My thoughts exactly. That is currently the law here in Ontario. Films are rated by the Ontario Film Review Board, a government body, so they have the weight of law. But under the updated Film Classification Act, ESRB ratings are accepted as having the weight of law. Therefore it is actually illegal in Ontario to sell…

Hmm, I hadn't realized. I'd only heard anecdotes from some indie musicians, but that was probably before this information became known. Thanks for helping clear up my misgivings.

Has anyone actually gone on to give money to an artist they discovered through Spotify? Buying music, merchandise, going to a show, etc.? I'm very critical of how much Spotify shortchanges artists, but maybe there's a huge dividend in terms of exposure I should know about.

5-6% of Italians are agricultural workers, compared to about 2% of Americans.

I just heard we have Rdio in Canada now, but I haven't tried it out yet.

Interesting. Yesterday my girlfriend and I went to Ikea to buy a desk (one we'd decided on weeks ago). I quickly checked their site on my phone to make sure it was in stock, and the mobile site not only confirmed it was in, it gave me the self-serve aisle and bin location. We were in and out on a weekend inside of 20…

The Chitauri weren't totally made up. They were basically the Ultimate Universe version of the Skrulls. It's actually pretty neat in their first team outing, the Cinematic Universe Avengers fought both the first enemy the mainline Marvel continuity Avengers faced in Avengers #1 (Loki) and the first real enemy the…

Yeah, this was me first hearing they were making a Battleship movie:

I wouldn't call either of those movies "really, really" good—but they definitely weren't really, really bad. Interestingly, I liked them more when they were both trying to be their own thing. I only disliked them when they tried to be like every other uninspired genre flick out there.

Looks like it's missing a verb. Allow me:

Until they finally gave Samus' character development over to Team Ninja. And that went over swell.

In other words, the transition from Blade Runner cyberpunk black, chrome, and mirrorshades design to post-cyberpunk white and soft blue light IKEA-meets-iPod design is now complete with the assimilation of personal clothing.

The scientific issue is that a bunch of scientists travelled millions and millions of miles so they could act as dumb as a bunch of horny teenagers at summer camp.

Dammit, you're absolutely correct! I can't unsee it either!

Yeah, that gun that shot all those mini-cams into the room so the breaching team would have a heads-up before charging in was such a brilliant and plausible thing. The 3D car chases were also really nail-biting.

You reminded me of John Scalzi's "Flying Snowman" (http://whatever.scalzi.com/2011/12/11/the-flying-snowman/)—the thing in a genre piece which finally breaks your suspension of disbelief.

Actually, I kind of appreciated some of the winks and nods to the Arnie version—they were just little touches for fans of the original (and nowhere near the outright contempt the Clash of the Titans remake displayed for the original) but didn't overwhelm the story or anything. And I still say TR 2012 was one of the…

Unfortunately the North American television industry doesn't seem to be structured that way. There are some books that would work great as a 4 to 12 part TV miniseries. Not all of them would work as the basis of a continuing series, with 12-22 episodes a year. But North American TV hasn't been very friendly to the…

Because textbook publishing is big business. And the educational curricula in the biggest markets—i.e., California and Texas—will dictate the content of textbooks nationwide. If enough public school boards in one of these larger markets force creationism into their curricula, textbook publishers will include it for…

I can imagine a take where they set it in the early 80s, when the comics were published. Then it will take place in the future of X-Men: First Class, but the past of the other X-Men films, and thus literally be "future past".