Every day I look at the news and the Don Cheadle version of Captain Planet looks more and more reasonable.

Nah. It’s like inflation - what was “good enough” in 2006 is underwhelming now. The Nolan Dark Knight trilogy and the Infinity Saga raised the bar and now audiences expect a superhero movie to be at least that good or it sucks. Most of the Multiverse Saga and the latter half of the DCEU would have been considered absolutely mindblowingly impressive in the 00s. Stuff like Aquaman, Black Adam, or Eternals would have compared very favorably to the kind of superhero movies we got in the 90s and 00s. Yes, that era had crackers too, but for every Blade you had a Blade Trinity; for every Spider-Man 2 you had a Spider-Man 3. For every Batman Begins you had a Batman & Robin. And the duds far outnumbered the classics.

So most modern superhero movies would have been considered amazing in that ecosystem. But we no longer have that ecosystem. There are so many superhero movies nowadays that it takes something really special to stand out from the crowd. Survival of the fittest has been dialled up to 11 and “ehhh, it’s OK” is no longer good enough for most audiences. Thor: Love and Thunder was “OK”. Blue Beetle was “OK”. But in the 2020s, “OK” means “not worth the ever-rising ticket price”

No, I assume what’s next is that countries which have slightly more coal reserves than Ireland will be next, and so on.

I mean, if the headline was “Rising sea levels cause flooding in Ireland”, you wouldn’t say “big deal, wake me when the flooding reaches Nepal”. Of course there’s going to be an order to such things.

Can you recall anything that might help me google it?

What could possibly go wrong?

Nobody mentioned the US though

It always really surprises me that Sweden and Turkiye have so much interaction with each other. You’d never guess from looking at a map.

No conditioning required. The Bystander Effect has always been baked into human instincts.

I only have 200 on Steam and have 100%ed 24 of them with an average completion rate of 62%.

I have 102 games on GOG

If the Marvel films aren’t going to reference the TV shows (much) then Mephisto and magic can be our TV villain, our TV BBEG.

I feel like that would be Kingpin, but then again who says there can only be one BBEG for TV? Totally plausible for there to be a street level BBEG and a cosmic BBEG.

There is a kernel of a truly great movie hidden inside Batman & Robin. Unfortunately it’s buried under a mountain of shit. The result? Pure corn.

Assorted musings:

1. Did anybody else think that before you could see his face, Mephisto initially sounded like Benedict Cumberbatch? For a second I genuinely thought it really was gonna be Dormammu and not Mephisto. And given that in the next scene he appeared in and thereafter, he ditched the American accent, I’m pretty sure the fake-out was intentional.

2. Speaking of Dormammu: by summoning Dormammu’s power to Earth, Zelma totally just nulled and voided Dr Strange’s bargain with Dormammu, didn’t she? Dormammu can now argue that he was not the one who first violated the terms of the agreement; that it was an Earthling. I wonder if that’ll end up being the reason Clea has to come looking for Strange’s help in MoM’s post-credits scene… after all, we have no specific timeframe for that scene.

3. It seems to me that Riri basically just cribbed (and improved) BARF. Brain-scanning tech that creates a virtual reproduction of dead loved ones for a little *cough* therapy session? That’s literally what Tony demoed when unveiling the September Grant for MIT students. Riri improved on it because now the virtual loved one can think autonomously, and the simulation only needs a single projector built into the armor rather than multiple projectors from a swarm of drones. Riri really went all-in on the whole “if I take something Iron Man did and do it better, people will take me seriously” thing.

4. I’m glad they had Riri actually take the deal with Mephisto, as she’s far more interesting as a morally compromised antihero, as the show’s been portraying her all along. She has that in common with Strange, I guess! Magic really does seem to corrupt or harm almost everyone who’s used it so far: Agatha, Wanda, Billy, Strange, Mordo, Riri, Parker, even the Ancient One a little… even most of Agatha’s coven got sacrificed. Donnie Blaise opened a portal to a hell dimension! And Zelma seems likely to be helping Parker soon. So far, only Wong, Jennifer Kale and Ned Leeds have really escaped any noticeable consequences, and if the comics are anything to go by, then being a magic user bodes ill for Ned… satanic panic is real, kids! Magic: not even once!

5. I wonder if Mephisto had anything to do with the generational curse placed on Alice’s family.

6. This is really just more of the “Ironheart cribs a lot from BARF” point, but “planned contingency protocol to fake a defeat so you can sneak up on your opponent” is straight from the Mysterio playbook.

