I’ll probably regret this, but for shits and giggles, I’m going to try and give an earnest answer here.

Let’s first assume that “manhood” is a thing. That there are people in the world who define themselves by gender roles, however those manifest. It might be biology, appearance, dress, behavior, profession or any number of other ways that someone chooses to manifest a gender role.

So if we accept that, there’s a lot of ways of approaching what western society might call “manhood”: machismo, aggression, breadwinning, vinyl collecting, having the best lawn in the suburbs, etc. This is where things get dicey, in my opinion. The right is full of angry men who feel slighted by a society that they feel increasingly has no place for them. In some ways they are right: men are less likely to have education past high school, less likely to have modern workforce skills and less likely to have their formerly tolerated bullshit accepted anymore. This has lead to the rise of what people often refer to as “toxic masculinity”. People who lean into traits like misogyny or racism and follow leaders who make them feel tough, like they are in the driver’s seat again.

I think the appeal of Walz is that he gives at least the appearance of another path. He’s a man, no question. He hunts, he fishes, he works on his pickup truck, he coached football, and he taught social studies. But he’s also championed reproductive rights, LGBT causes, and even took a fairly light hand during the BLM protests in 2020 (which can be easily twisted, unfortunately). He’s the kind of pro-labor and pro-rural progressive that started to get marginalized in the 2000s, was on it’s death bed when the Tea Party ascended and that MAGA seemed to finally bury.

So yes, manhood is an issue because that seems to be a major part of the ethos that is following the alt-right. But Walz is a man that a lot of men can see themselves in: men who work, love their families and who want government to support their lives, not some fantasy they wish existed. Government that does infrastructure, public safety, boring stuff that we used to not have to think about. And because he’s done all those “manly” things he feels like the old fashioned man that a lot on the alt-right claim to want back, while showing them that old fashioned man is not what they think it is.

So there it is. I admire Walz. He’s not perfect, but neither am I. I hope he doesn’t disappoint me.

No JLA/Avengers, which is weird, but I’ll probably get them on my list. I’d like to see these published in non-omni paperback collections as well.

Is there any word on size? Some of these were published in a larger size, if I recall.

If the company doesn’t want to match your salary expectation, then why interview? Are you hoping that meeting with the team will change their mind? I don’t have enough experience to know if that happens, but I suspect it’s unlikely.

Because the assumption is there’s very little throughput. Storage isn’t really that expensive, but bandwidth is and Backblaze is only cheap if you aren’t trying to get at your data regularly. That’s fine for backups because hopefully you never need them.

EDIT: I should say that for an individual user, getting data out of Backblaze isn’t that expensive, but it’s more expensive than cold storage. I think they charge $.01 per GB transfered, so a 10GB movie would cost you about ten cents to stream. It would cost you $100 to recover a 10TB backup from Backblaze (though for a fee than can mail you some of that on a hard drive, I think).

Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I enjoyed Discovery and hope you do. It took some big swings and not all of them were hits, maybe even a minority of them were, but I respect the desire to do something new and push the franchise forward and it has some legitimately good stuff.

I would probably pay $80/month for 1 service that had everything guaranteed with no problems.

You’re describing cable, and for years we begged for a la carte options to free us from cable packages. I can’t fathom going back to paying $80/month for a bunch of crap I’ll never watch when I can jump around for a third of that. I’ll never argue that what we have is the best solution, but it’s a damn sight better than where we came from, at least from a consumer perspective. It perhaps peaked when Netflix was the only game in town with both physical and streaming to get me everything I could ever want for $20/month, but 8 streaming services is still better than shelling out for a cable package.