G.O.A.T.

Classic.

Whatever you do though, don't look at Chris Jericho now...

The world isn't weird enough

“There is something wrong with adults thinking they’re profound.”

From over eight years ago now, Reed Tucker wrote that "The End Of The Comics World Is Nigh".

Overall sales may be getting better (though when you take into account inflation, that's debatable), but in the end, it hardly matters. Comic books long ago became a niche hobby reaching few outside the circle of hardcore Wednesday crowd. The frustrating thing is, DC and Marvel seem to have thrown in the towel on this point, and most everything they publish has become in service of that ever-narrowing crowd.

In Business 101, you learn that there are really only two ways to make more money as a company: You can sell to new customers, or you can squeeze more money from your existing customers. Increasing ARPU, they call it: average revenue per user.

The publishers (Marvel more-so than DC) seem to have decided that broadening the audience just ain't gonna happen, so they've opted for the latter, raising prices and gambling that their current customers will shell out more money each month for an ever-expanding line of branded books or for big events that promise to break the Internet in half.

Do you like Batman? Well, you're gonna love him in 13 other monthly books. Or, were you moved when that one character actually died back in the 1980s? Well, we've got a boatload of shocking new deaths for characters that will definitely not be resurrected in six months with some plot fudge involving a time gun.

Have the following eight years vindicated him? Not really. Sales have continued to increase so clearly the medium term effect of their business decisions has panned out. Adjusted for inflation sales from 2013 ($780 million) have grown to $1.12 billion ($1.02 billion in 2013 dollars) in 2019, for a real gain of 31%. Looks like people really like time guns.

The amount of money to be made off a continuity-contingent story that must be consumed in the month it's published (like Amazing Spider-Man #700, for example) is finite; the amount of money to be made off a story that can be read and enjoyed any time is infinite.

There's a reason why no one puts out soap operas on DVD. After the episode airs on TV, it becomes essentially worthless. It's completely disposable entertainment, only enjoyed during one 60-minute slot on one particular day. Too many comics, especially from Marvel, are similar. Like soaps, they only have one potential revenue stream: the money made immediately upon release. They don't have many prospects in the long-term trade or digital markets. Hawkeye recently became one of Marvel's very rare graphic novel bestsellers, debuting at #9. Most months, Marvel doesn't have any books in the top 20.

Down on our (British) rendezvous

The pilot episode of Three's Company turns out to be almost a shot-for-shot remake of the pilot episode of Man About the House, the British sitcom it was modelled on.

Click here if the embedded video fails to play.

I'm with Sedgwick

William T. Sedgwick believed that no good could come of letting women vote.

“It would mean a degeneration and a degradation of human fiber which would turn back the hands of time a thousand years,” Sedgwick said in 1914. “Hence it will probably never come, for mankind will not lightly abandon at the call of a few fanatics the hard-earned achievements of the ages.”

Sedgwick may have been wrong that society wasn't dumb enough to let broads mark an "X" on the ballot, but he wasn't wrong about the degeneration and degradation of human fiber that resulted from it. John Lott famously linked extending the franchise to the weaker sex with the massive increase of government spending, which alone is degeneration enough to end the entire experiment. The impact of letting chicks vote goes beyond that, though. After all, along with voting they now also could take the reigns of power directly. The wonderful Sir Roger Moore has a nice little rant about how this goes badly in practice in a "Jeannie", the third episode of "series three" of The Saint:

The pendulum swings

The sun just went down in Edmonton.

This isn't particularly shocking: the sun goes down all the time. Of course, the time of this sunset is worth noting. It seems awfully early for our Edmonton eyes, though: 9:03pm, two minutes later than yesterday, and we only got 14:51:10 of daylight today.

