Honestly beating the Fermi paradox would leave too hopeful. Sure a type 2 or 3 predatory civilization would eat us but I’d be happy going out knowing were not alone

this future is immeasurably better than the “white nuclear family eats turkey dinner pills around the telesensor after a long day at the button factory” future the boomers were promised

I’m honestly afraid to re-read it as an adult. One of the bloggers I follow re-read it as an adult, and said that Ender is a lot less of a sympathetic character... he says racist things to push boundaries, he hurts people to make points, he generally takes being smart as an excuse for being unpleasant to people.

Geralt is a massive, far cry from “generic”. In fact, any character that you can create yourself is generic, limited to a flat baseline personality that anyone can squeeze their own interpretations into. Geralt, on the other hand, is an established character with two short story collections and five novels worth of…

If by “unprecedented political transformation”, you mean:

That’s fair. But even when I hear the smartest people on the planet discuss it, I still can’t shake the feeling I’m watching Plato and Aristotle discuss nuclear fusion.

You know the practice of greenwashing? Big Corporate remarketing their products as eco-friendly, yet they’re just as wasteful and destructive as they were before? What every second article by Dvorsky does is sanewashing, remarketing techno-wish fulfillment as not only possible, but imminent. So you got Buzzfeed…

Just look up on a clear night and you’ll see the sun shining on a far away planet.

Great article. You can make my smartphone as fast and powerful as you want with all the bells and whistles and great cameras and side bars and styluses and what not. But if I can't get reception anywhere and my battery keeps dying, what's the point?

Ahem:

Depends on how you define civilization. A lot of groups have managed without fossil fuels. If you’re thinking consumerism and airplanes, that’s a different matter. If you want to tell the Romans they were uncivilized for only using coal in Britain, go right ahead. I’ll hold the time machine door open for you.

Embrace the uncertainty, folks!

I'll take "Walking Dead" one step further and say "stuff with zombies in it." We've reached this point where most zombie shows/movies/books/games kind of feel like they're telling the same story, and my guess is that 10-20 years from now, 95% of the zombie media out there will be forgotten.

Recently revisited The Patriot, and I will elaborate on your comment by pointing out an awkward theme in films about that era. Slavery is acknowledged and depicted, but the protagonists are usually the 'good' slaveowners who say please and thank you.

Honestly... I think it's damn near impossible to find a "perfect book," and how you weigh a book's flaws vs the value of the message it imparts or the experience you have reading it is wholly subjective. To some people, dense, overwrought prose in a highly cerebral idea-stuffed package isn't their idea of a good time,…

Holy Fallout Batman,that was creepy as fuck. But in reality those kids didn't look scarier than kids did on Halloween back in the 1930s,,,

There is no way to overestimate the huge impact the medieval Muslim world had on the development of modern science and technology. Algebra, the introduction of the zero and decimal notation, optics, astronomy, logarithms, medicine and anatomy, engineering, natural histories, ship building, the highly accurate…

With out a doubt. This game kept my family sane for years. Sure it would sometimes bring us to each others throats, but it kept us level headed and from blowing real problems out of proportion. We still try to keep the tradition, but now that we are all of age it usually involves shots of some sort.

The Lottery. Short, simple and brilliant. Shirley Jackson tells this amazing story in under 4,000 words - which is such an impossible achievement. In the shortest space she created a world and filled in what needed to be filled and left the rest for the reader to infer. In my mind every short story is graded against…