You're right except for one aspect, it did NOT get "a lot of attention" and was not "high profile".
Almost nobody I know even knew this movie existed until I told them about it. Nobody saw a poster or ad that they remembered.
I blame it entirely on the marketing effort. Advertising was almost non-existant, and what little did seemed to consist of posters with Mal and Inara staring wistfully into space. Combine that with a name like "Serenity" and on casual inspection it looks like some instantly forgettable romantic schlock.
They should've had posters that emphasized the action, the spaceships, River kicking ass with an axe and combat boots.
And MAN... where was the marketing blitz after the opening weekend? Critics and audiences everywhere LOVED it, why weren't they trumpeting this fact all over the place? I was expecting to be assaulted for a week with choice quotes from respected sources, and shots of people exiting the theatres absolutely gushing about the movie, interwoven with some good one-liners and action shots from the movie. But we got NOTHING.
Fuck, this movie got 87% from RottenTomatoes' "Cream of the Crop". The New York Times wrote "Joss Whedon's unassuming science-fiction adventure is superior in almost every respect to George Lucas's aggressively more ambitious screen entertainments." Orson Scott Card called it the greatest sci-fi movie ever made. Why they didn't exploit this kind of praise for all it was worth is completely beyond me.
Maybe they thought grassroots word-of-mouth would be enough, but it obviously wasn't.
Nonetheless, many terrific movies did poorly in box office, and went on to become cult classics. I still have faith that Serenity's quality and accessibilty will be major assests in the long run.
<minor spoiler> I'm also wondering how these insane chaotic cannibals possess enough spaceships to blockade an entire planet so thickly that it's literally difficult to fit between them. </minor spoiler>
That's actually a general pet-peeve I have with the Firefly-verse... Whedon seems to treat interplanetary space as about the size of a sea, where ships randomly encounter each other quite frequently. Happened several times in the TV series.
But... this is really a small gripe. Everything is secondary to the plot and characters, which are uniformly excellent, as is the dialog. If I want an epic space opera which at least makes an attempt at believable science (excepting hyperspace), I have my B5.:)
Go see Serenity, it rocks. I went with 8 people (most of whom were NOT familiar with Firefly) and we all loved it. The whole crowd loved it. I admit I was a little worried for the first 10 minutes or so, when Whedon crams 10 gallons of exposition into a 5 gallon hat, but once we get aboard the actual Serenity, everything starts to jive, and the audience was soon won comepletely over. And the whole movie is good, not just parts... a masterpiece of pacing.
Hi there, I'm the proud owner of a vintage GP32, and I would be extremely confident at the GPX2's ability to run Doom and Quake full speed.
My GP32 *already* runs Doom II at full speed (60fps), and it can play Quake at maybe 5-8 fps. That's with a single CPU @ 166MHz.
This new one has 2 x 200MHz ones.:)
Some other things the lowly GP32 could do:
Near perfect emulation of NES, Genesis, TurboGrafix16, and numerous others. Playable (but somewhat slow) SNES emulation. Many other systems emulated to various degrees( C64, Atari2600, ColecoVision, GB/GBC, MAME, etc) DivX / XVid playback (I was able to get 320x172, 24fps to work), plus Ogg/MP3 playback, image viewing, and document viewing (!Reader can handle PDFs and HTML, including ZIPPED, with inline images).
The GP32 was a brilliant little gem, and was perfect except for a few wishes:
More storage capacity (GP32 has 8MB RAM, and SmartMedia which is limited to 128MB)
Faster CPU
A couple more buttons (to better play SNES games.. GP32 only had 6 total: A, B, R, L, select, start)
The GP2X addresses all of these. I am ordering one immediately.:)
Still, I find some of his stuff interesting, like the compilation of solar system changes. I brought this up a year ago on Slashdot, and was promptly berated for not fact checking, and told that downloading Celestia would clearly show me that Pluto was getting closer to the Sun, thus explaininng why it was heating up. Well... I downloaded Celestia, and Pluto is getting farther away. And heating up. And now the Mars changes are confirmed.
What if every planet could be shown to be changing like this? Would we still have the endless cries of "nothing to see here"?
'You think the "monster of the week" and dramatic love story of angel buffy that were the focus in seasons 1-3 were good.'
