Just saying, I can see the Other Dave Meadows wielding a chainsaw against people more easily.
Oh no! Shit.
See, this is another one of the many reasons why the intention of the author doesn’t fucking matter: They may be lying.
Could this be our Legion of Super-Heroes loving Dave Meadows?
We had another David Meadows, didn’t we?
I’ve finished season 2 of the Sandman.
You know, with season 1, I felt they stuck too close to the original at times – it could’ve used more breathing room. With this season, it’s the opposite. They inserted a lot of stuff that made everything terrible in the second half of the season (seasons of mist was okay). Once they got to the Kindly Ones, there was an incredible lot of changing subtext into text. MMorpheus kept telling everybody that Daniel was going to be the new Dream and announcing his own death; but he also walked around a lot trying to weasel his way out of it (including petitioning his parents, Time and Night, which was just such a terrible, terrible idea). Towards the end when they get back to the actual story, it got a bit better, especially when the new Corinthian comes around. But it was still so annoying to have all this moping around that you’re kind of glad when he’s finally dead.
The High Cost of Living adaptation as an epilogue was quite good though.
Another quirk I think English “posh” speakers have, or at least many academics, is a little stutter. I don’t think it is a real medical stutter, it’s more an affectation. I’ve heard it in Dawkins, Roger Scruton, and I’m sure some others whose name I can’t remember.
Hugh Grant!
A gang of about ten migrants beat a 17 year old kid to death in Narbonne, France.
See, this is what I mean. Do you get a news alert every time someone is beaten to death anywhere in Europe? Do you get a news alert when a migrant is killed for whatever reason?
I am not saying this isn’t terrible, but every day, 47 are killed in a homicide in Europe. But somehow, this is one case, out of those 47, is the one that is reported to you. Why do you think that is?
I’m watching season 2 of The Sandman, with the kind of mixed feelings you’d imagine. As an adaptation, it’s pretty good, even if it feels a bit sterile. But it’s hard to watch this with any objectivity; the books are still resonating in my mind. And so is the other stuff, of course.
Some weird decisions – Nada isn’t reincarnated, but walking the waking world as she was, to give Dream an additional motivation to go on a quest to find Destruction. Oh, and they decided to show the actual first meeting of her and Dream and their story, which doesn’t work even a little bit.
Right, so now the thing happened and Starmer’s gone.
So what do we think? Will this save Labour and by extention the UK?
Or is it just the first step in another game of musical chairs in which we get a handful of successive Prime Ministers trying to survive in the chaos?
Anybody taking bets?
Yeah, I mean… anger is the basis for punk rock. But unfortunately sometimes, what you get is nazi punk rock.
I just reread the book and that’s not what the film is going to be.
Thank fuck
You cold-hearted bastard, I had tears in my eyes at one point while reading!
Sounds fascinating!
I just watched the British-Nigerian movie “My Father’s Shadow” (that was in the running at Cannes last year) for work. During the nineties, a father travels to Lagos with his sons; he wants to collect salaries that he’s owed there. At the same time, there’s political hupheaval because there are democratic elections (that will be overturned). It’s a very good movie about fathers and sons and about Nigeria, and it’s also a movie that has its own fascinating slant, an ambiguity for which I have what I think is the most productive interpretation, but which is deliberately left open. Let’s just say there’s an element of magic realism there.
Are you doing a John Oliver imitation?
That wouldn’t be the worst person to imitate, honestly.
But no, I am – as before – giving you as honest an assessment as I can. I think quite a lot of people today, and you amongst them, are driven to emotional extremes because that’s what the algorithm wants. And the emotional extreme that it’s aiming for in your case in justice not being dealt, especially in cases in which minorities are involved.
You say that there is not enough anger. I believe the opposite is the case. I think we are in a period in which there is no shortage of anger, and while that could potentially be a good thing if it was aimed at the right targets, it can also be used to stoke the flames of hatred towards what we perceive to be The Other and push people towards extremism. I am worried that that’s where social media is pushing you, Arjan.
