Red Ants Underneath @redantsunderneath - Tumblr Blog

Do you think that if you were falling in space... that you would slow down after a while, or go faster and faster?

TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (1992) dir. David Lynch

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds "Subspace Rhapsody" & Buffy the Vampire Slayer "Once More, With Feeling", requested by @thecaptainoutoftime

redantsunderneath

argumate

can anyone explain all the buzz around Oppenheimer? why is a biopic about a theoretical physicist (!) generating this much interest, I’m confused

official-kircheis

robin-hood-for-freedom

Marketing is certainly part of it. But also The Manhattan project tends to fascinate a lot of people, and Christopher Nolen has a lot of fanboys who will hype up anything he does

dr-retard

Yeah most of the hype I've heard for this movie is because it's Nolan.

It is pretty hype when they come out and say they used entirely practical effects for the movie

argumate

practical, effects—

poipoipoi-2016

What even is this movie?

Nolan

Zero CGI

Marketing has been entirely about how hellish this movie is

People leave the theater devastated

But that was Dunkirk which was an excellent movie I saw in the largest IMAX screen within 3 states radius and will never watch again so...

Bonus: 3 hours and 2 minutes long

Which gives you plenty of time for the extended Florence Pugh nudity

Which is why this movie is producing Age Gap discourse

But not geopolitics discourse since Barbie already slid into that lane

argumate

the way it’s inextricably linked with Barbie of all things

redantsunderneath

When they first announced that the two movies we're going to open on the same day, I got a chill down my spine, because, what's the phrase, the Kabbalistic implications are immense? The first thing we knew about Oppenheimer is that they were doing a "real" batter-my heart-three-personed-God nuclear explosion because Nolan needed to get it practically. The first thing we knew about Barbie is that the opening of 2001 a space Odyssey was important enough of a reference point to place it front and center in the first trailer. Both of these things smack of the fall of man. One of the great mimetic moments of the last decade is the sequence in Twin Peaks the Return part eight where the Trinity event is depicted, following which there is a unleashing of certain elements on the world, including a coarsening of the masculine spirit, a perversion of the feminine spirit, and the putting of some intrinsic American soul to sleep. There is a clear indication of the event as some sort of Jack Parsons style rite ripping open the veil between dimensions, and allowing some taint in. On the one hand this is about the postwar years as a slide into something somehow less noble, more base, distracted, and narcissistic. But part of it is envisioning the coming of age of the boomers as weaning on the fruit of this time specific "tree of smoke," the produce section of the knowledge of good and evil. Both these two movies are probably going to do something similar, imagine an symbolic order derived from the postwar period, our ideas of "the 50s" when we think of positive (America at the top of the world! modern design! nostalgia for cool progress!) and negative (alienation! conformity! disposability!) of the era, and both of them are going to be deeply gnostically indebted to a moment of "waking up" into the chaotic world that has been unleashed by stealing fire from the gods. Wait that's another metaphor, but you can throw Pandora in there too.

Oppenheimer centralizes the event, and I'm assuming they're going to ignore his communist party flirtations in the 20s and 30s at the beginning of the movie, and focus on will and achievement against the odds in the black-and-white world of da' Nazis, and then something bad creeping into the American psyche in its aftermath: J Edgar Hoover, the military industrial complex getting out of control due to Truman having the management style of boss baby, the general atmosphere of fear and distrust, etc. Meanwhile Barbie, keeping that 2001 intro in mind, is going to be about a version of the garden of Eden (one where Adam was created from the rib of Eve) where there dawns a kind of consciousness that this paradise is a demiurgic illusion. Ticky tacky, pink and purple boxes, all the same. This results in a journey out into the American desert southwest (of the real) which is somehow the heart of our collective 20th century fall from grace (too much to go into there).

The idea that Barbie is going this way is supported by many interview quotes and comparason points from people who have seen some of it, but it remains to be seen whether that whole thing will wash or not. I disagree that Oppenheimer is intrinsically uninteresting to a broad audience, as I'm old enough to remember when that shit was still really vital in the American consciousness (and I'm not that old), plus I think there's a good number of people that have read the Pulitzer Prize winning American Prometheus biography and see something in it that lines the horizons of Oppenheimer to something in our culture today (whether it's something is pedantic as global warming, or deep-seated like neoliberalism, the idea that a principled man is essentially powerless against the prevailing winds of how everything just is at the moment, and the futility of trying to turn the boat around before it goes over the waterfall).

Anyway, Kitty Oppenheimer didn't dress like that, but I assume they're going to touch on some of his habitual womanizing and her alcoholism, so i t's got some of that biopic juice to it, and it's not like anybody cared about John Nash. The focus is pretty squarely on the fact that it's a Nolan movie where he gets to do Nolany stuff.

argumate

to find the opposite of Kevin Bacon we must first determine what the opposite of something is, and we define that two objects can be considered opposites if they are connected by a relationship and by the inverse of that relationship:

opposite(x, y) ← ∃p, q. inverse(p, q) ∧ p(x, y) ∧ q(y, x)

one such relationship is “X starred in a movie directed by Y”, which is its own inverse, and we find that Kevin Bacon starred in Story of a Girl, a 2017 TV movie directed by his wife Kyra Sedgwick, who starred in Loverboy, a 2005 film directed by Kevin Bacon.

thus the opposite of Kevin Bacon is his wife.

argumate

of course we can simplify this considerably if we assert inverse(husband, wife).

redantsunderneath

I nominate Alistair E. Haywood. Kevin Bacon is a single white real actor that most people know, cinematically active into the present, characterized by a large number of "connections" with other actors such that the average "jumps" necessary to get to any other person in a movie is low (3.098). Given this definition, there are 583 actors that are more Kevin Bacon than Kevin Bacon, and the best Kevin Bacon is Samuel L Jackson (2.898). Nonwithstanding, Alistair E Haywood is not real, not white, and he represents multiple people that are not actors, standing in as a symbolic name representing the number of people that most people don't know (even in the historical record), active only in the earliest pre-history of cinema, characterized by zero "connections" with other actors (Bacon number effectively infinite).

If you don't like the non-real part of this, you can substitute Charles Marvin or Gilbert Domm, real people who are the only named figures we can find associated with the series of horse jockey still shots strung together to make rotoscoped "films" (the original photos where rough so the published as stills series were traced out) by acquitted cuck murderer Eadweard Muybride (this is a quite a rabbit hole - the Wikipedia page of "the Horse in Motion" has a lot of information and at least some of it is wrong, but the Muybride trial and aftermath are good reading). Charles Marvin was the person in the first of these published ("Abe Eddington" - all the series are named after the horses) apparently, although there were previous unpublished ones. The rider of Sally Gardner, another rotoscoped series, is known to be G Domm who is only known to be Gilbert Domm of Ohio due to believable but tenuous internet sleuthing. The only series that exists in photographic form that we can find (again, as far as I can tell, this is a shit show) is "Annie G.," which is the image most often shown, the one that has an identifiable black jockey, and one which we absolutely do not know who the rider is. The time honored tradition is to use the photographic one, and attribute names of other ones to it and pretend like it's the only one to simplify what's going on. There's some indication that the actual first one ever shot was one with a horse and buggy and a white non-jockey rider so I think we can all agree the narrative is probably better if we just don't pay any attention to the details and just cook it down. Alistair E Haywood seems like a reasonable way to round everything into a just so narrative, print the legend, etc.

I still haven't figured out the elusive "who has the highest defined Bacon number (11.604)." I spent an awful long time looking through all the William McKinley connections because he seems to be the Kevin Bacon of the late 1800s. Never got to an absolute conclusion.

I've not not been thinking this.

#Youtube #taylor swift

oursaviorkellinquinn-deactivate

ATTENTION

If you see this you are OBLIGATED to reblog w/ the song currently stuck in your head :)

morealias

The Killing Moon, Echo and The Bunnymen, Songs to Learn & Sing (1985).

redantsunderneath

You Don't Know Me, Ray Charles, Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music (1962).

twiststreet

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that very soon after the publication of Ulysses, critics started to speculate that the novel as a form mig

An essay on Ulysses by Sally Rooney.

redantsunderneath

It's Bloomsday again, innit.

kontextmaschine

"Why is he Miles Morales when that's his mom's last name?"

