I think if you pick the sequel up right with the Underminer, the question is, “What the dramatic arc?” We’ve already seen the answer to “What’s it like to be a superhero family?” in the best way possible in the first film. If you immediately try to generate new drama out of that, you’re likely to end up like the…

Everybody’s saying it, but I honestly will predict it: someday they will sell a Special Director’s Edited Edition that is shorter and better.

200% learning the wrong lesson. Their editors (and suits behind them) are constitutionally incapable of seeing the “long arc” of what they did, which is:

I don’t see the “trademark sarcasm” back in her early Avengers stories. She was actually a rather straightforward, honest, both-feet-on-the-ground nice person in those stories. No neuroses or hangups, a strong sense of her own professional competency in her pre-superhero life, very willing to learn from her fellow…

Yes, setting it in the past is the only way to make a movie from a ride full of dumb colonial-era stereotypes. I snark, but honestly if I were handed the job of making a movie from that ride, I think I’d just hand it right back, because it’s unsalvageable unless there’s a green light to really turn the whole thing…

Wait, you mean won’t admit like this very recent article at this very site by this very author wouldn’t admit it? This is a very quick journey from shilling for a shill for Mars colonization to skepticism about Mars One, which I welcome, but a teeny-weeny bit of reflexive self-awareness about that shift would also be…

I think it’s when Jonathan Kent essentially commits suicide in Man of Steel. That made zero sense in so many different ways.

I’m sure this is all over the comments, but where’s The Incredibles?

Actually, I just read Gromann’s notes on the images. I appreciate that he’s trying to develop a game design and visuals in an African setting, but I think he’s going out of his way to invent an entirely imaginary or hypothetical setting when he could very easily use a real historical example that would give him some…

Exactly. The analogy is one that only absolute historical ignorance could think was valid. It’s like thinking that the time is right to launch ships because we’ve had Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon movies and so we know how to fly around in rockets with little sparklers on them and reach Mongo before it attacks Earth.…

The idea that we have to do it NOW NOW NOW is just wrong-headed at the time scales of the “doom” you’re talking about. At that kind of grand, sweeping level of thinking about the human future, a thousand years from now or ten thousand is just as good as five years from now. In fact, better, because if we don’t figure…

Yes, yes it is a pipe dream. Look, leave aside the problem that we haven’t figured out how to live sustainably on a planet that’s actually very friendly to us, let alone one that’s unfriendly. Leave aside the cost of the initial venture, which is mind-boggling. Leave aside the insane economic and practical…

Though the weird thing about the Singularity in some treatments is that it’s not even necessarily progress—Vinge was clear from the beginning that it was just radical difference (on the order of modernity from premodernity), not Nerd Rapture where we all become Awesome Bush Robot Immortals. But yeah, it’s about the…

Sure, but there have been times in the history of modern Western thought where the assumption was otherwise—that progress was inevitable, evenly distributed and irreversible. I think in a sense that we’ve progressed in our view of progress—I don’t hear anyone assuming this any longer except occasionally with some more…

I think “civil rights roll-backs” is just a conceptual misfire from the outset as a way to describe the ebb and flow of social power in relation to particular groups, classes or communities within human societies. Social power definitely did ebb and flow in this respect in many societies, but “rights” is a…

I actually thought it was one of the worst Pixar shorts. Maybe THE worst. Not particularly visual, not particularly subtle in its message—lots of ‘tell’—and actually rather hamstrung by the visual style. (e.g., if the goal was to capture both real geology and Polynesian mythology, it was too much like the house style…

To be pedantic back at you, the point is that even oil that actually had real truffles in it wouldn’t necessarily taste like truffles because of “oil from truffles”. My point was about “infused oils” more generally—e.g., infused oils pick up taste from source materials that soak in them, and whatever it is that’s the…

I’m a bit puzzled about how whole coffee beans contain all the other stuff. If you buy whole beans, it’s just whole beans. If you buy pre-ground, obviously caveat emptor, but I would have thought that was screamingly obvious anyway for someone buying pre-ground coffee.

Infused oils often don’t contain “oils” from their infusion source. They absorb flavors over time because something is soaked or squeezed into them.

Then how is it possible in The End of Time that the Time Lords can reach out of the Time Lock to Earth, given that they already believe that the Doctor has already done to them whatever it is that he’s done to them? I think it’s just possible that Russell T. Davies and Moffatt have different ideas about what happened…