Jingus

Your constant reiteration of that statement might possibly explain your odd obsession with me. Sorry to shoot you down bro, but I just don't swing that way.

We need to stage an intervention for poor young pbone here. He's clearly addicted to snarky yet cryptic one-liners of excessive brevity where he mocks other people's posts while never bothering to explain exactly what he disagrees with or why he feels that way.

Technically they did release Let It Be in the 70s, the theme was decade-specific, not supposed to be just disco. My main point was just that this guy apparently had zero music from any earlier than about the mid-80s. Either the school never bothered to inform him of the situation, or he just didn't care.

No, haven't read the short stories. As for Xenocide and Children of the Mind, I pretty much see them as Speaker for the Dead: Parts 2 & 3. The end of Speaker was obviously kind of a cliff hanger with more resolution coming in the future, so I don't consider it to be so much of a stand-alone work. I'd say it was the best part of the trilogy, since it moved at lot faster than Xeno and Children, which as mentioned felt like they were overstuffed with filler and could've easily been distilled into one book.

10th grade, would've been 15 or 16, a geeky redheaded girl named Matilda. And despite my rep, she actually wasn't fat, aside from her somewhat disproportionately large breasts. I totally don't remember what the actual first date was, we kinda got matchmade together by mutual friends who saw we were both lonely nerds and thought we might work well together. So I'll go with what I remember, and say this 70's-themed dance at school. I wore this hideous tan leather jacket and poofed my hair up like Travolta, and when we got there all my effort was for naught as it turned out that the fucking incompetent DJ they hired didn't have a single 70's song in his entire collection. No Disco Inferno, no Staying Alive, hell not even a late Beatles album. And then at the end of the night, he literally pulled the plug on the whole thing right in the middle of one of the slow dance songs. Whattadick. Anyway, Matilda broke up with me during summer break that year for reasons which were rather murky and unexplained, though we ended up getting back together again for senior year, and she's still a friend of mine and we still talk sometimes.

There are school systems that don't make you buy your own required reading? That's how it always has been at every school I attended. Partly I think because the English teachers often tend to pick out their own list of what they want their kids to read (and usually let them choose from a list of different books), so it's not the same thing as every chemistry class always being taught from the same textbook. 20 whole minutes? Jeez, you gotta pack a lunch for a trip like that. And no, I haven't read the first and haven't heard of the second. Although it does sound infinitely cooler than the stuff I had to read in high school, the Famous Dead White Guys list with the usual suspects like Shakespeare and Twain. (Nothing against either of those two fine fellows, but sometimes I'd wind up getting assigned the same required reading book two or even three times over the course of my schoolings, which just felt like overkill.)

Farenheit 451 is amazing in several ways, but especially in how eerily prescient it was on a few points. It basically predicted the entire Political Correctness craze, long decades before it happened. Also, its description of televisions getting so big that they cover an entire wall, but they only air increasingly mindless shows... nuff said. Ender's Game is, as said, fucking awesome. Unfortunately, it seems like with every sequel Card writes, the franchise gets increasingly worse. The Speaker sorta-trilogy was okay, but seemed to be dragged out for much longer than it needed to be, especially in the last two books which really felt like they could've been condensed into one. The Shadow series starts out as a puzzling retcon, and then degenerates into a third-rate Tom Clancy knockoff. And I just read Ender in Exile recently, and thought it was totally worthless, just a bunch of people standing around and talking about inconsequential shit while retconning half the damn storyline of the entire series. Would something like House of Leaves technically be considered "sci-fi"? It's damned weird, and at times too self-conciously clever for its own good, but very different and ambitious. I recommend it most to any pretentious college-kid types, but anyone who enjoys unique stuff would find it interesting. Anyone ever read (or even heard of) any of Jim Munroe's stuff? I've caught two of 'em, Angry Young Spaceman and Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gas Mask, and he's interesting enough to give a mention as a somewhat talented albeit fairly unknown artist.

It's not mine, it's a Joss Whedon quote. Are we supposed to stop inserting random pop culture snippets of dialogue as answers, like everyone else was doing?

If nothing we do matters, then the only thing that matters is what we do.

