Paramount/CBS absolutely, 100% do not care that you donated to the Kickstarter. If anything, that’s only going to justify their likely position that Axanar is too high profile to get the usual blind eye extended to fan works.

Where on earth did this “if it’s not for profit, it’s fair use” idea come from, anyway? I’ve seen a lot more people parroting that line in the past couple of years than I ever saw in the past (and I’ve been following fanfic/fan film/fan whatever communities since the mid-1990s), and I’m just a bit floored by it. I’ve…

That’s true for trademarks. It’s not true for copyrights. Copyright holders are free to enforce their rights entirely at their discretion: they are free to turn a blind eye if they so choose, but, of course, that’s not something the creator of a fan work should ever take for granted. If you don’t have an actual…

Crimson Peak is actually my pick for happiest surprise of the year. I loved almost everything about that movie, from the script to the acting to the absolutely luscious direction: it restored my faith in Del Toro after being mostly disappointed by Pacific Rim. It was, however, mishandled terribly by marketing, which…

I really loved most of the Convergence tie-in miniseries. But the flagship title... hoo boy. What a hot mess that was.

I didn’t like Jurassic World, but I can’t really fault the direction. It wasn’t anything particularly special (though the action sequences were decent), but it was, at worst, competent, and had moments of real skill. The movie was let down by its script, and I hold out hope that if someone can hand Trevorrow a decent…

On that note, I don’t actually care much for Star Wars. I have sort of enjoyed maybe two of the movies, including The Force Awakens, and I don’t think any of them would make my top 100 movie list. I probably wouldn’t be hugely upset if the franchise “completely disappeared.” But, geez, no one deserves the kind of…

I honestly don’t think this is entirely fair to George Lucas. Lucas is arguably the first major Hollywood producer to not only acknowledge, but embrace the fact that his work had a sizable fan base. He encouraged and facilitated the rise of Star Wars fandom for years. Heck, when Lucasfilm was still under his control…

The politics hurt Tomorrowland, to be sure. But what killed it, at least for me, was that it ran completely out of steam when it still had about 30 minutes to fill. There’s really no way for me to get over the fact that the ending consists of three people talking past each other and a building more or less arbitrarily…

Well, I guess if you’re getting Pizza Hut delivery....

You still see a handful of automat or automat-esque eateries in some places. There’s one at Tyson’s Corner mall in Northern Virginia, for instance. Though, really, only the basic premise is the same as “classic” automats: the aesthetics are quite different.

I was wondering if Shadowrun: Dragonfall was being excluded because it’s actually a “standalone expansion” (i.e., not actually an expansion at all). If not, it absolutely deserves a mention.

In addition, the next scene in which we see Maz is in the cellar, when she’s poking around Luke’s old lightsaber. Maz pretty clearly knows that there’s something special about Rey by that point: I find it a little silly to think that she’d just thrust the thing off on the first person to show a tiny bit of shell shock…

I’m also intrigued by the fact that the comics are being co-written by Andrew Cartmel. Cartmel, of course, was script-editor of Doctor Who during the time Aaronovitch was writing for the show (the modern role of showrunner was effectively split between producer and script editor in the classic era, with the latter…

In terms of game quality, perhaps. But neither company was “doing fine,” business wise. Square was flirting with bankruptcy after the disastrous Square Pictures/Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within fiasco. Enix’s situation wasn’t as immediately precarious (and, technically and legally, the merger was Enix absorbing…

In addition to the loading times, there are some weird trade-offs made for the translation. It’s the same localization as the SNES release... except that it limits the length of monster names in the battle screen to one fewer characters than the the US SNES release. That’s in keeping with the Japanese original, but it…

It’s also important to note that it was Andrew Cartmel (the classic series’s last script editor) who had the idea that Ace would become a Time Lord, and, by his own admission, it was a fairly preliminary idea. Had he actually gone through the full process of developing season 27, it’s entirely possibly he would have…

Smeagol was, IIRC, from a race very closely related to the hobbits, but not actually hobbits themselves. But the implication is that Gollum is Smeagol’s personality, corrupted by the One Ring. After he loses the ring to Bilbo, Smeagol’s original, more innocent personality slowly begins to reassert itself. The Smeagol…

The weird thing is, what was the actual point? There’s very little about the overall narrative arc of Spectre that actually benefits from the backstory, and the movie basically rushes through any scenes where they even bother indicating any emotional connection between Bond and Waltz’s character. The movie would work…

There are some terminal entries talking about how Maxson signed a treaty with the Outcasts shortly after becoming Elder. So, formally speaking, the FO4 Brotherhood of Steel is the reunited Lyons’ Brotherhood and Brotherhood Outcasts.