Yeah, he’ll basically be boring underwater through porous limestone.

The WKMG report says the woman could face up to five years in prison offense for each offense if convicted.

Heh, never heard of that Foster (the “Home Tree,” indeed).

Cameron designs his science fiction set pieces like an engineer, and he’s very disciplined about hewing to that semi-hard sf conception. He’s actually quite detail-oriented in that sense. The technology in Aliens and Avatar looks like it would work; nothing is a greeble, every vent and button has a purpose.

Back at the dawn of time, the very first asshole crawled out of the primordial muck and shouted, “This is who I am; if you can’t handle it, that’s on you!” It’s kind of the genetic fingerprint of asshole-ry; when you hear someone say some version of that statement, you know who and what he is.

It definitely wasn’t portrayed as remotely that large, though, but we could handwave that by saying it was centered on an artificial light source/whatever.

I prefer to think of it as a Ringworld-esque halo, since it has Niven’s sunshade panels providing night and the sun is in the middle.

Ah, but the island is just as bad. The city I live in has had an intense amount of mining throughout the 1800s and a very large majority of the remaining mine shafts have no direct ability to be detected. No maps, no recent exploration with current tech, just a bunch of holes in the ground in an area just waiting for…

I guess now is the future.

Exactly. They definitely nailed the design concept, if not the market.

The novel was originally published in 1978, and in that version, the plague starts in summer of 1980. For the expanded version, King bumped the timeframe ahead ten years and changed most of the pop culture references to late-‘80s ones — a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic book instead of Howard the Duck, for example.…

Good call! I haven’t seen it since I was a little kid. I should watch it again.

Not just Cheery Littlebottom... STP has long been an advocate for at least a mildly more progressive view on such things. Discworld is filled with characters working against gender and racial stereotypes, and characters who hold those stereotypes growing and evolving past them (Fred Colon), or often receiving their…

I read it as “if it’s not about you, chill out and follow the lead of the people it is about” — so even if the details don’t match the real world, the principle is pretty applicable.

#Stratospheronaut

I remember a lot of moral panics about music lyrics, video games, the Internet, adult cartoons, even Jurassic Park — parents were afraid little kids would go in thinking the dinosaurs were like Barney, and then they’d be traumatized when they started eating people.

I’d rather live in the ‘90s than the ‘80s or the ‘00s, but the political culture at the time, even in supposedly mainstream, middle-of-the-road, “liberal” media, was rabidly conservative at the time. All the issues that today’s Republicans are rabidly batshit obsessive about existed in embryonic form. And there was a…

Star Wars, generally, doesn’t want to let emotions get in the way of the story. Leia’s lost her home planet and the only family she ever knew, but she never mentions Alderaan after Tarkin blows it up.

The tone thing is a problem with all science fiction, though. Like, an entire planet gets blown up in A New Hope, and at the end, everyone is like “yay, we won!”