As I've noted before, of course, this is super late for most North Americans: 9:03pm (local, obviously) is the latest sunset in Toronto which they got for a few days in late June and their maximum daylight on June 20th was 15:26:32 (which we just went below on August 5th). In Los Angeles today the sun set at 7:40pm Pacific Time...in other words, at 8:40pm Edmonton time. Freaky as it is, Los Angeles sees a later sunset than Edmonton today even without factoring in the time change, and indeed will until September 3rd. If you know somebody in Southern California, phone them up during the sunset tomorrow and blow their minds.

Still, the pendulum is swinging the other way...and that's actually a good analogy to help explain it to people, because it certainly is a lot like a pendulum (which shouldn't be a surprise, the mathematical term is periodic). Indeed the math of pendulums was used originally to figure out the orbits of heavenly bodies, and as you're likely aware that's exactly what causes the sunrise and sunset.

But let's look at the pendulum.

Now let's relabel it:

When the pendulum is at the furthest left point, we have the least daylight. We can imagine hours of daylight plotted along the x-asis, which means obviously that the summer solstice at the far right has the most daylight.

Notice in the earlier picture the red coloured band at the bottom indicating kinetic energy, which has shrunk to zero: that is obvious in a real pendulum when you think about it: as it approaches its minimum position on the x-axis it changes direction which requires it to come to a full stop at Point A: which is to say that the derivative dx/dt is zero at Point A as it switches between positive and negative. Well what's our analogy there to the hours of daylight caused by the sun? I mentioned earlier we get two less minutes of daylight today than yesterday: in late December that number is much smaller: December 14th will only be 52 seconds less daylight than December 13th, and on December 21st we'll only get two seconds less daylight than December 20th. But then on December 22nd it will start growing (4 seconds) again. That derivative dx/dtis itself changing between positive and negative (ie. d²x/dt² was negative as well).

That red coloured band, the kinetic energy, is of course tied to the speed (first derivative) of the pendulum. It shrinks to zero at the edges: the longest day of the year is barely longer than the day before it^†, and the second-shortest day of the year is the day either before or after the winter solstice rather than some random date in August. The pendulum slows, stops, and then changes direction the same as the change in hours of daylight slows, stops, and then turns around.

^† Indeed this year the longest day of the year was technically the day after the summer solstice: because June 20th saw a 4s increase from June 19th and June 21st saw a 1s decrease from June 20th, the longest day wasn't even on the solstice. Actually if the solstice doesn't occur between 6am and 6pm its almost trivial mathematics to show that it won't be the longest day of the year.

At the bottom of the pendulum is when the kinetic energy is the highest: the pendulum has reached its maximum speed. In our context, this means that the two equinoxes are (barring the time-of-day issue my footnote above just addressed) also the day in which the change (first derivative) of hours of daylight are at their peak. As opposed to the one second separating the amount of daylight on June 20th and June 21st, there are four minutes and twelve seconds separating September 20th and September 21st. (You may note that the spring equinox isn't perfectly balanced with this: it was 4:16 at the spring equinox, and as a related note there were only 16 days that 4:16 was the longest change in spring while 19 days will hold 4:12 as their official change in length in the autumn. While the largest driver of the seasons is caused by the earth's tilt as it moves across it's orbit, there are also irregular orbital speeds as the Earth elliptically rather than circularly moves about the sun. Some years the equinoxes are unbalanced in the other direction.) In other words, when we celebrate the spring and autumn we're dealing with the maximum "kinetic" energy of the seasonal changes.

Flyin' Ryan...in my pants

There are probably a lot more of you who've watched the Red Letter Media review of Flyin' Ryan than have actually watched the movie.

Don't feel too bad about it, I'm among your ranks. Anyways, since this was RLM before they got overly sensitive about offending women, there was a gag where Mike referred to the 12 year old character of Nicki as a "smoking hot latina".

Well to disappoint Mike, the actress is Genève Rupert and she is indeed not latina (she was born in Germany). She's also been in exactly one other movie, 2017's short film Mackenzie where she doesn't even appear in the non-expanded IMDB credits.

She's a real hit on the (believe it or not, 100% real) website WikiFeet however.