Yeah, the show really shows – once again, like on GoT after they ran out of novels – that it’s the actual writing in the books that made Game of Thrones work. Working off a finished plot is meanigless if you can’t make the characters and their dialogue work.
(Which is also why there’s really no such thing as stealing an idea when it comes to writing. Yeah, there can be good ideas and concepts, but that’s not the important part.)
“These are very serious crimes having to do with the destruction of National Monuments.
Trump saying that is so incredibly funny.
ou don’t have to ensure you’re directing that anger at the right people or anything, shake your fist impotently at the sky!
Not the sky. The refugees, the migrants, the unemployed, the lazy beaurocrats, the trans people, the woke idiots. And in this case, supposedly the justice system because clearly it doesn’t want to punish people who so clearly deserve it, which is probably also because of woke.
That was a lot of words to say “the actual writing on this show is pretty shit”.
I briefly thought about catching up on House of the Dragon, but then I remembered that I thought the first season was utter shite and I wasn’t going to touch it again for good reason.
Can we just have regime change in Israel?
Funny how an ongoing genocide is seen as grounds for a military intervention except when Israel is doing it to Palestinians, when it’s not even a reason to withdraw any kind of support from Israel.
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale meets Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
Jesus fuck, that sounds like instant depression right there.
That is nt part of the news coverage however. Sloppy not to mention such a thing.
‘s not sloppy, it’s to generate outrage. At least I assume that you first saw this not on the SkyNews website but on X or other social media, potentially posted by someone else with a link to the Sky article. Look, the algorithm wants you to be angry all the time, because it gets your attention that way. And for many news outlets (not to mention fucking “influencers”) – potentially SkyNews – that’s a business model now, because they need the algorithm to pick up their headlines.
The BBC report itself does mention all that.
Cambridgeshire Police said a 30-year-old man arrested on suspicion of attempted murder had been bailed and was “unfit for interview”. He reportedly has learning disabilities and had been on a trip to Johnsons of Old Hurst, near Huntingdon, with carers.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp9l2278m8no
So, you know… just don’t go and make assumptions. Just check with proper sources first, before you get outraged. Or even better: Just stay away from the fucking algorithms that keep feeding you hate slop about weak justice and immigrant crime and so on. Just… read a newspaper in the morning. Listen to solid news podcast, maybe one by a public radio channel. How about that?
I’ve been watching The Beauty. It’s very much a Ryan Murphy show, with all that that entails… but most of the time, I like the schlockiness that he brings to his shows, and this one is quite an enjoyable romp.
It’s funny that these days, an indie comic gets made into a TV show and we don’t even talk about it here. World’s a different place.
Dude, your algorithm is feeding you exclusively stories about immigrants committing crimes from all over the globe to make you more and more racist. Stop clicking.
Also all my neighbors here are immigrants. Polish on the left, Iranian on the right, and Eritrean above me. I have a good relations with all of them. I also worked with many of them when I still had a job.
Okay. So maybe you should look at these experiences more than at the cases that make national headlines.
Really in a nutshell the thing I’m trying to say is, I just think it’s evidently false to say that after three generations immigrants are all “fully assimilated” or “integrated” or even that this is feasible.[…] It is quite a different culture, with many (not all of them, don’t misquote me) people who have fundamentally different opinions about many things that you would probably think are important.
It depends on what your understanding of integration. If you equate this with “full assimilation”, then no, that won’t happen. But it doesn’t need to. Not everybody has to enjoy sauerkraut and bratwurst and pray to Jesus to fully be part of German society.
As for it being a completely different culture, the same goes for me and someone living in a village deep in Bavaria, not to mention Sachsen-Anhalt. The idea of one coherent national culture is a mirage, it’s nonsense. There’s always a thousand different subcultures running in parallel, and these days some of them are influenced by ethnicity. (Well, actually, they always have been, but those ethnicities used to be a smaller number and geographically closer.)
