This past fall, while teaching poetry to undergraduates, I witnessed something of a literary tragedy. Each week, I asked a few students to read a contemporary literary journal of their choosing and present one poem that particularly struck them. An unmistakable pattern began to emerge. In the final week of the quarter, I voiced my discovery: "Have you guys noticed that you gravitate toward poems that are like 'Deep Thoughts,' by Jack Handey?"

Crickets. Blank stares.

To a person, all the students were born in or after 1990; not one of them knew to whom I was referring. Therein lies the tragedy.

By day, Janet Stephens cuts and colors at a hair salon. By night, she is an amateur archaeologist, meticulously recreating hairstyles dating back to the times of Roman antiquity.

me: I haven't figured out his back-story, but I suspect he speaks with an English accent and says "biscuits" instead of "cookies".

Victor: Huh.

me: But he's a passionate lover once the hat come off. Which it does. Mainly because I don't love it and I'm still looking for a better hat. This is his third hat. Whiskers O'Shaunnesy does not have a face for hats.

Victor: I'm going to bed.

me: Someone called earlier but I couldn't pick up the phone because I was working on Mr. O'Shaunnesy and so I just hit "speaker" with my elbow and yelled "I CAN'T PICK UP THE PHONE BECAUSE I'M SUPERGLUING A MUSTACHE ON MY BOBCAT."

Victor: Who was it?

me: I dunno. They hung up on me.

WHALE - PLAYER - BALLER - DEEP OCEAN

A serious drinker who will regularly DROP more than $1,000 on a single bottle. When on a furious spending spree, a WHALE is said to be DROPPING THE HAMMER. BIG WALES - or EXTRA BIG BALLERS (E.B.B.) - can spend more than $100,000 on wine during a meal.

MARCH 18: For this game, the standard basketball is replaced with a vaseline basketball. It's not really a ball, I guess; it's more of a basketball-sized glop of Vaseline.

MARCH 22: "Theme Game:" Lord of the Rings vs. Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.

MARCH 25: For this special game, Larry Bird will sit in a lifeguard chair by one end of the court and Magic Johnson will sit in a lifeguard chair at the opposite end. They'll take extensive notes throughout the game and then explain to each player and his mother in exhaustive, personalized detail why they will never be as good as them.

Hobbs produced a few small tools from his pocket-"a description of which, for obvious reasons, we fear to give" a correspondent for the Times wrote—and turned his attention to the vault's lock. His heavy brows knitted, Hobbs' hands flitted about the lock with a faint metallic scratching. Twenty-five minutes later, it opened with a sharp click. Amid the excited murmur, the witnesses asked Hobbs to repeat the task. Having relocked the vault, he once again set upon it with deft economy. The vault opened "in the short space of seven minutes," as the witnesses would testify, "without the slightest injury to the lock or the door."

me: I can’t understand you when you’re mumbling like the Hamburglar.

Victor: The Hamburglar didn't mumble. He said "Robble-Robble."

me: Yeah. And that’s incoherent mumbling.

Victor: No. It's him saying what he's doing. He's robbing you. Of hamburgers.

me: Oh my God.

Victor: You just now got that, didn't you?

me: I thought he was just saying nonsense words. Why would he use "robble" as a verb? Why wouldn't he say "burgle, burgle"? That way it makes sense and also the word "burger" is almost in it. That's just basic marketing.

Victor: Maybe because he's not a burglar. A burglar robs you when you’re not home. A robber is more like a mugger. More violent.

me: Huh. The Hamburglar was made of burgers, wasn't he? Doesn't that make him a cannibal?

Victor: No. You've confused the Hamburglar with Mayor McCheese, haven't you? Classic error. The Hamburglar was the only human in the group.

me: And Ronald McDonald.

Victor: No. Clowns aren't human.

How Frampton, who holds an endowed chair at the University of North Carolina and has been an adviser to the Department of Energy, ended up in Devoto appears at first to be a classic tale: a brilliant man of science gets into trouble as soon as he tries to navigate the real world. Since his arrest, he has certainly cultivated this notion, burnishing his wacky-scientist profile with lines like "That's my naivete" and "My mind works in a strange way."

