Sternhammer

The bigger the budgets, the less appetite for risk. These huge superhero franchises are so different in scale from the original comics in this way.

Nah, your just use your increased intellect to get other people to push the button for themselves, increasing the pool of intelligent potential friends available to you.

Actually this reminds me of a story I read last year where two people are in a race to massively increase their intelligence. Neither can tolerate the potential threat the existence of another hyper-intelligent person holds so it’s a struggle to the death. If I remember correctly they gain there ability to effectively read people’s minds by reading body language, micro expressions, etc., develop new systems of logic and hyper-efficient language to think in and have an entirely mental showdown at the end.

Unfortunately I’m too stupid to remember the title.

Well said.

I’d also point out that dehumanising a subgroup is a powerful technique used to manipulate people. Tell people who to hate and you can get them to go along with anything while they’re focused on the scapegoats. Popular scapegoats include:

• immigrants (taking our jobs while, paradoxically, being a welfare burden)
• religious groups (Jews, Muslims, etc.)
• welfare recipients (dole bludgers, a burden on society)
• criminals (war on drugs, tough on crime)

Any time someone is demonising a group theres a good chance they’re just trying to manipulate you.

Indeed. As always when it comes to identity there’s a difference between how we see ourselves and reality.

There are several aspects of the Australian identity that look unflattering to modern eyes—gambling and drinking to excess come to mind. These things change slowly but they do change.

Incidentally I do think innovation is a valued aspect of the Australian identity.

I played Frontier Defence obsessively for years and maxed out all of the titans (which really enhances the experience). A fully unlocked Scorch is such a beast!

It’s still possible to play on console but hard to get games near me (Australia). Luckily it’s quite playable on more active European or North American servers.

I was replying to Tekila’s comment about ‘real life’ cows which I think are best thought of as ‘sentient’ but I appreciate your point.

This feel close to my experience. I can still remember the feeling of leaving the cinema after seeing Iron Man. It felt quite inspirational, like you could build things and improve the world. I’m not sure the film really stands up to closer scrutiny but that’s how it felt at the time.

More films dilute the experience until eventually it feels very thin and repetitive. It also becomes clear that most of these stories revolve around people hitting each other repeatedly until the third act and that everyone’s powers are arbitrarily elastic.

I also think multiverse narratives can backfire. Oh no! The baddie won/hero died/world ended! But it’s OK, in another universe/dimension/reality the baddie was defeated/the hero is still alive/the world was saved. So, every event can be rewritten, there are no lasting consequences, nothing really matters. Why care? Multiverse settings are writers wanting to have their cake and eat it but that just seems to make for bland cake.

Sentient: able to perceive or feel things.

Sapient: 1. wise or wanting to appear wise 2. relating to the human species, of the species Homo sapiens.

I think players are desensitised to unnatural dialogue. For example, to my Western ear lots of Asian games seem to have weird dialogue, no doubt due to poor translation. (Kojima is known to insist his dialogue be translated strictly and literally from the Japanese which explains, partially, why his games feel pretty strange. Plus Kojima is bonkers.)

I hope this isn’t Microsoft becoming more Apple-like. That said, if this leads to a restriction on the use of cheat-capable controller accessories such as the Chronos Zen then it could be a significant positive for FPS console gamers.

It reminds me of Apple locking faster charging and data transfer on USB-C to their own proprietary USB cables.

Are you sure of that? It was certainly rumoured before the release of the iPhone 15 Pro that Apple would require MFi cables for high speed data transfer but I don’t think that turned out to be true. As far as I can tell any high speed USB-C cable will allow full speed transfer from an IPhone 15 Pro. It might need to be a Thunderbolt 3 cable, especially for recording to external SSD, not sure, I’m no expert, but I don’t think it needs to be an MFi cable.

The main image is a still from an episode of Space 1999. No idea which episode but the space suits are distinctive.