Facebook has long been a bit vague when it comes to laying out their political leanings. That seems to be coming to a calculated end.

This excellent piece from Popular Information illustrates a case where Facebook is breaking their own rules, seemingly, for political reasons. In this instance, they’re refusing to enforce a rule that bans networks of political “news” pages that work together but don’t acknowledge that they’re affiliated. It seems that most who’ve read this piece are, understandably, perceiving it as a threat because of the massive power Facebook demonstrably holds over the American electorate, which is a valid concern. However, I don’t believe that Facebook’s decision to allow one very successful, very political network of allegedly unaffiliated pages to continue operating was made for the sake of promoting a political agenda; no, this is an exercise in self preservation.

Facebook’s malfeasance is one rare topic upon which liberals and conservatives generally agree. There have been many calls for Facebook to be more heavily regulated from Republican and Democratic legislators alike, however I believe that the Democrats have slightly outpaced Republicans in calling for Facebook to be dealt with, despite the fact that the notion of privacy as a civil liberty seems to fall slightly more in line with traditional conservatism. This trend can likely be attributed to the fact that Democrats and their elected officials tend to be a bit younger than Republicans, and thus more in tune to issues of this nature.

Given the extreme political division our country is experiencing (which Facebook has cultivated for monetary gain), the fact that their deservingness of punishment is one topic most people can agree upon puts Facebook in a very dangerous position, not to mention the fact that the drum beat is growing ever louder, and more and more people are tugging at the curtain.

One solution to that looming threat? Take a side, and further capitalize upon the division you’ve sewn by allowing that side to defend you to the death. Give one side or the other a couple free passes, have a few chats with the right folks, and then step back while that side begins to see you as one of their own, and then you’re good to go. It honestly doesn’t matter which side Facebook takes, because taking either side would all but ensure that party's loyalty, not only because they don’t want to upset Facebook and have their reach limited, but because both parties are so committed to doing the opposite of what the other party wants.

Now, in this case, Facebook seems to have chosen to ally themselves with the Republicans, but again, which side they pick doesn’t really make a difference. In defense of the Republicans, Facebook just as easily could’ve jumped on the left-bound bandwagon — a few public statements in support of people with confusing genders and a few removed Trump ads, and they’d have them in their pocket, too. I believe this choice was made out of convenience; as mentioned above, slightly fewer conservative law makers have gone after Facebook.

If you’re a Republican, this should offend your sensibilities. As stated previously, privacy is a civil liberty that has long been a value of traditional conservatives, and Facebook is the biggest threat to personal privacy our country has ever seen. True conservatives should be outraged that Facebook is even trying to get in bed with them, and that their purported reason for doing so is their mutual support of free speech — what Facebook is trying to paint as free speech (political advertisements that include false statements of fact), isn’t. It’s paid speech, it’s false advertising, and it’s speech that presents a clear and present danger — it’s NOT protected by the First Amendment. In any case, free speech is a patently American value, not a partisan one.

Facebook worked hard for a long time to avoid taking a side, and we should enforce that hard earned neutrality by refusing to allow the public perception of Facebook to shift. They do not deserve to be seen as a company guided by any sort of moral compass or political agenda, because in reality, their chief motivators are, and have always been, financial.

TL,DR: Facebook is picking a political side so that their own regulation will become a partisan issue, and therefore never actually gain enough traction for any meaningful legislation to pass.

#deletefacebook

This research done by DuckDuckGo’s SpreadPrivacy.com does a great job of illustrating why you can’t trust Google Search. It’s rather dense, but polls suggest that online privacy is becoming a mainstream issue, so it’s well worth the time it will take you to read it.

Basically, they had a bunch of participants search for the exact same search terms on Google, and then they analyzed the results. In each case, participants were given different results in different orders based on the personal information Google had collected about them and used to predict which search results might interest them the most, effectively putting each user in their own filtered bubble, regardless of whether they had been using private browsing mode. They do this because the more links a user clicks, the more money they make from advertising. And because they’re shady.

