the two genders
Editorial Director at Rebellion Publishing Ltd. he/him
3,046 followers 472 following 1,783 posts
view profile on Bluesky
the two genders
We've played gender-bingo with waiters and bar staff for years: coffee vs tea, cider vs spirit-and-mixer, gammon vs steak. But that one's got us beat, that's terrible.
WOW.
do you mean, how does he reach the pedals? he has a little terrier mate in the footwell that's how all these car-stealing dog gangs work
For a while, movies adapted from Clancy's books were prefixed "Tom Clancy's" in marketing. Then movie tie-ins of his books would have the marketing on, hence a book by Tom Clancy would be titled "Tom Clancy's [title]".
I should be able to get a ride on a fire truck if they’re already going that way
this is the most positive press i’ve ever seen about this site & it feels nice knowing i could help contribute
🎶 I’m the queen of bitchful thinking 🎶
hegel having penetrative sex, to synthesis
kid's like the A Beautiful Mind guy but for TV plots, it's incredible
S3E7 "Revelations," when Xander rushes in to talk to Giles and Gwendolyn Post smirks to herself, 12yo asks, "Does the other Watcher turn out to be evil?"
S3E6 "Band Candy," when Ethan Rayne is revealed and he tells the worker not to eat the candy, 12yo turns to me and asks, "Does the candy turn adults into kids?"
my fucken kid is some sort of TV plot savant, istg thus far: S2E16 "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered," literally the moment Xander corners Amy, before anyone mentions a love spell, 12yo sadly drawls, "Love spells never work out well"
Oh, the Flagsmashers were from the comics, where they were sort of evil commie nihilists back when that was a bad thing. But yes, they don't translate well to modern audiences, especially when their case is "We've literally been living without national borders for 5 years and it has fucking ruled."
Yeah, that's a structural MCU problem. Make their villain smart, empathetic and morally justified, then tilt hard to dumb and evil in the third act to justify the hero kicking their teeth in.
Heh. Okay maybe "making amends" is a generous interpretation, but there's a definite feeling that she accepted wrongdoing at the end of WV.
Right? Perversely, that was one of the projects in Phase 4 that *most* needed to be a Disney+ show. Give 'em nine, ten hours, slow burn. Half of every episode in historical flashback. Highlight different characters in different episode so they get to shine.
So I'm still disappointed, but I can see how it happened and I don't think it happened because anyone particularly hated the character of Wanda and wanted to fuck her over.
But I also gather that the two projects were written in isolation and only stitched together (with the hasty addition of the Darkhold to the end of WandaVision) once they were signed off. Of course, that wasn't too late to rewrite Multiverse, but I guess by then they were committed.
Yeah, I waver about that one, because the decision to make Wanda go evil out of grief IMMEDIATELY AFTER a project in which she went evil out of grief (especially given she snapped out of it, expressed contrition and determined to make amends) felt like a massive kick in the teeth.
I have a lot of sympathy for the feeling that Marvel Studios have lost their way and that the franchise is played out, but so far I'm still along for the ride.
And the highlights were many: WandaVision, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Shang Chi, Loki, Hawkeye, Moon Knight, Ms Marvel, GOTG3, The Marvels, Agatha All Along and Thunderbolts* all stand up alongside the best the Infinity Saga has to offer.
All said, though, through both phases the only film or show I actually hated was Secret Invasion.
The first season's finale was silly; the second and third finales just kept upping the stakes until they were so high they didn't mean anything any more.
Similarly, every season of What If...? consisted of a really solid 6-8 episodes full of fun alternate timelines (some better than others, but all worth the price of admission), followed by a special team-up/crossover that played out as a sort of cosmic Top Trumps.
Conversely, in some places they didn't exercise *enough* restraint: I really enjoyed Love and Thunder, but it could have stood to have someone on Waititi's shoulder telling him to rein himself in from time to time.
Wakanda Forever felt like they had an already busy story planned before Boseman's death triggered a rewrite, but rather than give them the chance to reimagine the whole film as Shuri's ascension, they had to cram it in with the other plots because they were needed for the larger arc.
Same for films strongarmed into serving the multiverse arc: Quantumania was an incoherent mess, Multiverse of Madness was fun but narratively weak.
(Certainly you can see BIPOC characters in other MCU films being allowed to be angry/political, so it's not a general squashing - I think because Sam carries the shield, Sam has to be Nice.)
They suffered the most when you could see management leaning on them. I'm pretty sure both TFATWS and Captain America: Brave New World would have been angrier if Disney didn't have a definite feeling about how Captain America could behave.
That said, more of the failures have been noble than craven: the pacing of Eternals suffered from trying to tell a ten-character, 7,000-year story in one film, for instance.
