Celery bitters can be pretty powerful too. They're best when balanced with other, sweeter bitters (4th Regiment uses orange and Peychaud's bitters as well as celery), or with stronger flavored bases like a very botanical gin or some ginger-based mixer.

One-Note Pony covered the Japanese side pretty well. Chinese does import loan words, but they tend to be semantically based more than phonetically based (i.e. Chinese for internet is "wangluo" or literally "net connection"). But there are still several phonetic loan words, like card-"ka," poker-"pu ke," bus- "ba shi,"…

Most of the Japanese names are just puns or transliterations of foreign words, which is common in Japanese. Chinese usually prefers a descriptive rather than transliterative approach to translation. They sound perfectly fine, even good in Chinese, but end up really wacky when translated literally back into English.

The Wolf of Wall Street: A Personal Attempt to Kill Dikachu with Martin Scorsese

Baumbach has actually been kicking around While We're Young for a few years—at least since right after Greenberg, possibly even before. Not that some of his current life hasn't slipped in, but the impetus at least goes further back (probably to the same ruminations on age/success/relevancy seen in Greenberg).

Although I did laugh at it making the creepy pervy implications of Byron's cult explicit. Because duh.

Well Zach was in there, and Sheridan did send him an invite. He just managed to figure out how to avoid Sheridan's elite squad of the pushiest rangers in the universe.

I think wintermute/yuri were comparing the back half of Season 5 (at least the Centauri arc and these next few episodes) to the Scouring, not Sleeping in Light. Sleeping in Light only fits in with the Grey Havens, and laying aside the parallels with legends quietly fading away to the permanence beyond, JMS mostly…

Babylon 5 shares an interest in religion and the mystic with DS9 and BSG and that's reflected in its finale. However, it's an integral part of the series throughout and handled much better than in the other two series, which both have trouble reconciling their sci-fi elements with the religious ones. B5 is essentially…

Based on your description of what you liked about the TNG ending, I think you'll be well satisfied by Babylon 5's.

Servant of Darkness want pants too!

Do you like the TNG finale? It's a tad cute, but I feel like it's a minor miracle in how efficiently it ties back to its origin, especially considering the episodic, unplanned nature of the show.

The concept behind the Centauri is fine and their ships look cool and their culture isn't all about triangles. (Although the Narns do have a little depth in that they do apparently have a number of different religious philosophies, even if we sadly never get to hear about any besides G'Quan.)

Of all things that could be improved by a Babylon 5 reboot, I think the Centauri could benefit the most by far. The Narns are great, and the Minbari, Vorlon, and lesser races have solid base designs that could be spruced up a bit with a little extra budget. But the Centauri need a whole new less inherently ridiculous…

I hate how Delenn's subplot in this episodes is a really lame plug for Crusade. "We need to build more ships, maybe ones that combine Human, Minbari, and Vorlon technology. And you need to go arrange this right now in the middle of a war!"

I think the problem with most finales is that they're trying to be both a climax to several plot threads and a reunion/farewell to all the characters. Babylon 5 splits those up, to the benefit of the finale but the detriment of most of Season 5.

The LOTR books have a very long ending, but there's still just one ending. Gollum's fall at Mt. Doom is the closest the books have to a big climax, but even then it doesn't feel like an ending. On the other hand, every scene in the last part of Return of the King is filmed like a climax, so I think the "too many…

XII's problem is the disconnect between female character designs and their actual characters. Ashe is great, but she runs around in a hot pink micro skirt and a shirt that must be suspended by the magic of nethicite. VI perhaps only avoids this problem because of the graphical limitations of the time (though there's…

I'd mostly agree with that list, except what the hell is IV doing down there?

Hmm… I'd say from most to least problematic (haven't played II or XIII):