Let's judge a movie by its title!

I'm not saying you're dumb if you liked
it, and we can still be friends, I'm just
saying that I'll probably be judging you.

In the grand internet tradition of having strong opinions about things that don't really matter and that have no real bearing on one's life at all, I think Avengers: Endgame is a dumb title. Dumb and generic. They might as well have called it Avengers: The Sequel. To be clear, my opinion is fairly colored by my opinion of Avengers: Infinity War, to which Endgame is the sequel. I found AIW to be tedious AF. It was a bloated, confusing CG-heavy mess of a-huh? AF? It means 'as fuck.' It's something the kids are saying. I try to stay on top of these things.

Anyway, I just want to be clear that my fan-ish complaining is about how I think the title is dumb in and of itself and while I really didn't like the last movie, my beef is with part II's title. The trailer itself is whatever. If you recall, the last movie's cliffhanger saw the scrotum-chinned Thanos use the magic rainbow glove to finger-snap half the universe's life forms out of existence for Malthusian reasons or something. It's hard to say.

Maybe next Thanos could wish for some higher stakes for the new
movie. Because for real, where do you go after 'murders half of everybody'?

Incidentally, yes, pre-modern
Avengers is an actual thing.

This movie picks up with the remaining cast looking sad and dejected about their predicament and trying to find a way out of it. Which they totally will. Is it a spoiler if we're just predicting a predictable movie? I mean, Disney isn't going to kill off half a dozen successful and marketable characters and the next thirteen Marvel movies aren't going to be about the world moving on after half the global population got raptured. I'm not saying that that wouldn't be interesting, just that it's not happening. I think I read somewhere that the Renaissance in Europe and the rise of the middle class were ushered in in part by the plague causing a labor crisis and making it basically their Thanos. So they could go that way, it's just that no one wants to see Avengers: Class Mobility in Pre-Modern Europe, so Endgame it is.

But these movies aren't really about being interesting, they're about hitting box office projections. That's not necessarily a criticism, I mean, it's a business, I know. I get that if you're spending $400 million on a movie, you kind of have to play it safe and Endgame as the title for the last movie in the story arc is definitely playing it safe. The real bummer here is that despite all this, I'm probably going to sit through this one too.

Black Panther draws his power from all the previous Black Panthers
to carry the mantle before him. He gets his invulnerability however
from the fact that his movie made $1.2 billion for Disney.

Is 'garbage human' too harsh?

To be clear, I'm referring to humans
who are garbage, not our nation's many
hard-working sanitation workers.

Or is it just harsh enough? And has he tried not acting like some anti-democratic garbage human? Because that would seem like the first step towards-huh? Who's an anti-democratic garbage person? Why I'm glad I pretended you asked. I'm referring of course to North Carolina state representative David Lewis, who is the sponsor of a piece of legislation designed to rotate the chair of the state election board. Sounds fair, right? Yes, but like pretty much everything Republicans do and say right now, it's actually some partisan, anti-democratic garbage human horseshit.

The bill would establish that the chairperson in odd-numbered years would be from party that has the most registered voters which in North Carolina would be the Democrats. While in even-numbered years the chair would go to the party with the second most registered voters, so Republicans.

"Wait a minute...don't elections happen in even-numbered years?"

-Some stock photo person

"I was simply correcting ballots that
were incorrectly filled out as votes for
a Democrat. I don't see the problem.." 

-Dowless, noted shitheel

Yup, that's right, Lewis's bill would make sure that Republicans, whom you might remember as the party who, having been dealt a bunch of losses last month, are right now busy spending their last few weeks in power in Michigan and Wisconsin hobbling the offices they lost and screwing over poor people. In fact, the North Carolina state ethics board has refused to certify the 9th district's results because it's pretty clear that some asshole called Leslie McCrae Dowless apparently stole and tampered with the absentee ballots so that Republican Mark Harris would win.

You almost have to admire the hutzpah it takes for Lewis to propose such a nakedly partisan bill designed to hand disproportionate power to the party most people don't belong to. On the other hand you totally don't have to admire the hutzpah. At all. 

"Hey, I'm just trying to carry out the will of the voters...
specifically, and exclusively the ones who voted Republican."

