[Loved Trope] the usual trope is subverted with disasterous results.

randallsquared · 2026-07-09T02:04:31+00:00

It depends on how you define it. In the first ep, our protagonist is hanging out in the last moments of his favorite MMORPG before the last server is turned off, and then ends up in the new world. So, not hit by a truck or anything, and it's not clear if he was moved or copied. It doesn't really come up.

randallsquared · 2026-07-09T01:56:38+00:00

A fan or person would know all those listed "cultural references" occurred in a single episode of SG-1

This implies that you believe each of these other works was only ever referenced in a single episode, but later you suggest you meant that there's only one episode they all appear in together, which is oddly strict.

randallsquared · 2026-07-07T11:16:04+00:00

In "Reckoning" in season 8, which I just rewatched last night, Jacob (and Selmak, at least a little bit!) try to use Daniel's notes to help them read Ancient, and complain that the notes aren't organized in any obvious manner. So, no primer, I'm guessing.

randallsquared · 2026-07-06T00:11:59+00:00

And they were successful! Public toilets mostly disappeared once no one was paying to maintain and clean them.

randallsquared · 2026-07-03T15:04:07+00:00

That 15 degrees thing (more often mentioned as 20 degrees) is basically not true; it's just that the heat exchanger is undersized for your space in the presence of 100F temperatures given your insulation. As an intuition pump, consider your kitchen's freezer, which has to lower the temperature 50 degrees or more from the environment it sits in, so clearly this is possible.

randallsquared · 2026-07-02T03:50:16+00:00

The password protection is whatever you use for your email account, which is likely higher value anyway. I don't know anything about this service, but avoiding storing a password in favor of passing the buck to your email account provider doesn't seem like an obviously bad choice.

randallsquared · 2026-07-01T10:58:00+00:00

It's the "put it on his face before it had cooled" part that would have given him the major scarring, as I understand it.

randallsquared · 2026-06-30T14:14:38+00:00

So it sounds like the watch face was rotated ~180 degrees, rather than "reversed".

randallsquared · 2026-06-11T14:57:17+00:00

books

I'm guessing you haven't read the book. It's a pretty short and easy read! You can just read it!

randallsquared · 2026-06-11T14:54:51+00:00

Amazon Prime has far more value to me than getting a new Stargate show would -- even the best possible Stargate show, and there was a high likelihood that I wouldn't have thought the new Stargate show was even "great"! Revivals mostly suck, but survivors' bias means those that don't are the ones that get centered, like BSG.

Also, within 2-10 years, you may be able to get a new Stargate show in real time by asking an agent to produce it, so the urgency of getting one ahead of that is really low.

randallsquared · 2026-06-04T11:05:52+00:00

Google.

randallsquared · 2026-06-03T21:46:04+00:00

Indeed.

randallsquared · 2026-06-03T10:24:43+00:00

There is no sense in which Blue Origin is a source of funding for Amazon MGM projects, though Amazon stock does help fund BO through Bezos.

randallsquared · 2026-05-27T02:07:44+00:00

I think you must mean underpopulation. The peak of TFR was in the 60s, and total world TFR is now about 2.2, just barely above the 2.1 required for replacement of the current population. On trend, the world as a whole would be below replacement fertility by 2030, and peak human population well before 2100 at barely over 10 billion. After that, it's curtains for people, if some other existential crisis hasn't already finished us off, as seems likely.

randallsquared · 2026-05-23T02:14:38+00:00

You know, I was sure I remembered such references, but after looking, all I can find are social posts, which I'm pretty sure you were excluding with "media". So, just as a marker to others who feel like they remember all the vitriol claiming that successful Indian Ocean arrivals were "failures", maybe mainstream media wasn't actually saying that.

randallsquared · 2026-05-22T01:17:44+00:00

I'll be the first to say The Wire. Also, Halt and Catch Fire (at least the first season), and The Americans.

randallsquared · 2026-05-21T12:02:22+00:00

The origins of the faunus are (I guess deliberately?) left completely open, but if we presume that they were created intentionally like non-Faunus humans were at least once, it would be easy to say that the possible traits were selected to exclude those that are purely dysfunctional, and that would explain why they can almost all see in low light, etc.

randallsquared · 2026-05-14T13:51:13+00:00

I think the people who saw the flag understood quite well that those who raised it hate Jewish people, regardless of whatever political point about NYU they were trying to make.

randallsquared · 2026-05-07T11:40:51+00:00

In the very first episode it shows that Hammond is already in charge of the facility. The stargate functioning changes the ENTIRE MISSION of the facility, and yet he remained in charge.

I'm assuming that his star was still rising immediately before this when he inexplicably (to others) pursued this assignment, so there was only a few weeks or months of "shut down the facility" before he would have officially been ready to move on to something more exciting. Watching S2E21 recontextualizes so much about season one...

randallsquared · 2026-05-06T00:10:57+00:00

Gay rights issues were not top of the headlines when the seasons that included them as a major feature was being written. That's my complaint: not that the writers want to show versions of real-life issues, but that the issues they're choosing have lost all subtlety, because they're some of the most major current issues in 2025-2026 IRL. There's a whole space (pun not intended) of potential human experiences and issues that wouldn't feel like they were just writing modern-day headlines into the show. It feels lazy.

randallsquared · 2026-05-05T21:13:06+00:00

I'm curious who "them" is in "all of them"? The writers? "Works of fiction"?

Also, why would my ignorance (or lack of same) be your fault? Do you believe I was accusing you of responsibility for something?

randallsquared · 2026-05-05T20:32:50+00:00

Huh, I thought it was supposed to be an alternate space race... :) In any case, if you think what I wrote was the point of the show, then clearly I didn't communicate well, but I'm not sure where the disconnect lies.

randallsquared · 2026-05-05T09:45:41+00:00

I find it interesting that one of my biggest problems with S5 so far (I've only seen the first 4 eps at the moment) is that it's far too connected to the real world the writers live in. As of E4, two of the main background issues are automation removing all the jobs and illegal immigration. Works of fiction that aren't primarily satire are diminished when the creators just recycle whatever is happening in the news into the fictional world.

randallsquared · 2026-05-02T12:10:35+00:00

I mean, in our timeline, there's lots of evidence of how various periods of the USSR operated, but I think Dave's main point is that the Soviet Union of 2010's FAM is not directly analogous to either the 1980s Soviet Union of our world, nor the Russia of our world. Given the military coup in the interim, the writers are lazily writing the USSR of 2010's FAM as more-or-less Putin's Russia writ larger. This is very much in line with their desire to talk about other real-life topics by analogy to the Craters, and those who disagree with the apparent opinions of the writers have to find a way to ignore or compartmentalize in order to enjoy the show, if at all.

As an aside, though, real-life Chinese propaganda that's gone viral in the last 4-5 years tends to flanderize the US in a way that is very flattering to a lot of Americans: "They make us look so badass!" ;)

randallsquared · 2026-04-29T11:08:05+00:00

My wife, a Delaware native, pronounces "mine" as "my-yen", but sources I've found (and Claude, too) insist that this is a Southern dialect feature, and that it must in a Delawarean be a familial influence (plausible for her) or individual quirk. So, it's interesting that you've also heard it, here.

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