Amentep

Would you say the part added great value to the film? That Gollum was...precious? ... ... I'll get me coat.

A few random points about the current topic (I was going to post more, but then I finished reading the whole thing and realized much of what I said had already been said) - I think its easy to forget that people feel loss more keenly than gain. A lot of people - rightly or wrongly - feel that popularity of a thing makes that thing less special. I think this fuels a lot of the antagonism fans have against other fans; its less about the 'fake fan' and more about fear at the prospect of losing ones own fandom by having it transformed into something you don't recognize. Its less about the fake fan and more about the fan with the issue, really. I think I've mentioned here that fans obsessions can be a bit off putting if you're not a part of the fandom - I've never read A Song of Ice and Fire - even back when I was reading a lot more than I am now - because fans (around the time the second book came out?) turned me off of it (after being told about how great it was that it was gritty and realistic and the singular description of why it was gritty and realistic was that it had a brother ****ing his sister and a lot of death.) I also left a Doctor Who group because the leadership decided at a convention to make fun of Pern dancers. I may not get other fandoms, but I'm not going to mock other people for it. I admit that part of why I haven't gravitated towards more recent animes is...I'm not really that big of a fan (ha) of what I perceive (rightly or wrongly) as the modern fanservice elements in it. Sure, Cobra has had nudity in it, but the nudity has been (so far at least) appropriately situational. Arguably a bit gratuitous, but contextually it makes sense and doesn't detract from the narrative, really. Its probably a lack of experience with modern product, so I'm really put off by my perception of a lot of current anime that may or may not actually be accurate, but I haven't been interested by what I've seen that seems to indicate that fanservice (upskirts that aren't even disguised as coming from a contextually appropriate camera angle to frame action or story, jiggly breasts jiggling all the jiggling time, etc) is at an all time high. It probably doesn't help that there's a certain type of modern character design I don't really like either - which may be a product of growing up on 70s and early 80s anime designs.

That reminds me, I need to watch that Lizzy Borden show that Ricci was in...

Yeah, the insistence that literal CRT (as opposed to Boogeyman CRT) is being taught in elementary schools is...confusing. But I also imagine that the GOP politicians cynically figure they can make any kind of claim or arguments and the current climate shields them from anyone looking too closely (lest they be accused of being disloyal or somesuch).

Oh sure, it could. Like I said, everything is unsettled at the moment, so prognosticating is probably a futile effort. I could see them wanting a wide variety of games for a variety of markets (dedicated console, PC, Mobile, cloud) and I could see them having a narrow field and using the draw of IPs to back either console or cloud gaming.

It should make a difference, but for a lot of people "CRT" is a placeholder for things that they don't like that they think is being taught in primary/secondary schools. What politicians rail against is the boogeyman, and they call it CRT.

The positive side I guess would be that as far as I recall, Microsoft has indicated they wanted to put out a lot of different styles of game with large and small teams and budgets. So I'd say the door isn't necessarily closed on any particular style of game. But ultimately how it's all going to shake up is unknown. How these divisions are going to work at MS and how Avowed does being big unknowns ATM for the possibility of a POEIII.

OH MY GOD!

No I'm not saying that, and I can't really speak to how its presented now (as opposed to back in the day when I was in school) or even how it was done outside of my county in my state when I was a kid. Also, having been educated in the south, while there were cracks in the "lost cause" narrative, it hadn't completely fallen apart when I was in school. You couldn't avoid the topic of slavery, but that didn't mean that it addressed everything about it either.

I'm not sure I'm ready to see Lucifer do the run of shame after the DNA test results are revealed...

I think in Marvel, Lucifer/Satan only has the two known kids. But then Mephisto has pretended to be Lucifer a number of times, and I think "Satan" is treated like a title, so there may be other demons who were Satan who had other kids that wouldn't be related to Lucifer/ the Hellstroms. She probably won't suck the life force out of Bruce...probably.

I dunno, I'm old and most of my life I've been told the opposite, that the history of white people in America is pretty glorious (other than the trail of tears and that civil war thing and segregation). Being told the converse is still novel, I guess. Seriously, though, most of these things that I've read about aren't about telling white people they're all about colonial oppression (or, at least, their ancestors were), but actually trying to teach that there was colonial oppression which was traditionally glossed over back in my day (yeah it was there if you thought about it, but it wasn't really discussed a lot). While there may be a point to argue that its possible to over simplify (and/or that some of these approaches are over simplifying) such that you're basically recreating the same problem in the opposite direction, I think its better to try to get at a best understanding of the past than to be "America great!" or "America bad!" without any critical thought on the subject. And anyhow arguing that white people's contribution to history is racism and oppression really isn't what CRT is (even if that's what the people who rail against CRT wants it to be) as I understand it.

