I’ve been watching Blue Lights after many recommendations and it is very good but it is notable mostly for including an actress drawn by Frank Quitely.
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East of West is genuinely one of the best books I’ve ever read. Completely incomprehensible on an issue to issue basis, but just brilliant overall.
Agreed. I had a hard time with it monthly. At some point I read it all in one go, probably with a Comixology sale, and it’s fantastic.
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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.
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“It was a bit of a surprise to us, but it was only their personal situation that mattered to whether they expected to have children,” Hayford said.
I’m really not surprised. We don’t have kids, both my wife and I have reasonably good jobs, nothing too impressive, but comfortable enough. I don’t know how we could have afforded child care.
No I am not surprised either. I know pretty much every decision my wife and I have made around children has had a financial element and Ben earlier was right that financial uncertainty doesn’t help. For my father’s generation as long as you didn’t fuck up you had a job for life, I have been laid off because of restructuring, not my job performance, 3 times in 15 years (one I managed to find a sideways move at the last minute).
This summer I am moving back to the UK with my son, splitting the family for a couple of years, because it will save us between £60-90,000 in university fees we can’t avoid otherwise. As Bill Clinton’s plaque said ‘it’s the economy stupid’ as the answer to 99% of problems.
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I wonder if there is a connection between the modern sense of hopelessness and the decline of the birth rate. We’ve all seen those articles of GenX and millenials saying “I will not have kids, because of the climate change.” Or the more general “It is not fair to bring children into such a cruel world.”
My suspicion would be it plays a part for some but it is primarily economic. Reason being that regardless of the culture or the environment, from Sweden to Argentina or Korea or Canada the pattern to reduction falls the same as the countries become wealthier but the economic model makes children a cost.
https://news.osu.edu/most-women-want-children–but-half-are-unsure-if-they-will/
This article based on a US survey matches that, a big drop in the birth rate has come since 2008 and the great recession, the number of women on a yes/no question of whether they want kids hasn’t changed. The more nuanced question of whether they think they will has reduced.
That study found that as people’s dissatisfaction with their own lives increased, they were less likely to think they would have a child. But concerns about the difficulty of life for today’s young people and evaluations about problems in the community were not related to their goals to have children.
“It was a bit of a surprise to us, but it was only their personal situation that mattered to whether they expected to have children,” Hayford said.
“It wasn’t so much what was going on in society that predicted their fertility goals.”
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Yes Israel is the exception in developed countries but I think it’s also hard to replicate. Reading about it seems the main driver is orthodox Jewish families following a religious command to have a lot of children. They are rating that strict adherence above financial considerations. It’s clear though in Catholic majority countries like in southern Europe of Philippines people are no longer that devoted to follow a no contraception instruction over what they can afford.
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Yes 100%. Heads are being buried in the sand because this is already happening in my mind. Outside Africa and a few Middle East counties nobody is delivering replacement numbers of 2.1 and above. Plus no approach from a left or right government has been able to change it. Orban had 16 years, massive power and spent 5% of GDP (more than even the US spends on defence, they were at 3.4% last year) and it changed nothing.
So a realistic politician now has two options, immigration from Africa would allow population growth at least for the next few decades until they may also plateau or devise a different economic model.
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It’s the structure of a developed society in the first instance. In Africa the numbers are high because still a large number live off the land or have their own local trade, so more kids helps them to increase the labour and output. For the rest of us kids are a cost and quite a heavy one.
The replacement number really requires a significant chunk of people to have 3 or more kids as some will always choose not have them or not find a partner or have medical reasons they can’t. So to get to a 2.1 replacement figure you’d need a lot of couples who don’t have those issues to have 3 kids.
However it’s hard to justify a reason why you would have 3, of my contemporaries from my college days none have more than 2. I stopped at 2 for those reasons, the main driver for 2 is so they get siblings and don’t feel isolated. You will still have the support in old age with 1 or 2, housing is expensive and increasingly urban so with each child come a need for more space which is either expensive or unavailable.
The various grants the countries I mention above give are expensive for the state but also just mitigate costs for the individual, reduced childcare is nice but still more expensive than no childcare. I think to really inspire a baby boom you’d need to make it profitable for the individual which in essence it is for those African families.
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We can only dream of being this right on the internet. Exactly 1 year.4 users thanked author for this post.
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Can’t imagine why the Republicans party is chock full of paedophiles
I wonder when people are going to accept we have to work around this?
Essentially this is an issue affecting every developed country, quite a few developing too, and no solution has worked. Even India is now below replacement level. Singapore loosened laws on sex in films to get people friskier, Nordic countries have put in generous parental leave and child support, Korea has given a whopping $280bn in cash or voucher incentives and it still keeps reducing, they are rock bottom globally.
Orban’s right wing autocracy made it a key policy aim to have replacement fertility rate of 2.1 by 2030, spending a whopping 5% of GDP on it and essentially got nowhere much. It remains around 0.3% lower than most western European countries, probably because they clamped down on migration and new migrants tend to have more kids.
So basically short of forced birthing camps or some other fascist nightmare nothing works other than migration. Maybe countries like Japan that are looking at things like how robotics can provide elderly care are being more realistic.
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It’s been like this in the UK since Disney+ launched, we don’t have a separate service for Hulu.
The entire world outside the US. Hulu never existed as a service anywhere else (ok maybe Canada, I don’t know).
Netflix has many reasons to be criticised but a huge part of their success was jumping into making it a global service as soon as they could. It has paid back for them with things like Squid Game and Adolesence being zeitgeist hits everywhere.
I currently have to access DC Infinite using a VPN set to the UK, there is no reason for this, nobody in SE Asia has printed DC comics for over 10 years. Marvel’s offering doesn’t geoblock as there is no commercial or legal reason to do so. It’s parochial laziness that is costing them customers.
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The Church is deeply entwined in our education and medical systems and it’s just not good enough any more. Our government is still intending to hand off the long delayed and massively overbudget children’s hospital in Dublin to the Sisters of Charity!
The power is a major issue.
My wife’s family are all Catholics but it’s a real minority religion in Malaysia (as it was growing up in Wales where non-conformism was the norm). Looking from the outside the setup here in the Catholic church is pretty benign but they don’t get to control any big institutions. It’s a very different scenario to say Ireland or Italy, the entire congregation are minorities, about half of the members of their local church are factory workers from the Philippines and it’s actually quite lovely they all have a place to meet up on a Sunday.
(I told my son to stick with it as 100% of those immigrant workers are females aged between 20 and 35, work the odds).
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I’ve still been playing Xenoblade 3 on Switch. This game is unbelievably huge. I’ve been playing for weeks and still on chapter 6 (Xenoblade games usually have 10 chapters) and unlike the first in the series the side quests and discovery stuff is really interesting and not repetitive ‘fetch’ tasks. Others disagree but to me this is a franchise that gets better each time, albeit Xenoblade 2 was funnier, the script had some real zingers.
