The book is one of the cornerstones on which modern space opera is built, and elements of it have been borrowed in everything from Star Wars to Warhammer 40k. As such, to a modern reader it will feel clichéd and troperiffic —only, it was the source that created most of the clichés and tropes that it espouses.

My prediction: Serac himself is the outlier who will cause humanity’s extinction unless stopped. He’s proven himself just as unpredictable and violent as his brother, but there’s no one within the system he’s built capable of stopping him. And Rehoboam can’t perceive him directly because he’s made himself a complete…

Motoko from the film is an outlier in that regard. The Stand Alone Complex-version, the best one in my opinion, is an amalgamation of the film Major and the original manga character.

Well, it got fixed, fortunately. The Kinja players got replaced with YouTube embeds.

Yep. A bona fide copyclan. Which makes me wonder if Westworld is going to explore some of the same questions as The Quantum Thief-books: conflict against one’s self and preventative measures against it.

Before reading this I have one thing to say: who the hell at Kinja thought it was a good idea to autostart every single video on the page with sound, simultaneously?

That’s curious. In my country the only stuff that seems to be semi-permanently out are some types of pasta and rice, and according to the suppliers that’s only because they prioritise the most popular products in the supply chain. Sometimes one type of toilet paper is out for a day, but at the same time there’s a…

As I recall, there was a perfectly passable route to Kessel that anyone could navigate. The problem was that it took a very long time, as it had to go around all the obstacles and dangers surrounding the planet, while Han and co. had to try and find a quick route to prevent their volatile cargo from exploding, forcing…

Yes. All the way in A New Hope Threepo laments that “we’ll be sent to Spice mines of Kessel, for sure!” And yes, it was probably a deliberate Dune reference — Dune was a massive influence on all space opera thereafter.

Except that the Seven Kingdoms is already predominantly monotheistic. The Faith of the Seven believes in one god with seven aspects, as a direct analogue to Christianity’s one god with three aspects. 

They changed it mainly because they noticed that Ahsoka barely had any chance to interact with other girls of her age in the series. 

It’s very possible that two months from now the worst is already over in Japan, if the countermeasures have been sufficient. 

There was a guy once who made a project of a nose bridge piercing with glasses attached with magnets. Same in spirit?

The last time I heard, an Israeli source said that they could have a vaccine ready in the matter of weeks. Through the normal procedure it’ll absolutely be a year or more, since new vaccines have to go through a rigorous testing before they can be put on market, but in a case of an actual worldwide health crisis most…

So what you essentially are saying is that given we’ve got a current 2% death rate with the disease today, with modern medicine and the entire world’s medical community focused on it, this could easily be even worse than the Spanish flu...

So WWI was continuing in 1919 according to you?

The Spanish flu’s death toll was heavily exacerbated by the ongoing WWI, the resulting suppression of information and the packing of millions of soldiers into ideal infectious conditions, as well as the newly discovered “miracle medicine” aspirin, which the doctors prescribed in mammoth doses for the disease, not…

That’s the in-universe explanation. George Romero was a fan of the Marvel comics and threw in a reference for the fun of it.

It was a deliberate Marvel homage in the old movie. A guy called Dr. Logan nicknames a zombie Bub — not much room for coincidences, there. 

IIRC she does a lot of talking/pointing to words, and continues to speak as she writes to communicate in both formats. Am I misremembering?