Who wants to bet the low/no tax conservatives will let this thing through?
I'd take that bet. Almost every time an Internet tax is brought up, it's by some Democrat jackass like Senator Mark Dayton, and done in the name of "protecting" local merchants. (Never mind that most of the smartest mom & pop stores are already doing a lot of e-commerce on the side themselves.)
When these proposals get shouted down, they are typically shouted down by conservatives and libertarians, who see that the Internet is to the US as Hong Kong is to China: A petri dish of glorious less-regulated commerce, which will continue to make us all richer if we can just be smart enough to leave it the fuck alone.
The real solution is to put an end to sales taxes. Sales tax is regressive.
Correction: Sales taxes on essential commodities, such as food, energy, and clothing, are regressive. Poor people spend a greater portion of their income on survival than do the rich.
If you are middle-class or below, sales taxes on non-essential items might sting you pretty hard, but only according to how much non-essential crap you consume. Live the non-materialist life which floaty-headed liberal rags like to advocate, and you'll hardly pay a cent in sales taxes.
You got modded as a troll, but your comment is 100% correct. Dvorak has made a career out of spouting sensational bullshit (which even he must know is nonsense) in order to generate more hits for his site. He's one of the most successful trolls on all of the Internet.
If the editors are going to pay any attention whatsoever to submissions about his articles (and they ought not), then Slashdot needs a "Dvorak" category, so we can filter it out.
My wife would kill me, if I tried to set up the PC in the living room.
Two words:
Mac
mini
It's the ultimate "wife friendly" HTPC. Set it up properly, program your remote with the Keyspan buttons and the thing looks (and works) exactly like a DVD player when you're watching movies.
Pull out the bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and you've got an okay game machine for World of Warcraft, the Sims, Halo, etc.
Connect an EyeTV 500, and you've got PVR functions for the free over-the-air HDTV signals. (Yeah, yeah... box specs say you need a G5 for 1080i. Guess what, the mini downscales smoothly and good LCD's upscale well enough that you'll probably never notice the difference. "1/4 Def" is still a higher res than you get from a DVD.
The only pain-in-the-ass element is audio. If you want DTS or Dolby Surround you will need to buy a USB-TOSLink converter box, and the only company who makes such a creature for the Mac right now is M-Audio, who makes okay "pro" devices, but flimsy consumer gadgets with clumsy driver software.
Still, a media room computer plus marital bliss just might be worth the $1140 you'll spend. ($600 mini, $100 RAM, $300 EyeTV box, $60 Keyspan remote, $80 USB audio box.)
Better still, wait until the mini "2" comes out sometime after next month. If the current iMac is any indicator, it might very well save you the trouble of buying either the remote or the M-Audio box, while handling HD signals even better thanks to a spiffy new dual-core Intel chip.
The X-Box 360 clearly has heat management issues in some models (not most, but the early scuttlebut seems to be that it's more than one would expect.)
The author goes on some weird rant, based on the one and only 360 he has access to, speculating that other people's reports about overheating power supplied must be bullshit because his problem happened to seem to be with the CPU and/or graphics card.
So, why 10 more "problems"?
So you will have to load 10 more pages to read this useless "article." Nobody gives a fuck that there's not web browser built in to this game console (just like there's none in any other major console on the market), but you will need to load ad after ad to discover that such nitpicks are the best this joker can come up with.
Pathetic.
(Disclaimer: I don't own a 360, and won't unless or until there's a better selection of games available for it.)
I wonder how they will wrangle their way out of this one?
Easy. Don't pay it.
Re:Easter eggs don't count as news
on
Kong Lives!
·
· Score: 1
What would be news-worthy is if a blockbuster-action-movie-based console game actually turned out to be fun.
Every one I've ever played is a total piece of steamy, brown, nutty, moist, dogshit, and I suspect that's likely to be the case here, too. In the rare cases where I bothered to buy them, I always ended up wishing I hadn't.
Yes, Knights of the Old Republic, too. T3h. suck.
Oh, and that game with the hot ninja chick in the short red kimono... That was a another disaster.
Using sex or nerdy movies as a hook to draw my interest is all fine and dandy, but could somebody please bother to come up with a game worth playing while they are at it!?!?!?
Hey console makers? Want to raise prices? Fine. Make games that are worth it. I'd gladly pay $80 for a good game rather than pay $40 each for two games which are likely to stink on ice.
Oh, and Rockstar? Knock that LA Gangs shit off and get back to the heart and soul of the GTA franchise: Dago mobsters shooting the hell out of everything. I want to play a spaghetti-eating gangster in pinstripes driving cool sports cars and blowing up buildings, not some "street-wise" retard on a bicycle.
That sounds considerably more reasonable than your earlier posts did. I also agree that only one of us was starting to sound crazy. Comparing the death of a character on a sci-fi show to defacing one of the greatest works of art in history... sorry dude, but that's nuts. I stand by my incredulity.
but rather about the people who will be taking care of YOU in your old age- YOUR grandchildren.
My grandchildren will not be taking care of me in my old age. I live in a post-industrialist country where the old are generally richer than the young. If you live in a pre-industrialist country where people don't have IRA's, 401K's, etc., then I could see you wanting to live in the loft above Junior's kid's house someday.
If those people are in slavery to a trade deficit, you're fsckd.
Trade deficit is not slavery. It just means that we have a lot of our national currency floating around in other countries, where it can only be used to buy stuff from us. All trade balances in the long run, that's why they call it trade.
If those people don't exist- don't expect any help from governments bent on no longer providing services.
I would love it if the government gave up on "providing services" to me. The sooner the better. I could use the tax savings to fatten up my retirement account and live like a king.
If you're in a country that is currently growing in manufacturing, instead of shrinking, then you've got a half a chance at having an ok retirement.
Manufacturing!? You mean like working is sweat shops & clean rooms to build hardware? No thanks. We've got poor countries to do that for us. Laborious work is what you do when you don't have better options. By 100 years from now, robotics will likely take all of that shit over, so we might as well get used to having an economy which doesn't depend on making people sit on assembly lines and bolt things together sooner rather than later.
That the whole sub-plot was an utterly anti-objectivist plot about learning to accept River into the crew and care about her as a person and not evaluate her as a mere threat?
Required listening before we go on: The commentary track of "Objects In Space" on the DVD.
There was no anti-objectivist message to the show, in spite of the fact that the villian of the piece presents the case. The entire episode was EVANGELIZING objectivism, and Joss Whedon came right out and said this was his intention. It was a 43-minute long tribute to "Nausia", his favorite philisophic work.
No, this is analogous to you screaming that the color of God's beard on the Cistine Chapel was a HUGE MISTAKE and therefore a big FUCK YOU from Michelangelo to the churchgoers.
Many of us really liked the movie, and Wash's death scene contributed to it being a movie which moved and impressed us. You obviously didn't. That doesn't make Joss Whedon some kind of antichrist for telling the story in a way you don't approve of.
I mean, Janeane Garafolo on prozac!!! If you take a minute to go back and re-read your posts, I think you'll be forced to admit that you're starting to sound like the Kathy Bates character in "Misery."
people get killed... but serve no greater purpose.
Goddamn, you can stop repeating that any time now, it won't make it true.
Wash's death served the purpose of moving the story to where the storyteller wanted to move it. Just because the purpose was lost on you (because it crushed your fantasy of the show someday coming back on TV with all your favorite characters intact) doesn't mean that the purpose wasn't there.
I *loved* the series, and Wash was my second-favorite character after Kaylee. Women in the crowd audably gasped in horror at his death, as if an actual family member died right in front of them. The death of that character made the movie a better movie, which is the only reason to have anything happen in a movie.
I think he was once an operative just like Mal's nemesis in "Serenity" but something happened...
It's fairly clear that that was was the conclusion we were meant to draw. I kind of love the fact that we'll never get to know that that "something" was.
But in every OTHER movie everyone dies. From Predator to Aliens (every movie in the series) it's a STAPLE of sci fi to kill off main/supporting characters in sci-fi movies.
Correction: It's a staple to kill disposable henchmen. You knew Aaahnold would survive through the end of Predator, you knew Sigourney Weaver would not abruptly die in the first ten minutes of Aliens.
In Serenity, a character which everybody (both in the story and in the audience) knew and loved was the one to buy the farm. It came out of nowhere.
Funny you should hold up Star Wars as an example of where "everybody lives"... I seem to recall an equally important and beloved character, played by a well-liked actor, getting chopped down by Darth Vader in the third reel of that particular movie, and existing only as a ghost for the rest of the trilogy. That death, like the death of Wash, served to highten the drama for the rest of the film, and add a melancholy tone to the victory.
More to the point, the movie was the first time we got to see "the real Mal" as Whedon intended. On the TV series, he was constantly told to nice-up the character as a quirky and lovable anti-hero, rather than the broken man that he was supposed to be.
We got to catch glimpses of it, such as the scene when he locked Jayne in the airlock, but for the most part "Captain Thight-pants" was a rather happy-go-lucky character on the TV series, and it suffered for it.
I loved the series, but the movie finally allowed Whedon to do a lot of things he clearly had wanted to do with the show from the beginning, but lacked the free hand to do so.
Killing Wash established that "all bets are off." It was just about the last thing any fan of the show expected...
It's also typical of Whedon's M.O.
Pick one please.
