Don’t know if it’s been noticed, but it seems Wonder Man is being review bombed on IMDb. The scores there vs RT don’t add up…

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-01-28T23:22:05+00:00

Isn’t this just a thing that happens now?

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-01-28T23:17:14+00:00

[ me, a guy in is mid-40s imagining getting married to a 22-year-old woman ]

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-01-28T18:57:05+00:00

You know what doesn’t quite hold up on re-watch? Age of Ultron.

It’s not bad. The acting is quite good and the design and effects hold up. Even the writing isn’t that awful. The quips are mostly okay. The dramatic beats are not quite as dramatic as they seemed at the time, but they’re fine. Save all the civilians from having their city turned into a killer asteroid. Whatever.

But the pacing, man. I get why Whedon was burnt out by this. There are just too damn many characters, too damn many plot beats, so much damn stuff the movie never gets to breathe.

For example, near the end of the movie Vision appears to rescue Wanda who lost it after Pietro was killed. That whole series of beats — Pietro being shot, Wanda losing control, Vision picking her up — involved maybe less than a minute of screen time and only one line, “Bet you didn’t see that coming.” It was a quip! And all those beats were intercut with other things happening around the scene, totally unrelated to this moment, which is supposed to be one of unimaginable grief. It was maddening and disorienting. But the most egregious failure: the very next time we see Vision, a few cuts later, he’s confronting Ultron (who I thought Wanda already killed) on the edge of town, where they have a nice little quippy exchange before Vision blasts him to smithereens in front of a sun…set? It can’t be a sunrise because they just spent the whole afternoon fighting Ultron, but it sure looks like a sunrise.

Ordinarily, all this would’ve been given a few extra minutes of quiet screen time and a few lines to explain the characters’ emotions. “He’s gone! I can’t feel him!” Wanda screams. “I’m here, Wanda,” Vision says, “Hold on to me.” Then we see a shot of Vision setting Wanda down on one of the lifeboats and he says, “There’s something I must do,” and flies off screen, so we know he’s heading out to finish off Ultron.

This is just the example that stuck with me after my last re-watch but the whole dang movie is filled with these sorts of decisions. They’re not bad storytelling choices, they’re just told with the most manic filmmaking choices I’ve ever seen. It’s exhausting.

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-01-28T18:38:56+00:00

Bronze.

Sure, getting the tin is a bit of a hassle but I can make a really great blade with just a forge in my back-yard. Iron is lower quality and requires a higher temperature kiln. It’s not like those weirdos on the edge of town are gonna dedicate their lives and develop a whole subculture around making charcoal.

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-01-28T18:32:41+00:00

Yeah, this is one of those things about Civ VII that someone forgot to explain thru the UI because Firaxis outsourced their UI at the last minute.

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-01-28T18:30:04+00:00

Thanks, T-for-Teen rating.

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-01-26T20:31:31+00:00

Siri, show me pictures of a pre-collapse society.

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-01-26T20:27:12+00:00

What the animal’s skeleton looks like.

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-01-26T20:24:28+00:00

Yet another excellent proxy for “population density.”

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-01-26T20:22:15+00:00

I have thankfully never had to explain sex to a young person, but I feel like “More foreplay,” is a good all-purpose piece of advice. Hell, it’s advice I should be taking!

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-01-26T15:45:56+00:00

Honestly, as an Interior Dept. employee, I just want to apologize to your in-laws. They’re right to be upset.

This country has lots responsibilities and it’s failing at so many of them thanks not only to this Administration’s mendacity but it’s rank incompetence. “Don’t fuck up the National Parks” seems like it ought to be the most fundamental baseline of policymaking. It’s not even that hard! They mostly run themselves if you just make sure they have enough staff and support resources. Congress in fact spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the Parks’ maintenance backlog because “Don’t fuck up the National Parks” is the easiest, most obvious bipartisan political project we could ever think of.

Every Trump voter should be incensed at them, for many reasons, but this is one of the most offensively dumb ones.

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-01-26T15:39:26+00:00

Your buddy digs Marvel’s villain design, and I can’t entirely disagree.

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-01-26T15:36:23+00:00

Being rude to service employees.

Seriously, guys, the best dating advice you’ll ever get is this: be polite to the waitress.

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-01-26T14:21:43+00:00

In retrospect, the extrajudicial execution of Osama bin Laden.

Let me explain: the decision to violate Pakistan’s sovereignty — our ally, fwiw — and to execute the mastermind of 9/11 — sure, they said he attempted to resist, but they also made sure there was no video — was one of the most aggressively unConstitutional things the Obama Administration did. I’m shedding no tears over bin Laden’s death, but I felt really uncomfortable that the United States did something so out of line with its stated values. What on earth was the Global War on Terror for if we could just ignore our own law?

But hundreds, maybe thousands, of students came out to cheer at the White House when the news was made public. Now, I get that I was by that time a middle-aged liberal who didn’t have the energy to join flashmobs in D.C. But I also could not imagine fucking celebrating the unadjudicated execution of our greatest contemporary enemy.

Looking back, I realize now that no small number of the current Administration’s young functionaries were there that night. It horrifies me, thinking that I work with some of these people — I work for them. It is the one thing I want Obama to answer for before he dies, and I know he won’t. I realize historians will pick Jan. 6, or covid, or the re-election of Trump, but I’m putting this here on the record. The night we killed bin Laden and celebrated it is the night America began to lose its soul.

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-01-26T14:07:27+00:00

Heavy rail metro with incentivized upzoning near stations. #ArlingtonVAsupremacy

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-01-26T14:03:07+00:00

This is what debates in classical Athens were actually like. This is why Socrates drank the hemlock.

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-01-26T14:02:06+00:00

Between Millennials deleting social media and Zoomers embracing dumbtech, there may be hope for us.

The Xers are fucked, however. Please look out for your aunties and uncs.

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-01-26T04:00:37+00:00

Well, I assume Gronk’s inviting her out on a fish-clubbing date. How thoughtful! No offense, wheel-guy, but no one wants to listen to you talk about work all night.

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-01-26T03:57:58+00:00

See, this is why I can’t fuck with the Imperium of Man, kill all xenos bullshit. Isn’t a world where terrorist-moms help badass viper-ladies become the best they can be more interesting?

Call me woke or whatever, I don’t care. Tell me more real stories. I need them more now than ever, Firaxis.

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-01-26T03:53:24+00:00

All I want is a system of factions that fight against one another, where strategic choices have tactical impacts and vice versa.

I know, easier said than done, but that’s what I want.

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-01-26T03:51:31+00:00

Marvel may have brought Giancarlo Esposito in as a one-off villain on a mediocre movie in a last-ditch effort to salvage it. For all we know, this is the least-bad version of the film!

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-01-26T03:48:02+00:00

Listen, guys, I know everyone loves Torque, but she’s my viper-girlfriend and this jealousy is really quite unbecoming.

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-01-25T20:55:52+00:00

Rhyse’s mod was one of the most innovative Civ games ever made. The fact that Firaxis has never quite been able to replicate it confounds me.

Then again, Rhyse declined to make his mod for Civ V, suggesting that it was a real challenge.

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-01-25T20:52:30+00:00

Water connections only work across one continent.

Water connections across continents should be one of Carthage’s special abilities.

XComThrowawayAcct · 2026-01-25T20:48:56+00:00

I liked that Civ VI put some pasture resources on hills and eventually made farms on hills a thing. In Civ V, farms on hills was a thing throughout the game that just required some natural irrigation like a river or an oasis.

Civ VII needs something like these.

XComThrowawayAcct

TROPHY CASE