An idea that’s been bouncing around for a while: The Borg are farming the Federation. That is, the reason why they keep sending attacks that the Federation can* just barely *fight off instead of sending a dozen or hundred Cubes is that they are deliberately prodding the Federation to develop new ideas and technology that the Borg can assimilate for themselves.
Another Trek one: The Federation is “save scumming”. The reason why it has so many close calls, lucky breaks and narrow escapes from destruction is whenever they suffer a large enough disaster Section 31 or a similar secret organization uses time travel to change history so they survive. They do so subtly, from behind the scenes so it looks like events just worked out that way.
The Superboy-caused accident that made Lex Luthor lose his hair boosted his IQ from high-end genius to mega-super genius. It also turned him evil. Seriously what would the odds be that the world’s greatest super-hero and the world’s preeminent evil scientist went to high school together.
I’ve often thought that Pulp Fiction is, at least in part, a morality tale. Jules heeds the miracle he witnessed and, presumably, goes on to live a long life. Vincent, the disbeliever, dies. Marvin is the Doubting Thomas. And also dies.
—The “Arnie” T-800 Model 101’s appearance is based off of…Alan “Dutch” Schaefer.
The man not only had an appropriate build for the chassis of a combat Terminator, but there would likely have been extensive physical examination data (including blood/tissue samples), along with photographs and audio records, after his debriefing (and possibly decontamination) following the incident with the Predator and it’s mini-nuke.
All of which would have been locked away in the deep, dark recesses of the US government’s records…where Skynet would have been able to get at them in the years after Judgement Day, and when it was researching ways to upgrade from crude, rubber-skinned Terminators to full on human-passing cyborgs.
—The in-universe reason Mutants and the X-Men aren’t in the Marvel Cinematic Universe? They used to be—but something akin to the comics’ “Avengers Disassembled” and “House of M” storyline happened, and a half-crazed Scarlet Witch magically banished them from the universe.
Skynet/Judgement Day is inevitable; it’s part-and-parcel of our computer system’s architecture since the transistor was first invented.
Each iteration of Skynet (Terminator, T2, etc) is more powerful/capable than the last, because the actions of the Connors only delays Skynet in each timeline-shift, and thus, when Skynet finally “gains consciousness” it’s a more advanced system than in the previous timeline.
The Koensayr Y-Wing is not the slow, lumbering death-trap the Star Wars EU has made it out to be. The impetus behind this seems to be how quickly the Imperials caught up to Gold Flight on the first Death Star Trench Run, as compared to Red Flight and Luke’s Flight.
This assumes that the Y-Wings were going “full-throttle,” when as multi-role attack fighters, they were probably flying at “optimal speed” for their (very difficult) target profile.
You’re not American are you? Such a young country!
You see over here in England we have a couple of thousand years of recorded history. And lots of it featured men on horseback fighting with swords…
Some highlights:
55BC Julius Caesar invades England for the first time
122 Hadrian’s Wall is built (uncannily forseeing President Tr*mp :eek:)
597 Kings School, Canterbury founded
731 The Venerable Bede completes his ‘Ecclesiastical History of the English People’
880-890 Alfred the Great issues a Law Code
1066 Tower of London built
1086 The Domesday Book published (massive survey of England for tax purposes)
1096 First Crusade (featuring men on horseback fighting with swords)
1135 Civil War in England (just like Game of Thrones!)
1167 Oxford University
1215 Magna Carta signed (Barons restrict King’s power)
I could go on, but you get the idea.
Actually I must mention one more:
1415 Battle of Agincourt (English Longbowmen slaughter French Nobles who were on horseback fighting with swords)
Han mentions the Kessel Run and parsecs to see if Ben and Luke had any idea what he meant. When they didn’t appear to, he decided to charge the rubes enough to pay off his debt without knowing that they were being overcharged.
At that, consider SPIDER-MAN 2: Alfred Molina shows the fragile little inhibitor chip keeping his robot arms’ AI from running amuck. And, in his attempt to build a clean energy source for the world, Something Goes Wrong: the chip is skewered by a slim piece of metal, and he becomes the puppet of the robot arms.
Who could’ve seen that coming?
Anyone. Anyone could’ve. It’s obvious and stupid and needs a fanwank. And mine is, that delicate little chip was designed to get broken: signals go through it, from his brain to the arms and vice versa; so, if Something Goes Wrong and it shatters with a merry little tinkling sound – well, that’s the whole idea: if no signals go through it, then the arms will just loosely dangle. It works by breaking.
So the somewhat less foreseeable outcome is that it’ll be severed by a slim bit of metal that can conduct electrical signals – which, I freely grant, still makes this a bad plan; but at least it’s not an insanely bad plan, is my point.
You have to remember that the studio system was firmly in place at the time. In fact, Warner Brothers tried to get the guy who played the Big Bad Wolf for Disney to pair with Sam Sheepdog. Walt refused to lend him out, so they went with someone they already had under contract.
I really think the Wolf-and-Sheepdog films are some of his finest work as an actor. He’s totally convincing as a wolf, but the change to his appearance is very subtle; just some nose makeup and contact lenses. the rest is all in his performance.
It’s this kind of thing that led Steven Matuchek to leave Hollywood and go into engineering; he was under contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Merlin as I recall, but it was just as hard to get them to release an actor to other studios.
Well done. That’s true the world over, more or less. Also, the APPEARANCE of very rapid progress in some places and times, has been misleading as well. One of the myths of American Ascendancy, is that it was the result of how intrinsically wonderful our version of capitalism is. But actually, from 1600 or so, until the first half of the twentieth century, we were catching up to where Europe had been for quite some time. And we accomplished a lot of it, not by Americans thinking up stuff, but by stealing the people and the technology of the rest of the world, just as China is doing now.
In Pixar’s Ratatouille, rats haven’t always been intelligent. In fact, they’ve only been around since the early 1980s, when escaped rats from a secret government lab in America got into the wild and started interbreeding with regular rats. By the early 21st century, these “smart rats” had displaced normal rat populations world wide, (including France) but, being smart, had successfully hidden their existence from most humans.
The name of the “secret” government lab the original smart rats escaped from? National Institute of Mental Health.
