Don’t forget the mood “goo goo for babies”

Sword fight? Fanning at each other, crossing and smacking swords. Maybe even walking around each other. I don’t think that’s how a real sword fight would look.

Akira fucking Kurosawa, on the other hand…

The Protagonist Throw!

Notably, the Terminator never lays a finger on Sarah Connor in the first Terminator movie, because Cameron knew that if the perfect killing machine got its hands on its target, it would just kill her immediately and that would be the end of the movie.

Or tossing an entire Zippo lighter into a pool of gasoline. Do you have any idea how much a good Zippo costs?!

In Robocop when Murphy gets shot to pieces and wheeled into the ER, Verhoeven got real ER doctors to play the scene, so their chatter is very realistic and very nonchalant as they work on a guy that they know full-well is a lost cause.

I think in Event Horizon they tell the guy about to get airlocked to take deep breaths and then let all the air out of his lungs… which I think is accurate if you want to live as long as possible in vacuum. But then he gets horribly disfigured by the decompression, so they might have only got some points for accuracy.

There was an analysis of Nolan and post-Nolan Batman that argued that once you strip away all the fantastic parts of Batman, all the Clayfaces and Mr. Freezes and Poison Ivies and the sentient robots and uncanny weirdness, all that is left is a bunch of problems that frankly the cops should be able to handle, and that Batman at that point is just a cop who is willing to violate people’s Constitutional rights.

If Batman can be replaced by a well-outfitted SWAT team, then you’re not writing Batman well enough. Give him some insane nonsense that cops are not equipped to handle.

Hell, in Star Trek VI, where the Praxis Effect originates, it’s a horrifying industrial accident that blows up Praxis, so for all we know there might well have been some kind of moon-sized particle accelerator that blew up and did cause that ring shape. But it seems to show up in a lot of places where there’s not as justifiable an excuse.

I was in a play once where we were going to fire a blank onstage, in a fairly small black box theatre. There were two options, a .22 and a .45 caliber blank. The .22 made a sharp CRACK that really shocked you. The .45 made a VWOOM sound that filled up the entire room and left you with the feeling of a wave of violent energy having just passed through your entire body.

We went with the .22.

Ahem

Better for what? I only listen to mp3s I’ve got stored on my phone; I use BlackPlayer for that, and I love it. For streaming music purposes… I dunno, I never got into that racket.

“You are Star Trek, but we do not grant you the rank of Generation.”

If there are two parties, and one says it’s raining, and the other says it isn’t, it’s not the news media’s job to give an unbiased report on the debate, it’s their job to look out the fucking window and say whether or not it’s raining.

I have a theory about this!

It falls under the umbrella of why transhumanism (or transklingonism, or whatever you like… transbeingism?) is so rare in Star Trek. None of the major powers have fully embraced cybernetic or genetic augmentation. Why?

Earth has the Eugenics Wars which is used to explain how leery they are of genetic augmentation, and it could also explain their conservative attitude towards cybernetics. The encounter with the Borg would just reinforce this pre-existing attitude. But the Klingons, the Romulans, the Cardassians? Why haven’t any of them fully embraced either genetic or mechanical augmentation?

The theory is that, in the Star Trek universe, “natural” evolution is the only stable way for species to advance. The augments led to the Eugenics Wars, and you’ve also got the Bynars who went full cybernetic and nearly had their civilization collapse due to one bad solar flare. The changelings, the Douwd, and the Q, on the other hand, seem to have evolved to their extraordinary powers taking the long route. The Borg are the ultimate example of the dangers of advancing too quickly; they became a cancer species so aggressive that every other sentient species cannot help but ally against them and seek their destruction.

If augmentation were a viable means of advancement in Star Trek you would expect to see more examples of it in the galactic community, but you don’t, so there must be a very good reason why it isn’t.

That transparency has lots of uses!

When confronted, the young man’s mother admitted that the signs in the trunk of the car belonged to her son, who she described as “just an idiot.”

Deep fried pecan pie on a stick!

She told me that she couldn’t be bothered to think about Donald Trump.

Funny thing about that…

The former Berlin businessman I referred to earlier told me that he blamed his own group, people with the time and the money and the opportunity to know better, for what happened to Germany. “We ignored Hitler,” he said. “We considered him an unimportant fellow, not quite a gentleman, not of our own class. We considered it just a little bit vulgar to bother with him, to bother with politics at all.”

—Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government

Not blaming you or your friend for Trump, but reading the book that quote came from made me a lot more engaged in politics on a day-to-day basis.

That boy needs therapy.