And I think many would argue from experience that weed doesn't cloud one's judgment the way alcohol does. You know you're not fit to drive: on weed it's not hard to do the right thing, and if you have any kind of paranoid streak while on it, you may psych yourself into not driving when maybe you could, or into being…

Jackman is fine. He was the best thing about the first two X-Men movies and X-3 and Wolverine would have been just as shitty if not shittier with someone else.

Salem's Lot and The Shining were the only novels to actually scare me as a reader (as opposed to being grossed out or unsettled)—in high school, mind you. I doubt I could make it through a Steven King novel now. Also Lovecraft's "Whisper in the Dark," which is still one of my faves.

The movie version of The Shining is a pop culture touchstone — but as usual, the book is even better than the movie.

I don't think it counts as preaching, not exactly, because, at least from my atheistic perspective, communicating atheistic beliefs isn't entirely the same as communicating religious beliefs (which is why the bit on the labeling of vocal atheists as evangelical being specious if meant as an equivalency rather than…

Except that's not really what atheists are taking exception to, otherwise they'd merely be anti-evangelists. Or something. Persuading people to your own ideas, be they religious, political, whatever, is fairly universal and exactly what you're doing here by making a declaration of your views rather than being silent…

Feige also spilled that Tony has, "invented a technology that allows him to basically have the suit arrive to him anywhere at any time, piece by piece... And it doesn't always work at first."

It would be a tall order for the thread police if that were the standard for what counted as an acceptable post. Like it or not, this is Prometheus' cultural place in this small corner of the world. Other films have their own afterlives. Prometheus has this one. Its badness might have been enough on its own to earn…

Exactly. Calling it sci-fi is kind of specious: it's sword and sorcery. And Kirschner's "romance" explanation is right on. Broad-stroked romance landscapes—our heroes travel from the City to the Forest or whatever—have been replaced by dedicated planets: Swamp World, Winter Planet, Desert Planet, Forest Moon, City…

Sounds like bullshit to me.

Of course genre labeling forecloses not only on due consideration for literary awards, but also on the broader literary readership a work might otherwise garner, and the one may be due in no small part to the other. John Crowley is a good example (though he has received a share of recognition over the years): his Littl…

Totally agreed. And internally, the only indication we have of his being a replicant is the unicorn dream sequence in the director's cut, which feels out of place when it happens (unicorn dream sequence, really?), only to be justified by the origami match that leverages the replicant reveal with a heavy hand (gaff…

Once a roach surprised in my kitchen scurried to hide under the nearest object, which happened to be my foot. The smell the wafted up after I stepped on it is still one of the worst smells I've ever smelled. I'm sure its diet differed from the one's he's shoveling in the photo above, but still.

And one (or more?) of the exterior columns, I think for the building in which Sebastian lives, is multiplied and used in a scene in Legend—in which, I might add, unicorns feature prominently. Draw your own conclusions.

Star Trek displaced elements of the Moby Dick narrative at best (vengeance! a chase! an allusion!). That's not the same as Moby Dick in space.

Don't listen to the nay-sayers. It's The Great American Novel. It isn't too long, it isn't boring, it isn't a chore, and it contains nothing remotely "tangential"—indeed, all the enthographic, cetological, philosophical, etc. chapters are the point of the book, being Ishmael's attempt to "capture" the Whale, just as…

And they make little munchkin animal sounds.

More is less, less is more, often especially where character development is concerned, since real people aren't reducible to tidy explanations of character or motive, or their lives to plot, as some (most?) people seem to demand of them. You may want to know more, but that feeling may be a result of what makes this…

http://imgur.com/aMi31