Short answer, no, because you can't see them. They also would travel too fast. However, in most hard science fiction, rotating or changing the point of impact will tend to screw up the amount of damage they can do.

They pronounce his name exactly like anyone else in Melbourne would, except that a lot of us (not me!) would put a na-na-na-na-na before the batman.

I actually think a lot of them think the train station is named after the fictional crime fighter, particularly the shorter crowd.

jimnms, having seen the movie, I can see why people are reacting this positively to it. Have you seen it? Where you have or havent, consider the following.

You are right that this isn't the first black superhero movie. If you ignore comedies starring goofy concept heros, the list of movies narrows. Then, consider movies with black super heros who are not anti-heroes (Spawn, Blade). Why this distinction? Anti-heroes are great, but they aren't characters for a general young audience to aspire to. To notice that the majority of main character superheroes in movies are either partially a joke or a dark/brooding/scary/threatening/antisocial hero might be a drag. especially when you compare it to the pool of white super heroes who aren't (most of them). That's important.

First movie with a mostly black cast? No, but how many such movies arent about slavery, inner city gangs, extreme poverty, surviving racism, genocide or third world conflict. How many are almost purely optimistic blend of science fiction and the beauty of African culture? How many imagine what an African country unmolested by colonialism might look like in the future, where its citizens were allowed to reach their highest potential in terms of culture, government and technology? This is in part what the Afro-futurism science fiction genre is about and its a very rare genre to make it to film.

Especially a film that has a budget of $ 200 million dollars. That budget is important. It says that at this point in history, the largest (maybe?) movie studio recognizes that the public wants to see black characters in this light. That's a big deal too.

And considering how well this movie is doing at the box office, Black Panther is a signal of whats to come. More stories about inspirational black characters told at this kind of block buster scale.

Does that make a bit more sense? I'm sure there are other reasons; one being its a really good movie! Hope this helps.

I've been struggling to find the right adjective to use to describe your story, but all I can say is thank you for telling it. It's personal accounts like this that really bring home the effects of war, and this is what happened to the victors!

I admit I don't read much non-fiction, but I hold a very special place in my heart and my life for Spike Milligan's war diaries which, along with the Maus graphic novels, taught me more about the reality of war than I ever wanted to know. Like your story they are so relatable and so full of banality and horror side-by-side that my disgust for the instigators makes it painful to try to see things from their point of view.

I try to eliminate unconscious bias where I spot it, but here I just can't. Unfortunately this disgust also stops me from wanting to learn more.

I'm starting a social media campaign to hurt the airline financially because they didn't provide a gluten-free organic lactose-free vegan low-fat meal option for my service rhino. And then I overheard two flight attendants sounding annoyed with my demands so I published the home phone number of the airline CEO. Fucking attention-whores.

Ever read Stephen King's book "The Cell", where people's brains are damaged by cell phones? Look for it in the non-fiction section.

I’ve nothing against YA fiction... I read and enjoyed the Hunger Games well into my 30s. This just has the look of Yet Another Dystopian YA Adaption in the vein of Hunger Games, Maze Runner, Divergent and so on. Doesn’t mean it’ll be BAD, though.

You forget that Bob's one of the Foxnews wingnuts. He wouldn't know real news if it fucking bit him. When all you watch is fictional propaganda, then of course comedy and satire seem like just another flavor. All that matters in his view is the end slant...if it's "for" the GOP, then it's good, otherwise it's a lie.

TL;DW! I jest, I jest! I remember I used to read metric (yes, METRIC) tons of books during my formative years. Novels, fiction, non-fiction, comics... I read Times & Maclean's (Canadian equivalent of Times) magazines front-to-back... like over 90% of all articles every week. But high-speed internet & smartphone happened then I don't read prints very much anymore. Still read/watch news too much though, but it's now more depressing than educational with the stuff I read online. The journalistic standard is way down.
Much harder to find really enlightening long-form reporting these days.

I love the show overall. Krill bothered me a little bit though, because it felt a bit too MacFarlane-y to me.

Taking The Orville as an homage to Trek (TNG specifically?), it struck me that any Trek character that would be asked to infiltrate a hostile alien group would take that task very very seriously. They'd learn enough culture / language / etc. to pass cursory examination, and they'd know to limit attention being placed on them as much as possible. That's just sort of taking your fiction/material seriously.

The Orville's (Captain!) Mercer and Malloy were basically just screwing around on their infiltration mission though. They knew very little going in, which is somewhat excusable since in there is solid story justification for it in that they are doing very early recon because humans in general know very little about the Krill. BUT, if that is the case then it would be doubly important to just try to fade into the background and not draw attention, and they didn't really do that at all. Long, "funny" answers to questions instead of being terse, not trying to blend in behavior-wise, etc.

