“You trust everyone and think everyone you ever met is, like… beautiful.”
“Maybe that’s the real punk rock.”

It feels like in order to get anything made in Hollywood these days, it has to be part of a franchise. So if it’s becoming more difficult to tell an original story, it can be smart to do the next best thing: use IP to explore interesting themes and make a statement. After all, some of our favorite genre movies are the ones that take familiar characters and tropes, and then use them to do something more.

This is a movie about one of the most famous superheroes of all time. It includes cartoonishly evil villains, space aliens, sci-fi portals, and a flying dog. It’s also a movie that is overtly political and willing to criticize the American government. While other studio blockbusters steer clear of politics, this one drives fast right on down the middle.

At some point in the last decade, the term “virtue signaling” was popularized online, referring to the act of expressing moral values for the purpose of showing others how good of a person you are. In reaction to this, a new phenomenon has emerged: “vice signaling.” This is when a person proudly expresses immoral or offensive opinions, seemingly with the intent to show how much they don’t care about what others think or feel. It seems like there’s a lot of that going around these days.

We’re all taught that we should be kind and honest and care about others, but doing those things requires vulnerability and introspection. It’s much easier to build a wall around your feelings and be an asshole. Plus you get to feel like you’re different from everyone else, like a rebel: “I’m not gonna be what they want me to be.” A younger version of me certainly saw the appeal.

But what happens when this attitude becomes mainstream? Are you really so different from everyone else when everyone else is as much of a dick as you are? Are you actually a rebel when your behavior and statements resemble those of the president of the United States? This is the political climate in which Superman is released.

Right now, a lot of people think it’s cool to not care about others, so this movie gives us a hero who is radically compassionate. Granted, it’s expected that the hero will be a good person who tries to save people, but it does feel like a response to the current time. And it goes even further by making it political: sometimes doing the right thing means going against the American government.

Superman is meant to show us the best of what humanity can be. So in a time when people seem encouraged to do their worst, Superman returned.

It’s kinda strange that it’s all over now, right? I mean, The Avengers are gone. No one else is coming to save the day?

Simple plot and predictable structure, but a lot of fun and a good message at the heart of it. The message isn’t groundbreaking, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently so it worked for me. I like that they’re using a Marvel movie to talk about mental health and loneliness. It’s not saying much, but most of these movies don’t say anything at all, so I’ll take whatever I can get.

It’s kinda strange that the golden age of the MCU is over now. The original Avengers are gone. The last few years of this franchise have felt more unstable than ever, and we don’t know if anyone else is coming to save the day.

In her book, MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, Joanna Robinson writes the following:

Whedon wasn’t trying to set up Thanos as the Avengers’ next foe. Rather, he just wanted to provide an explanation for where Loki’s army came from, seasoned with a bit of fan service. For its part, Marvel Studios was so focused on making sure that everything came together for The Avengers that it approved the inclusion of Thanos without much thought about what that might mean for the movies to come.

I think sometimes fans give Marvel Studios and Kevin Feige too much credit for the first ten years. They speak about it as though they had this grand plan for everything and it was all figured out years in advance. There’s some truth to it, but there was also a lot of making it up as they go. Even the Iron Man post-credits scene was, as Jon Favreau said in an interview with Robinson, “purely a love letter to the fans and something that would be a fun easter egg for people who sat around until the movie was over.”

Feige was involved in that scene, of course, because he knew that the specific dialogue would have important implications later on. For example, in one version of the scene, writer Brian Michael Bendis had included references to mutants and Spider-Man. Obviously these had to be cut because Marvel Studios didn’t have the film rights to these characters at the time. But I think there’s another reason that Nick Fury isn’t very specific in that scene: Feige was leaving his options open.

One of my biggest criticisms of the MCU in recent years is that it feels like they give a character a movie or show, not because they have a good story to tell, but rather because they just want to set up that character for some kind of crossover later on. It actually feels too planned out. The studio must strike a balance between overplanning and completely winging it.

