I think this has a lot to do with when you read Eddings. I was bored once and stuck somewhere where I ran out of reading material and I was able to get the Belgariad. I pretty much hated it from the get-go and stuck with it literally because there was nothing else to read. It wasn't just that I could see how it ripped…

I am just so so ARGH ACK DAMN over the fact that they just do not seem able to actually SHOW US why the League of Assassins and Raysh ROZ Raysh al'Ghul are bad exactly.

I remember, roughly around the fifth or sixth time I got shoved into a chain link fence and had my face dragged along it in fifth grade, reading John Bellairs' The House With a Clock in Its Walls and The Figure in the Shadows. I identified with Lewis in many ways, though not all of them (not the least because I didn't…

I might almost be that contrarian about Game of Thrones, in this sense. Not that the books were greasy kid's stuff and the TV series the real deal, but that the TV series has in multiple ways improved upon the books, particularly in the past season. Some of that is due to the necessities of a visual presentation that…

Yes. This drives me nuts: the people who like to talk about this the most often are the least inclined to think about it expansively or creatively. Most discussions of the Fermi Paradox are spectacular displays of unexamined tautologies and baldly stated assumptions.

"We know only one way". Assuming that's the only contingency that evolves capacities like what we call intelligence is like assuming:

On #2, this is a good example of how much science fiction has polluted our ability to take a colder look at the Fermi Paradox. Usually it's hard enough to think clearly about it just because of our tendency to anthropomorphize everything, to assume that intelligence would be produced by evolutionary circumstances…

It's important to do an in-house rethink at Gawker Media about how to reduce the rate of this kind of unambiguously incorrect reporting, because it is hurting the causes that the stories are meant to help. This is not just one reporter's error, it is a pattern across Gawker Media's sites. When reporters at various…

I think you can argue that really successful institutions or organizations—the sort of things that have "rules"—often flourish when one of the roles that they assign within their own structures is iconoclast, skeptic, dissident, or ombudsman, when they build an internal ecosystem with many niches and roles.…

This entire season feels like the writers keep getting themselves into a jam and then scrambling desperately to keep the whole thing from crashing down around them. This episode it came fairly close to crashing in two respects:

It sort of looks a bit as if monkey-recapturing technique includes kicking it in the nads.

Terrible clickbait headline. I feel like io9 normally avoids headlines that really don't fit the content at all, but George is more prone than most to pull that. This system only shows that rocky planets formed very, very early, which—ok, important and interesting. But nothing here really modifies the existing state…

It plays limit and it only wins when it's playing against one other player. No-limit hold'em against multiple players and I am guessing it is as vulnerable as any other poker bot.

So:

I think it's very possible that we will find out that Waller didn't stop the bomb on purpose. Or even planted it. I think we've already had big hints that she may have been using the island to create Oliver (or people like him), or at least that she fixated on Oliver as an ideal agent. I would guess that in the…

Please tell me that the story and characterization is better. I couldn't stand FC3's loathsomely stupid protagonist and the stereotypes that surrounded him. I also got tired of having to have him do absolutely idiotic things in order to get to the next area or content.

I'm not seeing Martin Freeman as Wong, though.

I couldn't get past the art. Which was just awful.

This is wonderful. I had no idea this existed. Thank you.

One major frustration I have with anarcho-primitivists and deep ecology activists is that they have a very selective reading of what the "anthropological literature" shows about pre-agriculture societies. Basically they've read Marshall Sahlins' famous piece about Stone Age economics, maybe some of the most romantic…