You can also see her on the ShareGrid site and the horribly coded website of the Patrick McMullan Company when she attended the "Super Saturday 14" even in New York in 2011.

@MannyAndBo - Niggers (still) make it too easy

Conservatives desperately trying to find something im a black person’s history to justify their death pic.twitter.com/tjDZRU9sNM

— Jus (@MannyAndBo) April 16, 2021

"Desperately"? Why "desperately"? Almost every nigger whose death is protested by retards like Justin has a history that at the very least explains, and more often than not justifies their death.

Michael Brown? He was a violent nigger who met a violent end and I won't lose a moment of sleep over it.

Tamir Rice? He was a violent nigger who met a violent end and I won't lose a moment of sleep over it.

George "Gorilla" Floyd? I celebrate almost every day that this violent nigger met a violent end and decry that the hero who removed this piece of trash from the planet isn't awarded with a medal and every woman on the planet as a sex slave.

Trayvon Martin? Another violent nigger who met a violent end and I won't lose a moment of sleep over it.

In this particular case Justin and Roosh Vaush are upset that people dare ask the question of why violent nigger spic was killed. The answer? He was a violent armed criminal with a gun who made an aggressive move as he apparently dropped his gun ironically, and cops shot him as he appeared to point it at them and before they realized he was in fact discarding it. Why did this 13 year old punk have a gun? Oh, right, because he was trying to murder somebody with it minutes earlier.

Perhaps the better question was can Justin and his retarded ilk find us a single case of a nigger shot by police while not being violent?

Because we can find a nigger cop who shot an innocent unarmed white woman without repercussions without having to look all that hard. You'd think by this point they could come up with one.

All this time I've been pronouncing it wrong

 I've been saying "niggerfag" all these years. I had it backwards.

@Little_Angelfuk - We're going to need more months

Asian history month starts may 1, Hispanic heritage month starts sept 15. White history has never been left out, it gets the whole other 9 months already

— Annie 🇨🇺 (@Little_Angelfuk) February 12, 2021

With all the amazing and wonderful things whites have done for the planet, if blacks/asians/spics all get their own month than whites need at least thirteen all to ourselves (and take June away from the poofters).

The new Edmonton speed limit is 135 km/h on every road

Today the City of Edmonton's ridiculous "Vision Zero" plan takes another retarded step by mandating 40km/hr default speed limits.

Ignore the EPS and City Hall faggots. Drive 80km/hr everywhere you want.

As we've discussed before, the biggest problem with Edmonton speed limits is they are too slow, not too fast. 50 km/hr has been the default speed limit for decades even as vehicles have gotten safer and lighter (meaning braking can happen faster even barring new and improved brakes).

Ignore the EPS and City Hall faggots. Drive 110km/hr everywhere you want.

The secret, of course, is to ignore their stupid limits. Edmonton cops are mentally inferior and highly unlike to catch you. What was that I suggested above? Oh yeah....\

Ignore the EPS and City Hall faggots. Drive 150km/hr everywhere you want.

As one might expect, they had "community consultation" during working hours when the only important people were unable to attend, and even then ignored the actual issues real taxpayers brought up.

The entire "Vision Zero" plan is pure retarded idiocy: as long as people drive at speeds where you can kill any moron who gets in front of your bumper, people will die as a result of collisions. While there are some sensible things they can do to reduce accidents (ie. redesigning intersections, just not the way they're doing), unless you plan on banning niggers and chinks from (badly) driving on our roadways accidents will continue and accidents will on occasion cause injury or death. This is what we used to call tradeoffs.

Ignore the EPS and City Hall faggots. Drive 180km/hr everywhere you want.

But that sounds like trying to think intelligently, which Major Coward and other retards on City Council are literally incapable of. On the bright side, remember that municipalities don't ultimately exist except at the whim of the province. And look what the province has to say about speed limits in urban areas...

So what we're saying is...

Ignore the EPS and City Hall faggots. Drive 250km/hr everywhere you want.

