Yeah... this is kinda weird. I hope they're going somewhere good with all the tonally weird stuff, but I'm getting kind of pessimistic.

Oh, bravo. This is the kind of careful intellectual analysis I look to io9 for.

Great reading about this topic: the 1997 Stephenson piece for Wired, "Mother Earth, Mother Board", and the book "Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet"

I love "Streets of Fire", although I can't resist the urge to call it "Streets of Violence".

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO *pant* OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Seriously, man. They'll mess you up.

What's that? AN ANGRY MAN AVENGING THE DEATH OF HIS DAUGHTER?

Not so much too powerful in and of itself - instead, I think it goes back to how everything has to be THE MOST INCREDIBLE DANGER EVAR. So the stakes are always highest. Threatening a city isn't enough - you have to threaten the planet. Threatening the planet isn't enough - you have to threaten THE VERY FABRIC OF…

MY GOODNESS THIS IS A LONG FIFTEEN MINUTES. GIT ALONG, CENTIPEDE. YOU CAN LEAVE NOW.

TAKE ONLY PICTURES. LEAVE ONLY FOOTPRINTS. AND CORPSES.

the "me" network is really making their mark picking up series that I assume are pretty cheap to get rights for, and playing the hell out of them. I know folks who are rewatching things like "Emergency" and "The Rifleman" on it now.

It ends with killer birds. Well, there's some stuff after that, too.

It's an Italian movie, but it's all in English. Takes place in the US, even. (Sort of like the Italian Westerns that were being made around the same time.)

"The Visitor" played at this year's Boston SF Film Festival Marathon. Clearly part of the "cash in on The Omen/Exorcist" run of movies. Fucked up and weird and seriously strange.

Rise of the Machines was a bad movie - and a positively criminal waste of Clare Danes. But it was actually a terminator movie. My understanding is that Salvation was rewritten to be shoehorned into the terminator franchise.

I thought it was a good adaptation - getting the backstory in of disappearing geniuses and stuff that led to the death squid would've been much too difficult.

Nerds pedantically debating trivia? That is totally what happens at some fun parties I go to.

On the one hand, Sagan never said "billions and billions" on Cosmos. On the other hand, it's become such a cultural touchstone quote. Like "Play it again, Sam", something doesn't have to be correct to be quotable...

I've recently watched both "Black Sunday" and "Silent Running", and I have to say, even at his most epic-meltdown-crazy, Nic Cage cannot hold a candle to classic Crazy Bruce Dern for on-screen whackadoodle.

Also useful for blowing up the Superbowl.