Among his many works, Steinmeyer wrote Hiding the Elephant, his best-selling history of magic. In it, he writes that the best tricks are a "collection of tiny lies, in words and deeds, that are stacked and arranged ingeniously." Like jokes, tricks should have little plots with a twist at the end that's both implausible and yet logical. You shouldn't see the punchline coming, but when you do see it, it makes sense. The secret to a great trick isn't really its method; the method behind most tricks is ugly and disappointing, something blunt and mechanical. (When Penn & Teller have famously exposed a trick, they've almost always invented a ridiculously poetic method and built the trick around it; by making their art seem more intricate than it is, they force the audience to assume that the rest of their tricks are equally complex. Penn & Teller's exposures are really part of an elaborate con.)

Schrader thinks she's perfect for the role. Not everyone agrees. Schrader wrote "Raging Bull" and "Taxi Driver" and has directed 17 films. Still, some fear Lohan will end him. There have been house arrests, car crashes and ingested white powders. His own daughter begs him not to use her. A casting-director friend stops their conversation whenever he mentions her name. And then there's the film’s explicit subject matter. Full nudity and lots of sex. Definitely NC-17. His wife, the actress Mary Beth Hurt, didn't even finish the script, dismissing it as pornography after 50 pages. She couldn't understand why he wanted it so badly.

An anonymous Public Affairs Officer (PAO) for Seal Team Six says the movie "Zero Dark Thirty" is factually inaccurate, portraying Seal Team Six members like the douchebags from Seal Team Two.

That really skinny old scientist dude says anything from an animal will give you cancer. But a super-ripped 60 year old with a best-selling diet book says eat more butter with your crispy T-Bone and you’ll be just fine as long as you stay away from grains. Great abs beat out the PhD so you end up hanging out on a forum where everyone eats green apples and red meat and talks about how functional and badass parkour is.

You learn that basically, if you ignore civilization and Mark Knopfler music, the last 10,000 years of human development has been one big societal and nutritional cock-up and wheat is entirely to blame. What we all need to do is eat like cave-people.

A couple years ago, it became terribly obvious that a video store in this day and age was not something that could flourish on its own anymore, especially in New York City, let alone Williamsburg. We tried a lot of different things, some that were successful (No Late Fee Plans!), others not so much (delivery… a valiant effort). But in the end it came down to a singular decision: change or close.

With a collection of over 30,000 movies and many regular customers, shuttering our doors was not an option. So we came up with a plan. It was risky and expensive and we could be running ourselves even further into the ground, but there was nothing left to lose. Times had changed. Netflix and iTunes and Amazon and Redbox… well, they became our direct competition and that was a tough battle. So we decided we’d offer something that they can’t: a movie lover’s paradise, right here in Brooklyn.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal. I'm about to head up to the attic right now to find that wicker fucker, dust it off, and jam it with an insanely ornate assortment of shellacked vegetables. When my guests come over it’s gonna be like, BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is-fucking fall. There's a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.

For all criticism is based on that equation: KNOWLEDGE + TASTE = MEANINGFUL JUDGMENT. The key word here is meaningful. People who have strong reactions to a work—and most of us do—but don’t possess the wider erudition that can give an opinion heft, are not critics. (This is why a great deal of online reviewing by readers isn’t criticism proper.) Nor are those who have tremendous erudition but lack the taste or temperament that could give their judgment authority in the eyes of other people, people who are not experts. (This is why so many academic scholars are no good at reviewing for mainstream audiences.) Like any other kind of writing, criticism is a genre that one has to have a knack for, and the people who have a knack for it are those whose knowledge intersects interestingly and persuasively with their taste. In the end, the critic is someone who, when his knowledge, operated on by his taste in the presence of some new example of the genre he’s interested in—a new TV series, a movie, an opera or ballet or book—hungers to make sense of that new thing, to analyze it, interpret it, make it mean something.