Thunderbolts* feels a little more like the old Marvel Studios format. Most of these characters come from a previous movie or show, but they don’t feel like they were created purely for this movie to exist. It feels more like someone looked at the roster of bad guys from the past and said, “You know what would be fun…”

I’ll acknowledge that this is almost certainly not how films are actually made, I’m simply talking about how the movie feels. I’ll also acknowledge that the characters John Walker and Valentina Allegra de Fontaine were definitely introduced purely as set up for something else, but it was never very specific. To me, the inclusion of those characters always felt like Feige saying, “Put them in a show and we’ll figure out something later.” In fact, the time between The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Thunderbolts* is the same as the time between Iron Man and The Avengers: four years.

Overplanning in this franchise can lead to quality problems, where characters and projects feel forced, but overplanning can lead to other problems as well. For example, imagine you planned an entire saga of shows and movies around one particular actor to be your main villain, and then this actor is convicted of domestic assault. What do you do then? Apparently you load up some trucks full of money and send them to the homes of Robert Downey Jr. and the Russo brothers.

I don’t know who is coming to save the MCU. Maybe it’s Downey and the Russos, maybe it’s the Fantastic Four, or maybe it’s someone else entirely. Regardless, I want to believe that the team at Marvel Studios is recalibrating how much they outline this universe, even if some of that is due to external factors out of their control. Not having total control is good for creativity; they certainly had constraints when they were first starting out. It’s good to give yourself flexibility; you’ll break very easily if you’re too rigid.

In a 2017 interview with Robinson for her book, Feige said, “Don’t worry about the universe. Worry about the movie.” This isn’t an amazing movie, but at least it doesn’t feel like it’s only worried about the universe. I give Thunderbolts* three and a half stars.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, it seems that disinformation has increased tremendously. Seeing the lies and conspiracy theories about masks and vaccines made me realize how important it is for people to receive proper science education. However, I’ve been unable to articulate what that would actually look like in practice. Until I came across this piece.

What we don’t teach is how science functions as a social institution that allows tens or hundreds of thousands of individuals to work together collectively to undercover the workings of the physical universe. Everything we teach about the process of science involves that which one can do alone at night in an empty laboratory.

This gets at the core problem of how schools currently teach science and how to fix it. We teach young people how to do experiments, but we don’t teach them what that looks like when scaled up to the level of global cooperation. And if people don’t understand that, they’re more vulnerable to disinformation about it.

We need to teach people why science deserves their trust – and this requires teaching how science works as a social institution.

Now we just need to reform the entire American education system to reflect this ideal. That can’t be too hard, right?

Forty years of context may seem like overkill when it comes to examining the FTC’s attempt to block Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision, but I think it is essential for multiple reasons.

Not only is this a great summary of The Console Wars (a topic I’m ashamed to say I don’t know much about), but it also made me realize that the way I’ve been thinking about it was a product of my generation.

I mostly payed attention to video games when I was a teenager, around the time of the 7th generation consoles. Here’s how Ben Thompson describes this era:

In this new world it was the consoles themselves that became modularized: consumers picked out their favorite and 3rd-party developers delivered their games on both.

This time period defined game consoles for me, and I think some part of me believed that this is the way it’s always been and always should be. But reading through the history makes it clear that this is not how it’s always been, and maybe my opinions on how the gaming market should function are simply a product of my age rather than a conclusion I arrived at rationally.

If I continue to argue that the gaming industry should be like the way it was when I was a teenager, I might as well be saying, “The way it was when I was a kid is how it always should be!” And I don’t want to be one of those people.

I wrote a story for a friend. But in the end, he didn’t treat me like a friend. And I’m hurt.

A sad story with a happy ending. It’s so rare that a brilliant work of art is voluntarily placed in the public domain.

One of the worst things about western religion is the emphasis on good vs evil.