Because the Peter Parker-like alliteration and the non-whitebread "Morales" make it clear from the name alone this wasn't another Ben Reilly, but growing up Black in NYC in the crack era was a more interesting background for his cop dad.

redantsunderneath

Online direct information of Brian Michael Bendis' decision to name Miles Morales' father Jefferson Davis is not easily obtainable. You figure he's probably been asked that question a million times during interviews, so it must be something he routinely declines to answer. The stuff that leaks around the edges seems to suggest that Bendis had a childhood friend with that name and didn't take into account any of the associations. It's more likely that he realized the thorniness but thought presenting an element of reality in all its ironies and little tensions would be a good thing to explore. But the cultural E/M field at the transition between the aughts and the 2010s didn't remain static, and the charged elements involved started to react very differently after a couple of years.

The Watsonian version is that the father was a contrast to Miles, as smart kid that got sucked into some dumb stuff that set the course of his life as an informant under Nick Fury trying to take down the superhero criminal underworld, and his son follows a somewhat similar but "ultimate"ly vastly different path. This created a situation where, for the safety of his loved ones, it was decided that he would walk and Miles would take his mother's name as she was the one of the parents who wasn't an undercover cop working with very dangerous people. Note that the name gets increasingly critiqued in text, gets changed to Jeff in the PS game, and eventually gets changed in the universe (after the 616 transition which "sticks" as the movie version) to Jeff Morales, with him taking his wife's name as his family stabilized.

The Doyleist version is Bendis wanted to set up a bunch of subversions of expectation and make some bold choices to confront prior sterotypes but, like everyone was limited by experience, fallback archetypal forms (cliches), and lack of being able to tell the future. He wanted to set up a mixed race nontraditional family, depict a son having his mother's name, have a father with a name suggesting a fact-of-life unpleasant association, and create a conflict between what path is Miles going to take in life versus what he discovers his father has done. Note, if the decision was different, his name would've been Miles Davis, and I don't think this joke has absolutely nothing to do with why the names are what they are. But (as KM says above) the alliteration of the initial letters is pretty important, let's be honest.

A lot of decisions in how they frame the story are in an effort to "reclaim" various aspects of urban and ethnic New York popular image of the central park 5 era (which means depicting them) but then the character became really big, cultural preferences changed, there were pressures to deproblematize the story, and we are talking about comic book creators who have to write a lot under conditions that limit how thought out everything can be (with a lot of post hoc editorial refiguring). In fact, Miles now lives in a different universe with presumed to be basically the same family (unless they need to pull something) except they are from the this new one. Note how different the story adaptations are at every specific time period (e.g. the changes in the PS games' story) and the movies' need to translocate 100% of the shadow stuff onto an uncle so that his dad (who, remember, is named Morales now) can be the positive role model he doesn't realize he has in his always-been-stable family.

tonyzaret

Just read what has to be the worst Marvel fanfic of all time - EVERY character was one of the author’s OC’s and the only “ships” in the entire thing were the ones they spent like 600 pages in trying to find some whale called Moby Dick

redantsunderneath

"Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair."

Yeah, sure. No shipping of Ishmael and Queequeg at all.

janmisali

I think most people just don’t like how “dwarf planet” is a separate categorization from planets instead of a subtype like Gas Giants, Rogue Planets, etc etc

this is demonstrably not what people are saying they dislike most of the time. it is mostly people saying they think pluto shouldn't be considered a dwarf planet, or that dwarf planet shouldn't be a category at all

commie-bongwater

But.. these people are saying Pluto shouldn’t be a dwarf planet or that dwarf planets shouldn’t be a thing specifically because dwarf planets are not considered planets.

If some astronomical society came out and said that dwarf planets should be redefined as a type of planet instead of their own thing, I’m very confident that all these “Pluto is a Planet” people would be on-board

janmisali

you're overestimating how much thought the average pluto reclassification truther has put into their belief system. in my experience, most of them just want things to go back to how they used to be. the model of the solar system they learned in elementary school was correct, any deviation from that is those evil scientists messing things up for no reason

blogofex

If I may poke this badger a bit, much of the problem is that science education has bad epistemics.

Classification schemes are not actually facts about the external universe; they are simplifications of observed data providing convenient cognitive handles for related phenomena. However, we teach science as if its classificatory schemes were factual. "Pluto is a planet" and "Pluto has an orbital period of 247.94 years" are both treated as being the same kind of fact, despite the fact that the former is a shorthand for how we classify celestial objects while the latter is something you can actually measure.

So when a bunch of astronomers take a vote and declare that Pluto isn't a planet, this gets mentally processed as if the scientists are changing a fact about the physical world. Which is obviously a thing that they can't do! It's fundamental to the process of science that the physical world is not up for a vote, and so they correctly intuit that something hinky is going on when a bunch of astronomers get together and vote that Pluto is no longer a planet.

