Of course, the easiest simplest killshot on flat earth is the sun setting below the horizon. Flat earth and space deniers tend to say the sun is well, something that’s not a star, but more importantly that it stays in the sky and circles further away from a given location on earth until we can’t see it from a given location anymore while it stays overhead. To think that is to deny easily observed reality of it setting below the horizon. They just wordsalad about perspective until the conversation ends.

One aspect of flat earth/space denial that keeps me engaged is learning from the responses that educated people give to their questions. Details of space programs and astronomy that wouldn’t come up often except to answer flat earth/space denial.

My first tattoo was done in a shack with a DIY tattoo kit ordered online.

Afterwards we had DIY beer made with a Mr. Beer kit ordered online.

Knocking with your feet to pretend there is a ghost is still an alive and well practice. I don’t have exact instances on hand but John Wolfe on YouTube has covered a lot of ghost hunting content and some people in there do it.

Today there are more technological ways to create ghostly knocking using various devices, but if the “ghost hunter”/“medium” is taken to a location they can’t prep beforehand, some of them still do basic knocking tricks.

Space deniers.

They are a sub-set of flat earthers. Not all flat earthers are space deniers, but every space denier I’ve seen is a flat earther.

Some of the more prominent ones like Level Earth Observer spend innumerable hours picking apart International Space Station live footage as “fake”. Things like space rocket launches need to be picked apart to absurd degrees as well. Every camera glitch, every stutter, every little movement is hyper-analyzed and declared to be a fraud.

I find it all fascinating. Some of these deniers put forth their own lay theories, which are usually very Biblical in bent, but many of them like LEO will twist themselves into incoherent knots refusing to admit they have a viewpoint and that they are “just asking questions” despite pushing back in a very particular way to all the answers they get.

Some of them like “CC from New York, Westchester County” are just totally off the deep end, not even playing word games, just conspiratorially ranting without even internal consistency.

I’ve only ever interacted with a space denier directly once and it was as equally interesting as it was frustrating.

There’s a big flat earth/space denier overlap with other fringe ideas like young earth creationism which gets you into Kent Hovind territory. That’s interesting in its own way but also full of slime.

I had a blender bottle from which I had drank all the liquid, which still had ice in it. Because the ice was above the 100ml line (the limit for LIQUIDS), they took it and threw it away. They wouldn’t even just dump the ice, but tossed the whole bottle. Being that I was running short on time for my flight and I got my work to pay for a new one, I didn’t fight it (also just because I’m correct doesn’t mean the argument is going to go my way in a situation like this) but I’m still flabbergasted that ice was a liquid according to the pair of TSA seat fillers checking my bag.

I almost had a multimeter confiscated on a different occasion when they couldn’t figure out what it was. That one I put my foot down until a supervisor thankful instantly waved me through when he showed up.

I don’t think that proves much besides marketing people slapping anything on a cover long after the movie was made.

In the DVD commentary, the writer/director talked about how he’d had the basic idea, including gun kata, since high school. He could have been lying but I think he was honest and this was sort of a case of independent parallel ideas, since somebody turbo nerdy enough to come up with gun kata probably had influence from Hong Kong action movies that similarly influenced The Matrix.

The action style and flow is much different than The Matrix, and while both plots are about fighting the system, Equilibrium is much more straight forwardly grabbing elements from classic dystopias.

I like ENT. It is far from perfect, but it gets ragged disproportionally.

Season 1 & 2 do have some bombs (‘Dear Doctor’) but even in these less loved seasons, there are good episodes. ‘The Andorian Incident’ is a great episode right in the first season that not only introduces Jeffery Combs as Shran, but becomes a touchpoint for future episodes. There’s a number of other good to ok episodes, I’d say at least in the same amount as TNG’s first seasons.

Season 3 is divisive, but I liked seeing the proto-enlightened humanity backsliding a little bit into the militarized ways. This was an examination of that, done without getting too bogged down. I enjoyed the increasing knowledge of Xindi cultures being a factor in unraveling the situation.

Basically everyone who watched it loves season 4.