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The only real fear for me with Russia is the nuclear aspect but MAD has stayed in force for a long time and the rather unique setup the UK has with Trident means it is basically suicide for Russia to launch anything.
If you don’t know Britain’s nuclear arsenal is not on land but kept on 3 submarines (hence trident), 2 of which are always in motion if the 3rd is getting maintenance. The captains of those subs have instructions that even if the UK has been hit by Russian nukes and the capital destroyed they can hit back in revenge and launch on Moscow.
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There’s a strong cultural element. In the west giving money has been seen as either a bit vulgar or more commonly means a lack of thought given to the gift. Hence even though Dave is right that a gift voucher is just cash but with a limitation on where you can spend it, it passes the ‘thought’ test of at least he or she likes Starbucks coffee or clothes at GAP.
In east Asia, cash is pretty much the default, on weddings and birthdays you get a red envelope with money in it. The vulgarity of money isn’t an issue, maybe because of the lack of Christian influence and the camel/eye of a needle stuff. Chinese New Year wishes are basically around prosperity and wishing you make a load of cash in the coming year.
This is massive when it comes to weddings, when I got married 18 years back the average cost in the UK was around £18k, usually borne mostly by the couple or if lucky a wealthy parent. Mine cost around that but every penny came back in the red envelopes given as gifts at the reception (the hotel keeps them in their safe). In a roundabout way (there is no set price and close family give more) you charge them for the meal and entertainment.
I see now that trend is heading westward and I think by necessity, young people don’t have that much money now with housing costs etc. Usually they live together in advance so they don’t need the cutlery, saucepans, tea sets etc for a new home they needed 40 years ago. It may be in 10 years time or so it becomes the norm, I’m not sure.
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Honestly at the moment I’m feeling pretty negative about the whole Russia situation. Maybe it’s time to get a bottle of vodka ready in case the Russkis overrun Europe.
I don’t think they can overrun Europe. They’ve spent years struggling over relatively small patches of Ukraine and France and the UK have very significant armed forces and tech that get called in if they enter a NATO country like Poland or Finland.
That doesn’t mean things can’t get very messy and dangerous though, with increased covert attacks and the ever present threat of nukes.
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I second the recommendation for the Shock Doctrine. It opens your eyes to a lot of things that go on in the world.
Is there a version of bookshop.org in the Netherlands?
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Interesting. Germany tries to build up its military but people are so brainwashed to think “military = bad” that they refuse.
It’s a bit similar in the Netherlands I think. People often just refuse to acknowledge Russia is an enemy. Those drones that were spotted in Western Europe recenty, some people just refuse to think they are real and call it all fake news.
You get ingrained beliefs. Germany have since 1945 been told not to spend on defence, The Netherlands has been very fiscally conservative on borrowing for just as long. It’s hard to change attitudes on a dime even if it’s 100% true Russia is a danger and they need to do it as the US will no longer foot a chunk of the bill.
You get a similar conflict in the UK (and probably US) where an ingrained attitude hates the idea of national ID cards while they simultaneously moan about immigrants coming to work in the black market on the right or not everyone having access to ID for voting on the left. There could be a solution…..
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Oh I forgot Humble Bundle is a great place for digital comics.
This is their current Image offering: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/image-comics-in-10s-books?hmb_source=&hmb_medium=product_tile&hmb_campaign=mosaic_section_1_layout_index_2_layout_type_threes_tile_index_2_c_imagecomicsin10s_bookbundle
175 trades for $18!
(You’ll need a CBR/CBZ reader for these but there’s a few of them free in the app stores, I’ve used Perfect Viewer and CDisplay in the past).
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I have to admit I use both as they can be relatively cheap now anyway. For comics you don’t need anything other than a big screen generic tablet, I have a 12″ Honor that makes all my comics a bit oversized and is a fraction of the price of an iPad Pro or Surface and does the same job. If you tax your tablet more for other things then it may be worth shelling out but I only ever use it for reading comics and Netflix/streaming, it needs no processing power or bells and whistles, just a good big screen.
For prose books I like the bog standard Kindle, easy on the eyes and also cheap.
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Mamdani seems to be having a great time with Trump. Weird. But it could be good.
I think Mamdani is clever as hell. Some on the left decried this but some on the left are obsessed with gesture politics over delivery.
He asked for the meeting, knowing Trump responds well to personal discussions over rhetoric in the media, and in the end he walked out of there conceding nothing. None of his agenda has changed but he’s got Trump (for the moment at least) not to withhold billions in federal projects for New York.
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“The device replacement cycle is how big wireless keeps us stuck in place,” Lauren says. “We operate in 18 countries. In only 2 of them are phones even allowed to be ‘locked’ to one carrier: the United States and Japan. In Europe, it’s literally illegal to have a phone locked.” Perhaps not coincidentally, the average European is paying about $35 a month for wireless data, less than half the $83 a month that the average American is paying. I’ve gotten animated about this because that extra $48 a month per person adds up to a tax of tens of billions a year on Americans.
Interesting facts on mobile phones. Although it existed briefly in the UK I have never had a locked phone. I am also surprised that average is as high as $35. I got 10gb a month in the UK on a pay as you go for $13 last year, in Malaysia I could get that for $4.
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I’ve been reading the Absolute line on DC Infinite. The first 7 issues (which is all they have at the moment) of the ‘trinity’ books.
The concept starts off with a rather silly, typically DC in Crisis style, explanation of a new universe that doesn’t really need one in a ‘DC All-in’ oneshot. Darkseid merges with the Spectre or something and creates or becomes (it’s not very clear and I don’t care enough to check) a new darker, more dangerous, universe.
Luckily the creators have completely ignored this to tell Marvel Ultimate style new reader friendly alternate takes.
In the order I liked them best:
1) Batman – a non billionaire Bruce in a very scary version of Gotham, has echoes of TDKR in the aspect of how chaotic everything is at street level but doesn’t ape it otherwise. It’s very well told and features some great art, when they had to use fill-ins for Dragotta we get Marcos Martin so there’s no drop-off at all. Unlike the original Ultimate books and the other 2 Absolute ones here it moves the story on at a fair clip which is refreshing.
2) Wonder Woman – Diana is raised in Hell rather than Paradise is the basic concept. Like most of my favourite WW books it plays heavily on the Greek myth aspect. A little slow maybe at times to tell her origin but it’s a stylish package and Thompson writes a WW that feels more like a character of ancient myth landing in our world than any previous versions, strange morality included (the Gods could often be arseholes).
3) Superman – Albeit in 3rd place I still liked this a lot. The ‘twist’ from the original here being that Kal-El only leaves Krypton as a teen and operates in the shadows. Echoes of the very early Superman stories where he fought against mob bosses and corrupt officials but in a modern setting and dialled up to 11. Very different setups for Lois and Jimmy are intriguing.
