If the aliens are the analogues of the prospecters and trappers, it makes you wonder what a sequel would be like, where their analogue of the US Cavalry shows up to put down the heathen savages who've been massacreing their people...

He took Nat in and raised him, but was still stuck in the period "Indians aren't really people" mindset; it took Nat getting fatally wounded saving him for him to see that Nat had been everything his son wasn't, but he'd been too caught up in prejudices to see it. One more of the kicks upside the head that explains…

The only movie adaptation I've seen that did a good job was a TV-movie version of The Lathe of Heaven.

There is the Masquerade each year; a list of winners is here, but IO9's gallery of the winners is part of their Comic-Con coverage.

Dolph Vader, of course.

I'm reminded of the joke about the union brothel.

What has happened with some unions is that they've become the same executives that unions were created to protect workers against. When a union's management starts being more concerned with preserving and increasing their power than with using that power for the union members, then the union has become a corporation…

They moved up to Los Angeles, on Hollywood Blvd west of the 101; their website is here.

There's also the Fantasy Showcase Tarot, produced by Bruce Pelz back in 1980, where he solicited a different artist for each card. It's an interesting cross-section of the fantasy artists of the period.

Or, if you don't mind it being a dead-tree reference, I highly recommend The Ashley Book of Knots, which presents more than 3,900 knots and how to tie them

Actually, that practice is just extending historical practices to distilled alcoholic beverages. Brandy exists because merchants would distill wine for shipment — the distilled wine lasted longer, it took up less space (and taxes were paid by volume), and it could be 'reconstituted' with water at the other end of the…

I would imagine that 'Stormtrooper' as a term, its usage going back to WWI (the German 'Stoßtruppen' or 'Sturmtruppen'), would be considered to be generic, so as long as no overt reference to the Star Wars properties (the movies, books, et al.) were made, just calling it a 'stormtrooper helmet' is not in itself…

Well, no; the book is utilitarian, but not the content; if he produced a bound volume that had "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" and "J.K. Rowling" on the spine, but contained only blank pages, that would be a reproduction of a utilitarian object, which the buyer can freely copy the text from the story into,…

Fuel consumption. It takes a significant fraction of a loaded aircraft's fuel load to make a vertical takeoff; it's much more efficient to launch them conventionally, while retaining the capacity to make vertical takeoffs when conditions warrant. This is one reason why many thrust-vectoring aircraft are designated…

Except that 'née' with that accent mark was stolen from French, where it means 'born', and is used to indicate a person's birth or maiden name, as in "Barbara Phillips, née Michaels". The accent mark generally accepted as indicating an emphasized/extended vowel in a transliteration from Japanese is a macron, as in…

NCSoft's superhero MMO 'City of Heroes' has, perhaps inadvertently, added something new to cutscenes — cutscenebombing. All of the cutscenes in the game are rendered with the game engine, so everything looks just like it would in-game — and most actually occur on the mission map (in fact, one of the things the…

You can find the DVD on Amazon.com.

IF you read the linked article, it does mention it — "The artist’s work previously inspired an animated version of the story in 1983, directed by Ralph Bakshi (The Lord of the Rings, the 1960s Spider-Man TV cartoon). That Fire and Ice is beloved among fantasy aficionados and grown-up kids of the 1980s, but has largely…

Some people never pick up the habits and tricks that make it easier to do arithmetic. For example, when you're buying a bunch of things that generically have $x.99 or $x.95 prices, adding up the total is much easier if you round up everything to the nearest dollar, and add whole dollar amounts while keeping a second…

...but the leaf and the vold scored near-perfect in crash test ratings...