WoW has apparently gotten better about making their high end content more accessible since I left back at the end of the Burning Crusade, but god... there are just better ways to have fun in gaming than MMOs, or really any RPG that forces you to grind for hours to advance like some Final Fantasy or JRPG games.

For me it wasn’t a matter of video games, in general, but rather the video game grind that I needed to reject. Those years I played World of Warcraft, I had a lot of fun, but I also spent way to much time to support that fun, and had to sort my schedule around it in a way that just wasn’t healthy.

It doesn’t help that many of the greats have issues with women, minorities and LGBT people. Clarke is probably the most readable of his era today, but I remember Richter 10 was basically one long bit of Islamophobia. And the Rama series gets rather dirty after a while.

Really? Given how up and arms South Carolina and the whole rest of the South has been over taking down their Confederate battle flags, I say, bring on more slavery movies. Let them see what sort of horror that shit represents.

John Scalzi was posting a while back on how his daughter was a sci-fi fantasy fan, but completely ignored the kind of classic sci-fi that he and I both grew up on... your Clarke, Asimov, and what not.

Absolutely yes. As a kid, my ability to get Sci-fi was basically two or three shelves at Walton’s books, and 30 or 40 books at the local library. There are so many great authors like Banks and Lem that were writing throughout my whole life that I would never hear about or find a copy of in rural North Carolina.

I know my girlfriend was already disappointed that they went from a dual gender set of kids like they had in Jurassic Park to two boys, so the whole ‘woman wears high heals stupid’ thing was just frosting on the cake at that point.

Two doctors you say? Animal Human hybrids, eh? Sounds very familiar.

Yeah, X-files is very much in a Watergate/Deep Throat sort of setting, where your shadowy operatives are physically breaking into places and keeping records in filing cabinets. And that made a lot of sense back in the 90s, when people still read newspapers in the morning, and aliens were sticking things into people…

Exactly what I was about to say. Person of Interest does everything the author mentioned so much that the comparison would be difficult to avoid, and the whole nature of all permeating surveillance and AI oversight is clearly enough to hang a whole show on.

He was also on the Boondocks

And in China too!

Oh well that’s good then. Other reviews weren’t really that specific.

But by that logic, Mulder being a Holocaust denier would make sense too. So clearly they are making some choices for the sake of good taste.

I would say that Fringe certainly ended better than Lost did.

So, I heard Mulder turned out to be a 9/11 Truther right?
Ugh. Maybe it was just easier for me to handle all that conspiracy stuff in the 90s because those weren’t the people running the country.

Wow. I suppose it’s not that big of a leap if you’re speaking in tongues and passing out in your worship place. But still.

Exactly. Make a VOD movie that’s all animated, put it for sale on Blizzard’s game buying service, and make buying it give you some sort of WoW pet or item. They’d probably make just as much money as it will in theaters.

There's plenty of magic in Star Trek too... Telepathy, Telekinesis, etc. But the main difference is how it's treated as a natural rather than mysterious phenomenon. Though it is funny that no one in Star Trek ever seems interested in providing Vulcan powes to Humans, or blocking them. Maybe everyone is just super…

Oh yeah, but you’ve got decades of Buck Rodgers and Flash Gordon in there too. Star Trek seems formative, but I sometimes wonder how much of that is because it was just widely loved and accessible for so much longer than other sci-fi shows that we just don’t see.