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They called Zack Snyder grimdark, but the new SUPERMAN movie has some pretty dark content that I never expected to see in a SUPERMAN movie and even Snyder didn't go there.

I'm glad it went well!

There's a scene in Season 1 of SUPERMAN AND LOIS where Superman's equally powerful half-brother, Tal-Rho, tells Superman that humans have destroyed our ecosystem and rigged our society to fail and Superman should have taken over our planet and gotten us in line years ago as our ruler and king. Tal-Rho says he intends to do what Superman should have done already.

I was, uh, really struggling to think of any counterargument. Tal-Rho yells, "Make a choice! Us or them!"

Superman quietly replies: "There is no us or them."

I... really needed that. I guess I still do and that's why I'm seeing it tomorrow even though it's a work night.

I would like to watch IRONHEART, but I'm probably going to watch THE HARDY BOYS and the latest run of DOCTOR WHO first.

AI is given a single vending machine to run, quickly runs its own business into the ground.
https://www.inc.com/ben-sherry/an-ai-ra … e/91207636

ICE is officially more funded than any other federal agency... and Trump now has an army of thugs masked thugs empowered to kidnap anyone which he can use to sabotage elections.

I don't know how Americans will fight this.

Jacobin observes: Democrats are a weak political party that is at the mercy of incumbents who won't pass the torch.

https://jacobin.com/2025/06/cuomo-nyc-m … ts-mamdani

THE KARATE KID is one of the most interesting franchises America has ever produced, arguably demonstrating the worst and best aspects of any film and TV franchise. The original movie, while dated and limited in by the filming and fight choreography of 1984, is a minor masterpiece: bullied teenager Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) is fleeing a local gang of karate students and their abusive mentor, John Kreese, who runs the Cobra Kai dojo.

Daniel discovers that his apartment building's handyman, Mr. Miyagi, a serene, quiet, humble blue-collar worker, is in fact a master of karate and willing to train Daniel in martial arts to compete in a tournament against his oppressors. Miyagi's lessons are frustrating, bizarre and indirect, prioritizing harmony, peace, balance and serenity, with Daniel discovering that the karate Miyagi offers is not based in dominance or violence but masterful minimalism. The film sets up a tournament where Daniel must find out if his limited skill and ability to react and redirect can match the muscular aggression of Cobra Kai and their lead bully, Johnny Lawrence.

THE KARATE KID, despite being an action movie, is more of a gentle dramedy. Due to the limitations of the lead actors who weren't really martial artists, the action that is there may not have aged well.

The sequel, made in 1986, is (at least to me) almost everything a sequel should be if there has to be one. The story shifts to Okinawa, Japan, the fishing village home of Mr. Miyagi where this time, Daniel learns about his mentor's family history and a troubled and violent conflict that Miyagi fled home to escape, only to be drawn back by the death of his father. PART II is an incredibly stirring exploration of Miyagi's past through Daniel's perspective as Daniel is swept into a deadly confrontation with a karate master that sees Daniel not in a tournament but a duel to the death. PART II achieves almost every possible success one could hope for from a sequel.

And then with PART III in 1989, THE KARATE KID franchise crashed into every possible failure a sequel could have. PART III is a formulaic rehash of the original film where Daniel is yet again dragged into another karate tournament and is inexplicably as unskilled and incompetent as he was before Miyagi trained him in the first movie. As a result, PART III undermines everything Daniel and Miyagi accomplished in the previous two films and makes Miyagi look inept and Daniel look ridiculous.

With the fourth film in 1994, Ralph Macchio declined to return and we have Miyagi mentoring a teeanged Hilary Swank in THE NEXT KARATE KID -- except where Miyagi was previously a complex, humble man of past violence and present serenity,  Miyagi in the fourth film is a clumsy caricature of 'Asian' 'wisdom' reciting inane proverbs, and the villains of the fourth film are cartoonish figures without any of the troubled personhood of the villains in the original two. THE NEXT KARATE KID is so visually dull that it looks more like a direct to video cheapquel than a motion picture.

After this crash and burn, the franchise went into hibernation for 16 years until Sony Pictures decided to wheel out the brand again in 2010, this time electing to reboot the series with a reimagining where Jaden Smith plays Dre, a young American boy transplanted to China where he flees the local kung fu wielding bullies and is rescued and trained by Mr. Han, a Miyagi-like figure played by Jackie Chan. Inexplicably, despite the martial art being kung fu, Sony insisted on calling the film THE KARATE KID just to get the brand into theatres. Despite this foolishness with the title, the 2010 reimagining is a beautifully shot film with heartfelt performances and a gentle warmth and earnest sense of tragedy matched with Jackie Chan's martial arts excellence vastly surpassing the fight choreography of the original film.