It's not helpful to describe this attitude as "anti-science". These people have picked up on the genuine fact that there is something weird about the reclassification of Pluto. But the weirdness is not that the astronomers are lying, the weirdness is that the education system is lying to you by making you learn classification schemes as if they were universal facts and not human constructs.

redantsunderneath

Sure, but the education system is not doing that bad of a job of incorporating new types of knowledge into what was the evolving concept that started as "those objects that have weird paths in the sky with respect to the other things we call stars" to "oh, they're doing that because everything is revolving around the sun, which earth does too, it's a name that means thing that goes around the sun" to "there's lots of things that go around the sun, it just needs to be big and round." This isn't challenged effectively for a long time due to the nature of discovery of the objects, so if you only add three in a century and a half (the first such additions since before we can remember, and replacing other formerly conceptualized planetary bodies such as moon) you can kind of naturally add those to the bin and teach that. My point is it is a matter of allowing the evolution of what we call these things to take place over time, and evolving school curricula have a place in this, but when the PR campaign is "Pluto is not a planet, and if you believe different you're a moron and an asshole" it makes sense that morons and assholes will be the ones who react. It doesn't help that the intra-discipline controversy continues behind the scenes, and the current sorting system that they moved to replaces one problem with a bunch of other problems and is probably worse.

fruityyamenrunner

my position is they are all planets, even the moons. even the asteroids become planets once somebody loves them enough

love really is what makes a nonstellar celestial body a planet - this is quite obvious to me, and I do not mean this to be at all mystificatory -- anyone who thinks for a minute will know what I mean and see I am not *wrong*, but the international astronomical union will never accept this because they are emotionally constipated rationalists.

the people who are angry about pluto are angry because their love object has been thrown into the ranks of some unloved celestial objects, the "dwarf planets", with the rejection confirmed by a strange insistence, against how modifiers work in English, that "dwarf planets are not planets". It is absurd and, looking at the history of science here, it's not difficult to tell that the astronomer behind it has emotional issues of some kind. He discovered Eris, Sedna and Orcus and presumably loves them, but he ended up in some kind of strange emotional trip where he had to ritually "kill" Pluto and castrate Lowell/Tombaugh before he could consummate his love.

I don't know, fucking astrologers. This sort of thing, projecting emotions into planets, is definitely the most astrologerlike thing that astronomers still do, the kind of thing Scientists did all the time, actually, that's out of fashion, so no wonder they're emotionally constipated.

Is the correct attitude therefore to love the dwarf planets? Yes, but they're not making it easy.

For one, there are too many of them all at once.

For two, I think only *now*, about 20 years into the post-Quaoar era, do they all even have names. You can't love an alphanumeric designation.

three, back in the 1920s when nobody knew what a planet looked like you could excite people with orbital elements and a 🌟 because that's what planets looked like in those days. Nowadays, a planet has high resolution pictures and science fiction stories about men from there, pop culture bullshit named after it. The outer planetary probes have produced, as it were, pornography which has made it difficult to love a mysterous and dark lady.

Four, unfortunate but true, people did at least have some understanding of the classical lore, so they had some associations with "Neptune" and "Pluto". But basically nobody has any pre-existing lore to leverage with the 21st century planets because they are learning who Sedna or Eris or Makemake are at the same time as they are learning about the planets.

The bigger bodies are easier to love because, of course, they are most like our planet, and you can see them quite easily through telescopes, and there are thousands of years of love poetry and, yeah, the pornos, but the current NASA ideology of calling them all "worlds", even comets and asteroids once they get a robot and a camera (and therefore love) there is basically correct. They are one of the few organisations willing to do the hard work to make the *IAU voice* NOT PLANETS, YOU BUSH SUPPORTER loveable.

Except for understandable political reasons like that janmisali bitch, they can't call them all "planets" so they have to call them "worlds".

redantsunderneath

Michael E. Brown grew up in Huntsville and went to "Gus" Grissom High School. Reality needs better editors (at least better than Mangas) to say "come on, no one's going to buy that." "Is there porn of it" is not a bad possibility for a planetary criteria, though.

janmisali

I think most people just don’t like how “dwarf planet” is a separate categorization from planets instead of a subtype like Gas Giants, Rogue Planets, etc etc

this is demonstrably not what people are saying they dislike most of the time. it is mostly people saying they think pluto shouldn't be considered a dwarf planet, or that dwarf planet shouldn't be a category at all

commie-bongwater

But.. these people are saying Pluto shouldn’t be a dwarf planet or that dwarf planets shouldn’t be a thing specifically because dwarf planets are not considered planets.

