When I was younger I used to feel the same way. "I'm a mature adult who reads Plato and Dostoevsky, I'm too artistically mature to enjoy those big pop culture franchises!!" As I grew older I learned that just because something is popular and popularly accessible doesn't make it bad or myself unrefined for enjoying them.

Just because something is accessible doesn't make it boring.

Now, I think there's a few thing that are true.
1) The genre has evolved. Discovering a Universe is fun but you can't keep rediscovering the same Universe, those early Marvel films don't really hold up that well.
2) That means latter films need to raise the bar, either in comedy which sometimes falls flat, or in more complex themes that sometimes fail.

I still hold that one of the best Marvel films of the past few years was the Eternals, and that more or less bombed. Did it bomb because of the structural problems (too many characters, flat 2nd act)? Or did it bomb because the themes were a bit too advanced for the audience? Doesn't matter, I enjoyed it and I don't care too much about what signal that sends about my artistic tastes.

I think there's room for both.

I remember study years ago talking about the most complex genre of music when it came to themes and emotional content... it was country music. Basically, the claim was that because country music was relatively culturally homogeneous there was a lot of shared language and it was easier for a song writer to go into more advanced themes.

I think the Marvel stuff is similarly underrated in that regard. Because the audience knows the universe so well they can skip a lot of the world building and jump to much more difficult themes.

I mean look at WandaVision, can you imagine a normal show trying to pull off the old-style sitcom approach they did? And the whole show was basically about trauma and the main character having a mental breakdown, not a thing many movies can do unless they want to do a character piece with the main actor quivering in the corner. AntMan deals a lot with trying to rebuild broken families, and then learning to enjoy the non-traditional structure you're left with.

Remember films really only have an A and a B plot, and if you want to stick an advanced theme like that in a one-off film it needs to be a really obvious B plot that won't resonate with many viewers because of how heavy handed it needs to be. With the marvel films they have the luxury of making that stuff way more subtle.

Now, I think the 4 marvel films a year was way too much and there needs to be room for more than just superheroes. But I think there's still a place for big franchises tackling stories that standalone films can't really handle.

You need a PhD in Marvel character development to watch these shows. They take themselves way too seriously too.

We know the U.S. nor any western country will not be able to catch this guy, but at least there is now a name and a face It's a good piece of detective work to let the Russians know their wall of security is as good as swiss cheese.

This isn't the first time someone deep within the Russian security or intelligence apparatus has been unveiled. Certainly makes them wonder who is leaking this information. Paranoia can be entertaining.

What spinoff series were failures? I'd say Picard is the worst of them except for the third and final season. You could skip the first two and not lose anything. Discovery had five seasons and while some weren't great I still enjoyed the series. Lower Decks did nothing for me and all the voice actors were either coked up or got paid per word. Strange New Worlds is good because the season isn't just one long story line.

The noble savage myth is bullshit. They warred, they destroyed habitats and moved on... They simply lacked the technology (and this population) to do it on the kind of scales we do it today.

Microsoft has been in the gaming space since the 80's, they definitely make money in games. If my memory is correct during their slump years the XBox division (I think this was around the 360 era) was the best performing sector of the company while other divisions (like mobile) were bleeding money.

Where were are now it seems like XBox is specifically struggling but gaming as a whole is doing well.

Xbox Sales Drop But Microsoft’s Gaming Division Grows in Revenue

I personally would much rather they get out of the "console" space entirely and merge that with with PC hardware division, put out something like a competitor to the Steam Deck, every generation the line between PC and console blurs more. Plus them exiting the console space would leave Sony and Nintendo alone which makes for a much more interesting anti-trust situation for the two of them.

Stories that were told in comics can be good and work.

Comic book stories - those low quality ones that fans will buy because they are fans - don't work beyond that limited audience. "Hey, let's throw these comic cliches together and forget actual writing" isn't good enough.

Now get a director who doesn't understand what works in the genre and give him a committee-vetted script base on one of those comic book stories, and you're going to get feces.

KSP2 from what I have read is in such a weird spot. An original indie game built by a company with not really much game dev experience before this should be a slam dunk for a fleshed out sequel by a more experienced dev team but alas it seems like balls were dropped left and right. Just on word of mouth I haven't even attempted to try KSP2 as a fan of the original, I just hear about terrible performance, still wonky physics and lack of content.

As usual the reporting is confusing and has substantial gaps.

The summary implies the subsidy started in 2015, which would be bizarre since that's was the start of a short window of competent NDP governance.

Reading more closely the deal was actually struck in 2008, and operations may have started in 2011 (though again, nothing actually gives an overview). As far as I can tell there's nothing special about 2015.

Overall, I don't hate the idea of a massive subsidy to get the oil company to do something, but make it a straight up grant/subsidy.

Fake carbon credits are just a way to green wash the whole endeavour and trick the taxpayer into extra subsidies.

I gave up on palm pilots when the second one broke in my pocket. Cool software, though.

"And they were big into phones early on. They just couldn't figure out the interface."

I had an HTC Raphael 110 and the problem was not the interface, it was the lack of reliability. The phone would often get into a state where you had to reboot before you could make a call, it would occasionally reboot itself...