Why is that a bad thing, you ask? Well, if Google knows enough about you to predict which links you’re most likely to click on when you search for a given term, they know enough about you to do some serious damage. Imagine the case of a Google user with strong political beliefs; in a very short amount of time, Google could learn enough about that user to show them results that are most likely to appeal to their beliefs, and they will do so, even if it means promoting results that aren’t factually correct, hiding results that may challenge their beliefs, or taking that user down a habit hole that pushes their opinions further to the edge of the political spectrum. Personalized search results yield huge confirmation bias issues and result in case by case censorship.

I can’t stress enough that everyone should stop using Google as their default search engine; DuckDuckGo is a great alternative that yields accurate search results, and is available to be set as your default search engine on Apple devices.

Last week’s headlines were an exercise in illustrating just how far ahead of the competition Apple is in some areas, as the BBC revealed that incredible security issues exist for Google’s and Samsung’s latest flagship devices.

Google’s new Pixel 4 has a facial recognition system which they’ve made a point of touting is the only one, besides Apple’s Face ID, that is secure enough to be used for sensitive authentications, such as authorizing payments. Unfortunately, their facial recognition system doesn’t really meet that standard, because it works even with your eyes closed, as opposed to Apple’s Face ID, which not only requires your eyes to be open, but also for your eyeballs to be aimed at your device. Google admits that, in theory and in practice, this would allow a third party to unlock your device by holding it up to your face while you’re sleeping or otherwise unconscious.

Samsung, on the other hand, was trying to look cool by making an in-display, ultrasonic fingerprint scanner, which does sound pretty cool, except that it doesn’t work. Not that it won’t recognize your finger, it’s just that it WILL accept anyone’s finger if the device has a cheap plastic screen protector on it; such screen protectors are, unfortunately, ridiculously common.

Can you imagine if Apple shipped a device with a security feature that could be fooled by any finger in the world and a cheap piece of plastic? In Samsung’s and Google’s defense, both companies have announced that they intend to release software patches to address these issues in the coming weeks, but it’s astonishing that they shipped them in the first place. It’s a good thing Android has a reputation for having such a high percentage* of users on their most recent software versions.

*sarcasm.

I’m not the only one linking to this article right now, but in the wake of Mark Zuckerberg’s recent attempts to rewrite the Facebook origin story, it seems a good time to remind ourselves exactly how the company came to be.

Katharine Kaplan, writing for The Harvard Crimson in 2003:

Mark E. Zuckerberg ’06 said he was accused of breaching security, violating copyrights and violating individual privacy by creating the website, www.facemash.com, about two weeks ago. The charges were based on a complaint from the computer services department over his unauthorized use of on-line facebook* photographs, he said.

“I understood that some parts were still a little sketchy.“ “Issues about violating people’s privacy don’t seem to be surmountable,” he wrote at that point.

Students were ranked within the general Harvard community and individual Houses according to attractiveness. Zuckerberg hacked into House websites to gather the photos, and then wrote the codes to compute rankings after every vote. The programming and algorithms that made the site function were Zuckerberg’s primary interest in creating it, he said.

He’s clearly still interested in algorithms. Facebook is clearly still sketchy. He clearly doesn’t understand the concept of privacy. Is it a coincidence that Zuckerberg was born in 1984? Probably not.

#deletefacebook

*the word “facebook” in this quote is not referring to the social network; it didn’t exist at this time. A face book was an online source of ID photos and names for a group of people, a directory of sorts.

UPDATED: 11/28/19, 13:45

Wow. I don’t know how much evidence there is for these claims, but they’re certainly bold; calling for Hillary to join the race — Tulsi is not holding back.

In case you missed it, Facebook has updated their advertising policy to make it easier for people, companies, and campaigns to publish ads that contain false or misleading statements, a move which ought to be condemned equally from conservatives and liberals.

The old rule was that you couldn’t publish ads that contained such statements, but the protections were rolled back last week to allow any statement that hasn’t been proven to be false by an independent fact checking organization, and even that flimsy rule doesn’t apply to politicians, so they can, in theory and in practice, publish ads on Facebook that contain completely false information with no repercussions. Even before this rule change, misinformation campaigns on Facebook led to the extreme political division our country is experiencing, and significantly influenced several high profile elections around the world. I recognize that that’s a lofty claim — if you don’t believe me, check out this piece I wrote about a film called “The Great Hack,” and then watch it for yourself on Netflix.

