Eh. Gawker has some really funny columns like Best Place to Eat in New York.

The Hobbit films were doomed the second that del Toro pulled out. Jackson didn't want to do them, but too much money had been spent already so he kind of had to, and the films just scream obligatory-as-shit.

It's difficult to explain, but basically, yes?

Do you think Martin is going to take the Swiss Airways job? And if he does, will they go with the really obvious move of making Douglas captain and Herc his first officer?

What I'm confused about is the idea that he invented Facebook to attract girls. That's not really in the film. What's in the film is that he felt like a lot of his social life was out of his control and he wanted to have some control rather than being controlled.

It was cooler when Marina Abramovic did it.

See I have no problem with that kind of narrative if the film wears that on its sleeve. I mean take the Fifth Element. That shit screams fun goofy dumb lark. A movie like that, in my opinion, can pull that kind of shit all it wants because there's no deceptive marketing saying that it's anything other than a fun,…

Well, see, that'd be fine if hard-SF posturing hadn't been a part of the film's marketing. But it was, right down to having a tie-in book about the plausibility of the film's science and sending the science consultant out for interviews about how scientifically plausible and realistic the film was.

It's like a lot of freshman/sophomore films where it's way too episodic.

Uh sure no one else's films are held up to this high a standard and that's why literally no one sperged the fuck out over Gravity.

The issue's more, I think, that the film dolls itself up a hard science, and milks a lot of its drama and pathos from the fallout of that, before going full on new-age glurge during the sequence where it turns out that love is a fundamental, universal force on the same level as, say, Van der Waals forces.

The repeated invocation of Fifth Business keeps making me think of Robertson Davies' Deptford Trilogy. Which is, unlike this book, actually good.

To be honest, I really doubt the spoiler just because it'd open them up to even more Dumb and Dumber jokes.

So, a little birdy told me that the final season is going to involve McAvoy suffering from a degenerative mental condition.

I'd say topicality is why they chose to watch that one in particular, but if you look at their reruns over the past few years it's almost always recent material with a blurb that's updates/corrections at the end.

I dunno if it'd work to be honest. The Resurrection Crusade would, at the very least, have to be significantly re-jiggered since so much of it (and other evangelical stuff from that era of the comic) is based around the kind of kitschy stuff televangelists like Robert Tilton sold.

Realistically, yes. But there's a big fear that if they did disclose you'd get any radical nation/large religious movement/jackass with enough money transmitting.

Naw, the New World Order continually fucks up relations with the Lizard People, much to the Doctor's consternation.

There are actually conflicting first contact procedures held by various agencies, depending on who makes first contact. SETI, for instance, isn't going to tell anyone until they've managed to communicate a few basic ideas (IE that we don't have a unitary government, etc)

Both the US and the USSR actually envisioned international institutions capable of taking charge of both nations in the event of alien contact or alien invasion as late as the nineteen eighties. It was actually a pet interest of Reagan, who brought it up repeatedly when discussing disarmament.