If some astronomical society came out and said that dwarf planets should be redefined as a type of planet instead of their own thing, I’m very confident that all these “Pluto is a Planet” people would be on-board

janmisali

you're overestimating how much thought the average pluto reclassification truther has put into their belief system. in my experience, most of them just want things to go back to how they used to be. the model of the solar system they learned in elementary school was correct, any deviation from that is those evil scientists messing things up for no reason

blogofex

If I may poke this badger a bit, much of the problem is that science education has bad epistemics.

Classification schemes are not actually facts about the external universe; they are simplifications of observed data providing convenient cognitive handles for related phenomena. However, we teach science as if its classificatory schemes were factual. "Pluto is a planet" and "Pluto has an orbital period of 247.94 years" are both treated as being the same kind of fact, despite the fact that the former is a shorthand for how we classify celestial objects while the latter is something you can actually measure.

So when a bunch of astronomers take a vote and declare that Pluto isn't a planet, this gets mentally processed as if the scientists are changing a fact about the physical world. Which is obviously a thing that they can't do! It's fundamental to the process of science that the physical world is not up for a vote, and so they correctly intuit that something hinky is going on when a bunch of astronomers get together and vote that Pluto is no longer a planet.

It's not helpful to describe this attitude as "anti-science". These people have picked up on the genuine fact that there is something weird about the reclassification of Pluto. But the weirdness is not that the astronomers are lying, the weirdness is that the education system is lying to you by making you learn classification schemes as if they were universal facts and not human constructs.

redantsunderneath

Sure, but the education system is not doing that bad of a job of incorporating new types of knowledge into what was the evolving concept that started as "those objects that have weird paths in the sky with respect to the other things we call stars" to "oh, they're doing that because everything is revolving around the sun, which earth does too, it's a name that means thing that goes around the sun" to "there's lots of things that go around the sun, it just needs to be big and round." This isn't challenged effectively for a long time due to the nature of discovery of the objects, so if you only add three in a century and a half (the first such additions since before we can remember, and replacing other formerly conceptualized planetary bodies such as moon) you can kind of naturally add those to the bin and teach that. My point is it is a matter of allowing the evolution of what we call these things to take place over time, and evolving school curricula have a place in this, but when the PR campaign is "Pluto is not a planet, and if you believe different you're a moron and an asshole" it makes sense that morons and assholes will be the ones who react. It doesn't help that the intra-discipline controversy continues behind the scenes, and the current sorting system that they moved to replaces one problem with a bunch of other problems and is probably worse.

janmisali

I think most people just don’t like how “dwarf planet” is a separate categorization from planets instead of a subtype like Gas Giants, Rogue Planets, etc etc

this is demonstrably not what people are saying they dislike most of the time. it is mostly people saying they think pluto shouldn't be considered a dwarf planet, or that dwarf planet shouldn't be a category at all

blogofex

Along those lines, I like this video from an actual astrophysicist PhD saying that the "dwarf planet" category is bad (I agree with her), while repeating many of your overall points:

redantsunderneath

You can skip to about 20 minutes in as most of what's valuable is in the last third, unless you want to hear the word capitalism a bunch. Still, I think this topic is interesting to look back on as the primary problem was not that the IAU decision was illegitimate (it was - conference held in Prague, vote at the end of the last day when most people had left, 4% voting, planetary scientists not well represented, come on they had email back then - but that's a thing that has to do with the politics of a body within a field of science and who is interested in that) but that we were at the end of a phase where people were crowned as the legitimate spokesman for science, and the person who was designated in that role had this tendency to attempt to devalue other majesteria and act like scientific decisions are an inherit property of the universe that only rubes and stupid people would not accept as the natural law that had been rendered from on high. Also, philosophers are losers, we have no need for any other type of thinking.

