“Victorian Death Photos” are a thing, and were probably more socially acceptable then than in present-day society

A lot of quotes from the Batman Dark Knight have become pretty common lingo or at least widely recognized, like “not the hero we deserve but the one we need” or “you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain” or even “some people just want to watch the world burn” or “it’s not about the money, it’s about sending a message”, maybe also popularizing the whole “immovable object vs unstoppable force” etc.

I assumed for closure, to put it behind you after you leave.

Vasily Arkhipov in 1962 and Stanislav Petrov in 1983 are usually credited as single-handedly preventing nuclear launches. If it wasn’t for them, perhaps people wouldn’t think that nuclear weapons are such a strong deterrent.

I don’t really have an opinion on this but I’m just gonna say that about that association between porn consumption and aggression, it doesn’t seem like they’ve found a casual relationship, just a correlation. Could be that people who are inclined to sexual aggression (or verbal aggression, as they say in the abstract is more strongly associated) are just more likely to consume porn.

I get that the environmental impacts are pretty significant. I looked it up and it seems like aviation is like ~3% of worldwide emissions and while that’s not really the biggest number I’ve ever seen, it is pretty significant.
I just think it’s equally unreasonable to condemn air travel in general when the alternatives are equally unreasonable. If somebody wants to go on a trip, what should they do? Months-long zero-emission backpacking journey? Never visit anywhere your whole life? Wait for your country to build high speed rail?

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8847607/
It’s not just divorce, there’s a variety of factors that are correlated with decision to cohabit. This article goes through a bunch, including for example, martial satisfaction (they call it “adjustment” in this paper) which in their sample was slightly lower in men who cohabit before marriage and a lot lower in women who cohabit before marriage. They don’t really speculate on the reasons for this, but I’ve heard it suggested that cohabitation increases marriages out of convenience among couples who probably wouldn’t have gotten married otherwise.
Also important is that these impacts are long-term, and both cohabitation and marriage have positive outcomes in the short-term.

It was so roundabout and specific that I couldn’t possibly remember the details, but there was apparently a certain baseball player who got an unbelievable score, which was in some way both a holy number and statistically impossible.
They knew all the details and connected it to the player’s own questioning of religion, but I thought it was absurd. Somebody, somewhere, made a very specific play in baseball? Doesn’t sound that unbelievable.

The page you link says that Golden Hour and Blue Hour occur during both sunrise and sunset, so I’m not sure how that shows what the difference is between sunrise and sunset.

I’m extremely skeptical that tens of millions of people, a huge percentage of the working population, make any significant income from TikTok. Do you have a source for that?

I mostly agree although rather than saying author intention is a vital aspect of art I would say it can be, but that the raw, uninformed experience is almost always more important

So often I have friends read a book or watch a movie and say “I don’t really get it, it doesn’t make sense, I didn’t really like it” and then some time later they’ll come back and say “actually, I read the Wikipedia article about it and now I understand. The author actually intended it to be about [xyz]”
Um, what? If those themes and ideas were not evident in the original story, then what does it matter what the author intended? Surely the author also intended to write a cohesive and understandable story (and evidently failed, for you). Surely the author intended to convey those themes in the story itself. You didn’t enjoy the movie, you enjoyed reading the Wikipedia article about the movie.
If author intention actually matters to non-meta media analysis, then that totally undermines anything the author actually does to convey the ideas in the work itself.
If (to make a specific example) my friend watches Mamoru Oshii’s Angel’s Egg and concludes only from the Wikipedia article about it that it’s abstractly about Oshii’s loss of religion, then that totally ignores everything in the movie that does or doesn’t convey those themes just to create a shallow interpretation based on what the author was allegedly trying to do.

I don’t know if I’m remembering the plot correctly but I think you can control the actions of only the target individual and only in a way that’s reasonably possible