Yeah, I've given it an honest try, and like many others I have to cry foul. I *hate* this thing. It's really, really, REALLY going to discourage conversation in any threads that aren't at or near the top, but are instead buried somewhere off-screen in those annoying little thumbnails up there.

I don't know, I'd make a pretty hard distinction between hard sci-fi and "fantasy".

Collex, I think the bigger point is that people who have actually served in the military are LESS likely to start wars of convenience—they've seen the horrors of war, maybe lost friends and comrades, and so on. Whereas the armchair generals who have never gone anywhere near boot camp are all too eager to send their…

Only if SETI uses Macbooks.

OK, add my voice to the complaints that this new comment system sucks. I've given it a chance, but it blows. And it blows even harder now that I've just tried posting a reply to someone buried pretty deep into the list of comment threads.... and it returned me to the very first thread. Now I have to page through…

TL:DR — then you just lost all capability to respond. If you didn't read it, you can't engage in a dialogue about it. You can't just say "I don't want to pay any attention anymore, so therefor I win!" Debate doesn't work that way. You don't win by quitting, you lose by quitting.

""I wonder why books are not as prone to remake as movies and TVs. "

My recollection may be off, but I always thought that Johanna was fairly dark-skinned and athletically-muscular—like a female track star or something. Didn't she, like, dual-wield woodcutter's axes? I'm pretty sure she at least flung them around a bit.

Never mind the fact that lots, and lots, and LOTS of people who either don't believe in a vengeful God, or don't believe in *any* God or afterlife at all, still manage to be perfectly empathic, compassionate, good-natured, and moral/ethical people.

I'd argue that religions just replace the monkeysphere. People use it to discriminate against anyone who doesn't believe what they do. And many religions actively *encourage* that outlook.

I think it's a problem of fan expectations. Most of the movies that get shit on the hardest & messiest (you're welcome for that image) are properties that are especially beloved AND go back 20+ years—Watchmen, Alien, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, etc. If the new movies fail to live up to the *totally unrealistic and…

Are you sure it wasn't Dukes of Hazzard? :-)

"If our descendants survive for a million years, there's a good chance they'll change our galaxy in quite visible ways"

Well, the thieves have to have footage of their crime to put up on Facebook afterward, right? Isn't that what all the criminals do these days?

I love how the copy of these promo releases are always 75% list of names, with maybe 25% actually telling you anything about the project.

My wife and I took a vacation on the south island a couple years ago. It pretty much ALL looks like Middle Earth. We totally fell in love with the place, to the point that we seriously considered packing up & moving there (we're from the US). However, their immigration policy is fairly strict—basically you can't…

This is a perfect example of why it baffles me that people consider the bible to be a reliable source. It's been translated and interpreted several times over. It's the book equivalent of "the telephone game", where the end result bears little resemblance to the original statement.

I wouldn't get a first-generation *anything*.

Bearing in mind the recent column on "how to tell when a movie sucks from the trailer", I couldn't help but point out to my wife while we watched Eureka on Hulu, that the Battleship commercials contained all of about ten spoken words.

""People for some godawful reason always want to see the humans come out victorious..."