What Happens if Justice League Bombs? Greetings and/or salutations, people! Welcome to io. 9's (occasionally weekly) mail column, where I solve the mysteries of the world of nerd- dom to you, both fictional and otherwise. This week: What was Elektra’s deal in The Defenders? Is an evil BB- 8 droid a good thing or a bad thing? And, most importantly, who’s to blame for Game of Thrones season seven?

· The wealthiest 50 people in the world control a staggering portion of the world economy: $1.46 trillion — more than the annual GDP of Australia, Spain.

And don’t forget to send your questions to postman@io. Untie the League Lys D.: What happens if Justice League suck as bad as Batman v Superman does? Do the other DC movies get scrapped? Do they try another new DC [movie continuity], or do they have to wait a while so people don’t get confused? How long would it take for the taste of JL to wash out of people’s mouths? Let’s take a step back and remember that “bomb” is a relative term here. For all its faults, Batman v Superman made a ton of money—$8.

GRRM Warfare. About 80 People, Give or Take: 1) Are Benioff and Weiss actually bad showrunners who have coasted on George R.R. Martin’s work? 2) Why was the.

The story of Xenu is covered in OT III, part of Scientology's secret "Advanced Technology" doctrines taught only to advanced members who have undergone many hours of. AIRPLANES. Piston-engine airplanes in the movies are unusually subject to engine failure. This failure mode is unique to filmdom - engine coughs, keeps running.

The problem is that WB knows it could have made a lot more if it had been better, and fans had actually liked it. Then the studio miraculously got Wonder Woman right, so it knows that it has the power to make a true, Marvel Studios- level superhero blockbuster, even if it has no real idea how it managed it. Since these movies still make money either way (for now), there’s no impetus for Warner Bros. To wonder if WB will reset the DC Extended Universe is to wonder if it actually has a cinematic universe in the first place. Aquaman is much too close to being finished for the WB to back out of now, and Wonder Woman 2 is as a safe a bet as there could be. But what does it actually have in the works that’s even close to definitely getting made?

The next film on the schedule is Shazam in 2. Dwayne Johnson’s Black Adam for his own film later.

Neither Cyborg nor Green Lantern Corps. Cyborg has a star—and they’re both ostensibly coming out in 2.

Not likely. Now, here’s all the DC films that Warner Bros. The Batman, which was originally announced in 2.

Matt Reeves said he was completely starting the movie over from scratch this past summer. The Flash, which has had Ezra Miller attached to star since October 2. Flashpoint at this year’s San Diego Comic- Con.

Batgirl, by the suddenly less beloved Joss Whedon. Justice League Dark, which was announced in 2.

Lobo, announced in 2. A Joker and Harley Quinn movie. A Nightwing movie. That insane “gritty” Elseworlds Joker origin movie from Martin Scorsese.

Theoretically Black Adam, a Deadshot solo movie, and Suicide Squad 2. And there’s always Man of Steel 2 and Justice League 2.

All these movies were either announced so long ago that we have no reason to believe they’ll actually get made in the next five years, or are so new that there’s little chance they’ll survive until gestation. Since 2. 01. 3, WB has made four DCEU films: Man of Steel, Suicide Squad, Batman v Superman, and Wonder Woman. Do you really think all 1. I’m guessing five, max, and it’ll take at least 1. Oh, and if somehow Justice League is a smash hit and everything gets greenlit? Well, then Ben Affleck is still obviously, adorably desperate to abandon this nonsense, and Flashpoint almost certainly will, by its very name, reset the DC movie- verse anyway. And then there’s WB’s astoundingly insane decision to maybe make DC superhero movies that aren’t in continuity with the rest of the films, for maximum audience confusion and absence of synergy.

The bottom line is that WB is basically so terrified it’s going to screw these movies up again, that it’s waiting for Justice League and Aquaman to come out, and let the studio know if it’s on the right track or not. Until then (and, if we’re being honest, probably long after then) it’s going to keep throwing anything it can think of against the DC movie wall. The occasional movie will somehow come out, and no one can be sure if it’ll be part of the cobbled- together Extended Universe or not. Not even Warner Bros. GRRM Warfare. About 8. People, Give or Take: 1) Are Benioff and Weiss actually bad showrunners who have coasted on George R.

R. Martin’s work? Why was the decision made to shorten seasons seven and eight when the show could have clearly benefitted from more time? Will season eight have the same problems? Afv Episodes With Bob Saget. No. I know Weiss and Benioff have barely done anything else in Hollywood beyond Game of Thrones, which seems pretty incriminating.

