic intra-fandom fights on LiveJournal and Yahoo groups and message boards over this same kind of stuff 15+ years ago. The fandoms and characters are different, but the juvenile “my team is the only right one” behavior is the same old crap.

This may be a difference between US & European banking. In the US, if someone has your name, bank name, account #, & routing #, it’s possible for them to debit money out of your account. That’s how EFT (direct debit) payment systems work here. You have a bill, you give your insurance company or mortgage lender or…

And they just tell everyone their account #? That seems... insecure.

A Star Wars Christmas Carol, with Kylo as Scrooge.

In the Navy, commander is below captain. But unlike Starfleet, the Rebel Alliance seems to use some mix of naval & army ranks (i.e, having both generals & admirals in the same command structure), and an Army captain is a lower rank than a Navy commander. 2 ranks lower, IIRC.