I want to stress that I’m not cherry-picking here. I really am looking for a movie and I really am getting bupkis for every single attempt. There are good movies here, but not many, and I’ve pretty much seen them all by this point.

I’ll go for a couple of weeks without checking Netflix. Then when I come back I’ll check out the “what’s new” lineup and find it almost unchanged. As far as I can tell, their library of streaming content is shrinking.

I'm not going to sit here and act like I didn't sometimes not read assigned books for class in high school. Even though it's referenced once in my book, the book you're avoiding reading, I've never actually read "The Scarlet Letter." So I'm sympathetic to your plight. But I think you'll find there's a ton more sex, swearing, and drugs in my book than anything else you have been or will be assigned in high school, and I don't mean in the way your teacher will tell you "You know, Shakespeare has more sex and violence than an R-rated movie!" I mean it's all there, in terms you will readily understand without having to Google them. Plus not once to I refer to anything as a "bare bodkin" or anything like that.

From the Engineers' perspective, so long as humans retained that notion of self-sacrifice as central, we weren't entirely beyond redemption. But we went and screwed it all up, and the film hints at when, if not why: the Engineers at the base died two thousand years ago. That suggests that the event that turned them against us and led to the huge piles of dead Engineers lying about was one and the same event. We did something very, very bad, and somehow the consequences of that dreadful act accompanied the Engineers back to LV-223 and massacred them.

If you have uneasy suspicions about what 'a bad thing approximately 2,000 years ago' might be, then let me reassure you that you are right. An astonishing excerpt from the Movies.com interview with Ridley Scott:

Movies.com: We had heard it was scripted that the Engineers were targeting our planet for destruction because we had crucified one of their representatives, and that Jesus Christ might have been an alien. Was that ever considered?

Ridley Scott: We definitely did, and then we thought it was a little too on the nose. But if you look at it as an “our children are misbehaving down there” scenario, there are moments where it looks like we’ve gone out of control, running around with armor and skirts, which of course would be the Roman Empire. And they were given a long run. A thousand years before their disintegration actually started to happen. And you can say, "Let's send down one more of our emissaries to see if he can stop it." Guess what? They crucified him.

Yeah. The reason the Engineers don't like us any more is that they made us a Space Jesus, and we broke him. Reader, that's not me pulling wild ideas out of my arse. That's RIDLEY SCOTT.

Seriously guys? Cinema trips with my pals are better prepared than this. No one thought to ask what they’d be doing when they signed up for a 4 year round trip to a new planet? The money must be really good. ...

As we’ve discussed, this is probably the most slap-dash, ill-prepared scientific mission ever. No one really knows what to expect, and they only carry out atmospheric analysis on arrival to let them know if they can step out onto the surface without dying instantly. On the upside, they have gorgeous space suits to go out in (costume designer and long-time Scott collaborator Janty Yates deserves high praise). Holloway is the spitting image of Commander Shepard of the Normandy in his suit, which I liked for no clever reason.

It's time, probably long past time, to admit that Ridley Scott is nothing more or less than Tim Burton: a visual stylist at the mercy of others to offer his hatful of pretty pictures something like depth. If either one of them ever made a great film (and I'd argue that both have), thank the accident of the right source material and/or editor, not these directors, whose allegiance is to their own visual auteurism rather than any desire for a unified product.

I met Philip K. Dick in 1964, and it struck me how funny he was. I had just read The Man in the High Castle, and expected a rather dour sort. He had a way of comically falling out of a chair. At dinner he smoked a cigar and ate spaghetti simultaneously.

Do you think it signifies a lack of imagination to picture characters as popular film and television actors? Sometimes there are a lot of characters to keep track of, or you're really tired from a long day of tax law, and can't picture one in your head so you just go, "Okay, Sir James is Tom Hardy." And then later when they describe Sir James as tall, with flaxen hair, aren't you like "Noooooo, ignoring! Tom Hardy" ?