I don't mind MacFarlane's humor, and even think that it adds a little something that is very often lacking in Trek. But only when it is story-appropriate, and it kind of jarred me out of the moment on that particular episode. It was still an OK episode, but that just hurt the immersion for me, I guess.

On one hand it does perhaps lack imagination, but on the other it makes perfect sense that aliens we first find would be much like us since they'd be attracted by our radio waves, and to become a space traveling civilisation they'd likely have similar motivations and their brains/reasoning capabilities would have evolved in a similar way. Afterall the human brain seems to be hardwired to find other humans - we see faces in the clouds and random floor patterns etc.

That new movie Arrival (2016) (not the Charlie Sheen 90s one) did a great job of unique aliens.

I guess another reason why fiction makes aliens like us is so that it allows a story to be told without the story getting bogged down on the details (unless that is the focus of the story).

the first time I watched pulp fiction I walked out. It was because the movie was so vivid I couldn't stand to think that I was watching a movie while stuff that I was watching in the movie was going on outside. I loved that movie and eventually watched the whole thing

Good piece in the Nation on the current state of Russiagate.

Appetizer:

These imperatives have incentivized a compromised set of journalistic and evidentiary standards. In Russiagate, unverified claims are reported with little to no skepticism. Comporting developments are cherry-picked and overhyped, while countervailing ones are minimized or ignored. Front-page headlines advertise explosive and incriminating developments, only to often be undermined by the article’s content, or retracted entirely. Qualified language—likely, suspected, apparent—appears next to “Russians” to account for the absence of concrete links. As a result, Russiagate has enlarged into a storm of innuendo that engulfs issues far beyond its original scope.

Damn, sorry to hear that. I could go off on a frothing at the mouth rant at how bad it was, what we went through. To save money our original company, a nationwide US health insurance company, outsourced us right at merit raise time (nice touch, a-holes) to an off-shore company that would probably only ever meet expectations running an assembly line operation for building PCs.

They were out of their league taking over level 1 and 2 operations for a large company, which was already working through the pains of merging with other companies they had acquired. Instead of inspiring the legacy workers to stick around to make the transition work, their attitude was we were lucky the host company insisted we get first crack to reapply for "our" jobs. Like it was all one big assembly line and we could be easily replaced with someone with an A+ cert for $11\hr. The equivalent of pulling up to a storefront and having IT landscapers jump in the back of a pickup truck to work that day. Might work for an assembly line but not for a complex embedded IT infrastructure with 1001 local support quirks. They were completely clueless.

Add insult to injury, their internal processes were so bad, over the course of a year they asked us continually to remind them of the phone# of the iPhone they gave us and the serial# of the laptop they gave us. At least half a dozen times, it was fucking absurd. And when we were offered an incentive to help reduce the ticket log backup, they mailed unsigned money orders to fictional home addresses they had on record for us. With the stamp on the wrong part of the envelope for those lucky enough to receive their unsigned money orders. You had the option of mailing the money order back to get it signed (good luck getting it back) or committing a felony to get the money you legally earned, by not using the first option. Took me 7 months to finally get my money order, who knows where they originally mailed it. Their indifference during this whole mess was staggering, you had to badger management and HR like they were a deadbeat drunk brother-in-law who owes you money.

And they kept putting off the review\raise process until they finally offered us 50 cents an hour for the highest performers. I gave my notice the next day.

Sorry for the rant, it was such a colossal failure on all fronts, except no doubt for the amount the host company saved on IT during that time. But of course nobody is interested in capturing the countless hours of downtime and lost productivity introduced by these IT cost "savings". Last I heard they were putting the contract back out to bid before the scheduled end of the current contract, which doesn't surprise me. What a freaking waste.

I hope you find work soon, Ant.

Yeah, and a Democrat shot up a GOP basketball practice after Kathy Griffin {or insert whatever left-leaning public persona you want} made negative / seemingly "violent" comments about Trump / Republicans.

The common thread isn't that trivial nonsense like this video "incited" those people to violence. The common thread is that unhinged idiots that can't differentiate between fiction and reality sometimes do crazy / terrible / violent stuff. The fault lies with said unhinged idiots, not any external entity that they claim influenced them (Trump, Kathy Griffin, Grand Theft Auto / Doom video games, Ozzy Osbourne, whatever).

Syria is a prime example of a propaganda war. I have long thought this is why reporter's are being targeted by both sides, they interfere with the narratives of both sides by reporting facts.
We can't believe reports that come from those involved, they all clearly have an interest in preserving their narratives that excuse their actions. Without independent reporting on the ground, at best we're debating skewed versions of reality, and more likely pure fictions created by the involved parties.
That is their plan, because it denies a possibility of effective opposition to the actions they're hiding, skewing, or excusing.