Diamond Age Wagie (Consider Phlebas)

Seeing folks entering the bargaining stage of denial where they move the goalposts from "pedophile ring" to "blackmail op" to "Can't deny Leon Black hit on a masseuse." Instead of embarrassing yourselves this way, you could simply admit you fell for a mass delusion, gave up on norms of logic & evidence, were an irrational sucker. You can promise yourself in the future not be such an infantile sucker.

This is forever controversial but IMO Spider-Man should have organic web-shooters. It's always seemed silly to me that his backstory is that a spider bit him and gave him Spider-Powers™ ... except for his most famous spider-power, which he made in a lab. For branding, you know.

I started teaching 4th graders graphic design at an afterschool program, and this one kid does not engage with any of the material, but he comes into class and furiously googles the Titanic for an hour every week

No. As Robert Kirkman recently spoke of at Comics Pro, Invincible was a low selling comic that he propped up with Walking Dead sales. It ended as a result of the market not reacting to it. He had stated this repeatedly. Yet, as animation it is a massive success. Biggest zero to hero success of my lifetime. So please retire that take.

There is a case to be made for taking succesfull comics/graphic novels and adapting them to film (road to perdition, 300 etc..), but superhero specific movies? The charcter and story needs that brand recognition for widespread appeal before a studio is willing to risk $$$ on. Its why we see the same characters replayed again and again, and most likely will continue to. Smaller comic supers are more of a risk because they arent household names, but it may not always be that way. Social media can create widespread brand awareness overnight. Invincible by Ottley, Walker and kirkman may be the best example of a newer superhero successfully making their way to the bigscreen, but then it seems less the studio (image), and more what the creators are doing with their creation that has got them there.

Grok Imagine

Some people at frontier AI labs told me they believe startups are over. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI will absorb every industry as AGI nears. Coding today, science, medicine, and finance next. Then everything else. If they’re right, that’s a pretty boring end of the world.

zoomers aren't having sex but also zoomers are spending like two to three hours a day on tiktok which explains the no sex thing, I had the grad students send me their screen time stats