The artist formerly known as Prince was a beta tester for the first Oregon Trail (he was in third grade at the school near the developers)

I mean not very close to the book (also, Byron quote?)...but I thought it made a better double bill with Coppola Dracula than Frankenstein 1994. And its second-act twist idea could easily end up incorporated into the pop-culture default version, like Winona Ryder's reincarnation was

How pointless, considering the best possible variant in that particular subject's latent space was found years ago:

Yeah somebody once described it as being able to always play the good cop because in the event of any trouble you've hired the bad cop

I think the plan is to Kardashev Type I-ify all Earth's resources to build the next radio transmitter. But they're basically Asimov robots, so first they have to eliminate the last humans with free will who could order them to stop. (Using Asimov's loophole, what if the robot believes it's helping?)

This sounded intriguing, so I went and looked up a summary, and it came with a looping gif of the relevant bit, and yikes

iirc the oldest recorded agricultural settlements in Western Europe belong to a group sometimes called the "Wheat-Beef People", hundreds of thousands of human beings whose entire posterity is basically just two thumbs up for gluten and cow dairy