There is no better future. Even if we manage to avoid WW3 (which we probably will for now) and the creep/rush towards fascism (doubtful), we have fucked up the planet too bad, and we are incapable of stopping. Things will just continue to deteriorate until we reach a worldwide ecological or societal collapse.

You’re making an invalid assumption that the opinions of the 10% or more who participate online are not shared by a substantial proportion of those who don’t.

The communities were at its largest less than 10% of the total US viewership on a worldwide site.

Great album, but I can’t help but feel the article proves the adage that writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

Frodo isn’t mononymic; his last name is Baggins.

I quite like the bit where the girl who’s beloved by all and seen as a total sweetheart meets with a fatal temptation (her friend’s fiancé) that exposes her moral weakness. There’s something quite noir or Joseph Conrad about it.

It even has a first chapter that is so excessively long that it is itself divided into chapters, just to set up why all the different people are on the boat!

I don’t think it should be a problem.

The various gimmicks in this film reminded me of nothing so much as Amélie, and I think it has a lot of the same charm, while telling a much more realistic, grounded, messily human story. I particularly liked the way time jumps were used to suggest all sorts of background events not included in the movie, which pays…

So, the chances that this story isn’t true but was cooked up by (a) his parents, (b) a publisher, (c) the library, (d) some other adults are what? 50%? 60%?

Yeah, Finnemore didn’t have anything to do with Season 1. Word of him being brought on for Season 2 got a pretty big response on Twitter a few months back. Checking out the original article on Deadline, it’s pretty clear how the misapprehension happened. (It also demonstrates that this piece is more or less a…

It’s not the complete book, though. It’s mainly screenshots from the documentary (and images that are not from the pitch book), and it only covers about a quarter of the full book.

I am pretty skeptical of that claim, specifically because duneinfo.com, which has spent decades collecting information about various Dune adaptations, including original scripts from all the other attempts and a lot of other material from the Jodorowsky project, does not have a complete set of the storyboards.

No, man. Jodorowsky definitely read the book (he talks about it in the documentary), and apart from inserting a few bizarre flourishes, the script and storyboard follow the novel pretty closely.

This whole crypto project is dumb, but it is wrong to say the book is available online. The gallery linked contains a bunch of images from different sources (including a few that aren’t actually from the Jodorowsky Dune production). It’s a great collection, but it only has about 70 full pages—of very varying…

Yeah, if I could get my pop culture fix somewhere else I would be out of here in a heartbeat. The way they’re treating the last few remaining writers who made the AV Club what it once was is appalling. The site is already a shell of its former self, and after this I can’t see how it can become anything but a rotting…

I’m more and more leaning towards the classical definition of any celestial body or point of light wandering against the firmament. The moon: planet. The sun: planet. Any satellite: planet. (Earth: not a planet.)

I haven’t dismissed anything. (I haven’t even visited the site between my last comment and just now.)

“Cradle of humanity” and “cradle of civilization” are separate things referring to different regions, as a quick Google search will confirm. (Various places in Africa—from Ethiopia to South Africa— have been nominated as the “cradle of humanity”; my understanding is that latest thinking is that the evolution of homo…

The Matrix is also the movie where humans are kept around to provide energy for the computers. (Yes, I know this explanation was only used because they didn’t think audiences would understand the idea of our brains acting as the computational substrate. It’s still what the movie went with.) Nitpicking scientific…