A couple of days late on the F5 this week, but Dan asked: Some folks don’t know to quit when they’re ahead. As such, there have been some really bad sequels, trilogies, and series installments foisted upon a soon-to-be-disillusioned fan-base. So, which are the worst five cases of N+1 when they should have stopped at N? I’m mostly thinking of books and movies, though some other form would be acceptable. Also, is there anything you would have done to fix the sequel short of erasing it from existance? Well, now, I’m not really into series in books, or perhaps in …

This week, the question is mine, and for once it’s pretty short: If you could choose five nationalities to be born into in your next five lives, which ones would you choose? Now, having said this, it’s pretty hard to think five lives into the future. You know, it’d even be hard to choose my next life strategically. So I guess I’m going to do the reverse of what Kim Stanley Robinson did in exploring history, and I’m going to make up a future history in which my future lives are played out. Future Life 1: A Brit during the …

Dan asked this for the next Friday Five: Dr. Feelgood has unlocked the primal secrets of mood altering drugs and can now induce any emotion or mental state with no undesired side effects, so he’s trolling the internet to find which drugs to make first. Which five moods/emotions/mental-states would you most want to have available in pill form, and when would you tend to use them? Note that these aren’t necessarily the moods/etc. that you most enjoy, just the ones that you most want to have available on-demand. This, of course, is the kind of question that is very, very …

Adam asked this on Friday, and of course, I’m running behind as usual these days: A friday five question: Talking with a friend at work, the subject of conspiracy theories came up. It’s a favorite of mine, as the mental contortions most conspiracy theorists come up with are truly a sight to behold. Here’s what I want to know: What are your top five conspiracies, real or imagined. As a special bonus, can you find a common thread to link them all together, kind of a Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory? Well, I just got off a bus on which I …

For Friday Five this week, our dear friend Rob, Has asked a million-dollar question, or, I estimate, worth at least thirty bob, If anybody’s keeping count of score. And if they are, please email me a chart, Nothing too fancy. It needn’t be high art. “Name the five most nightmarish in-laws or Events involving in-laws you’ve had to burn Through,” Rob asks, and opens such a door Into the past, that I feel I must spurn The very thought of facing the request For mem’ries cause a sharp pain in my chest. And so I’ll not comply, but plead the …

I am so behind on this, but of course it’s not that big a deal, so I’ll answer the question that Laura asked now: Think back to the 80’s and early 90’s – which were your five absolute worst fashion disasters? Do you have any photographs from that period, and most importantly, will you share them? Well, choosing any five given moments is pretty difficult, given that my life was kind of a continual fashion disaster from the first time I wore clothes until the eighth grade—which would be, let’s see, about the eighth grade, yeah. That was when suddenly …

Rob‘s been thinking of forms of torment: I’ve been thinking about films for a while and those films that have left an impression on me. Many of them involve a character being tortured in some way or other in an attempt to get them to spill their guts. Name five tortures that would have you screaming like Winston Smith. Well, this isn’t what I expected to think about for the next few days (I bumble as I prepare this post beginning Wednesday night) but let’s see what I can come up with. That awful Baha’i torture death with the molten …

Dan has asked a very tough interesting and challenging question this week: At the moment of death, when you realize that there’s no way out, you worry about those being left behind — at least, we think we will. But this isn’t about who we would worry about. Instead, it’s about those who have already died. If you could go back and do a five minute “exit interview” with them, you could tell them the good (or bad) news about what happened in the years that followed. Which five people would you do this for? What would you be sure …

I didn’t get to Friday’s question on Friday because, well, I’ll write about that in my next post. For now, I’ll turn to the question, which is one of my own: Imagine that you had a robot custom-built for your home, but one of limited abilities. It is, after all, one of the first domestic bots ever built. Which five tasks, chores, or jobs would you have it configured for, if it were limited to five specific tasks? I’m assuming I’m living in an apartment basically like my own, though maybe a little bigger and with a separate room for …

Laura‘s short Friday Five question for the week is this: “There was a light and then someone hit me…” What are your five earliest memories? This is really a difficult question for me. I don’t remember so much from my early childhood, so I’m going to have to think hard to answer this. Excuse that smoke smell, it’s my brain scalding. I remember going out to the coast and staring out into the ocean. When I was a kid we lived in Nova Scotia and I have this strong memory of going to some kind of bay which was shaped …