-David Lewis, North Carolina Rep. and 

symptom of our crumbling democracy

"White people...disenfranchising minority
voters? I'm shocked I tell you. Shocked!"

-an easily shocked person

I mean, it sounds more like election fraud which, amazingly is the very thing David Lewis uses as the rational behind his attempts at passing voter ID legislation. There's something like 0 cases of proven voter fraud every year, but Republicans keep trying to pass ID laws to combat the non-problem, but such laws often have the practical effect of disenfranchising minority voters which, unsurprisingly, would benefit Republicans. So in many ways Representative David Lewis is the actual problem he pretends to fight. But wait, it gets better...or worse depending on how entertaining you find the death spiral of American democracy. 

"Huh? Shame? I think it's pretty obvious
I don't have the capacity for shame."

The rotating election board chair and the voter ID laws you can almost try and pass off as efforts to make voting more accurate and equitable. You know, if you squint, turn your head sideways and are intellectually dishonest. But the GOP has been fighting with the courts all year about district lines drawn by Lewis who said at the time, and I shit you not, he really said this with his word hole: "I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats. So I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country."

Representative Lewis, Leslie McCrae Dowless and the GOP in general are acting like goddamn fascists. They've spent the last decade gerrymandering districts and disenfranchising voters to make sure their backwards, plutocratic, Reganomic-boomer nonsense is intractably lodged into American law long after their rapidly aging base has died off. Which is the exact opposite of the way democracy is supposed to work. 

"Annnnd done. Great work everybody. So, how long do you think
it will take before we fuck this up? A hundred years? Two? Well,
whatever, we'll be long dead. Whose up for sangrias?"

-John Adams, 1788

In related news...

What? Don't look at me like that.
I mean, they might as well.

The Republican Party recently retired their classic elephant mascot in favor of the herpes virus. According to the RNC:

"We feel that this new mascot better reflects the party's philosophy going forward. Like the mighty herpes virus, you're never getting rid of us, no matter how hard you try."

-RNC Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel 

on the party's surprising move

Did they just magic wish glove Daredevil?

I've not seen very much of Daredevil on Netflix, but everyone seems pretty keen on it. What I have seen was pretty great, and the reviews are positive and so I think we're all understandably confused about why Netflix just cancelled it just a month after cancelling the also popular Luke Cage.

Yeah, they also cancelled Iron Fist, but no-one really liked
that one. What? Don't look at me like that, it's true.

'We have enough money,
thank you very much."

-Netflix to fans

According to this, Mathew Ball from Amazon's streaming service-who has nothing to do with Netflix, I guess he's just offering streaming service insight-Marvel was fighting with Netflix over how many episodes to produce. Netflix wanted fewer, Marvel wanted more so the compromise was to cancel the shit out of a bunch of popular, well received comic book adaptations. Weird right? I'm not like a business person and so take my read on this with a grain of salt, but don't they want to, you know, make money?

Sure it's a business, but maybe it's also about
artistic integrity and-why are you laughing?

You'd think Netflix and Marvel could get over their respective deals and work something out but here we are. I suppose it probably makes business people sense, but it just seems counter intuitive that they'd cancel something successful. On the other hand, after everyone declared Star Wars fatigue after Solo, I wonder if this isn't Disney trying to avoid making everyone sick of comic book adaptations-which, too little too late, but at least that'd make this a more understandable, maybe even artistically motivated decision.

Like, there are too many comic book adaptations right now. Disney, having assimilated Marvel on its quest to own everything, might be trying to make sure the market for superheroes doesn't collapse under its own weight. I mean when it comes to TV, viewers are a finite resource and with three hundred comic book shows floating around right now it's probably not the worst thing in the world that they just magic rainbow wish gloved half their Netflix series.

Now before you point out the obvious parallel to what I'm suggesting here, let me remind 
you that A: unlike Daredevil and Luke Cage, everyone Thanos finger-snapped into oblivion 
is 100% coming back in part II, B: Thanos should have just wished for more resources, 
and C: Infinity War was dumb. It was a dumb, boring movie. There, I said it. 

Do they let people in prison use Twitter?

Upon hearing of Bush's passing, I think a
decent number of us pictured Dana Carvey.