Yoiks! Is that all you got out of seasons 1-3? How about a non-castrated Spike, and Drusilla in their prime? How about Angelus? The mayor was a fantastic villain, and Faith added an interesting dimension.
Not trying to get in a flame war (thus I shall resist the urge to criticize seasons 4-7;), and I certainly respect your tastes, but labelling the first three seasons of Buffy "monster of the week" and overdone romance is selling it a bit short, IMHO.
Yup... that beautiful arching atrium on the ground floor of "Fiddler's Green" is BCE Place, I used to work there. You can see the Hockey Hall of Fame in one shot. Lots of scenes shot underneath the Gardiner as well.
So any sites saying "best viewed with..." are run by idiots - whether that "browser X" be Firefox, IE, Safari, Konqueror or even Lynx etc. etc.
Websites should be written to standards so they can be viewed by users in the browser of their choice.
OK.. writing websites to standards won't get you very far with IE (unless you're talking nested tables design. I'm not). Or more like, it often takes a lot of work to find a "standards" way of doing something that DOES work without IE completely F$#@ing it up. If you're trying to do nice clean HTML+CSS, the time wasted finding workarounds for IE's horrific rendering bugs is just staggering.
For commercial work, I might agree with you, that the site must work in IE, with all the bells and whistles.
But I've done non-profit/niche sites, that were perfectly functional and pretty in IE, but looked and performed better in browsers with better standards support. So we slapped a "Best in Firefox/Mozilla" blurb, to help promote it. Again, this is a 100% standards compliant site.
Anyway the point is, I think you're overgeneralizing, and equating "best viewed with" with proprietary, non-standard formats, which it doesn't have to be.
1. $69 for base unit. It runs on CF1/2 (or Microdrive) so that's extra of course.
2. Plays standard MP3s (up to 320 kbit, incl. VBR), and there's rumors of an OGG firmware upgrade.
3. No DRM whatsoever.
4. The batteries (2xAA, so you can carry rechargable spares, so you never ever run out) last a long time.. no moving parts (like a HD unit) helps with that.
5. Get a flashcard reader, use your CFs like floppies.
Other goodies:
- Built in FM radio (lousy reception tho) - Built in microphone - Line-in jack - Any of the above three inputs can be encoded on-the-fly to MP3 (64 kbit).
Disadvantages: Much more expensive per GB than a hard drive unit, and your size is limited (but CF goes up to 8GB last I checked)
I specifically bought this unit because I was looking for a DRM-free MP3 player that ran on Compact Flash, and standard AA batteries. It was the only one I could find, there may be more now.
So... I take it you think an advanced spacefaring civilization would have to resort to direct mating to insert genes into our DNA?
Because our genes are only a few percent different from apes, right? Isn't it at least possible that changes were introduced through genetic manipulation at some point?
Thanks for that. I read the whole paper, and like to think I even understood most of it. It does make a lot of sense to use an analytical methodology which takes bias explicitly into account.
It doesn't absolutely disprove it either though, and I still would highly recommend "The Field" though. It is crammed full of fascinating experiments; the REG stuff (which obviously you're familiar with) is just part of it. For example, did you know Apollo Astronaut Ed Mitchell performed ESP experiments from the moon? Or another one I found very interesting, was they found that a person's stress levels increase significantly when they are being observed, even when they are not consciously aware of being observed. In other words, scientific data in support of the "feeling that you're being watched". Neat stuff.
This brings to mind the origins of D&D... IIRC they tried to include Hobbits as one of the character races, but the Tolkien estate wouldn't hear of it. Thus, D&D has Halflings, which are virtually identical to Tolkien's Hobbits.
Seems like they changed this in 3rd edition though, Halflings now seem a lot more like Kender from Dragonlance.
I read in a book called "The Field" (by Lynne McTaggart), an even more amazing experiment, that showed that human consciousness could affect events in the past, as long as they hadn't been measured yet.
They found that just about everyone could, on a small but repeatable level, affect the output of a random number generator just by concentrating on it. (The implications of that, if true, are staggering enough alone)
So then they tried running the tests and sealing the results, and had the participants concentrate on affecting the results of the test that had run three days ago.. and guess what? The studies showed statistically significant results. Crazy stuff... like the mind is some kind of lens that can "focus" quantum probability.
