As an Old, I've been reading The Onion since the beginning — it started in the late 1980s at the University of Wisconsin when I was an undergraduate. I think I have fondness for that period most, but yeah, when I would visit campus in the early 2000s and snag a copy it seemed a bit stale.

But what would you *do* in those 40 minutes? The movie is basically an extended The Twilight Zone episode. The whole *point* is to have the twist in the last moments.

But it does! Practically everything about Firefly brings up that Shaara's The Killer Angels was Whedon's inspiration.

Oh, you don't have to leave *this* site to complain about that!

But I don't think he was doing it ironically.

But that's wonderful. It's heartwarming that there's something that the Silent Generation, GenX, and Millennials can bond over — just how full of shit Baby Boomers are and that most of their musical acts were so bad that they can't be enjoyed without drugs.

I like the *concept* of Infinite Jest but I've just never managed to get more than twenty pages in. It isn't the footnotes. I had no problem with House of Leaves or Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell which copied the conceit of footnotes in fiction, so I don't really know why.

Yeah, I saw it for the first time a couple of years ago. I resisted it for years because I was such a fan of vintage noir films and books and thought the idea of setting in the (then) current 1970s was a mistake. But it really worked more so than recent neo-noir.

Yeah, it's in keeping with the Stoic philosophy. Marcus Aurelius never went either.

Although with replicators and holodecks, a lot of the current motivation for greed and assholic behavior would be eliminated — the poorest person would have as much access to stuff and adventure as the richest. That *would* change human nature. Too bad they seem to be rather unlikely technological developments (and…

Exactly. Probably William Gibson came closest at predicting current tech but even he missed the whole mobile phone thing. The characters in Neuromancer have access to virtual reality, an Internet beyond what we have and human-level AI, but they still have to use a payphone to call somebody when they're out.

To be fair, dictation was how executives wrote letters and memos, even into the 1980s. They didn't type — typing was for secretaries who listened to the dictation, either live or recorded. Even if a word processor was imagined, it would be a tool the secretaries used. But by the late 1980s, a personal secretary was…

There's quotes that go one way or the other — yes, Marxist Liberation theologists stress the whole overturning the moneychangers thing, but the religious right really has the support of the bulk of the Bible, which has a lot of wealthy slave-owning people whom God seemed to be just fine about.

Chamberlain wasn't as naive as people make him out to be. Like the old saying "Diplomacy is saying 'Diplomacy is saying 'Good Doggie!' until you can find a rock". Britain wasn't ready for war so he had to stall Hitler until it was.

Read "McIlhenny's Gold" — Tobasco is made by a terrible company that had a very long tradition of abusing its (largely African-American) farm staff actually growing and picking the peppers.

In the American Midwest, Red Lobster is probably the best seafood restaurant in town. I grew up there. I get it. What I don't get is why there are Red Lobsters on the East and West coasts of America where there are plenty of actual non-chain seafood restaurants.

Gee is clarified butter. That's more of an Indian restaurant thing.

At least when I lived in Southern California Red Robin would have some local brews from Ballast Point on tap, which is surprising for a national chain. I had to give them credit for that.

What counts as an "economy chain"? Things like Chili's and TGIF Friday's?

And it was based on an obscure 1964 novel Simulacron-3 which arguably was the first worl to feature a simulation within a simulation.