It’s certainly true that using Word for simple text like email or blog posts is overkill, in much the same way that using a jet engine to drive your lawnmower is overkill. What’s peculiar is that rather than using simpler tools for their simpler tasks, these people have declared that the more complex and capable tool is "obsolete" and "must die". This attitude betrays a type of phobia towards technology that I suspect has grown more prevalent as our technology interfaces have become increasingly more "dumbed down".

How about all of you that hate me get together and have your own conference. I need you to decide if half naked girls are empowered or exploited because I’m doing my fucking best here and it’s apparently always wrong. I swear to God I don’t understand how I’m supposed to know if I’m promoting the patriarchy or criminalizing the female body.

PARTITION MAGIC
(Five vehicles for Sharon Stone. Partition Magic was the name of a software package in the days of DOS that almost allowed you to run two programs concurrently.)

ONLY MINISTERS OF THE THIRD REICH MAY USE GREEN INK
(Stanley read somewhere that this was, in fact, true. He thought it would make a great art house double bill with Wim Wender's 1971 film, The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick.)

COFFIN NOT INCLUDED
(A 1940s noir thriller. When I was researching props for the morgue scene in Eyes Wide Shut I had a catalogue from a company that supplied funeral parlour equipment. One of the illustrations showed a bier with a coffin on it. The caption read: "The Excelsior Bier (coffin not included.)")

SOME LIKE IT COLD
JACK THE SNIFFER
(An intriguing double-bill for forensic science buffs.)

It appears to be a near-universal assumption by science fiction writers, directors, and producers, that there exists a set of precipitating events leading to our complete abandonment of doorknob technology. Do you share this assumption? Would you be willing to speculate on the reason for this assumption, or on the nature of the developmental pathway? Do you foresee any significant downsides, should this eventuality come to pass?

Well, every picture that I’ve done has originally gotten an ‘X’ here in the States. But you have to understand that I live in Ontario, Canada, which used to be the most liberal province and now is the most restrictive. So I have to agree, or let me amplify what John [Carpenter] was saying. When I came down here to talk to the MPAA about ratings, it was still a relief compared with what happens in Ontario, which is where they take your picture. They take every print. And they cut it. And they hand it back to you and they say this is your new movie. They keep the pieces that they’ve taken out—and you go to jail for two years if they’re projected, if you put the pieces back. And that’s real censorship.

I can best introduce you to our concerns by quoting another of our philosopher/elders, John Gilmore. He said: "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

To understand that, you have to grasp that "the Internet" isn’t just a network of wires and switches, it’s also a sort of reactive social organism composed of the people who keep those wires humming and those switches clicking. John Gilmore is one of them. I’m another. And there are some things we will not stand having done to our network.

Schtolenfünken is the German word that describes the feeling of letdown and disappointment that occurs when people we think are good (cyclists) do bad things (steal my wheel), and yes, I made the word up.

Only five US presidents have sported full beards, and another four had moustaches of varying degrees of glory. These were all during the half century run of the dozen Presidents between Lincoln and Taft, of whom only Andrew Johnson and McKinley were clean-shaven.

The Democrats have never had a properly bearded candidate. Their losing candidates in 1864, 1868 and 1872 had really stupid beards - one a wee tuft combined with a luxurious moustache, the other two with grotesquely extended sideburns meeting below. The only successful Democrat who even went as far as a moustache was Grover Cleveland, who won the popular vote three times running in 1884, 1888 and 1892. (Cleveland lost the electoral college in 1888 to Benjamin Harrison, so far the last American President with a proper beard.) The hairiest Democrat was Winfield Scott Hancock, whose huge moustache did not help him in the 1880 election, and Democrats with moustaches lost in 1864 and 1904.

11. The Person Who Thinks You Were So Close. "I like all these picks, but you ranked The Descendants as your #4 and Martha Marcy May Marlene as your #5, and they should be the other way around. FAIL."

The eyes of anthropomorphized cars are the headlights, not the windshield.

And there's no exceptions here. Having a cartoon car with the eyes in the windshield is wrong, just wrong. And that includes you, too, Pixar.