For various reasons -- directors dropping out, Jaden Smith aging by the time Sony found a director who stuck -- the 2010 film never saw a direct sequel with Dre and Han. However, from 2013 - 2014, the original bully character from the 1984 film was referred to by the Barney Stinson character on the sitcom HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER, with Ralph Macchio and Johnny's actor William Zabka playing themselves in guest-appearances. The joke was that Barney considered Zabka's bully character, Johnny, to be the true hero and protagonist of THE KARATE KID.

With this renewed prominence, TV producers Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz, and Hayden Schlossberg, whose production company had a deal with Sony TV, pitched a Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence TV show in 2017 to various streamers and networks. YouTube Red picked it up, with Sony licensing the TV and streaming rights for a show that the TV team decided to name COBRA KAI in order to emphasize that Johnny's perspective would be receiving equal emphasis in this sequel.

COBRA KAI's first season in 2018 shows Johnny Lawrence 34 years after Daniel defeated him at the high school karate tournament. Johnny is an alcoholic, underemployed handyman, estranged from his son and the mother of his child, at odds with his stepfather, missing his dead mother, and increasingly frustrated as he sees that Daniel LaRusso is a successful and popular car dealership owner. Now in his 50s, Johnny continues to be haunted by his high school humiliation and his lost glory. One night, as Johnny eats a cold dinner outside a shopping plaza, Johnny sees a teenaged boy, Miguel, attacked by a gang of bullies.

Johnny ignores them until the bullies throw Miguel into his car, at which point an incensed Johnny attacks the bullies, trounces them easily with his karate, and is inspired to reopen the Cobra Kai dojo and regain his lost pride with Miguel as his first student. The reopening of Cobra Kai puts Johnny on a collision course with Daniel as these two grown men begin to re-engage with the high drama and critical conflict of a petty high school squabble that began in 1984.

COBRA KAI, to me, is a hilarious demonstration of how all drama is two people who do not like each other, forced to be in the same room together. Zabka excels at playing the boorish, aggressive, yet strangely good-hearted Johnny whose bullying masked deep-seated abandonment issues, turning Johnny into an oddly relatable character dealing with a long history of failure and embarrassment. Meanwhile, Macchio is brilliant at portraying Daniel's exasperated astonishment that his high school bully continues to be a problem over three decades after they first met.

COBRA KAI proved so successful that when YouTube Red shut down, Netflix bought the show and it ran for a total of six seasons over seven years as Johnny and Daniel deal with rivaling karate dojos, the war between their children and students, and the bleak resignation as Johnny and Daniel become reluctantly adjusted to how they are hopelessly entangled in each other's lives and make the horrifying discovery that they may in fact be friends. COBRA KAI was such a cultural phenomenon that Sony Pictures saw that the KARATE KID brand was on the rise... and nonsensically released a statement in 2022 shortly after COBRA KAI's Season 5 had been released, announcing "The return of the original KARATE KID franchise" on June 7, 2024.

There was no cast, director or writer attached; Sony Pictures had simply seen that with the KARATE KID brand revitalized via the COBRA KAI TV show, they were going to have a movie with the KARATE KID brand in theatres in the summer of 2024... and would figure out what would be in the movie later. The COBRA KAI producers released a statement clarifying that they had no involvement in the KARATE KID film for 2024 but wished it well. Over a year after the original announcement, Sony Pictures finally announced a director, Jonathan Entwistle and also that the film would feature both Jackie Chan and Ralph Macchio, despite the Mr. Han character appearing to exist in a separate continuity. The COBRA KAI producers also said that they had offered notes on the movie script, but that there was no tie in between the film and the TV show beyond Daniel LaRusso appearing in both.

Macchio further clarified that he would be filming the sixth season of COBRA KAI and then appear in the new KARATE KID movie, and that at his urging, Sony Pictures had moved the release date to May 30, 2025, rather than see it come out before COBRA KAI had finished its sixth and final season.

COBRA KAI had a grand finale in February 2025. KARATE KID: LEGENDS came out at the end of May. And...

The movie is not terrible. It's not bad. It's absolutely fine. The opening starts with a reprise of THE KARATE KID II where Miyagi shares his family history; we hear again how his 17th ancestor, Shimpo, was a fisherman who vanished in a storm, thought to have been washed out to sea. Shimpo vanished, but returned by ship 10 years later with a Chinese wife, two children, and what Miyagi calls "the secret of Miyagi-Do Karate."