This person then went on to gloat about how he "drove the getaway car" on popping a cap in Pluto's ass for years which I don't think he understood how apt the analogy was. There should've been some linguistic humility, more of an approach of "we're doing this for this reason because science needs words that are agreed-upon, but those concerned with the popular imagination, you do you." I think there was an active resistance to acknowledging that this was an ongoing controversy and the matter was far from settled internally (and the definition was, as in the video, pretty sucky for a number of reasons), but the person I'm talking about did have a very "culture war" approach to science versus all other fields of human endeavor. It almost didn't matter what the matter at hand was, a scientific body had said something, and there is a general non-acceptance of this something, so we have to wade out there and call anyone who pushes back anti-enlightenment. Dangerous approach to the subject of what is true.

official-kircheis

Which President of the United States is most likely to have personally killed another human?

George Washington

Andrew Jackson

William Henry Harrison

Ulysses S. Grant

Theodore Roosevelt

Dwight D. Eisenhower

John F. Kennedy

George H. W. Bush

Donald Trump

Someone not listed above (specify)

Voting ended onMay 28, 2023

rendakuenthusiast

Cleveland's service as sheriff was unremarkable; biographer Rexford Tugwell described the time in office as a waste for Cleveland politically. Cleveland was aware of graft in the sheriff's office during his tenure and chose not to confront it.[45] A notable incident of his term took place on September 6, 1872, when Patrick Morrissey was executed. He had been convicted of murdering his mother.[46] As sheriff, Cleveland was responsible for either personally carrying out the execution or paying a deputy $10 to perform the task.[46] In spite of reservations about the hanging, Cleveland executed Morrissey himself.[46] He hanged another murderer, John Gaffney, on February 14, 1873.[47]

isaacsapphire

What on earth is going on with every "which president was most likely to have done X?" having Grover Cleveland as a surprise strong contender?

Anyways, Washington, Jackson, Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, and Eisenhower all had military careers with battles and such, so like, I think all of them are solid contenders.

For folks unfamiliar with American history, George Washington basically started the Seven Years War, Grant was The Big General of the American Civil War, Teddy Roosevelt fought in the Spanish American War, and Eisenhower was The Big General of WW2. Jackson was notable in the War of 1812, which was a Napoleonic wars sideshow/American Revolutionary War 2.0 from the British being short on sailors to fight Napoleon and being like, "American sailors are basically British sailors, so it's cool for us to impress them into the Royal Navy, right?" and the Americans objecting to their citizens being kidnapped by the Royal Navy.

st-just

There is, like, zero chance Jackson and Teddy didn't each have a personal bodycount.

jeweled-weevil

Every single one of them except Trump was active duty military. As mentioned above, along with Bush and Kennedy serving in World War II, and Harrison in Tecumseh's War and War of 1812.

Trump and his Bone Spurs got out of serving... but I wouldn't be surprised if he had murdered Someone.

isaacsapphire

Yeah, I realized last night that I somehow forgot about Kennedy's WW2 record and Harrison's Indian Wars record. And Bush #1's WW2 service record.

Like, bone spur boy seems pretty unlikely compared to all these military men with combat experience.

redantsunderneath

How the hell is William Henry Harrison at 1%? That's the obvious answer. Even the other military men that saw direct combat (didn't go straight to officer school or start in command positions) weren't involved in ground raids intermittently over 20 years. Were there other presidents who was campaign-nicknamed after a battle they actually fought in (Roosevelt is the only comparison, but that was like 2 weeks in country to address identity dissonance not a career)?

funnytwittertweets

modmad

as someone who boarded on several Barbie movies I can tell you with absolute confidence that the entire crew I worked with would also. like to make Barbie vs predator

dagny-hashtaggart-deactivated20

The next Predator movie should be set in the movie theater in which you’re watching it. Go to a movie and without warning an alien will hunt you for sport.

redantsunderneath

fantastic-nonsense

I'm so tired

fantastic-nonsense

For everyone who wants the explanation:

DC and Marvel Comics start doing variant covers in 1986, creating an inflationary industry bubble where speculators buy variants in the hopes of selling them later for boatloads of money.

The speculation bubble pops in the mid-90s, causing mass industry upheaval and the closure of several comic companies.

Marvel nearly declares bankruptcy in 1996. As part of the company's (successful) effort to save itself, it sells the adaptation rights for its most successful characters (Spider-man, the Fantastic Four, and the X-Men) to Sony and 20th Century Fox.

As a result, when Marvel is finally in a place to do its own movies, they only have adaptational access to the Avengers, several b-listers like Iron Man and Captain America, and a bunch of Marvel’s relatively non-profitable characters.

