That's actually the third gen of Novas. The original was an high optioned Chevy II, which was a little shit box cranked out in 1962 to compete with the Ford Falcon.

Me too! He's currently on display in a 75 gallon fish tank in my garage.

I had an 82 and considering the condition it was in when I got it, it was a fantastic car. It was a hand-me-down, I thought it was just a gussied up Camry and everything I found out about while I owned it was a surprise.

You wouldn't know it from these. There is nothing practical about any of these outfits.

Except that hybridization is also produced in labs and promoted by the same companies that genetic replacement is. It has exactly the same problems and has for decades.

God damn, we are the most exclusionary and impossible to please culture outside of maybe gaming.

But it would have been if it had been Christian faith healing instead of Buddhist faith healing? You've made my point. You've hand-waved New Agers getting the Federal government to recognize chi in the most significant piece of Democrat legislation in 50 years as not important because that doesn't fit your narrative.…

It was pretty mainstream. Maybe not playing it, though you could buy the books and minis at places like Sears and J.C. Penny's, but it had a huge cultural footprint. The number of heroic fantasy movies, TV shows, and books that appeared in the late 70s, early 80s was just ridiculous. In sheer quantity of rip-offs,…

It's not my fault what you can't see, but here's an example. Acupuncture is the healing of the body through the realignment of chi. People who believe in that not only exist, but they got provisions to force insurance companies to pay for put in the Affordable Heathcare Act. If that doesn't seem radical to you, then…

Sure it is, you just don't see it because it's more normal to you. Just like in, say, the rural South, what you would consider the extreme right is more normal. It's all perspective.

The only ones who hate "sci-fi" are the ones who desperately want the genre to be taken seriously and often trade it for my own most hated term: speculative fiction. All fiction by definition is speculative. The only way to apply the term specifically to science fiction defines it way too narrowly, implying that all…

Honestly, that usually applies to Cyclops, too, who may be crap in his personal life but usually leads his team to do the right thing. The only way for those two characters to fight like that was to have them both act wildly out of character.

If you are fighting against Captain America, you are probably the bad guy.

They aren't analogous. The purpose of eugenics was to create more intelligent people using Mendelian genetics and artificial selection. It didn't necessarily have anything at all do with race, nor did it necessarily require sterilizations, forced or otherwise. That it lent itself to racism and was taken over by…

Eugenics was originally an attempt to use artificial selection to make people smarter. It was clumsy early attempt at genetic manipulation based on Mendelian principles as interpreted by Darwin. Racism was present in the early ideas, but it was incidental. What the wealthy, British gentry who came up with idea…

No, I'm operating on the belief that what seems like a well-meaning moral imperative backed by science can, in 100 years, look terrifying, ghastly, and futile.

Eugenics isn't rooted in racism and fear at all. 100 years ago, it was a forward-thinking, pro-science position that was embraced by the progressive movement, out of which also came things like universal suffrage and conservationism. The idea was make the species stronger by weeding out "bad" genes while promoting…

But wait! You suddenly notice the car actually has a dealer license plate frame and a little dealer badge on the trunk that says something like Jimmy Smith Chevrolet: Don't Even Try to Beat a Jimmy Smith Deal, Or We'll Cut Off Your Thumbs! It's at this point you remember something crucial: some people still buy the…

So...we didn't know the book would have a title? Is that what we are saying?

There were supposed to be some, but the DoD pulled its cooperation because it didn't want to be associated with SHIELD, which it found to be a worrying concept. And, ya know, an all-powerful (they had nukes!), international covert organization led by a shadowy people who didn't seem to have much to do with…