These interviews are really interesting! I'm going to have to go and read the book now.

🖖

Try to learn Russian really quickly.

FIFA. Every man and boy in England loves FIFA, except me. I find it totally boring and pointless.

No. But physical proof is not the standard we use for determining someone's historical existence.

You cannot achieve any good by hurting people.

People are so convinced that if we're more cruel to criminals, they'll stop committing crimes, or if we're harsher to workers, we'll work harder, or if you're tough on border controls, immigrants will go away. It does not work and it cannot work.

I kinda think that if you can imagine a one-line fix to a plot hole, it isn't really a plot hole.

I remember someone insisting to me that there was this huge plot hole in the film of the Fellowship of the Ring, because Merry and Pippin don't get told about what Frodo and Sam are actually doing until the Council of Elrond, but still willingly run around risking life and limb to help them. Now, not only is this not a plot hole in itself (I'm pretty sure I'd help anyone fleeing a demonic horseman, just on principle, never mind if that person was my lifelong friend/cousin), it's also quite obvious that they could have been told everything offscreen. The audience didn't need to hear all that explanation again, five minutes after we first heard it.

A lot of plot holes people like to complain about are basically of this nature. 'Can you imagine a fix?' Yep, easily. 'Did the audience need to hear it?' Nope, because I could easily imagine it. 'Well, there you go, then.'

It's funny how cosplaying is seen as this weird niche nerdy activity... unless it's as an athlete.

Although, having said that, we do have the term 'full kit wanker' in the UK, for anyone who buys the whole kit (not just the t-shirt, scarf or hat). Because, you see, there's an acceptable quantum of cosplaying.

This isn't a strict proof, but Occam's razor applies here.

If we claim the Universe is a simulation, we're supposing, on no evidence whatsoever, that there's a whole other unknown universe running our Universe. That certainly makes us guilty of multiplying entities beyond necessity!

Not a line, but in Ratatouille there's a point where Linguini is trying to explain to his love interest that he's being guided by a rat in his hat and he's saying, 'I've got a tiny... little...' We see the reaction shot of her looking confused/disgusted and very quickly glancing down at his crotch.

It's just a fraction of a second, but a great gag for the grownups anyway!

So, fun fact, St Augustine, who is considered one of the Church Fathers, explicitly argued that if the 'Antipodes' (i.e., southern continents not connected to Europe, Asia or Africa) actually existed and had humans living there, that would prove the Gospel was untrue.

The reason for this is as follows: Christians of his era believed that the reason God had allowed the Romans to destroy the Second Temple and push the Jews into exile was to prepare the men of all nations (as understood at the time) for the coming of the Gospel. The idea was that the Jews had taken the Old Testament, and the prophecies of the Messiah therein, across the whole world. Augustine argues that if the Antipodes contained human beings who had never had any kind of contact with Jews, and therefore no contact with the OT, and no contact with Christians, and therefore no contact with the New Testament, either, that must mean the Gospels are false. Why? Because there's no conceivable reason that a just God would have deprived entire civilisations of the chance of redemption.

Of course, we now know that at the time Augustine was writing (4th-5th century AD), there were literally millions of people who had never had the slightest contact with the Jews or Christians and, furthermore, wouldn't do so for another millennium. So, per Augustine's argument, all those millions were condemned to Hell (the concept of Purgatory didn't exist at this point, but condemning them all to no chance of Heaven, just because they were unfortunate to be born a long way away from Jersualem, is clearly also unjust). Either God is incredibly unjust and unmerciful, which means the Gospels are untrue, OR the Good News wasn't actually spread to all men, which must also mean that they're not true.

The upshot of this is that one of the Church Fathers has, in retrospect, irrefutably argued that the Gospels are untrue. The amount of special pleading required to make out that, actually, the Maori or the Easter Islanders or [insert any other uncontacted peoples here] had an opportunity to accept Christ and somehow missed it entirely is far beyond any sane interpretation of the evidence.

Now, as you might have noticed, this hasn't stopped people from believing in the Gospels. I don't see why the discovery of life on another world would dislodge people from a belief that is transparently false when nothing else has.

Capital 'N' is written differently; 'U' and 'u' are unambiguous.