Disney buys Marvel in 2009 after the success of Iron Man and creates the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Disney hires Joss Whedon to helm Avengers (2012), which is a critical and commercial hit and launches the MCU into a global success story.

Whedon is re-hired to direct Avengers: Age of Ultron, which introduces Wanda and Pietro Maximoff (Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver). Due to Fox still owning the rights to the X-Men, Wanda and Pietro’s origins are changed. They’re introduced as non-mutant characters whose powers originate because of human experimentation with the Infinity Stone.

As part of the company’s attempt to draw in new comic readers by creating synergy between the MCU and the comics, Marvel retcons Wanda and Pietro Maximoff’s origins in the comics so that they are no longer Magneto’s children. This is incredibly unpopular with existing comic readers and doesn’t seem to draw in new readers, but the creative choice stands. This kickstarts a variety of changes (some small, some large) to various characters to align their comic depictions more closely with the MCU.

In the comics, Kamala Khan is introduced as an Inhuman and the new Ms. Marvel in 2014. She becomes one of Marvel’s major “legacy hero introduction” success stories. Critically, she's also the only major Inhuman besides Medusa and Daisy Johnson/Quake to actually gain any sort of traction with the public despite the Inhumans existing since the 1960s.

The Inhumans, a group largely associated with the Fantastic Four, are introduced into the MCU via the Agents of SHIELD tv show in 2015. The MCU attempts to give them their own spin-off in 2017, which is a critical and commericial failure and is cancelled after one season.

The MCU debuts a Captain Marvel movie starring Carol Danvers in 2019. It’s a success, leading Kevin Feige to greenlight a sequel.

The MCU’s next movie, Avengers: Endgame, sets up a status quo that is conducive to introducing several younger legacy characters such as Kamala Khan.

Simultaneously, in the comics the X-Men and Marvel’s mutants enter “The Krakoan Era,” where all the mutants separate themselves from humanity, move to a sentient island called Krakoa, and create their own nation. This era has included the resurrection of several formerly dead mutant characters via the “Resurrection Protocols.” All mutants are functionally immortal at this point.

Disney buys 20th Century Fox in 2019. After the sale is completed, they gain back adaptational rights to the Fantastic Four and, more relevantly, the X-Men (and thus all of Marvel’s mutant characters).

When the MCU Ms. Marvel show comes out in 2022, Kamala Khan’s background is changed to make her a mutant, capitalizing on Disney’s new rights to the X-Men and making her the first mutant introduced into the MCU.

In 2023, Kamala Khan is randomly murdered in a Spider-man comic for shock value. Fans speculate that this is happening so Marvel can resurrect her on Krakoa and retcon her background, making her a mutant to create synergy with her MCU depiction and fold her into the X-books.

...also variant covers are once again alive and well and so is the speculation market (for both variant covers and major comic events like character introductions and deaths), meaning that her death is also probably partially fuelled by an attempt to appeal to that market. The comic industry has learned nothing from the 90s and we are all suffering for it.

redantsunderneath

This is off by just enough to completely frustrate me into writing something. There’s a bunch of little iffy details but the main thing is that it misplaces the real historical roots of Fox's rights to the X-Men, although the information around the impact of this and the looming ret-ret-con are largely correct. Variant covers are a blight, but they only became truly industry health threatening in and of themselves in the 2000s, especially starting 2010-12; before then they were one facet of the event minded beanie baby-mentality - get-cher multimillion-seller, speculator driven pumped up numbers and leave retailers holding the bag.

One notable detail: the meme itself mentions 1986 Marvel variant covers, when the 1986 thing it is referencing is DC’s Man of Steel number one (Marvel didn’t start doing this until 1990), the pertinence of which was being the first comic printed with more than one distinct cover solely aimed at moving more product. That is selling it short, though, as it is maybe more important as an event comic that is part of a broader push in which upselling units by leveraging the in-a-bind retailer's relationship to FOMO addled customers, not variant covers specifically, is what makes it the progenitor of what tanked the market in 1995.

Forget that, though. If you want root cause analysis that goes back to this historical level, I think you have to start with the nature of Marvel to begin with.