In summary well worth a read. These are by all accounts I’ve seen from comics shops selling like hotcakes and maintaining the sales each month, so it’s nice it pays off to put out quality and not just gimmicks.
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Toy Story 3 is genuinely a masterpiece, you should watch it. Toy Story 4 is OK but is the first one where you felt like maybe they should have just left the whole thing alone.
I would confidently omit the ‘maybe’ from that sentence. TS3 is a perfect ending to an excellent trilogy. They really should have left it alone as the 4th was pretty average.
So Christian, watch TS3. Imagine it finishes there.
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The fuck? Was that real? And if so, why did they use an ordinary merch plastic mask?!
To be fair that kind of is the conceit of the mask. As a kid in the 1980s we’d make an effigy of a man and stick on a cheap plastic Guy Fawkes mask and go house to house collecting a ‘penny for the Guy’. Then at the end of the night burn it on a bonfire.
Since then the tradition has ebbed away and the image absorbed into films and Anonymous but when I was reading V in 1986 or so the context was that he was wearing a cheap plastic mask any kid would pick up at a corner shop for 25 pence and an outfit you could hire in any fancy dress shop. (Nowadays when you Google ‘Guy Fawkes costume’ around half the results call it a V for Vendetta one).
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Supposedly, William may have helped push Andrew out: How Prince William Secretly Plotted to Finally Destroy His Uncle
The impression that I get is that from reading various sources is that William will be a King who will not take anybody’s bullshit. I can see him deal with Harry and Meghan far more severely than grandmother and dad.
I would say that The News Agents podcast (which includes Emily Maitliss as one of the presenters) discussed and debunked this story the other day.
They would have pretty excellent access to royal correspondents after many years at the BBC and by their account William wanted to go a little easier and it was Charles pushing the full stripping or titles etc.
There’ll never be an official statement on it either way so we can just guess and choose the version that chimes the best really.
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I agree it is tough to find a crime under British law then. It is still odd though, the way he is being ejected from the royal family if there is no real crime. Maybe there is more to all this.
I’m not sure there is more. It’s more than just whether a crime was committed or could be prosecuted. He’s displayed morally repugnant behaviour. He shouldn’t be having sex with teenagers set up for him as a middle aged man, he shouldn’t be writing emails wanting to meet up with Epstein after he was convicted (but let off with a pathetic sentence) for being a paedophile. Something he lied about to everyone as he told Emily Maitliss in his infamous Newsnight interview that he met Epstein the year before to cut off all contact.
For all his faults I can imagine King Charles is fucking seething at his brother and the shame he’s brought on the family, where public support is basically the only thing that maintains their status. The UK is far from an absolute monarchy in the 21st century, the institution exists by public consent and if that opinion polling ever gets deeply negative they all lose their silly titles and houses and all become “Mr/Ms Windsor”.
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Interesting that prince Andrew apparently has to give up the title of prince now, yet it seems there is no police investigation against him.
I want to make it clear firstly that I think he’s guilty as hell and a complete piece of shit. The next bit is not about what I think should happen, what is right or wrong, they could nail his balls to a wall and I’d be fine with it. It’s about the legal system.
I don’t think there’s any great conspiracy about a lack of charges against Andrew Windsor. There’s not a case that would stand up in court on current evidence.
The only photos we have of him with Guiffre are in London, when she was 17. The UK age of consent is 16 so there’s no ‘statutory rape’ charge or similar that could be applied to him. By her own account in her book he didn’t exert any force, she was groomed to be compliant by Epstein and Maxwell. Even if he admitted he had sex with her, and barring a surprise witness it’s impossible to prove he did, it would be difficult to find an offence he committed if he just said “Epstein said this girl wanted to sleep with a Prince”. The trafficking charges would be on Epstein and Maxwell, Epstein and the sole witness (Guiffre) are dead and Maxwell is already convicted and saying nothing.
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Someone on twitter made the point that all the main platforms are controlled by right wing billionaires. Bezos (who owns Washington Post) and Zuckerberg seem to have switched to supporting Trump. It’s all quite concerning.
I think Musk is all-in, in fact further to the right than Trump and half his crowd. He’s already declared the likes of Nigel Farage are too left wing for him and he prefers neo-Nazis like Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.
Zuck and Bezos are just cowards. They bent the knee as soon as Trump took power because they are afraid of any repercussions on their business if they didn’t. I’m not saying for a second they are secretly Marxists or anything, they are billionaire businessmen after all and like to be taxed low and have weak unions. My suspicion is though they’d rather someone more rational in there, probably don’t like the ICE shit, definitely don’t like the tariffs etc.
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I’ll stick with Apple Music; I have issues with their playlists – so predictable.
Yeah that’s not perfect on Tidal either.
They have playlists of a certain type and the mix of artists they pick is pretty spot on for me. However it only selects the same few tracks from any artist over and over again, even if they have an extensive discography and dozens of hits.
So if The Smiths appear it’s This Charming Man and There’s a Light that Never Goes Out. Blur is Girls and Boys and Coffee and TV. Bowie is Space Oddity and Life on Mars. Wet Leg is CPR and Chaise Longue etc etc
All great tracks but they did a lot more than 2 songs each and I’d quite like to hear them.
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Reminds me of this great moment when one the AfD party leaders was interviewed for a kid’s news format and he was going on about how important it was to get more German culture back into schools, folksongs and poetry and so on, and the kid asked him what his favourite poem was. Didn’t know a single one.
Reminiscent of Trump’s favourite bible passages.
The worst actions to rhetoric comparison I’ve seen has to the the leader of the ‘patriotic flag’ anti-immigration movement in Manchester. He had a conviction for smuggling 4 Vietnamese nationals into the UK.
His ‘defence’ was he was bringing them to work on a cannabis farm, still very illegal in the UK, and not taking benefits. It beggars belief.
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He is the poster boy for social media radicalisation. As you say his first post in response to the criticism was saying he’d take it on board etc.
That’s morphed week by week from having ‘concerns’ into vicious insults about any trans people and now sharing neo-nazi material.
He’d be living a far happier and more successful life if he’d just deleted his Twitter account after that first IT Crowd criticism. It’s a tragic story really because he wrote very funny sitcoms that made people happy and now just wastes his time ranting online and making everyone’s lives more miserable.
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It’s very dumb. A lot of the reason soccer betting scandals tend to happen at the lower levels is it’s not really worth doing for the top players earning $5-10m a year. They could take a kickback from a syndicate but when the risk is a lifetime ban from the sport they are going to be considerably worse off if caught and as you say, is $4.7m not enough?
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One of the main issues is that they are not only performing there, but they are being specifically instructed by the government not to mention topics or make jokes that will embarrass or ridicule the country or its leaders, and are happy to go along with that kind of censorship of material for the right price.
This is the key difference really. Yes Burr isn’t wrong the UK has a terrible list of atrocities in its past (and quite a few dodgy things in its present) as do many countries but if you play the Hammersmith Apollo you aren’t doing it in service to the King or government and won’t be given a list in advance of what you can and can’t say.