#deletefacebook

UPDATED: 11/28/19, 13:30

Here’s a fun exercise, let’s see how two of the biggest news outlets in the country, one stereotypically more liberal and the other stereotypically more conservative, chose to represent the same story. Given Zuckerberg’s actual quote and the unpartisan nature of this issue, this should be a fairly straightforward chance to identify potential bias. Let’s get started.

First Things First, Here’s What Happened:

Lest we judge too soon, it’s important to know what Mark Zuckerberg actually said, so that we can draw reasonable conclusions about how the news outlets are presenting it. In an interview that covered censorship and in the wake of Facebook’s recent policy change that allows politicians to publish ads with Information that is known to be false, Zuckerberg said “my belief is that in a democracy, I don’t think that we want private companies censoring politicians in the news.”

The Headlines:

Here were the headlines of the stories from CNN and Fox News which covered that interview.

CNN: “Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg: Private companies should not censor politicians”

Fox News: “Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg rejects calls for Trump's social media to be shut down in exclusive interview”

The Verdict:

This is only one example, so perhaps it’s just a misrepresentation, but based on this exercise alone, “fair and balanced” seems like a stretch.

This has been quite a week for everyone’s favorite lifeless-eyed big tech CEO. First he got into it with Elizabeth Warren over whether or not politicians should be able to publish ads that contain lies, and now this. I’m glad to see that Washington is starting to recognize what an enormous enemy of democracy Facebook truly is.

In an interview with Fox News’ Dana Perino, he was asked a question about the disagreement between Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris during the fourth Democratic debate over whether Donald Trump’s Twitter account should be suspended. Zuckerberg responded by saying “my belief is that in a democracy, I don’t think that we want private companies censoring politicians in the news.” Of course he doesn’t want to censor what politicians say in their ads. The more ads they sell, the more money they make. The more sensational those ads are, the more engagement they deliver, and thus, the more money Facebook makes.

No, Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t want to censor politicians, in fact, he wants them to publish the most ridiculous ads possible. Then he’ll just censor all the people talking about those politicians to effectively gerrymander opinions, enabling companies like Cambridge Analytica to publish their own sensational ads (which are personally targeted to undecided voters, whose information they’ve collected and analyzed without consent), effectively allowing them to sell out major elections to the highest bidder.

He’s trying to pass this off as a free speech issue, to seem like he’s making the tough decision now that will seem like the right one in the long run. He cites his confidence in people as a reason that the truth will prevail despite this inconvenient but necessary decision to allow the erosion of truth in our society. Fortunately, I’m not the only one seeing through Zuckerberg’s bullshit here; CNBC’s Steve Kovach had a similar take:

While there’s almost no human involvement in deciding what to pump into your Facebook feed, there is an algorithm that’s making those decisions. In general, that algorithm is designed to keep users sucked in, and the best way to do that is showing them stuff that will engage, enrage or feed their biases. Truth doesn’t matter to an algorithm. But when you’re delivering news and information at a massive scale, you also carry the responsibility to get it right. Facebook is doing that on a scale never seen before in human history. And its leader admitted on Thursday that it wants no part in playing the role of fact-checker. In fact, in the case of false political advertisements, it’s willing to get paid to spread those falsehoods.

History won’t look fondly upon that.

#deletefacebook

See also: this.

This is why Elizabeth Warren is in my top three for the 2020 election; she has a terrific way of playing by the rules while embarrassing her critics. Her response to last week’s Facebook advertising policy change (news which led me to read the policy and notice a glaringly hypocritical policy about ads for surveillance equipment) was the best clap back anyone could’ve hoped for.

#deletefacebook

You know that identity politics has a firm hold on our nation when journalists for the New York Times are incapable of understanding why an open minded, moderate presidential candidate could attract followers. Lisa Lerer’s piece is trash, and she is only serving to further divide our country by telling the far left snowflakes and SJW’s who read her nonsense that having a variety of opinions is so bad that it’s not only considered treasonous within the Democratic Party, but that it equates to appealing to white nationalists, anti-Semites, and the alt right. Disgusting.