Different opinions can be fine, but we’ve also had people killed here for saying certain things about Islam, parents who killed their daughters because she was too “Westernized” etc
And you have people getting killed for being gay, or being women, or out of jealousy, or because they ran into somebody with a psychosis. When it comes to migrants, we tend to attribute crimes to their being immigrants, and to the things that make them Other from us.
And once again, I am not saying that things like radical Salafism (imported to my city of Bonn from Saudi-Arabia, by the way) aren’t problematic; they are. And where there is ideologically motivated crime, or deliberate radicalisation, you have to fight that. (But that also goes for Christian extremism, and for right-wing radicalisation.)
But the best way of fighting the root causes in all of these cases – and I am including naziism here – is to invite everybody to participate in our society.
It’s been ages since I read a Millar book. I think the last ones were the first two volumes of The Magic Order, or something like that. I do mean to catch up with him at some point, but it’s not exactly pressing business for me.
there is a distinct distance many of them still have to Dutch society
= failure of integration.
Look, two things about this:
– For one, you are looking at newspaper and TV reports and the like that by their very nature focus on stories that are about
conflict. I work at a school, remember? The vast majority of kids you’ll talk to are just kids growing up here. Yes, different lives at home to some extent especially if they’re second generation, but if things go well they can navigate that fine.
– When it comes to things like islamic schools, I don’t disagree that that can be a problem. But most of these problems could be solved with policy. I think we’re on different sides when it comes to cause and effect:
You seem to think that some migrants don’t want to integrate and want to have nothing to do with Dutch society.
While I would say that rejection by mainstream society leads to ghettoisation and isolation (and that, in turn, to extremism, sometimes).
I do not think it is a realistic view that anybody who comes to a new country looking for a better life comes there with an attitude of not wanting to have anything to do with this country. It’s also not what history demonstrates. Look at the US and, say, the first Italian or Irish immigrants there.
Sure it’s true that people who immigrate won’t immediately adapt all cultural values of their new home; in fact, it’d not only be naive but also be counter-productive to expect them to do that. They can be as religious and conservative in their views as they want, as long as they respect the laws and are friendly. And then the next generation will be different, and as Todd says, usually by the third generation you can’t tell the difference. If that doesn’t happen, the reason is usually a failure of integration.
The long and short of it is that radicalisation tends to happen mainly when people are on the fringes of society and can’t participate.
And dude, it’s not as if there aren’t millions of second- and third-generation immigrants these days who can tell you all about these experiences.
Here’s a suggested reading and watching list in the realm of fiction:
– East is East (movie)
– Hanif Kureishi: The Buddha of Suburbia, The Black Album (novels) and My Son the Fanatic (short story)
– Small Axe (TV mini series)
Heh. Yeah well, like I said, I never got into it.
But restarting that franchise – there’s a million exciting ways to go about it. But honestly if the assessment of the execs here is correct, I kinda get it. If Gero was going to much for nostalgia instead of doing something new and exciting for a younger audience, it was on the wrong path.
I was never into Stargate back then, but it’s still a great basic concept for a sci-fi series. Hard to mess up, you would think.
Based on what I have seen, immigration is only a short-term solution to declining birth rates. After about three generations, they have fully assimilated into the local culture, and the birth rates begin declining again.
Well, yes, but immigration won’t stop, after all. Nigeria currently has a population of 250 million people and is set to have 400 million by 2050, according to projections. We won’t run out of people globally, we just need to let them move around more.
True for most groups, I think, but some of the immigrants we’ve received here don’t integrate. Some become more radical when they’re here. Even after three generations.
Well, yes, and there are people who have carefully examined the reasons for this and shown how we could change this (mostly with proper integration policies), but most countries won’t do that because it’s more important to their politics to act as if this was a law of nature and some immigrants are just evil or dumb. Even though we desperately need immigration.
Sigh.
Well you could say a pub serves a community purpose. I would be OK with that. Or a cafe. Or something like a soup kitchen, for people on a low income to have a healthy meal.
I actually have a vision where all of this is concerned: Community Centers.
