Oh GOD this book is amazing. I have nothing else to add but to thank you for reminding me of its existence.

Despite the fact I read this book as a young kid, all I can think of when I hear about the movie now is how they already did this and called it Pleasantville.

It seems to me that the very nature of genre storytelling REQUIRES a certain amount of "hand-waving", if not outright plot holes. FTL drives, ghosts, monsters, mutant powers, magic missiles, artificial gravity, language consistency...if you dig deep enough, there's always something.

They *used* to be old men, anyway. Now in the New 52, they're sexy young college kids again!

Haha oh my goodness, is that Statler and Waldorf supposed to be in the style of Alex Ross? That's pretty hilarious if so. Ross's paintings all sort of look like old men to me anyway.

Incidentally, also, if anyone is interested in the concept of "lectors", there's a quite good play (like, Pulitzer-Prize-winner good) called "Anna in the Tropics" by Nilo Cruz about a lector who reads Anna Karenina to a factory floor of Cuban immigrant cigar-rollers in 1930 Florida. Obviously, drama ensues.

I always figured pinsetters went extinct because they kept being murdered by demons trying to irritate Constantine.

Well, I do certainly like action scenes. Maybe I'll get to it one of these days. As you point out, I did watch 7 other movies in the series, after all.

I suppose. I just didn't have any enthusiasm for it. Was it substantially different from the book? That was part of the reason I never bothered, because I already knew how it ended and I found Part I to be a bit of a slog (the beautiful animated version of the Deathly Hallows story aside- that was incredible).

*shrug* Like I said, I'm clearly in the minority. The movie was very popular. I had just already read the last book and never worked up any enthusiasm to actually go see the finale in cinema form. The story was over for me. It's not a judgement on people who did see it, it's just how it was for me.

Yeah, it turned out to be a prime recipe for seeing the first one and then never bothering to see the last one.

EDIT- though I'm clearly in the minority on this one, since apparently the last HP movie is one of the highest-grossing films of all time. I assume it's "Seinfeld Finale Syndrome", where a lot of people…

Haha oh man, I thought I was going crazy! I was like "I could have SWORN Gamora was Zoe Saladana just from the trailer alone!"

Huh, it actually hadn't occurred to me that it might actually be intended to read "April, 2006". I was reading it as "April 06, [no year listed]." A brief googling shows that this movie came out in 2005, so I'm forced to admit you may well be correct. DAMN YOU, SON OF THE MASK!

It's honestly pretty amazing that growing humans can learn all of this without ever actually sitting down to study it, knowing what the proper words for what they're doing is, or heck, even that there ARE words that describe this kind of thing! BRAINS ARE AWESOME, Y'ALL

PLUS- the Bloodpack. The whole movie was worth it just for them. Of COURSE there's a team of Punisher-esque vampire maniacs who want to take out Blade! And NATURALLY it turns out they're a bunch of chumps in way over their heads who all die hilariously.

Ah she's SO BADASS in that movie. I love her bronze head-butt helmet, and the scene where Conan frees her and she just goes nuts on all the villagers is terrific.

I don't know why, but the fact that the "Date" field of his ID card doesn't include the year is really bothersome. ARE YOU EVEN TRYING TO CREATE A BELIEVABLE WORLD, SON OF THE MASK??

I believe that would be the phenomenon of multistable perception.

I find this kind of thing really interesting. Curses are fascinating because so often there's *something* there- just not something supernatural. Humans are great pattern-recognizors after all, but we're not always so great at looking beyond the surface of events. It may well be true that everyone who lives in that…

Regarding number 5...I wonder if it's possible the vase could have had some kind of radioactive material inadvertently mixed into its component metals? Granted it seems like it would have to be emitting a hell of a lot of rads to kill a healthy person in a couple months, but I'm not really a doctor, I've just played…