Tulsi had a pretty good response.

As if to prove my point, NYT just published a “greatest hits” smear piece. All your favorite hits in one article! These are the folks who will be acting as the “neutral” questioners/moderators of Tuesday’s debate lol

— Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) October 12, 2019

Dan Lamothe, writing for Dan Lamothe writing for

The Pentagon will deploy an additional 1,800 troops to Saudi Arabia, senior defense officials said Friday, a modest increase in the U.S. military’s presence in the Middle East meant to deter Iranian aggression. […]

President Trump has approved the deployment of an additional 14,000 U.S. troops to the Middle East since spring

I am not a pacifist, but our presence in the Middle East is not a necessity, it’s war mongering. Fourteen thousand is a huge number, and the brave men and women we send to fight for us deserve the respect of only being called upon when it’s truly necessary. True patriots should see our continued military engagement in Middle Eastern affairs as a direct affront to our troops.

Specifically in the case of the Iranian attack on Saudi Arabian oil installations, that’s a situation that should be between Iran and Saudi Arabia; our dog doesn’t need to be in that fight. In any case, Saudi Arabia sure seems to fit the bill for “shithole country,” so it’s hard to imagine why Don is so apt to help defend them. Perhaps it’s because he and the Saudi crown prince share a distaste for the free press (read: the Saudi government chopped up a journalist last year).

Cydney Henderson writing for USA Today:

Sunday's spotting of the unlikely duo had many fans throwing a flag on the play. 

I take issue with this verbiage. They aren’t throwing flags, they’re throwing tantrums.

We need to see more stories of people with opposing political beliefs treating each other with civility, not denigrate each other for getting along. Our country is grappling with the most intense political division since the civil war, and we need to be frequently reminded that despite our differing opinions, we’re all on the same team.

As politically divided as everyone is, it’s astonishing to me that super libs are gonna give Ellen shit for saying “be kind to everyone” — this is cancel culture at its most dangerous, and for some reason, the gays and trans people and all the SJW’s in that camp are leading the charge. My theory is that the “LGBTQIA+” label removes individual responsibility and enables those people to behave cruelly in the name of a minority group, thus serving as an outlet for the frustration caused by their own insecurities and internal conflict; they often accuse others (especially same sex attracted men who disagree with them 🙋🏼‍♂️) of hating themselves, but it’s almost is if they’re projecting when they do that…

Here’s the rub: progress is never made through cruelty or indignation. How can you negotiate if you don’t come to the table?

The most touted feature of the new iPhones, especially in recent years, is the camera. Each year, Apple delivers solid hardware advancements and software tweaks that usually add up to more than the sum of their parts. This year, the hardware is terrific, but the software works against it. The redesigned camera app absolutely sucks and I hate it. Here’s why:

• The new drawer for the settings is redundant, but at least they finally got rid of that god awful square photo mode and just gave us an aspect ratio setting.

• The zoom/lens switching interface is very inconsistent between camera modes, and it takes several seconds longer than before to go from a zoom distance somewhere between two lenses (like 1.8x zoom) back to any of the non-digitally zoomed options (0.5x, 1x, and 2x).

• The app now also has an extremely annoying disregard for your manually adjusted settings. For instance, I wanted to use the flash for a photo but the iPhone thought night mode would be better (I tried it, and in this instance, it wasn’t). Moving my hand ever so slightly from the shutter button to toggle the flash setting at the top and back to the shutter button was enough movement to cause the iPhone to reanalyze the scene, and turn night mode back on. I had to do this four times while attempting to capture a single photo before I was able to hold the phone still enough that it didn’t override my choice to use the flash.

• Deep Fusion was hyped up a whole lot on stage to be so astonishingly unremarkable in practice. My photos with deep fusion aren’t at all noticeably different than the ones without it.

A few positive notes:

• Portrait mode still isn’t perfect, but it works a lot faster and more precisely than before.

• The cool new feature that is supposed to use the wider lenses to capture what’s outside the frame so that you can rotate and adjust without cropping works very rarely and seemingly without any rhyme or reason, but when it does work, the photos are indistinguishable from the rest. Hopefully we’ll get to the point where the cameras are so tightly integrated that all three are used to capture each image, theoretically giving you remarkable detail regardless of how far away your subject happens to be.

