Skua

Spitting Image seems like the most immediately obvious one. It's older, of course, but I think the point stands

I'm not sure about that characterisation of Ripley in Alien. She doesn't survive by fist-fighting the xenomorph, she's not Arnie in Predator. She's just determined and resourceful.

Scaphism, although the historicity of it is questionable

What happened in Tanzania? The drop there seems to account for pretty much the entire loss in Africa between 2007 and 2015

We can indeed print steel with direct metal laser sintering. I think that the object needs heat treatment afterwards, though to be fair it is almost ten years since I properly read up on it and things have probably advanced since then

Ehh, what you call yourself isn't important. The point is you're still eating a diet that's compatible with not fucking the environment

Well my username is a bird, so I'm going to say it's just a severe case of self-loathing

Even if we fail, Elon Musk ends up further away than he currently is

I like the future that this suggests

Depends on what you mean by the "come to a stop" bit. Stop relative to Earth? You're still going Earth speeds relative to the sun, which is what you're trying to hit. It's like throwing a ball at something while driving past it. If you mean stop relative to the sun then sure, you don't even need to shoot him towards the sun, he'll fall right in. The trouble is that stopping relative to the sun is specifically the bit that takes a lot of energy.

He'd still have the 30 km per second (67,000 mph) of sideways velocity that Earth has when it's orbiting the sun, and that speed is enough to prevent Earth from ever hitting the sun.

Orbits aren't very intuitive; if you want something you launch from Earth to fall straight into the sun, you actually need to fire it directly opposite to the direction that Earth orbits in. So if you imagine Earth orbiting clockwise, you want to shoot the thing counterclockwise. If you do that at the right speed, you counteract all the orbital speed and the thing just falls into the sun.

If you can speed something up a completely unlimited amount then sure you could aim straight at the sun and just fire it so fast that it hits the sun anyway. It'll be off-centre a bit but the sun is pretty big. Consider how much of the sky isn't sun though. If the sun is directly overhead and you shoot straight at the sun, the thing you fired is already going 30 km/s sideways before you even started. We could do the trig to figure out how fast you need to shoot it to still hit the sun anyway but I think the more important part here is getting a feel for the motion involved.

You can get caught in the sun's pull by just leaving Earth's sphere of influence, but remember that all of the planets are already caught in the sun's pull and have remained distinctly outside of the actual sun for essentially forever