A. S. Byatt also had an essay around that time that fairly honestly complained that unlike the work of Tolkien or LeGuin, Rowling's world building was rather lazy. There was basically no explanation of why the magical world was a parody of the UK's Civil Service with various Ministers. The essay didn't go over well…

And long before the Cars franchise existed, Roger Zelazny wrote a series of stories (Devil Car and so on) about a world in which self-driving cars eventually gained sentience and rebelled against humanity. Some of the cars still had the rotting bodies of their former owners inside. Although I don't know if the Cars…

You mean Uber was responsible for multiple Nobel-prize winning discoveries? I mean, yeah, I'm not a fan of today's AT&T, but AT&T back in the day of Bell Labs was *awesome*.

See also the absurd "pixel art" phenomenon which ignores that 8-bit graphics were generally seen on CRTs which blended the pixels together — the sprites may not have been that detailed, but they weren't really blocky.

People always forget Warren Harding though. He really was the closest to Trump in many ways.

The point of the Silver line was (and presumably still is at some point in the future) to get to Dulles, not just the malls in Tyson. Basically the whole reason DCA (no, I won't call it after the Gipper) still exists is because you can get to it on the Metro and so people are willing to pay overpriced tickets for that.

I wouldn't say I didn't like it, but a couple of weeks ago this site was discussing The Untouchables and how stupid it was that the movie had Frank Nitti killed by the hero when in real life he lived on for years afterwards. Well, Ludendorff didn't die in WWI but lived until 1937. Is it really asking too much for a…

Didn't one of the comic relief characters say something to the effect that he was both terrified and aroused by her or something to that effect?

And is actually right, as in correct. This is the 21st century. Most people get that L. Ron Hubbard and Joseph Smith were con artists. That's what founders of religions are. While the older ones like Buddha and Abraham and Jesus are too far back to get a real idea of what they were like or if they even really existed…

I'd say the whole "I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed…" speech is both one of the best lines and is pretty quotable even ignoring Scott's excellent delivery. It really is basically a slightly exaggerated version of the speech that every pundit in favor of war gives when they want to convince people that…

And Illuminati. He really created a lot of great games.

And people actually used to play games like that in real life in the 1980s (minus people actually getting killed). Steve Jackson (of GURPS/Ogre fame) published a set of rules called "Killer:The Game of Assassination" in 1982. Don't think it would go over in today's paranoid world.

Guess it was just a Conspiracy of Fools who was The Informant about what makes his Serpent on the Rocks hard. But he shouldn't worry, in 500 Days nobody will remember this.

I was in grad school in 1995 and collaborating with a group in Argonne National Labs. The people there were all excited that a major motion picture was filming on campus — it turned out it was the forgettable Chain Reaction.

Yeah, learned that in grad school when I had a lot of Chinese labmates. Even cheesy American-Chinese restaurants (if run by immigrants) have a secret more authentic menu for actual Chinese people.

Philly cheesesteaks are everywhere these days. As are hoagies, but under the name "submarine sandwiches" in most of the Midwest. Of course the weasel word is "decent", but as with things like pizza, there may be an actual difference in opinion of how these foods should taste rather than simple incompetence for not…

Yeah, I don't really get why age-difference is "icky". I think it's because people conflate it with asymmetrical power relationships like bosses having affairs with younger subordinates which may not be entirely consensual as the subordinates may fear for their jobs if they refuse. But there the problem is the ethics…

Because the coasts set the trends thanks to most of the popular media being located in them. When something new gets invented or becomes popular on either coast, a couple years later every small Midwestern town gets it. There isn't much mechanism for things spreading the other way.

It actually isn't these days. It's one of those places like Pittsburgh and Milwaukee that went through a rough patch in the 1970s and 1980s when most of the manufacturing jobs died but is actually redeveloping into a kind of cool place. Which I know isn't entirely unproblematic as the newcomers tend to be wealthier…

See, that's the problem. People think all mixed-wookie kids are hairy. It doesn't work that way.