My washing machine can play the first three notes of "Hot Cross Buns", but that's about all I can get out of it. :/

I came to io9 hoping for a short film to wow and entertain, after fruitlessly searching YouTube to no avail.

Here ya go. Jump to timestamp 5:35. When they're distressed, the sound is AWFUL.

Are you sure it's not a baby screaming? =)

Well, given the history of Star Wars... it probably *was* his first name, at that point. x.X

A friend of mine thought Patrick Stewart... made significantly funnier by the fact that he did not know who Tom Hardy was.

Yes! Because the ability to see heat is so very useful when your target and the surrounding environment are both a balmy 98.6 degrees...

Thanks for clarifying. I knew I was close, but not necessarily all the way there.

I love to be informative =)

I believe that, technically speaking, they're the same thing — just at different ends of the light spectrum. Thermal images are actually obtained by observing infrared light emitted as heat at very low wavelengths, whereas the stuff talked about in the article is the high-wavelength part of the infrared spectrum.

Ahahaha... a DENT in the polls! That must by why they used Harvey DENT when they released The Dark Knight in 2008, right? They were trying to make a DENT in the polls?

I was obsessed with "Mountain of Mirrors" for a good year and a half when I was very young. It's still my favorite of them.

Are you sure? There are plenty of arguments to the fact that the world has been habitable long enough to support the rise and fall of human civilization a few times over. Maybe this magnetic polarity reversal so utterly destroys technology and civilization so as to leave no trace whatsoever...

I have a Duff, you have one too...

Diedrich Bader seems to have the ability to make cartoon characters awesome. I'm not sure how he does it, exactly, but Warp Darkmatter was easily one of the best parts of the Buzz Lightyear cartoon — he somehow manages to just ooze cocky badass-ness.

I kind of hate that the first thing I thought was "Isn't Temeraire a black dragon?"

Interesting and (perhaps) timely advice. I've always been sort of afraid to try 3rd-person-omniscient in my writings for fear of ending up sounding like I'm trying to be Douglas Adams... but maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing.

So, I saw this in the bookstore yesterday. I saw three things: "Prince", "intergalactic empire" and "Every Prince wants to become Emperor, and the surest way to do so is to kill, dishonor, or sideline any potential competitor."

From what I understand, that's correct. In fact, I've even heard the balloon analogy used before in this context.

That may be the root of the problem, though; when they ask, I think people ARE expecting a magic formula, because they don't want to do all that hard work.