That was my impression too. I assumed they kept teleporting around like that because they had merged with all of their parallel selves and so become kind of "unstuck" in time and location, making them potentially everywhere and nowhere. Something like that should be by definition pretty impossible to kill.

Christian Scientists are the ones who don't believe in medicine, mainly because they don't believe that anything unpleasant is really "real". Apparent sin and suffering are explained as perceptual errors on our parts. Medicine is proscribed because reliance on "material cures" supposedly retards your spiritual…

As someone who just finished a nice plate of fried tofu, this makes me wish I had a waffle iron. I'll bet it's much faster than using a pan.

Gradually picking up on the terminology as you go along is certainly what the author intended, and I can see how it works for certain readers. In a sense it mimics learning any language: the first time you encountered the word "quiche" in the real world, for example, there (probably) wasn't a person standing by ready…

I have great respect for the author, but I didn't care for Neuromancer either. (And I tried pretty hard to get into it.) I'm not a big fan of cyberpunk to begin with, but primarily it was the slang-heavy writing that made it so impossible to read. Stopping every several seconds to wonder what a fictional word means is…

This is what I thought too. Like other posters have already said, though, I preferred Surrogates over Gamer — it was marginally more realistic, even though both films are probably intended as allegories anyway. Plus nobody pukes into a gas tank in Surrogates (which would not even work).

I use Notepad to keep track of work-related tasks, and for working on my novel. (Matter of fact I completed a 150k-word novel entirely in Notepad.) I also use it for reading ebooks, most of which can be converted to .txt through various online converters.

At the same time, there's something about this game that strikes a chord, too. Lots of us remember how "cool kids" would have birthday parties at places like Chuck-E-Cheese. This game makes us take a look at that sort of thing in a different light—what if this popular sort of locale wasn't what it seems? We know there…

Yes! Chuka Ichiban was the first thing I thought of as well. Seriously this was a strange little show (like Dragonball, but with cooking). My Taiwanese friends all thought it was hilarious.

Great article.

This reminds me a bit of the old, old Back to the Future ride at Universal Studios, though with a headset rather than a simple video screen in front of the car. I also just recently tried a rollercoaster VR app for Google Cardboard, and that impressed me a lot more than I anticipated — if even a smartphone + cardboard…

When I worked phone support, one way of telling a dead/dying phone battery from a good one was to see if you could "spin" the battery. Phone batteries are normally flat squares, but as they degrade they often swell up in the center. Sometimes it's hard to see, but if you lay them flat and try to spin them from one…

I would love to play this. In the past I did spent long stretches of time without human interaction: stayed at home for weeks on end, with groceries brought in by someone I didn't see or speak with. Speaking from that experience, reality starts to get very bendy quite rapidly when there's nobody to talk to. I'm sure…

I brought a Taiwanese friend to Fuddruckers once. At the burger toppings bar they had sliced tomatoes, lettuce, onions, etc. sitting in metal bowls, with loose kale leaves arranged around the outside of the bowls for decoration. Of course my friend wasn't interested in the anemic-looking iceberg lettuce; I catch her…

I really liked this article (and laughed at several of the illustrations), so thanks for this. It probably goes without saying that there are still the few, rare situations where the opinions of others do have a significant impact on your life, like getting a job or applying for a loan. Otherwise this article is…

I assumed the whole point of The Sims was to play God over a townful of tiny digital peons who exist solely for you to manipulate and conduct social experiments with. The notion that some people regard it as a straight-up Let's Play House sort of game is just so...odd. I make dinner and go to work every day in real…

I thought I was pretty well versed in slash fanfiction weirdness, but obviously it's been a while since I've been heavily into any fandoms. My first thought was "since when do mpreg and furry have such a major intersection?" Then I read it started as a werewolf-story kink and it made more sense to me.

Your relationship sounds awesome. Best friends make the best spouses.

Ouch. People can be so tactless.

Pretty sure this one is a gay film, which makes the gender-flipped student version kind of interesting.