Even as a hormone-crazed idiot tween who unquestioningly devoured almost anything Marvel, DC, and Image shat upon the spinning comic wracks, I thought the "he hides his identity by using a device that blurs out his face with a skull on video cameras, but doesn't wear a mask or anything" was the dumbest damn thing ever.

Not Trek, but there's also the recent whitewashing of Ra's Al Ghul, Talia, and Bane, in the Nolan Batman movies. Two Arabs and a Hispanic guy, all three of whom are Batman's mental and physical equals (if not superiors) in the comics, replaced by two British dudes and a French lady. PROGRESS!

One thing that always confused me that maybe you fine folks can help me with:

"I respect this movie more than I actually enjoy it." That is a perfect summation right there.

Yep, this scared the shit out of me when I was a kid. And I loved it. I made a point to watch it (through my fingers) every year.

I think it's also just time. King's gonna sell boatloads of books, no matter what, so when one shows up, the publishing house wants to get it out into the world pretty quickly.

I loved THE TERROR, but man, it really suffered from "Let me demonstrate all the cool stuff about 19th Century sailing I learned" disease (aka: "scurvy") at times. There's one section where a character just lists, for pages, all the kinds of wood that make up the hull of the ship. Not to mention the lengthy…

Yeah, I've never seen the English dub either, but I think someone told me that it features Kiki and Jiji talking again at the end, which is decidedly absent from the Japanese version.

I want No Face socks. Obviously.

Plus the Peter David run, which is my favorite.

Same here (though the part I remember most vividly is the cab driver talking about Stalin's urine stream). My impression is that it's *super* Russian and much of the humor and plot-sense comes from its critique of Russian society at the time. I guess it's like Golden Age Simpsons. I rarely meet non-Americans who enjoy…

IIRC, in the original Japanese dub of "Kiki's Delivery Service", Kiki is never able to talk to Jiji again, even after she regains the ability to fly (he's still around, they just can't talk). It makes the ending more poignant, and underlines how Kiki has grown up, and how growing up means losing things and friends.

I'd actually argue Cersei backs up my point (I mean, the pro-lady point, not the creepy Dany sex scenes point). Cersei's awful, but her awfulness is her own and I think Martin makes it grounds it in a somewhat sympathetic background (awful father, dead mother, abusive husband, constant paranoia of knowing her children…

Man, the Valar really are shite, aren't they? Except Ulmo.

I think Martin's definitely pro-lady. His female characters are many, distinct, and have rich, complex personalities and inner-lives, and are just as important (often more important) than the men in the events of the novels.

I hear that line delivery every time I order French toast and it always makes me laugh.

I love the first hour. But once it turned into numbingly overlong and overshot battle sequence after battle sequence, I lost interest. Loved Gollum, though.

That'd be awesome. Sadly, I think Thranduil's halls will be the closest glimpse we get of Menegroth, for a while at least (interestingly, in the first draft of The Hobbit, Bilbo and the dwarves actually go to Menegroth itself. Even when Tolkien changed it, there's a lot of carry-over… elvish cave-cities in forests,…

TTT would have been the best had the following happened:

Other than Elven Kate, it's probably the one that will most stick with the plot of the book and will, therefore, be good.