If Daimon isn't shirtless 80% of the time with a large sometimes flaming pentagram on his chest, its Hellstrom in name only!

Dogma, Kids and Ferenheit 9/11 were the films Disney declined to allow Miramax to distribute after the Weinstein's sold to Disney. The problems with what became Rise of the Skywalker, from what I understand it, had to do with allowing The Last Jedi to veer wildly off the planned three act narrative so much so that it no longer matched up with the script that was being prepped for the third film. So they brought Abrams back both as a response to the negative reaction to TLJ and because the other director left after the work they'd did amounted to nothing and he couldn't make the film he'd planned. RE Chairchucker's reference to Helstrom, it started life under Marvel's TV unit (Agents of SHIELD, Runaways, The Inhumans, Cloak and Dagger) and not the movie banner (the, er, movies and the current Disney+ shows). And it was sanitized from everything I've read (they don't even call Daimon's sister Satana, but "Ana" and he's no longer the son of the devil and she's no longer a succubus*). They did fire the director for old tweets (but re-hired him) and the actress (who had a history of dumb tweets and they probably would have been better off just telling people they didn't hire actors based on their ability to tweet), but I think the latter was more because they've been trying to win SW fans over after the mixed reception of the SW films as they've kept another actress whose had some tweet controversies but who isn't in the SW stuff. I imagine there's never going to be a one-size response to these things. *yes Marvel has a sometimes superhero and sometimes supervillain who is the Son of Satan and one who is a Succubus. They also had a heroic/villainous half-vampire, full vampire, 2 different werewolves, a science vampire, several witches, a mummy, a swamp monster, etc. It was the 70s.

The problem, I think, is that what a lot of people are railing about isn't CRT. Its stuff like the 1619 Project and other educational approaches to presenting information about historical and systemic racism. They've been lumped together behind CRT because CRT was a easier way to refer to a group of things that some people don't like / find uncomfortable / think is skewed. I find it notable that all of the people railing against things like the 1619 Project and other efforts to provide more context to various topics suddenly pivoted to CRT; the only reason I can think is that it was pithy, easy to refer to and had "race" in the title, so everything that anyone didn't like could easily assume CRT contained it. Most education is built around the idea of giving a broad foundational knowledge. What you consider "gatekeeping", most educators would feel is providing a large enough scope of knowledge for the student to be able to adjust to problems that may not fit entirely into one field or the other later on in their career. Or that may be more useful from a perspective of how you relate as an employee (say writing and communication courses) vs how you accomplish the tasks assigned to you (major courses). Its, of course, a huge area of debate in Higher Ed, as there are people who believe that getting students through school and into a job as quickly as possible is more important than continuing with the traditional rounded education (and to be fair, most Engineering schools have probably paired the non-essential course down to the barest minimum. I know the local university trading heavily in Engineering students starts students in Calculus as no other math is as applicable to the majors).

As an aside, I've got my hands on the Cowboy Bebop series, so that'll be in my future (but after Future Boy Conan, most likely, and possibly after the Galaxy Express 999 70s series).

wut.gif There was always 20 rings. The One Ring was the issue, the ring Sauron created that gave him dominion over the other rings (and thus the other ring bearers (except, IIRC, the dwarves ended up being resistant to the detrimental effects of the rings, and partially the elves...sucked to be human ring bearers, cause you got to be ringwraithed).

Missouri highway patrol blasts out 'Batman' cell phone alert by mistake

Hope your recovery goes well and quickly!

Yeah, it was in Cleveland. Baker had the 'heart punch' which had allegedly killed two wrestlers (Alberto Torres and Ray Gunkel, both who died after matches with Baker but not because of the matches) and the riot started after he repeatedly heart punched Ernie Ladd. Jim Cornette and the Midnight Express against the Rock and Roll express triggered riots in Tulsa and Black Jack Mulligan got stabbed during a riot in Boston off the top of my head. Obtopic, wrestling aired at 6 pm Sat and Sun so many childhood dinners were eaten with wrestling on.

Yes, for wrestling it is. Also just referred to as heat. In the older days of wrestling, heels could generate enough heat that they'd get attacked by spectators. My dad knew a guy who worked at a local tv station, so he got in behind the scenes and got to see Freddie Blassie in his prime work the crowd such that security kept having to keep people from attacking him.

But...that's the easiest way to generate heel heat! Insult the hometown or a hometown institution.