I am not an American. How insightful of you to make assumptions. Once lived there for a year, though, and met many wonderful people, only some of whom probably watch Batman and Transformers. I say probably because I don't want to make assumptions.

I can't have both? I want both. Especially when, after simply expressing an aesthetic judgment, I was told I had insulted a whole category of people. I guess you're right — do that to me, and I'm going to want to demolish the argument.

No, thank YOU. After being told that I've insulted all depressives, must only like Michael Bay movies, have a short attention span and missed the point of the movie, it's nice to hear from someone else who felt the same way. And I don't even dislike all of Von Trier's work. I found Breaking the Waves emotionally…

Nah. Spielberg, Gilliam and Wenders. I didn't miss the point of the movie. You couldn't miss the point of that one. It kept hitting you over the head with it over and over again. The truth is I think its point was pernicious — that depressives have some sort of special insight into the tragic nature of the…

C-

No. I am not insulting sufferers of depression. They are not the movie. The movie was bad. Sufferers of depression are not bad. Not all of them.

I know that depression is, fool. (Actually, I felt a lot of it having to sit through that depressing crapfest of a pretentious cinematographic delight.) Depression doesn't make for much of a good story unless something happens. As an old writing teacher of mine once said, "one cannot render boredom by being…

I rarely respond in disagreement to a post praising a work of art, but I feel I must add a dissenting voice. I went to this one with my wife and a good friend. Each of us suffered in silence, figuring the other two might possibly be enjoying the experience. None of us did. It was an excruciatingly dull look at a…

So... the internet really is a series of tubes?

What, so it's going to be about some special boy who gets picked to go to the Jedi academy, and who discovers that the scar on his face is related to the dark Sith lord who once almost destroyed all the Jedi only to be defeated by trying a force-throw on this very boy when he was a baby and then, with his friends the…

The fact that the idea is comforting is the very reason we should be suspicious of it. This is religious thinking by another name. Unfalsifiable, and thus non-scientific.

Re-read my comments on loving this mundane universe. In fact, I love its wonders so much that I don't have to try to convince myself that non-real crap is real, such as its being a simulation or unicorns made of rainbows. I am quite enamored of this universe, and of your species.

Do you have access to your brain's ctrl-alt-del function? What was your last uncompromised save state?

Except that if that were true, you would have just ruined the experiment by figuring that out. We would be rebooted. The fact that the universe goes on means it's not simulated.

An interesting thought experiment, but I'm sticking with this universe (which, again, I love) being the most mundane possible while still permitting the complexity necessary for sentient life. Thus we are stuck in the real.

Just got 1-5 a couple of weeks ago. It's so much fun, and so inventive that when you're reading it the third time, it feels like you're reading a new issue.

Let's start a pool on when Parker comes back. I've got March of 2014, giving us, at the present rate of publication, fifty issues of Superior. Anyone else?

This seems like a rather unimaginative simulation. Why not have a simulation where magic works, where physical rules are variable, aliens exist, sex happens way more often, cancer tickles, and so forth. The sheer mundanity of this universe (which I love and appreciate) suggests to me that it is more likely to be the…

It's more convenient to believe in a crisis which we did not make and in which we can have no role in preventing or ameliorating.

People who think it's "nukuler" believe that the mnemonic relates to the fact that "nukuler is unkuler than more sustainable forms of generating power."