The Aral Sea is beautiful this time of year. Why, you can almost drive across the entire thing!

When I helped teach an English class on the side in Russia, over half of my students seemed to think that Ukraine's earlier Orange Revolution was the result of 'information warfare' from the West.

I have no idea if I'm being trolled or if this guy is sincerely just really, really dumb.

Ya'll just jelly of His Imperial Majesty Bokasa I.

I imagine a significant amount of that simply has arisen from it being labeled a 'test' period.

No, this is the internet. We can only do one thing and we must be enraged about it.

I don't even like Sarkeesian's work at all but the vitriol really confounds me with its stupidity.

By having characters that have more depth than say, Megan Fox (I can't even remember their name!) in Transformers. That seems like a pretty reasonable goal to me.

I feel as though everyone in this thread is making a different argument, all essentially valid, but all mixed up.

Yep original, I managed to nab it at a sweet $20.

Your points are largely reasonable but with Master and Commander it's definitely a case of narrative efficiency and focus.

Sometimes there's a fairly cynical market logic to it. If you put those elements in your show, it's simply much more likely that a niche demographic of dedicated fans will buy all the associated over-priced merchandise and crap etc. It sells.

It makes me think a bit of Tolstoy. Saying that he had some women issues is the understatement of the century, but he still managed to give us Anna Karenina.

Disqus is incomprehensibly being even worse than usual today, so it's still probably floating around out there somewhere.

I picked up vinyls of The Talking Heads' Remain in Light and the soundtrack to 2001: A Space Odyssey on my last visit to the local record store. I couldn't possibly pass up the great album art on the latter even if it's not exactly regular listening material.

I've been using variations on Pig since basically forever and Comrade because of my interest in Soviet things. My avatar is a photo by Eugene Atget, who documented Parisian street scenes from the late 19th century onward.

I planted a bunch of grass this weekend? That counts right?

Oh yes it's lady's night and the feelings right, oh yes it's lady's night, oh what a…oh, wrong song.

This is giving me flashbacks to taking out 1000 books from the library in college for research purposes and then only remembering to return them all on the last day of the semester.

This weekend I watched the stylish 60s gangster film Tokyo Drifter (not to be confused with similarly titled masterpiece 3Fast3Furious: Tokyo Drift).