[74] Similarly, the "Madman Omar's House of... " joke is an old EPU/GweepCo in-joke. For instance, in the GweepCo home-brew alterations to Nethack, there's a shop called "Madman Omar's House of Mimics", which carries nothing but, well, mimics, and my Sims 2 neighborhood at home includes a Madman Omar's House of Coffee branch.

[80] These proportions will be familiar to anyone who has read 2001: A Space Odyssey.

[128] I envisioned HAL as a slightly more advanced, but slightly less capable, home version of the HAL 9000, based on a loose extrapolation of what was then modern desktop computer hardware, in much the same way that the 9000 was based on a loose extrapolation of the big-iron centralized computer hardware of the late 1960s. At the time, I was reading an extremely interesting book called Hal's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality, edited by David G. Stork for the MIT Press. It's a collection of essays by various scientists on how realistic, or not realistic, the various predictions of HAL's capabilities in 2001 turned out to be.

[172] Otto, who takes the place of Kozo Fuyutsuki in the regular series, is drawn from my squad in the old X-COM: UFO Defense game. He was the fastest squaddie I had by far, able to cross most battle maps on foot in a single turn, and so was very important, pulling scout duty much of the time. He was also a dab hand with a rifle, but had no particular psi ability.

[358] A Night to Remember remains one of my favorite books, even though some of its assertions have been contradicted by more recent research. The fact that DJ's copy spends the series making the rounds of the NERV staff is one of my favorite running jokes in the show.

[393] Making the NERV TechDiv central computer a non-insane version of SHODAN from System Shock was one of those spur-of-the-moment decisions that would prove to have unexpected usefulness later.

[698] Why does DJ automatically believe what Jon says? Well, admittedly, he doesn't know Jon all that well yet, but it's fairly apparent right from the get-go that he's not particularly into fanciful stories.

[864] The answer to Misato's question, of course, is "Yes," or at least Jon's life was considerably more expensive than DJ's...