Steven Spielberg wanted to put Star Wars in this movie. Disney told him no. He is maybe the most famous director alive, and he still spent three years just getting permission for everything else you can see in this shot.
Almost every character in a picture like this is owned by a different company, and a lot of those companies are rivals. The woman in the goggles up front is Tracer, from the game Overwatch. Beside her, fist in the air, is Chun-Li from Street Fighter. Those two games come from competitors who fight over the same players, and someone had to talk both into sharing one scene.
That someone was a producer named Kristie Macosko Krieger. Getting permission for all these characters was her whole job, and it ate up three years. Spielberg said so himself. The writer, Zak Penn, joked the team should win an Oscar just for the paperwork, and that what they pulled off would get taught in film schools.
Plenty of doors stayed shut. In the book this movie comes from, the hero turns into the Japanese superhero Ultraman for the big final fight. They could not use him at all. His rights were stuck in a lawsuit nobody could sort out, so they dropped in the Iron Giant instead, a robot Warner Bros already owned. The huge metal monster the villain climbs into at the end, Mechagodzilla, is on screen only because a Japanese studio called Toho agreed, and even then Toho made them build a brand new version from scratch.
Spielberg did something a little funny with his own films. He left nearly all of them out on purpose, so his work would not hog attention from everyone else's. His crew kept trying to sneak them back in when he was not looking, like a Gremlins face painted on a wall, or a diner copied straight out of The Goonies. He caught most of them and cut them before the movie came out. The one he let stay was the DeLorean from Back to the Future, since he only produced that film, he did not direct it. A dinosaur from Jurassic Park slipped through too.
The guy who wrote the book, Ernest Cline, spent years sure nobody could ever film it, because no studio would get that many rivals to say yes at once. The movie cost 175 million dollars and made more than three times that worldwide. It does look as good as people say. But the thing that nearly killed it before a single frame got drawn was a fat stack of contracts, and the most powerful director in the business still lost a few of those fights.
@JakeParkerLIVE My favourites:
Campaign: Forsaken
Raid: VOTD
Dungeon: Prophecy
Exotic mission: Zero Hour
Character: Cayde-6
Class: Hunter
Subclass: Arc
Destination: The Dreaming City
Event: Solstice
Exotic: Raiden Flux
PvP map: Vostok
Public event: Injection Rig
Season: Season of the Drifter
Orcas eat great white sharks. They hunt seals, dolphins, and baby whales. They have never killed a single human in the open ocean. Not once, in all of recorded history.
An orca's brain weighs up to 15 pounds. Yours weighs about 3. They have roughly double the brain cells we do in the regions that handle complex thought. A neuroscientist at Emory named Lori Marino put an orca brain in an MRI and found these animals can tell different species apart underwater. They do it by sending out clicks that bounce off everything around them and come back as a kind of 3D sound map (this is called echolocation). From 500 feet away, an orca knows you're a human and not a seal. It skips you on purpose.
The answer is culture. Orcas around the world are divided into at least 10 separate populations, each with its own food rules, its own language, and its own way of hunting. All of it learned from their mothers. One population eats only fish. Another eats only marine mammals like seals and sea lions. These two populations can live in the exact same water and never swap a single meal. A baby orca learns what food is from its mother, and that list stays the same for life.
In the Pacific Northwest, one population called the Southern Residents eats almost nothing but Chinook salmon. Scientists have documented them killing harbor porpoises 78 times over six decades, carrying the dead porpoises in their mouths, and never once eating them. Even when the group was starving. A 2023 study in Marine Mammal Science looked at all 78 cases and concluded it was play. These orcas would rather go hungry than eat something their culture says isn't food.
Researchers studying whale behavior in 2001 found that orca cultural traditions "appear to have no parallel outside humans." Each family group has its own dialect, its own version of the language. Calves spend about two years just learning how to make all the sounds their family uses. Mothers will slow down a hunt on purpose so their young can watch.
In 2005, a 12-year-old kid was swimming in Helm Bay, Alaska when an orca came at him full speed. At the very last second, the orca seemed to realize it was charging a human. It bent its entire body in half and turned back to open water. In captivity, it goes differently. SeaWorld's Tilikum killed three people during his life in a concrete tank. Research from 2016, published in the journal Animals, traced it to psychological collapse from being locked away from the family bonds orcas need to stay stable.
I think calling this a "mystery" undersells the science. Orcas decide what to eat based on culture, not instinct. No orca mother has ever taught her calf to hunt humans, so no orca hunts humans. Only about 75 of those salmon-eating Southern Residents are still alive. Their pregnancy failure rate is 69% because we've destroyed their salmon runs. They won't break their food culture to survive. Whether we care enough to protect theirs is the part that actually matters.
We live on a planet with 1.3 billion habitable years left. We've had rockets for 69 of those years. In that time, the cost of reaching orbit dropped from $54,500 per kilogram to $2,720, and SpaceX is targeting under $100 with Starship. If they hit that number, getting to space becomes 545 times cheaper in a single lifetime.
329 orbital launches happened in 2025. Almost one a day. The space economy crossed $626 billion last year and should hit a trillion by 2034. SpaceX just filed for an IPO targeting a $2 trillion valuation, worth more than every airline on Earth combined. Starship, their fully reusable rocket (both stages fly back and land), can lift 150 tons to orbit. The entire International Space Station weighs 420 tons. Three flights could put the whole thing up there.
The engineering side of this is solved. What remains is a survival problem. Researchers published a paper in Scientific Reports calculating the natural extinction rate for humans, how often we'd get wiped out by asteroid strikes, supervolcanoes, the stuff we can't control. Less than a 1-in-14,000 chance in any given year. At that rate, we'd survive millions of years, more than enough to spread across the solar system.
Toby Ord, a philosopher at Oxford who spent a decade studying how civilizations end, puts the odds of a civilization-ending catastrophe before 2100 at 1-in-6. The threats aren't from space. Nuclear war. Viruses engineered in labs that could spread before anyone understands what hit them. AI systems are smart enough to act on goals we never gave them. All things we built ourselves.
A 2017 NASA paper made this case: we have a roughly 50-year window to lock in spacefaring infrastructure before resources run thin and energy costs make a restart nearly impossible. We're 9 years into that window. Given enough time, the math takes this to 100%. The only question that matters is whether we make it through the next few decades without blowing our shot.
playing nami is a power trip and men hate admitting it
you're not asking if you should engage
you're telling them when they're allowed to
bubble lands? you go in now
i hit W? you trade now
i have R? we dive now
and if you don't follow my calls? watch me do it without you.
i don't need you to carry
i need you to do what i set up
the amount of adcs who think THEY'RE calling the shots in lane is hilarious
babe, you right-click minions and pray that i press E on you
i'm tracking their jungler
i'm counting their cooldowns
i'm setting up every single kill you get to collect
you're not the carry
you're the clean-up crew
and the second you step out of line, talk shit, or try to one-up me in pings
i stop setting up for you and start setting up for mid
suddenly the 5/0 draven becomes irrelevant and the 2/1 syndra is giga fed
because i took my resources elsewhere
men are so used to women managing their lives, buffing their egos, setting them up for success
then they have the audacity to act like they did it themselves
in ranked and in life
newsflash: you didn't
i did
and i can take it away just as fast
the best part about playing enchanter?
watching a man realise he's completely powerless without you
because that power was never his
study the luumi way