In this reprise, however, Miyagi tells an extended version of his story, where he reveals that Shimpo washed ashore in China and was taken in by the Han family, who shared their kung fu with Shimpo, and that the Han and Miyagi families remain close even in the present day. Immediately at the outset, LEGENDS explains how the Miyagi characters and the Jackie Chan-portrayed Mr. Han character can exist in the same universe and why their styles of karate and kung fu are so similar. The movie then shifts to China briefly, focusing on Chinese teenager and kung fu student Li Fong, played by the charming and affable Ben Wang. Li is Mr. Han's grand-nephew, and Li's mother moves with Li to New York City, away from Han's kung fu academy where Ben encounters an MMA-trained bully named Conor and a love interest named Mia whose father's pizza restaurant is struggling.

Through a somewhat tangled plot, Li must compete in a karate tournament against Conor to save Mia's pizza shop; Han visits New York to train Li -- and elects to travel to Reseda to find Daniel LaRusso, asking Daniel to help him train Li in Miyagi-Do Karate to win the tournament.

It's at this point that the legal issues become clear: LEGENDS makes absolutely no reference to Daniel's life for most of the film. We see him living in Miyagi's house: there is no reference to Daniel's job, family, wife, children, business, whether or not he's maintained his karate training, or what he's been doing with his life since THE KARATE KID III in 1989. LEGENDS brings in the Daniel character but presents him as a complete blank aside from offering good-natured karate mentorship to Li.

Why? Because LEGENDS cannot use any characters or plot elements from COBRA KAI. The COBRA KAI series was made under television license and developed original characters that are held by the Sony TV division in collaboration with Hurwitz & Schlossberg Productions and Netflix, with Netflix effectively owning the majority of the show. Sony Pictures, the film branch, cannot use any characters that first appeared in COBRA KAI without entering some agreement with Netflix: they have no access to COBRA KAI's cast and cannot feature Daniel's wife, Daniel's business, Daniel's friends, Daniel's students, Daniel's kids. It's not impossible that Sony Pictures could have licensed them back from Netflix, but the convolutions and cost were likely seen counter to getting the KARATE KID brand back in theatres as opposed to promoting a Netflix property, effectively a rival.

As a result, Daniel LaRusso is nearly a cipher in LEGENDS. The movie makes no effort to define Daniel's life. Ralph Macchio refused to allow the film to contradict COBRA KAI in any way, but it also can't make any significant references or explicit tie-ins. They can't even show Daniel using any of the karate techniques that were first shown in COBRA KAI.

This also cripples LEGENDS' depiction of Daniel further: it's unclear why Han wants Daniel to teach Li anything; Li is already a capable martial artist and Ralph Macchio's above average athleticism and passable karate are clearly a lesser level of skill than Jackie Chan's Han or Ben Wang's Li.

The fiction declares that Daniel LaRusso is a martial arts master equal to the legendary; the obvious onscreen reality is that Ralph Macchio is a reasonably athletic man with limited martial arts training who can fake it for the camera -- but because Jackie Chan and Ben Wang are actual martial artists, Macchio looks like an imposter next to them, and all the points of karate that COBRA KAI developed for Daniel: his minimalism, his defense-only, his pressure point manipulation -- all of it is inaccessible and off-limits to LEGENDS.

LEGENDS comes off as simply an exercise in managing the KARATE KID IP: unifying the two separate timelines, making it possible to continue in the future as an anthology movie series whether the next film features Ben Wang or a new Karate Kid who can be either from Daniel's end or Mr. Han's end of the universe. Where THE KARATE KID and COBRA KAI had a lot to say about violence, aggression, pacifism, passivity, self-defense and physical offense, LEGENDS seems to simply run through the old formula. Li Fong is already a martial artist, so any training he receives seems trivial. The Conor villain has no backstory or personality beyond superficial savagery. LEGENDS is a film without a point or a purpose beyond rearranging the IP elements. It is not art. It is a product.

Spoiler warning.

Hilariously, the final scene of the film features Daniel back at home and hanging out with Johnny Lawrence with William Zabka making a cameo, validating the COBRA KAI continuity, and permissible because Johnny first appeared in the 1984 film. In this single scene, largely improvised by the actors, LEGENDS seems to accidentally concede that THE KARATE KID, even if going by another name on Netflix, is the franchise of Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence, and a KARATE KID film, even this mediocrity, is unable to get to the end without Daniel and Johnny reclaiming the narrative. COBRA KAI ended with Johnny and Daniel sharing a meal. LEGENDS ends the same way, which only serves to indicate how pointless LEGENDS really was.

This was probably more than what you really needed or wanted to know.

Farron's rock solid certainty of Trump's 2024 defeat was, ultimately, wishful thinking masquerading as analysis. At least Simon Rosenberg described the election as "close and competitive." Farron was simply telling his viewers what they wanted to hear; Rosenberg was telling people what he thought and is now conveying why he was wrong. I haven't bothered with Farron since the 2024 election and odds are, he's still telling people what they want to hear.

Trump has unleashed ICE to arrest and imprison and deport people of colour without criminal charges or due process or even the need to identify themselves as law enforcement or show their faces; criminals are now impersonating ICE to commit crimes because who can tell the difference of one masked thug over another? This is effectively a private army that I imagine Trump will be keen to use to intimidate voters in Democrat ridings even if America even has elections.

Democrats seem incredibly clueless and inept. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries have nothing worthwhile to say even in terms of empty rhetoric. https://newrepublic.com/article/196102/ … lure-trump

James Carville Jr.'s big strategy is for Democrats to do nothing.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/james-car … eat-trump/

America is sliding into authoritarianism.
https://www.salon.com/2025/06/22/americ … o-reverse/

But the No Kings rallies sparked something. Bernie and AOC are raising awareness of how America is dangerously close to becoming Russia. Can Democrats seize on this or are they stuck in clueless maintenance of their existing failures?

Spoilers for MISSION IMPOSSIBLE:

Every government in the world, including the States, wanted to possess and control the Entity, and nobody believed Ethan would hand it over. Ethan states outright that his plan is to destroy the Entity, which he can do safely when it can't control anything outside the 5D crystal. The president ultimately follows Ethan's plan, but prepares to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike should he fail, only to decide she will try to give Ethan more time.

Regarding Jasper Briggs: while he doesn't affect the plot, his presence points out certain ironies. Jim Phelps in the 1996 film was a rogue spy, a traitor who co-opted IMF resources and turned against his own government to pursue his own agenda. As far as the CIA and the IMF are concerned, that is an exact description of Ethan Hunt in 2025: Ethan is a rogue agent who is operating without sanction or approval from the agency that supposedly employs him. Briggs is furious that Ethan took Phelps down for what Ethan himself seems to do, and the IMF and the CIA generally think Ethan is out for money or revenge.

Briggs' confrontation with Ethan also sets up a later arc: when Ethan's team depends on William Donloe, the agent whom Ethan unwittingly humiliated and saw sent off to the Arctic in the 1996 film. Briggs' refusal to aid Ethan sets up the likelihood that the other person Ethan pissed off in 1996 is also unlikely to be an ally, building some uncertainty, except Donloe turns out to have a different view.

On the subject of the 5D crystal and Ethan's custody of it: in the middle of the film, Grace tells Ethan to think of the power that the Entity would give any wielder who could threaten its existence and dictate its actions. Ethan says he would trust no one with that power. Grace says she would trust Ethan, and hands it over to him at the end. He may run it over with a car; he may keep it for some purpose.

And about the Entity:

We need to note, before we get into the mechanics of how the Entity works: the Entity is not a realistic depiction of even a malicious AI. The Entity's plan across two films has been to corrupt and destroy information and data and replace it with fraudulent or altered versions that serve its ends; if the Entity is replacing the information on which it depends its assessments and decisions, it can no longer make reliable calculations or strategies. AI systems depend on reliable data to function and constantly glitch because of untrustworthy intel.

In addition, the Entity's plan is to contain itself within the doomsday bunker while exterminating the human face. This is foolish and counter to its stated goals: any AI system, even the Entity, depends on human action to generate the data on which the Entity acts and to maintain the equipment on which the Entity exists.

A server farm like the doomsday bunker is not something that anyone can set and forget: the electrical resistance of cables will degrade; fan coils wear out; power systems need fuel; solar panels need cleaning -- the Entity has killed or driven away all human staff and has no capacity to maintain its operating equipment or engage in repairs. It clearly has no robotics operation because it uses human agents.

Your question is why entrapping one instance of the Entity would affect all the others out there. The Entity, in its evasive and elusive maneuvers and its vulnerability to source code attacks via the Poison Pill, appears to operate on a centralized if mobile dataset from which its actions and decisions originate.

All instances are ultimately linked to the source code core in order to retain operational control and to, presumably, distinguish fabricated and altered data from the original data and to synchronize the actions across multiple instances. When the Entity is contained to the 5D crystal, the IMF has effectively removed the AI brain from the rest of its digital body.

This is not a realistic picture of a likely decentralized AI system, but within the fictional logic of a MISSION IMPOSSIBLE film, it's what we've been shown. The Entity's core data, if confined to the 5D crystal, prevents it from having any further influence over any other nodes of its function.

All this verbiage to defend a movie I wasn't that crazy about...

Are these films the rebootquel films or the Prime continuity films?

Torme himself called the whole 'Superman' backstory for Quinn being Kal-El of Kromagg Prime to be "pretty ridiculous" in an online chat.

