Yeah, we have Copperheads here and they are the same way—the babies are more dangerous than the adults. But neither are something you want to run into. Or step on.

Anyone who grew up in the country (me!) sees these all the time. Not quite as big, mind you, but they are everywhere down here and slow enough to easily catch. I caught a lot of them as a kid (and pretty much any bug or reptile I could get hold of). Spiders do not bother me at all, unless it's a black widow or a…

The problem, as I pointed out in another io9 article, is that you cannot build an artificial intelligence from the top down, because our brains are not simply fancy calculators. It is the errors we are prone to as much as the correct assessments of reality that make us human. We are hopelessly flawed because we…

Poor, poor deluded girl. Well, at least she has good grammar.

Wait, nowhere did he say "Vote for Obama if you want this." For all we know he could just be really confident that Obama will win a second term. I think we're reading a little too much into what he said.

I've always loved the Argento-written and produced (Michele Soavi directed) film The Church which came out at the tail-end of the '80s. I was in high school at the time and it completely changed what I knew about the horror genre. I had just started reading Clive Barker as well, and I think I saw Hellraiser not long…

Seems like a movie tailor-made for the SyFy Channel . . . circa seven years ago. I'm an agnostic but I thank whatever gods were involved in making sure this never happened.

Ooh! Can't wait! This is right up my alley.

This. Well said. And not only that, libertarianism fails to acknowledge that power vacuums always get filled one way or another. Personally I'd rather take my chances under a powerful, unified democratic state where the politicians have some accountability to the public than under some local gangster, warlord or…

Oops, I replied to the wrong post. Sorry.

Ditto. It wasn't that bad, and in some ways it was quite good. I don't understand the need for every element of a story to make perfect sense, which seems to be a Western/Anglo conceit. I like that the film was often mysterious and didn't answer all of the questions it posed. It left a lot up to the imagination,…

Goddamn. That's all I can really say to that, and even that doesn't feel adequate.

"armadildo"

John Bauer is one of my favorite Golden Age illustrators (and not just because he influenced the design of my favorite film of all time, The Dark Crystal.) He was freakin' awesome. Sad that he and his family perished so tragically, and when he was still quite young. It saddens me to imagine the loads of great work…

6. Can you really experience anything objectively?

Someone had to do it. Glad it wasn't me. :)

Cool, but couldn't they have called it something other than lithopanspermia? It sounds like a disease of the gonads.

I don't really understand this nonsense about what is appropriate and inappropriate in fiction. People are so easily offended and disturbed these days. We've become a bunch of PC wusses. The beauty of fiction is that anything goes and there's no reason why we need feel disturbed by it because, and I really feel…

I would love to discuss the physics of the TARDIS with her.

Was just talking about this film here recently. Hmmm . . .