Saves on costume fabric costs.

I would just like to vote that whoever gets to the TI first makes one of these threads first each week. It's easy to find the food, fashion, and booze threads — they're going to take up two pages of comments apiece. It makes it much harder to find the little threads that engage with the specifics of the Index — and…

Exactly, and I don't see why that's a problem. You experience something, then you sort through afterwards to find what images or sounds are emblematic of that *remembered* experience.

Rygel is sort of the sour note on that thesis, though, since he's routinely turned into a punching bag for all kinds of abuse and is even eviscerated at least twice and generally seems to bounce back (often within the same episode) without any permanent damage. His Durka trauma is the only thing that seems to stick,…

I know it's one of those "it's a sci-fi fantasy, where do you draw the line in suspending your disbelief?" deals, but the Vorc's size change between forms really irks me. I guess we could assume the aggressive form is just inflated like a blowfish, but it really doesn't move or affect other objects like something that…

Seems like the major fallacy in your framing of the case is assuming the question is whether or not to "have a kid" when in fact the question is whether or not to have a pregnancy. And men seem perfectly free not to be pregnant.

@avclub-c69c2659762674838fe0053cb735c98f:disqus Huh. You propose this description of the world, and yet virtually every person I've encountered online who was a strident anti-circumcision advocate (i.e., hijacking message board discussions to proclaim how abhorrent the practice was) were people who identified strongly…

"But I don’t think anyone would argue that Scott Thompson’s Brian is the lesser of Hank’s assistants."

No, babies grow into girls. So the sequence is right. You wouldn't have "Three Men and a Little Lady" come before "Three Men and a Baby." That would be ludicrous.

A bigger issue than just technical verisimilitude is that the found footage premise is an artistic constraint. Part of the aesthetic pleasure of the device is seeing how the filmmaker maneuvers and executes the story within the constraint.

A difference with vinyl is that it provides a fundamentally different kind of experience of "listening to music." It has a kind of ritualized quality. Your interaction with that physical object and the technology to play it has this distinctive cultural aura to it.

So, I've heard a number of atheists criticizing the "this story will make you believe in God" frame of Life of Pi seemingly without understanding the conclusion. [Note: I haven't seen the movie, but I have read the book — maybe there's some change that muddies it up in the film.]

This is also probably my single favorite segment ever of TAL.

Here's the OED:

Was anyone else reminded of Humbert Humbert's verse indictment/sentencing of Quilty? No? Nevermind.

And at least among the high school kids I knew, the Pulp Fiction soundtrack album was pretty huge — and in the days before Napster and really any internet music beyond MIDI files, a compilation soundtrack album was a fairly major vector for exposing non-Top-40 tracks.

I did watch a streaming movie a couple of years ago where they had apparently not captured the center audio track, so you basically got the movie with the ambient sound and other sound effects, but no main dialogue (other than sometimes as a kind of echo in the left and right channels).

Also, since everyone seems so keen to use Honey Boo Boo as an example in this discussion, it's worth noting that if you read the review, Sonia has this statement at the end:

"Stretch" or "Fill" would distort the image (in the TVs I've used, anyway). He probably has it on something like "Zoom," which is one way of taking squarish 4:3 content and making its edges touch the edges of the widescreen frame, but consequently making the top and bottom of the square disappear outside the margins.…

Often, you can turn subtitles off, but only if the supplied version of the movie doesn't have them burned into the image.