The Watchmen integration is possibly the worst idea in the history of comic books. And that is saying something.

I’m sensing some French Revolution action coming to King’s Landing—Cersei and Jamie don’t really grasp what it is to go up against an entire city of people who hate you. Even if we stick to the 100 Years War template, there were a few ugly cases in France of city folk killing nobility followed by even uglier cases of…

There. is. nothing. weirder.about.this. In fact, whether it’s an old corn field or a marijuana field, that is 100% what everyone who knows anything about the area in question would expect before “exotic astronomical theory by a teenager predicts ancient ruins” as an explanation of symmetrical features in a satellite…

On one hand: players of any game tend to lack proportionality, and massively-multiplayer online players even more so. So the complaints are often histrionic, self-centered, etc.

Oh, dear, did experts actually do expertise to a non-expert whose work was trumpeted by tons of non-experts as proving something about the field that the experts have spent their lives studying? How terrible. I think io9 should publish lots of stories about 14-year olds inventing perpetual motion machines and…

I’m glad somebody saw a week ahead of the episode I had to watch, because the one I saw was full of inconsequential stalling and nothing-burger hohummery. Hope the episode where things happened was a good one! When do we get to see it, Rob?

My big problem is that Zemo’s entire plot arc is complete nonsense and doesn’t even hold up while you’re watching, let alone afterwards. It’s “Loki WANTED to be captured” on steroids—a plan that depends on a series of events that the planner couldn’t have possibly have counted on happening, and that the planner…

Qyburn and a bunch of children. What could go wrong?

The thing with killing in the MCU vs. the DC Murderverse is not just killing. It’s the entire aesthetic of the films. Star Wars is different than Saving Private Ryan because each film’s narrative and its aesthetic tell us that the deaths of enemy soldiers are not or are moral issues respectively, even when the moral…

Well, the Ancient One was the Sorcerer Supreme—and yeah, they’ve established in the comics that this is a title that the supreme magical defender of Earth from other dimensions gets given over time. There were Sorcerer Supremes before the Ancient One and there have been at least two after him (Dr. Strange and Brother…

I don’t quite understand the conclusion that these narrative problems stem from “going off the road” of Martin’s books. At least half of what you’ve identified as issues actually stem directly from the problems of the fourth and fifth book in the series as written by Martin. Arguably they improve on what Martin has…

Except we find out that’s just club soda.

Better to steal that line than something something reductionist complaints about The Jungle Book.

Even though I agree with a lot of the basic push behind this post, I find it pretty odiously reasoned. To the point that I suspect it’s being put forward in a kind of dumb and provocative way just for the clicks.

I’m actually wondering now if maybe Mikkelsen is playing Kaluu, the Ancient One’s opposite number. Maybe to give Strange a choice between “black magic” and “white magic”—over the years Marvel has found a way to make Kaluu fairly charismatic and to make black magic not so much bwah-hah-hah evil-for-the-sake-of-evil as…

I don’t think Earth-2 Harrison Wells will want to get access to those accounts as Harrison Wells, since: a) people actually do know he’s dead (that’s why Barry owns STAR Labs now: it was in his will) and b) Thawne-Wells made a videotape confessing that he murdered Nora Allen.

I do think the show hasn’t really thought…

So I think in terms of Lee and Kirby’s introduction of the character that from the outset it really escaped the bounds of Tarzan-cliches, and that’s what’s let the character grow. Like Evan, I don’t know exactly how to credit that, or whether it was just dumb luck, because the character definitely skirts the edges of…

The point then is to focus on and explore the shared, accepted meanings of language, and thus just who all is in the conversation. It’s a relative thing. Bullshit is about context, sociality, intentionality. Bullshit (and meaning) does not reside in the words themselves, it is not a physical phenomenon. It resides in…

Exactly. It’s perfectly valid to say Chopra is full of bullshit. But it is bullshit also in a different way to think that you need Science [TM] in order to precisely identify what is and is not bullshit. There are sturdy humanistic ways to talk about what is or is not bullshit that have been around for thousands of…

But meaning IS contextual and subjective. This is why early information theory bracketed off semantics as a different and difficult problem that couldn’t be quantified or approached using Claude Shannon’s ideas about information.