Although how did he become a fat kid without his teeth? Does he just drink a lot of shakes? Does he have dentures?

Well, I have to admit the computer scene was really exciting back then (even if your smartphone let alone your computer are orders of magnitude faster than the machines then). You really didn't know what advances in technology each year of the 1980s would bring. These days it is pretty predictable — next year's…

Agreed (I was there too). It reminds me of why my father is such a big fan of "The Last Picture Show" — that was the 1950s as he remembered it, not the golden age depicted in "Happy Days" and the like.

And that of course was a return of the original Mr. Wizard (Don Herbert), who really created the whole genre of kids' science shows in the 1950s, and who Nye himself admits he watched as a kid.

I agree with you with the unlikelihood of Tituba reading it, but the Malleus Malifacrum was certainly read by some in Puritan America — Cotton Mather wrote in his Wonders of the Invisible World "Witches have often (as Sprenger observes) desired that they might stand or fall by this Tryal by hot Iron, and sometimes…

I hated how they took all the cool RPG elements (like skills) away. Why?

Google translate on the Chinese Wikipedia page for the movie makes it sound like that nothing was changed supernatural-wise.

Well, I'd be a little careful with that in regard to Miller and Sartre. They both were Stalinists — the fact that they realized that their idol wasn't 100% flawless didn't mean they were somebody like Orwell who saw through Stalin from the start.

And the anti-terrorism movies (with Western heroes who are 100% good and terrorists who are 100% evil) *aren't* propaganda?

True. I think the "evil government scientists" is supposed to be a homage to the ones in E.T., but these do go over the top. Besides the general unethical nature of their human experimentation, tattooing numbers on people probably wouldn't go over so well given the higher than average Jewish presence among scientists.

As a government scientist myself, I always love the sorts of sprawling government labs that get presented in pop culture as opposed to the reality where every inch of crowded bench space is fought over in internal power struggles.

a pulsing mass as reminiscent of the tentacled beast of Possession

I don’t know, Julia Roberts was there and Blair Underwood was there and Steven Soderbergh was there.

Because DVDs are just so much warmer, you know? Or whatever bullshit people (generally people so young as to never had to deal with vinyl as the normal music medium) are claiming about vinyl.

Even then it doesn't really make sense. The MKUltra was made public knowledge (and Senate hearings held) in the 1970s. And the "Philadelphia Experiment" was part of standard conspiracy lore since the 1960s. The only connection I can see is that there was a flop movie about the Philadelphia Experiment in 1984, but…

"We really love conspiracy theories, and there was a lot of weird stuff and experiments going on at this time. Whether it was MKUltra or the Philadelphia Experiment where the government—true or not—was doing stuff where it was trying to put the boundaries of science in this sort of race with the Cold War"

What did poor Scott Tracy ever do to deserve that?

It doesn't sound very different than the implausible accusations of loyal Communists of being American spies that Stalin and Mao used to get rid of any potential rivals not too long ago.

Yes, people even had conspiracy theories where her death was actually an assassination. As if the ex-wife of an inbred prince with no actual powers was worth an assassination.

Well, if they saw something flying they couldn't identify, they saw a UFO. Maybe they are just bad at recognizing birds and aircraft.