I dunno. I think the Playboy readers at least have a more plausible case. Playboy's run some brilliant short fiction in amongst the pornographic wrapping paper, whereas Hooters just has awful, awful wings and a really depressing, misogynist atmosphere.

The sheer volume of men who claim that they go to hooters for the wings is frankly mind-boggling. Do they actually think they're fooling anyone?

The nerd tears over this *will* be tremendously amusing, but this is also kind of a really shitty thing to happen, so it's gonna be hard to enjoy them.

Just gonna leave this here:

Pan Am is actually a really interesting example. It, and the other Mad Men-ish shows that were so popular with networks (The Playboy Club, Magic City) along with other period pieces from 2011 and 2012 were actually pitched because it was thought that they'd do well internationally.

NBC's trying to skew younger and nerdier, since lame-o-zoid losers like us look the same as others in-demo. Plus we have a greater tendency to buy merchandise and shiny discs. This is important since ratings are only really part of the calculus.

It's a sort of counter-programming.

Love the pop art look here.

No, I did not laugh at Jar Jar, and part of the problem is that he's basically a minstrel show character.

It isn't really about "the artistic expression of the director" at all though. Movies are massively collaborative. For example, Lucas's ex-wife was incredibly important to the films and her re-cut of the original film is probably what saved it. Similarly, Lawrence Kasdan wrote Empire Strikes Back and return of the…

Bioware only made the first KOTOR game. The second was made by Obsidian, which you can easily tell because it's simultaneously much smarter and quite buggy.

It's not an absinthe scene. It's a kind of botched adult joke. "Pink Elephants" or "Seeing the Pink Elephants" refers to the hallucinations that are brought on by the DTs.

The thing that bothers me is that that kind of angst and "mature" shit would work if it were actually done well, but there's never a willingness to actually tell a complicated, interesting, and ethically complicated story because it still has to sell as a film. Which is why we have Christian Bale gurning over morally…

No, a lot of people think that science is magic. Read basically any pop science publication and you'll see dozens of examples where research is exaggerated in a way that feeds into this fetishization. Look at futurists like Ray Kurzweil, or at any lionization of social media and technology post-arab spring, and you'll…

Fetishizing a good idea in a bad way degrades that idea. That's my whole point. When we fetishize the abstract concept of rationality in irrational ways that doesn't lead us to rationality. It leads us to to the situation Sagan discussed in the chunk of Demon Haunted World that I paraphrased: a situation where the…

You jumped on my comment because you don't get the difference between aspiring to rationality and free thought and dogmatically fetishizing the concepts of rationality and free thought. If anyone is making a specious argument, it's you, since you keep setting up nonsensical binaries that aren't actually in what I'm…

To an extent, they do own rationality as it's discussed in the public where for a variety of reasons, not the least amongst them that they're the foremost public intellectuals, in terms of profile, promoting rationalism. They also loom large in areas like the Skeptic movement.

But do they arrive at the right answers? Take Cosmos: It's been criticized by historians and scientists for how badly it botches a lot of history. Its treatment of Bruno, in particular, is ludicrously simplified and quite inaccurate. When you begin from a false premise, how can you arrive at the correct conclusion?…

There's a resolution patcher included with Wesp's patch and the Clan Quest mod, which bundles an older version of Wesp's patch.

The problem with Tess's patch is that it actually ultimately introduced a lot of new bugs. Wesp's is the better of the two, although lately I find myself using the older version bundled with the Clan Quest mod because his inability to stop iterating on the patch has led to maddening little meaningless tweaks that…