As churches close down, it’s also clear that they don’t fulfill the vital function they once had: Bringing the people of a community together to see each other once a week, to have a chat, to feel closer to the people living around you. This was a very important thing, and apart from a few very old people, it’s pretty much gone.
We need something like this. We need community centers where, on Sundays, there’ll be somebody giving a short lecture on a current topic, and afterwards you can have a cup of coffee and talk, and the kids can play on a playground/in playrooms. And it would be inclusive for everyone, not just exclusive to people of one faith.
We desperately need something like this. If I was to found a new political party, this would be one of the cornerstones. This, and 16 months obligatory civil service (which you can do in these community centers). And it’d all be paid for by taxing the rich.
Heh. Well, it’s both kinda true, isn’t it? From a climate change PoV, we’d need to shrink the population (or/and our consumption of goods). From a capitalist PoV, that’d be the apocalypse.
It’s almost as if we’ve built an unsustainable economic system that we’re now trapped in until it has killed us all.
I heard they want to demolish at least one of the churches. That should not be allowed. Churches that are closed should get a new cultural purpose for the community.
Absolutely. Or alternatively, be turned into pubs, like they tend to do it in the UK and Ireland.
It’s not all doom and gloom for Masters of the Universe, though. Following early screening in May, the movie earned positive reactions, with critics calling it “one of the biggest surprises of 2026,” comparing it to the likes of Marvel’s Thor and Guardians of the Galaxy. It’s also fair to say that the box office is a little unpredictable at this moment in time, with original horror movies Obsession and Backrooms smashing expectations and beating The Mandalorian and Grogu on the charts. Perhaps Masters of the Universe can do the same.
It’ll be interesting to see how this one fans out. I think Masters of the Universe is indeed not as beloved a franchise as some producers may have thought, to the nostalgia effect getting our generation into the theatres might not really be there.
But the trailer really does look like it’s a very fun movie for teenagers, and if that’s the case, it may catch on by word of mouth after a bit.
It feels very cyberpunk without having any SF elements in the same way that Falling Down does.
I think that goes for a lot of JG Ballard’s work.
I remember seeing Crash back then. I did like it, but I was disappointed at the same time (because I kind of expected more, after the more obviously surreal mindfucks of Videodrome and Naked Lunch).
Heh. Looks like Backrooms might overtake Mandalorian and Grogu, which would be very funny indeed (as we’re talking a 10 million vs. a 300 million budget).
God, I really want to see Backrooms, but I probably won’t be able to catch it in the theatre.
So I watched The Old Guard 2 for some reason. Well, the reason was I did like the first one and I think Charlize Theron is a great lead in this kind of movie. And it’s always nice to see a movie turn an indie comic into big bucks for the creator, of course.
So, I don’t know, I couldn’t tell you a thing about the first movie anymore, but like I said, I remember liking it. This one though… wow. Terrible in absolutely every respect. Not a single original thought in the entire movie. It was full of the kind of plot ideas and even dialogue lines you’d get in every immportals movie since fucking Highlander. And it’s dumb and predictable and boring. And then it ends on a fucking cliffhanger as if it was a given that a shit sequel to a somewhat decent small-budget action movie will get another sequel. Jesus fucking Christ, what were those guys thinking?
First one was written by Greg Rucka alone, the second one has another writing credit besides him, so I’m going to blame the terrible script on her.
(due to dwindling population, economic stagnancy and whatnot)
Wikipedia says the population of Germany is growing.
edit: well looks like it grew till 2024, and now there’s a small decrease
We don’t have enough births. The population has been growing very slightly because of immigration, which the majority of the population apparently desperately wants to stop in spite of our needing even more population growth if we want to somehow support the coming wave of retirees and people in need of elderly care.
(This topic was also in the Kurzgesagt vid in the other thread, but I didn’t actually watch that one or the answer, I’m afraid.)
