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Black Panther has a 6.8 on Douban, described as the Chinese IMDB, compared to 97% on RottenTomatoes and a 7.8 on IMDB.

“A torture for the eyes”: Chinese moviegoers think Black Panther is just too black

Some moviegoers disliked Black Panther because they felt Marvel was trying too hard to be politically correct (link in Chinese). While many reviewers on Douban stopped short of leaving overtly racist comments about the film, many discussed their discomfort of being surrounded by so much blackness.

“Maybe the Chinese are still not used to a film full of black people,” wrote one reviewer on Douban (link in Chinese). The commenter said he had to pinch himself more than 10 times to stay awake during the movie because “Black Panther is black, all the major characters are black, a lot of scenes are black, the car-chasing scene is black—the blackness has really made me drowsy.”

Another reviewer who came into the theater late made a similar observation: “When I entered the theater, a bunch of black people was fighting in the night… I’ve never been in a theater so dark that I couldn’t find my seat.”

Someone else said the experience was worse in 3D (link in Chinese): “The film is filled with black actors and actresses. Also, because the film’s colors are a bit dark, it’s nearly a torture for the eyes to watch the film’s 3D version in the theater.”

The movie made $63 million on its opening weekend in China, which should put it around #30, a couple spots behind Iron Man 3, which had awkward content shoehorned into its Chinese version.

He Became A Celebrity For Putting Science Before God. Now Lawrence Krauss Faces Allegations Of Sexual Misconduct.

BuzzFeed News has learned that the incident with Hensley is one of many wide-ranging allegations of Krauss’s inappropriate behavior over the last decade — including groping women, ogling and making sexist jokes to undergrads, and telling an employee at Arizona State University, where he is a tenured professor, that he was going to buy her birth control so she didn’t inconvenience him with maternity leave. In response to complaints, two institutions — Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario — have quietly restricted him from their campuses. Our reporting is based on official university documents, emails, and interviews with more than 50 people.

Many of his accusers have requested anonymity, fearing professional or legal retaliation from Krauss, or online abuse from men in the movement who have smeared women for speaking out about other skeptics. A few allegations about Krauss made their way onto skeptic blogs, but were quickly taken down in fear of legal action. So for years, these stories have stayed inside whisper networks in skepticism and physics.

In lengthy emails to BuzzFeed News, Krauss denied all of the accusations against him, calling them “false and misleading defamatory allegations.” When asked why multiple women, over more than a decade, have separately accused him of misconduct, he said the answer was “obvious”: It’s because his provocative ideas have made him famous.

Her "International Woman's Day" emojis have sparked an online backlash

Kim Kardashian's decision to launch a "women's empowerment" add-on to her personal emoji collection for International Women's Day has received a considerable online backlash.

The collection features slogans such as "nasty woman", "my body, my choice" and "full time feminist".

Some on social media celebrated the move as positive promotion of ideals of equality. Others accused the personality of hypocrisy because her other products and emojis are provocative and sexualised.

Coca-Cola plans to launch its first alcoholic drink

Coca-Cola is planning to produce an alcoholic drink for the first time in the company's 125-year history - with an alcopop-style product in Japan. It is keen to cash in on the country's growing taste for Chu-Hi - canned sparkling flavoured drinks given a kick with a local spirit called shochu. The product is typically between 3% and 8% alcohol by volume.

A senior Coke executive in Japan said the move was a "modest experiment for a specific slice of our market". "We haven't experimented in the low alcohol category before, but it's an example of how we continue to explore opportunities outside our core areas," said Jorge Garduno, Coca-Cola's Japan president. It was unlikely the drink would be sold outside of Japan, he suggested.

Some BBC commenterds want to ban alcopops.

Also at NPR and CNBC.

If you've never read Michael Krieger of Liberty Blitz before, I think you might be in for quite a treat: https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2018/03/06/foreign-government-lobbying-is-an-abomination-and-should-be-eradicated-immediately-part-1/

The basic gist is that while the "resistance" is freaking out that Russia "hacked" the United States election by running ads, meanwhile foreign governments actually spend orders of magnitude more money than Russia allegedly did, influencing already elected, in power politicians, and nobody seems to care. Some choice excerpts:

Only an childish culture with a subconscious imperial collapse fantasy would discover that a Russian troll factory ran the above and conclude it represents an existential threat to the Republic

It’s ridiculous to the point of comical that we’re turning a Russian troll farm spending $100,000 on clownish Facebook ads (like the one below) into a national security issue, while the Trump and Clinton campaigns spent a combined $81 million on Facebook ads.

each time there’s a bipartisan push in Congress to stop the U.S. government from actively aiding the Saudis in their genocidal campaign in Yemen, Saudi money swoops in to line the pockets of American lobbyists in order to prevent Congress from doing the ethical and constitutional thing.