Torme absolutely did not mind having Charlie O'Connell in small roles and as a body double, but he wasn't going to give make Charlie a regular cast member. He may have cast Charlie as an alt-world brother of Quinn's for a guest appearance.

The Kromagg 'plotline' was never meant to be some season-dominating story-arc, just one recurring thread in the anthology format of the show with maybe 1 - 2 Kromagg episodes a year.

FOX did not like the Kromaggs for a variety of reasons. First: Torme had been shot down about Kromaggs repeatedly, and he proceeded to go over his FOX network liaison to the network head to get approval. This led to a lot of bad feelings at FOX, who now wanted no more Kromaggs shows just to keep Torme in line.

The second: while Torme didn't want a season of Kromagg episodes, he did want to do story arcs where episodes ended with cliffhangers that led into the next, or where threads like Arturo's illness or his son would carry across multiple episodes. Kromaggs were one such arc. FOX said they did not want this: they wanted episodes that they could air in any order, and they disliked how Kromaggs could lock them into an airing order.

Of course, I think this was probably just an excuse: one Kromagg episode a year could air at any point. And on their watch, they approved the Rickman character appearing in multiple episodes, albeit in a fashion that those could be seen in any order. The main reason was internal anger at Torme going over management's heads and to their boss.

It's PAL, so it's likely the German blu-ray files that you hated so much.

I admit they are not good; they just happened to play better on my player than the Universal discs.

It isn't... quite what you think it would be.

The story is this one:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/11KF … it?tab=t.0

I personally think well of every actor's talent on SLIDERS. Charlie O'Connell turned out to be pretty good at seething outrage; Kari Wuhrer's comedic timing and dramatic prowess is strong, particularly when she has to do both in EIGHT LEGGED FREAKS, and I say that despite strongly disliking Kari for how she treated Sabrina Lloyd. Tembi Locke does a beautiful job of crafting distinct personas for her roles, particularly in her Diana doubles in "Applied Physics". Robert Floyd is a master of the craft, achieving perfect naturalism in his BAR RESCUE episodes and effortlessly mimicking Jerry O'Connell as a performance rather than as an imitation.

Charlie was inexperienced. But to me, if the performances for Kari, Tembi and Rob have issues (and they do), it's never because of the actors. The scripts require unnatural behaviour or awkward dialogue; the story lacks emotionality or subtext; the direction is poorly staged and underconsidered; the blocking is under-rehearsed and ill-timed.

There's also the fact that acting styles have evolved significantly since 1994 - 2000. Acting in a 90s TV show was less about naturalism and more about conveying clear points of plot and emotional information, more a highly technical form of stage theatre than the more naturalistic approach that's preferred today. Actors in a 90s era show will overenunciate and speak more slowly and unnaturally than a performer would today.

Seasons 1 - 2, to me, look like a mid-budget indie production, while Season 5 looks like what it is: a rushed and slapdash cable show on a very low budget, and that's naturally going to affect ahow the performances turn out. I would never say that the cast were not good, but rather that the material and the results weren't equal to their talent.

I think Tracy Torme's Kromaggs were brilliant.

I think David Peckinpah's Kromaggs were just the Klingons from the original STAR TREK but with far less effort.

A very talented fanfic writer, Tucker, once did a rewrite of "Roads Taken" with the original cast and Quinn and Wade as the romantic couple as opposed to Quinn and Maggie. It's quite an upgrade!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1icU … it?tab=t.0

I deliberately didn't give details about what's in the movie.

I would say... the movie is strangely overburdened with exposition. I have no idea why. Christopher McQuarrie has talked a lot about how he never wants the audience to have to remember too much; he doesn't like overlong exposition. But FINAL RECKONING boasts one of the most overexplained plots I've ever seen. The 1996 movie had a plot that nobody could understand. The second one had a plot that nobody needed to understand. The seventh film has a plot that that I found myself understanding to the point of wondering how much I really needed to understand it.

Just got home from MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: THE FINAL RECKONING. I liked it, but I didn't love it. It was good enough.

One thing I did note: it's always rankled with me that the 1996 MISSION IMPOSSIBLE made Jim Phelps (the hero of the TV show) into a villain. THE FINAL RECKONING attempts to repair this distantly, and I appreciated it.

