Mark my words, I might be something someday....

In 2013, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas predicted the film industry as we know it would “implode” if/when, in the near future, too many wildly expensive blockbuster movies flopped. And if ever there were a year for an implosion on that scale to occur it would be 2018, the year when there are nearly as many major studio tentpole releases as there are weeks in the year. Well, here’s the thing …

2018 will see the release over 40 massive, tentpole movies. There are nearly 20 releases that happen exactly a week apart. This means that Marvel’s Black Panther will have only a week to make most of its money before Pacific Rim 2 steals its audience, which will give the unnamed Marvel/Fox movie a week to make its money before Wreck-It Ralph 2 comes out, which will only have a week before The Flash and/or Tomb Raider comes out, because Warner Bros. is dumb and scheduled two of their own tentpole movies for the same day. And all of those movies will be released in February and March, the two months studios usually use as a landfill to dump the movies they think suck. The year isn’t just crowded; it’s a clusterfuck, and there are going to be big casualties. There are too many massive movies and not enough people to watch them.

TL;DR version: blockbusters actually haven’t made money for the studios for the past 10-12 years – at all, on average, even for the Disney/Marvel machine – because the market can’t support more than 5-6 successful summer blockbusters per year. 5-6 is the number of movies your average interested person can make time to see, so to a degree, it doesn’t matter if there are 12 or 18 or 30 releases beyond that. They’re all massive loss leaders designed to enable partner sales of ancillary goods/services. 

In other words, the purpose of the movie is to get the largest number of people hooked on a fandom. Then ABC or Netflix can make money off spinoff TV series, Lego or Hasbro can make money off toys, and so on. Disney or Fox make money off the deals they have with ABC/Netflix/Lego/Hasbro – not from the box office.

So the crash isn’t going to be because there are too many movies: you’re already seeing some of the adjustments predicted by the blog author (Matthew Ball), like variable pricing in the form of season or premium passes with tie-ins. The crash is going to be because there’s an upper bound to the number of active fandoms an average fan can participate in at once. And I actually suspect that number is higher than 5-6 per year, because you’ve filtered out the punters who would tag along to see the Avengers but can’t be arsed to buy a Iron Man mug or watch Jessica Jones on Netflix – in the new model, a punter is useful for reducing the initial loss but uninteresting beyond that. What you’re trying to do is turn a punter into a fan.

No matter what I put my characters through, they make it. They get to make it to the end of the story and have everything work out and be ok.

Religion came up with Petunia recently.

bonus, Petunia Last Supper:

trans women who don’t wear makeup 💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕

girls who don’t wear makeup 💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖

if it’s dark, don’t shine your flashlight into the trees.

if a child approaches and asks you a question, don’t tell the truth.

you may find some harrowing artifacts (i found a ribbon on a tree and some bible pages) pick these up and keep them. they belong to you.

if you walk down a long, straight pathway, you will feel someone behind you. don’t look

you may see people in your peripheral vision; these are the spirits. they won’t hurt you.

if you wish to communicate with the spirits, do not do it alone. cast a protection circle. only ask polite questions.

you will feel bursts of dread and terror. ignore them.

don’t read too much into what the graves say. some things are best left unsolved.

research the history of the graveyard beforehand. you need to know what you might encounter.

some beings may not want you to leave. should you come into contact with one of these beings, leave immediately.

don’t read the hidden graves.

if you find a headless angel statue, don’t look for her head.

if you find a tipped over angel statue, leave her be. she’s only resting.

don’t listen to music. this will distract you from them.

Time Lapse of the Land Taken From Native Americans

Yes!

Basically scientists have found that if you start selecting for people-friendly animals, you see a bunch of hypothetically unrelated traits start showing up in all sorts of mammal species: floppy ears, piebald/patterned coats, etc.

This is true for everything from cows to dogs to rats! One of the coolest long term studies on this has been the Russian fox experiments.

So essentially the science goes like this:

You have two copies of every genes, one from each parent.

We tend to simplify genetics, and say that for every single gene you have it is random,l coin flip which copy you pass on to you offspring. We also tend think of genes as a 1:1 ratio of genes—>traits.

But! This is not quite the case.

Genes have a specific physical location and order relative to each other on your chromosomes, and the chance of genes being inherited together goes up the closer together they are located. This means random, unrelated traits can wind up being more commonly inherited together in specific patterns just because those genes are located close together, and you don’t get that completely random reshuffling of two parent’s traits. Some of them tend to stay “stuck” together.

This is called linkage, and it’s why you often see red hair, pale skin, and freckles together, for example.

The second factor that plays into this is that a lot of times 1 gene affects several different traits (or several different genes affect 1 trait). This means that sometimes you really *can’t* untangle two traits because they have a similar cause. For example, say genes for increased aggression are responsible both for making a spider a better hunter (pro) and making a spider more likely to eat its offspring (con). Because the same gene is the cause of both things, natural selection can’t really untangle them.

Circling back to the redhead/freckles/pale skin example, these traits are affected by a number of different genes, but also one gene in particular: MCR1, a gene that changes how your body responds to hormones promoting melanin production. Again, one gene related to pigment production can affect a BUNCH of different traits. (And also skin cancer risk. Fun!)

Domestication Syndrome in mammals turns out to be due to both linkage and genes affect by multiple traits!

See, when we domestic animals we want them to be friendlier/less aggressive, which normally translates to less FEARFUL.

And it turns out that the same genes involved in adrenal responses and other stress reactions are also involved in melanin, cartilage, and bone production. So when we domesticate animals we get these recurring changes in pigmentation (white patches, piebald costs), floppy ears (cartilage), shorter muzzles and other changes in physical stature (bone growth), etc.

We also wind up selecting for a lot of neotenic genes in general— that is, retention of childhood traits into adulthood. That’s because baby animals tend to have lots of friendly/trusting/biddable/curious traits we are looking for.

And honestly, who can say no to a face like this?

ps, since it was mentioned:

the same genes involved in domestication probably help animals form social groups in general. if you need to get along with and trust strangers you need a decrease in the panic/aggression genes.

cats, for example, probably domesticated themselves when they started living close to each other and to humans to feed off of pests in grain silos.

and yeah, some some recent theories suggest humans may have ‘domesticated’ themselves: