I think “dark films for kids” are like any other kind of movie that’s not a massive blockbuster. They didn’t really stop existing - it just became financially and creatively easier to get them made as TV instead. Steven Universe and Adventure Time both have creepy-dark elements, and Over the Garden Wall is very much…

I didn’t discover this movie until something I was watching about cutting edge movie VFX highlighted the stained-glass window knight, so I rented the VHS. It was better than I thought it would be.

I guess resistance isn’t futile.

I remember when this came out. Critics were tired of Spielberg-produced kid-centric movies with big ILM budgets and they dismissed it because they felt that it pandered too much to kids by turning Sherlock Holmes into an Indiana Jones style movie (they both admired and loathed the special effects) and I remember that…

I actually auditioned for the role of Holmes in this movie, back in my younger days. After running through some lines, the auditioner told his assistant to “Put a question mark next to his (my) name”, which sounded promising but probably just meant, “How the hell did this guy think he could audition for a movie?”

Anyway…

I remember visiting a reptile zoo on Kenya once and seeing a sign on one of the fences that read, “Persons caught throwing refuse into the crocodile enclosure will be required to go in and retrieve it.”

While that may be true all you need is one good “scandal” and your company can be F’d. Andrew Grove, former Intel CEO, wrote a book called Only the Paranoid Survive. It’s about “strategic inflection points” which are moments in which a company either fails horribly or breaks through and continues to be successful. I…

The biggest legal question of the coming years will be ‘If a self driving/autonomous vehicle kills somebody who is legally culpable?’

Honestly thought it was going to have been highly radioactive. The thieves were caught four days later, after their skin melted off and they grew some new limbs.

Reminds me of this Onion classic: https://local.theonion.com/bassist-unaware-rock-band-christian-1819566943

The other issue is that the largest segment of the audience for Christian Rock music (and music in general, really) is made up of people who don’t want to be challenged either musically or lyrically. They want to hear songs that sound familiar and have uplifting messages about how great Jesus is. That’s always going…

Why do I have a sneaking suspicion that something’s a little off about the “Spreading false information about terrorism,” and it’s not aimed the Chinese version of 911 truthers, but rather political activists?

Authoritarian governments were all over the place in nineteen thirties europe, yes. But the Nazis were an unique brand of crazy all the same. The dictators of the usual variety did what they always do - kill and arrest political opponents. Line their pockets. Hitler had grand and murderous plans of an entirely…

to quote Norm MacDonald, the more I hear about this Adolf Hitler, the less I like him...

The fantastically comprehensive Uchronia site has a list of the oldest alternate histories, from Livy through 1939's classic “Lest Darkness Fall” by L. Sprague de Camp.

There’s a great novel by Stephen Fry called Making History, about changing the past so that Hitler doesn’t show up. The methods (not time travel exactly are fascinating, and the results are not what the protagonist expects.

Hitler is quite the central character in all of this and his death before 1939 would probably have changed a lot. Hitler was never a moderate, in fact he always the most aggressive in all of the Nazi’s plans. Easy, because Hitler was the programmatic and ideological source of the Nazis. His Mein Kampf was the central…

We have actually negotiated & avoided war with numerous dictators.

The earliest example of alt-history speculation I know of, although not really a novel, is the Roman historian Livy, who wondered what would have happened if Alexander the Great had turned West and attacked Rome rather than East to attack the Persians. (Spoiler alert - he thinks Alexander was overrated and would have…

Both are apparently based on a tourism poster from 1935 designed by Lothar Heinemann, “Deutschland, das Land der Musik.” (Which is why there’s a pipe organ in the middle.) Very strange that Munich would reuse the image, given its prominent use on Vollmann’s National Book Award-winning novel.