The moral of this story: The Lone Ranger is more regressive, and does a poorer job representing native Americans than The Pumaman. Yes, let's turn back to this stinker of a movie made famous by MST3K, because everything relates to MST3K, eventually.

I think that the important point is that trying to pretend that all of the aboriginal Americans were the same is more racist that calling the "Indians" or "Native Americans". North America was a vivid landscape of differing cultures, each unique and distinct, usually separated by vast geography and vaster cultural…

Nitrogen would simply be a way to asphyxiate someone, and we have lots of ways to detect asphyxiation. You wouldn't catch it on a tox-screen, but a decent ME would go, "Um… why did this perfectly healthy person suffocate in the middle of the day?"

I've only been to exceedingly small local cons, or to exceedingly large professional conventions.

Okay, now, I'm in the middle of welcoming the 4-day weekend with a comically large martini, but… this is the most awesome looking thing ever. They overflowed fail into awesome.

Echos? It's the same damn song. It's been rearranged, but it's still the same basic piece.

You can still join the Blue Blaze Irregulars. We won't mind if you're an alien.

Minor thing- three Federal agents walk away, only two- the real two, return. Newbie, who had so many great moments this episode, wasn't part of the real squad.

I'm not arguing any of that, including the "4 quadrant" bit. It just seems that there's this small subset of people that believe the film was absolutely amazing and is the bestest besty best ever, and if you say even the slightest thing critical about it, you're a philistine who murdered a puppy while not paying…

Yes, an eight minute long fight sequence was totally necessary to the plot, and not inserted because it was juuuust about time for the action sequence.

I think that says just about everything we need to know

Pretty much everything that ever happened on the Helicarrier. The entire action set-piece in the middle of the film- tedious and pointless. If you didn't think Iron Man turning on a fan was boring, remind me to have you over for a nice session of watching paint dry. And the action sequences- less "wasted scenes" and…

Avengers was okay. It wasn't anything spectacular. It remains way more hyped than it actually merits, and I think it's the intersection of Whedon fans and comic-book fans which does it. The movie was chock-full of wasted scenes with no real purpose. The action sequences dragged on well past the part where they were…

Pedantically, a fedora is any hat with a diamond shaped body. That includes the broad-brimmed fedora which people with taste wear, the narrow brimmed trilby, and the tyrolean hat, which you might wear to Oktoberfest.

If a trilby is a fedora, then so is a tyrolean cap. So I say we just throw leiderhosen at them and hope for the best.

No, the Earth is not caught in a flow of particles which holds it in place. Even if we assume gravitons, it's not gravitons which keep the Earth in place- gravitons create the field effect of gravity which keeps the Earth in place.

And while the spinning turbines might be cool, there wasn't any spinning on the SR-71. The spike would retract as the aircraft went faster.

Or at least, we could make room for a hyperspace bypass.

Stars aren't "staying where they are". They're moving in a chaotic system. The n-body problem, on galactic scales, is essentially chaos that forms certain patterns. One mobile star isn't going to impact that in any meaningful way. The worst thing we could do is get within a light-year or two of another star as we…

My design for a true interstellar spaceship would be a collection of satellites orbiting the primary star, and using magnetic fields to vector the solar winds. Your total acceleration would be really small, but you don't have to be in any particular rush, either. You've got a starship rated for tens of billions of…