There’s also the possibility that Vance invokes the 25th two years and one month into Trump’s term. He gets to be either the guy that saved America or the guy who made the tough choice for the good of the nation. Then he’s POTUS for nearly two years and can still be elected to two terms. If this is his plan, he’ll start sounding half-way reasonable in six months.

We also have stripes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaschko's_lines

I’ll give one. Despite Sheridan and Delenn giving that speech about rejecting the Shadows and Vorlons and making their own way, the Vorlons won. The Army of Light, the Rangers, and the Interstellar Alliance are all in line with Vorlon philosophy, they run on Vorlon tech, most members were Vorlon allies, and they still oppose former Shadow allies and destroy Shadow tech when they find it.

Another is that the Shadows should have had their own Kosh, a character who was still comitted to the original goal and hadn’t succumbed to motive decay. Shadows believe in strength through adversity, so one setting up obstacles with the expectation that the cast would overcome them and grow stronger cpuld have been interesting.

Er, no. A Linux program from five years ago probably won’t run on a current distro if it hasn’t been maintained in four years. A Windows program released twenty years ago and never patched has pretty good odds of running on Win10 without even needing to touch the compatibility tab.

Which they could clean up, but it would mean killing backwards compatibility, which is arguably the only selling point of Windows.

The new body is distinctly inhuman, so it’s also transhumanism.

This isn’t even a hypothetical. There are countries, such as Russia, that actually do this.

I think that might be the default mode for cats.

They’re pissed about sportsball because sportsballers started protesting while still respecting the flag by kneeling and now they refuse to watch sportsball.

Strange New Worlds is also a potential entry point.

It won’t work. LLMs work on probability. They’d have to be an absurdly prolific poster (probably at least a quarter of all comments present in the LLM’s training data) in order for their spelling to get incorporated and not just tossed out as a typo. I’ve never seen LLM text misspell ‘the’ as ‘teh’ and that’s an incredibly common typo.

Cheap to duplicate is great for them. That means larger profit margins.

Like Bruce in Batman Beyond. Typically he was on comms helping Terry be Batman, but it was always memorable when he went into the field.

I once had someone flip me off because I put my turn signal on. We were in the right lane, I was turning right, and the left lane was completely empty.

Yes. The pupils were generally only visible in the pre-rendered videos.

He actually did that. Part of the reason Miles Morales was created is that Peter had started a business and actually started making money, which made him less of an everyman.

Now I want to play Plague Inc…

She’s a Qanon die-hard first, Trump supporter second. A portion of the Qanon faction has started to break with Trump over the Epstein stuff.

Cowboy Bebop and the Ghost in the Shell movies are great places to start.

Anyway, it’s not so much a change in what’s being produced as what’s being imported to the US. There was a good mix of shonen and seinen at first, but shonen sells more merch so we get a lot of it now. Just watch stuff tagged as seinen if you want more mature themes or more sex and gore.

This has been a problem for far, far, longer than you think. The silver age definitely had it, the golden age probably did, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it cropped up in the proto-superhero stories, like Zorro. It’s a consequence of having a long-form story where the narrative’s status quo isn’t allowed to meaningfully change and characters either aren’t allowed to die or aren’t allowed to stay dead. Recurring antagonists also can have much richer characterization and more complex relationships with the protagonists, which makes writing stories about them more appealing the more often they appear.

The usual trajectory for a new superhero or new incarnation of an existing superhero is to start off with street-level problems, then get a nemesis that has strong ties to those street level problems, then have the dynamic between the two grow in prominence to eclipse all other parts of the plot. The Joker, for instance, always starts off as either a mob boss with a gimmick or a serial killer with a gimmick, not far removed from the mundane crime Batman always starts with, but always winds up with a fixation on Batman and spawns stories designed as some commentary on Batman’s no-killing rule. Again and again and again, dozens of times over the decades.

Why? Because the dynamic between the two characters tends to be fascinating and results in audience engagement.