PNQ: When did the exclamation point become standard usage for denoting different versions of a person? Like, when John Doe meets his older self, you suddenly see Old!John and Young!John?

I think, like many of the most recent advancements in the language of fiction, it came out of fan fiction communities on LiveJournal and FanFiction.net. It survived because it was successful.

I only heard about it earlier this year, but it seems to have been in common use for perhaps two or three years.

DISCLAIMER: IANA Linguist.

I remember seeing the exclamation point used as much as five years ago (possibly longer) in the TBBS Enterprise forum among the Reed-Ragers and Tuckerites. Evil!Reed sticks in memory, but I know there were other examples. Whether this constituted standard usage at the time I can't say.

So sfdebris is reviewing Red Dwarf. Aside from "smeg", I knew nothing about it.

PNQ: What is the allure of this show? A grunt, a copy of a pretentious peon, a cat that can talk, and a computer trapped aboard a starship three million years in the future?

I can understand British scifi/comedy, that's why I love The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But this stuff is just too much.

Am I missing something here?

Yes.

The hilarity.

It's a seriously funny show. So long as you're watching the original, anyway. Give it a chance. If you like HHGttG, you'll probably like Red Dwarf.

I can understand not listing hidden tracks on the back of a CD case, but WHY can't the information be part of the file's metadata for iTunes purposes? Why "unknown" or whatever?

Disney bought Marvel?

PNQ: What? Just...what?

For complicated reasons I was reading some lists of those movies considered the best of all time.

PNQ: What's with Citizen Kane? Whether or not it's a good movie is a discussion for another time; I'm just debating it's position as one of the best of all time. Have any of you ever watched the thing for entertainment? Or did you watch it for scholarly reasons?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_Tower

PNQ: They renamed the Sears Tower? What? I kinda thought that this building had achieved enough notoriety to have an immutable name!

Scholarly. And frankly I didn't get it and didn't really enjoy it. I think Citizen Kane is one of those movies which is famous more for being a First than for being a good film. I am not a film student, but Wikipedia has an overview of why the movie is considered "important" in film-making terms. The problem for modern viewers is that everyone after Welles borrowed all his tricks, so when we come to see CK after years of seeing his methods used as standard MO everywhere else, unless we know what to look for, all we see is a standard movie with a not-particularly-interesting plot.

Other examples of Firsts would be the kinds of films or TV shows which launched genres: "An American Family" plus The Truman Show and "Survivor" were the predecessors of voyeuristic reality TV. Halloween and Friday the 13th begat legions of mostly mindless horror flicks. Our own beloved "Star Trek" was one of the first TV series to treat scifi as intelligent adult drama rather than the kiddie-level "Flash Gordon" tripe from the '50s. I think "Hill Street Blues" was the first police procedural, IIRC. Again, whether any of these examples stand up to being "good" entertainment years later is in the eye of the beholder; I'm saying that these were the important, ground-breaking works. A different kind of First would be Pulp Fiction and Sixth Sense, as I would argue that those two movies have the added layer of being great First films for a director or writer who then can't come up with any other directing (Tarantino) or storytelling (Shyalaman) gimmicks and so keeps doing the same thing with every new movie.

So whether CK deserves the "best film of all time" label is dependent on what your definition of "best" is. Broke new ground? Categorically. Revolutionized the art form? Quite possibly. Engaging to watch a century later? Your mileage may vary.

So I just saw the pilot of Stargate: Universe on Hulu...

PNQ: Is anybody else annoyed by this "you have to start off with a bang, then use flashbacks to show how people got here" thing?

I like events to occur in their proper order, except when necessary for exposition. If there is no valid reason to shuffle events out of order, I hate to see it. As simple as that.

P.S. Aside from that, I'm excited about Universe. Sure, I would've liked another season or two of SG-1 to finish the Ori storyline properly, and the cancellation of Atlantis ticks me off greatly. Well, any Stargate is better than none, right?

So once again I see a YouTube video with the annotation "all negative comments will be deleted."

PNQ1: Does anyone else think that posting this is grounds for deletion of the video? If you can't handle criticism you should NOT post the video!

After all, one of the guiding principles of democratic countries is freedom of speech, right? As long as you're not making threats or making judgments based on race/religion/gender/etc. everything should be allowed.

PNQ2: And a lot of these videos really are of low quality! Why bother posting something that you know will garner a negative response? Why torture yourself like that?

Forget it...

Not much, but if I kept seeing it be done over and over again, I expect that it would get old fast.


Well, some people are really sensitive to criticism or just overly defensive in general, I guess. I agree, you should be able to take that, but it's YouTube's site and they have decided to allow people this much latitude in handling their uploaded videos, and they have that right. *shrug*

And KJ just brought up the point that they may not be warning off negative comments in general, but senseless flaming in particular. Insipid little bits like "this iz dum" really aren't much good to anyone anyway.

(I should probably say something about that here, shouldn't I?)

Anyway, this brings up a PNQ: How much server space would it save YouTube if all those ridiculous "chain letter" comments suddenly disappeared entirely?

You know, it occurs to me that some of these people may be uploading it to show a particular group of friends, not to show the world in general (although if they actively wanted the world in general to not see it, they wouldn't put it on YouTube). If I did that, it would certainly annoy me if random strangers kept stumbling upon it and leaving derogatory comments. I'd feel like "This isn't for you in the first place, so why do you care?"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Mickey

So there's a new Disney game coming out. I'm kinda proud that I remembered that the sorcerer from Fantasia was named Yen Sid, the existence of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, the Phantom Blot, and so forth.

PNQ: Opinions? Fresh new take, or horrible abomination?

From a review of And Another Thing (AKA Hitchhiker's Guide 6):

"'Frood' isn't a verb! Zark is spelled with a lower-case z! Did this guy even read the first five books?"

PNQ: Are these allegations valid? 'Cause if so, this guy needed to do more research before writing a Hitchhiker's Guide book. I don't expect a 100% fit, even Frank Baum had to tweak the rules of Oz as the sequels were written, but "frood" and "zark" are simple enough to be considered immutable and very easy to use properly.

Well, I only recall "frood" being used as a noun, and I think "froody" as an adjective. But hey, technically, fish aren't designed to go in your ear, either. *shrug*

The point is that certain grammatical rules were set up by Douglas Adams for radio/TV/books, etc. and were followed consistently. These rules exist and there is no reason for this guy to change them without appearing either presumptive or negligent.

So RandomGuy has made another video to promote a comic book convention, and Marvel is maintaining their policy of asking him to not use action figures based on the movies for these convention videos. And it appears that you can't used DC figures for these either.

PNQ: What's the logic?

Both Marvel and DC know of RandomGuy and the Marvel guys at least like them. They could sue, yet they don't. What is the point of saying "you can use our characters for convention videos, but you can't use the movie versions"? Seriously, PLEASE explain this logic to me!

Every single time RandomGuy posts one of these videos he has to say "no, we're not changing our action figures, Marvel asked us to not use the movie versions for convention videos." Every. Single. Time. Doesn't this create animosity toward Marvel?

Current iPod Classics can hold 160 GB.

PNQ: Does anyone actually have 160 gig of stuff that you have the need to carry around with you? Does anyone really take the bus/train/plane enough to sit down and play all that media? When do you find the time to use it?