I’d say it’s more comparable with doing a gig for a mafia boss because MBS ordered the execution of a critic and he’s signing your pay cheque.
The defences are also very reminiscent of those made during apartheid era South Africa. Cricket and rugby teams would tour, claiming to make things better by doing one afternoon training session with black kids in a township (while also pocketing $100k each in an era the sports were meant to be amateur). I think history proved them wrong really, the later 1980s move to completely boycott SA contributed more to a positive change than their random outreach to a handful of selected kids.
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I was looking for Line of Duty clips on YouTube to see if they all use ‘haitch’. Adrian Dunbar (and his character Ted Hasting) are Northern Irish so that would be explained by the Hiberno-English bit.
They are surprisingly hard to find, it’s mostly analysis of the plot videos narrated over by fans. I did end up though being amused by this recap video from the BBC narrated by Diane Morgan (aka Philomena Cunk).
(She says ‘aitch’, as does Stephen Graham in the clip).
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I think it’s ethically wrong while also being aware that if that guy hadn’t done side by side comparisons I’d never notice.
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This Internet Theory of Late Night’s Decline Is the Strongest One Yet
There’s been a lot of hair pulling recently about why late-night programming is struggling. The only one who’s seemed to really crack the code is Gutfeld! That doesn’t really count, though, because it comes on at 10 p.m. and is watched by people who are so fueled by hate they need 24 hours of Fox News programming. Plus, some of that large audience has to be the old people leaving their TV on when they sleep, right?
But, because of the rapid decline in late-night viewership, there are plenty of people who blame the hosts for failing to keep a large audience. Gutfeld’s success and the massive numbers of views on YouTube for Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers suggests that the problem isn’t the hosts themselves.
In a Substack post shared to the r/LateNightTalkShows, the account ThinkingAndData suggested that the real problem with late night has nothing to do with the white men helming the major network shows.
“In the past, late-night was a jack of all trades — comedy routines, sketches, celebrity interviews, music performances — but with the dawn of the internet, it has emerged as a master of none,” the Substack post posits. “This theme has played out twice before, with two major predecessors of late-night: vaudeville and variety shows.”
The article traces how both prior forms of entertainment were killed by new forms of technology. “With vaudeville, it was motion pictures, and with variety shows, it was cable TV. With late-night, it’s playing out over the internet and social media,” the post continues.
This isn’t an entirely new theory, but the response on Reddit shows that it best reflects most late-night fan’s realities. No one is tuning in at 11:30 p.m. to watch Kimmel or Colbert on TV — very few people even pay for cable anymore, especially young people. “I actually watch all the late night on YouTube the following day and I’m 34 years old,” one person on the Reddit post commented. “It’s become a way for me to stay informed without going insane about what’s going on.”
“You NEVER need to watch anything when it ‘airs,’” another person chimed in. “You choose when to watch. And so the communal element and the sense of anticipation is gone from late night and other shows that historically have relied on being fresh with commentary on the day’s or week’s events.”
“‘Did you catch ___ last night?’ has been almost entirely replaced with ‘did you catch that ___ bit on YouTube?’ at this point,” a third Redditor commented.
So, where does this leave late-night programming? YouTube revenue isn’t exactly going to cover the production costs of these massive shows.
The Substack post frames it like this: “The issue with current late-night shows is that they operate on a business model of mass appeal, but today’s attention economy is built on niches. As the economics of late-night become more dire, I expect more of the remaining late-night hosts to either retire, reformat their shows or eventually get kicked out.”
Some on Reddit think it might just be time to scrap this form of entertainment altogether, and invest in whatever comes next. “That 75-year-old format is definitely stale, especially with a middle-of-the-road host,” one person commented. “But yes I agree the main problem is it’s just a weird old from of entertainment from a bygone era.”
If this is what the people active in the r/LateNightTalkShows subreddit are saying, it’s likely an even more grim prognosis from the general public.
I’ve always found late night US TV rather bizarre. A load of shows on every channel, doing the same thing at the same time to ever decreasing results. They all have the same stage dressing of a city skyline, regardless of where they record. They all sit on the same side with a desk, with a house band and a monologue etc etc.
You can’t discuss the new media intrusions without facing the fact that the beloved Letterman got lower ratings in actual numbers than a Sunday farming show on BBC1.
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It does. I won’t get them all but all of them look interesting. The Deniz and Spurrier books are most anticipated for me.
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By all accounts RTD has already written the 3rd season (with other writers as is usual) and a couple of episodes of the 4th.
That’s not the same as being showrunner of course and as with the Billie question the gap in production makes everything less certain. In truth the gap in being able to confirm is why Gatwa left needing rewrites. It’d probably be preferable if Disney left, I don’t really want super effects and budgets, the BBC one was fine and some of the episodes looked excellent.
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It’s crazy that the American government can shut down. Sorry, we’re closed for business!
To be fair Belgium did without any government for over a year.
Ok slightly differently, they had no government but in their system that just means civil servants carry on with whatever rules and budgets were last decided. I think the US in unique in shutting up shop.
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Just to clarify, I know Farage is a bad guy, and he did bad things for the UK, but I’m talking about this position on the conflict with Russia specifically. He changes his stance on that quite often.
Farage has taken a shitload of money from Russia, he used to work openly on Russia Today. His ex leader in Wales has just been convicted for being paid to ask questions in the EU parliament supporting Russian interests, he will be sentenced soon. Russia was also deeply involved in the social media side of the Brexit referendum.
However that is not a popular position in the UK, it could be deemed by a lot of his supporters as very bad and possibly treasonous, so Farage always distances himself from his support for Putin publicly.
So he’s not really changing his stance often, he’s a Putin beneficiary and supporter who knows he can’t stand on that so will pretend he isn’t.
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It’s quite amazing they still find new episodes this late on, in the most obscure places too like Kenyan national TV.
I read a great article recently on the future of Doctor Who but can’t find the link again.
It’s fairly straightforward, Disney paid (or contributed to) 26 episodes, which includes the spinoff War Between the Land and the Sea that is coming very soon. Then they make a decision to continue.
(This kind of nonsense is part of why streaming shows are so slow and take 2-3 years between seasons I think).
I think it’s 95% likely they will end their interest there but both Julie Gardner, head of Bad Wolf, and the head of BBC Drama say it’s going to come back regardless. So the only question is when as I can see they can’t budget or schedule until they get that confirmation either way.
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Heh. Well, it’s a good PR gag for that agency. But this isn’t feasable yet.
Here’s the main issue. It should be noted all the video is AI, not just pretty starlet Tilly but the fat guy and old guy and they are very convincing. It’s technically very impressive but it is also deathly boring and unfunny.
I wanted to show my wife and kids the massive technological advances the video showed and reveal at the end it was all fake but it needed me to ask them to be patient with frankly tedious content to get the end reveal.