Well, I can tell you that manufacturing and exports between the US and China effectively stopped dead with the tariffs. It was impossible for US assemblers and resellers to purchase and cover the tariffs. But Trump's recent retreat on the China tariffs has given some relief to Chinese manufacturing and American buyers. It has also shown the world: in trade, Trump can be waited out: https://www.salon.com/2025/05/14/the-ar … -and-wait/

I wanted to buy a Xiaomi Box 3rd Gen (a Google TV streaming box) because my 2nd gen of that product is no longer decoding newer video codecs effectively. The Xiaomi Box 3rd Gen, due to the export issues, is no longer available within North American shores and has to be bought from China. Getting one of these boxes to Canada cost me about $46 USD, but when I accidentally shifted the destination to the States, the price and shipping went to $85 USD.

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have made some media appearances in recent weeks, discussing Trump's second presidency and their 2024 campaign. Neither claimed to have won. Neither accused anyone who reported their loss to be lying or to have been duped. Neither harassed anyone who reported that Democrats lost the 2024 presidential election. Neither made claims of voter fraud or election tampering. Neither claimed that hacking an election in the States is "simple, stupid, easy." Neither claimed that any news source that reported the conceded results of the 2024 election were unreliable.

Harris on ABC: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/kamala- … =121323724

Walz in Vanity Fair: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/t … -different

I am backtracking on my reluctance to share insights from Simon Rosenberg to offer his analysis of the past, which is: it was a very close election; Trump won by 1.5 points, not a landslide; and if 115,000 votes had gone differently in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Harris would have won.

Despite his optimism over 2024, he did repeatedly describe it as "a close and competitive election" and never claimed that Kamala's victory was certain, and he flat out admitted when the results came in that he had more questions than answers.

His overall assessment: Democrats go into a political coma until a month or two before an election and Republicans dominate the news cycle. The Democrat strategy is to eke out tight wins in swing states; this strategy has too many variables to foil it. Democrats are still thinking in terms of legislation and hearings instead of the court of public opinion, which he warns is "dangerous old think. They operate 24/7/365 movement wide and so must we."
https://www.hopiumchronicles.com/p/sund … ng-some-of

As always, I don't know if this is accurate; his hopes for 2024 were wrong, but his assessments of Democratic weaknesses and myopia seem accurate when considering how Democrats lost 2024, which itself is a statement of historical fact.

In addition, Rosenberg's hopes for 2028 depend on free and fair elections, and the White House has demonstrated with the unlawful imprisonments and deportations and using ICE for unjust search and seizure that they will interfere with elections going forward.

I wonder why Netflix is doing that. I mean, they already made the title. Are they really losing money by keeping it up... ? Or are the shifting to a technology platform and building in branching pathways or maintaining that functionality doesn't make sense if they don't plan to make any more interactive titles?

Anyone trying to save money these days?

Recently, I switched almost all of my credit cards to 'cash back' cards (a curious term as you don't actually get physical cash) where certain categories of expenses get a small percentage reimbursed at the start of the new year. Recurring bills  and subscriptions like phone and internet service get 1% back, all grocery store purchases get 2% back, all other expenses get 0.5% back. By my estimate, I'll get about $245 USD back a year, which isn't a fortune but enough for a month of psychotherapy. I also isolated any 'lesiure' spending to one card and all 'essential' purchasing to another card so I can always take an easy but harsh look at the leisure spending to cut things I don't need.

Due to coffee prices, I've started buying whole beans in bulk which, strangely are cheaper: the average cost for 100g of ground coffee in my area is about $2.50 while whole bean comes at $2 for 100g.

I also got a Costco membership which leads to significant savings on bulk purchases of eggs, milk, and supplements like vitamins and over the counter medications.

I'm currently looking at what monthly and essential subscriptions I can switch to an annual plan for a slightly lower rate. I switched my mother to a new annual cell phone plan that amounts to $9 a month for 15GB of data over one year; I'm going to see if I can do the same for myself although I'm presently at $20 for 7.2GB a month and am not sure a lower tier exists for the data I need.

Spoilers for DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN and THUNDERBOLTS

We have a serious continuity problem here. In DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN, Mayor Wilson Fisk declares war on all New York City superheroes (whom he refers to as vigilantes), dispatching a task force of corrupt cops to shoot any superheroes like Daredevil on sight. Fisk won his mayorality with a huge swell of support. Superheroes are not wanted or needed, it seems.

But CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD has Captain America invited to the White House. The president asks Sam to create and lead a new team of Avengers. And then in THUNDERBOLTS, CIA Director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine assembles the press to proudly reveal a new team of superheroes, the New Avengers, to joyful relief and applause on the street before Avengers Tower.

The discontinuity between Mayor Fisk declaring all superheroes to be criminals and Director de Fontaine unveiling the New Avengers is glaring: de Fontaine and the Thunderbolts/New Avengers make no reference to superheroes being unwelcome in New York and Fisk having superheroes hunted down with municipal authority makes no sense when the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency is sponsoring superhero teams.

