Philotic Web

Janus%TheDoorman

Vincent and the Doctor - 4/5 Not a whole lot to say here. I'm not a big art fan, so I think a lot of the best parts of this episode are wasted on me, but it manages to keep a smile on my face throughout the whole of it. The first time I was so charged up after the Silurian episodes with anticipatio...

Janus%TheDoorman

I noticed that the Fairy Tale motif was completely gone from Vampires in Venice. Maybe that's why it feels out of place. Amy's Choice - 5/5 I know I said the Angels arc will probably be the best remembered episodes from this series, but if I had to pick one to show someone unfamiliar with the series...

Janus%TheDoorman

Before we move onto Vampires of Venice, here's a picture of Neil Gaiman on the TARDIS . He wrote the third episode of the next series which just finished filming. Right then... Vampires of Venice - 2/5 This whole episode is kinda meh. The Doctor bursting out of the cake at Rory's stag party is about...

Janus%TheDoorman

Carl Sagan.

Janus%TheDoorman

They don't move when you can see them - they move the the gaps between the frames of the video. All of the scenes with the Angels moving are just really smooth stop-motion video. You can tell if you watch it knowing - the Angels never show a hint of exposure blur. Flesh and Stone - 5/5 I've been bac...

Janus%TheDoorman

EDIT: Pulp Fiction explains this better than I do. NSFW Language, of course From my perspective, it's not a religious thing, and it's only generational is a very specific context - it's something ingrained in our instinctive social patterns, and the no inter-sex friends thing is just a response to ...

Janus%TheDoorman

The Big Bang Theory, a show on CBS that promotes horrible stereotypes about science nerds.

That we all know are true.

Janus%TheDoorman

Time of the Angels - 5/5 Even more than the finale, I think these two episodes will be remembered best out of this season. River's back. and she's always going to be a polarizing figure, probably even more so once we find out who she is. Someone has suggested that she's Amy from the future, and the...

Janus%TheDoorman

EL - your location tag, is that an inside joke I missed, or is it just to frustrate me as I squint really hard trying to read that sign?

Janus%TheDoorman

Rewatching Series 5 because these are the last few days I expect to have much free time before Christmas. First time I've watched it since it aired, and I'll post short musings on the episodes as I watch them. They will be from the perspective of having seen all of them, so there will be unmarked sp...

Janus%TheDoorman

I still pronounce it like that, I just think "gaol is British for jail".

Janus%TheDoorman

Gaps like that already exist. There are lots of people who do lots of good work in a field, or have a lot of experience, but will lose out on jobs or positions for lack of a college degree, whether or not they've got equivalent or superior knowledge. If anything, transhumanism promises to help close...

Janus%TheDoorman

I still don't get it. Where exactly are you expecting this hacking to take place? The only place voting machines are ever hacked is once they get to the polling stations where the only people there to maintain security are usually understaffed senior citizens. AI mental enhancements would be more ak...

Janus%TheDoorman

I'm confused. The kind of sensitive access you'd need to someone to meddle with any technological enhancements is at least as, if not more considerable than the access you'd need to cause severe harm now. Where do you perceive the risk increasing?

Janus%TheDoorman

I think Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced used that spelling, and the whole time I was playing it I couldn't for the life of me figure out what the hell a gaol was.

Janus%TheDoorman

All I ask is that you all please do me - and all other people who have disabilities in this world - the courtesy of walking a mile in our shoes first. (And that does not include plugging up your ears with cotton or blindfolding yourself for just an hour. Try doing it for an entire day, say. Even th...

Janus%TheDoorman

This might belong in Science, but then it also might belong in the Morals and Ethics one, too, so I stuck it here. Anyway, I'm leading a discussion group on the subject of transhumanism tomorrow, and I'm wondering if any PWebbers were familiar with the idea and wanted to share any cool ideas or argu...

Janus%TheDoorman

Schrodinger's f******.

