Heard the zoomers are referring to the 90s as “the late 1900s.”

“Velvet or velveteen. A gentleman must know the difference.”

It would have been funny if they wrote it so that Florence Pugh turns out to have been a trad influencer in real life, who joined the simulation and had her memory wiped on purpose to make some kind of point, and that’s why her sexist 50s husband is a pretty boy who goes down on her all the time rather than, like,…

Realistically, it will be the 2030s before we see a military conflict between China and Taiwan. China is just not ready, and they know it. Invading Taiwan will be a more difficult task than D-Day, and it will take them a decade to get to the point where they have a reasonable likelihood of success, and we will see all…

I want Alan Moore and Grant Morrison to have a televised wizard duel.

Moore wrote a subversion of the superhero genre, but the problem is that to write even an entertaining subversion you have to accept some of the premise. Watchmen makes the point that powerful vigilantes running free would actually be bad for society, but it still has to buy into the idea that some people are just so…

Frodo is the one who spends months carrying the ring while it is at its most dangerous. I think we’re supposed to count that towards his heroism; Tolkien tries to get across how damaging that experience was by describing how Frodo never actually fully physically or mentally recovered from it.

In fairness, Tony did try to get them some oversight, even if it didn’t work.

Bilbo/Frodo was like an 18th/19th century country squire, effectively the version of aristocracy that survived into the late modern period, whereas Aragorn and the like are the original medieval aristocrats. He’s definitely a rich guy with an outsized say in the Shire.

That said, it would be interesting to examine why AppleTV’s Blackbird didn’t get the same pushback; I suppose the real-life killer in that show was less famous than Dahmer, notably unattractive and his modus was less luridly morbid, making him probably less likely to attract fangirl/boy types, and it was the first TV a…

The Hannibal books/movies probably caused a bit of this by promulgating a popular image of serial killers as brilliant sophisticates with a twisted but consistent morality, rather than the unhinged necrophilic fuck-ups they usually are. 

I know Tolkien had some conflicted feelings about the orcs, because he wrote them as NPC antagonists but developed a Christian-lite theology for his world in which only Iluvatar could make sentient life and nothing sentient could be without the possibility of redemption. But putting that aside, there’s really nothing…

Dracula Untold?

“A starter car?! This is a finisher car!!!”

Diving depth record for saturation divers is 534 m, in an exercise, and the deepest for a real job was around 330 m. One guy got to 701 m equivalent pressure without leaving the chamber. So it’s more like 1000 ft.

They’ll make something that can do chores in a lab environment at 1/10th speed, using the exact same objects every time that are covered in april tags and set up in the same position each time inside tape outlines, and then they’ll milk the videos for years.

Is most of the Pharazon stuff in the Silmarillion rather than the appendices? I know Pharazon does some conniving to attain power, but I thought he was supposed to be a force of nature, world conqueror figure rather than the smarmy politician they present him as.

Wasn’t there an elf lineage that just kind of went off somewhere and was never mentioned again?

Sauron isn’t supposed to know about hobbits until the LoTR, I thought?

You’re never going to find a historical badass warrior culture that isn’t also terrible by modern ethical standards. Societies develop warrior castes to advantage their own societies, and even if they only intended it for self defense, the warrior caste itself quickly starts calling the shots. Writers have to either…