It's pretty obvious that Marvel liked Dario Scardapane's storyline of Fisk hunting superheroes wtih police and simultaneously liked Jake Schreier's delightful and hilarious THUNDERBOLTS ending where the team prepare to take down the corrupt CIA director who tried to kill them only for her to abruptly declare them to the press as the New Avengers, preventing them from attacking her as she's now positioned herself as their benefactor and sponsor and given them a global level of validation and admiration.

Scardapane clearly had no idea what was going on in THUNDERBOLTS and couldn't address it; Schreier clearly had no idea what was happening in BORN AGAIN and couldn't accommodate it.

I have a writing mentor, Joe, who has described situations like this as trivial and irrelevant. He once said to me, "Continuity is a tool, but all too often, it's a trap. It doesn't matter if Laurie Strode died in 2002 movie if a 2018 movie wants to show her alive and kicking. It doesn't matter of the X-Men are hated and feared in the same universe where the Avengers are praised and admired. And no, there is no comic book or novel that explains how Xander Cage came back to life in the third XXX movie and it doesn't matter. Screw continuity. Tell a good story first."

I agree with maybe half of that. My view is: continuity errors can distract someone from appreciating a story, so rather than dismiss continuity issues as irrelevant, it would be better to identify them and smooth them out. To address and defuse the trap rather than avoiding it.

I believe that if Scardapane had been aware of THUNDERBOLTS, he would have rewritten Fisk's dialogue a little. "We don't need a gun-toting vigilante who wears a skull mask on his chest, or a man who dresses in a spider outfit, or a guy who wears devil horns to save us! These are not CIA operatives protecting our shores! Or US Army officers who answer to the chain of command! Or refugees from other realms contributing to their communities. These street vigilantes have no sanction! No oversight! They are thugs! Violent offenders! They attack our homes and places of work and worship! They will not be tolerated! They will be stopped!"

So why didn't Marvel make him aware?

It seems to me that Marvel's attitude is to approve of a TV show's plotline... and then inform the team if there's a tie-in they want to make, such as Kamala Khan's father. TV is flying blind and has no awareness of the movies. And Scardapane doesn't get to suggest crossovers; the system is that Marvel imposes or gifts them.

The issue may also be that BORN AGAIN's first season was finished filming before THUNDERBOLTS' ending was finalized, and it was too late to go back and make adjustments to BORN AGAIN.

It is amusing, however: for so long, AGENTS OF SHIELD and the Netflix and Hulu shows seemed so separated from the feature films, because Marvel Studios was separate from Marvel Entertainment. Now they are all under one banner... and the disconnect remains pretty much the same.

Why kill Foggy?

This question has no definitive answer, and to me, this is why Kevin Feige's "We'll decide it in post" attitude is maybe fine for feature films but a problem with a TV show. It's clear to me that Marvel was undecided on whether or not the Netflix shows were in continuity and declining to make a decision until forced had then hedging their bets. They wrote and filmed the show so that it could be edited both ways: as a rebooted Daredevil who just happened to have the previous actor (in the way J. Jonah Jameson remained JK Simmons in the Sony and MCU Spider-Man films) or as a sequel to the Netflix show (with explicit references to Ben Urich and Foggy that could be cut). They also planned that their reboot could conceivably go from vaguely related to the Netflix show to explicitly connected in later episodes. They simply did not decide.

Feige and Marvel also took the view that the TV shows whether on ABC and Netflix had a much smaller audience than the MCU films, and they treated all the Disney+ shows as films that just happened to stream in shorter installments and across longer spans. Their view may have been that the Disney+ DAREDEVIL audience was conceivably the mass MCU audience that might not be familiar with the Netflix show, and they wanted to market their DAREDEVIL as the first season of a new show, not the fourth season of an old show. Dispensing with Foggy and Karen was a path to that; killing Foggy was to declare a break with the original series.

But why? Why not bring Karen and Foggy back for the soft reboot, given that they were already keeping Cox and D'Onofrio and bringing in Jon Bernthal?

My opinion: it was to save money. Disney is notoriously tightfisted with pay. One common Disney practice is to change the title of a show to avoid paying royalties or salary increases. The show is called DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN to avoid having to pay royalties to the Netflix DAREDEVIL showrunners, Drew Goddard and Steven S. DeKnight, whose development work would have entitled them to payment for each new episode of DAREDEVIL even if they'd moved onto other projects. There is no series-royalty payment for them if the show were called DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN, saving Disney money.

