Better Worlds

Main Topics are dead, and we have killed them. Last time we thought we were doing a followup show, but now it’s official: we’re going to talk about whatever we want to talk about. This time, that includes Nordic Facts (the future of Finland Facts?), some Tower Thoughts (it’s a Destiny thing… are we still explaining jokes?), candy rankings (maybe we did have a main topic), and Thor: Ragnarok (no spoilers; we promise).

Our followup list got long, so we decided to do our first all-followup episode. Which turned into a small amount of followup surrounded by conversation ranging from game shows to board games, Lord of the Rings to Destiny 2, and weapons of mass destruction to… sports? There’s also a little bit of spoiler-free trailer talk on Pacific Rim: Uprising, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and Justice League.

A straw man, a Scotsman, and literally Hitler walk into a bar. Is it a joke (punchline: something something “unnatural”), or are they our top picks for the finest logical fallacies?

Dustin isn’t playing Destiny 2 (yet?), so he has questions for Matthew and Trevor. This is a shorter-than-usual bonus episode covering our initial thoughts on Destiny 2 as of September 10, the fifth day after the Cabal attacked.

In the second of this quantum pair of episodes, we talk about how we’ve seen quantum physics used in fiction. Dustin graciously continues to answer our questions. There’s also a bit of a history lesson on how quantum physics were preceded in science fiction by radium and transistors.

Dustin fills us in on quantum mechanics and what he’s been doing with his life. Matthew struggles to understand the dangers of “eclipse madness.” Trevor struggles to think of good quantum questions.

All the news from Comic-Con that’s fit to ramble on about.

Spider-Man, Spider-Man We watched the sixth movie of Spider-Man He slings some webs In the ’burbs We all thought it was pretty gurb

Wonder Woman is a significant milestone for superhero movies: a DC movie that all three of us were interested in talking about.

E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) is like Christmas for the world of video games. That is, if Christmas was a time for watching videos about presents that you might get someday, possibly months or years into the future. And if you like to spend Christmas talking about your hopes and fears for what those presents will be like.

It isn't fair. Books, books, everywhere, and all of them to read. Drowning in choices? We toss you a life preserver of sorts—our own recent reads.

We have slain gods and plagues. Now it’s time for some patrolling and light banter. Bungie has started making announcements about the sequel to Destiny (coming out September 8), so we decided it was time for a retrospective on the game that birthed a podcast.

Hannah & the Heptapods are getting the band back together to revisit their 2016 smash hit, Arrival. Journey with us to mysterious Montana as we ask what makes great science fiction, what does it mean to choose something better than fear, and how many words can Dustin coin in one episode? If you haven’t seen the movie yet, you can listen up to the spoiler warning at the 57-minute mark. (We want to tell you why you should see Arrival.)

The first teaser trailers are out for Thor: Ragnarok and Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and by Odin’s beard, they shall be discussed. We also cover a host of other topics including coffee math, ancient math, movie math, starfighter/airplane age math, and Force-alignment math.

Every spring, birds begin to sing of Free Comic Book Day, and flowers bloom in anticipation of the wonders in store. Here’s our guide to this year’s event.

In the next step towards the Singularity, Netflix is growing thumbs. Meanwhile, the humans can’t agree on what stars mean, and some of them really don’t like Rotten Tomatoes. Stick around for our most educational aftershow yet, brought to you by Dustin and Matthew’s strange new fixation on Finland.

A champion is crowned.

As the saying goes: "If you love something, send it into gladiatorial combat." In Better Worlds' first superhero tournament (our first anything tournament, for that matter), we have ten Marvel and six DC heroes facing off for the biggest birthday blast this side of Tunguska. Sixteen heroes enter, only one… will… Belay that. This discussion got a little more heated than we expected, so this is going to be a two-parter. Fill out your bracket and follow along.

If anthropology is the study of humans, and cultural anthropology is more specifically the study of human culture, then we're guessing that cultural dinopology is the study of dinosaurs in human culture. We are not linguistics experts; we just play three on a podcast. This episode covers The Big Five dinosaurs or dinosaur archetypes (depending on whether you're asking Dustin or Trevor), the Jurassic Park franchise, Terra Nova, Primeval, and a grab bag of terrible movies at the end.

This week we discuss news stories about old things. That's right: dinosaur news. They're terrible lizards, Brent.