Superhero movies in general tend to struggle when they have a main character fight anyone who isn’t another main character. I suppose the intent is to make the hero or villain appear powerful by having her defeat a bunch of badass normal people but what usually ends up happening is that the normal people just look like losers instead. Thor himself had the same problem when fighting Surtur’s and Hela’s minions - they looked scary but they were so weak compared to him that the fights were comedic instead of dramatic. However, at least Thor’s lightning made his fights look cool. Hela’s spikes were the opposite of a fun fight scene.

If I were editing the script, I’d have Hela lay siege to Asgard with her undead army. She actually fights the Asgardians and forces them to retreat inside their fortress instead of just humiliating them and they’re barely holding out while Thor is on his journey of self-discovery. This would also fix the problem with her own undead minions being useless. They’d actually have something to do (fight the Asgardians) rather than jogging around chasing civilians while Yakety Sax plays.

(Oh and what was up with a guy who can beat the Hulk getting taken out instantly by a taser thingie? If those things are so powerful, shouldn’t everyone just be throwing them at each other instead of using weapons?)

I’m going to go against the trend here and say that libertarian corporate city-states actually sound pretty cool. They’re generally not portrayed positively in fiction but I think they might work well in practice. I’m a lot less optimistic about cooperating with all my fellow Americans in order to govern the whole country democratically than I used to be. Choosing to move to an independent city-state with a government that I agree with (albeit one I don’t elect) might work better.

Too bad they made her character so boring. “I’m evil! Also your dad was evil! I shoot spikes out of nowhere rather than having cool fight scenes! My evil plan is to have very slow-moving zombies chase civilians around ineffectually!”

Sorry, but Rowling’s point (whether or not one agrees with it) is going over the responder’s head here. She believes that transgender women are only superficially women, so her analogy deliberately uses superficial characteristics associated with black people.

I’m not sure what the point of lying about a requirement that you have which the employer intends not to satisfy would be.

The rules of my building are an interesting toy model of this. Technically I’m supposed to have carpets everywhere (I don’t and no one else whose unit I’ve been in does) and even painting a room a different color requires board approval and a bunch of fees. In practice, many rules are not enforced against people who don’t make trouble. A neighbor of mine even has a dog - not exactly a subtle violation. I suspect that all those rules are a response to the fact that it is legally really hard to evict someone. You can’t just say “He’s an asshole and all his neighbors hate him.” But if fact if he’s breaking a whole lot of rules (just like everyone else) then you can decide to make an issue of it in his case.

We’re seeing this happen on a national scale with people like Lisa Cook now. She refuses to leave her job so Trump is threatening to have her criminally charged with mortgage fraud. Pretty much no one is ever criminally charged with mortgage fraud, but if the feds look closely at anyone’s life then they will certainly find an error on a mortgage application or one of other countless possible crimes.

I definitely am interested in it, although I’m worried about buying a car from a new company’s first production run. I haven’t driven an electric car before but maybe it’ll be fun.

I don’t mind hair everywhere (although I wouldn’t get a dog with long fur because they overheat so easily) but I don’t understand how people who don’t live on a ranch take care of herding breeds. Australian cattle dogs are really popular in New York City but I would never dare to get one in an apartment. It was hard enough to have a dog with a strong prey drive - he could not be off-leash anywhere without a tall fence and double-layer gates, and he would forget that he was on a leash and take off at full speed whenever he saw a squirrel. I admit I envied the people with guarding breeds a little - my sister’s pit bull mix looked like a crossbreed between a crocodile and a pig but that dog just followed my sister everywhere, even indoors, leash or no leash.

I actually owned a 1998 S10 before I got that BMW. It was the most basic trim, with a manual transmission, a regular cab, and hand-cranked windows. That truck was a lot of fun because of how poor the traction was. I could skid around corners at 25 mph and one time I did a burnout accidentally when trying to start moving up a steep hill after stopping for a crossing guard letting a bunch of little kids across the street. I would love to have an S10 again but mine had the brakes fail in 2011 (to be fair, I had bought it used with 200k miles on it) and I wasn’t comfortable driving it after that. I can’t imagine how many problems it would have after 14 more years.

It’s too bad that there are exactly zero options for a truck like that these days. A truck would actually be very practical for me (I live alone so I don’t need passenger space but I do move big stuff sometimes) but there are no fun models that aren’t already old enough to drink.