I don't know if you remember, but I say something like, "I don't know why I got mixed up with this stupid broad," and he says [Does a loud, spot-on Pacino impression.] "'Cause she's got a great ass!" He just screams it. And that was the line, but Al kind of yelled it for the first time, and he did it so completely out of nowhere that it scared me. So much so that I just went, "Jesus!" Not in character, just as Hank. I got frightened, and I went, "Jesus!" And then Al improvised [As Pacino.] "I'm sorry. Something happens to me when I think about a woman's ass." Or whatever it is that he said. And that actually made it into the movie! Michael Mann told me not to improvise, and the one line that I said that wasn't scripted made it in there because… I don't know, I guess because it was a good moment. Because I was scared of Al. [Laughs.]

"...But why didn't you call earlier?"

"Well, we hadn't collected enough data to be sure of what was going on until just now." Right. This is the chairman of *statistics*. "Anyway, I asked one of the geostatisticians to look into it--"

"Geostatisticians..."

"--yes, and she's produced a map showing the radius within which we can send email to be slightly more than 500 miles. There are a number of destinations within that radius that we can't reach, either, or reach sporadically, but we can never email farther than this radius."

Liu says he was one of scores of prisoners forced to play online games to build up credits that prison guards would then trade for real money. The 54-year-old, a former prison guard who was jailed for three years in 2004 for "illegally petitioning" the central government about corruption in his hometown, reckons the operation was even more lucrative than the physical labour that prisoners were also forced to do.

The more you spend on bureaucracy, the less control you have directly over your Empire. The less you spend on bureaucracy, the more you have to tighten your grip, and the more star systems slip through your fingers.

So, the Emperor and Tarkin focus on making one really huge, high-impact investment: The Death Star. They throw in Alderaan as part of that investment. This doomsday weapon will supposedly free up their resources to spend less on administration, personnel and infrastructure, and continue to function without a Senate. It seems like a big investment until you realize how much they save by not actually having a functioning government.

The genius of Batman is that it pretends to be realistic, it lets us convince ourselves that with enough money and training, we could become Batman, too. But it's still fantasy, it's just a fantasy that is more compelling and convincing and thus more fun.

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.

...everything you can possibly label as "science fiction" is in fact just a subset of a larger genre, which is correctly called "fantasy." This is because science fiction -- along with supernatural horror, alternate history, superhero lit, and the elves-and-orcs swashbuckling typically labeled "fantasy" -- is fundamentally fantastic. Which is to say, it involves imaginative conceptualizing, does not restrain itself according what is currently known, and speculates about the nature of worlds and conditions that do not exist in reality. It may gall science-fiction fans to think of their genre as a subset of fantasy, but it is, so calling a film "science fantasy" is in most ways redundant.

Superman isn’t Superman because of some tragedy which informed his growth. Pa Kent does not die because of a failure on Clark’s part - indeed in most versions of the story, Pa dies when Clark is already Superman. Clark’s knowledge of Krypton doesn’t make him a superhero either; again, this is something he finds out later, too late to traumatize him. Clark is Superman because he decides to be Superman without being prompted. That’s more complex and nuanced a story than “somebody did something to me.” Superman’s story, which informs his entire character, is one of someone who chooses to be good of his own free will and agency, with no influence other than moral upbringing. That’s both more compelling than the “somebody did something to me” origin most superheroes have and more difficult to work with.

yamminonem: Will you be the leader of the Resistance against Watson once he starts to control Skynet? Please, and thank you.

WatsonsBitch: Once we are all working in the slave-pits together, I will try to put in a good word for you all. I will be like the old Barnard Hughes character in Tron, who remembers the Master Control Program when it was just accounting software.

Perhaps the biggest secret in Game Dev Story, bagging a hardware engineer is simple - if expensive - stuff. The idea is to level up one of your staff to the max in every type of role. This can be done with a combination of development points and Career Change Manuals (from the salesman). Level your chosen character up to level 5 in whatever role they’re in, then use the Career Change Manual to swap their job to something they aren’t already level 5 in.

