Schill MacGuffin's Comments

It Conquered The World actually has a lot going for it. It's probably Lee Van Cleef's best non-spaghetti western performance, and the plot is fairly intriguing -- Scientist collaborates with alien invader, only to have second thoughts as he realizes it's not as "enlightened" as he'd hoped. It's high on my list of films I'd like to see remade on the "Don't-Remake-Successful-Movies-Remake-Ones-That-Could-Actually-Be-Better" theory, similar to the '80s remakes of The Fly and The Blob.
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I might have done okay at this when I was a kid, in the immediate vicinity of my home, but my awareness of road names has dwindled to near zero. I'd previously noted how annoying it was when radio traffic reports would mention a problem referencing a cross street, and how largely useless that is.
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A parabolic trajectory shouldn't make any difference in terms of net kinetic energy, and therefore damage. It should only matter in terms of how "square" the impact is, and how completely that energy is transferred -- and that should be a fundamental difference between damage from a fall and damage from something hitting you, and in D&D probably shows up somehow in "saving throws".
But I also question the table being capped at a 200lb. object. The energy delivered by a falling object shouldn't be capped at all, and intuitively there should be a difference in the damage from having an anvil dropped on you and having a blue whale dropped on you, even given the limitations of D&D's simple hit point system.
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I don't know about "best" in a broad sense, but the dreaminess of it definitely makes it the best Christmas background music... whether for shopping, peaceful partying, or curling up before the fire.
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At college in the early '80s, I don't recall ever looking at a syllabus. It was all about daily assignments, longer-term projects, and participation. The only exception being a professor who pretty much phoned in the whole course -- He spent the classroom sessions ranting about the crimes of the Reagan administration, until the Final, which he decreed would be our "critique of the books on the syllabus". After a pretty hectic marathon to produce a paper, I was relieved to find that he half-assed the grading of that as much as he had the rest of the semester.
Things may have been a lot more rigorous in the '40s, but I'm skeptical that reading nine opera libretti, on top of some of the most legendary "doorstop" books in literature, would have been particularly vital to grasping Auden's course. That's the sort of thing that created the market for Cliff Notes.
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If the zoom at the end was original to the video, I think it's almost certainly staged (though I'm not sure why the cameraman found it desirable anyway). The cat was likely an unexpected volunteer participant.
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I think Tater Tots are really a particular variety of hash browns -- just pressed into "Tots" rather than into a flat patty or rougher bundle. They're not cylindrically cut solid potato chunks like that diagram implies.
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I'm a little hazy on the nature of the accomplishment here. Once you've set up your supercomputer to start calculating, isn't the number of digits you reach just a matter of how long you leave the machine running? Or, I guess, how much memory you have set up to receive/hold the results?
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In the Philadelphia suburbs, we were blessed with three UHF channels, even back in the '60s. They didn't come in all that clearly, though, depending on the weather and your patience in adjusting the antenna. Philadelphia's PBS station was actually based in Wilmington, DE, though I think they had a broadcast antenna on the Roxborough heights a bit northwest of Philly, like most of our stations did.
Local listings included another PBS station in Allentown, that some of the outlying suburbs might have been able to get reliably. I don't believe I ever tried, since their programming didn't vary all that much from the other one. In the later '70s I believe a couple more UHF stations popped up, and as cable was just getting established in the early '80s, as Philadelphia proper dragged its feet in granting cable franchises, there were even one or two broadcast "scrambler" stations on UHF channels, were you could rent a decoder box to pick up their movie offerings. Those died out quickly once cable was widely available.
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This would have the best imaginable pet potential for a genetically revived species. Who wouldn't love a pet that could help you out in the kitchen or workshop, but wouldn't be as prone to chew your face off as a chimp?
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Profile for Schill MacGuffin

  • Member Since 2014/02/15


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