I think I'll add myself to this who's who thread of AV Club commenters now because under Kinja I'll be in the greys and never again reach these lofty heights.

It's the Crazy Four now. Though they're mostly crazy with misogyny.

It's basically a Gilbert and Sullivan song. It could have been in Pirates of Penzance.

To some extent there's a surprising amount of other influences as well. Women did tend to do a lot of programming pre-80s in the US, but very rarely did they do so in Japan. Japanese management styles became incredibly influencial in the 80s and I don't think it's a coincidence that the view of programmers shifted to…

There are a number of utility uses for handguns, particularly when hunting by oneself, that a rifle just does not perform. It's also far easier, cheaper, and generally more fun for recreational shooting. That being said, I think we could fix a fair amount of problems with our society through a highly regulated handgun…

Have you played Snatcher? It's derivative and obvious, but damn is it soaked in the kind of atmosphere and characterization that modern games (including his) spend millions of dollars trying to render.

It's charged in a very different way. Each special interest wants to make sure their loophole makes it in and each special interest has a Senator or two in their pocket. There's only two ways to do tax reform: 1. Get rid of ALL loopholes and lower rates for everybody (and lower it more for the rich) or 2. Redistribute…

As Scott said, those first twenty minutes were like a retired train.

U2 in Trash of the Titans? "Potato Man" "Where the hell have you bean?" and
Bonobos: "Hold on people, he is talking about waste management! That affects the whole damn planet!"
Larry Mullin Sr's Son: "Oh here we go."

I respectfully disagree.

Conservatives don't actually outnumber liberals, but liberals tend to group in geographically smaller areas. The US voting system prioritizes geography over population for a number of historical reasons so despite the fact that liberal positions are far more popular than conservative equivalents, they're much better…

For a long time people would buy novelizations of movies or episodes of the things they like because there would be literally no way for them to see the actual media. The home video market in the early 90s completely changed the way that pop-culture is consumed.
Imagine a world where you get to see your favorite movie…

Look, Mark Millar needs some place to try out his movie pitches.

My thinking is that it annoys people that something which shamelessly, blatantly recycles other people's ideas as it's selling point is getting a major movie release when an untold number of original and possibly better ideas languish and die in development.

I think I remember a comedian making this argument, but I don't remember who; Patton Oswalt, maybe?
Being a geek used to be a lot harder to do. In order to become a Trekkie you'd have to tape all the episodes so you could watch them whenever you wanted. You had to buy books and manuals that explained the minutiae. You…

Comics have always had dumb ideas and ludicrous storytelling, however, the last 15 years or so has seen a two-fold problem in the industry. First, decompressed storytelling means that every bad idea takes six-eight months to play out instead of one month. Second, the community reading comics has gotten so small and…

I really hope they don't try and play him off as some kind of season-long bad guy mastermind. That really isn't the character.

I can buy that, but I don't particularly find the Klingons presented in the trailer as more visually impressive/appealing than either the TOS or TNG-era Klingons. Their uniforms(?) look straight out of Dune and really stupid for a warrior race that prides itself on martial combat. TNG uniforms were very late 80s Mad…

No. In abstract, it was really about the right to self-determinably own other human beings as property.

I don't think it's that easy to assume. History has shown that Europe got very good at conquering massive native populations, but that was after centuries of practice. Maybe it would have been slowed down, but it would have been slowed by A LOT. Most early North American settlements barely survived as it was, if you…