The Bicycle Thief

Order is the lie.

Chaos is the reality.

The other biggest strength of Absolute Batman is that it knows when to be smart and when to be stupid, like any great work of genre/niche fiction.

A real question I have is if the author, Scott Snyder, saw the rising tide of Warhammer 40K and leaned in, or if this is just convergent evolution?

Having Bullock give voice to the "Actually, Batman made the villains into supervillains" makes me respect Absolute Batman more than I already do.

It also indulges in comically hard-boiled '90s excess trying desperately to masquerade as grounded paramilitary fiction.

The biggest strength of Absolute Batman is that it knows which iconic elements it wants to focus on, which it wants to remove, and which it wants to recontextualize to create a very fresh yet very familiar feeling Batman story.

#DCComics #Batman

lol The soap audience is the real entertainment, sometimes. We are talking about Martin. He infantalizes everyone as a form of control. he's not gonna emerge from the kitchen with a bowl full of condoms.

Is the problem that it's too realistic for the over-the-top insanity-craving soap audience?

We're complaining about parents infantalizing their kids, now?

Not to be pedantic, but Padme moving for a vote of no confidence in Chancellor Valorum's leadership was engineered by Palpatine to further his ambitions.

That is the real doom of it all. Just because a cultist is disillusioned with Trump doesn't make them suddenly a reasonable person.

This is the result of thinking a lot about something but being completely brainwashed. When you twist yourself into a pretzel that is also a mobius strip.

This person is in for some bad news about MAGA's plans for good paying American jobs.

Sheev Palpatine if my favorite protagonist and antagonist in all of fiction (using a boolean and).

Sheev Palpatine's only flaw is his dismissal of the power of the will of the individual.

The story of Star Wars is the story of Sheev Palpatine being the victim of his own success.

TIL that the reason Palpatine was trapped on Exegol in a rotting, fingerless clone body is because he was "too powerful".

The Star Wars Expended Universe (or whatever they call it now) never ceases to be a source of absolute cinema.

Palpatine returned because he somehow became the main character of Star Wars.

They will go that route if they are cowards. I think James Bond was killed with a clear intention in mind, but I think those people aren't making the decisions, anymore.

I do stand corrected, "he survived" is the easiest answer. If Victor Cassadine can be shot and burned to death yet return to screen with a different actor who is 20 years younger than the character's lore-accurate age, James Bond can do it, too.

Horowitz nails it here. James Bond, as he was, is dead. They franchise owners/stewards have to face the consequences of that choice.

The easy answer is to just reboot the whole franchise, but writers would be equally paralyzed in creating the modern Bond.

The combination of the old money conservative and young, tech-savvy Neocons has created a Regressive Right that is mining the future to cast us back into the past. It is as staggering as it is frustrating.

I share this belief because I've seen it work in practice.

I would also fully believe that the destruction of language education was some 4D chess anti-intellectual long game.

But this underestimates how much a part of audience invests into the singular identity of the title character. This is a larger than life hero who accumulates achievements and accolades to a superhuman degree. Making it a legacy shatters the illusion, brings the character back down to earth.

The Former Staffer Calling Out OpenAI’s Erotica Claims Steven Adler used to lead product safety at OpenAI. On this week’s episode of The Big Interview, he talks about what AI users should know about their bots.

Steven Adler used to lead product safety at OpenAI. On this week’s episode of The Big Interview, he talks about what AI users should know about their bots. www.wired.com/story/the-bi...

I'm pretty sure I have not one but two non-VCR RF demodulators...

But where?

The emperor may be naked,

But he is still emperor.

The great irony of AI will be that it drives down the value/cost of human labor that profit-driven corporate structures will preferentially select impoverished humans over AI. And maybe that was the goal all along.

Of course they'll fail. Elon is the pied piper of dumbass billionaires. People being "cheaper" than real supertech is a premise I really see the value in these days.

He probably meant that it will "eliminate the impoverished".