I have a phobia of praying mantises. (Mantidaephobia?)

I have the highest respect for proper philosophy, and I am sorry if I insulted any philosophers by comparing them to this horseshit. :)

I skimmed through this paper also. He's basically saying that the universe is fractal — the structures found in our DNA are also found in galaxies and in subatomic particles, even in the fundamental forces of the universe. That, he argues, suggests that life itself is fractal and should exist on the smallest and…

With their clunky, brass-colored communicators and quaint knob-covered computer panels, the original Star Trek series now qualifies as steampunk.

...and this being a Lewis Carroll universe, the explosion will sound like a barking dog.

The popular wisdom used to be that if a man was not a Democrat at age 20, he had no soul, and if he was not a Republican by age 50 he had no brains. In other words, it was expected that people's political affiliations would change with time.

> P.S.: Charlie's a woman :)

Heroism is subjective, so I'm not going to address that requirement at all. It's too arbitrary.

I disagree completely with your premise. For one, many new icons have been created in the past decade. Harry Potter. The Firefly crew. Katniss and Edward and Jacob. The new My Little Pony cast. Invader Zim. The comic hero Invincible. Spider Jerusalem!

COVERT — "The aroma of cloves, red hair dye and leather oil mingle with the exhilarating scent of black widow venom. Seduction de la melee."

People also need to look at how Amanda Hocking made it big. She works incredibly hard. By the age of 26, she had written 17 novels, and she spent all of her unemployed time promoting them. The quality of her work is beside the point — the girl is dang near superhuman. Not many people are going to be able to follow…

You have inspired me to write a novel titled 'Vampires vs. Clowns'.

Slavery has already made a comeback. Have you read about Foxconn, or about manufacturing plants in Asia in general? Poor people are already used as slaves in our world today.

Once we realize that some humans are turning into something different and potentially scary, our first impulse will be to hunt them down and deal with them before they get too widespread and powerful.

Well, she ain't getting to Nirvana anytime soon.

Every day I become more convinced that My Little Pony will not only survive, it will someday become a religion.

Schumpeter's 'creative destruction' is an economic effect. I think V is talking about 'altruistic destruction' — as in, everything sucks so let's burn it down and start over.

Interesting anecdote — not only do I have no allergies, as a result of growing up as a filthy semi-feral child in the wilds of downtown Philadelphia, but I am also immune to poison ivy. I fell into a patch of it when I was around 5 years old and got a full-body rash, but after that it has never affected me.

I spent most of my time as a kid eating mud pies and licking the dog on the nose. I have no allergies.

The darkest animated Disney movie I know of was 'Mars Needs Moms'. The martians kidnap and lobotomize mothers, commit wide-scale gendercide, there's a Total Recall-like asphyxiation scene on the martian surface, and then that weird interspecies relationship between Gribble and the martian hippie. Creepy, creepy…