I would highly recommend "Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water;" it goes into fair detail about Lake Tulare. Fascinating read.
It's rare that I purchase games on a whim, but based off your comment, I went ahead and ponied up the ten bucks for Undertale. Looks interesting!
On that same note: I'm not a fan - generally speaking - of survival games or early access, but I purchased The Flame in the Flood, and it's already given me back the entertainment for the cost, and can only get better.
I think the author of the article gets it right on pricing per hour of gameplay for indie games, in a general sense. I'm not sure this works for AAA games, though, where RPGs have - and are expected to have - tens of hours of gameplay if one simply burns through it, and multiplayer games have an almost unknown fun-per-price-hour factor (Rocket League comes to mind), due to the seemingly variable nature of how much time people invest in multiplayer games.
If that makes no sense, I apologize - alcohol and dumbly meatsticks.
The first time I saw Aliens - it was one of the strange TV edits that included the sentry guns, but lacked the other salient bits - holy fuck, it immediately gave me the sense of "this is what films should aspire to."
Roughly seventeen years later, I always experience the same thrill that I did the first time I saw it.
On an unrelated but personal note, which I feel appropriate given the subject matter: it took me YEARS to figure out what the fuck was wrong with my memory, because that strange cut that had the sentry guns (CBS edit, I believe?) was not readily available until the director's cut came out on DVD - I was not fortunate enough (keks) to own a Laserdisc player, so I spent a good number of my formative years thinking I was insane for insisting that "ALIENS HAS SENTRY GUNS! IT'S BAD-ASS!"
Further unrelated note, because I'm that much of nerd, and couldn't afford it, but went nuts anyhow: I purchased a $4,100 replica of the M41A pulse rifle built by Phil Steinschneider, and while I no longer have it - wow. What an amazing piece of film history, even if to only have a meticulously researched, almost exact replica of an item that defined a good chunk of my existence.
TL;DR: Aliens is the greatest film ever, and I hope every future generation (and those that show it to them) have the same enthusiasm that OP and I do for the film. Masterpiece.
The sentry rifle purchase is impressive! Next time you have disposable income, you could always get one of the sentry gun computers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_Compass
There's one in the Smithsonian Air & Space museum in Washington DC if you're in the area and prefer to window-shop without buying. :)
It's also not the kind of environment that fosters high-energy physicists, but we're talking about a regime that has indigenously developed nuclear weapons.
A minor quibble, but North Korea did not indigenously develop nuclear weapons - they acquired most of their knowledge and capabilities from Pakistan via the Khan network. They most certainly spent a great deal of effort internally to convert said knowledge into functional nuclear devices, but by no means did they develop everything internally.