7. Why are they talking about Riri being a once-in-a-generation genius when Riri knows full well what Shuri’s capable of?

8. Do we think Riri ACTUALLY brought Natalie back from the dead, or is this more like a Scarlet Witch dealio in which she’s actually just stolen a variant of Natalie from another timeline?

9. Why on earth did Zeke go back to his house almost immediately after a prison break? Is he stupid? I mean I know he had his bionics and probably felt untouchable, but even still.

10. So after people were complaining that the Multiverse Saga hasn’t done enough to make everything feel connected, this show is continuing story threads from:

    • Iron Man (Stane family legacy)

    • Civil War (BARF, MIT, the September Grant and the Stark Legacy)

    • Doctor Strange (Dormammu)

    • Wakanda Forever (obviously)

    • Agatha All Along (Mephisto)

It still gives the bot the at-first-glance appearance of being a human user of long standing, though, which I assume would make the account saleworthy to bad actors.

Calling it now: Trump will invade Mexico before his term is up, arguing that it’s to “secure our borders” and that the Mexican government has “failed”.

They’re both great. One is a sequel to the other. Get BotW.

Should someone repost the article so that it can be discussed and shared but the bot doesn’t get the upvotes?

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I suppose first we should consider food. For that we look at what every human needs to consume (considering all necessary vitamins and minerals in addition to obvious calories) and then try to figure out what sources of those nutrients is currently the most efficient at producing them. Then there should be data somewhere on how much of that foodstuff is produced per year and how many people are employed in producing it. If not enough of that foodstuff is produced to meet the planet’s needs for that nutrient, then move on to the second-most efficient source and so on until the need is met. Then the same again for the next vital nutrient, hopefully with overlap on sources of previous nutrients. And so on until all nutrients are accounted for, and that should provide a number for how many people are directly involved in the production of the food. That would be the primary list. THEN we would need to consider secondary elements for food production: everyone involved in producing the tools/resources used in direct production (tractors, combine harvesters, fuel, fertilizer, etc), but ONLY calculating for JUST enough to meet the demand represented by the primary list. Surplus manufacturing to be ignored. Keep going that way until you have it all the way down to raw materials (steel, silicon, rubber, etc). Finally, you look at the distribution network necessary to actually get all of these things where they’re needed. This would, naturally, include workers employed at road maintenance, transport drivers (although billionaires seem fairly insistent that these jobs can be eliminated soon), etc. That would provide you with the BARE MINIMUM workers necessary for food production.

Then you perform a similar process for the production of:

• Housing

• Clothing

• Healthcare

• Education

Once you have the bare minimum, you can actually talk in concrete terms of just how much of humanity is employed in essential work and how much isn’t. Most likely, when evaluating clothing, the “most efficient source” was sweat shops, so once you know that humanity has enough non-essential workers, you can make a compelling case that laws need to be passed to guarantee that more workers are diverted to clothing production, with an aim of providing better working conditions for all.

We can’t really have intelligent conversations about whether capitalism is or isn’t a good way to allocate resources until we have the data on what the optiminal use would be. We all SAY that the world produces enough for everyone, but nobody really KNOWS.

The main problem with modern civilization is that it’s no longer possible to rob rich people. If Peter Thiel’s money actually physically existed, in like a vault somewhere, SOMEBODY would have burgled the vault by now, purely because of the insanely favorable risk vs reward ratio - like a lottery where the cost of buying tickets of every possible combination costs less than the jackpot, once the reward is high enough, there will always be SOMEONE who will make the necessary investment to negate the risk. And “robbing the rich” would always have enough popular support that there would be little effort to find the thief as long as the oligarch was unpopular enough. But now Thiel’s money no longer physically exists, and it’s basically impossible to forcibly take it from him without basically having to destroy the entire global banking system first in order to get at it.

Yeah, the same power set isn’t grasping. But is Darren Cross a shadowy reflection of Steve Rogers because they’re both American? The nationality part is grasping.

And so the same power set MIGHT mean that Killmonger’s a shadowy reflection of T’Challa (and I say “MIGHT” because is Captain Love a shadowy reflection of Zorro just because they’re both good with swords? Would making him a fellow Californian make him one? Is every boxer that Rocky fights a “shadowy reflection” of him, just because they’re fellow boxers?), but does that mean that Black Panther is the same movie as all other Marvel movies? Not really. “The hero and villain have similar abilities” is ultimately a very small part of the overall movie. This entire line of criticism of the movie is a stretch, and seems more like a post-facto rationalization for dislike of the movie that comes from somewhere else.