Marvel/Timely/Atlas has always been particularly thirsty, cringingly so. It was not unusual in the 30s for all the teeming numbers of comic companies formed by hustlers just trying to make a buck to be in the mode of making money however they can, grabbing for quick attention. However, all the other ones (besides killer instinct National and the related companies that eventually wound up being DC) cashed out at some point, or went bankrupt and mostly folded into DC itself (not only due to the nature of the market, but due to DC’s killer instinct of lawyering and backstabbing its way to dominance… the story of Max Gaines being liberated of All American comics is really quite incredible), leaving Timely as the last thirsty jackal alone with the Lion. This ethos stayed with Marvel into the 70s and 80s (due in no small part to Stan Lee being the perfect guy to embody this kind of short-view shucking and jiving) in the form of lame and low rent merchandising efforts, to the extent that their big initiative for decades was having some shop on 36th and 7th or something make cheap looking outfits that they could aggressively market to people’s birthday parties. Their mass media was cheaply made (e.g. cut up "cartoons") and their handling of the movie properties was really ill considered. Even before the events of 2 below, they were already swimming in bad-deal options they were waiting on to expire, only to have the holders make something really bad to keep the rights. The company was always trying to get out from under some or other bad deal in order to make another bad deal, usually with the company involved in the first bad deal making more money than Marvel. They didn’t seem to think about trying to find people to work with who would make something worthwhile, or just make something at all. The bluebook value on my five-year-old car is greater than the amount of money they eventually made from the first Blade movie.

The company gets acquired by Ron Perlman at the end of the 80s. You can think of him as a junk-bond king, etc., but the nature of him at Marvel was one of a protracted pump and dump scheme where he loaded the company with trust-emulating assets in an effort to make it a look a much bigger affair, acquiring Toy Biz and a distributor, to make the company look like it was worth a lot when he eventually flipped it. One thing that is poorly understood is that the company did not need to go bankrupt - they were not in great financial shape, but the bankruptcy was initiated by Perlman so that he could override the board of directors because Ike Perlmutter and the members aligned with him were already trying to wrestle control away. It was during this period where the X-Men movie rights were being dithered with, as Fox had an option stemming from the cartoon that was going to make it difficult not only for Marvel to seek other options, but for them to get significant financial windfall from the project even if it was completed and made money. It was in this environment that a deal was struck that, to honor Marvel’s other options, the other rights holders could use the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, but that they could not be used “as X-Men” which meant they could not be mutants, the concept of which was from then contractually obliged to be a function of the Fox held X-Men property.

There’s not enough emphasis here on the sour grapes aspect of attempting to will the Inhumans into replacing the X-Men in the popular consciousness, and how poorly this went. The idea in the comics was to minimize the X-Men, and promoting the Inhumans as way more important, while using the characters in their televisual produced entertainment to outcompete Fox. The ret-cons are particularly ugly, no one bit on this at all not even a little, and the TV efforts have not exactly aged into a fond memory. However, there is a lot of residua from this lying around the comics including a “white event” like thing where they tried to create a bunch of new mutants–that–weren’t–actually–mutants in a single event to replace the population, and maybe show Fox who’s boss.

The Merrill Lynch deal that allowed them to use 10 characters as collateral for a loan to start Marvel Studios in earnest (it already technically had been around for eight or nine years) was after Marvel entered a phase of aggressively trying to buy back the rights of as many characters as possible. Iron Man, Hulk, Black Widow, etc. had already been optioned out when the plan was hatched and had to be re-acquired before that deal closed. It’s no doubt that the reason this was doable was that by focusing on the Avengers as a bigger thing than the sum of its parts, the use of the less recognizable characters made it easier to recover rights piecemeal, but it's not like Tony Stark was just laying there.

Did Liz Holmes just do gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss in the wrong order?

sungodsevenoclock

Learning that part of Elizabeth Holmes' megalomania was making everyone read "The Alchemist" making me ask:

If you were an egomaniacal tech startup entrepreneur, what book would you foist upon your minions?

dagny-hashtaggart-deactivated20

I feel like going proper obscure would probably be somewhat incompatible with success as an egomaniacal startup entrepreneur, so in the spirit of going with something fairly well-known like Coelho’s book, I’ll say The Name of The Rose.

youarenotthewalrus

Trying desperately to come up with an answer that's an actual book but deep down I know that it would absolutely have to be Homestuck.

Also a valid answer.

redantsunderneath

If I were Holmes, it would be Pale Fire. And I'd deny that there was any epistemologic ambiguity whatsoever. Forget Botklin, the book is about needing to explain a poem to stupid people who just don't get it.

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