I would imagine that in both cases, some of it was pocketed by middlemen of one kind or another, but that they still received a sizable chunk of money, pissed it away, then complained that they didn’t get enough.
Yeah, but the problem is: that's still dumb. Imagine you're Hasbro. You must have some knowledge that your toy-commercial-as-TV-show is popular. You have the sales figures on the toys. You have the TV ratings. You've probably done some kind of market research. At the very least, you know enough to think it's worth making into a movie in the first place. Even if you think, quite understandably, "we should use this movie to introduce a bunch of new toys," or, a little less understandably (but I'll forgive it), "the kids don't actually care much about the characters specifically, it's enough that they fire guns and they're on screen so we can theoretically slop out new ones whenever," you still have to forget that parents and children might have a couple objections to seeing the hero of a kids' movie get stabbed and die on screen.
But even if you are misinformed about your products' popularity, and even if you do totally forget that killing the hero might not go down well, you still have to make the wrong choice here too: what will actually give you more opportunity to sell new toys? Killing Duke off and saying he's gone for good, or having him written off in a less permanent way? You can get you new line out either way, but option B lets you keep Duke in your back pocket for if the new guys aren't as popular or to make special edition guest cameo figurines or whatever.
It requires bad decision making on every level.
Yeah, but in your example would a cop be less at the mercy of bullshit without the body cam? I'm pretty sure the only difference would be that the management bends over backwards to say "well, we can't prove he was rude to the abo, but we love those guys and we take diversity very, very seriously, and there were a bunch of other (equally frivolous) complaints made against him, soooo...."
I don’t get why that’s the first thought, though. Have a spin-off where Duke goes and trains GI JOE SPECIAL RECRUIT UNIT or whatever. Then you can even make crossover toys where the original characters get special “instructor” or “veteran” or “mentor” figures, or whatever you want to call them.
Fair.
Well, sure, but that’s one of those fantasy candidates I was talking about.
Oh, yeah? What do you think would be a reasonable alternative to Trump? Maybe Paul Ryan, or Mitt Romney, or Jeb Bush? Perhaps you’d like Kamala Harris, so we can keep fantasizing about “accelerationism”? Ooh, ooh, I know! Massie! Please ignore that Massie hitched his wagon to DeSantis (who is way more pro-Israel than Trump), or his lolbertarian support for H1Bs and opposition to e-verify. He said that one thing about AIPAC once!
Look, Trump isn’t perfect. He’s more pro-Israel than I’d like. But he’s also clearly more pro-Christian and pro-America than any alternative, and (not withstanding whoever your fantasy candidate for The Day Everyone Spontaneously Wakes Up may be), the only decent candidate that can actually win and move things in any sort of positive direction. You can keep sitting there being a grump loser applying unrealistic purity tests to avoid accepting any sort of incremental progress, but I’d like to actually accomplish things.
Harry himself is effectively a paroled murderer. In his past he killed his old master with magic, claimed self defense and got off on a technicality.
I think this misrepresents things a bit. His master summoned one of the worst beings in existence for the express purpose of hunting him down and killing him. And at this point, Harry has no idea about the existence of the wider magical world; he’s not going to be able to get help from the White Council or anything. There’s no “technicality” there—Harry really didn’t have other choices.
Now, I also understand why the council was (is) edgy about him, both because of the way using magic to kill can corrupt you and because of essentially all of his actions since then. But to suggest that killing his master was anything less than a legitimate necessity in the moment is unfair.
His name is the comics is actually Nathaniel Richards, he's a far future descendant of Reed Richards, aka Mister Fantastic from the Fantastic Four.
Doesn't this carry about a thousand asterisks for various retcons, alternate timelines, and fakeouts? Kang is like if there was a personified parody of complicated comic lore, except he's a serious character.
Often when I see a headline about Tim Pool in particular I have to do a double take. Obviously on some level it has to be a me problem that I just can’t adjust my expectations of this guy, but it really doesn’t feel like he belongs in any sort of meeting with Netanyahu, secret or otherwise.
This is great, but it also shows how much AI voice acting is lagging behind the visual part.
Saruman still isn’t pretending the Uruk Hai are the same as Men, though, or even the same as Orcs. He’s explicitly making them to be superior for his purposes. I can’t think of anything with that particular element.
Getting to that point necessarily means you didn’t get murdered by the violent black you shot in self defense, so it’s still a step in the right direction, relatively speaking.
Either the airline is lying to cover their ass after massively mistreating some passengers, or those passengers are lying after being loud and disruptive. Based on the short video I saw, the woman certainly doesn’t seem to be unable to control herself, so I’m inclined to lean towards believing the passengers, but there’s no real way to be sure.
Okay... let's ignore the hallucination about the bar fight. What's even being implied here? That he was bought off to retire in order to sabotage the project? Well, the product in question was a joint development between IBM and Microsoft. (Grok correctly identifies Letwin as both a Microsoft employee and a OS/2 dev, but leaves out this context in a way that makes it sound confusingly like Letwin had his own side company). Said joint development lasted until 1990, which is another important detail Grok leaves out. It correctly notes—albeit in the aforementioned confusing manner—that Letwin was on the Microsoft side, not the IBM side. He wouldn't have been on the project for about three years by the time he left Microsoft in 1993, so what is the "conspiracy" here?
Your entire post is a shoddy Grok summary that you didn't proofread, complete with some wink wink nudge nudge eyebrows that point at nothing. As Antonio said, there are things that Microsoft did, but this post only briefly touches on the most famous one.
A darker twist involves OS/2, IBM’s Windows competitor. By 1990, OS/2 had 10% market share, until its developer, Gordon Letwin, died in a mysterious 1991 bar fight. No hard evidence ties Microsoft to this, but conspiracy buffs note Letwin’s exit from Microsoft in 1993 and OS/2’s rapid decline after. Windows’ 90% OS dominance by 1995 raises eyebrows.
I guess this does raise some questions, yes, but mostly as to the quality of your information.
Do men have a biological advantage in pool?
There can’t have been that many trannies out of all the entrants, and yet the finals has two of them and no real women. The tournament itself would seem to suggest the answer is “yes.”
Everyone gives DOOM Eternal a pass because the game part is good and at first glance it’s cool demon murdering stuff. But if you pay any attention to the lore, Heaven is a lie, angels are evil parasites, and God is a usurper who was actually created by Satan instead of the other way around. It’s very anti-Christian.
I can’t imagine what the argument for banning people from putting up bulletproof glass must be.
They’d also achieve equilibrium, if there weren’t social incentives in place to prevent that.
I think you nailed it with “grabage.”
I guess if you want something less flippant, it comes off like they took the look of those DC animated movies that were fairly popular and then changed some stuff to try to look more “anime.” So… corporate trend-chasing? Unless you’re also including the DC stuff as an example.
That crazy bald woman from Wicked, right? It’s hard to imagine a worse casting.
Yes, but that could describe every incident. Like that more recent bodycam footage that went viral on X from the wellness check in the apartment complex.
Sort of, yes. But he’s “against it” in a way that is completely backwards and ineffective on every level. He’s wrong about the driving causes, he’s wrong about the current political effects, he’s wrong about the solutions. It would actually be impossible to be more fully wrong while still being sort of in the ballpark of being right, to the point that I think anyone who counts him as an ally of any sort would find themselves more hampered than those treating him as an outright enemy.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I meant “some part of everything,” so even though the donations got stolen and there were lawyer fees on their lawsuit, I’m assuming they still got—and blew—at least a couple hundred thousand overall.