Pilotless drone!

Yeah the auto-explore feature is very slick.

More like a defence against the idea that Doctor Who was worth watching.

I think I read two of them all the way through. I might have gotten farther by taking audiobooks on my long drives, but when I stopped reading them I don't think I was even curious about what would happen next.

Well that fortitude paid off towards the end of the Dune books (3 and half of four were an endurance test for me) but apart from that, yes, silly stubbornness.

Have you tried Dungeon Crawl yet? You can play online, and watch others play, and there is an accelerated version (Sprint) and a flag-defense version. It combines many of the strengths of Angband and Nethack, with a few time-saving features.

After meticulous naming and numbering of albums which took days to assemble, I now have gigs worth of "untitled" in my music library. I don't really blame iTunes for being iTunes, but I do wish the other music players wouldn't insist on imitating it.

And half of that time was probably devoted to all the spyware.

And how could I forget both the Ender series and the Bean series by Orson Scott Card? After an enjoyable start and pretty good follow-up, the Ender series was pure torture to finish. I ought to have known better than to take the same road with Ender's Shadow, but at least I had the good sense to give up after book 3.

I've mentioned this before, but Terry Brooks' Shannara series helped me overcome my compulsion to finish what I start. I'm not proud of this, but I actually heaved book #7 into the fireplace in a moment of exasperation. I'm a bad person.

I had the impression that book-Baron cultivated a degree of loathsomeness as a strategy, just as Bellonda deliberately kept herself fat to encourage others to underestimate her. Movie-Baron didn't quite convey the quality of doing everything for a reason.

The main problem with any adaptation is going to be the waste that goes with conveying things which the characters understand in an instant. I don't know of any way to portray such multilayered communications as take place in those books, or the fact that the characters tend to survive by wasting nothing and never…

I still say the movie is a good watch, in spite of its tell-don't-show aspects, mildly annoying voiceover, and the plot voids that go with so much editing. Lynch came very close to conveying the subtleties involved in basic survival for Herbert's characters, and the fact that the least of them in that distant age is…

He does look uncharacteristically long-in-the-tooth in that picture. Doesn't come close to the ID photo I took today though.

There's a good example of a movie which I hated but is filled with great performances.

I would have liked to see more of him too. Mickey was pretty much useless to all practical purposes, but he was fun.

School Reunion isn't the first time the Doctor has had (and disposed of) the means to reorder the universe as he saw fit, so the whole temptation aspect came off as a bit toothless to me. The first example that springs to mind is the Key to Time, but I could probably dig up two or three more. Then again, Tooth and…

What the goddamn fuck?

For what it's worth, back when I enjoyed standup I thought Paula Poundstone was great.

He also told the world about Elizabeth Cotten, who taught him guitar picking.