Though the fact that Kid Miracleman didn't have a direct analog in the Marvel Family blunted the impact somewhat. (Though it was probably just as well, in some ways.)

My problem with the DRM is that I don't trust them to maintain the servers long term. I have comics from the 80s that I can, and do reread. Ditto hardcovers and tpbs from the 90s. Will Comixology be there in 2034? Will my account still be accessible?

I'd disagree with "entirely". But it shares a problem with a lot of pioneering work: what was once new has been done so often that the impact is muted. In this case, juxtaposing someone with the powers and memories of an old-style comic book superhero with a darker, ostensibly more realistic world. (Sort of the way…

Did he put one of those little gates across it?

And they come back at an appropriate age with the O'Briens' 3/8 Klingon grandchild.

While they're hard to track down, you might enjoy Ray Brown's "Reformed Sufi" stories from the 1980s (a fringe religion becomes dominant as a result of the existence of destructive teleportation, because it offers more reassurance on the identity issue than competitors) and James Patrick Kelly's "Think Like a…

Because Ferengi women wear… wait, what?!?

Lurky McLurk. can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the Cold War analogy being referenced is at the level of the Vorlons and Shadows, with the human-level species being varying degrees of ally and proxy in their overarching ideological conflict. At the level of our heroes, it is more WWII-like.

Of course while it was of dubious canonicity, the animated series had the Recreation Room (a holodeck in all but name) back in the TOS era. Right down to the life-threatening malfunction. (In that case it was the ship's main computer that was the problem. Still the issue of putting in leisure equipment that can be…

Yeah— I strongly suspect that programs no one reasonable thinks are sapient will be able to break even on the Turing Test before we have a good handle on AI. (Current ones already score in the low double-digit percentages in competitions.)

Was "Space Seed" expensive? As I recall, it was practically a bottle episode in terms of sets. (A bit of time on the Botany Bay, and otherwise entirely contained in extant Enterprise locations.) Was Ricardo Montalban a high-ticket actor to get?

"My favorite detail, which I’d forgotten entirely until reminded by this movie, is that hitting “return” moves the cursor not down to a potential next line, but to the beginning of the current line—there must have been a rational reason to design it that way, but damned if I can guess what it was."

That's only about every third episode.

JRRT was unequivocally a gentleman and a scholar. But he did establish that the name of Glóin's father was, well, Gróin.

Well… not only. :-)

The only reference I recall Tolkien making to Jews was when a German publisher in the 1930s asked him to verify that he was Aryan. He drafted a letter that first tweaked them about their terminology— "I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-iranian; Gypsy, or any related dialects." He then went on, "But if I am to…

Tolkien's letters re proposed adaptations make it pretty clear that there'd never realistically have been one he liked. Granted, he got some notably terrible and slipshod proposals— his point by point critique of one of them is worth reading.

He spent a lot of time reworking those bits because reworking bits what what he liked to do, and he always thought there were improvements to make. (He even wrote a short story mocking the tendency in himself.) Publication was practically epiphenomenal for him, though it's probably the only reason LotR was ever…

Though the overarching theme is that no amount of violence committed by people can do much more than slow them down slightly. And a lot of it winds up doing the opposite because they're working at cross-purposes. There is plenty of violence, which can be handled in whatever cinematic fashion the director chooses—…

"For me, it was Tuesday."