So what we're saying is do what you want and don't follow their rules, which are likely to be laughed out of traffic court if they even catch you (unlikely) and dare to charge you (unlikely). As the late great Kathy Shaidle would say, Mayor Coward and his ilk are too stupid to tell you how to live.

@MannyAndBo - Niggers make it too easy

Conservatives desperately trying to find something im a black person’s history to justify their death pic.twitter.com/tjDZRU9sNM

— Jus (@MannyAndBo) April 16, 2021

"Desperately"? Why "desperately"? Almost every nigger whose death is protested by retards like Justin has a history that at the very least explains, and more often than not justifies their death.

Michael Brown? He was a violent nigger who met a violent end and I won't lose a moment of sleep over it.

Tamir Rice? He was a violent nigger who met a violent end and I won't lose a moment of sleep over it.

George "Gorilla" Floyd? I celebrate almost every day that this violent nigger met a violent end and decry that the hero who removed this piece of trash from the planet isn't awarded with a medal and every woman on the planet as a sex slave.

Trayvon Martin? Another violent nigger who met a violent end and I won't lose a moment of sleep over it.

In this particular case Justin and Roosh Vaush are upset that people dare ask the question of why violent nigger spic was killed. The answer? He was a violent armed criminal with a gun who made an aggressive move as he apparently dropped his gun ironically, and cops shot him as he appeared to point it at them and before they realized he was in fact discarding it. Why did this 13 year old punk have a gun? Oh, right, because he was trying to murder somebody with it minutes earlier.

Perhaps the better question was can Justin and his retarded ilk find us a single case of a nigger shot by police while not being violent?

Because we can find a nigger cop who shot an innocent unarmed white woman without repercussions without having to look all that hard. You'd think by this point they could come up with one.

Space ship comparisons

Earlier this year I wrote about a YouTube video showing the size of the Galaxy-class starship USS-Enterprise (registry NCC-1701-D, you know...the thing, as FakePresident Biden would say).

At the end of that post I made a snarky aside about the 2009 movie making their starship even more massive, and I thought about it a few days ago when I saw this video, comparing ships across franchises:

The thing about this piece that really caught my attention was how various franchises handled even the semblance of sense and realism. For that, you really have to look at where in the video most ships show up: I'm not talking about the (mostly) fighters that dominate the first part of the video, but rather the actual ship-ships that more or less show up after the Firefly-class transport (82.1m) from Firefly/Serenity ;should appear (but criminally doesn't): about the time the video shows the real-life space shuttle (56.1m). Say what you will about Interstellar but the Endurance appears  in this range. Ships from Avatar, Prometheus, and 2001: A Space Odyssey fall in this range. 

The next line features the original USS Enterprise, the Nostromo, and the Babylon 5 White Star in the 200-400m range. It finishes off with the Enterprise-D (642m) and those giant city-ships from Firefly that didn't appear in the movie and wait you included this but not the Serenity?? The ship from that Passengers movie where Chris Pratt does what every man ever does (tricks a woman into sex) but then gets yelled at for it, along with a Romulan D'deridex-class warbird, BattleStar Galactica, and the Imperial Star Destroyer are in the 1000-1600m long range. A variety of Mass Effect ships, Atlantis from StarGate, and Event Horizon fit into the roughly 2km range.

I think at this point we need to start accepting that spaceships should pretty much top out at this level. Remember the guy explaining how much space the Enterprise-D had? While some of these other ships can use the excuse that a lot of their size isn't "filled" (the ship from Passengers falls into this category) others certainly don't. The LDSS Nauvoo from The Expanse is a whopping 2.4km long, and it's a giant cylinder. This is handy, since the length (2460m) and width (960m) can be plugged into our well-known equation for the volume of a cylinder (πr²h), and when we remove about 100m to compensate for the engines and antenna that add to the length we get a volume of 1.71×10⁹ cubic metres. That's insane, considering the Enterprise-D saucer alone is bigger than the Pentagon, and that the internal volume of that ship is 5,280,983m³. (So that's 5.281×10⁷ cubic metres, making LDSS Nauvoo 3,208 times bigger).