So I never spent much time thinking about George H. W. Bush. Like, I was a kid when he was President and I watched the news and everything, but I didn't like, have strong opinions about him. It takes years of observation and disappointment to cultivate cynicism in our leaders. It was a different, less vitriolic and Fox News-y time, and the sexual misconduct allegations were decades away so he was just the President.

Could we...could we just pay Martin
Sheen to be the President as Bartlet?

I'm not bringing this up because I think he was like a great President or something, I'm mentioning it because I was reading this article about how the note he left for Bill Clinton during the transition has been making the rounds online. Presidents apparently leave notes to their successors in the desk drawer, I think there was even a West Wing episode about it. I'm not sure how long this has been a thing, but H.W.'s seems to be the oldest a lazy internet search will come up with, and since I'm not getting paid or anything, let's assume it is.

And-huh...you know, speaking of fictional Presidents, is it me, or did George H.W. Bush look like someone you cast as the fictional President? I mean, here, let's compare:

This is actual President Bush, before we
had to clarify which one he meant.

Here's Michael Douglas as the President
in The American President.

Kevin Kline in Dave...

...and the President from the NES game Bad Dudes.

I don't mean this as a reflection on him as a President necessarily, but goddamn, he was...generic-looking. Of course this probably is just a hazard of having two hundred years of almost exclusively middle-aged, white male Presidents...

"Yeah, but what are you going to do about it?
Elect a black guy? Or a woman? Fat chance!"

-Republicans 

up 'till 2012

Pictured: the moment Arsenio Hall
called the '92 election. 

In fact, I suppose a lot of our problems can be traced to two centuries of middle-aged white guys. Wait, what were we talking about? Oh, right, the letter. Whatever we may think of Bush the First, or may not think of him as the case may be, the letter is kind of touching. Here's this guy, this one-term President who kind of got his ass handed to him in the election thanks to a shitty economy and the fact that his opponent could play the sax, and he's writing-like by hand-writing a letter wishing his successor well.

Anyway, here's the letter. You'll note that Bush doesn't even call him sucker or complain about immigrants costing him the popular vote:

Yes, presidents do face unfair criticism
sometimes. Other times they pardon a
bunch of officials who traded arms for
hostages and the critics have a point.

Dear Bill,

When I walked into this office just now I felt the same sense of wonder and respect that I felt four years ago. I know you feel that, too. I wish you great happiness here. I never felt the loneliness some Presidents have described. There will be tough times, made even more difficult by criticism you may not think is fair. I'm not a very good one to give advice; but just don't let the critics discourage you or push you off course. You will be our President when you read this note. I wish you well. I wish your family well.

Good luck,

George

Don't let the critics get you down? I wish your family well? Good luck? Did people really used to talk like this? Yes it turns out. There was evidently a time in American politics when elected officials showed or at least feigned respect for their colleagues on the other side.

The two would later become friends and do charity work
together. Clinton even gave Bush socks with his pictured on
them...which, is that weird? Like, that's a little weird, right?

P.s. Oh, and Bill if Nazis ever make a comeback,
whatever you do, denounce them immediately.
Only an idiot would embolden white nationalists
by not saying anything. I mean, fucking Nazis... 

Obama, George W, and Clinton all left kind of similar letters to their successors, in all of these cases members of the other party. Yet in every case they congratulated them and gave them their best wishes-something that in the last couple of years has become unfathomable. I just can't help imagining what kind of letter Trump is going to leave. I mean, assuming the handcuffs aren't too tight (yes, I'm knocking on wood). I don't think I'm being unfair when I suggest that his letter to his successor will be somewhat less gracious and eloquent than those of his predecessors.

In fact, I don't think I'm too far off-base when I suggest that his letter-or, let's be real here, his angry and weirdly mis-capitalized farewell tweet, will probably involve some bragging, some unsupported conspiracy theories about Crocked Hillary and some bullshit about how the media has it in for him.

Although I suppose Trump's successor should just feel
lucky if he doesn't leave them an upper decker. 

Times that try nerd's souls

"But as president everything he does is, by
 definition, legal. Ipso facto, emptor caveat."