Dividing the world in such a black-and-white way can lead to truly awful behavior. For example, if your group is good and the other group is evil, there’s no incentive to be kind and compassionate. After all, if something is evil, you don’t try to work with it or understand its point of view. You don’t even have to be nice. Why would you? It’s pure evil. The only thing you do with evil is defeat it. You simply must destroy it by any means necessary.

In America we’re now seeing this play out on a mass scale. Religion has taught people to view the world this way, and now it’s been weaponized for political gain by bad actors like Donald Trump, QAnon, and Libs of TikTok. We now have large numbers of people who believe that Democrats are doing child sexual abuse literally all the time, and also they’re making kids gay.

And why are the Democrats doing this? Because they’re evil. No other explanation is needed. Republicans are good, Democrats are evil. That’s it, that’s the entire philosophy.

Western religion teaches people two things:

1. Evidence doesn’t matter
2. The world is black and white

Basically, everything is either good or evil, and you don’t need to be able to prove it.

On the other hand, eastern religion tends to focus on enlightenment vs ignorance. This is much more useful and healthy in my opinion.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is about to reach the conclusion of its biggest story arc yet: The Infinity Saga. So before Avengers: Endgame comes out, I want to reflect on why I enjoy this series so much. It all comes down to the shared universe.

Shared universes are not new. Movies, TV shows, and comic books have been doing it since the beginning of their existence. But the way comics have done it has always been different. Movies and television will either make a direct sequel, or give a character their own spinoff completely disconnected from the original source material. Sometimes crossovers happen, but they usually have little to no affect on anything once it’s over. But in comics there are multiple stories happening at the same time, and what happens in one story can affect another. Crossovers actually matter.

When Marvel Studios decided to start making their own movies, they used the same strategy from their comics. From day one it was designed to be a shared universe where crossovers happen and have an affect on the world. This amount of connectivity between movies had never been planned out like this before. At the same time, most of the films can stand on their own. Each movie is pretty self-contained while also being part of a larger universe. Marvel tells one story per movie, but they always remember that this isn’t the only story.

One of the things I really like about this format is that it gives us time to get to know the characters. The characters are the thing people love most about the MCU and part of that is because we get to spend so much time with them. This also means that when an Avengers movie happens, they don’t need to spend time explaining who everyone is and what their powers are. You have that information because you’ve seen the other movies, which means they have more time for the actual story.

You’ve probably seen a movie (or a TV show) where everything comes together in the end and it blows your mind. It feels like you have been rewarded for paying attention and watching the entire story. It’s one of the most fun experiences you can have while watching a movie. Marvel Studios has done this on a much bigger scale. Over the course of 11 years, they’ve made 22 movies that are all part of a larger story. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is one massive audience reward.

I also really appreciate the casting of these movies. First of all, Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark is the greatest superhero movie casting decision of all time. As for the other characters, there’s a lot of them and all of them have been cast really well. There were a couple of mistakes in the beginning, but we got there eventually. For the most part, they got it right the first time. Not only are all of these actors amazing, but a lot of them are pretty big stars in their own right. And many of them don’t just play a character once, they keep coming back. Marvel Studios even found a way to take a bunch of these actors and put them all together for two of the biggest movies ever made.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is doing something that has never been done before. When they started building this universe, there was no template to work from. They had to figure out how all these pieces fit together as it was happening. Furthermore, this new and interesting idea could have been botched in the execution. But while Marvel Studios was inventing a new kind of cinematic storytelling, they also made a bunch of great movies. And making a great movie is really hard. It’s amazing that they have made 22 movies and most of them are at least decent. Some of them are pretty fantastic.

If I had to rate the MCU on a 5 star scale, I would give it a solid 4 stars. It’s not always amazing, but it’s still pretty great. Recently I realized that because I’ve given every movie its own rating, I could find the average and get a rating for the MCU as a whole. So I did the math and it came out to 3.5 stars, but my overall feeling is still higher than that. It’s because the thing I enjoy the most is not specific to any individual movie, it’s how they’re all connected. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is greater than the sum of its parts.