Was the show perfect? No. The temporal Cold War running plot was a time wasting slog. Was the finale revealing the whole thing as a TNG holodeck program stupid? Yes. But did the show have a unique take on human-Vulcan relations? Yeah. Did it on the whole keep that optimistic spirit of Trek? Yeah. Was it a long road getting from there to here? Yes, it’s been a long time, but my time is finally near.

Dune has an examination of the chosen one trope. You can pull a lot of meaning out it, but it certainly does more than unabashedly say it’s a good thing.

Regarding the Fremen, idea of a chosen one in-universe only exists because it was seeded as a self-serving belief by a foreign religious group messing with their culture. It isn’t a “real” prophecy, but one seeded so that it can be potentially “fulfilled” by someone in the know in-universe. The fremen follow Paul into war with fanatic zeal. This examines how damaging religious influence is.

The Kwisatz Haderach angle is another “prophecy” except it is being actively worked to be fulfilled in-universe using non-mystical means. Paul realizes how terrible it is to be this type of chosen one and rather than fulfill it he abandons it, and not in the cool “rebel taking down the system” way, but in the “overwhelmed by the weight of it”, way. He becomes broken and all for nothing since his son just completes the path he was on anyway, and it leads to a lot of (nessesary?) evil at his command.

More like “Guess I’ll just print this file labeled ‘hyper realistic movie prop lazer blaster’.”

I feel like her getting with Lucky and having a baby near the end was complete character assassination. I recall hearing the Fox pushed for certain things in the last couple of seasons and I suspect the push for her to get with Lucky, and Lucky becoming a reoccurring character was part of that.

In my mind, Luanne taking over Jack’s barber shop was the end of her character arc in the show. She’d finally found her calling and become a success. (Then suddenly we never see that Barber shop again and she backslides into just being a one dimensional dummy, but now pregnant and with Lucky to be annoying with in every scene.)

the meme of Hank with the big can of WD-40 that won’t open, but he’s prepared for that and just pulls out the smaller WD-40 was representative of the whole show

And he had the WD-40 to fix the squeak in the door of a place he was staying in on vacation. It wasn’t even his house.

Encounter At Farpoint was a fine pilot episode, and I’m tired of pretending its not.

Hank is an annoying boomer but he lives his values, which makes him endearing. There’s an episode where he notices the tile in his bathroom is faded and says it was guaranteed for 20 years and its only been “what 17, 18 years? Where’s that receipt?” That’s an annoying and obnoxious boomerism. On the other hand, if Hank guaranteed something for 20 years, even as an unofficial offhand comment, and somebody called him on it, he’d go take care of it.

Same thing with tools. Many boomers pretend to have any idea what they are doing when really they don’t have any tools or skills. Hank had enough tools and skills to teach an entire shop class in his garage.

He believes in the idealized idea of America. That means he works hard and to a high degree of craftsmanship and honesty. It also means he can get scammed and taken advantage of with his expectation that other people are doing the same.

I think they struggled early on for different reasons.

American Dad was too laser focused on being a political satire show and I just don’t think the writers were equipped to write a good political show. It just comes off as angry and with unlikable characters. Once it loosened up a little bit, having that political satire premise as a foundation gives the characters a baseline to work from and they all feel distinct because of it.

The Orville feels like Seth didn’t want to make a comedy. It feels to me like he just wanted to make Star Trek, but because he’s “a comedy guy” a lot of the humor, especially early on felt like it was put in to meet some expectation of Fox that a Seth show be a comedy.

‘In Country… Club’ is the example episode I use to get people to try the show. It is so good and commits to hard to the premise.

American Dad is a fantastically funny show, but season 1 is basically unwatchable. Season 2 is a mixed bag. I’d recommend people just start watching from season 3 onward and only check out the earlier episodes as a curiosity.

The conversation wasn’t exactly productive. In any case it wasn’t just that he didn’t care for reading books, but he actively opposed it which was really a wild position.

Somebody once told me they don’t read recreationally because authors are lazy for making readers do all the work of imagining what their story looks like. He was completely sincere, and actually became agitated at the idea of people reading anything beyond manuals or mandatory sorts of things.