I am still amazed at how good that movie was, for some random thing I found on Netflix Instantview. It was like Ghost Hunters meets House of Leaves.

I think I enjoyed Matter and Surface Detail more than The Hydrogen Sonata.... perhaps I had high hopes for a more in depth exploration of the Sublime and the foundation of the Culture, rather than looking at how a civilization would deal with having an expiration date (which is not to say it was a bad book by any…

I think there are a lot of famous genre authors that you could say that about... JRR Tolkein's writing springs to mind as being really disjointed and putting its emphasis more on random bits of scenery than characters and plot. I do think that sometimes the worlds or creatures that these authors make become far…

That's true, I just think that the Bible tends to portray it all so negatively, but at the same time, I think in real life you had people worshiping other Canaanite deities in older, more traditional ways, while the cult of YHWH promoted by the King kept trying to remove and destroy their worship places and overwrite…

The conquest of Jerusalem by the Babylonians (around 600 BC) is also mentioned by the Babylonians... I think there is a particularly nice stone panel that depicts it being conquered with siege towers and large numbers of troops, and the carting away of captives and treasures. Its one of the key instances where…

I have those too... the worst part is that it feels like my whole awareness is centered around my teeth as they are broken and ruined, in a way that I just can't prevent. I wonder, personally, if it isn't at least in part from my parents and dentists trying to teach me dental hygiene with the threat that these are…

I also think that the problem with Outbreak was that the whole "we get the original animal vector, we cure the disease" idea is also bunk. Sure, its helpful sometimes in knowing what animals to avoid in the forest, but its far more helpful to have humans that have survived, or some other really large animal that you…

The only way I could think of to dodge a laser would be to be aware of when a laser gun is pointed at you, and jump before someone can pull the trigger.

My alternative ending thought was that Bagul wasn't interested in the kids at all in this instance, that he was interested in the writer producing a book about him (or a website) and making it as accurate as possible, so that when it was released, he would reach a huge number of people, In the Mouth Of Madness style.

I'm once again reminded of the kids who would play D&D and have their characters worship Jesus. Dudes, when you try and shove Jesus into everything, you just look like you're desperate to stay 'cool' and 'hip', or that you can't enjoy anything without trying to shove Jesus deep into it.

While I'm sure the British government could have been more generous with the acclaim, I generally think they've been pretty good about praising the Poles that contributed not just to the Enigma project, but to the Polish pilots that fought in the Battle of Britain, and so on. Though certainly, Poland, put these guys…

And while that's a possibility, there are plenty of instances where its just plain made up. King Arthur, for instance, really just seems to have been written up whole cloth back in the 1200s. Fiction writers are entirely capable of inventing huge worlds without necessarily having historical inspiration. But,…

Exactly, their population growth was unsustainable, both for China and for the whole world. I personally think the whole *world* needs negative population growth for a while.... so many of our problems with the environment would be solved by having fewer people chipping away at the edges of the wild areas in the…

Even some ant-gay organizations that conduct conversion therapy in CA have realized it doesn't work and abandoned it. And that's on top of all the scientific work that shows it doesn't. When you go up against that, you deserve to be called a fool.

I meant it more as: I can understand why they'd want to do something episodic, because then they don't have to be shackled to something when it doesn't work out as well as it should. That doesn't mean I *like* it, but I can understand why, if you're not sure what you want to do with a show, why you'd go for an…

Yeah, and I have mixed feelings about DS9, though, admittedly I only watched it as a teenager. There were parts of it that I really liked (the Dominion, Gareth, Odo, Sisko, and Gareth), but boy howdy I got tired of the Bajorans and their many issues after a while. That's why the adventuring lifestyle of a starship…

Sure, I remember some hand waving like that happening. But, again, it sucks away the drama from that sort of situation. If the writers really wanted to go in that direction, they could have made a whole bunch of very interesting stories about it, but they just wrote it off instead. Its an optimistic assumption that…

I'm reminded of the episode of TNG when they found out that Warp travel was slowly eroding the universe.... it was a bleak episode, the very mechanism that makes all the action in the Trek universe possible was slowly killing it. If anything, that resonates even more now with climate change. But they just passed it…

The look on her face in that artwork is pretty awesome. If you come at the witch, you'd best not miss.

If I recall the original Red Dawn correctly, it seemed like it was not exactly the current day... Europe, Mexico, and South America went communist, so a lot of the troops were coming from land invasions, either from Mexico or across the Bering Strait and through Alaska. And presumably they had the navies of all the…