Disqus tends to run slow on this machine. Not sure if it's spaghetti code or gremlins, but I'll see how it is here. I guess I don't feel so resistant to change that I'll pitch a fit, but if this winds up making it a pain to load pages I can't really help that.

They were great, and felt a lot more modern for lack of a better word. I guess if we get past the requisite gay panic stuff it would be really fun. Assuming people didn't trash it to ride on the name.

Yeah, I'll allow him the "half", but he did a very good encapsulation of what made Conan in the books unique. Milius didn't copy it, but I felt he made it his own. I hadn't seen the original Conan for many, many years, and I assumed it would be a goofy timewaster like Destroyer. Then I saw it and was gobsmacked, not…

Thanks. I appreciate the energy you put into that.

Ah, jokes of wisdom from the city-states
They were entertaining until they started knocking the place where old Chappelle is living.

I'm fine with relentless death or puzzling it out with friends, I did a whole hell of a lot of that way back when, but when the puzzle was so obscure that it took on the tone of a cheat code, that's what we'd call broken now. Rose colored glasses, seems like.

My NES and C64 experiences were both second-hand :) Phantasy Star was the main game in our household back then. I think I would have got a kick out of the old C64, though.

It was Jet's old territory, that's what "duty" refers to.
Since Jet used to be a cop, when there happened to be a bounty, no matter who it was, he'd go after them, since bountyheads are still law breakers no matter what the circumstance. His being a bounty hunter is still analogous to his old job. It's easy to make…

And here's the problem with these older games
Many of Nintendo's games felt rather obscure, especially if they were more complicated and had poor translations, to the point where you were pretty much forced to buy Nintendo Power, or play obsessively and push on every single rock, to figure things out.

This is the reason bandwidth is so shitty nowadays.

There's a reason they put a T on the end of GLBT
From the description of Wandering Son I gathered there were transgender themes, but I didn't really pick up on any homosexual themes until the "gay or not" qualifier toward the end. What does transgenderism have explicitly to do with homosexuality? They may overlap at…

I wonder if some of this is just immersion into a foreign culture, where you sort of pick up some stuff and have to leave the rest behind. Too much of this is alienating, but the right amount helps things feel a bit more intriguing than straightforward prose might.

hip hip hurra!
It follows my trailer law where if it doesn't look bad in the trailer it has a chance not to be bad. It brought up some of my old horror feelings from the Carpenter film (did they license the music, there?).

Too Bad Literary License Is Unpopular in Songs
Well, if you've heard how people who are abused (in just about any way) justify staying and prefer what they perceive as stability to the uncertain world beyond, It Felt Like a Kiss makes perfect sense. It's sympathetic in the way we shake our heads when we see someone in…

The Singularity isn't going to singulate itself, people!
Would looking these things up online alleviate some of the confusion? I remember William Gibson nodding to the internet when no one gets his references saying something to the effect of: "no one's stopping you."

Exposure good, or bad?
Well, good to know they made multiple references to transgender titles, instead of the only one they could think of off the top of their head.

Yep. The man needs a strong editor to cut through things. And add a few contractions and colloquialisms to the fucking dialog.

He's written…
…He's written…

So… alphabetically it's:
The Hobbit: There and Back Again
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

Shapiro will eventually be too liberal for me.
This is what a general slide to the right looks like.