Australia was never as racist in the past as it is now. 15 years of nationalistic political dogma and an increasingly toxic governmental attitude toward immigrants from third world countries have had a terrible effect on the national idea of what's an appropriate response when someone who isn't your colour annoys you.

Rapier wit you have.

Your post was so edgy that I cut myself.

You know what you should totally do? Double down and pretend to be making an academic argument that the idiots here don't understand.

At least he was nice enough to put his crazy right up there for you to see. No reason to wait until he offers to show you his underground bunker to decide he's a terrifying head case.

Was English not his first language? This is the kind of disjointed stuff I get from ESL students trying to write speeches.

With your winning personality, I can't believe you aren't already taken!

Did you post this in the online dating horror stories thread on Something Awful a few years back? I'm sure I've read it before. Prop swords are not something that come up often.

Australia. The driest place in the world.

I fear that you have never been to an Indian restaurant in the same postcode as "good". This sounds like a description of a late night drunk-food Indian "restaurant", where all the food is under glass and they scoop it into take away containers while you watch and charge a dollar extra for curries with meat in them.

In Alien she was a great character and in Aliens she was a weirdly realised mother figure enacting violence to rebuild her surrogate nuclear family. The first movie they were essentially truck drivers. Blue collar slobs shipping minerals from point A to point B. I really don't feel like there was any character…

That Shonen Knife song is rad.

Samus Aran has a pretty huge amount of character development for a video game character, especially one who is more often than not mute.

O'Bannon has said that he sort of imagined the whole cast as male by default, but he deliberately wrote them all to be gender neutral. When the studio asked him who could be female he was like "All of them, I guess. Howabout Ripley?"

Alien doesn't really have a main character until about half way through. Once the ensemble starts dying off, Ripley emerges as the intelligent, resourceful survivor. And like Jabom001 said, the entire cast was "male" (or gender neutral according to O'Bannon) until pretty much time for casting.

Other M never happened.

I never feel like these are "Strong Female Characters". Sure, they are strong and female, but I think they work because they are good characters, with interesting motivations and personalities, who have experiences that are worth participating in. Being female for Ripley and Samus is (usually) not a major part of the…

In Japan this is actually a well-practised technique.

I used to work in a call centre that dealt with warranty and breakdowns for several of the big car companies. We were told day one not to take any bullshit. I got to the point where I used to sound deliberately happy to hang up on shit heads. I got promoted.

Ah yes. The Japanese are the only people to ever have done something terrible. Good call.