Anyway:
While the population is declining, the age structure is also shifting. Over the next two decades, the proportion of older persons in the total population will significantly expand. Today, the population group of children and young people under age 20 is roughly the same size as the group of persons aged 65 and older, and each group makes up about 20% of the total population. In 2030, the group of persons aged 65 and older will account for 29% of the total population; in 2060, every third person (34%) will be at least 65 years old.
[…]
So yeah. Too many old, retired people and too few babies. The most important answer to that is immigration, but our politics is doing everything possible to reduce immigration and turn us into a completely xenophobic country. So… yeah. The other important answer is re-distribution of wealth, so old people won’t die in the streets because somebody needs their third yacht so desperately. Crazy, I know.
The suspicion I have is that with couples having more money to spend, the prices for homes started rising.
Well, possibly to some extent, but the bigger factor is that this is an investment sector, and there are a lot of rich people who need to invest their huge heaps of gold somewhere. So housing prices rise.
Did the doubling of the workforce come with a doubling of GDP? If it didn’t, the rewards per individual worker will automatically be smaller.
What Ben said.
Or, this:
We live in a world in which a tiny number of people own too, too much. And while there’s a recession going on and everybody has less, this does not go for the richest, like, at all.
The Oxfam report An Economy for the 1%, shows that the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population has fallen by a trillion dollars since 2010, a drop of 38 percent. This has occurred despite the global population increasing by around 400 million people during that period. Meanwhile, the wealth of the richest 62 has increased by more than half a trillion dollars to $1.76tr. The report also shows how women are disproportionately affected by inequality – of the current ‘62’, 53 are men and just nine are women.
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/62-people-own-same-half-world-reveals-oxfam-davos-report
In Germany, everybody currently seems to agree that we won’t be able to afford our social securities for much longer anymore (due to dwindling population, economic stagnancy and whatnot), but nobody seems to draw the conclusion that we can’t afford the level of pure richness anymore that we are currently affording to a very few people. Which is weird, cause to me it seems fucking obvious. Instead, it seems like everybody wants to take support away from the poorest, for some reason. It’s strange.
It shouldn’t take me this long to recognise a Star Wars incest joke at this point, but it did take me until the point where they’re wanted and moving around a lot.
Ironically, in the 1930s tobacco companies used to advertise the health benefits of smoking cigarettes. In the 1950s, after scientific studies began noting the damage that smoking did to our bodies (not just our lungs), those companies doubled down, getting endorsements from “doctors” stating that their brand is healthier than its competitors (“four out of five doctors choose our brand”).
In spite of knowing, from their own research, that their product was actually incredibly harmful.
The way this went tells you everything you need to know about corporations.
Early eighties is also when stock buybacks became legal.
That was The Before Time!
It was certainly before my time, so I agree.
Only Christian of current users actually pays the Patreon.
Fuck yeah! Me for the win!
Like I said there are not many former Millarworlders left.
“Why are so few of us left healthy, active, and without personality disorders?”
I mean, it’s true, but the problem with that one is that this logic is also being used by, like, hardcore MAGA people and their equivalents here.
Who would’ve been one guy who at looks vaguely like he could be Greek…
Complaining about historical accuracy with The Odyssee is a bit like those complaints about Lord of the Rings. Jesus, people, it’s all made up! What, are the cyclopses also not historically accurate?
I get that it’s sometimes hard for people to understand that this doesn’t matter if you’re doing this kind of movie. But it’s not that hard a concept to understand that you can just ignore skin colour and gender in these kind of movies. You can’t if you’re making a MLK biopic, sure, but this one isn’t about history, or even the real world, people. But it’s not like that is really the concern, is it? Or they would’ve complained about Brad Pitt as Achilles, or Diane Kruger as Helen. It’s about them wanting to exclude anybody who doesn’t look like them, because they feel attacked the moment they don’t recognise themselves in even two of fifty faces in a movie.
I thought this was overall a really good season of this great show, and it ended very satisfyingly.
It’s still incredibly to me that Seth Rogen and Eric Kripke successfully brought these two Garth Ennis books to the screen. Hats off to them, and to the audience for being ready for this crazy shit.