This will be the biggest hurdle because AI by its nature cannot innovate, it collates and reassembles existing content. If you inserted this tech into 1964 you’d have 200,000 jangly guitar Buddy Holly/Beatles things but no reprobates in Birmingham would have invented heavy metal or German nerds created electronic sounds.
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I made a switch last month from Spotify to Tidal.
This may vary by geography but here it is now cheaper, has better sound quality, pays artists more and has a better suggestion algorithm. I have found great new music with their feeds, far better than Spotify.
It’s not perfect as it tends with any artist to just replay the biggest hits, picking The Smiths as one of my ‘followed’ bands has meant replays of ‘How Soon is Now’ and ‘There is a Light’ and not much else from their catalogue but you can tweak that with some extra effort or as I pay just choose the albums or greatest hits.
More importantly the ‘daily discovery’ is pretty spot on.
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Yeah apart from a couple of oddities I think 95% or more are in other collections. Looks a nice package though.
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There’s always a bit of shenanigans like that. When they moved to downloads the price of games didn’t really drop despite the cost savings (or cinema ticket prices when they stopped shipping heavy $5000 cans around the globe). I think in both examples they are, as any business does, looking at what the customer perceives as value. The packaging and distribution are very low down the list compared to how much fun the game is and how many hours you’ll get out of it.
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And given that I was paying £40-£50 for a new game back in the ’90s, they’ve bucked the inflationary trend pretty impressively, especially given how much more complex and costly to develop they are these days.
Yup, a point I was making recently, a PS1 game was often £50. Using an inflation calculator that’s £103 today.
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And because there’s a two term-limit, the current president, Yoda Michael D Higgins can’t run again.
What was Higgins’s deal before he was President?
What was Higgins’s deal before he was President?
Jedi master in the Dagobah district.
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We’re reaching the limits of human vision and biology to actually perceive the difference.
I think that’s been there with TV tech for a while. I stand in the electrical shop and the basic HD TV is a fraction of the price of the highest definition OLED and I’m squinting to spot the difference in the picture.
Similarly with digital camera definition everything was about megapixels 5 or so years back, the marketing has shifted because there’s a realisation that just increasing that number has reached a point where it makes no real difference.
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It’s interesting looking at what my kids and their friends play.
Tech jumps are smaller than they were in our day. A move from 16 to 32 to 64 bit transformed what could be done in a few years. It’s not true now, Breath of the Wild was made for the WiiU but fits perfectly well into Switch games.
They do play a lot of indie games and are not badgering me for a Switch 2 because there’s no evidence right now it will offer much more than they have. For teenagers Hollow Knight has always been a bigger deal than Red Dead 2 or other AAA games.
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Still I don’t like it if people just say the country is entirely bad like he seems to do. The US has lots of great people and has done great things, as well as bad people and bad things. This attitude is not helpful.
It’s not hugely related to what’s written though, which is a lamentation of a decline under Trump. You can’t really have a decline without a previous upside.
I do get part of what you say, it can be easy to launch at the USA as they have had a dominant economic and cultural position, often very positive but sometimes not, since the end of WW2. I just think you take it too far to a position that nobody can have anything negative to say that isn’t borne of jealousy or hypocrisy. He’s allowed not to be happy and think things are getting much worse.
Native or not I don’t think saying ‘Netherlands is a shithole’ is any more useful. It surely does have shitty parts but also very good ones.
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Newsome will lose just as bad as Harris, because all he has is fuckwit memes
They aren’t even his really, they are Camille Zapata who is very sharp, although I guess he should get some credit for employing her and letting her go rip.
He has the same problem as a lot of the party though that, that recent move aside, he’s been very bland and centrist and lacking in ideas. California has a terrible homelessness problem, which isn’t his fault necessarily, a chunk of it is climate because if I had to sleep rough I would do it there and not freezing myself to death in other states. He’s not really proposed any solutions though, moving homeless camps on obviously does nothing to address the core problem, just kicks it down the road to another week and location. Doing it for a photo op is deeply cynical.
The exasperation so often is a failure to get to grips with an issue and fix it or make it better.
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UKians seething about the US is always funny. You lost, get over it.
This is an example of why we shouldn’t just buy the framing of internet memes. A quick Google shows the author is from Wisconsin, his Substack contains this line:
I am American, yes—but I no longer see myself as merely just “American.” Not in the narrow way nationalism demands.
To the other point. I don’t think the ‘you lost’ thing really resonates 250 years on. It probably weighs as heavily on the average UK citizen as the Netherlands not owning Indonesia, Turks pining for the Ottoman Empire or the USA wanting the Philippines back. Not at all really.
I think it is fair to point out hypocrisy at times from Brits and other Europeans criticising the USA (an example is on immigration where they always been far more draconian than the US). Trump is awful though, gun deaths are high, too many people go bankrupt from health issues and I don’t think it serves anyone well to pretend they don’t exist or they can’t comment.
It reminds me a bit of a BBC Hardtalk show I saw maybe 20 years back when I first arrived in Malaysia and the foreign minister basically defended every tough question with ‘you are foreign so don’t understand’ and when that failed with ‘the British did terrible things in 1857’. While true was hardly relevant to the questions being asked or the responsibility of the 35 year old British woman of Indian heritage asking them.
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I will eventually get to XC2 and 3.
That MonolithSoft can get the Switch to do what it does is technical magic. Combined with world design you will never see in any other game, the XC games are amazing.
I had a great time with the first game on the Wii. XCX is good too.
Having played a few Switch (or Wii originally) games now after being a PC only gamer for a few years I think they are very clever. The more cartoony but often beautiful renderings from the likes of Zelda and Xenoblade are less processor hungry but work just as well if not better. There’s less risk of ‘uncanny valley’ stuff going on.
In a weird way it reminds me a bit of a long time ago with Spectrum v C64. The latter had the jump on memory and processing power but there was something aesthetically pleasing about how the Spectrum generated more rounded graphics and I think the programmers worked a bit harder to get the best out of the system.
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I’ve been playing Xenoblade Chronicles 2. I’m a big JRPG fan but never played these as they never got a PC port but my son got a Switch last Christmas. The first Xenoblade was decent enough, good story but there’s a lot of walking around rather empty massive maps and the fighting is rather passive, it’s mainly about trying to position yourself behind baddies.
XC2 is a big improvement for me, the maps are far more interesting as is the combat which adds a lot of different combinations to try.
The biggest winner though is the script and voice acting. I have never played a game that made me laugh out loud so many times. The cast are excellent. The original Japanese plot goes some very ethically dodgy places, your main characters are ‘drivers’ that basically control the ‘blades’ assigned to them (most of which are sexy women who may fall in love with you even though it isn’t clear they are human).
The ick is saved by how they make them take the piss out of the bosses half the time and I think it’s helped by how an obviously British translation team doing it made some changes to the norm. None of the leads really have an RP accent, the only one is Zeke who is basically the posh idiot character Jack Whitehall played in Fresh Meat a few years back and always had me chuckling.
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Dolan’s Claim, “Kirk Is a Modern Saint Paul” Refuted by NCR: “He Was a Racist”
A cardinal claims Charlie Kirk is a modern Saint Paul…however he also says he never heard of him before the shooting…
I think it would be truly embarrassing really if the actual numbers of ‘never heard of Kirk before the shooting’ were discussed a bit more. I am very online and check news/politics every day and I was at best vaguely aware of him as a right wing podcaster.
There was a Reform councillor in south Wales last week who stormed out of a meeting because there was no minute’s silence or similar tribute to Kirk. I can say with a lot of confidence that 99% of the constituents in Torfaen had no fucking idea who he was before he made the news for being shot and would take a decent wager said councillor was among that group.
For all its other ills in recent years under Musk it hasn’t been really acknowledged enough how Twitter, which has always had one of the smallest social media platforms, way smaller than Facebook, Instagram, Tik-Tok etc, has been held up as the crucible of public opinion because it makes life easy for lazy journalists who can submit stories using just cut and paste.
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1970s Marvel before Shooter and the late 80s/early 90s are great examples of why the editorial and writing duties need to be separate.
The 1970s era lacked any discipline so you get nonsense like Martin spells out above of half finished issue and no direction. The later period has assistant editors taking over writing duties who otherwise wouldn’t have enough talent to get the job. Terry Kavanaugh and Michael Higgins’ awful Excalibur issues especially but there are many more.
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It makes me wonder… which company if they bought WB, would be able to do the DC movies justice?
https://collider.com/netflix-wants-to-buy-warner-bros-discovery-theatrical-experience-impact/
Maybe. I think the current WB bosses are pretty shit and Netflix could do better.
The consolidation though is really bad and it has driven down standards. The fewer companies that own anything the more they can get away with passing off shit. The best example for me is US television in the 1980s, which didn’t have public service requirements, before a large cable challenge could start making any challenge commercially.
We like the nostalgia but there’s an entire decade of a lot of money ploughed in and thousands of shows but it was all crap because that’s all they needed to do.
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Comics do love these gimmicks (video games too), we had high numbers 8 years or so back with geek boxes or whatever they were called at the time.
Saying that I think the doomsayers never quite realise how massive these numbers are compared to other genres or media. EPL football games in the most popular league sport in the world will get less than 500,000 at times. Celebrity ghost written novels sell 10k. 2000ad is now selling around 18% of The Sun newspaper daily distribution.
There are a lot of people who want to read well made comics but we kind of like the underdog status that it can’t be possible. Like the genuinely upsetting injustices of Kirby or S&S or Bill Mantlo are always in the conversation but never that Byrne is under oath in a US court he earned over $10m at Marvel or that Chris Claremont bought a private jet.
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Sky today announces Force & Majeure, a sharply funny and stylishly escapist new Sky Original series starring Emmy-nominated actor, writer, director and producer Natasha Lyonne (Poker Face, Russian Doll) and Emmy-nominated, BAFTA-winning actor and writer Matt Berry (Toast of London, What We Do in the Shadows). Created by acclaimed comedy writer Tom Scharpling(Monk, What We Do in the Shadows) alongside Berry and Lyonne, the sharply comedic series is written by Scharpling, Iain Morris (The Inbetweeners, Time Bandits) and Cirocco Dunlap (Russian Doll, The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy) and is a retro-infused, playfully irreverent take on the classic TV action-adventure detective genre from Objective Fiction and Animal Pictures.
When British art expert (cum art thief) Thomas Force (Berry) and American mercenary Jennifer Majeure(Lyonne) are recruited by an eccentric, justice-obsessed billionaire Amanda Daventry, they find themselves tasked with defeating the evil plans of international villains operating in the most fabulous locations across Europe.
But as Force & Majeure team up to defeat the forces of evil, they must also work together to escape the clutches of Amanda, who may not be telling them the whole story.
This looks a promisingly daft 80s TV show concept. NBC Universal have the international distribution.
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https://www.comicsbeat.com/batman-1-sells-500000-copies-goes-to-second-printing/
Impressive numbers from DC, they appear to have their mojo back in the last year or so.
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Still I think the same decline in reading and math is seen here in the Netherlands. A lot of kids who are going to high school don’t have sufficient reading and writing proficiency. It is not just a US thing.
I certainly don’t think it’s exclusive to the US at all. The UK has actually had a rise in those education stats while just about everything else has gone to the toilet but not every country is going to be improving every year.
I also don’t think anything I said really was about Europe deriding the US, although it’s valid that happens.
The more pertinent point is I think they are damaging those economic strengths that have been a notable step above most of Europe the last 50 years. Breaking ties and trust for really the short term enrichment of a few. I loved my visits to the US but won’t go again while the current regime is so randomly aggressive to travellers. We have countries this week opting out of US arms deals because of their erratic NATO responses. Hyundai/LG have paused that battery plant because they chained up their executives. The fossil fuel obsession is I can only see a very poor long term option economically. Last September China bought 25% of the US soy bean crop, this September that has become 0% and the farmers will go out of business in a year if they can’t replace that trade.
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Now I want to add WorkBalloon to my podcast list:
https://bleedingcool.com/comics/greg-rucka-on-dark-times-at-dc-comics-with-dan-didio-geoff-johns/
and:
I’ve listened to Word Balloon for over a decade now. It helps that John Siuntres’ main career was in radio (mostly sports reporting I think). It adds a professional sheen a lot of fan/hobby podcasts don’t have. He’s sometimes a bit out of touch with younger guests, I think ideally he’d be like David Meadows and return to the 1970s but I can forgive him that as at least he tries.
Like a lot of interview podcasts though I don’t listen to every one, just the creators I am into.
The most entertaining were his Neal Adams ones, that guy had an ego like you can’t imagine. He basically invented everything from 1965 onwards by his own account but I still couldn’t help liking him and being amused by it.
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I guess it would make more sense if anyone were selling things on under RRP, which is what I planned to do with a test purchase.
I went back in today and it seems that’s happening. The silly $390 Absolute Batman book is still there first (so clearly haven’t sold) but some guy is selling Batman Dark Patterns issues for $2.
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The idea of a TV ‘series’ in the UK is next to dead, it is ‘season’ now.
Which is good, because series meaning both a year’s run and the show entirely was pretty confusing.
To be fair originally it wasn’t. A series was a programme, a season was a series. ‘The programme will be coming to an end with its last episode today’ would be how it was used in the 1980s. It got muddled around the time box sets came in and labelling them series or season and the US and UK terms getting interchanged a lot. So now it’s probably better to use a standard.
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I tend to agree with Ben. I think Morrison’s take was fine but it has a finite length of interest.
