Look up time dilation. Time doesn’t just “stop” at the speed of light: it slows down regularly as you accelerate towards the speed of light. Technically, time is passing more slowly for me, sitting on a train as I head home for the night, than it is for you at your home. At those kind of speeds, the difference is…

Nah. It’s easy to get an astronaut to the furthest reaches of intergalactic space in the time it takes him or her to eat a light lunch. You don’t need cryogenics, you just need to understand general relativity. Oh, and have an unimaginably vast source of energy to hand to reach relativistic speeds, of course.

You didn’t actually have to hold reset while powering off. It was just that the NES didn’t actually power down in the sense that a more modern system did: it just cut the power. If, by chance, the system was writing to the battery-backed RAM when you did that, it could corrupt the save. Later consoles (SNES onwards)…

The PSP releases are the best looking and best sounding, to be sure. But they have the same problem as the Dawn of Souls releases: the “fixes” to the mechanics that were optional in the PSX releases are mandatory in the later (post-PSX) remakes. I know that a lot of people (inexplicably, IMO) prefer the…

To be fair, Final Fantasy III (the original Famicom version, at least: the less said about the 3D remake, the better) uses pretty much exactly the same magic system, and it doesn’t have save points, either (which weren’t introduced until the SNES games). It has one cheat, though, where it adds a brief exterior section…

Yep. And the ur-example is problem sports team rivalries, which are older than dirt. The Nika riots that almost toppled Byzantine Emperor Justinian grew out chariot team riots. The biggest difference from today is that the Internet tends to amplify everything.

My problem is that the “icon” argument seems to me to basically lead to the problem we used to always hear about Superman, before Man of Steel: he’s boring. People are bored of “traditional” or iconic Superman stories, but they scream bloody murder if you try to break with any of that tradition and taking the…

It’s worth pointing out that Sony didn’t give up their rights to Spider-Man when they made a deal with Disney. They still get to the money for solo Spidey films, Disney just gets to use the character in other MCU films, and Kevin Feige et al. are helping establish the creative direction. That’s not a terrible deal for…

Mega Man could’ve been worse. They could have based him on the first game’s American box art....

Baltimore is not cheap living, actually. You could probably manage with $53k/year, but it would be a fairly thin margin, especially if you’re renting instead of owning your home. And the suburbs, if anything, are worse, because suburban Maryland is actually quite wealthy, with a fairly high cost of living (116 where…

Well, “Hal” for one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_This…

I’m not sure I agree with the way you’re presenting contextualization in the first place. Proper context is a great deal more than sitting someone down and telling them “this thing you’re about to watch is inappropriate or bad.” The examples I cited above (with the exception of Lovecraft) were all taught to me in…

You may not be passing value judgement on Kipling for its own sake, but the author of the article very clearly is.

I did my graduate study, in part, on early cinema, and one of the biggest issues was breaking the older behaviors of the audience. Early movie audiences were loud and raucous. As the movies became more acceptable as art and culture (particularly with the rise of feature films in the late 1910s and early 1920), theater…

When I was in college, I once went browsing through the shelves of the library. The best thing I found was an old travelogue of Japan, printed in 1911, with its cover and indicia emblazoned with swastikas. It was obviously chosen simply because the publisher though it looked pretty, but I’d be hard pressed to think of…

We judge history and historical figures all the time, though. In large part, we define what’s acceptable to our modern society by contrasting what was and was not acceptable in the past. The Nazis, for instance, were a large part of what killed anti-Semitism in Europe, and played a major contributory role in the end…

How exactly do we contextualize a two hour movie?

Kipling, like most authors, is a human being. He was capable of amazing insight, rhetoric, and poetry... as well as terrible prejudice, close-mindedness, and obnoxiousness. He’s absolutely still worth reading and remembering, just like Mark Twain, H.P. Lovecraft, or countless other historical writers, but…

This is absolutely not possible in a lot of markets. First-run theaters in my area have matinee prices at $9.50. The only second run theater within 50 miles of me has prices which bottom out at $7.

I agree. I’m actually feeling much more positive about DC than I have in the past. But I do understand the skepticism: for a lot of people, it’s a “once bitten, twice shy” kind of situation. People were excited for a lot of previous events, relaunches, and changes in direction, and many feel let down by them. But I…