Let’s have the scene that made me fall in love with the show one last time – Butcher beating the shit out of Translucent to the sound of “London Calling”.
I thought that happened in 2012?
Bold to assume there’ll be a Democrat President ever again.
MDMA/Ecstasy was, like LSD, also developed as a medicine. There are videos of it being tested on pensioners, I think for dementia treatment.
Viagra was first tested on middle aged miners in the Welsh town of Merthyr Tydfil for helping high blood pressure and angina, when they started reporting an interesting side effect they changed tack on its use.
Same with heroin, of course.
I’ve seen a lot more advance criticism of The Odyssey than I have excitement for it. He seems to be one of those popular directors that it’s trendy to say isn’t very good, when I think he actually is very good, technically and conceptually.
Well, I criticised him before it was cool to do so!!!!
I think I wrote at least a dozen or though diatribes about Inception on this forum over the years, after all.
That said, I do think he’s a great director. It’s just that not each of his movies clicks with me (and even when they do, I love to nitpick because it’s the kind of movie you’ll want to think about some more).
I think with the Odysee, the things is more that it’s been caught up in the culture war?
Yeah, with every movie, there’s always a few people going, Oh, this is finally another good Star Wars movie. And then a few years later, we all look back and go, yeah, that was pretty shit.
Looks pretty fucking good to me.
I’ll get that HBO subscription when it’s out. Wanted to watch the Hedge Knight thing anyway.
What are people’s main complaints about Starmer, concretely? Is it reasonable to expect another candidate from the same party would do a better job?
I’d say the main problem is the one Labour/middle-of-the-road-socialist parties always have, which is that once they’re in power for some reason they always turn to pretty conservative policies.
And Keir Starmer has gotten onto the “It’s all the refugee’s fault!” train, too.
Another PM from the conservative wing of Labour wouldn’t make a difference. Someone like Burnham or Milliband, who are from the more left-wing faction, might do quite a few things differently. I think switching PM and policies would actually be the best chance for Labour to stay in power, because Starmer’s mix of left- and right-wing strategies don’t send a clear message and nobody likes him.
I love Nolan’s Weird Big Idea movies, but he’s not an interesting director to me when he’s doing “normal” movies. Oppenheimer (sorry), Insomnia, even his Batman movies retrospectively… they’re okay, but I don’t love them.
I suspect the same will go for The Odyssee. Perfectly fine big epic movie about that story, without anything making it particularly special.
I had to break my watching of The Bone Temple into two parts (which I hate doing, but needs must and all that) and I do love that they made Jimmy Saville the villain of this piece.
Good to see Cook from Skins finally getting his proper break, too. Took Jack O’Connell a bit longer than the other guys, but what a year he has had, playing the villains in this and in Sinners. He’s going to be big, and well-deservedly. Cook was one of the most compelling characters in Skins and a lot of that was his performance.
Still the ” they’re just poor kids who had bad luck in life” argument only goes so far.
That wasn’t my argument at all. It’s just that research shows that there are factors that contribute to people committing crimes, and that if you want to have less crimes, your best chance is to try and reduce those factors as far as possible.
You’re talking about criminal justice and punishment which, sure, go ahead and do that, if it makes you feel better. I suppose we have to do that, as well, because a sense of justice is important to our societies. But it doesn’t prevent more crime from happening. For that, you have to address those root causes.
Sure. There’s risk factors for becoming a criminal, and there are groups in society that have a lot of them. It’s just that ethnicity isn’t actually one of them, it’s a correlation.
We need to one hand help people get their lives in order and be compassionate to people who truly seek a better life, but also be tougher to the inveterate troublemakers.
I think the feeling that you have to be “tougher on” troublemakers is very understandable, but it’s not the way to success. Research has shown little effect in tougher laws warning people away from committing crimes, and prison is not good at getting people back on the right track. The desire to punish is completely human, but it’s not productive.