• Night mode impressed me.

And now for some real world examples: I wanted to put some of these features to the test, so my sister and I went kayaking to try and get some cool shots. They were good, but they weren’t overwhelmingly impressive. We left all of the settings on auto, only manually adjusting the zoom and focus.

The Auto Live feature was a disappointment, for some reason deciding not to capture a Live Photo despite obvious and intentional movement happening in the frame. The selfie camera was also very quick to refocus itself even after I’d just attempted to manually set the focus—the result was a bunch of photos like this one, where my face was fairly well exposed, but the sky was so overexposed that it appears almost completely white. The ultra wide angle camera was useful for shots like this, but generally it’s not very helpful and I think most people would benefit more from the telephoto lens—that would have been the better choice for the iPhone 11. Additionally, there seems to be so much software magic happening with each photo that you sometimes end up getting photos that are blurrier than they would’ve been before, which makes the whole thing feel a bit disingenuous. Look closely at the detail of the tree leaves and the surface of the water in this photo: it’s not exactly great.

The iPhone 11 Pro camera system can be summed up with one word: tradeoffs.

The second public beta for iOS 13.2 was recently released, and it’s a terrific update, including clearer privacy permissions for Siri, new Haptic Touch options, and a ton of new emoji.

While some of the new emoji are great, a lot of them are a bit absurd. For every character emoji, Apple has added a third gender option.

While I don’t have a problem with representation — I particularly like the ones that are more representative of folks with various abilities, like the prosthetic limbs, hearing aids, wheelchairs, etc. — I do have a problem with creating specific emojis for a microscopic portion of the population which almost only serve to overcrowd the emoji picker.

If Apple insists on implementing multiple gender options for an emoji, it should work in a similar manner to the skin tone picker, and it should remember your last choice. Overcrowding was already an issue with only two gender options, and now the emoji keyboard is just a mess. As a man, I had roughly two times more emojis than I needed under the ‘people’ category, and having all those extras made it much harder to quickly pick out the ones I was looking for. Now the problem is getting two times worse, because not only do I have to train my eye to overlook all the female emojis, but now I have to ignore all the androgynous ones as well (which usually just have the female face with a weird haircut and neutral colored clothes).

I could go down a rabbit hole here with my thoughts on the whole ‘3+ genders’ thing, but suffice it to say that I think a lot of people need to try a bit harder to overlook gender stereotypes and present themselves how they want without denouncing their genitals. In a lot of cases, I believe the tendency to do this stems from cultural and individual laziness in regards to challenging the established gender stereotypes, and I actually think it’s regressive for one to just adopt a third gender rather than attempting to broaden the parameters for the two genders that exist in direct correlation with biological factors.

Whatever — not my circus, not my monkeys. My goal is in solving the real issue here; the overcrowded emoji picker. I need the people at Apple to realize that adding more emojis every time someone comes up with a new gender (or otherwise marginalized group) is unsustainable. After all, Memoji already does the job.

This is now the third time Twitter has had an allegedly accidental privacy snafu in the past few months. As I said last time this happened, I’m getting closer and closer to clicking the ‘delete’ button on Twitter, too.

Jack Dorsey: I now speak directly to you. I want you to know that you are not special. I’ve already deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts, and your service is not only tangibly less successful than your competitors’, but also less useful to me, personally. If these ‘accidents’ don’t cease, I will have no problem getting rid of my Twitter account and encouraging my massive readership to do the same.

From an opinion piece by Molly Roberts for The Washington Post:

There’s something known to those who grew up online as a “cursed boomer meme.” These memes are cursed because they are, basically, bad: occasionally indecipherable and almost never achieving the effect they intend. They’re boomer memes because they come from that crowd-of-a-certain-age that seems to have stumbled onto the Internet and now keeps bumping into things.

Many of these memes are variations on formats popular among millennials, but warped to the edges of recognition by some soon-to-be grandfather who has recently discovered the wonders of Photoshop […]

Some are originals, borrowing only the conventions of meme-making — macros with the white “Impact” font, say, or excessive collaging — to build something bafflingly new. Most of all, they’re deadly earnest, which is sort of the opposite of what memes are supposed to be.