I also know that it feels like the two of them fully abandoned the books this season, and then calamity and problems immediately ensued. But let’s remember that Weiss and Benioff have made six good to great seasons of Game of Thrones, and there’s a hell of a lot more to showrunning than just putting the books onscreen. More importantly, the two have been going off script from the books from the very beginning, from that wonderful, iconic conversation between Cersei and Robert Baratheon in season one right through that magnificent season six finale where Cersei finally achieved everything on her vision board. They had run out of book material for various storylines starting back in season four, and yet we were good straight through six. Have poor choices been made this season? Absolutely, but that brings us to…2) .. I think is responsible for most of the season’s problems.

More time would have allowed more characters more moments, more explanations for some of the bizarre things that happened (see below), and just more breathing room to give the various storylines more weight. It still wouldn’t have solved the godawful mess that was the Sansa- Arya storyline, but it likely did mean Weiss and Benioff needed to figure out a way to kill Littlefinger sooner rather than later, and the only way they could think of to kill him with some drama was by turning Arya into a crazy person. As for who decided to shortened the seasons, I sincerely doubt Weiss and Benioff wanted to. Game of Thrones is their baby, and they knew they were in for a long haul, assuming the show didn’t get canceled. I doubt they were bored right at the beginning of the series’ epic conclusion.

Certainly HBO didn’t want shortened seasons; they’d be happy to run Game of Thrones until the heat death of the universe. That leaves the actors, and remember, seven years is a long time for an actor to play a single character, especially actors of the caliber of Lena Headey and Peter Dinklage. I bet anything Kit Harington and Emilia Clarke at minimum are dying to be done with it in order to move on to new projects. The actors all had to sign new contracts for season seven and eight, and for many of them, the show needed them more than vice versa. I imagine these two shortened seasons was all they could get out of (one or more of) the biggest stars, forcing them to try and stuff everything they hoped to do in 2. Which resulted in problems like…Grey(Worm)’s Audacity. Wes: What the hell was the opening scene with the Unsullied and Dothraki waiting outside of some castle and how did we teleport from there to the first meeting ever of the major players?

I have scoured the net trying to figure out what the scene was and no one has covered it. Please help! Although it wasn’t spelled out, it’s actually pretty easy to put two and two together here. The big truce meeting was at the Dragonpit, right by King’s Landing. Obviously, Cersei was not going to remove her army and Euron’s fleet from the capital for these little talks, because that would have been dumb as hell, and Cersei is not dumb. However, Daenerys would also not just come to King’s Landing, right smack in the middle of Cersei’s forces, without her own troops.

So she had Grey Worm, the Unsullied, and the Dothraki surround the city, so if things went bad her forces were there to bail her out/kick Lannister ass. The better question is, how did the Unsullied get from being trapped in Casterly Rock with no food and surrounded by Lannister troops, to hanging outside King’s Landing looking totally fine? You know, I pride myself on being able to figure out completely unsupported ways to fill the plot holes of just about anything, but I have no clue here.

Hear, All Ye People; Hearken, O Earth (Part 1)This is the first installment in a two- part series. THE QUIZ [1]The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes…— Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Hound of the Baskervilles”NOTE: This is a follow- up to my quiz that ran in The Times, “Are You an Optimist or a Pessimist?” I would like you to read my essay and then take the quiz. It doesn’t matter whether you have taken it before. If you haven’t taken it before, please take it. Catch-22 Movie Watch Online. If you have taken it before, please take it again.

Here is my confession. My quiz wasn’t really a test of the optimism or pessimism of the reader. There was a hidden agenda.

It was a test of the effect of typefaces on truth. Or to be precise, the effect on credulity. Are there certain typefaces that compel a belief that the sentences they are written in are true? I picked a passage from David Deutsch’s second book, “The Beginning of Infinity” — a passage about “unprecedented safety” — and embedded it in my quiz for The Times, “Are You an Optimist or a Pessimist?”. If a one- kilometer asteroid had approached the Earth on a collision course at any time in human history before the early twenty- first century, it would have killed at least a substantial proportion of all humans.

In that respect, as in many others, we live in an era of unprecedented safety: the twenty- first century is the first ever moment when we have known how to defend ourselves from such impacts, which occur once every 2. Do you think Deutsch’s claim is true? Is it true that “we live in an era of unprecedented safety”?( ) Yes: The claim is true( ) No: The claim is false. How confident are you in your conclusion?( ) Slightly confident( ) Moderately confident( ) Very confident.

I do not mean to dismiss the possibility of global catastrophe from asteroids or global warming or a host of other possible calamities — bioengineered viruses spreading out of control, Malthusian nightmares of overpopulation choking off life on the planet, etc. I wouldn’t want to dismiss even the most outrageous of millenarian fantasies, including Mayan predictions of the end of the world. But for the moment, I was interested in something somewhat less apocalyptic. We all know that we are influenced in many, many ways — many of which we remain blissfully unaware of.