When you’re looking at the problem of gangs with immigrant backgrounds, research has shown that those come into being when you have large groups of people who have no option of participating in mainstream society. Who are stuck for years and even decades in a country that doesn’t allow them to find a job, to get an education, to support themselves and their families. This is when people turn to crime, when they have no stake in society. And that doesn’t just go for migrants, this goes for everybody, it’s just that migrants find themselves more often in this situation. Ironically, right-wing extremists often have similar origins; in Germany, the worst violent nazi gangs usually from in the most desperate areas in East Germany.
The demographics crisis is easy to solve. We all just need more migration.
There’s a doc about Lars Eidinger, who is playing Brainiac in Man of Tomorrow, by the way. He must be brilliant on stage.
Oh, and a few years back, on of the best German bands (/art projects), Deichkind, shot a series of music videos with the guy. This is him dancing in the song “Keine Party”.
He’s been turning himself into a bit of a national treasure.
I think the big problem that’s crushing us is that there’s a secret class war going on. Seriously. Our democracies are failing in part because the public institutions are all chronically under-financed, and the reason for that is that about half of the wealth belongs to a handful of people who have managed to make sure that nobody will ever ask them to contribute. And because they can’t be touched, you have to blame the financial problems on the welfare state, on the lazy bumfucks and migrants, and take our social systems further and further apart. Ensuring more radicalisation on all sides. And there seem to be only a very few politicians in our countries that seem to be willing to take this problem on, mostly because the side of the money is the easier side to be on.
I do believe we need governance that is in certain ways more forceful, but that also maintains basic human freedoms and dignity…I hope that is possible within the paradigm of liberal democracy
I think it is. We need to push back hard against the idea that only a weak state that interferes as little as possible with the markets is a good state. Capitalist democracy works best when you have a strong state regulating it, but it’s hard to get that back once you’ve abandoned it.
I don’t know, Orban’s gone, the nature of the far right when in power is becoming more obvious as they piss people off, as they’re incapable of stopping. Farage and co are getting some scrutiny and don’t like it. Trump and Putin are going to die, and you can bet neither have any succession plans.
You just wait until Farage is Prime Minister and he’s shaking hand with President LePen.
Orban’s gone, but who knows if that will hold. Kaczyński is gone in Poland, but they’ve now already elected an extremist President who is ensuring that Tusk can’t do any meaningful reforms. Similar things may happen in Hungary. I am not yet optimistic about this. The good thing is that the new government will get a meaningful inflow of money from the EU, so hopefully that boost to the economy will make a difference. In the end, authoritarian governments fall when the economy has turned to shit. That’s why Hungary happened, really.
This won’t get better until the Left – in all our countries – gets its shit together and we’ve done something about social inequality. So, good luck with that.
I finally saw 28 Years Later, and it was really great, I felt. Once again, what starts as a pretty typical post-apocalyptic zombie movie turns into something entirely different at some point (while still being that, of course). This movie was far more loving and tender than I expected it to be.
Very much looking forward to The Bone Temple.
Usually the content is old enough that anybody who wants to buy it at a more standard price has already done so. For digital comics as opposed to physical, sales are basically pure profit, so if you can reach a new audience for older material by setting an ultra-low price – an audience that wouldn’t have bought the book under any other circumstances – then it makes sense to do so, because you’re still extracting a little bit more turnover out of the books without incurring any additional costs.
Yeah, but under that logic, why don’t they sell oder books in digital at a far lower cost than they do? Most books still cost pretty close what the print version do. So weird that they do this, but only in the context of the Humble Bundle. Not that I’m complaining, mind you.
I actually really like the twists in the Absolute books (Bruce isn’t rich, Kal El came as a teen and works underground). Wonder Woman is the least traditional though, leans a lot into the mythology aspect and I think is my favourite because of that.
I’ve only read the first trade of Absolute Bats, Supes, and WW, but judging from that, I’d also say that Wonder Woman is simply the best written book of those.
Yeah, it’d be pretty cool if they established a cinematic Wildstorm universe, like, 10 years down the line.