Like most of the entertainment industry, they overreached with the TV project, and that showed in, e.g. the rushed visual effects on She-Hulk.
They were hammered by lockdown and the writers strike, of course, which killed the revenue on some of the earlier films. And Jonathan Majors turning out to be a big ol' abuser forced them to sharply rewrite the whole arc of the franchise.
The multiverse storyline has been a huge, ambitious idea that has fallen over in many places - in part, I suspect, from not having a clear enough vision at the outset - but it has also generated a tonne of fun.
Looking back over MCU phases 4&5, I mostly have good impressions rather than bad.
The Marvels, directed by Nia DaCosta. A great, unfairly maligned movie.
hmm if I could guarantee pistol shrimp stunning power and mantis shrimp invisibility I could be persuaded
ooh, i could get shrimp powers! [mentally catalogues the powers of a shrimp] ...never mind.
heh. answering 12yo's question about mustelids and rodents, I have just discovered that there are two distinct groups of species known as "bear-dogs" and "dog-bears." 😀
It's charming, but sometimes you have a villain that rationally would never work on, and it's tricky navigating that with a kid - especially one that is *also* still learning that RPGs aren't always collaborative and sometimes things don't work.
Teaching 12yo to roleplay I encountered the phenomenon a lot of roleplayers have discovered teaching their children; viz., that they will befriend everything they encounter rather than fight.
So you sort of need to either accept from the outset that you'll let the thing work, or signal firmly and clearly that it won't. And do that sharply before they get time to commit.
And because, in LRP as in all roleplaying, you want to give the players agency, the longer they Keep Trying the more likely you are to just give in and let the thing they're trying work - which teaches them that the thing they were trying eventually worked.
Something I've noticed a fair bit with LRP (not as much with TTRPGs, but it happens) is that players will Keep Trying until they're actually, conclusively beaten, no matter how broadly you hint that no, this isn't fixable (or no, that's not how you fix this).
Lose the arbitrary penalty for being an adult and build the mechanic around being imaginative, free-spirited and unpredictable.
And there was something not a million miles away that would have worked - rather than childish innocence, make it about wildness and wonder.
Massive thanks to the very splendid @elizachanwrites.bsky.social for reading THE SALT ORACLE 🖤🌊🖤
They tried to do something similar to the tension inherent in the Humanity/Rage/Paradox systems, but passed straight through "tension" to "constantly pissing on your chips."
Its big problem to me was that the Banality system essentially amounted to "being useful and functional is punished by making your character effectively unplayable."
Conceptually jarring, mechanically incoherent, but rather sweet. An odd beast.
Project Hanuman is up on netgalley! @alasdairstuart.com relevant to your interests :-) #sff #scifi #amwriting
Food of some sort?
I don't even think he sees conversation as adversarial, tbh (shit, I like a good argument, sometimes). I think he thinks he can win at having conversations. Like, "you mentioned five Great Men in this conversation, I meaningfully invoked six. I conversationed better."
I'm with Daniel on this one. Leaving aside the low-hanging fruit - that listing people/topics like a checklist like this suggests that you don't actually understand or care about any of the people/topics - this dude definitely also sees conversation as something you can win.
Absolutely this. Facebook also has its own code, &fbclid=.
12yo, midway through season 2: but spike gets killed, right? me, sweating: he... dies before the end of the show, yes
Amazing. ❤️
Got 12yo into Buffy. So as usual, her mother and I have been talking with her about the show as we watch, and she (12yo) has referred to Xander as a "giant manbaby." ❤️ Kid's gonna be alright.
And you can absolutely have a satisfying and meaningful adventure in which the Queen of Powerarmortopia punches the sun and the Guy Who Likes Pens has to write something down. It's just down to the GM's creativity. Balance isn't about equal power, it's about equal engagement.
Yeah, one of the interesting things about it is there's zero interest in the '80s/'90s obsession with "balance" - the same group can include Cosmic Wizard, My Armour Can Punch Battleships, and Guy With Knife.
Therein the problem. Same with Farage, Badenoch, Rowling and whoever else. They all know their words will be reported, and that most of the audience will read the words and not the context.
It's a weirdly endearing beast. One day they thought, "Shit, we have a bunch of different games, with mutant animals/superheroes/spies/epic fantasy/horror/monsters/space and whatnot, let's mash them all up," and then the mashup grew into this behemoth that was weirder than the sum of its parts.
this is one of a number of challenges confronting the press in this age of disinformation and propaganda, including the "bias to neutrality" and toothlessness of media standards law, and there may be no easy answers to any of them - sadly, the press shows little signs of even trying.
this report isn't saying that Russia will face severe consequences, it's saying that Trump *says* Russia will face severe consequences. it's the same way a paper can report on some Reform dipshit complaining about a "flood of migrants" or a "surge in crime" whether it's true or not.
traditionally, a newspaper will print statements from public figures that they know to be untrue by putting them in quotes (since they're not reporting the words as true, only that the person said them). unfortunately this gives the biggest assholes in politics a free pass to lie to the public.
