Yeah, Cutthroat Island totally killed the pirate genre by flopping. It's not like there would be made blockbusters based on pirates a few years later or anything.

I thought Crimson Tide was a fairly famous film even now. And the soundtrack by Hans Zimmer is amazing — I play it over and over. Weird to think it was from twenty years ago — I would have thought maybe 10 — it is interesting how the fear of an anti-West Russian leader who might be crazy enough to start a war was…

In the same year as "It Follows".

It's actually a grocery store there. I know, weird.

What do cephalopods from ancient Tokyo have to do with pasta? Was it ramen?

Am I the only nerd who belonged the book equivalents to this? I belonged to the Science Fiction Book Club and the Mathematics Book Club. Same deal in that you got a lot of books for cheap in the beginning, but had to constantly say you *didn't* want the current book of the month or it would get shipped to you.

Yeah, everybody brings up how obnoxious Hawke's character is, but Ryder's character is even worse. I mean ignoring the whole romance angle, you have a woman who has a dream job to millions of people (an entry-level show-business job as an assistant to a pseudo-Regis) and throws it away for a cheap laugh of screwing…

How did you ever find it back then? I mean these days, you find a quote you don't recognize it, you Google it. But before Google, before Lycos, before AltaVista?

That used to be my mind-blowing realization — only the event was the fall of the Berlin Wall. Of course now, there are *children* of people who weren't born when the Wall fell.

Okay, if super popular bands get counted as "alt-rock", what does that make cult favorites like TMBG? Alt-alt-rock?

And 1995 was when the Internet first became popular among non-geeks. As a geek that had been on Usenet (yes, I'm old) for several years at that point, it was actually exciting to suddenly have everybody (including my jock brother and even my parents) suddenly discover the Net. Well until they started forwarding me…

I think a lot of "Up" love has to do with the opening sequence, which tells a story of a romance and marriage better than entire movies dedicated to the theme. The actual plot of Paradise Falls and the mad explorer? Not so much.

Nirvana was alternative rock? I thought it was mainstream. Alternative Rock was always things like "They Might Be Giants" and so forth.

There's also the real East German(!) arcade game PolyPlay. There was even a German novel that suggested it could be lethal. Maybe Polyplay became Polyibus through retelling…

Also, Babylonia has nothing to do with Egypt, so even that part's wrong.

And are using zero-based numbering for some reason?

Traditionally, there were a lot of literal fuckers in boarding schools — namely it was a proud tradition in Eton and places like that for the older boys to rape the new kids.

He did the same thing with "Thunderstuck" which was both about the development of radio and the first example of a murderer being apprehended by radio (the ship captain recognized the fleeing murderer from descriptions and radioed authorities to arrest him when they docked) — the murder story was interesting, but…

Quebec French contains entire verb tenses that have died out in French French plus weird mutations all of its own.

What kid wants to shop for toys online?
Well, 1) most kids these days *love* to use computers/tablets so I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon browsing is a thing among them. 2) When I was a kid, I used to love paging through the Sears "Wishbook" which was kind of like browsing Amazon only on paper.