Go read these comments on a restaurant advertisement for ribs. They’re brutal. And there are so many of them, ripping savagely at these lovely beef ribs.
Then you learn…these are served by a Minneapolis comedy club that has booked Louis CK for 8 shows.
Goddamn ribs. They deserve it all.
This “Beyond Meat” stuff must be booming if it’s showing up on grocery store shelves even in remote, barren backwaters like rural Minnesota.
But OK, I’ll give it a try this evening, despite the fact that marketing something as just like meat isn’t exactly a great way to reach vegetarians.
Hey, kind of like how Joe Biden is a fake progressive who’ll appeal more to neo-liberals and centrists, but not so much to people who want real change in the system.
Facebook and Instagram have finally had enough bad PR from those wackaloons and has outright banned a host of bad actors. It’s a start. However, it doesn’t affect the structural problems in social media algorithms — they’re built around simple-minded mechanisms that don’t consider the quality of the content, but rely on who is linking to who, and counting the number of references as an indication of popularity. It’s an extravagant version of a sneaky online poll. So you still get fed bad information, even if they retroactively cut out the original source of the lies.
Simply by following Instagram’s suggestions, Russell was recommended 240 Instagram pages posting misinformation. Looking at one QAnon page resulted in suggestions for 12 more. Liking and engaging with even borderline-extremist content on the platform results in recommendations for more extreme content. Just last week, Instagram recommended that I follow Yiannopoulos and Jones after I liked and followed many right-wing meme pages. Russell also noted that more than 30 white-nationalist pages flagged to Facebook and Instagram last month are still up. “One would think that Instagram would bother to halfway try to clean this stuff up,” he tweeted, “but it’s all still there.”
Banning these extremist figures is a step toward stricter moderation of extremist views, but time and again, we’ve seen that the internet’s worst actors always find new ways to exploit platforms. For instance, after Instagram promised to ban anti-vaccine hashtags such as #vaccinescauseautism, anti-vaxxers simply developed new hashtags by changing a letter or adding a word.
The one good thing about cutting off these phonies at the knees is that it makes it far more difficult for them to directly profit from their lies — the lies still get out there, but InfoWars, for instance, has just lost a big chunk of advertising revenue, which we can hope will reduce their effectiveness at poisoning the discourse. It might also discourage the next guy with a get-rich-quick scheme based on selling conspiracy theories.
They actually do a simple experiment in this video to show the effectiveness of washing your hands after handling meat (but where was the control of sampling the bacterial load before handling?), but still, this is one of the reasons we’ve been going vegetarian at my house.
Of course, another control that should have been done: what kind of bacterial smear is on your hands after handling lettuce? I demand a new video with more rigorous quantitative comparisons.
That’s especially since my new dietary regime I’ve imposed on myself and my wife is salads, and nothing else, for dinner every other night. We get our protein dose every other day. Tonight it’s fake pulled pork (seitan) sandwiches, we’ll see how this stuff tastes.
Someone had to say it.
I like my hops subtle, not sprayed in concentrated form into my face.
I’m pretty sure these are equivalent to Valerian steel and would be exceptionally effective. Marcus is auctioning off a pair of beautifully wicked handmade knives to benefit our legal fund. I would bid on both if said legal fund hadn’t drained my bank account rather severely already. I’ve always wanted a tactical chef’s knife, just in case.
Get ’em while you can. Marcus has set up a fair system to manage the auction, and you can both help us out and get a totally appropriate weapon out of it.
That’s not a bad thing. I saw it last night, and overall, it was fun, but there was so much to criticize.
First, a few of my problems with the movie.
It’s a time-travel movie. Hollywood cannot make those — they screw them up everytime. It’s a plot device that they can’t use consistently, where they have to first point out the dangers and consequences of time travel and impose limitations on it, but you know at the first opportunity all of that will be thrown out. Endgame is no exception. It doesn’t have to be that way: Tim Powers’ novel, The Anubis Gates (the best time travel story ever) revels in the consequences and causality and the story is actually driven by the implications of time travel.
It’s too much to digest. This movie is the culmination of 22 other movies, and every character has to have a cameo. The first half it focuses on a manageable subset of the characters, but near the end, it has to pack them in. There are a couple of scenes where the action comes to a halt, and the camera wanders through the good guy army taking care to give everyone a moment. For example, Shuri gets a static shot standing there — she doesn’t do anything in this movie, but she gets a few seconds to be applauded. Sometimes it was too painfully obvious.
Every problem is solved with a fight. My wife got confused about who was who, but it wasn’t a concern, because every character’s main attribute was their ability to thump bad guys. And speaking of bad guys, Thanos is a terrible villain. He’s big, purple, and muscular, and his superpower is hand-to-hand combat. That’s it. He’s physically stronger than everyone, which somehow leads to him having an alien fleet and hordes of four-armed monsters fighting for him. It is not a spoiler to tell you that the culmination of the movie is a gigantic super-brawl.
Disposable ethics. Just as an example, Hawkeye (the bow and arrow guy) is so wrecked by grief by the conclusion of the previous movie that at the beginning of this movie, he’s rampaging through the criminal underworld, leaving warehouses full of dead bodies, that sort of thing. This horrifying behavior will never be addressed. He has demonstrated super bad-guy-thumping ability, so he’s embraced as a hero. It’s a conflict that would require an entire solo movie to explore and resolve, but this movie is so sprawling and over-full that it’s treated as an ignorable bump in the road.
Death is weightless. Several well-known superheroes die in this movie. Their deaths have relatively little impact, because, well, the whole movie is about reversing the deaths of trillions of intelligent beings with a time-travel plot contrivance, so why couldn’t there be another magic trick in a later movie to resurrect them? Nothing is final if we can just make a continuity adjustment in a sequel.
