There has to be a famous William Blake other than the poet/engraver, but I can't bring anyone to mind. I say this because poet William Blake only married once and his wife outlived him.

Bah. Always with the wasted potential, these YA fantasy series. God forbid there be any ambiguity by the end of a 7-book series.

Ha, yeah, that's one case where he had better be extremely careful about the next thing he says on that subject. He must have realized that he was playing with fire on a different level with that comment.

Depending on how it's handled, I actually do. The example I'm going to use is a different sort of case entirely and definitely worse; I'm using it because I believe it's in the same family of offense, morally speaking. With that said: imagine a movie based on the idea that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion had an…

Having not finished the last two books, I don't know if this came up in them, but: I was always sort of disappointed that there wasn't a magnificent bastard of a Slytherin student secretly wrecking evil up with nothing but raw talent and ruthlessness. If Gryffindor students were capable of making things like the…

Well, there was that guy he punched as far as physical abuse, but I'd be hypocritical to count that against him (personally, I'm kind of surprised that we don't hear about paparazzi getting punched more frequently. I've got to think that some celebrity living time-bomb is just going to straight-out snap one day). …

Yeah, I recognize how vaguely I've defined everything I'm talking about. "Drinking culture" is an odd idea, but it seems to exist; note the difference between what we've been discussing and, for example, the stereotypical Mediterranean approach, where you just drink tiny amounts all day long with your meals and don't…

Maybe it's more of a cultural stance, if that makes sense. Kind of a "swim against the tide" sort of idea. I'm a social drinker, but I wouldn't even want to keep up with the pace of pub culture. I need that money for rent and that physical health for not dying in my 60s!

I've noticed something which may be a trend or may just be a case of making connections where none exist, so I'd welcome anyone with some insight into this.

That said: if there had to be a Sandman movie, but it was allowed to be good, I'd want the Endless to be played by many people each, all deployed strategically for both plot logic and affinity for the specific acting needed in a given scene. Their appearance was always mutable and contextual to observers.

Well, such things never have immediate or entirely predictable effects. More to the point, I actually do agree that more restrictive gun laws wouldn't do much on their own. Cultures are influenced by many mutually-reinforcing or -detracting factors. Basically, easy access to guns isn't the only reason (or even the…

You know, in the aftermath of Anders Breivik's massacre in Norway, I was struck by the detail that he first tried to purchase arms illegally in Prague and wasn't able to do it. He travelled there expressly for that purpose, but nobody would sell to him.

I highly doubt that it's number one, but I can see where he's coming from on that. Meat production is one of the few industries in which practically every populated country in the world is likely to participate in some way (growing feed, raising animals, processing and shipping the product). The sheer scale is…

Yeah. I'm no expert on pitched percussion, but a) metal bars tend to mean that it's a glockenspiel or a set of bells and b) the mechanism to the right that the musician manipulates during the breakdown suggests that it's closer in nature to a vibraphone anyway.

I think Amnesiac has the highest concentration of my favourite Radiohead songs. I don't see it as a lesser companion to Kid A at all. If those are B-sides, what the hell are the A-sides?

It's interesting how much tension there can be between "supposed to be" and "technically capable of being". Like, there's a certain way that most of us think of movies, a sort of ideal middle-ground (Die Hard, maybe? Something well-executed and thrilling) from which we expect deviations to both occur and to remain…

I think that the timing just never quite lined up. Back when interest was at its peak, the infrastructure (read: networks that show adult animation and people that watch it) just wasn't really there. Now it'd be doable, but Shadowrun has sort of retreated into something that only roleplayers really know about.

Song titles:
"You drive a Jetta"

Is your stage name going to be Suburban Seth Putnam?

Jesus. OK, so speaking as someone who has enough in common with you that I felt weird reading your post: