In high school I never game much thought to Bill Simmons. My friends and I just assumed he was some kid we didn't know. After I graduated from college, I continued not to think much about him because, after all, I had never heard of the dude. But that all changed today, when I read a portion of an essay which was…

Damn. When you start throwing grenades, we know you MEAN it.

The most charitable thing I can say about the first Percy Jackson movie is "Oh, yeah, I think I saw that movie once."

It's happy 'cause it's eating brains.

Blowing kisses to the hot chicks in section 304.

"made of Fat and Wet Wipes." Somewhere in that phrase lies a really outstanding punchline, but it hasn't come to me yet.

Excellent point.

I think you're right in a lot of ways, though the distinction between bad worlds and bad writing isn't a very sharp line. A good writer will generally know to tell you only what you need to know and leave the rest on the editing pile. There are exceptions to this, of course: Stephen King is a wizard at world building…

Less is more. Episode IV works better because it simply throws us into the situation. It tells us what IS rather than WHY it is. I like the original Star Trek better than the newer TNG-type shows for exactly this reason. We don't need to know WHY a starship works, or hear a lot of techno-babble about warp cores and…

The Sun hates it when you photograph its bald spot.

The more I hear about this wedding, the happier I am that I was not invited.

A friend of mine described watching Liquid Sky as "like having your brain smashed out with the word Fuck." It's been nearly 30 years since I saw it, but I remember how numb we all were after seeing that thing in a midnight showing. It is the most studiously transgressive movie I have ever seen, I think.

Or alternatively, the other civilizations looked at this idea and said "why the hell should we bother?" It does seem like an astonishingly difficult, time consuming, and at least initially expensive idea for relatively little in the way of reward, certainly on a scale counted in anything less than centuries, perhaps…

So in other words, reality is exactly like a wide open video game in which you have the ability to save as many times as you want (say, Skyrim or Oblivion, though there are others). The state in which the game exists at any given moment relies on the main character performing nearly perfectly and surviving an…

Battlestar Galactica. Rewatched it with my kids after they reacted so well to watching the original Star Trek (which held up very well compare with my childhood memories). Turns out the original BG was very, very silly, particularly in the unspeakable "Eastern Alliance" episodes late in the series. Also, the physics…

I may be in the minority, but I was not fond of Matt Smith as the Doctor, at least after his first episode, which I enjoyed. I found him too frantic and twiddly, like the second doctor. But he suffered the additional disadvantage of being too young to take entirely seriously. I am not sure, however, whether I was…

It would in fact be a horrible idea were it not absolutely essential to maintain your life function. Same goes for, say, recreational kidney transplants.

Noble effort

Oh, that's good. 'Cept my old Pa was an American, not some foreigner.

This. While the effect sounds sort of cool, overall, inserting foreign objects, particularly those that could interact at a distance with the real world, seems like an INSANELY BAD IDEA.