-Rudy Giuliani, lawyer/buffoon

Sure, it may feel like our country is tearing itself apart like never before. I've heard it said that we're at our most polarized since the Civil War. Left vs. right, Red State vs. Blue State, Democrat vs. Republican. Americans are divided over things like health care, immigration and how many crimes the President is allowed to commit before we, like you know, ask him to stop. But as someone who grew up in the eighties and nineties, I can tell you that we've been through worse.

Some of you might be too young to remember, but we once had to choose between three entirely different 16-bit video game consoles. It...it still keeps me up some nights.

You don't know the things I've seen...

"Super Nintendo or Super Scamtendo?
We'll have more after the break."

-Anchors on slow news days

It was a conflict that pitted brother against brother, sister against sister, parents against children because now they have to buy another goddamn gaming system. 

"You're telling me the new Super Mario won't work on my kids Nintendo? And now I've got to buy them a Super Nintendo? Sounds like some kind of scam to me."

-Parents in the 90's,

 angry about technology

These were difficult years for our nation, so you're probably wondering why I'm reopening these old wounds. Welp, it's because someone's making a miniseries out of the book Console Wars. Never heard of it? That's probably because you don't care that much about the video game industry and the shake up that happened between the eight and sixteen bit console generations. Congratulations, you probably lead a well-rounded life full of fulfilling relationships and diverse interests.

And that's swell, but do you have to keep shoving it in our faces?

"Hey Tim, I'd like to engage in sexual
intercourse with you. In exchange for
professional considerations, of course."

I however, suffered through both Console Wars the book and Console Wars the console wars. I say suffer through because while Console Wars is undeniably well researched and full of rich detail about the people and events of perhaps the most formative years of the modern video game industry it's also kind of shit. The author, Blake J. Harris, for reasons passing understanding decided to dramatize his otherwise informative story, inventing stiff, unnatural sounding dialogue for the 'characters.' It's off-putting and reads like a novelization of the harassment prevention training videos you had to watch at work.

"Yesssss...words sustain us...all that is
written is but grist for our mill..."

-Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO

But since everything that exists is fair game for streaming services, the TV show is happening whether I think it's a good idea or not. And as awkward as it is I guess Harris's choice of a narrative structure probably does lend itself better to television. And it's being produced by Seth Rogan and Evan Goldberg who, among other things produced Future Man, which is great and it's being directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts who did Kong on Skull Island which was also pretty good. So I guess there's at least hope that the series can rise above Harris's dialogue issues.

On the other hand, it's a clunky narrative about some fairly unlikable business people negotiating deals, stabbing each other in the back and neglecting their families all in the pursuit of increased revenue and stock options so like...good luck.

Pictured: Ted Kalinske, then CEO of Sega of America and-no, not the Unabomber...
you might be thinking of Ted Kazynzcy. Although Ted Kalinske is partly responsible
 for Sonic the Hedgehog, so it's not like he doesn't have a lot to answer for as well.

Biloxi Boo's

So at a campaign rally-yes, a campaign rally for the midterms which are over, but in Missouri they're having a run off. Evidently Missourians are having a hard time deciding between Democrat Mike Espy and noted racist and public hanging supporter Cindy Hyde-Smith for the U.S. Senate.

"I'm sorry, are you saying it's racist to send your kid to a whites-only school and
wish the Confederacy had won the war so we could still own-oh, now I hear it."

-Cindy Hyde-Smith, seeing the error of-

just kidding, she still loves segregation

Pictured: Roy Moore, seen here
inexplicably not going to prison.

Yup, Missouri Republican voters have their heads so far up their own ideologies that they'd rather have a racist than a Democrat. According to Missouri RNC committeeman Henry Barbour: "We don't want to have an Alabama." Which, sure. Nobody wants an Alabama. But Barbour is referring to last year's special election in Alabama in which Republicans ran Roy Moore, a rapist, against Democrat Doug Jones. Jones won by twenty thousand votes and that's super, but should it have been that close?

Where was I? Right, the campaign rally for lynching enthusiast Cindy Hyde-Smith where an appearance by Donald Trump is seen by voters as a plus and not, you know, a skin-crawling and cheeseburger-scented kiss of death. I'm beginning to think that this is a sign that Republicans, like as a thing, are just different from us.

Any rational person would be unnerved by the
thought of Donald Trump lurking behind them.

Above: the opposite of what he just said.

