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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • The correct answer is District 9.

    However, I find I’m often disappointed by sequels to great movies. I feel like there are far more mediocre movies that failed to fully explore the depths of a good concept, where a sequel (perhaps in a different genre) would retroactivel make the first movie better.

    For that, I also choose Johnny Mnemonic.

    Also, In Time, Elysium, or Chappie.

    I also think now would be a great time for a Galaxy Quest sequel. There’s a lot of fertile sci-fi tropes that could make for another hilarious movie. Like, after the end of the revival of the original show, there’s a Next Generation spin-off that overshadows the original, plus a bunch of expanded universe content. The Thermians and other aliens keep replicating the nonsense as real technology. What remains of the OG crew has to convince the new cast and writers/showrunners to stop being so lazy in their hand-wavy rushed bullshit, because there are very real consequences to poorly executed cash grabs full of plot holes and dangling threads. Maybe there’s a prequel series that creates a schism in the Thermian society, with the older generation following the Never Give Up, Never Surrender idealism, and the younger generation believing in a grittier, cynical imperialistic ideology.





  • With one linear timeline, you basically have Back to the Future rules. You can go back and change things, even if it rewrites you out of existence. Of course, there are some logical paradoxes that arise from that theory of time, so most versions rely on some delayed repair mechanism, like how the photo of Marty slowly disappears, or how The Ancient One explains the Time Stone to Professor Hulk. Time Cop, Butterfly Effect, and Looper do the same, with changes going into immediate effect like old injuries becoming later scars in real time, but erasing yourself really ought to be devastating to spacetime itself. I liked the concept in Butterfly Effect where the time traveler experiences all the memories of their new life in the altered timeline with every new change, but then they abandon the hard sci-fi aspect to get cute with stigmata. Donnie Darko probably handles it the best, where time travel itself creates a universe-ending paradox that requires the destruction of the time traveler.

    Essentially, you jump from now back to another location in spacetime where you didn’t exist the first time around. If you overlap with yourself, you’re either going to gain a new retroactive memory, or there’s some magical maguffin that erased the memory (like the Tardis does for the Doctor), or some universal force reconciles the timestream and eliminates the paradox.











  • Except it’s not merely a cult, it is the entire history of the development of our nation. Our infrastructure is built on the idea that space is plentiful, and everyone has their own car. The very concept of suburban America is predicated on at least one car in every home. Communities were built without walking access or public transit. Commerce was congealed into vast campuses consisting entirely of parking lots and three-story office buildings. School districts consolidated into massive centralized buildings where thousands of students arrive via hundreds of big yellow busses, some traveling for hours each way.

    Even if you wanted to break free from the “cult,” there’s like two cities in the entire USA where you could live, work, and raise a family in a decent school district without a car, and they would be some of the highest cost of living areas in the entire world.