Hand to god, I didn't even think it was a joke. Just a different way of saying "This kind of reminded me of Mr. Holland's Opus."

Of course I'm a damn Lovecraft fan. I miss jokes -constantly- with this show.

Gasp.

I'm not sure what you're not understanding here, since you literally pointed out the point.

I think we actually agree, but I got my point muddled.

The essay's interesting, and I agree with some of his points, but the attempt to boil down value to concrete terms never really works. His mention of the Transformers films is especially odd; while I agree that, much as I'd love to see a Coen bros. movie about giant robots fighting, they were maybe not the best choice…

Anything but my father's suicide!

It's entirely possible to have problems with both movies and not be a hypocrite. I found SR (while I admire the passion it inspires in smart people) to be overly portentous and philosophically muddled; I found Man Of Steel (which clearly worked for a lot of folks) shallow, and punishingly bland for the last 45…

Just finished Joyland, which I thought was okay; slight, but that's to be expected.

I've said this a lot, but as Stephen King endings go, Under The Dome is far from the worst offender. (I remember getting to the three-quarter mark of Dumas Key and being just utterly horrified at how thoroughly it collapsed.)

I tried to listen to Valis on audiobook once. Felt like having a schizophrenic just off his meds whispering into my ear for eight hours.

It's probably my second favorite Vonnegut, right after Slaughterhouse-5.

Well, my name's on there now, if that helps. (Also, do you need a hug? You sound like you need a hug.)

According to an article I looked at while writing this (and now can't remember cause I'm kind of friend), Matheson called Night Of The Living Dead the closest film adaptation of the book, even though it isn't an adaptation. Which is pretty cool. (All the adaptations are worth seeing, though, so long as you accept that…

Yes, but very, very, -very- slightly. Basically, there's a concern that the people inside will run out of air and water eventually, although that concern serves more to make things worse than it does to actually immediately threaten the characters.

Because it's not exactly a cliffhanger. The spot Sisko and the others are in isn't the sort of thing that's going to be quickly resolved; it has huge ramifications, and I'm eager to find out what those are, but this isn't like "Best Of Both Worlds, Part 1." I'm not worried about anyone's immediate safety, not even…

I also liked the PayPal gag.

I think one of the fascinating things about Huck Finn is how much the struggle to reconcile the opinions of the time against the way basic human decency spoke against those opinions informs the text. It forces you to address the issues of stereotype and race and whatnot because of its imperfections; there's a…

Well, I agree with you about cynicism, Todd.

Ohhh, that's probably right.