There is a whole lot more to a healthy democracy than “I voted”.

China doesn’t need to retaliate. Chinese cinema goers are overwhelmingly choosing domestic product over import in recent years. For 2024, for example, 80% of the Chinese box office went to Chinese productions.

The problem is he brought a deck of poker cards to a chess game.

The movies normalized The American Way™ as the default way of doing things. The billionaires then financed the people pitching The American Way™. Without the first, the second wouldn’t work.

The Chinese market is huge, yes, but increasingly turning away from Hollywood productions to homegrown ones. In 2025 for example 哪吒2 (Nézhā 2) broke scored over $2 billion at the box office, with a record-smashing $1.96 billion of that coming domestically. By way of comparison Captain America 4 only managed $14.4 million so far, a dramatic drop from 2016’s Captain America 3 returns of $180 million in 2016.

For reference, even CA3’s $180 million is an order of magnitude smaller than Nezha 2. CA4’s is two orders of magnitude smaller.

Now this is still true: China’s theatre-going audience, estimated at over half a billion people, is larger than the entire population of the USA. It’s still a hugely important market. But, for example, in 2024 the Chinese box office was estimated at ~6 billion dollars total: and 80% of that went to domestic films. The best-performing foreign film of 2024 (Dune 2) only made $48 million, ranking it about 8th. 7th was 维和防暴队 (Wéihé Fángbàoduì/Formed Police Unit) and it made over $120 million.

I’m pretty sure that the Chinese market for Hollywood films is vanishing.

I hate you so much right now. CHOKE ON THE UPVOTE, JERKFACE!

Oh, the world’s worst-run and most corrupt convention is doing something bad?

In other news, water is wet.

🙄

He’s got a big apology video up somewhere on Youtube. If you search on “Vaush” and “lolicon” you’ll probably get to it.

What does this look like to you, Sparky?:

(Also: opening up a Star Trek community war is “casual”? 🤣 )

Either TOS or Enterprise. Because they were boldly going. TNG was always flying around like a delivery van. Voyager was fleeing home. DS9 was sitting there and waiting for things to come to them. (Well, for the bits I watched; I gave up after the first season and understand things started to actually happen after that.)

I haven’t watched any Star Trek property after Enterprise.

You be you. I’ll be me. I find “endless struggle” a boringly tedious and draining way to live. Not for me to choose for you. Nor vice versa.

Or I can ignore walled gardens. Which is what I do.

This is almost word for word what’s been said about every new technology or social trend for my entire life. “This new thing is worse than everything that has ever come before and the Apocalypse is nigh.”

Sorry. After hearing this over and over and over and over again all my life I just don’t take this kind of moral panic seriously.

The paywalled one?

Weird cults victimizing people are literally prehistoric in age. It’s a bit “hue and cry”-ish to go into a moral panic over “AI cults”.

There’s plenty to criticize in modern “AI” (beginning with “it doesn’t work”). Let’s not make stupid reasons up!

Fair. Fair.

What do you think the difference is between being “not indemnified” and “liable”?