They're filled with blood all right— with the Man in Black's second victim in the first episode, before he scalped the guy, he had apparently drained a couple buckets of blood off of him and said that that's the most they can survive losing. Presumably the idea is for them to be realistically murderable.

I figured that that was a joke at that character's expense— like, the douchey friend probably thinks he's being really adventurous by letting a manbot touch him at all. Also, if I remember right, the manbot bore a slight resemblance to the other friend… so the guy might be very timidly working his way up to a more…

"Again, these outdated ideas about the black family and black fatherhood aren’t challenged anywhere in Luke Cage"

Yeah, I don't really understand the complaint. The filmmaker is just establishing that these three stories are happening at the same time in the same area, and that even in a small town it's easy for these people to be on such different tracks that they aren't aware of each other. It's not a big deal.

I hope you get to soon! Meanwhile I can tell you some trivia from the Reichardt Q&A that you might dig if you're a fan:

Stewart is very good in this - the headline is a little misleading though; I think she's more of a supporting actor than a lead here, the 3rd story is more about Lily Gladstone's character.

Speaking of funny, it's funny that a lot of the humor in this is kind of close to cringe comedy, which is something I respect but find hard to watch— but it's a weird variation where you're not so much trapped in the intolerable situation as just sort of dispassionately hanging out near it. "Cringe reverie"? Anyway,…

Got to see this last week in a school event where Reichardt did a Q&A. The movie is great. I guess someone who thinks all her stuff is too slow probably wouldn't like this one, but I still don't get that, since for me it's the kind of "slow" where every frame has something in it that you want to look at or find out…

Just to be the designated nitpicker here, I'll say that the Minority Report scene, though I'm sure it was a deliberate homage, isn't the same scene and doesn't work the same way because of how it ties into the premise of the movie.

A young, relatively skinny and awkward Crowe is one of several reasons to see the 1991 Australian movie Proof (Hugo Weaving is another reason). Crowe made enough of an impression on me in that one that I was really confused by his later reinvention as a big tough guy.

I don't know why some people describe that as the "premise" of District 9. The beginning is filmed that way because the main character is being followed around by a film crew. Once he goes on the run, he no longer has a film crew, but he's still the main character— and the big change in his circumstances is kind of…

"Flesh-eating virus"?

Yeah, I didn't catch up with it till much later. I can't imagine how pissed I would've been if I'd been following it when it got cancelled.

The most stereotypical stoner-joke experience I ever had involved brownies, except it was just the crumbs from an empty pan. My girlfriend had gone out of town and I was pissed off to discover that she had taken the whole batch that she had just baked with her. So I ate the few remaining crumbs, angrily washed the…

It wasn't quite the last one - the show did get cancelled there, but then NBC aired 3 more of the 6 remaining episodes the following year. So the last one on NBC was the one where Sam and Bill got to make out (but not with each other).

(Btw, it looks like the BBC thing is just an audiobook, not a dramatization— sorry)

Alas: "There's no one who wishes I were more prolific more than I do. If I could produce stories more quickly, I would, but by now I think it's safe to say that my rate of production isn’t likely to increase. The fact is, I don't get a lot of ideas that interest me enough to write a story about them. Writing is hard…

I can also imagine someone trying to adapt "72 Letters" and being like "Steampunk and golems— cool! Wait, now the story turns out to be about what? How the hell am I supposed to explain that…"

If they're keeping the central idea of the story, then yeah, there's some kind of twist at the end. Whether it comes across the same in the movie as in the story, who knows; it might be something that works better on paper, Chiang definitely put a lot of thought into how it's constructed. But since I still enjoyed…

Really the only one I could have sort of, kind of imagined an adaptation of was "Understand." I wouldn't have expected a good adaptation of it since so much of what happens is verbal and internal, but I wouldn't have been surprised if someone made a vaguely related "cat and mouse game between two hyper-geniuses"…