Could typefaces be one of them? Could the mere selection of a typeface influence us to believe one thing rather than another? Could typefaces work some unseen magic?

Or malefaction? Don’t get me wrong. The underlying truth of the sentence “Gold has an atomic number of 7. The sentence is true regardless of whether it is displayed in Helvetica, Georgia or even the much- maligned Comic Sans. But are we more inclined to believe that gold has an atomic number of 7. Georgia, the typeface of The New York Times online, rather than in Helvetica? I asked a friend, the psychologist Marc Hauser, about experimental results on typefaces.

He recommended a blog post, “The Secret Life of Fonts,” written by Phil Renaud, self- described as “a Canadian blog design and web design enthusiast, with a particular admiration for web standards and CSS innovation. Ruby on Rails, xhtml/css, ajax, and a whole lotta love.” [5]I’m nearing the end of my sixth semester of university, and things are going pretty well: I’m clearing a decent grade point average, enjoying my major, and just having wrapped up my semester’s “essay alley,” wherein all my courses require a term paper or two, and getting my results back telling me that I’m doing much better than usual.

At first, I’m just relieved to be doing so well. Still, ever the skeptic, I start to wonder: what exactly am I doing differently now to be getting all these A- range paper grades all of the sudden?

I haven’t drastically changed the amount of effort I’m putting into my writing. I’m probably even spending less time with them now than I did earlier in my studies, and while I guess you could argue that I’m probably just being a great example of practice making perfect, I’ve got my doubts; I even used to take courses concentrating on writing better essays, and in the time surrounding that, my grades were pretty low. Then it hits me: the only thing I’ve really changed since I’ve been getting these grades is…my essay font. Renaud had written 5. The Facility Full Movie. Eleven were set in Times New Roman, 1. Trebuchet MS, and the remaining 2. Georgia. The Times New Roman papers earned an average grade of A- , but the Trebuchet papers could only muster a B- .

And the Georgia essays? A solid A. Well, would you believe it? My essays written in Georgia did the best overall. This got me thinking as to why that might be: maybe fonts speak a lot louder than we think they do. Especially to a professor who has to wade through a collection of them; Times seems to be the norm, so it really doesn’t set off any subconscious triggers. Georgia is enough like Times to retain its academic feel, and is different enough to be something of a relief for the grader. Trebuchet seems to set off a negative trigger, maybe just based on the fact that it’s not as easy to read in print, maybe on the fact that it looks like something off a blog rather than an academic journal.

Who knows…So, be mindful of your target audience when you’re marking up a document, whether it’s a university essay or a commercial website. You never know just how loudly a font speaks. But Renaud’s results are anecdotal. I wondered: is there an experiment that could decide this once and for all? Or barring that, at least throw some empirical light on the situation? Could the effect of typography on the perception of truth be assessed objectively?

Benjamin Berman (who designed the Multics emulation for my Times article “Did My Brother Invent Email with Tom Van Vleck?”) created a program that changes the typeface of the David Deutsch passage. Each Times participant read the passage in one of six randomly assigned typefaces — Baskerville, Computer Modern, Georgia, Helvetica, Comic Sans and Trebuchet. The questions, ostensibly about optimism or pessimism, provided data about the influence of typefaces on our beliefs. The test consisted of comparing the responses and determining whether typeface choice influenced our perception of the truth of the passage. More than 1. 00,0. I gave the results to David Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell, who helped design the questions and the overall character of the quiz.

Here are the results. Deutsch; 6. 1 percent were optimists and agreed with him. I don’t know whether such a test was done 1. Of course, it is unclear whether there is a majority that believe that science and technology can save us from ourselves.) The quiz received more than 2. No one except for Michael Mc.

Gahan from Denver, Colo. In a reply, he wrote, If the “surprise” in the results has anything to do with Deutsch’s claim being presented in Comic Sans, consider me unsurprised. Specifically, something tells me that this is an A/B comparison experiment in which some people are presented the passage in a “formal” font, and others are presented the passage in an “informal” font, and the “optimism” results will be compared based on the presentation condition — otherwise, what is Comic Sans doing in the New York Times, which should know better? I look forward to the results! July 1. 2, 2. 01. GREAT KINDNESSI’d give my right arm to be ambidextrous.— Old Proverb. Until about 1. 50 years ago most people wrote out documents by hand.

Since the advent of typewriters (from John J. Pratt’s pterotype in the 1. It is an easy matter to change an entire document from Bembo to Garamond to Caslon to Palatino. We forget that written manuscripts, letters and journals were once unique objects often containing clues about the writer and the context of when and how they were written.

Can we separate the form of the writing from its content? Usually, it’s difficult if not impossible, but let me give you an extraordinary example of a page from a journal written during the Crimean War by Captain Mark Walker.