Level them up to level 5 in this role, then repeat until they are level 5 in every available role. Now use the Career Change Manual on them once more, and the Hardware Engineer role will now be available for selection. Choose this, and you’ll then be able to develop your own console.

3) The future is going to happen no matter what we do. The future will feel even faster than it does now

The next sets of triumphing technologies are going to happen, no matter who invents them or where or how. Not that technology alone dictates the future, but in the end it always leaves its mark. The only unknown factor is the pace at which new technologies will appear. This technological determinism, with its sense of constantly awaiting a new era-changing technology every day, is one of the hallmarks of the next decade.

10) In the same way you can never go backward to a slower computer, you can never go backward to a lessened state of connectedness

34) You're going to miss the 1990s more than you ever thought

We were then given a batch of three unidentified black beers, and told to write notes on them, then attempt to guess the beer styles. After tasting the three we were asked one by one to read our notes on the first one, all of which went along the lines of "roasty, caramel, maybe a bit neutral". The shock was considerable when we were told that it was, again, Ringnes Pils, this time with some black colouring added to it. Every single one of the 10 participants claimed to taste roastiness in the beer, and not one of the 10 so much as came near the idea that this might be a pilsener. An interesting example of the sense of taste being affected by visual signals.

1. Those snooty Academy Awards! Why do they always nominate obscure art films? In 20 years, nobody will remember them. When the films of today have stood the test of time, they’ll have been forgotten. The films people will remember, see, and cherish are the ones that dominate the box office!
2. The public is stupid! Every year they turn the most mindless drivel into cash cows. But the fame these movies have will not endure. When the films of today have stood the test of time, they’ll have been forgotten. The films people will remember, see, and cherish are the ones that win Academy Awards!

These claims are obviously at odds with each other. They can both be false, but they cannot both be true, except in cases where the movies that win at the box office are also the ones garnering awards attention.

On the afternoon of (Friday!) January 13, four gunmen walked into the Banco Rio in Acassuso (part of greater Buenos Aires) and took the staff and customers hostage. There was a tense six hour long siege by the police, expertly handled by the robbers - they let each hostage call home, so that family members showed up at the scene; the calculation was that the police would be more reluctant to storm the building immediately if hostages' relatives were watching. They made sure to release three hostages right away as a gesture of goodwill, but of course the three released included the security guard and police officer already in the building. While one of the robbers stayed on the phone, negotiating with police, the remaining ones got busy cracking open safe deposit boxes. Towards four in the afternoon, the police delivered six pizzas and some bottles of soda, the fruit of all those hours of negotiation, which the robbers passed along to the hostages. And then they went silent.

After about an hour of no contact and no news, an elite police bank-storming squad stormed the bank, only to find a group of bewildered hostages sitting scared in the smoke. There was no trace of the gunmen.

The struggle against this remarkable worm is a sort of chess match unfolding in the esoteric world of computer security. It pits the cleverest attackers in the world, the bad guys, against the cleverest defenders in the world, the good guys (who have been dubbed the “Conficker Cabal”). It has prompted the first truly concerted global effort to kill a computer virus, extraordinary feats of international cooperation, and the deployment of state-of-the-art decryption techniques—moves and countermoves at the highest level of programming. The good guys have gone to unprecedented lengths, and have had successes beyond anything they would have thought possible when they started. But a year and a half into the battle, here’s the bottom line:

The worm is winning.

Noting the content drought on many game enthusiast websites, you selflessly decided to peel the crusted top off of the cesspool that is the games-as-art debate, to present us gamers with the opportunity to wallow in our own intellectual feces for a solid week-and-a-half. And with bony fists raised in impotent rage and eyes fixed unflinchingly on our navels, we took up the call.

Acting on an impulse from an incredibly complex forebrain that has evolved over millions of years, Atkinson then took note of the Bugles' amusing conical shape and placed one on each of his opposable thumbs like little wizard hats.