There you go. Foreign governments are paying intermediaries (lobbyists) to arrange meetings with the very people elected to serve as representatives of the American people. Every minute a Congressional member spends with a Saudi lobbyist is a minute he or she can’t spend on issues that affect the daily lives of the U.S. public. Is that Russia’s fault too?

Which VPN Services Keep You Anonymous in 2018?

Which version of XKeyscore are we running on?

Exclusive: Florida Public School Teacher Has A White Nationalist Podcast

Crystal River teacher hosts white nationalist podcast, HuffPost reports

Meanwhile:

Here Are 911 Transcripts of Some of the Times Apple Employees Walked Directly Into Glass Walls

Today Facebook sent a warning to the Babyon Bee, a Christian satirical website (think The Onion, but Christian-themed), alerting them that one of their articles had been fact-checked by Snopes.com and determined to be false. Facebook warned Babylon Bee that if they persisted in posting false content they risked having the distribution of their posts reduced and their ability to advertise removed.

You really have to see the Snopes.com "fact-checking" to believe it: https://www.snopes.com/cnn-washing-machine/.

This is a fact-checking article about a Babylon Bee article that said that CNN bought an industrial-size laundry washer so they could spin the news before reporting it.. Yes, it's that blatant. Why in the world did Snopes fact check this?

It stands out to me here that this article claims "some readers ... interpreted [the washing machine article] literally." That's got to be baloney. Either this is boiler plate that goes into every Snopes.com article about the Onion, the Babylon Bee, and other satirical websites, or this is a third-rate Snopes writer just trying to crank something out to meet a deadline. Or else it's a bold faced lie, but surely not, right? Do they actually have evidence that anyone somewhere actually made this misunderstanding. Or possibly English is not the writer's first language, as evidenced by the grammatical error in "CNN had made a significant investment in heavy machinery to assist their journalists 'spin' the news they report."

Reader who attempted to click the Babylon Bee link from Facebook were faced with a warning that they might rather go see the more factual "additional reporting" on the subject from Snopes: https://twitter.com/MrB_Loves_Jesus/status/969425733100720128/photo/1/

Here is the Babylon Bee owner's screenshot of the warning from Facebook: https://twitter.com/Adam4d/status/969405110324523008/photo/1/

And here is one of the more complete reports of the event I've seen, which includes the fact that Facebook has since corrected the error and acknowledged it was a mistake that should never have happened: http://freebeacon.com/culture/facebook-threatens-satirical-site-article-failed-snopes-fact-check/

What I don't see reported on much is that the owner of Babylon Bee has also recently (mid-January) launched his own news aggregator site based on the idea that internet giants like Facebook, Twitter, Google et al are now exercising too much control over what news people do and do not see: https://www.christiandailyreporter.com/manifesto.html

President Trump promised steel and aluminum executives Thursday that he will levy tariffs on imports of their products in coming weeks. He said the imported steel will face tariffs of 25 percent, while aluminum will face tariffs of 10 percent.

"We're going to build our steel industry back and we're going to build our aluminum industry back," Trump told reporters.

The president announced the action after meeting with leaders of the two industries at the White House. On Thursday afternoon, major stock market indexes fell sharply after Trump's announcement, with the Dow Jones industrial average closing down 420 points, or about 1.7 percent.

The obvious two problems with such a proposal is first, it makes everything more expensive for US companies since steel and aluminum get used in a lot of products. Second, there will be return fire. For example, most steel imports come in from countries friendly to the US (Canada, Brazil, South Korea, Japan, Mexico, etc). Retributive tariffs from our best trade partners is not to going to help the US's situation.

Even if this is a typical hard bargaining tactic (start off with an extreme demand and then negotiate down to what you really wanted), it's pretty provocative. There are already people making decisions based on what Trump might do (such as sell offs in the markets). Countries might follow shortly.

Trump is already looking at a massive route in the 2018 elections. This sounds like it'll dig the hole deeper since even the risk of a tariff war will depress economic activity. Right now, the US economy is doing relatively well. But Trump can fix that. Voters will look even less favorably on the Republicans, if the economy tanks on top of everything else.

Hi-Rez president compares new ‘Overwatch’ hero to a ‘Paladins’ protagonist

Just bookmarking so I can check out the videogamedunkey video later.

Nintendo Holds Off on Switch 2.0, Looks to Peripherals for More Sales

It would be bizarre to release a new version of Switch so soon. They talk about a slimmed down version (rather than a mid-cycle upgrade like PS4 Pro or Xbox One X). Compare to PS4 (Nov 2013) and PS4 Slim (Sep 2016), and Xbox One (Nov 2013) and Xbox One S (Aug 2016). In fact, the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X didn't come out very long after the slimmed down versions.

What they could do is drop in newer ARM CPUs and Nvidia GPUs. Even if they underclock and keep performance almost the same, the console would benefit from lower power consumption since it is battery-powered in handheld mode.