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I’m actually fascinated by the way that for all its ills the internet has for the younger generation basically fucked up almost all the norms of regional bias. I see Americans say ‘shite’ in comments. The idea of a TV ‘series’ in the UK is next to dead, it is ‘season’ now. Korean music and Japanese animation are what they care more for than most western fare even though they speak English all day at home. My wife now watches Swedish crime dramas and Dutch romcoms, the language less important than the blurb sounding interesting.
Adolescence just won a truck of (deserved) Emmys but UK TV has been doing that kind of brilliantly acted social commentary for decades, it’s just now it got on Netflix with an easy button to watch if you live in Wisconsin. In 1988 I saw the first showing of Akira in a non Asian cinema with an audience of 200 people at a festival. This weekend an anime film debuted at $70m in the US.
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Meanwhile Nepal has had what looks like a legit revolution, including burning down parliament and stripping politicians naked and dragging them through the streets. Not a lot of new about that in Western media, maybe they don’t want to give people ideas. There’s a new PM now but it remains to be seen what will actually change.
Honestly stuff like the rally in London is just tame and harmless, some silly people waving a flag and raising their fist and saying “we’re not gonna take it”. The people in Nepal were actually mad as fuck, desperate and ready to kill anyone that stood against them. In the West people are mostly tamed.
(I think there are probably some radical nazis among the crowd in London who would be ready to kill but I don’t think that is true for most of them, they’re probably more like boomer conservatives who think Starmer is a commie or something silly like that.)
Of course it’s mostly good that people are a bit more relaxed and not ready to freak out and start some violence but there must also be some willingness to fight tyranny when it occurs. Sometimes violence is justified, as a last resort, under extreme circumstances.
It’s an interesting thing with Nepal.
A guy on Bluesky I follow, roughly the same age as me and political leanings, took the piss out of someone commenting to one of his posts that kids weren’t reading about Charlie Kirk’s murder but the Nepalese revolution.
I asked my two teens on their Tik-Tok feeds and they actually backed up the Nepal side of the argument. They didn’t know who Kirk was but saw several Nepal videos.
The disparate way we get information now is fascinating. My Tidal app fed me a playlist based on what I typically listened to that I played in the car as I drove her to college, she’s 16, born in 2008 and immediately identified a song by the Cocteau Twins. At 16 I didn’t know who the Cocteau Twins were and they were contemporary but not on the BBC Radio 1 playlist. It would be the equivalent of me listening to tunes from 1956 of which I knew nothing.
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The interesting thing is that the US has not been great in any of those stats for a long time, that show is pretty old now and nothing much changed positively.
Where they have exceeded most other countries is economically and ironically there’s a lot at risk there now. The tourism industry will take a massive hit, nobody I know will go to the US now unless they have to for work or already booked and paid for tickets. The massive debt coming from the ‘big beautiful bill’ risks the safest investment post WW2, US bonds. They are going all in for fossil fuels which is potentially a disaster, it’s an extremely long term payoff, new oil and gas locations can take a decade to come online, by 2035 most European countries will have made new petrol cars illegal. The best guess is that will be drilling for hugely devalued gas and oil by the time it reaches the market.
I read a book from John Pilger a long time ago and while he somewhat lost it in his later years, he was very clever in criticising the right using their own quotes. He had the CATO institute saying lax immigration gave the US a $50bn advantage per year over European countries because of low pay. That may also be wiped out.
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Was reading from a comics retailer online that one issue of Red Hood is suddenly selling like hotcakes. Nothing like the speculator market to make hay in a crisis.
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I am back!
Not sure what the error was, I raised it with the hosting company and it immediately fixed. Makes me suspicious the server crashed and they just rebooted it when I raised a ticket.
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Dan actually got me by posting on the Patreon wall which got sent to my email. For some reason Patreon has never been set up to notify if anyone either increases or removes their sub, you have to log on seek it out.
It’s quite bizarre really, a (rightly deserved) consumer boycott should be most effective but on that platform just any reply of ‘bananas’ on the wall to a 5 year old post has more effect. Silly really.
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Actually I may have underestimated my abilities as I think I’ve fixed it.
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Guys,
Apologies. I took some time away because I was having some mental health issues. When I get down I have a tendency to get argumentative, I wanted to spare you that for a little while wit every intention to return and had no idea the site had major issues until I saw it come through on Patreon today.
Now I know I’ll get on trying to fix it. It looks beyond my abilities at first but will see if I can get help from my old dev guy.
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I.E. they’re trying to do what McFarlane, Lee, Larsen et al did back in the day. Create characters that sell books rather than creators or concepts.
Did they do that? I’ll give some credit to McFarlane for his dedication to Spawn but most of the Image launch books were just analogues of existing Marvel and DC books. I have an archer superhero, he’s called Shaft and not Hawkeye, even though he’s really Hawkeye.
I have admiration to some degree for that era and the energy they brought but 30 years on next to nothing they originated is being published.
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A prominent Chinese vlogger has suggested Hamas are too mild and Israel has to be treated similarly to Germany and Japan in WW2, and they have to destroy and slaughter whole cities basically, like was done to Hiroshima and Dresden.
Yeah but Arjan, why should we care about a Chinese vlogger and his or her opinion?
We have a society now where basically anyone can broadcast, make their own TV or radio show. It doesn’t mean they are well informed or have much useful to add. Has the vlogger ever been to Israel or Palestine? More likely they just sit in China and make provocative statements for clicks.
Elon Musk is a big fan of Ian Miles Cheong who posts day and night on US policy, he lives in Ipoh in Malaysia and has said in a past post he’s never even been to the USA. In truth he has no real interest in shit like gun policy in the USA, it doesn’t affect him or me for that matter, he’s getting ad revenue for being provocative and cultivating a particular audience.
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What is frustrating for all is there is a relatively easy solution to this really. Like I said the West Bank is not desirable territory, it’s mostly a desert and has no resources of any note. Nobody here would choose to live there. The water from the Dead Sea and Sea of Galilee is being sucked dry, the reserves lowering every year.
A two state solution would leave Israel with the nice bits and Palestinians accepting rule over what is left. The Gazans are more extreme because they live in more extreme circumstances. One begets the other and there is no security method that can ever make people safe over thawing of relations. In Northern Ireland they had fences, they had watchtowers, they had roadblocks and tanks on the street – they had more violence than when they removed them after talks.
You can’t provide security via strict controls, there is no precedent for it. The more desperate they make the lives of people in the Gaza strip the less they’ll care about repercussions. It’s a vicious cycle. One violent act produces the next.
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I hope they also issue trades later on.
They will, as long as they don’t flop massively. Having read Gillen’s analysis of Image sales the creators make the bulk of their money on trade sales after the costs have been settled on the issues.
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I’m not sure ramping up production is that good an idea. A steady stream of product yes but companies can easily go off the rails doing too much too fast.
