The first one was entertaining.  It got a lot of it’s appeal from telling a story that felt like a glimpse into a much larger world.  The sequels went downhill because Rice wasn’t as good at populating that world as her readers were at imagining it.

Yeah, turning every opponent in a large circle into immobile skeet for a few seconds seems *plenty* powerful without also taking half their HP.

“Basta” just means “enough”.  It’s probably the least shaming line in there.

I took that line to mean only “a sliver” of people will share the author’s interpretation of the work.

If the showrunners can take the good idea at the core of this story and moderate Ennis’ edgelord tendencies (and irrational hatred of superheroes), this could be an improvement on the original.

The team is publicly owned, so they are legally allowed to issue shares. The shares they’re selling at this point are basically decorative non-voting stock, so yeah, you’re getting a poster with some negligible legal significance. It’s essentially just a fanclub (which every other team has) that highlights the…

Pretty sure I’m thinking of a different George Wallace...

It would be nice if some AA company released a large single player game for $80 and trumpeted how it’s a complete game, “the way games used to be”. But two major problems:

Gonna trot out my favorite bit of Wisconsinite Packer trivia:

Might want to amend it to $400 *million*. I was initially unsure if this was a joke about some tiny account that the Packers have as an artifact of their 70+ year history.

If the type of persecution that Tim Tebow and other Christians fantasize is happening to them were *actually* happening, they’d be right to inject it into sports.  Because then, it would (as you say) be the objectively right thing to do.

I don’t think the subject of a biography needs to be an extreme personality or tragedy victim to be interesting.  But stories do need conflict, and I agree that there’s not a lot of that here.  His testimony to congress, maybe?  The closeted black man on the cast?  Not sure what they can play up here.

It makes even less sense to put it in the part of the game without any players.

Yeah.  I realized they worked really hard on the CG, but it just looks like human faces pasted on furred humanoid bodies.

I find it interesting that the trick at the center of The Prestige is a “too-perfect” setup that people would see through immediately.  But...in the movie, the professionals *do* see through it immediately.  I imagine there’s no shortage of other acts that audiences would love despite the pros being unimpressed.

Same place you can find the couth and gruntled.

It’ll be like a sober, lamer Burning Man.

Hey, I’m in Madison too!  Small world.

I’m reminded of the women’s hockey league that’s currently imploding and is basically asking the NHL to carry them as a charity case. You’re absolutely right - for the foreseeable future, the look of pro women’s soccer in the US is less “pro baseball” and more “pro lacrosse”.

I think the WNBA is a bracing look at the realities of a women’s league, a least in the US. Namely, it’s essentially a PR writeoff for a wildly successful men’s league.  We’re never going to have a men’s association football league with anything *close* to NBA money to toss around, so unless there’s 8 Portlands out…