Janus%TheDoorman

That's the point I'm trying to make. Superrationality is just a logically rigorous way of saying "They know each other well". He doesn't do much in EG, but through the rest of the Speaker books Ender makes it a point to make sure people get to know each other well - particularly different ...

Janus%TheDoorman

ಠ_ಠ

whatisthisidonteven

Janus%TheDoorman

With that out of the way, I'd like to weigh in on the 5 Sexist Expectations article. On the first point, about fighting, I agree that men shouldn't be billed as hyper-aggressive brawlers who are always looking to settle things by fists before words. However, I do think it's legitimate to expect a ma...

Janus%TheDoorman

Most originally, vests are worn as part of a three-piece suit. This is fine for most regions in America, but not as tenable in the hot and arid southwest. As Hollywood came to be the conduit through which a lot of pop culture flowed, and most of the stars were wearing two-piece suits, often of light...

Janus%TheDoorman

I only just came to this realization while reading this thread, but if you want to think about it this way, Ender's Game is one giant Prisoner's Dilemma. You've got collective humanity against the Formics. As was pointed out at the beginning of the thread, among the humans there's some doubt as to w...

Janus%TheDoorman

Probably Stilson and Bonso. The others are much easier to rationalize away, especially seeing as how Ender's involvement never got much more visceral than a video game - if one they were forced to play at literally breakneck pace. Stilson and Bonso would feel much more real to me, and much more like...

Janus%TheDoorman

Y the Last Man is a good comic, maybe even a great one, but I think it's a bit overhyped. Yes, Yorick is one of the most well-rounded heroes in recent memory in... anything, and that's what makes the story work, but... meh. It's not Watchmen, or the Dark Knight Returns, but people put it up on a ped...

Janus%TheDoorman

In a world of people who are near-perfect ideological representations - the Wiggin children, obviously, but also Jane, the Hive Queen, and the Piggies, and even Novinha's children - almost all the characters in the Enderverse are strongly rational given the information that's available to them. Novi...

Janus%TheDoorman

I just don't see the significance of them possibly having been constructed as opposites along those lines- if Peter and Ender had died similarly opposed deaths, or Bean and Achilles, but Bean and Ender's relationship from a literary standpoint is that Ender is the humanist side to war whereas Bean i...

Janus%TheDoorman

Bean's not dead, at least not yet. There's another book coming out, Shadows in Flight that promises to wrap up the Enderverse as a whole. The Wiki article seems to suggest that it will take place after Bean's death, but details are ... scarce. Either way, I don't really see how they're opposites. Ca...

Janus%TheDoorman

I'd bet Alessandra and her mother exist because OSC realized that simply having Ender out maneuver the Captain for the governorship would have been boring and exactly what we expected, given that it's a foregone conclusion, but adding in those two brought a bit of character drama to the events. Mayb...

Janus%TheDoorman

I have my guitar, which could make for a sweet grindhouse-style zombie movie, or something much, much cooler.

Janus%TheDoorman

The ethics of death and violence are just about the oldest question in the book - they're another way of asking what the meaning of life is. You must know the meaning of life to know what it is to take it. You'd be surprised at how subtle and varied our opinions on when it's right and okay to kill s...

Janus%TheDoorman

Frankly, of all the things the Enderverse characters are, they are NOT easy to relate to. None of the Battle School kids seem remotely like children, and there's a very distinct lack of warmth and love in pretty much every relationship in the series, except maybe John Paul and Theresa, and their cha...

Janus%TheDoorman

It's been a while since I read through the Speaker set but I remember always being annoyed with Novinha. All the time.

Janus%TheDoorman

I'll just leave this right here

Janus%TheDoorman

You're forgetting that Ender's greatest gift was his ability to understand people and love them. As I understood it, this was precisely why the Bugger Wars took such a toll on him, I thought this was the reason he took his mini-retirement. Having to love something and destroy it would have been inc...

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Transhumanism