A fabulous starred review in @publisherswkly.bsky.social for @shoutoutmapes.bsky.social 's THE GANYMEDAN! "This sprawling novel will appeal to both hard sci-fi fans & readers looking for thought-provoking insights into an all too possible future" Out November. Preorder: geni.us/ganym
HISHE did a great cartoon about that: youtu.be/4vjs_0CoRs4?...
I read a bunch of big, fat books at 10 or 11, but none of them jump out as being "way too old" for me even then but in a different way, Anais Nin's Little Birds, when I was maybe 12?
❤️
*even, dammit
I don't have to say "Rocky," because the answer is "Oscar" and it's not event close
and Cap has a great many strengths, but carrying out advanced alien engineering on the fly isn't one of them, he certainly didn't make any of these things himself after travelling back into the past
now, it's just about possible that the Aether has been turned back into goo and Steve has a syringe in that little case, but does Banner or anyone know how to reconstruct the Tesseract? and there's definitely not a sceptre in there
Reality Stone: the angry Aether goo (has to be stuck back into Jane) Space Stone: the Tesseract (needs to go to Asgard as the Tesseract) Mind Stone: Loki's sceptre (needs to be stolen by Strucker to empower Wanda and Pietro)
but not all the Stones were in Stone form when they took them out of the Sacred Timeline in the first place...
just thought of something: at the end of Endgame, Cap heads back to restore Mjolnir and the Stones to their relevant points in history, right? pictured here with Mjolnir next to him and a little briefcase containing all the Stones
Right? I guess the Mind Stone is in the film, but it's not like Ultron was trying to get it for Thanos or anything.
That said, since they're from a scientific study, there's some wiggle room - a new drawing faithfully copying the original would be fair use (this is the visual equivalent of reading a work of non-fiction for research and then writing a new text referencing facts from it).
Most illustrations or photographs become public domain on January 1st 70 years after the creator's death, so it depends if the creator died before or after 31st December 1954.
I mean, canonically Thanos wanted the Cosmic Cube (for basically the same reason he later wanted the Infinity Stones), so it kind of makes sense for Thanos to be in the plot at that point. But they'd clearly not settled on the Infinity Stones plot until Thor: The Dark World.
The switch from Tesseract = Cosmic Cube to Tesseract = Infinity Stone was a particularly vivid example of this. In AVENGERS, Thanos gives the sceptre (which is "powered by the cube") to Loki, and later we're told actually the sceptre is another one of the Infinity Stones he's desperately seeking.
🚨 | NEW: Founder of The Entertainer, the UK's biggest toy shop chain, will transfer 100% ownership to its 1,900 employees. This means all members of staff will get a share of the profits and a say in how the firm is run. 💪
Mogofernes
there's a recipe for boiling ham in coke and it's amazing.
us: can you do something about the atlantic ocean being in the way of beerb deep ones: [makes the sea rise to swallow canada and uk] us: not like that
*looks around, whispers* but do we want their attention tho
Oh! New information for me.
*clarification: was published by the brewery, it's changed hands since bsky.app/profile/did:...
Thanks to a conversation in a pub in Wexford - www.rte.ie/news/regiona... - I love that it kept being stolen from pubs so they decided to publish it.
❤️
I liked that the original explanation of the star system was essentially motoring-based - 1 star was ‘worth stopping at’, 2 star was ‘worth a detour’, 3 star was ‘worth a special trip’
Yup!
the Michelin Guide was a marketing campaign to encourage people to drive for pleasure: by promoting restaurants you might drive to (or visit en route somewhere else) they hoped to make people drive more and thus need more tyres
the GBR was conceived of as a way to resolve arguments in pubs about, e.g. which was the longest train route, the bird with biggest wingspan, the golfer with the longest drive etc.
one of my favourite things is when people first learn that the Guinness Book of Records is in fact published by the brewery and Michelin stars for restaurants are in fact bestowed by the tyre company
Amazing! Another beerb to add the pile of beerbs I must buy you when we solve this "atlantic ocean" problem
HEY I JUST WON TWO AURORA AWARDS GO TEAM Thank you so so much to @jonathanstrahan.bsky.social @dtmooreeditor.bsky.social @mkcurry.bsky.social and the wonderful organizers and presenters! And my readers and voters -- SERIOUSLY, thank you for taking the time to vote! 🤩
my extremely specific monty hall problem meme
this is true and hilarious and also one of the clearest indicators yet of the ultimate goal of anti-trans hatred
Andy "Legally Blondeshell" 