"What exactly are the overheads"? Uh… paying a person to write the column? I'm assuming the AV Club staff doesn't work for free, maybe I'm wrong.

I think you have it right (at least from the very little information we've been given): it was all cold-calling, and if/when they get a bite, they're supposed to just keep developing that person as an asset to see if they can get anything valuable. If Sofia's position at Tass turns out not to be of any use, they'll…

Paige is distressed about a lot of things, but one of the big ones is PTSD from the parking lot attack, and not knowing if she'll be able to get past that fear. Elizabeth is telling her "I've been in that state too, after an even worse experience, and see, I turned out OK." Seeing her mother as a vulnerable survivor…

I agree. If Tuan really had no conscience and no regard for anyone but himself, he wouldn't be any good for this job. He's an asshole, but he's an asshole who's dedicated years of his life to a higher purpose that's unlikely to ever give him personal recognition, and that requires him to spend 5 days a week pretending…

I kind of want Tuan to discover that he doesn't actually know how to get in with the popular bully crowd because he's not in fact the coolest kid ever, even if Pasha thinks so.

Boring answer: truly random doesn't necessarily mean not compressible, because 1. some compressible sequences of identical stuff will probably show up randomly (if you could guarantee that that would never happen, then it wouldn't really be random) and 2. if you're talking about lossy compression (which MPEG is, and…

Vern is supposed to be a ridiculous person who's a legend in his own mind - every other character is eyerolling at pretty much everything he says.

Oh, Grant Morrison, bless his heart. I liked The Invisibles a lot (or maybe I should say I liked about 60 percent of it a lot) but it's not what I would call a coherent book with a strong sense of what it is (other than "cool and outrageous"); if you cut out every panel and arranged them in a new order, you could end…

I feel like I've still seen it used in ads a fair amount— not for a fight scene, but just for the general "camera seems to move around while everything else stands still" effect. And the show Person of Interest seemed to use it in some of their computer-surveillance-POV scenes.

That's way way more plausible than having two of the main characters coincidentally be related (or, as someone suggested elsewhere, having a connection to Gabriel). There were many millions of people in the Gulag.

I think the producers have mentioned this in interviews, just generally along the lines of: when they have storylines happening in very different places, using a distinctive color palette (whether it's with lens filters, lighting, or just choices about colors in sets and costume) is one way to help the audience…

I saw it as the simplest possible gesture of mild rebellion for someone who thinks he has the world's most boring and conservative dad.

Errinwright didn't just "use a clear threat of violence"; he took out Mao's entire Martian operation first, leaving Mao with no choices other than 1. give up on the whole thing, 2. try to find a whole new set of secret allies on Mars or Earth, even though Errinwright knows your business, or 3. go back to working with…

End of book is a pretty different effect than end of season, if only because there's a big time jump between books that they're not doing between seasons. I mean, when we catch up with Holden again in book 3, it's understood that he's been talking to… the last-minute guest star… for quite a while.

I'd say that whether Prospero really started out trying to help Caliban and then turned harsh, rather than being abusive to him all along, is open to interpretation - it's only Prospero who says so, and Prospero is quite a dick. The magician isn't really that much more respectful to Ariel, who never tried to harm him…

Ha, I was about to say something about that "why not?" look— I half expected her to say "You know, you're not the first guy to ask me to beat him up and throw him in a storage locker. I guess that's just some people's thing."

That article is the same material they're talking about in the other article. The ratings are what they are, I wasn't denying that. But all the stuff about "possible cancellation" is still just speculative… that is, it's always possible that a network could decide to drop a show, but the Wired piece isn't actually…

That Wired article is really lacking in content - it doesn't give you any basis for thinking that "it's fan support that's keeping it on the air", it doesn't actually provide any evidence that the show is in trouble except that the Nielsen ratings are not so hot, even though it's not at all clear whether Nielsen…

Minor nitpick, but: she couldn't have shot those guys, because she didn't have bullets. The UN's only reason for having that suit at all was that Mars was making a big thing of giving them the only piece of evidence left from the battle; Mars wouldn't have loaded the weapons on it, and it would've been pretty weird…

Well sure the outside of the ship is sturdy, but I meant that once it's been taken apart into a million little pieces, even the interior bits aren't being affected by Venus's atmosphere in any way—and they aren't moving at all. That's way beyond anything that you could explain with a "technology we can more or less…