Person A: I like the Star Wars prequels!

Me: That’s your right.

PA: They’re my favorite Star Wars!

Me: You’re allowed to like whatever you want.

PA: They’re better than the original trilogy!

Me: [Through gritted teeth] There’s no such thing as objectively good or bad media so…

PA: Anakin is a tragic hero!

Me: Okay so…

Dotally tormal nude.

I got his autograph at a convention once. Most celebrities fall somewhere close to the middle of the “smile, nod, sign autograph, receive money” curve. Tony Todd started asking me questions about what I was doing at the con, what sort of stuff I was looking forward to. He was sweet and kind and giving to a gigantic dork to whom he owed nothing, and he gave me a memory that I’ll cherish forever. He deserves every ounce of praise he’ll receive, and more.

Without becoming the worst version of what they hope to defeat, they at least have to acknowledge that the game has changed. Democrats are still trying to make three-point baskets while not doing much more than tut tutting about the fact that Republicans have set up a step ladder and are dumping bags of tennis balls through the hoop on the other side of court.

If there’s one thing I’d hope that Democrats would learn from Trump’s successes, it’s that playing the part of the staid, respectable, traditional politician is not a winning strategy. I don’t think it’s reasonable to suppose that adopting better policies will, in and of itself win elections; Trump has either terrible policies or none whatsoever, and voters still eat him up. He’s a carnival clown, and that’s what the majority wants.

Get out there and start screaming. Throw tantrums. Take credit for things (preferably good things that you did, but again, Trump proves that all you really need to do is take credit, period, and let reality try and catch up with you). Democracy is a shared hallucination, and Trump has proven that if you employ sufficient pressure, you can change the nature of the dream, policies and reality be damned. If Democrats don’t accept that public perception is reality and adjust their strategies accordingly, they and we are going to continue to get fucked for the foreseeable future.

The American electorate:

“There’s a horse. In the hospital.”

No I don’t! I tell the truth!

Bluetooth speaker? No! Homemade PVC pipe passive amp? Yes!

I’m just having a hard time imagining a scenario in which it would be offensive…

Plenty where it would be a little confusing. Sandra Dude O’Connor, or Susan Bro Anthony would take some explaining, at the least.

I loved swordfish steak the one time I had it, so I’d bet that Scylla, Charybdis, or the Kraken would be quite good.

Oh, also The Kraken is quite tasty.

Sword fight? Fanning at each other, crossing and smacking swords. Maybe even walking around each other. I don’t think that’s how a real sword fight would look.

Akira fucking Kurosawa, on the other hand…

The Protagonist Throw!

Notably, the Terminator never lays a finger on Sarah Connor in the first Terminator movie, because Cameron knew that if the perfect killing machine got its hands on its target, it would just kill her immediately and that would be the end of the movie.

Or tossing an entire Zippo lighter into a pool of gasoline. Do you have any idea how much a good Zippo costs?!

In Robocop when Murphy gets shot to pieces and wheeled into the ER, Verhoeven got real ER doctors to play the scene, so their chatter is very realistic and very nonchalant as they work on a guy that they know full-well is a lost cause.

I think in Event Horizon they tell the guy about to get airlocked to take deep breaths and then let all the air out of his lungs… which I think is accurate if you want to live as long as possible in vacuum. But then he gets horribly disfigured by the decompression, so they might have only got some points for accuracy.

There was an analysis of Nolan and post-Nolan Batman that argued that once you strip away all the fantastic parts of Batman, all the Clayfaces and Mr. Freezes and Poison Ivies and the sentient robots and uncanny weirdness, all that is left is a bunch of problems that frankly the cops should be able to handle, and that Batman at that point is just a cop who is willing to violate people’s Constitutional rights.

If Batman can be replaced by a well-outfitted SWAT team, then you’re not writing Batman well enough. Give him some insane nonsense that cops are not equipped to handle.

Hell, in Star Trek VI, where the Praxis Effect originates, it’s a horrifying industrial accident that blows up Praxis, so for all we know there might well have been some kind of moon-sized particle accelerator that blew up and did cause that ring shape. But it seems to show up in a lot of places where there’s not as justifiable an excuse.

I was in a play once where we were going to fire a blank onstage, in a fairly small black box theatre. There were two options, a .22 and a .45 caliber blank. The .22 made a sharp CRACK that really shocked you. The .45 made a VWOOM sound that filled up the entire room and left you with the feeling of a wave of violent energy having just passed through your entire body.

We went with the .22.

Ahem