Anyway, Trump had this to say of the asylum-seekers he recently sent armed U.S. troops to the border defend us against:

"You know you hear these stories about, oh, they don't commit crimes, we commit crimes, they don't commit crimes. Always it's us. No, no, it doesn't work that way. It's fake news."

-The President, rolling out 

all the old favorites again 

...yeah, but if you go by the numbers, immigrants do commit less crime. Of course, if you're going by the numbers Hillary Clinton should be President so here we are. Speaking of crime, did you know that Democrats love crime? According to Trump, "Democrats have become the party of caravans and crime." And "Democrats want to turn America into one giant sanctuary city for violent criminals and MS13 gang members." 

"Damn you Donald Trump! Once again you've seen through  our carefully spun web of
deceit. Yes, there's nothing the Democratic party loves more than crime and murderous gangs."

-Nancy Pelosi on Donald Trump's

first-rate detective skills

It 'd like a Rorschach test. Either you see
troops using tear gas on asylum seekers
and are appalled, or you're a Republican.

Wait, party of crime? Some strong words given the number of Trump administration officials who've been indicted, convicted or struck plea deals and the fact that the President is himself under investigation-but ok. Anyway Hyde-Smith, the likely winner of today's runoff, is a public execution fan who misses the antebellum South (which is weird because Missouri wasn't a Confederate state) and her rally yesterday went bananas for the President as he spouted racist nonsense about immigrants and crime, and then blamed the migrants for getting in the way of our tear gas. Holy shit, right? I mean, how are we all from the same country?

Today in grim portents of a bleak future:

Hey, it turns out that despite reassurances from a reality show host with no background in climatology whatsoever, climate change is not a hoax but actually happening.

"No shit..."

-The people who used to live in what is now a

 burnt-out hellscape just north of Sacramento

Oh wipe those stupid grins off your
stupid faces. You're generation is still
doomed, it's just that so are we now.

According to the Fourth National Climate Assessment, which is due out next month, but released today, more on that in a bit, but according the report our impact on the environment is directly responsible for the uptick in natural disasters like hurricanes and wild fires. It explains that our continued recklessness when it comes to not ruining the planet we live on will have a devastating consequences for our lives now and is not, as we've hoped up to this point, just some vague menace our children and grandchildren will have to deal with long after we're all dead.

"What can I say? We hate prosperity."

Still don't care? Well then hold on to your portfolio, because not only will the effects of climate change continue to kill people, it will also harm our economy. Projected losses to the U.S. economy could be in the hundreds of billions-yes, with a 'B'-of dollars. Can you believe it? Our precious economy! And after all that hard work Donald Trump has done to make it so great, here comes climate change to ruin everything. That's the Democrats for you.

Wait, is the economy doing well, or just the people who play the stock market? I ask because everyone else has like three jobs and still can't afford rent...

"Whaaat? No, no, the economy's doing great! Trust us. We'll just keep doing
our stock...things. and it'll start trickling down you the rest of you any minute now."

-People whose job is to make 

money using other money

"Pfftt...I can quit any time I want."

-America

Oh and if your wondering why this shocking report about our increasingly irreversible fate was released on the day after Thanksgiving when everyone is busy recovering from their turducken hangovers and stocking up on unbeatable holiday deals on consumer electronics, stop wondering. It's because the President is hoping we won't look up from our Oculus Rifts and spongy, leftover stuffing long enough to see how utterly screwed we are by our almost comically stubborn refusal to do anything about it.

"Yes...they should find new jobs.
Our future literally depends on it."

-The 325 million of us
who aren't coal miners

Wait, are we stubborn or just powerless in the face of lawmakers whose campaigns are funded by the industries whose emissions are ruining the climate? Maybe both? But since we're so screwed anyway, why worry? Sure, we could shift away from our carbon heavy economy and towards a more sustainable model, but at what cost I ask you? Eating less meat? Riding our bikes sometimes? And what about America's fifty thousand coal miners? What are they supposed to do? Find new jobs? In this economy? Wait, is the economy great or not? I forgot where we landed on that...

Anyway, the White House isn't commenting on the report yet, but here's what the President had to say-well, tweet, last Wednesday, while California was still on fire:

Um, it's called climate change now, and it
just burned down eleven thousand homes.