Darn this show. I mean, I see what they're trying to do. I admire their intentions. But it seems like words such as "flawed" and "frustrating" were invented to be applied here. The chairshot got a bad laugh from me; in the middle of what was obviously supposed to be such a Deep Meaningful Character Drama, they throw in a freaking pro rassling joke? The show's general tone is so leaden, both in its grim feel and overburdened with philosophy, that the usual Whedon style of whimsical comic relief feels very out of place. It doesn't help that they spend so much time with the characters spend so much time baldly discussing the subtext, as if they weren't sure that the audience would get the message unless it were explained out loud. And so far, the villains have all kinda sucked. The mysterious Alpha is intriguing enough, but the one-shot Heels Of The Week and the more assholish Dollhouse employees feel extremely cardboard and one-dimensional. Is this Fox's studio meddling coming to light here? In all of Joss's previous shows, even the bad guys got more nuanced and subtle characterizations than they do here. The show just feels like it thinks we'll be completely lost and not watch if it doesn't lead us by the hand through every plot point and underlying metaphor. But some of the little details were so wonderful. Like, the pop song from this episode. It was perfect. Just soulless and prefab enough to be readily identified as typical plastic top-40 garbage, but just catchy and upbeat enough that it was believable that this chick would be a highly successful act. And while the singer was written in a rather contradictory fashion, the guest star who played her really acted the hell out of that part, as did the guy playing her manager. Bits like that will keep me watching this show until the studio's axe inevitably falls.

Would Alexander the Great count as a dictator? Dude took his tiny kingdom of Macedonia and turned it into an empire which stretched across three continents, all within his own short life. I can't think of any other example of one person accomplishing that much sheer quantity of conquering.

Actually, 7.5 inches is my personal record. Nothing new about that, I've said it in the L/S/D folder before. I've got, like, a Slinky thing going with my genitals, since while hard it routinely gets 6-7 inches, but in shrinkage conditions it gets down to the size of my thumb. I'll say that much, I just don't feel comfortable doing the "describe in excruciating detail" thing. Yes, I am aware of the irony of claiming to have a somewhat larger-than-average penis in the same thread I was suspicious of everyone else's claims of such.

No kidding. Especially after doing a bit of research at everyone's favorite semi-credible online encyclopedia: Which means the majority of penises are, in fact, smaller than six inches in length. Which is kinda funny when you consider that six inches is the shortest figure stated by anyone here. So either we just happen to have a membership (ha!) which is freakishly disproportionate compared to the rest of the population, or everyone with a small-to-average dick just happened to miss this thread, or we've got some lying muthafuckas here. And yeah, I do mind, sorry.

So, he's doing the gimmick of Lawrence the next-door neighbor from Office Space? (Now I'm wishing I still had copies of the "date" vignettes my fed shot with me and ODB a few years back.)

Well naturally I did. But still... magic resurrection of a days-dead corpse? I mean, this is a show with some pretty goofy plot twists, but I sure as hell wouldn't have expected them to go that route. (And don't say they did the same with Christian, he was portrayed as more of a ghost or something similar.)

The slo-mo and wire-fu worries me because, well, Watchmen was never really about the same kind of stuff that most superhero comics were. It had fights and superpowers and explosions, but those were never the important parts. It was about the emotions in between the heroic acts, and, well, the guy who made 300 doesn't seem like the first choice to do a comic adaptation in which story and character should be prioritized over action. Yeah, to compare to another genre, that's kinda like saying "I liked Meet the Spartans and I liked Airplane!". Firstly, if you've seen Little Children or Hard Candy, you know that Patrick Wilson is a perfectly competent actor. Don't just shriek "but, Phantom of the Opera!" and call it a day. Secondly... Paul Greengrass? The guy who directed the Bourne sequels? What an utterly random and non-sequiter name to drop.

Everyone has a movie like that. You can't say a nice word about Natural Born Killers anywhere near me without getting a lot of inarticulate screaming in return.

Yeah. It definitely kicks the shit out of The Reader and Benjamin Button, and while I haven't seen the other two Best Pic noms I have a hard time imagining they'd be better. Hell, I actually liked Slumdog better overall than Dark Knight, not in pure fanboy fun but in terms of cinematic artistic achievement and other big words. Although I still wouldn't say it was the best movie I've seen this year, that was Wall-E, which really deserved more than the Best Animated and Best Sound Something that it's gonna get.

