“[They] recommend daily vacuuming, and on top of that, they suggest you use a steam cleaner.”

Instructions unclear. Tried to steam-clean my cat, now bleeding from multiple lacerations. Send help.

Yes. Here’s some concept art from the pilot, showing ALF’s new look.

Interestingly, producers of at least two SF TV series ran into accessibility issues that were significant enough that they affected the scripts. In “Doctor Who”, the Doctor’s robot dog K-9 (and, even more famously, the Daleks) were unable to cope with anything that wasn’t flat and level. Similarly, Twiki, the tiny…

I’ve been reading the description of what they have to do to get out of the cave, and it makes me think that if I were one of the kids I’d probably tell the rescuers “No, I’m good, thanks. Staying right here. Squeezing through flooded tunnels in total darkness, tunnels that are barely large enough for me, let alone…

I’d say that “Edge of Tomorrow/Live Die Repeat” was a decent movie, and even “Oblivion” had its good points (his own performance in the latter was forgettable, but he did a reasonably workmanlike job in “EoT/LDR”). Say what you like about him, but he does seem to have the ability to attach himself to some…

Scientology’s claim to be able to produce super-humans looks fractionally more plausible when you see some of the stuff that Cruise gets up to. On the other hand, I strongly suspect that that’s just Cruise, and he’d be doing the same kind of thing if he were a Seventh-Day Adventist or a Neo-Confucian.

Also, for all the…

“What’s that, Lassie? Timmy’s in the gravity well?”

If I understand correctly, this depends on the attacker embedding the content-to-be-encrypted within an embedded image URL in the malicious email. Your encryption-savvy client will automatically decode the encrypted blob, turning the URL into something like…

“Nostromo” is the title of a novel by Conrad, set in an imaginary South American country called Costaguana, whose capital is Sulaco.

“Narcissus” is a reference to the title of one of Conrad’s novellas.

Incidentally, the “Sulaco” is supposedly a “Conestoga-class” ship. There’ve been a number of US warships named the…

I hope they’ll remember to name the spaceships after elements from other Conrad fiction: “Nostromo”, “Narcissus”, “Sulaco” etc.

Or did someone already do that?

FedEx.

Ha ha. Actually, black-and-white moviemakers understood about contrast, so details - whether of faces or anything else - tend to stand out better than in color video that’s been heavy-handedly color-graded. 

Looking at those pictures, I see a bunch of light-skinned, dark-haired, more-or-less-unshaven thirty-something males with broadly-similar body types dressed in clothing of similar cut and color.

Yes, I am exaggerating for effect. But with a cast that contains quite so many people who look loosely similar to each other,…

I would like “The Expanse” better if the aggressive color grading didn’t make all the dark-haired, white male characters essentially indistinguishable on a small screen. “Ah, new scene. Wait ... is that Holden? Miller? Dimitri? Alex? Amos? Or some other character I’ve never seen before? Hmm, maybe the context will…

“Where are all the mercenaries/Paid for by the king?/Have they joined the mob, you say/Doesn’t money mean anything?” [“Flowers of the Night”, Kantner Slick Freiberg]

As someone who got to enjoy the 68K to PPC transition, and the PPC to x86 transition, I can’t tell you how thrilled I am by the idea that another shift might be coming up in a few year’s time.

If it’s anything like the last two, we’ll see software written for the previous architecture first (a) running under emulation…

Please, nobody spoil the story for me. I’m going to be watching that dubbed into Thai in the back of an overnight bus somewhere in Asia in about three years time.

I am puzzled by the acute accents on ‘The’ (i.e. ‘Thé’) in the final titles. I instinctively read ‘Thé’ as French, so that it comes out meaning ‘Tea City & Tea City’.

Did she just jump into the same water-filled quarry that Mike goes into in the first season of “Stranger Things”? Or is America just full of flooded quarries with teens and pre-teens raining down into them 24/7?

As a very occasional novice skier, I would like to comment that all chairlifts are possessed by Satan, but it’s not often that you see it displayed quite as obviously as that.