Just FYI the US Customary units for A4 are wrong on that image. For my fellow Americans, it’s 8.3" x 11.7".

Yeah, of all the Tudor neologisms that didn’t really stick, ‘counterblaste’ is one of the more regrettable ones.

To be fair, James VI/I was a deeply, deeply weird dude, but he was ahead of the curve on second-hand smoke.

Definitely before they knew, but not before some suspected.

since when is “there is a dog” something that you put triumphant music over

Since today, LOL.

The general vibe here is that this Suprman is good and kind, and the trailer is directly tying that notion to triumph. We’ll see if the movie bears that out (and if it’s just generally any good). Watching the trailer, I assume there’s going to be a part either at the beginning or in the middle where a set-piece in the more muted Snyder-y action-y suit is going to go very wrong and provoke a period of reflection, but I assume he’ll accept his inherent cheesy goodness by the last act.

That is better, even just as a calculated marketing notion. The trailer didn’t actually have the slogan, just very traditionally wholesome Superman imagery, stuff like Supes being saved by a happy superdog, taking a big hit to save a child, hanging out on the Smallville porch with Pa Kent, that sort of thing. There are also at least two costumes in the trailer, and one of them is very old-timey with square-cut trunks.

Seems like Gunn has been tasked with channeling the Christopher Reeve movies and rebooting the Justice League (hopefully not entirely in in a single movie again), and doing all of it with more heart than the Snyderverse take on DC. Tall order, but he has shown he knows how to deliver the Superhero goods that the studios want while playing around on the edges enough to keep the formula fresh, so I might actually watch this one.

They say that escapism media tends to be a response to the particular anxieties of an era. Probably pretty telling that this looks like it’s going to be a multi-lateral, consensus-building, hope-inspiring take on Superman.

Truth, Justice, and [what we were sold as children should be] the American Way.

Also, KRYPTO! Dyno-Mutt and Blue Falcon movie when???

I haven’t watched any Superman stuff other than the 80s movies. Did the other reboots use the John Williams theme?

Quite the reminder that traditional RT score presents “consensus that a movie was at least okay.”

Not that it isn’t impressive Marvel had such a long run of universally decent popcorn fare, but I always thought it was funny that there are two approaches to make a movie that will get a very high score.

I think the Pitch Meeting may be enough for me. Left to their own devices, Sony’s Spider-IP movies seem to be mostly pretty dreadful.

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised anymore but the film is over fifty years old. A new modern version could capture a whole new audience.

Yeah, this particular type of remake has been done for almost a hundred years. Nothing to get too worked up about, though even as a kid I wasn’t interested in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Even for the rest of it, I’m at a point where I will just take these things on their own merits. Sometimes the creative hijackers who do their own story under cover of an existing property make something watchable (e.g. Foundation), and for most of the rest they were working with a property unlikely to inspire anything brilliant in the first place (e.g. Halo, which as a non-player still isn’t that bad… just “meh” with too big a budget).

People want to tell stories. I’ll watch as many of the good stories as I can make time for.

I understand that the trail divides here and one can either float the river or take the Barlow Toll Road.

I’m still reading tea leaves of course, but while he may well have been completely right about literally everything, I sense that what changed was his tolerance for BS, combined how much the administration valued him.

Regardless, it’s still an absolute shame. Of course the personal tragedy for his family, and then professionally, either this poor guy was railroaded and mistreated, or else he missed a chance for a productive final act in his career.

What a sad situation. I googled around and went through some reddit threads and found my way to the final email. It was lengthy and one sided, and got off in the weeds towards the end, but the “ethics” complaints he felt it worthwhile to share were mostly centered around “lying, incompetence, hypocrisy, information hiding, etc.”

They boil down to, “They are taking my meeting space to give to a new professor and they waited until the last minute to tell me and fed me some BS about it,” and “the MechE department won’t be recommending my course for a certain requirement any more, and they didn’t tell me until long after they’d decided.” There were other grievances about the university not making lasting change after George Floyd, not taking his concerns about imminent environmental collapse (or the university’s role in preventing it) seriously, and a last-minute cancellation of a monorail proof of concept he wanted to do between two parking garages.

Honestly, it sounds like he was struggling and felt the weight of the world on his shoulders, and was no longer psychologically equipped to handle intense, but likely common, levels of office politics, academic fiefdoms, and baroque bureaucracy. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear his workplace saw the signs, and simply treated him as difficult but ensconced, an inconvenience to be avoided.

One minor cultural artifact of this general idea:

Pease porridge hot, Pease porridge cold, Pease porridge in the pot, nine days old.

I don’t know why, but Glen Powell always makes me think of a wish.com Ed Norton who’s being treated like a wish.com Brad Pitt.

So I guess yeah, he’s a wish.com Tyler Durden.

There was existing precedent for a tiny version of Windows that is barely enough to run a single program. The original Windows version of Microsoft Excel came with a runtime version of Windows 2.1, so that customers who didn’t have Windows could still use Excel.

Fun fact, the “DOS” version of AOL did the same thing but with GEOS. Pretty impressive that it all fit on one 1.44MB floppy.

Incoming Chinese carmaker Xpeng

Australian firm Pegasus Aerospace Corp received airworthiness certification from CASA for its driveable Pegasus E flying police car last year

you would need a pilot’s licence – not simply a car licence – to be able to eventually fly the X2 in Australia.

likely to be bungled in red tape for some time before it could take to the skies

We can take orders… you can secure one with a fully refundable $100 deposit.

So I guess a more accurate headline would be this:

“Australia’s” “first” “flying car” “now” “on sale.”

This is one more way for him to say, “Fuck off. We’re not doing a sequel or reboot.” Maybe with a little dash of, “but if you still wanted to throw some money at me…”

As long as you know what it is, consensus as to okay-ness or better, then it’s still a decent metric. Still, “universally okay” is not always what I’m after, nor is it quite the achievement the studios will proclaim.

If you’re inclined to take reviews seriously (and it’s a whole other discussion, but I very much believe criticism and analysis are worthwhile when done well in their own right) , still better to find a few sources whose takes tend to line up with your own.