Stuff running through my head as I watched episode #2 of Dollhouse: -Man, that was a drop in quality from the pilot. You could really tell Joss Whedon was neither writing nor directing this time. Notably lower budget, too. -Eliza Dushku... still really not sold on her as a leading lady. Sure, it helps that she's not really playing an actual character here, but intentionally false combinations of various cliches. That helps sometimes. Still doesn't help when she does one of those groan-inducing line readings where she's growling with all the talent and sincerity of Elizabeth Berkeley. -Is it just me, or is the Dollhouse set just the Wolfram & Hart set from the last season of Angel with a tiny bit of halfhearted remodeling? You wouldn't think that something like that would be kept randomly standing for five years, studio space can't be cheap, but it looks so identical that I gotta wonder. -So far we've had two Crisis Of The Week individual episode plots, and neither one of them was very good. I tell myself, this is the standard pattern for every Joss show, they always start out weak... and then build to something stronger. If, y'know, they get the time. But still, first a kidnapping case straight outta Law & Order: SVU, and now a freaking Most Dangerous Game ripoff? (The added detail that this hunter only hunts girls and starts the hunt almost immediately after he fucks them is kinda creepy, but the rest is ancient formula.) -I'm wondering when we're gonna get a Ship Episode. This goes back to an old saying about the original Star Trek: sometimes they would spend an entire episode on the Enterprise and never beam down in order to save on budget, and those Ship Episodes sometimes wound up being the best episodes in the show's history. So, sometime soon can we please get a Dollhouse episode which doesn't involve some kind of fabricated situation involving one of Echo's missions? The supporting characters in and around the Dollhouse itself are rather fun, and I'd like to see a storyline based on them. And the show needs more Amy Acker, dammit. -I hope they're going somewhere with this FBI Agent plotline which will make it feel different. Cuz right now, I can't look at this guy for a second (with the already-too-many scenes of his colleagues mocking him) without thinking about that reporter on the old Incredible Hulk show. -Also we've apparently met our big bad villain, Sylar. WHOOPS I mean Alpha, ahem, sorry. Although watching the first half of the first season of Heroes, the depiction of the two is rather similar. -Comparing this one to the other shows Whedon has done, it still feels way more like Firefly than the others. Not because of quality; good lord no, so far Dollhouse hasn't even sniffed that particular bottle's cork. But more because of how rushed everything feels. I mean, second episode of the series, and we're already getting plot elements laid out for the overall story arc. It's definitely that same Sword of Damocles feeling, like the creative team know damn well from the very beginning that their days are probably numbered and that they have to shove in everything they can as fast as possible. -There was exactly one punchline I laughed at. Black Giles asked Dushku if she knew how to use a gun; she takes it, chambers it, and says "I have four brothers... none of them democrats". That was funny. Not funny enough to make up for the little bit of throwup in my mouth when the phantom billionaire serial killer said, "Prove you're not an echo!" to the girl whose name just happens to be Echo though neither guy nor girl happen to know that at the moment. All in all, I wonder what the hell Whedon's gameplan is here, since it sure doesn't seem as meticulously planned as his other work. Comparing it to the post-pilot episodes of Buffy and Angel, it seems roughly on the same level, except of course being in the most infamous timeslot on the most infamous network when and where shows always get cancelled early, so the chance of them having enough time to grow and improve isn't looking too good.

Do Terry Pratchett's Discworld books count as fantasy, or parody/humor? Either way, if you haven't read any, go fix that.

Goodfellas

Ghost Busters Silence of the Lambs

Why does that matter? They haven't even tried to introduce that as one of their standard rules of time travel. All we know is that Daniel and Desmond have some kind of magical connection which somehow let Des remember meeting Dan years after it happened. That's the only time the show has ever played around with anything like that. In comparison, Richard knew that he'd already met Locke in the past when he gave him the compass. And Charlotte remembered Daniel from when she was a kid, when he hasn't travelled back to that time yet. So can we lay to rest this "hasn't happened yet in the past cuz it hasn't happened yet now" theory? They only did something even resembling that the one time when they needed a reason for Desmond and Penny to meet back up with everyone else again. It wouldn't have seemed plausible for even Ben to find them on their yacht when Widmore assumably had already tried and failed to locate them, so the writers needed Des and Pen to somehow hook back up with the rest of the gang another way. Thus, the mystical dream of Desmond suddenly remembering something from years earlier. Kinda like all those magical pre-signed contracts that Mick Foley kept pulling out of his ass to alter things even after he'd been fired as commissioner. It was just a shortcut tailored to the needs of the plot, every other example of time travel on the show has specifically and explicitly not been handled under the same rules.

That does look like it hurts like hell. I once turned my ankle in a similar fashion during gymnastics class. Let's just say that "painless" would be a completely inaccurate way to describe the experience. The joint itself even made Rice Krispies sounds as I went down.

I don't get it. "Haw, I worked you by telling a completely believable story, with no obvious goal or motivation, which nobody else refuted, to explain my prolonged absence." What's the point of that? It's not like this was a "Milky got both hands chopped off" level of whopper.