But I think this is primarily because The End of Time implies that the Doctor has trapped Gallifrey (and originally the Daleks as well) in a time lock, which is from his perspective very nearly the same as killing them (e.g., makes him feel just as guilty)—it’s like sending an entire race to solitary confinement for…

Ah, this is exactly the idea that I also just posted about. I think it’s an obvious way to go with a lot of potential to sustain multiple stories.

If he feels bad, there’s a way to restore one part of the character hook it gave nuWho and yet move the story forward. Someone was always going to recreate the Time Lords one way or the other, but what would give the Doctor a new source of angst—and yet a new dramatic problem—is if we went back to the status quo of…

Professor reacts poorly to being hauled into a Title IX proceeding for having written an essay with which some disagree? In what way did “professor react poorly” to this development? What would you call “reacting well”? Saying, “Thank you, I needed to be accused of violating the rights of students in an opaque…

I think more describes the behavior of hypothetical models of people that aren’t really “people” in an empirically observed sense.

Indeed. A diplomacy system isn’t going to work if the factions themselves don’t develop far more of a sense of distinctive personality, whether more like Alpha Centauri or in some other fashion.

It’s not better. It’s considerably worse.

I have to say that this is the kind of puff piece that let certain lunatics act as if there was an issue with “ethics in game journalism”, not that such an issue was or is what they actually care about. Meaning, this is a game where there is ample evidence that a significant majority of its purchasers were seriously…

I can trump you. I had a way better idea in mind and damn it would have been beautiful.

Soooo...

Folks have got to recognize that if the conversation opens with treating the representation of the Black Widow in the film like it is one of the ten greatest crimes of the 21st Century, then the conversation is going nowhere that will help anyone. For the same reason, if the conversation opens with “Shut up and like…

Baron Mordo.

Considering that the Reverse-Flash has been watching them all along and planned this entire trap, why are we assuming that Gideon telling Barry that Barry created Gideon is true? Gideon could also have been pre-programmed to tell Barry what Eobard Thawne wanted Barry to hear.

Alas, Babylon seemed to me very much like Earth Abides, in some ways. It’s a nuclear war, and we’re meant to think that is terrible, but the protagonists actually mostly do pretty well as a result of being cut off and struggling to survive in North-Central Florida after the war. The lead character matures and becomes…

Fundamentally this is about the fact that Marvel and DC do not want to support storytelling in which time actually passes and characters age and change in a linear, accumulative way, even less now that both companies primarily serve as an intellectual property bank for film and TV adaptations. And yet they know that…

This is an easier question to answer if it's asked the other way: which fantasy or SF world would you actually want to live in? Just live in, not be one of the central characters of?

Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser are a good mention, yes. Though I think their overall world is often a bit hazily high-fantasy the way that Conan's can be, they themselves are both fairly gritty as characters and they define a kind of social landscape within their fantasy setting where manichean good-and-evil is just…

Jordan's world doesn't feel remotely real in its politics or in its conception of morality and immorality. It's high fantasy, if with a different template than Tolkien.

I think Paul Park's Starbridge Chronicles is usually classified as SF but I read it really as a fantasy-inflected retelling of the French Revolution, with a ton of hallucinogenic stylizing, and as such it seemed to me to have the "political" sensibility that Martin used. (I also think that like Martin, Park benefitted…

Lazy, lazy, lazy. Blofeld is related to Bond. Stupid.