Had a big backpack too.

For me, as someone who doesn't know any Finnish and knows that the languages are unrelated (I can just barely puzzle through Swedish and Norwegian dialogue via German, but Finnish might as well be Martian to me), when I've heard Finns speaking English the accent does sound vaguely "Scandinavian"— or at least, it…

Kristian Bruun is so good at physical comedy whenever there's the potential for embarrassment. The bit where he realized at the last minute that he forgot to unwrap the specimen cup was glorious, I just about choked on my drink.

Pretty sure that's why Kumagoro said "Felix clearly has a point, but at the same time, he's the flamboyant one."

For some reason I'm incredibly entertained by the backstory they provided for Ferdinand here (or if it came up before, I missed it). Of course he's an illegitimate aristocrat who joined the British Special Forces.

It's kind of that, but I think the movie also has a weird kind of respect for the guy's beaten-down condition - like, he's been so fucked up by life that he's almost immune from whatever these assholes are trying to do.

I saw it subtitled, it comes across the same way. It is tragic, and it's silly in an empathetic way, like it's just acknowledging that sometimes you can't help losing your shit in an undignified way among family.

In case you're for some reason (like, you have a life) unfamiliar with the many pointless in-jokes at this place, what Archmage is getting at is that he thinks you made up that story just so you could use the word "first" in a comment that might end up being the first comment, which for some reason is… a thing.

So much excellent editing there. The gag where everyone's running into the trailer to hide, and this desperate woman gets there late and they won't let her in, and she gives up hope and leaves right before the monster just runs straight into the trailer… it all goes by in just a few seconds but it's crystal clear, and…

Yeah, it's a great character choice that doesn't necessarily make much difference to the plot but gives the actor a cool angle to play it from.

I didn't mean illegitimate kids. I meant was there any point up till now where anyone told Claire that Randall isn't married and there aren't yet any little Randalls - and did she even think to ask anyone about that. Either way, I get that she's being a bit reckless with regard to Frank.

I can't remember (and if I could remember, I still wouldn't be sure whether it was on the show or just in the book)… in her previous run-ins with Jack, had Claire ever tried to find out whether he had a family already? I could definitely imagine her rationalizing, if Randall already had any kids, that Frank was…

We kept cracking up during the scenes where Philip, Elizabeth, and Gabriel are trying to be super nice to Martha and she's just staring at them, because her surly skeptical face totally looked like an expression our cat makes. It's what he does when you're approaching him and making reassuring noises, but he's pretty…

I may be remembering this wrong, but wasn't there a scene between Gabriel and Claudia a couple weeks ago that showed that Gabriel thought Philip probably had the right idea? In other words, that when Gabriel is reporting to his superiors he's trying to encourage them to take the agents seriously… but when he's talking…

I watched that commentary, and that's a ridiculous description of what she said. She said she wouldn't be with her boyfriend if he disapproved of her doing this show.

It was Brian Aldiss, and yeah, it's odd— I think it was one of those things where one writer dislikes another writer's work so strongly that they can't really be bothered to make sense about it. But the term caught on because it's a fun phrase and works as a description of a fair number of other books.

Several of Ted Chiang's stories involve memorable variations on this dilemma. In his short-short "What's expected of us", where a super-simple future-predicting device blows people's minds just by existing, he kind of cheats by making the time delay so short that there's no real opportunity to fool the thing. He takes…

In the book, JFK totally drops the ball on civil rights. MLK is assassinated earlier (something Al basically assumed wouldn't happen if Kennedy was still around, though his reasoning there was pretty thin and basically amounted to "I've been obsessing about this for so long that I've convinced myself JFK would have…

I was just about to mention Culloden. Watching that prior to season 2 would be a good way to get the audience appropriately bummed out— I mean, the show has already mentioned that the rebellion failed, but most people probably don't know just how much of a godawful disaster it was, and what happened to even the Scots…

It's not all that easy - she's still half convinced for a while that they're both nuts - but she comes up with the explanation before he even discloses it, based on the large amount of weird shit he's accidentally said over the years and his habit of alluding to secret knowledge. Plus, if he's really from the future…