Tywin et al.

Are the Ninja Turtles superheroes?

I thought there were some misses between Iron Man and Avengers, but after that pretty much everything has been a giant hit except for Iron Man 3.

I think gender does play some role here, and I’m not sure how their teammates and peers would react to sitting out a championship game.

I would be curious to see how people would react if before game 6 of the NBA Finals Giannis or Paul, the two major stars for each team, said they weren't playing due to mental health concerns. I'm not certain they would receive the same treatment as Biles is getting (and she is right to get it for a multitude of reasons).

Iron Man and TDK came out in the same summer, so I'm not sure that's correct. Yes it jump started the MCU, but didn't it take a handful of movies to really get its footing? Meanwhile TDK is considered one of the best, if not the best, comic book films ever made. Imo it's in a class of its own. Now that's a hot take. I recently watched Winter Soldier, and while it was entertaining, I don't get why people hold it up as highly as they do, but maybe my lack of interest in Capt plays a role in that. Ragnarok is insanely fun, but I don't think it ever achieved the cultural significance of TDK.

Blame Ali G.

Getting fairly close to giving up on cute woman from work. It's been about six weeks since she told me she's had a crush on me for a while and gave me her number, and since then every time I try to ask her out she's busy with one thing or another, but she always says she can't wait to go out on a date and/or hook up. Meanwhile, she hasn't asked me once if I was free on a given day. Considering how one sided it's been since then I doubt this is going to go anywhere and I'm not interested in being someone's flirty text buddy. Oh well.

Eh, if we're saying the world is fucked, right now the US is hardly the only country to blame. China won't do anything on the climate unless the rest of the world ignores every other bad thing they're doing and Brazil is actively destroying the much needed Amazon rainforest. The sad truth is so many with power across the world simply don't care.

It's not, as far as I can tell. It's very popular among film students, but its general appeal isn't that strong even if its influence is all over the place.

No, it's a losing fight because we know how this will play out before the fight even begins. If you pursue legislation that everyone knows is DoA before it's even written, all you're doing is wasting time while giving people a false sense of hope, and when the inevitable failure comes what will you have accomplished? I wouldn't say that at all. They're just playing within the rules of the game. Most Democrats want the things you're bringing up, but just because they want them doesn't mean there's a path right now to accomplishing them, and there's a good chance the negative backlash from failing would give Republicans more power which obviously even lessens the chances of accomplishing those things.

Have to disagree here. She’s been off and it’s possible she doesn’t want to risk screwing up and hurting the team. The individuals only affect her.

Why pick a losing fight though? It's not going to pass and become law before the midterms, so what good would it do? Democrats would be dealt a serious loss, the base would be disappointed and Republicans could spin it in a number of favorable ways for themselves. Given how difficult 2022 is already going to be, why make it even harder on themselves? Right now we just have to accept that Democrats are going to get three big reconciliation bills from this Congress and hopefully fill as many vacant judicial spots as possible. I doubt there will be any other serious victories worth talking about at length. On top of this, there are a lot of programs that Americans want, but they can't bothered to pay for them. It's really no different then when as a kid, everyone on my block wanted to pave the alley over, but when asked to put up their share of the costs almost everyone said no. And so it always remained an eyesore until I moved away. Incrementalism is the default in American politics. Rare are the chances to make sweeping changes, and if you try for it, you best not miss.

I don't think it's really bad. It's not good either, it's just kind of there. The big mistake they made was changing Sarah Harding completely. In the book she's a badass, but in the movie she's totally incompetent for most of the film. For those who haven't read the two books, JP was largely a faithful adaptation. Obviously there are changes, notably with the kids and more people die in the book, but they were pretty true to the source material. The Lost World, otoh, basically just shares the same name. There are some characters with the same names, but they totally changed who they were for the movie. It's also worth noting that parts of the book have been used for various plot points in The Lost World, JP3 and JW. A better adaptation could have produced a much better movie. And JP3 is hot garbage, though the JW movies aren't much better.

I think Dark Knight deserves to be in, but it can go in the latter half. And like with considering special effects and impact on film making, I think the Dark Knight, even more than the first Spiderman, proved that you could make comic book movies on a grand scale and now they dominate the industry. I'd be curious to see just how much overlap there would be when picking older films and how they're ranked compared to more modern choices.

As of right now I don't see a path forward in the Senate, and if it could be achieved through reconciliation, it would have to wait until next year because the one remaining shot at that for this year is going to be used for the bigger infrastructure package. I don't think people fully appreciate the time and energy that goes into researching, crafting and politicking behind the scenes for legislation that's relatively minor, let alone something massive like this, and how demoralizing it can be doing that work when you know the bill is all but DOA before it's even reviewed in a subcommittee.