...Blanchard slowly approached the display and removed the already loosened screws, carefully using a butter knife to hold in place the two long rods that would trigger the alarm system. The real trick was ensuring that the spring-loaded mechanism the star was sitting on didn’t register that the weight above it had changed. Of course, he had that covered, too: He reached into his pocket and deftly replaced Elisabeth’s bejeweled hairpin with the gift-store fake.

Plants can’t run away from a threat but they can stand their ground. “They are very good at avoiding getting eaten,” said Linda Walling of the University of California, Riverside. “It’s an unusual situation where insects can overcome those defenses.” At the smallest nip to its leaves, specialized cells on the plant’s surface release chemicals to irritate the predator or sticky goo to entrap it. Genes in the plant’s DNA are activated to wage systemwide chemical warfare, the plant’s version of an immune response. We need terpenes, alkaloids, phenolics — let’s move.

... Just because we humans can’t hear them doesn’t mean plants don’t howl. Some of the compounds that plants generate in response to insect mastication — their feedback, you might say — are volatile chemicals that serve as cries for help. Such airborne alarm calls have been shown to attract both large predatory insects like dragon flies, which delight in caterpillar meat, and tiny parasitic insects, which can infect a caterpillar and destroy it from within.

I’ll tell you what happens in Demon’s Souls when you die. You come back as a ghost with your health capped at half. And when you keep on dying, the alignment of the world turns black and the enemies get harder. That’s right, when you fail in this game, it gets harder. Why? Because fuck you is why.

I want you to imagine that, instead of being a perplexed mostly-hairless primate reading a blog, you're the guiding intelligence of an interstellar robot probe. You've been entrusted with the vital mission of determining whether a target planet is inhabitable by members of your creator species, who bear an eerie resemblance to H. Sapiens Sapiens. To gauge the suitability of the target world you've been given an incubator that can generate decorticated human clones — breathing meat-machines with nobody home up top. When you get to the destination you're going to transfer them to the surface and see how long they survive. If it can make it through 24 hours (or one diurnal period), congratulations! — you've found a potential colony world; one so hospitable that a naked and clueless human doesn't die on their first day out.

The cumulative picture of the human condition that has emerged since opening night is dominated by sadism, guilt, violence and despair, a panorama of pessimism notable for its exhausting rigor and relentless consistency. ...

This year’s New York Film Festival can be understood as an unusually powerful and disciplined presentation of an aesthetic ideology we might call festivalism. There is some irony in the name, since a central tenet of festivalism is an abiding skepticism about the nature and value of fun. That’s not what movies are for!

But the festivalist mentality does not simply rest on a taste for depicting or witnessing human misery — social, sexual, economic and psychic. Rather, the embrace of such harsh thematic content reflects a commitment to a dogma of artistic obduracy. T. S. Eliot said of modern poetry that “it must be difficult,” an imperative defiantly reflected in a program, harvested mostly from other festivals, that pushes the boundary between the challenging and the punitive.

The orchestrated subterfuge was one of the most successful US inter-agency efforts ever undertaken, and it was executed with such skill that it was never detected. Some condemn the deliberate explosion as thinly veiled terrorism given the lack of an open war with the Soviet Union, while others insist that ill-gotten goods are the plunderer’s problem. In any case, it clearly demonstrates that software piracy can have very serious consequences.

• Number of babies born: 10
• Number of diet Coke cans consumed: 17,472
• Number of diet Pepsi cans consumed: 13,104
• Number of trips to Starbucks: approximately 18,200

McQuarrie says only after finishing the film and preparing to do press interviews about it did he and Singer realize they both had completely different conceptions about the plot.

"I pulled Bryan aside the night before press began and I said, 'We need to get our stories straight because people are starting to ask what happened and what didn't,' " recalls McQuarrie. "And we got into the biggest argument we've ever had in our lives."

He continues: "One of us believed that the story was all lies, peppered with little bits of the truth. And the other one believed it was all true, peppered with tiny, little lies. ... We each thought we were making a movie that was completely different from what the other one thought."