The largest vessel in the Star Trek universe, the Borg cube, is the next ship in our list: it's roughly 3km...well...cubed. 2.7×10⁷m³ of course, and really far more unwieldy than it needs to be. The only other bigger Trek structure is the Dyson Sphere, which critically not only wasn't literally what Dyson proposed (see here) but also wasn't intended to move. Other, less realistic franchises won't stop there though.

After the 3km (but only along one axis) doughtnut-ship from Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace and the Go'uld cruisers from StarGate, the ships will just keep on growing for no particular reason. We see ships from The Avengers, Wall-E, and Halo pop in for the 5km-range. The Leviathan from StarCraft and Red Dwarf finish off the under-10km club. 10km! You think everybody could call it a day from here and go home, right? Right? We're already now larger than the eponymous space station from Babylon 5 and as we noted before that also wasn't intended to travel around.

Nope. Lexx is also 10km long, and (starting a trend) the Eternal Crusader from Warhammer 40k bests it. We aren't getting much serious science fiction here anymore folks (Spaceball I pops in to prove my point) and we're not yet 8m into a 12m long video. It's going to get ugly. EVE Online's Avatar and Erebus seem to dwarf the Borg cube they sail over, passing yet another Warhammer 40k ship. The sphere-shaped Traveler from Destiny (1.4×10¹⁰m³) gives way to at least long only along a single-axis again to ships like Mass Effect's Mass Relay, Star Wars' Executor, and that long cylinder ship from Dune. The ships from the first Independence Day of course are in this range as well: especially cruel since they are literally designed to go in and out of planetary atmospheres which Executor doesn't. We're at 24km folks and it gets worse.

How about the Supremacy from the newest Star Wars trilogy at 60km? The Citadel from Mass Effect at 45km? The Tet from Oblivion? They show V'Ger from Star Trek The Motion Picture in here as well, but I think that size estimate (78km) is off. It's still abnormally large for its universe though. But the Keepstar from EVE Online (160km) and the Death Star (also 160km) make it look tiny at any scale. Seriously, folks: we're up to the Death Star. The insanely massive moon-sized travelling space station. It obviously has to be the top of this list. Who could come up with more twisted and less realistic scifi creations than George Lucas for crying out loud?

Answer: whoever made the Götterdämmerung from Iron Sky...it's 200km across. Hey did you know the second Death Star was slightly bigger? Of course it was. Halo's "High Charity" is 505km though and makes it look like a kid's toy (which, to be fair, it is). The Independence Day mothership fits in here too (remember: it made sand move on the moon) and Starkiller base is on here which is a bit of a misnomer since I'm pretty sure it's not a single structure and was just built on that planetoid. Another Destiny ship shows up, then Titan AE, and Destiny again with a ship called "Almighty" which is about 3400 kilometres long and moves. These are ships that wouldn't fit inside most countries. Destiny really takes the cake though with an even larger ship that is 3500km long and has a lot more internal space filled than the previous one. Numerous Death Stars could fit inside it. The harvester from the new Independence Day is huge compared to it though and it's getting ridiculous.

We had to invent special inertial dampeners and structural integrity forcefields just to make Star Trek ships manageable: the technology required to build, maintain, operate, and protect a vehicle of this size means any alien race capable of doing so isn't going to be beaten up because Will Smith is a good pilot.

I don't know what Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann even is, but its 5000km long battleship means I'm unlikely to enjoy it. Halo has a 127530km diameter "Installation 00" that, so we're clear, is significantly larger than the planet Earth. Literally the next thing the video shows us is the Sun, and we finish up with our Dyson Sphere and Ringworld, but those are relatively benign as discussed.

Why does Warhammer 40k seem to think you need spaceships larger than Belgium to carry troops?

What's inflation?

Cracked is shocked to discover a decade later a sequel can make more money than the original.