ThirdGen

Yeah, technology.

For real.

I heard some intruders kidnapped Donald Trump, but police caught 'em on the Brooklyn Bridge. I can't blame them for failing, really. Bridge is the hardest trump-taking game.

Did you just flip an image with imgflip?

Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, it is more powerful in the mature than in the young.

Hmm - it is ambiguously worded. The captain would be the one to take the advice, and the subordinate wants to prevent that.

Oasis or Blur?

I wanted to say Castlevania so badly. Strangely enough, they... don't really say where the French-surnamed Belmonts come from. So! On with the show. A stalwart subordinate tries to keep his captain from making a terrible mistake at the janitor's request.

Until I step in and say JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.

Train harder.

I find all three to be different establishment parrots happy to present the greater lie of where the official left and right stances should be. In Political Compass terms, the "center" is the center of the top right square.

What'd you expect? Don't you know we're loco?

Ah, the "Where To Start" question. First suggestion - wherever you start, don't freak out. Doctor Who is a show that doesn't act like other shows. Explanations can sound continuity-heavy, but most of the time it's something the episode is just pulling out of nowhere. There's Classic Who and New Who. Classic Who needs to be watched with your historical-viewing glasses on, because the special effects, pacing, writing, and acting are according to very different standards. Once you watch New Who, Classic Who becomes less appealing by comparison (background singers: "Controversial o-piii-nion!"). Continuity only matters in episodes that are talking about the same thing as older episodes. Usually, it's a recurring villian species. Usually, continuity is even ignored in these. The Daleks and Cybermen are just Things That Happen. The best way to divide stories is this: There's a Doctor played by a certain actor. There's a point where he starts and a point where he stops. The Doctor has one or more Companions. They start somewhere, they stop somewhere. Just pick a bracket, roll with it, and have a blast! Or, if you're not having a blast, try a different bracket!

Respectability really comes down to time more than anything. Books and music? Well-respected, well-understood. News magazines used to be considered way less respectable than newspapers. Now the newspapers have mostly been gutted of in-depth, researched content, and the magazines with their full-page ads are no different than the papers. There's some stuff that's just generational, as well. TV? The "mindless garbage" of the 50s-70s. And now the frontier is games. "I just played the most beautiful game," can be as legit as a beautiful painting, depending on the work. But to people who don't even know how to play games, it sounds as silly as the unfortunate phrase "playing games" does. I don't generally watch cable news, but I thought the general consensus was Fox = Republicans, MSNBC = Democrats, and CNN sits somewhere in the middle. Keep aware of your own POV and the fact that if somebody seems crazily left/right, it's a measure of their distance from you. And if you want objectivity, heh. Good luck. Pretending to be fully objective is itself an ideological stance, and is also pandering to audiences and advertisers.

Wow, you are the Forum Mom.

(spoilers, maybe-ish, for The Well of Ascension) Hmm... here's the sort of thing I think I can answer without being terribly inflammatory. I think there are lots of factors that add to the appeal for atheists. For instance: - Religions with real gods acting on the world, magical powers, etc. have always been in fantasy works. It's fantasy, not reality. - One of the things that really clicked with me about Sanderson's books is that he writes fantasy as though it's sci-fi, with care for consistency. There's a sense of a grounded set of rules at work, even if they're not seen. He very much avoids my pet peeve about epic fantasy, that everything can randomly change because somebody finds an undiscovered orb of power or something. - Unlike the books of, for instance, C.S. Lewis, Brandon Sanderson does not step outside the "magic circle" of storytelling and demand that you, in your actual life, believe a particular thing. It's gutsy for an author with strong religious beliefs to have a subplot like Sazed's leafing through all the religions he's studied. You can take the ultimate message of that as, actually, a range of possibilities, because... - The characters have distinct viewpoints, with their own strengths and weaknesses. Like actual people's conflicts. - His being a Mormon has rather an advantage compared to more commonly depicted religions in that he can make allusions to stories that not all of the audience will immediately recognize. In Film Appreciation class in high school, I developed a mental groan reflex to movies from the 60s and 70s that hamhandedly throw in a crucifixion pose for their protagonist, for instance. Telling a story we haven't already heard a thousand times has much more potential for great art. And, nonspecific to the works themselves, - Atheists are into everything everyone else is. Just regular, walkin'-around people that happen to lack one particular hobby. - A poll on the Internet is pretty likely to have a bunch of atheists taking it. It happens. - The demographics here probably skew kinda young, and in the US at least, polls confirm more young people are drifting from the religion they were raised in to some sort of "none of the above," usually described as "spiritual but not religious" on polls that have an option phrased that way.

I think that ending was just to whet our appetites for those answers, among others, in the coming Wax & Wayne trilogy.

Brains in jars build all civilization.

Finding Nemo.

I think this should clear everything up.

Perhaps a chromium Ferring?

"Hee hee, you spell Applejack funny." <sproing sproing> "Now whah would you say that?"

Are there better names than "strong nuclear force" and "weak nuclear force" we can use?

Silly ten-year-olds. The side mirrors would have terrible trajectories.

Why are there so many songs about rainbows?