It’s not that the president loves memes, though he does. It’s that he loves these cursed memes in particular. Because as much as Trump is the Nickelback president, or the post-truth president, or the reality TV president, or the 140-character president, he is, above all, the cursed boomer president.

Roberts makes a terrific point here. I think this will ultimately be one of the best ways to describe Donald Trump — the president who was woefully out of touch, not only with his constituents, but with the rapidly changing world he was surprised to find himself “leading.” In most of his actions, but especially in what he does online, Trump really is like an old person who just doesn’t quite get it.

The thing about many people who are around Donald Trump’s age (and a lot of early Gen Xers, too) is that they really don’t seem to understand the nuance of what’s happening in the world around them. Nevertheless, you can bet your balls that they intend to be just as loud and as adamant as they’ve ever been, if not more so, for the sake of exuding a false bravado to mask their perpetual confusion.

From category #16 of the Prohibited Content section of Facebook’s Advertising Policy:

16. Surveillance Equipment 

Ads may not promote the sale of spy cams, mobile phone trackers or other hidden surveillance equipment.

How noble of Facebook, right? Wrong; this is hypocritical of Facebook.

It’s honestly laughable, given how Facebook’s entire business model is centered around their products’ tendency to act as hidden surveillance equipment. They admit in their privacy policy that they actually ARE WATCHING YOU (any time you use their built-in camera, regardless of whether or not you actually take a photo or video) and TRACKING YOUR LOCATION (possibly twenty four hours a day, depending on your device settings).

They’re trying to make it seem like they’re looking out for their users, but it’s far more likely that they simply want to be the only big name in underhanded surveillance, so they prohibit other players in the industry from gaining traction by refusing to display their ads.

This seems like an appropriate time to remind ourselves that Facebook just announced a new camera they want you to install in your living room.

#deletefacebook

I’m late to the game here, and this is more of an internal monologue of my thoughts than a thorough review, but I wanted to finally write about some of the things that have stuck with me from Avengers: Endgame. I thought it would be premature to do it before now because I wanted the chance to rewatch it a few more times, but since you can buy the film on iTunes now, I’ve been able to rewatch it again (after seeing it in theaters twice back in April) and organize my thoughts. If you haven’t seen it yet, (well, firstly wtf is wrong with you, and secondly,) here’s your ⚠️ Spoiler Warning.

Generally, I really liked the movie, and I think it will have more replay value than most finales, like “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2” or “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2.” I think they did a fantastic job with the character arcs, but I did have a few issues with the film from a plot perspective.

First of all, Carol Danvers (Captain Marvel) seems a bit too powerful to be believable. She can travel at nearly the speed of light, and she seemed fairly capable of handling Thanos by herself. I get that they tried to balance out her apparent invincibility and general ability to whoop ass by saying that there were a lot of other planets that needed her help—fine, that makes sense. But what doesn’t make sense is that for so long after the Avengers pull off their “time heist” and have all six infinity stones, she was still nowhere to be found. It seems like no matter what else she was doing, all six infinity stones being in the same place at the same time would be enough to warrant her immediate attention.

I also think that the Captain Marvel character (specifically as she’s presented in Endgame) would’ve benefited from being about 15% less cocky. I get that we’re hyping up the whole female power-equality-feminism thing, but there’s a difference between cockiness and confidence. In a similar vein, I thought that whole female character ensemble towards the end of the fight when they help Carol get the stones in the special glove (does it have a name? I don’t think it does. I’m calling it the Iron Gauntlet) to the van was a little much. I know we’re talking about a universe with superheroes and magic rocks, but what are the odds that all the female characters ended up in the same exact spot at the same time on that massive battlefield? The similar moment in Infinity War with Nat, Wanda, and Okoye was much better. While we’re on the subject of women, the movie would’ve benefited from more Natalie Portman (as Jane, not Thor🙄).

