If they had bothered to make an Avengers film circa 2023 it would have been the easiest "hey Hawkeye's changed" throwaway line and then people who liked the character could have gone and seen the series

They messed up making so many series about secondary characters that were both important and not. Should have stuck to one Wandavision / Loki (actually important) a year and one less consequential one like Ms Marvel or Hawkeye, both of which were actually fun

FatWS was a weird show in that it felt like necessary viewing but then it basically left the status quo exactly where it started. It was probably more relevant for Thunderbolts than the film it was supposed to set up

Well you need to get the energy to lead a band of villagers to kill a beast in a castle somehow

My uncle always joked that he wanted either this or Living In A Box

Probably but it might have been better to let him own the failure of Brexit a bit more and let him blow himself up earlier so he wasn't in charge during the pandemic

Which raises the horrible possibility that it would have been better to get a Johnson premiership out of the way earlier as a reluctant Leaver would have less incentive to push through a performatively hard Brexit than a reluctant Remainer like May

I broadly agree but it's not no effect at all - housing targets are partially dictated by existing housing costs so migration (internal or external, obviously the latter far more in most places) does have some impact.

I'm choosing to believe this is about Attlee and factionalism

I think even Trump could run a marathon in 21 hours tbf

Bowie also did an awful lot more to try and atone for his fascist flirtation and didn't go as far as selling Nazi merch tbf

Clarkson's politics are similarly idiosyncratic to pre-2015 Trump but I think the difference is that his more extreme stuff is largely an act whereas Trump has always been genuinely very racist

How are this and Stephen's first example both Rogue One

Not my specialist subject but I can only assume that without the Metro it would be even worse

Manchester is the exception but then the backbone of its network is old commuter rail lines that had loads of capacity. Other cities should have learned that lesson but it was never going to be doable to the same extent in most places

Lamine Yamal wasn't born the last time Italy played a World Cup knockout game.

David Cameron was PM the last time they played any World Cup game.

The Nations League is great for giving top teams an excuse to play each other and try stuff out semi-competitively and I do fear we'll suffer from having dropped down to League B and not having the practice

There's an argument that GoT did this for fantasy on TV and actually changed the game more than ASOIAF, which probably wasn't the only post-Tolkien blending of high and low fantasy books with more adult content but just the most notable one

Never forgave Roy Jenkins for this

I'm getting tied up in knots trying to work out whether this is any more proportional than straight FPTP or not

Yeah I remembered after I posted and berated myself for it

This explains why Morning Glory and Rumours never leave the charts - because they're fucking stacked

Their transition since Lonerism has been the audio equivalent of motion smoothing. That and Currents are great psych and synth rock albums but newer stuff just feels so... weightless

Girl, So Confusing (specifically the Lorde remix) and Sympathy is a Knife will probably have a bit of an afterlife as a totem of Taylor Swift being incredibly weird and petty

Tame Impala are a weird example in that by most measures they're a reasonably successful, arena-but-not-stadium-level band, but their streaming numbers are *massive* because they are on every vibes-based background music playlist going

Even that was an instant number one that didn't stick around for that long - 360 and Apple may well end up being more remembered

Singles and albums charts have gone opposite ways in terms of rate of turnover. Wolf Alice would probably have half a dozen top 40 hits and maybe gone top 20 with a lead single but probably wouldn't have had a number 1 album in the 90s.

Charli ironically became ubiquitous with her least outwardly commercial-sounding music in ages. She's probably decided that it's hard to replicate the impact of Brat as it was as much about the moment and the aesthetic as the music so she may as well just do what she wants for a bit

It works well for the likes of Foos and Muse to take 3-4 years between albums because 1. they're probably less motivated that when they were younger and 2. slightly longer gaps make it easier for fans to justify spending £100 to go and see them again

Yeah it's basically this or hyperpop. Skrillex-era dubstep feels like the last thing that would have seemed completely alien to parents