Pfft. I already have the perfect platform for that, and it's cheaper. (And yes it runs Doom II at 60fps)
GamePark32: http://www.gbax.com/gp32review.html
Specs:
Great 3.5" 320 x 240 screen. 64K colours. Variable speed ARM CPU, up to 166MHz (or OC'd higher) 8MB ram, runs off of 128MB smartmedia and 2xAA (10+ hours battery life) Can emulate just about everything up to an SNES. Can play MP3/Ogg/DivX/XviD (you'll have to encode video yourself of course), although the 128MB smartmedia limit doesn't make it a very good media jukebox.
I want solid state computing... zero moving parts. No fans, and a flash-based "hard drive". I don't care about noise, I care about having something that sucks very little juice and will essentially never break down.
I'm happy right now with my GamePark32... open ARM architecture, variable speed up to 166MHz. Great homebrew community. It can play 320x176 24fps DivX/XVid (if you know your way around encoding), has emulators for everything up to an SNES, and even has a port of Linux. (You can get a keyboard for it) Runs on SmartMedia cards and 2 AA's.
Give me one of these new AMD units, and a device that runs off CompactFlash (SmartMedia is limited to 128MB) and I'd be set.
He probably can't hear you; all the writing awards he's won over the years are blocking your voice.
Spotty acting? Sure. A number of awful episodes? Definitely. A rushed fourth season, and relatively vacant fifth? Check. Dated effects? Of course.
But BAD WRITING? You're nuts. Writing is what elevated and redeemed B5.
B5 was nominated for the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo three years running (won it twice, and would've the other time too if it hadn't been competing against itself). You think they give the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation for what, special effects? Dramatic Hugos are about writing. Maybe it's not "subtle" enough for you (whatever the heck you mean by that), but it was pretty damn good.
This is a guy that writes 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, 360+ days a year, and he's been doing it for decades.
Some other accolades: The "Ray Bradbury" award (for work on B5) from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and Science Fiction Age dubbed him "the Tolstoy of Science Fiction."
Well they say its trajectory is coming pretty much directly from the centre of our galaxy, which supports their galactic black hole slingshot theory.
It's still possible that it's an extra-galactic object that just happened to intersect with the centre, but that requires us to assume a large coincidence, and we know what Occam has to say about that.
I used JBuilder for the last 5 years (v3 - v9), but recently made the jump to IntelliJ IDEA, and man am I glad I put in the time to learn it.
Let me mention just a few things that I LOVE about IDEA:
Auto Import - Start typing a class name, ANY class name, and IDEA will import automatically it for you. Huge timesaver.
Auto Method creation - Just invent a new method on the spot and use it. IDEA will popup a little box asking if you want to create that method with the parameters you used.
JavaDoc help popups - Put the cursor on a symbol (eg a method, etc) and hit Ctrl-Q, you get a instant JavaDoc for it in a tooltip popup. 90% of the time this saves me from needing the API open in a browser.
IDEA's settings give you greater control over code style.
JBuilder's refactoring is truly bare-bones compared to IDEA.
I could go on and on, I'm still discovering new things every day. Like, if you paste multi-line text into a quote, IDEA will automatically split it up into multiple quotes, and add newlines and addition operators. Then you can convert the entire thing to a StringBuffer.apppend() construct with another mouse click.
JBuilder has been resting on its laurels since about version 4. IDEA is truly innovative. (And so is Eclipse from everything I hear)
According to the article, he IS entitled to a cut of merchandise deals though?
"He filed the lawsuit in November 2002, pointing out a clause in his contract that entitled him to 10 percent of TV, movie and merchandising deals"
Even so, according to IMDB, total wordwide box office receipts for Spidey 1 & 2 (which are both in the top 15 grossers of all time) is approx 1.6 billion. Must take some kinda nerve to try and claim they made no profit on that.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn, you're right! Guess the dress threw me.
Regardless; poster including title still looks like a sappy chick flick from a quick glance.
You're right except for one aspect, it did NOT get "a lot of attention" and was not "high profile".
Almost nobody I know even knew this movie existed until I told them about it. Nobody saw a poster or ad that they remembered.
I blame it entirely on the marketing effort. Advertising was almost non-existant, and what little did seemed to consist of posters with Mal and Inara staring wistfully into space. Combine that with a name like "Serenity" and on casual inspection it looks like some instantly forgettable romantic schlock.
They should've had posters that emphasized the action, the spaceships, River kicking ass with an axe and combat boots.
And MAN... where was the marketing blitz after the opening weekend? Critics and audiences everywhere LOVED it, why weren't they trumpeting this fact all over the place? I was expecting to be assaulted for a week with choice quotes from respected sources, and shots of people exiting the theatres absolutely gushing about the movie, interwoven with some good one-liners and action shots from the movie. But we got NOTHING.
Fuck, this movie got 87% from RottenTomatoes' "Cream of the Crop". The New York Times wrote "Joss Whedon's unassuming science-fiction adventure is superior in almost every respect to George Lucas's aggressively more ambitious screen entertainments." Orson Scott Card called it the greatest sci-fi movie ever made. Why they didn't exploit this kind of praise for all it was worth is completely beyond me.
Maybe they thought grassroots word-of-mouth would be enough, but it obviously wasn't.
Nonetheless, many terrific movies did poorly in box office, and went on to become cult classics. I still have faith that Serenity's quality and accessibilty will be major assests in the long run.
"Northern Canada"
;)
There's another type?
(MINOR SPOILER WARNING IN FIRST PARAGRAPH ONLY)
:)
<minor spoiler>
I'm also wondering how these insane chaotic cannibals possess enough spaceships to blockade an entire planet so thickly that it's literally difficult to fit between them.
</minor spoiler>
That's actually a general pet-peeve I have with the Firefly-verse... Whedon seems to treat interplanetary space as about the size of a sea, where ships randomly encounter each other quite frequently. Happened several times in the TV series.
But... this is really a small gripe. Everything is secondary to the plot and characters, which are uniformly excellent, as is the dialog. If I want an epic space opera which at least makes an attempt at believable science (excepting hyperspace), I have my B5.
Go see Serenity, it rocks. I went with 8 people (most of whom were NOT familiar with Firefly) and we all loved it. The whole crowd loved it. I admit I was a little worried for the first 10 minutes or so, when Whedon crams 10 gallons of exposition into a 5 gallon hat, but once we get aboard the actual Serenity, everything starts to jive, and the audience was soon won comepletely over. And the whole movie is good, not just parts... a masterpiece of pacing.
My GP32 *already* runs Doom II at full speed (60fps), and it can play Quake at maybe 5-8 fps. That's with a single CPU @ 166MHz.
This new one has 2 x 200MHz ones.
Some other things the lowly GP32 could do:
Near perfect emulation of NES, Genesis, TurboGrafix16, and numerous others. Playable (but somewhat slow) SNES emulation. Many other systems emulated to various degrees( C64, Atari2600, ColecoVision, GB/GBC, MAME, etc) DivX / XVid playback (I was able to get 320x172, 24fps to work), plus Ogg/MP3 playback, image viewing, and document viewing (!Reader can handle PDFs and HTML, including ZIPPED, with inline images).
The GP32 was a brilliant little gem, and was perfect except for a few wishes:
The GP2X addresses all of these. I am ordering one immediately.
Source
Yes, it's by Richard Hoagland, commonly considered a crackpot. Here's an entire section of Bad Astronomy dedicated to debunking him.
Still, I find some of his stuff interesting, like the compilation of solar system changes. I brought this up a year ago on Slashdot, and was promptly berated for not fact checking, and told that downloading Celestia would clearly show me that Pluto was getting closer to the Sun, thus explaininng why it was heating up. Well... I downloaded Celestia, and Pluto is getting farther away. And heating up. And now the Mars changes are confirmed.
What if every planet could be shown to be changing like this? Would we still have the endless cries of "nothing to see here"?
'You think the "monster of the week" and dramatic love story of angel buffy that were the focus in seasons 1-3 were good.'
;), and I certainly respect your tastes, but labelling the first three seasons of Buffy "monster of the week" and overdone romance is selling it a bit short, IMHO.
Yoiks! Is that all you got out of seasons 1-3? How about a non-castrated Spike, and Drusilla in their prime? How about Angelus? The mayor was a fantastic villain, and Faith added an interesting dimension.
Not trying to get in a flame war (thus I shall resist the urge to criticize seasons 4-7
Wouldn't explain the cases where they find the ship, but no crew. :)
"Land of the Dead was shot in Toronto"
Yup... that beautiful arching atrium on the ground floor of "Fiddler's Green" is BCE Place, I used to work there. You can see the Hockey Hall of Fame in one shot. Lots of scenes shot underneath the Gardiner as well.
OK.. writing websites to standards won't get you very far with IE (unless you're talking nested tables design. I'm not). Or more like, it often takes a lot of work to find a "standards" way of doing something that DOES work without IE completely F$#@ing it up. If you're trying to do nice clean HTML+CSS, the time wasted finding workarounds for IE's horrific rendering bugs is just staggering.
For commercial work, I might agree with you, that the site must work in IE, with all the bells and whistles.
But I've done non-profit/niche sites, that were perfectly functional and pretty in IE, but looked and performed better in browsers with better standards support. So we slapped a "Best in Firefox/Mozilla" blurb, to help promote it. Again, this is a 100% standards compliant site.
Anyway the point is, I think you're overgeneralizing, and equating "best viewed with" with proprietary, non-standard formats, which it doesn't have to be.
Check out a NEX ia+
1. $69 for base unit. It runs on CF1/2 (or Microdrive) so that's extra of course.
2. Plays standard MP3s (up to 320 kbit, incl. VBR), and there's rumors of an OGG firmware upgrade.
3. No DRM whatsoever.
4. The batteries (2xAA, so you can carry rechargable spares, so you never ever run out) last a long time.. no moving parts (like a HD unit) helps with that.
5. Get a flashcard reader, use your CFs like floppies.
Other goodies:
- Built in FM radio (lousy reception tho)
- Built in microphone
- Line-in jack
- Any of the above three inputs can be encoded on-the-fly to MP3 (64 kbit).
Disadvantages: Much more expensive per GB than a hard drive unit, and your size is limited (but CF goes up to 8GB last I checked)
I specifically bought this unit because I was looking for a DRM-free MP3 player that ran on Compact Flash, and standard AA batteries. It was the only one I could find, there may be more now.
So... I take it you think an advanced spacefaring civilization would have to resort to direct mating to insert genes into our DNA?
Because our genes are only a few percent different from apes, right? Isn't it at least possible that changes were introduced through genetic manipulation at some point?
I was thinking skinny, wanderlusting thieves ("HANDLERS!"), but yours is more succinct. ;)
Thanks for that. I read the whole paper, and like to think I even understood most of it. It does make a lot of sense to use an analytical methodology which takes bias explicitly into account.
It doesn't absolutely disprove it either though, and I still would highly recommend "The Field" though. It is crammed full of fascinating experiments; the REG stuff (which obviously you're familiar with) is just part of it. For example, did you know Apollo Astronaut Ed Mitchell performed ESP experiments from the moon? Or another one I found very interesting, was they found that a person's stress levels increase significantly when they are being observed, even when they are not consciously aware of being observed. In other words, scientific data in support of the "feeling that you're being watched". Neat stuff.
This brings to mind the origins of D&D... IIRC they tried to include Hobbits as one of the character races, but the Tolkien estate wouldn't hear of it. Thus, D&D has Halflings, which are virtually identical to Tolkien's Hobbits.
Seems like they changed this in 3rd edition though, Halflings now seem a lot more like Kender from Dragonlance.
I read in a book called "The Field" (by Lynne McTaggart), an even more amazing experiment, that showed that human consciousness could affect events in the past, as long as they hadn't been measured yet.
They found that just about everyone could, on a small but repeatable level, affect the output of a random number generator just by concentrating on it. (The implications of that, if true, are staggering enough alone)
So then they tried running the tests and sealing the results, and had the participants concentrate on affecting the results of the test that had run three days ago.. and guess what? The studies showed statistically significant results. Crazy stuff... like the mind is some kind of lens that can "focus" quantum probability.
Obviously only a Nazi would post a time cube link.
...
;)
(The real joke here will be clueless mods marking this as flamebait
"what do you call a trilogy with 37 parts?" ;)
Oh, that's easy. "The increasingly inaccurately named Discworld trilogy"
Apologies to the late Douglas Adams.
Pfft. I already have the perfect platform for that, and it's cheaper. (And yes it runs Doom II at 60fps)
GamePark32: http://www.gbax.com/gp32review.html
Specs:
Great 3.5" 320 x 240 screen. 64K colours.
Variable speed ARM CPU, up to 166MHz (or OC'd higher)
8MB ram, runs off of 128MB smartmedia and 2xAA (10+ hours battery life)
Can emulate just about everything up to an SNES.
Can play MP3/Ogg/DivX/XviD (you'll have to encode video yourself of course), although the 128MB smartmedia limit doesn't make it a very good media jukebox.
This puppy is a retro emulator's dream.
I want solid state computing... zero moving parts. No fans, and a flash-based "hard drive". I don't care about noise, I care about having something that sucks very little juice and will essentially never break down.
I'm happy right now with my GamePark32... open ARM architecture, variable speed up to 166MHz. Great homebrew community. It can play 320x176 24fps DivX/XVid (if you know your way around encoding), has emulators for everything up to an SNES, and even has a port of Linux. (You can get a keyboard for it) Runs on SmartMedia cards and 2 AA's.
Give me one of these new AMD units, and a device that runs off CompactFlash (SmartMedia is limited to 128MB) and I'd be set.
He probably can't hear you; all the writing awards he's won over the years are blocking your voice.
Spotty acting? Sure. A number of awful episodes? Definitely. A rushed fourth season, and relatively vacant fifth? Check. Dated effects? Of course.
But BAD WRITING? You're nuts. Writing is what elevated and redeemed B5.
B5 was nominated for the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo three years running (won it twice, and would've the other time too if it hadn't been competing against itself). You think they give the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation for what, special effects? Dramatic Hugos are about writing. Maybe it's not "subtle" enough for you (whatever the heck you mean by that), but it was pretty damn good.
This is a guy that writes 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, 360+ days a year, and he's been doing it for decades.
Some other accolades: The "Ray Bradbury" award (for work on B5) from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and Science Fiction Age dubbed him "the Tolstoy of Science Fiction."
Well they say its trajectory is coming pretty much directly from the centre of our galaxy, which supports their galactic black hole slingshot theory.
It's still possible that it's an extra-galactic object that just happened to intersect with the centre, but that requires us to assume a large coincidence, and we know what Occam has to say about that.
...and just like that, the sport of 'Funny Map Googling' was born. ;D
Check out "hippy beatniks in SF", LOL.
I used JBuilder for the last 5 years (v3 - v9), but recently made the jump to IntelliJ IDEA, and man am I glad I put in the time to learn it.
Let me mention just a few things that I LOVE about IDEA:
Auto Import - Start typing a class name, ANY class name, and IDEA will import automatically it for you. Huge timesaver.
Auto Method creation - Just invent a new method on the spot and use it. IDEA will popup a little box asking if you want to create that method with the parameters you used.
JavaDoc help popups - Put the cursor on a symbol (eg a method, etc) and hit Ctrl-Q, you get a instant JavaDoc for it in a tooltip popup. 90% of the time this saves me from needing the API open in a browser.
IDEA's settings give you greater control over code style.
JBuilder's refactoring is truly bare-bones compared to IDEA.
I could go on and on, I'm still discovering new things every day. Like, if you paste multi-line text into a quote, IDEA will automatically split it up into multiple quotes, and add newlines and addition operators. Then you can convert the entire thing to a StringBuffer.apppend() construct with another mouse click.
JBuilder has been resting on its laurels since about version 4. IDEA is truly innovative. (And so is Eclipse from everything I hear)
According to the article, he IS entitled to a cut of merchandise deals though?
"He filed the lawsuit in November 2002, pointing out a clause in his contract that entitled him to 10 percent of TV, movie and merchandising deals"
Even so, according to IMDB, total wordwide box office receipts for Spidey 1 & 2 (which are both in the top 15 grossers of all time) is approx 1.6 billion. Must take some kinda nerve to try and claim they made no profit on that.