Why couldn't CBS have given the new Star Trek to Hawley? Can you imagine what he could do with that world? An infinite universe vs. a tiny little tin box full of characters

At conventions I always got the sense that anime was often a source of shame for people in their day-to-day lives, but that at the convention they were completely free to be themselves without judgement. As such, this worked to inhibit any OTHER common judgements that people make about each other for fear of bringing…

As long as the apostrophe is shaped like a penis.

As someone who has studied and enjoys interacting with anime fans at places like conventions, it makes me really sad to see them get lumped in with the alt-right online. I can't speak to all fans everywhere, but my interactions have almost been universally ones of openness and acceptance of all types of people. For…

Hm… well it's not so much that the system does this by design. You can make the argument that the existence of nuclear weapons makes a strong centralized executive and powerful bureaucracy necessary in order to respond to an an existential threat. That the modern federal architecture owes more to Oppenheimer than…

Well, there can be consequences for individuals (see John Boehner), but yes, that's the inherent limitation for parties who engage in aggressive, purely partisan gerrymandering.

There's another school of thought that Democracy, at least American style democracy, simply can't function in societies larger than a few million, relatively homogeneous, and peaceful people. Any larger and democracy becomes a necessary fig-leaf for a very flexible form of oligarchy. In that, the oligarchs are not…

I've seen a few Political Scientists make a convincing argument that Gerrymandering is the single most dangerous factor in the health of American Democracy. It's going to be really fascinating to study its effects in a century or so, whether the parties realize how self—destructive it is, or whether they continue to…

I would not be surprised if the show did a shot-for-shot remake of Too Many Cooks with the Yellow-Eyed Demon standing in for the hobo and make it fit perfectly into the story.

Yeah, it wouldn't be hard for her to get laid, but to maintain a healthy relationship with someone who meets her, no doubt incredibly high, standards is more of a challenge.

Shout out for Films That Time Forgot. A feature that got me reading the AVClub back in high school. Also I miss Zack's Star Trek reviews, though I fully understand not wanting to tackle the beige that is Voyager and the margarita-vomit of Enterprise.

Do you mean this: http://www.marvunapp.com/Ap… ?

Fun Fact! In 2012 the market for glass eels was so hot that a Native American tribe in Maine with fishing rights on a crucial breeding ground found themselves in a dispute with noted cephalopod Governor Paul LePage who threatened to call out the national guard if they refused to abide by Maine fishing laws on their…

The Dollop was really weird this week. An episode about a mixed-race person in early 20th century America who is a smart, successful, wealthy, heroic, and all-around good person. Yeah, he faces racism, but he's also clever enough to get around it and do good in the world. It's just a really nice story about a great…

I read through some of The Dark Enlightenment and, man, this stuff is
really hard to get through. It presents such a deep and deliberate
misunderstanding of human nature and reality; one so blatantly
contradictory that I have trouble considering it even as a thought
experiment. Almost immediately I was wondering how…

But there are also instances in the show where they remove or deactivate weapons in the hands of people about to fire (including at least one time when it was actually firing in The Most Toys) so it does seem like they have that capability. Maybe it depends on how bored the transporter chief has been that day and…

Ahaha! Damn. I was wondering how far we could go before one of us had to go with: "uh, magic" as an explanation in our conversation about a made-up technology established in a 50 year-old television show. I really almost gave in with the beaming into space rebuttal. That was fun.

But if it's truly a matter 'stream,' how could they send to a specific point in the void either? It should a. keep going until it hits a solid object like a phaser beam does or b. lose energy and degrade over time. Beaming into space only works if they are replicating it from ship energy reserves. That's why…

But then the modem… and something bad happens!

But recall that Pulaski was de-aged in Unnatural Selection by using a sample of DNA from before she caught the antibody(!?) disease from those genetically perfect superchildren(!?!??!). If the transporter is just moving a matter stream then there's no way they could have altered her condition in the way described.…