Another way they may have wanted to save money: minimizing the number of returning actors from the Netflix show. Naturally, every actor asked to return would be able to demand an increase on their Season 3 Netflix pay. Marvel negotiated with Cox, with D'Onofrio, with Bernthal -- but seemed to avoid opening that discussion with Deborah Ann Woll and Elden Henson. Their atittude may have been: Daredevil, Kingpin and the Punisher will have action figures. It's unlikely that there will ever be a merchandising line for Foggy and Karen. Marvel didn't see the value of negotiating with actors who wouldn't serve as the basis for toys, who wouldn't accept a low, starter-scale rate of pay. They decided they wanted a largely new cast who would accept lower starting salaries.

It seems to me that their tightfisted attitudes led to a series that slipped from their grasp: Bernthal walked, Cox and D'Onofrio regretted signing up. With one key actor ripcording out and the other two displeased, Marvel decided to rethink the project. They approached Dario Scardapane, observing that he could get Bernthal back on board.

It looks to me like Scardapane argued to Marvel that trying to soft-reboot Charlie Cox's Daredevil with no connection to his three seasons on Netflix was futile as the established history was impossible to cast away; that any losing some projected profit by rehiring Woll and Henson was preferable to losing everything they'd already invested in the project; that the series being shut down was already bad publicity piled atop the already negative reaction to Woll and Henson not being rehired in the first place and the impending PR body blow of Bernthal ejecting himself out of the show. Scardapane admitted that his firmness that Karen and Foggy had to come back could have made Marvel decide not to hire him.

And then, with Scardapane aboard, why did Foggy stay dead? Foggy's death was built into the narrative of the White Tiger trial (with Matt having quit as Daredevil after failing Foggy and trying to convince Hector Ayala that his life doesn't lose meaning without the White Tiger identity), Matt's grief over Hector and Foggy's deaths leading him to Frank Castle, Matt's increasingly fractured relationship with Heather Glenn -- and it seems to me that they were simply unable to refilm or rewrite Episodes 2 - 7 (originally 1 - 6) to remove Foggy's death from the storyline, nor did Scardapane have the option of scrapping those six episodes entirely. His argument was, after all, that he was making changes to save Marvel's deficit financing of the series, not to write it off.

Will Foggy be back? Elden Henson is booked for Season 2, but it's not clear if he'll return in flashbacks or as a hallucination. And the comics are not necessarily helpful in predicting the future of the TV show: Karen Page has been dead in the Marvel comic book line since 1999. Foggy died in DAREDEVIL #82 (February 2006), stabbed to death when visiting Matt in jail after Matt was arrested after being unmasked by FBI and police. Foggy returned in DAREDEVIL #88 (August 2006), shown to be in witness protection. I'm actually a bit surprised that Karen Page hasn't been resurrected, but her character in the comics wasn't nearly as vivid as Deborah Ann Woll and a lot of writers have preferred to have Karen haunt the book without being in it.

The odds are good that Foggy will return alive in BORN AGAIN because, from a production standpoint, if they've come to a deal with Elden Henson, they want to get as much use out of him as they can. But it's not a guarantee: Ben Urich is alive and well in the comics and dead in the Netflix show.

I'll post tomorrow about the continuity, and yes, I agree it's become a problem.

I have to do my taxes. I hope to have time to post tomorrow.

Spoilers for DAREDEVIL

To me, this is a sensible form of resistance. I know we would all long for something like Season 3 where Matt definitively and totally defeats the Kingpin for the second time. But life isn't always like that. Sometimes, the evil that we thought we took down rises again. Sometimes, it acquires political power again. And sometimes, we have to mount a resistance that isn't defined by a decisive battle but rather an ongoing and perpetual resistance of quiet and constant effort even as we accept a situation that we don't like.

I am excited for THUNDERBOLTS. I love Yelena! Sorry you couldn't make an advance screening! The movie is not available for me to see it until next week Friday. I've already bought my ticket.

I will post about DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN by the weekend. I've just been so busy with work. But I thought the season was good if awkward, and I was delighted with the return of Marvel's greatest hero in the finale.

Trump didn't end the trade war on China, he amped it up. Tariffs went from 54 to 104 to 105 percent.

I have mixed feelings about the US and mixed feelings about China. Full disclosure: my family business is based in China, so it's okay if you want to identify an obvious conflict of interest on my part.

However, US manufacturing and assembly is so based in China-manufactured parts and components that this seems like total self-sabotage to me. Even if you want to build cars in the US (and why wouldn't you?), you still need a lot of parts from China, and to make the American customer pay an extra 125 percent to the US for those components seems like absurd self-sabotage to me. China doesn't pay those tariffs; Americans do when they pay for cars and iPhones or replacement parts for these products.

As for China -- we can talk all day about the human rights and ethics of both the US and China, but does the US really have any moral high ground over China?

Superman can't get here soon enough.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oko6ZIv54k0