OK, those were my major complaints, but there’s something that unifies them all: they’re entirely genre complaints. This is what comic-book super-hero movies do. To see them as flaws is like complaining that cowboy movies will have a gunfight, or that a rom-com will have a moment where the protagonists love each other, or that a Christian cult movie will revolve around a really stupid argument that somehow brings people to Jesus. It’s like being pissed off at the hamburger you ordered at a restaurant because it contains ground beef. It is the nature of the medium.
That said, then, The Avengers: Endgame is a superbly well done genre movie. We have reached Peak Superhero. The MCU is a complex, experienced organization that is a sleek machine for pumping out movies that fulfill a social role for a huge community of nerds, and it is a master at meeting expectations professionally and with a nice shiny gloss, and it has also built up a phenomenal roster of personalities that it can slot into roles. It’s a powerhouse.
It works well.
I live in a tiny college town of 5000 people. I never have problems getting into movies — we have a limited number of screens so there are those constraints — but I’ll usually pop into the theater 5 or 10 minutes before show time, and I only show up that early so I can get the best seat. Even that’s not usually necessary because some times I’ll get there and there are only a handful of people present. This one, we got there a half hour early and there was a line half a block long. Unbelievable, for Morris.
It was a crowded theater. Half the fun of the movie were the crowd reactions. There were gasps and cheers, the audience was really into it all. That brief shot of Shuri that I saw as a pointless cameo? People applauded. Those weightless deaths of beloved characters? People moaned and wept.
The Avengers: Endgame was effective, skillful movie-making.
What it excelled at was two things that communicators of any kind ought to respect. It was all about narrative, masterful story-telling that made it easy to leap over gaps in the logic. Stupid time travel logic doesn’t matter when what you’re trying to do is sweep viewers along in a series of challenging events. The second piece of the genre is emotion. Those 22 preceding movies were all about building personal connections with characters, and this movie was about intensifying those relationships and running them through a wringer to draw out the feelings of the audience. It does that so well.
If you’re one of those horrible movie viewers who hates genre conventions and wants accurate science and rational plotting (I don’t know anyone like that, do you?), you should attend one of these showings and pay close attention to how it fosters audience engagement, as does the whole Marvel PR machine. You’ll learn things even if you are expert at maintaining objective distance.
I’ll be curious to see what happens next, though. This movie wraps up a huge multi-movie narrative arc, but Marvel is not shutting down, there are more movies in the pipeline, they’re going to make billions of dollars out of this one, and you know some executives somewhere are scheming about how to get the steamroller going again. I can’t believe this was just an accident, and I’m sure there are plans afoot to fire up another mega-blockbuster.
This is Michael Christopher Glance. I include his name and photo so you know to scorn him if ever you meet him. This cowardly sack of shit got in a heated argument with his partner, and to teach her a lesson, intentionally shot their two year old child in the face with a shotgun. (The child survived, but is going to require massive reconstructive surgery.)
With any luck, though, you’ll never meet him, because he should be going away to prison for a very long time.
I have mixed feelings about these things. They kind of suck the air out of the room — how many superhero movies will be dominating the theaters this summer? I like the gigantic ensemble movies least of all, since they always feel overblown and crowded, and they replace interesting character development with simply trotting out yet another colorful costume. They’re great big telenovellas about luchadors…which could be fun, I admit, like having ice cream and cookies for dinner, but they’ll kill you eventually if that’s the only thing in your diet.
I’m still planning on seeing Avengers: Endgame tonight, with my wife. Which reminds me — another unpleasantness is that I’m going to have to explain the story to her first, since she doesn’t pay much attention to these things, and they always sound so ridiculous. “In the last movie, big purple bad guy collected a bunch of magic rocks that gave him the power to snap his fingers and make half the people in the universe disappear, because he thinks that will make life better for the survivors. In this movie, a few dozen surviving people in spandex will try to undo the purple guy’s magic.” This will not sound promising.
But Tony Thompson convinced me. People have emotional connections to these stories, to grand elaborate stories in general, and a lot of people love this series of movies. I’m willing to bask in the afterglow of the audience for a connection to that, even if my brain is going to be picking nits throughout it. I can find vicarious enjoyment of other people’s enjoyment, so even if I find a thousand annoyances in this movie, I’ll be able to take something away from it.
Also, I’m hoping Thor will find a way to resurrect Loki.
Good news, everybody! We can reduce arachnophobia with just a seven second clip from a Marvel movie!
Fear of insects, mainly spiders, is considered one of the most common insect phobias. However, to date, no conducted studies have examined the effects of phobic stimuli exposure (spiders/ants) within the positive context of Marvel superheroes movies, such as “Spiderman” or “Antman”. A convenience sample of 424 participants divided into four groups watched different clips. Two intervention groups (Spiderman/Antman) and two control groups (Marvel opening/natural scene) were measured twice (pre-post intervention). The measures comprised an online survey assessing socio-demographic variables, familiarity with Marvel movies, comics and phobic symptoms. Reduction in phobic symptoms was significant in the Spiderman and Antman groups in comparison to the control groups. Seven second exposure to insect-specific stimuli within a positive context, reduces the level of phobic symptoms. Incorporating exposure to short scenes from Marvel Cinematic Universe within a therapeutic protocol for such phobias may be robustly efficacious and enhance cooperation and motivation by rendering the therapy as less stigmatic.
Unfortunately, they don’t tell us what specific clip they used, so I can spam it everywhere and teach people to appreciate spiders. I kind of doubt that it’s this one, at the 1:37 mark.
Also, it’s Spider-Man and Ant-Man, both hyphenated. I can’t imagine how that slipped past the editors. Additionally, since there is a new Spider-Man movie coming out in July, I’m hoping for a spider renaissance this summer.
