This is a question about the real-world factors that have influenced the development of science fiction and television for children. In children's television (as well as movies), especially animation, there is a strong tendency toward using science fiction (or sometimes fantasy) energy weapons i...

I remember a black-and-white television show a long time ago where a man received a message from an alien and he could not decipher it. It turned out that it was not a message but rather a digital picture of what the alien looked like. Can anyone help me identify the name of the TV show and the...

If you have seen Avengers: Infinity War you will know Hulk is acting strange, the exact reason is unknown, but I have 3 theories that could be true: Remember when in Thor: Ragnarok Hulk says earth hate Hulk so when Heimdall teleported him to earth he quickly realized he can't fight because reme...

Looking for a sci fi short story/novel where ads are projected into dreams. I know about the Futurama episode s1e6, but I read this in my childhood well before Futurama. So it should be from a classic sci-fi period, something like Philip Dick's time or so. The story goes like this: there's so mu...

Workplace currently have a meta on going which asks a few questions to the moderators, it was also asked back in 2014. Whilst these have been posted alongside elections to give moderator candidates a small insight into what they are nominating themselves for I think the questions and their answer...

Looking for a book my mother read years ago. All she remembers is that someone was trying to cross an ice bridge from Russia (home) to America during a dystopian ice age, but first they had to cross Siberia and there were some nasty people living there. My mother probably read the book sometime ...

I'm trying to track down a self-published story or novella I read online roughly a decade ago, possibly on someone's Livejournal, written in the form of a series of emails or newsgroup posts exchanged by adult fans of an series of British children's fantasy novels (a bit like Narnia, but more of ...

When Cooper tries to communicate the coordinates of the NASA facility to Murph through the falling sand, it's said he's doing it in binary. How does he convert the coordinates to binary? And it looks like he is simply drawing 0's and 1's in the falling sand. How would that result in a bar patter...

In Games of Thrones S01E05 Lady Stark seems to act on impulse on arresting Tyrion Lannister. She should have waited for more evidences and consult with Ned Stark. Instead she arrests Tyrion and goes to her sister. Lysa is not a King who can punish him, while Catelyn knew their lives would be in ...

I am searching for a book (probably early 2000s) which contains a specific scene. I do not remember everything and the details might be somewhat different, however, this is the gist: The story plays at least a couple of hundred years in the future, in a technologically advanced society (spaceshi...

Alien ships come to earth in the middle of the night and kidnap people who must prove themselves worthy of being captain by killing the last captain.

Bit random but re-listening to Stormfront and the part where Harry traps Toot, he makes a circle in the dirt and then covers it with leaves. While I guess the circle isn't technically broken in that it's still dug into the dirt... It seems later in the books there's much more emphasis on not br...

I saw one video by Star Wars Reading Club about the question. Now it also makes me wonder why Grievous never helped Dooku out there. Considering that Dooku trained Grievous, he should have made him more worried. Is there any official explanation by the novelization on why the General didn't help...

In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, we see Voldemort use the Taboo Jinx so that whoever uses his name gets caught and arrested. We've seen this done not only to the trio multiple times but also to Kingsley (off-screen reference). Clearly this piece of magic appears indistinguishable (or at...

I found these two images by accident while reading about Tarot. And From the wikis seems like at some point Dr. Strange was using a Tarot deck to distribute tasks among some Marvel heroes. In the cover above I can see Spiderman, Captain Marvel and Dr. Strange himself. I cannot tell who the...

I was rereading Prince Caspian and noticed that in the start of the story they're in an empty, sleepy country station, and there was hardly anyone on the platform but themselves and then they're magically pulled away to Narnia from there (and at the end, they end up back on the platform). ...

In the films, both Anakin and Luke want to leave Tatooine, which indicates how harsh life was on the dusty ball that he was. It is clear that the main work is related to moisture farms, slavery, races and smuggling / space transportation. Their neighbors are hostile aborigines (Sand People as w...

Trying to think of the title of a book I read about a girl who is hired to go to a planet and steal some alien technology. She teams up with a scholar whose goal is to save the technology. His dad is in jail...It's a newish YA science fiction. Anyone know what I'm talking about?

This statement on this question doesn't seem right to me with what we know from A New Hope. There is no evidence to say the canon Imperials knew that the shuttle was stolen. The Galactic Empire placed a tracking device on the Millennium Falcon in A New Hope so they could use it to find the ...

I am looking for the name of a comedian from the 80s or 90s. He appeared once on Comic Strip Live or Evening at the Improv. His set was based on mayhem at Thanksgiving, with discussion of why jello shouldn't have things in it (such as celery), dogs waiting by the table for spillage ("they want to...