Next, lets talk about the whole time travel thing. Time travel is a fairly weak plot device, and its primary weakness is that it often creates a lot of logical problems; Endgame was not immune to this weakness. The easiest way to reconcile with these plot holes is to ignore them, because once you get started, you probably aren’t coming out of that rabit hole for a while. Cause like, what about that whole timeline where Loki got away with the tesseract? How did Tony solve the question of time travel in five minutes by inverting a mobius strip (which is already inverted)? And wouldn't the Avengers have seen Cap putting all the stones back while they were collecting them, since they had to be returned to the same moments they were taken from? Or was there a little wiggle room? If so, why didn’t he put the soul stone back a few seconds before Nat fell to her death? How could Cap live out a life with Peggy while she had a husband? Why didn’t they just go back and take the stones from Thanos with the Iron Gauntlet before he used them in Infinity War? If changing the past doesn't actually impact the future, then all of those things should have been possibilities. And why don’t they just make more Pym Particles?!?

Though, I will concede that, to Endgame’s benefit, the stories that Marvel has been telling do span a rather wide amount of time, so there were unique ways that they were able to use time travel to incorporate humor and heart. At the end of the day, I’m not mad that they resorted to using time travel, I just wish they’d come up with something better.

Moving on from my grievances with the plot, the story did complete a lot of character arcs really nicely, namely for the six original Avengers, and I think we can give credit for part of that maturation to the five year gap between Infinity War and Endgame. Tony is a lot more compassionate and level headed. Bruce was able to finally establish some internal peace between himself and Hulk. Thor (while a hot mess for most of the movie) finally accepted that he simply wasn’t the person everyone expected him to be. I can’t say too much for Clint—not gonna lie, I wish it had been him who had died for the soul stone, but that wouldn’t have had the same emotional impact. Natasha really transformed from the beginning of the MCU, and I think she had the most beautifully tragic life of all the Avengers, but her motivations were finally out of the shadows, and her arc was truly complete. Cap really changed a lot as well, maintaining the same optimism and grit he always had, but also allowing himself to be a lot less uptight.

Speaking of Cap (and briefly regressing to one of those rabbit hole plot issues), I think we’ve all known since “Age of Ultron” that he would eventually wield Mjölnir, but I didn’t realize that he would be able to use it to also conjure lightning. That seemed a little gratuitous and a bit too much outside of his territory; Thor is a god, but Cap isn’t, and I don’t think he would be able to adopt Thor’s powers just because he’s worthy of wielding his weapon.

Getting back to the subject of character arcs, I want to address the several impactful death scenes. Tony’s death was slow and you knew it was coming for several minutes. To me, this had less emotional impact than the two most memorable close calls he had, in Infinity War when Thanos stabbed him, and in Civil War at the end of his fight with Cap (I honestly thought Cap was about to bash his head in with that shield the last time he brought it down into Tony’s chest). In any case, I thought it was done well, and I liked how Pepper and Peter were so present for it. Iron Man is my favorite Avenger, but Natasha’s death really cut deep—I actually think I was more upset about her death than any other. It was just such an emotionally impactful completion of her character arc. Scarlett Johansson’s acting and the music really took that scene to another level. I hate that Tony and Nat had to go, but I’m honestly surprised that more characters didn’t bite it, especially some of the auxiliary Avengers (Bucky, Rhodey, Scott, I’m looking at y'all). And as for Thanos’s ultimate death scene: I didn’t like it. There’s something satisfying about having a villain’s cold, obviously dead body be presented on screen as opposed to having them just fade into nonexistence (Harry Potter screwed this up, too).

Overall, I really liked the movie, and felt like it was an appropriately epic conclusion to the MCU as we’ve known it.

Also worth noting: this movie really changed how I watch “Age of Ultron.” Up until this point, I’d considered AoU to be the weakest of the four Avengers movies, and it was hard to look past the fact that the main plot driver, Ultron, was a fairly weak concept. However, now I don’t think we’re giving it enough credit. It works a lot better after having seen Endgame. There are quite a few Endgame easter eggs, and it’s clearer than ever just how much leg work that movie did in terms of expanding the MCU, from furthering character arcs and tying in a lot of second tier players, to introducing the infinity stones, to setting up “Captain America: Civil War.” AoU had a lot of ground to cover, and it’s clearer than ever after watching Endgame how well of a job it did, despite having the weakest plot line of the four Avengers films.