Yeah I have always been wary of ‘linewide’ launches. I don’t think consumers want them, even original Image with the biggest hype comics have ever seen dripped their launch titles month by month. When single issues are $4-5 a pop nobody really wants to commit to $20-40 extra a month on an unknown ‘universe’. If you think of things like original Marvel from the launch of FF or even Vertigo, they grew very organically off one title and then branched out.
Saying that I think this looks less taxing than most but I would go back and advise them to launch one at a time and get the hype if the product is good.
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You don’t even have to do that, as far as Hamas are concerned. They can go to hell.
They are essentially a death cult. What they did would be the equivalent of a handful of us idiots breaking into an army barracks and hitting the sleeping soldiers with soap in socks. There is no other outcome than you will get fucked up. It’s not just suicide run for their fighters but thousands of their citizens.
This is just a downward cycle of shit with all responsible as they gave up on peace talks in the 90s.
Having been to Israel/Palestine (and I use the combined nomenclature there as when you travel around it is is hard to know which ‘state’ you are in) it’s a very strange place of contrasts.
It is underestimated how much the ‘settlers’ are religious fanatics. There is no logic to their actions, the country is split between the verdant Mediterranean side and the harsh and dry western bank. I went to Haifa, a lovely coastal city with a roundabout just outside that had a Jewish menorah, Christian Christmas tree and an Islamic crescent on it. Everyone just got on with their lives in a mixed society. They could do that across the whole area but they don’t want to. No normal person would move from there to a fucking desert area with threat of harm every day unless they are making some stupid point.
It’s so frustrating to watch again and again taking the path of hate and violence over what could relatively easily be space for everyone.
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Talking of Nikolai Dante, with so much more material available digitally, I had thought it might become more well known, but it seems to stay an under-the-radar epic.
It probably always will. I’ve pushed it as an all time great and it will be largely ignored as there are no big names or publisher.
As a long term character narrative in comics with a beginning, middle and end it is probably only matched by Preacher.
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Honestly John M Burns is amazing. He’s been churning out quality and quantity in his 2000ad work for years now and I knew he was way past 80 years old and yet putting out more content than artists a quarter of his age.
He deserves his rest and retirement. I don’t know anyone else his age that plugged away so hard and didn’t dip in quality.
I have many complaints about how The Order plot is incomprehensible but his artwork is sublime, as was the Nikolai Dante run.
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That was superb.
Love the trailer but I also just love RTD as a writer.
Having read his philosophy in ‘The Writers Tale’ which revolves around character moments, then work the plot around them. It is to a huge degree the antithesis to most sci-fi fans thinking, which is primarily imagined science and plot logic. The Star Trek fans that buy a manual of how the Enterprise works but most modern Star Trek is really tedious as a result.
I know that has weaknesses, there can be bits where it goes over the top, but all my favourite writers have ‘tics’ that annoy others. I have always loved Claremont or Heinlein or Sorkin that do that. Russell post his Dr Who stint has the best monologues in TV in ‘Years and Years’ and ‘It’s A Sin’. It may often be flawed but nothing he does is boring. I can’t wait and it really looks like like the Disney+ deal has increased the budget.
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The biggest argument against the EU has always been the CAP. It’s a policy that costs a huge amount of money to appease constituents and enable them to not be very effective at what they do.
We tend to be drawn into very binary arguments nowadays, that either the EU is perfect or disastrous. It has never been either, you can also rip it apart for the approach to Greece’s problems, where the priority was propping up the Euro in the richer countries over helping the Greeks. I can also praise that it is pretty much the only global institution to challenge tech monopolies.
I am still strongly remain/rejoin on the EU argument but the CAP is still outdated and bad.
They should also introduce a meat tax.
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As with all these lists, it’s hugely subjective. Even in terms of influence Survivor was a huge reality hit in the US ignored in Europe as Big Brother was the thing. Besides that how do you easily compare a sitcom with a reality show with a serious drama?
What they do well is remind you there are lots of good things out there, after finishing my Peaky Blinders binge yesterday I’m going to tackle Better Call Saul next.
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To be fair the Tory conference has been marginally more successful than the last one with Truss.
They really need to go now, flat out of ideas. It’s basically just lying about shit now. They promised in their 2019 manifesto to electrify the South Wales train line, cancelled it. Yesterday Sunak said they would electrify the (less busy) North Wales line, it’s never going to happen. Meat taxes never happened.
I saw a thread on Twitter that detailed how they have announced making the A1 dual carriageway near the Scottish border every single year since elected, promised again yesterday. Nationally people won’t know that and it may sound good on his list of works but locally they will know it’s a long undelivered project.
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The truth is that despite 13 years in power, the only area where the Tories have had any real electoral success for their entire tenure is with stoking this kind of division.
They’ve been surprisingly honest about it. Lee Anderson saying on camera they have nothing to run on but culture wars and pushing anti-trans rhetoric.
I think like many parties after a while they run into a cul de sac, appealing to the further right when most don’t care. 50% of Brits surveyed have never even met a trans person, far more will be affected by discount chain Wilco gojng bust, it’s the key anchor for my local shopping centre in the UK.
Sunak is just offering daft policies that will never happen, like everyone learning maths to 18, they don’t have enough maths teachers as it is. He’s now extended it to be being even more nonsensical by ruling out laws that were never happening anyway like a ‘meat tax’. It’s not without impact but I can only see it influencing those who already vote for his party.
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Since yesterday my twitter is filled with tweets about Musk, Tesla, SpaceX etc. Like all these tweets are basically just ads for Musk.
I get multiple very suspect ads with Musk in them promising me $1ook if I am not a millionaire off their crypto scheme in 3 weeks. Twitter is a complete shithole right now, he can’t even control ads that misrepresent him (and I have reported them and they keep coming). I spent a decade never seeing Musk’s genuine posts because I wasn’t interested, now that nonsense appears every day.
A large chunk of comics Twitter has left for Bluesky, it is still ‘invite only’ but they are trading invites quite briskly.
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How does Manga sell at an LCS?
Manga is actually an interesting example as the sales go through several models. They start at anthology, then collections which are generally cheap. My son bought 3 maxi volumes of One Piece in Forbidden Planet London for $20, a thousand pages for the cost of 100 pages of new US comics.
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Rishi is fucked basically.
This looks like a final spin of the dice betting on anti-green policies because maybe they had a huge vote loss but hanging onto Uxbridge by the fingernails is all he has. It doesn’t really impact people, demanding cars all go electric by 2030 never said you couldn’t buy ICE cars afterwards and most people in the UK don’t buy new cars but second-hand.
It doesn’t seem to be moving the dial, it’s just appealing to voters he already has. It smells like Major’s ‘cones hotline’ nonsense on the verge of him being hammered at the polls.
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This is the beta of the new site from the ex Comixology people. Looks very similar but I notice they have a ‘resellable’ tag on the books so looks like you can trade after you’ve read.
