“He tasks me. He tasks me and I shall have him! I’ll chase him 'round the islands of French Guiana and 'round the Suriname Maelstrom and 'round perdition’s flames before I give him up!”

It glosses over the “science-ing the shit out of things,” to use a Weir-ism, favoring the emotional connection , and compacts some other plot points, but everything that must be there is there, and done well. IMHO it’s pretty close to perfect as an adaptation to complement and revisit the book in a dramatic way, but it wouldn’t replace reading it.

For the record, I think project Hail Mary is a much better book than the Martian is, but the two films are roughly equivalent in quality. Damon is a little better than Gosling as the author stand-in, but r the Rocky dynamic makes PHM a more compelling story.

Yeah. I don’t think this is too hard to parse, nor is it likely to be some cogent political protest.

1. New flat surface attracts graffiti.
2. Within a short time, someone else breaks the glass to get access to the balls because they can’t or won’t use the app.

There could easily be an element of “fuck that app,” but the “reward” here is access to a basketball while at the park. I think Occam’s razor is an appropriate initial framework.

It also looks like the city was prudent and avoided a major investment of tax money.

You’re only slightly off, and the point is well taken that it’s far from the point of the show.

Third season of Ted Lasso gets to be pretty saccharine and certain plots are rushed, but by then the characters have built up so much goodwill that you’re willing to ride it out.

Also, if you find him immediately grating, give Ted himself about three episodes at the very beginning to turn into an actual human. It’s worth it.

We will see if the upcoming season four can recapture any of the magic.

This list is not even worth two dollars.

I mean, that’s a better choice than “fuck my waiter, specifically and today, while not affecting his bosses’ bottom line at all.”

But here’s the thing, it ain’t the owners’ problem either. They’re winning. The whole reason they do this is to externalize labor costs and do ad hoc market segmentation, except it’s based on customers kinda being dicks. When you don’t tip in the US, you have sided with the owners and have said to the server, “you are worth minimum wage.”

Agitate the rest of the day. Tip at mealtime.

Primaries are primaries. People walk back comments made during them all the time, and to a certain extent they’re the time to push your party where you think it needs to be.

I will be interested in what happens for the general. Can’t do much of importance if you pout and let the perfect be the enemy of the good (or the good be the enemy of the kinda okay), and thereby get evil elected.

Statistically speaking, the first part basically already happens. 90-97% of civil cases in the US settle before trial.

In a system that depends on interpreting unique fact patterns and evaluating and weighting “real-world” evidence with varying levels of subjectivity, I’d say that’s already as predictable as it’s supposed to be. What’s left has to do with inherent uncertainty on that 3-10% of close cases and clients with differing risk profiles (and pettiness), more so than it does with scummy lawyers bullshitting their clients, though TBF that definitely happens.

If anything, the issue with adversarial civil litigation generally, and the American system specifically, is that any uncertainty whatsoever breaks so drastically in favor of the party with more resources that reasonable claims settle when they had an excellent (but not guaranteed) chance at trial.

It is so fitting that what may quite literally be Trump’s only sincerely held belief about public policy is short-sighted, inefficient, bad for the world, and based on shallow considerations of aesthetics.

Which is the point of the phrase of course. It’s meant to simultaneously acknowledge and dismiss the “well ackshully” crowd. No, Switzerland is not fully surrounded, but also it doesn’t matter in any politically meaningful way.

gravity well

The only caveat here is that anything in orbit is nowhere near escaping the gravity well. The earth is pulling on the International Space Station at about 90% of the force as at sea level. It’s just that everything is going so fast it misses the ground.

In the article, that comment is directed at Boots Riley, though to be fair I think he could only be accused of Trojan Horse level obfuscation by people who think anything with social commentary subtler than Hacks is a Trojan Horse.

I like Hacks a lot too (even if the final season was a bit of a low-stakes victory lap, it still made me laugh), but “boomer actually has to explore social justice with an open mind” is at least half the point of the show.

This, and not ironically.

It is a slippery thing, this two weeks — not a measurement of time so much as a placeholder. Two weeks for Mr. Trump can mean something, or nothing at all. It is both a yes and a no. It is delaying while at the same time scheduling. It is not an objective unit of time, it is a subjective unit of time. It is completely divorced from any sense of chronology. It simply means later. But later can also mean never. Sometimes.

To be honest I think I’d prefer to see them cast a regular-sized Ackman, like Alyson or Margaret.

Oh, yes, I did start playing with a screen reader; why do you ask?

As I understand it, they do have one more season…

So, I generally agree with you. They’re sprinting through their plot outline to get to their end-game, and the “one season per decade” framing device is creaking under the weight of what they want to do.

Sounds like this was a pretty fucked up situation, but one wonders why the white cops (can’t say for sure, but the police wrists on the bodycam look very pale) would really have no trouble believing that a white kid out late at night had been tormenting a brown one.

I bet it has way less to do with being “woke” than it does with their actual experience on the job. They also called the ambulance right away, but they did fuck up quite badly by not believing him when he said he’d been stabbed.

To be clear, the Sikh kid needs to go to prison, the police need to be investigated and those officers disciplined, and I grieve for the victim and his family, but people who think that an 81%-majority ethnicity is enduring some epidemic of oppression, because previous white shitheads lulled some lazy cops into complacency, they have some other agenda. I wonder what JD Vance’s is?

I think that was Babylon 5 and J Michael Straczynski. You’re thinking of the repeated times when, in the middle of the hardest hitting writing in SciFi, there’s a ham-fisted, horribly conceived episode about a second-rate lounge singer coming out of a Ferengi holodeck or whatever.

New generation just never grabbed people the same way, but at least nobody’s fuckin’ their dead son’s best friend or doing missions in the throes of a serious hard drugs addiction. I’m still interested in how it all plays out, and only one season left, which feels about right.

I will note that it seems like understanding Star City, probably every season they eventually make, will be key to extracting full value out of the plot to FAMK S5. They may be going full Marvel with a cinematic universe.