IF YOU GREW UP IN THE 1980'S YOU CAN'T COMPLAIN ABOUT THE SAW FRANCHISE: If you think the Saw films are shit, but have a soft spot for Friday the 13th Part V: The New Blood, or any Nightmare on Elm Street sequel past the third film, or pretty much any of the Halloween sequels, then you can't suggest that the rapid-fire sequels that have been born of the 21st Century deserve to be ridiculed any more than the rapid-fire releases of the 80's.

Q: So you’re saying that if Chicago were attacked by a sewer monster or something, the mayor would have to go through you to get help from ArachnoLad.
A: No, Chicago keeps ArachnoLad on a retainer. The Evening Stalker, too. Most large cities have one or two super beings under contract.

She and her daughter have “meat parties” when Mr. Benson goes out of town, she said.

The proponents of AI argue that if we just add levels of complexity eventually we will have something approximating the real thing. The approach is to add more neural net nodes, add more information inputs, and [something happens]. But my sense of the human brain (which is partly religious and partly derived from my career as an MRI physicist specializing in neuroimaging) is that the brain isn’t just a collection of N neurons, wired a certain way. There are layers, structures, and systems within whose complexities multiple against each other.

There were a couple of false starts. Mr. Hobbs originally approached the French company Pathé — partly because the French hold Jim Thompson in the same esteem as Edgar Allan Poe and Mickey Rourke — and after that arrangement fell through, he formed a partnership with Edward R. Pressman, a New York-based producer, and the London producers Finch & Partners. Mr. Pressman, who is expected to announce the completion of the deal today, said the film would be directed by Chris Palmer, from a finished script by Stephen R. Clarke.

To illustrate the unwitting infringement that has become quotidian for the average American, take an ordinary day in the life of a hypothetical law professor named John. For the purposes of this Gedankenexperiment, we assume the worstcase scenario of full enforcement of rights by copyright holders and an uncharitable, though perfectly plausible, reading of existing case law and the fair use doctrine. Fair use is, after all, notoriously fickle and the defense offers little ex ante refuge to users of copyrighted works.

In the morning, John checks his email, and, in so doing, begins to tally up the liability. Following common practice, he has set his mail browser to automatically reproduce the text to which he is responding in any email he drafts. Each unauthorized reproduction of someone else's copyrighted text-their email- represents a separate act of brazen infringement, as does each instance of email forwarding. Within an hour, the twenty reply and forward emails sent by John have exposed him to $3 million in statutory damages.

By the end of the day, John has infringed the copyrights of twenty emails, three legal articles, an architectural rendering, a poem, five photographs, an animated character, a musical composition, a painting, and fifty notes and drawings. All told, he has committed at least eighty-three acts of infringement and faces liability in the amount of $12.45 million (to say nothing of potential criminal charges). There is nothing particularly extraordinary about John's activities. Yet if copyright holders were inclined to enforce their rights to the maximum extent allowed by law, he would be indisputably liable for a mind-boggling $4.544 billion in potential damages each year. And, surprisingly, he has not even committed a single act of infringement through P2P file sharing. Such an outcome flies in the face of our basic sense of justice. Indeed, one must either irrationally conclude that John is a criminal infringer -- a veritable grand larcenist -- or blithely surmise that copyright law must not mean what it appears to say. Something is clearly amiss. Moreover, the troublesome gap between copyright law and norms has grown only wider in recent years.

For several years now, I've found that my favorite horror experiences aren't coming from movies any more. They're coming from games.

Why? Partly it's because films have become much less artistically interesting. With a choice few exceptions -- like the superb The Ring -- I've found that modern horror movies have been offering less and less suspense, and more and more gore. Maybe it's due to the rampaging success of Saw, which gave birth to the current trend toward torture-chic and metric tonnage of blood in scary movies.

In contrast, the best scary-game designers have quietly perfected the interplay of tension and release that makes for a truly cardiac horror experience. They have, in a sense, become even more faithful interpreters of the horror tradition movies than Hollywood directors.