Relatively old cars. I’m not talking about antiques. I just don’t want a screen or an automatic transmission in my car. Right now I need to buy a car and frankly the only ones I want are a manual-transmission BMW or a late-90’s pickup. Either one would be a rather impractical choice.

I used to own a 2008 BMW 328i with a manual transmission and sport suspension. It broke down, fixing it would have cost more than it was worth, but I think I should have just paid for the repairs because at least then I would have the same car I had been driving for 14 years rather than a car with the same problems of old age but no nostalgia value. (2018 was the last year than BMW made a manual 3-series, and also coincidentally the year that backup cameras and therefore computer screens became legally required in US cars.)

Edit: I accidentally wrote that I didn’t want a manual transmission. Totally wrong!

Take the commuter ferry on the East River from Brooklyn to the Bronx. It’s far cheaper than the tourist ferries and the views are wonderful.

One time I brought a watermelon to a picnic so that I could show off my fancy butterfly knife and I ended up cutting myself so badly that I had to wrap my hand in duct tape to stop the bleeding while someone else distracted the children. Worth it.

do -something- that interests you that’ll get you out and interacting with like-minded people

But then you meet either normies or other male nerds, depending on whether you pretend to like normal stuff or actually do the stuff you really like.

I wish old OkCupid was still a thing. There were still way more men than women there but at least it was possible to find the interesting women.

you only need a copy of Death Stranding and a phone

Do you actually need the phone or can you use a screenshot?

Also, if they’re accessing Baldur’s Gate 3 fan fiction, shouldn’t they have used the photo mode from Baldur’s Gate 3? Surely no one is more entitled to read Minthara erotica than Minthara herself.

The Hobbit trilogy. It’s hard to understand how Peter Jackson could mess up movie after movie after movie like that.

Heck, are there dating sites that work at all anymore? Over a decade ago I had some success with OkCupid but my impression is that ever since swipe apps became a thing, online dating went from bad to terrible for everyone except gay men looking for hookups. Now I might have to go low-tech and ask my grandma to introduce me to her friends’ single granddaughters…

I think the big challenge now is to create a method of online dating that isn’t a miserable experience for most of its users, but if I had a creative solution for that, I’d be rich.

Other than that, AI friends. That’s the future.

The policy goals of the 0.01% are basically in lock step, why would they bid against each other?

But in fact both The Democrats and the Republicans raise money.

Yes, and so what? $5.5 billion was spent on the 2024 presidential election. That’s very little. There are individuals capable of spending more than that. So if spending more could actually affect the outcome in a significant way, why wasn’t much more spent? Surely the difference between Harris and Trump is worth more than just a few billion dollars to some person or group with that much money. My conclusion is that while some amount of money is necessary to run a campaign, even the relatively small amount being spent now is so far past the point of diminishing returns that spending more isn’t worth it even to billionaires who could easily do so and care a lot about the outcome.

I think people’s behavior is determined much more by social conventions and the expectations of their community (in addition to pragmatic self-interest) than it is by logical reasoning. I’ll risk being the preachy vegetarian by discussing people’s attitudes towards eating meat. Most people sincerely believe that cruelty to animals is wrong, and also that factory farming (if not all killing) is cruel. Yet they eat meat. I even know some people who started eating meat again after being ethical vegetarians. Did they change their minds about whether or not harming animals is bad? No. If pressed, they feel guilty but they don’t like to talk about it. The reason they’re eating meat is because it’s convenient and almost everyone expects them to, not because they reasoned from first principles. Likewise with religion - if no one else is giving everything away to the poor and everyone will think you’re crazy if you do rather than praising you, you’re not going to give everything away to the poor even if it would make sense to do so given what you believe.

Edit: Kidney donation is another example. I met a woman once who donated a kidney to a friend of her mother’s. This person wasn’t someone particularly dear to her, but she found out that he needed a kidney to live and she gave him hers. I think that what she did is commendable, but I still have both my kidneys. This is despite the fact that I sincerely believe that if, for example, I saw a drowning child then I would risk my life to save him. People would think I was a hero if I saved the child, or that I was a coward if I didn’t try. Meanwhile almost everyone I know would think I went crazy if I donated a kidney to a stranger. My relatives would be extremely worried, and they would try to talk me out of it. I’m not going to do something difficult, painful, and (to an extent) dangerous when everyone I know would disapprove, even if in principle I think risking my life to save another’s is a good thing to do.