Whedon's M.O. is to move against audience expectaions. Therefore, those two sentences do not contradict.
This is what I mean when I talk about misery-loving Wheddonites. You can rest assured that I have NO INTEREST WHATSOEVER in seeing anything else Wheddon has done.
Fair enough. You'll miss out on a lot of quality entertainment and witty dialog in the name of avoiding art which troubles and upsets you, but to each his own.
I can like Firefly without liking Wheddon. Just like I can like Star Wars (original and unedited) but still hate Lucas for what he did to the show - both in "improving" the originals and creating the prequals.
Firefly is just a story which Joss Whedon chose to tell us. Star Wars is just a story which George Lucas chose to tell us. Neither tale came about on their own, but were products of the imaginations of their writers. You can dislike other works by the same authors, but it's rather silly to try to create an artificial distinction between a story you liked and a storyteller you sometimes don't. The fact that you are so upset about them ruining the stories you followed is actually a pretty good indicator that you LOVED their work, with great passion. You simply can't pay a writer a higher compliment than to be utterly pissed off at a plot twist you didn't like in one of their stories. It's rock-solid proof that these writers managed to engage you on a deeply personal level, which is the ultimate goal of anybody who tells a story in any medium.
First of all, I disagree that nihilism can't render good art. Alan Moore's "The Watchmen" is nothing if not a 12-issue meditation on nihilism and it's a brilliant work.
Secondly, I disagree that the underlying philosophy of the film is all that different from that of the series. If anything, "Objects In Space" was a far more heavy-handed declaration of objectivism (of the Freshman Philosophy 101 variety) than the movie ever was. Jubal Early's line "well... here I am" as he drifts in space waiting to die pretty much summed up everything you need to know about what Whedon was trying to say with both the series and the film. You are welcome to not like it, but I think it's silly to trash the movie while holding the series (which contained all the same strengths and weaknesses) up on a pedistal.
"Outlaws" by LucasArts (once I applied the 3DFX patch) was far and away the most fun solo FPS I ever played. The various X-Wing games were also oodles of fun, especially deathmatching in LAN parties on X-Wing v.s. Tie Fighter.
Whatever you think of Lucas's movies, I'm always going to give games from that company a close look.
I thought the death of Book without his backstory revealed to anybody on the crew (or even the audience) was a terrific statement about the way people really relate to each other. We all have people we are close to in spite of being completely ignorant about vast swaths of their life. If you pay close attention, you can piece together a pretty good picture of the man Book most likely was, but you can't be sure.
That's how it is in life. The Jesus-freak chick you dated in college might have had an abortion two years before you met her. Your grandpa's best drinking buddy might have once crawled behind German lines doing recon, killing enemies by slitting their throats because WWII silencers overheated too quickly. Your oldest brother might be a transvestite who is considering a sex change. The truth is, we usually don't know every detail about each other, and having things we didn't know about some of the characters on Firefly made them more real.
Wash was Joss Whedon's proxy in the cast. He looked like a young Joss Whedon, talked like him, had his attitude, and got all the funniest lines.
In short, that character was the author's voice.
Killing Wash established that "all bets are off." It was just about the last thing any fan of the show expected, and Whedon had to do something on that scale of unexpected tragedy to change the tone and make it clear that you weren't just watching a two-hour TV epdisode and paying eight bucks to do so.
It's also typical of Whedon's M.O. Everything you said so far throughout these threads sounds exactly like the complaints of thousands of angry lesbians which erupted when Tara (Willow's girlfriend) was shot in Season 7 of Buffy. "It wasn't needed" "the show will be weaker now" "it seemed meaningless to the story." Heck, do a global replace of "Wash" with "Tara" and throw in a little whining about how big media hates real lesbians, and your posts would fit right in to the whine-fests from back then.
News Flash: Whedon is not only willing to kill off well-loved characters, he's actually eager for the chance to do so. He's an evil god who never wants his creations to be happy. Bear that in mind when watching anything he makes.
I was just really, really hoping for the movie to be popular in order to bring back the TV show.
Then you were full of false hope. Joss Whedon only got the movie deal by signing an agreement not to bring it back as a TV show. Furthermore, he had been expressing an interest, ever since the "Firefly" cancellation, in getting out of the TV business entirely and just doing movies. Notice how he hasn't started anything new in the wake of both Buffy and Angel ending?
If "Serenity" did really well, it might have meant two more movies, but that's about it.
Killing Wash was a brilliant move. The fact that it was a "meaningless" death feeds directly into the almost nihilistic worldview which Whedon (a militant athiest with a fetish for objectivism) had been injecting into Firefly almost from the beginning.
If you don't see how perfectly it fits in to his universe to have Wash take a reaver grappling hook (just like the one he pointed out in the pilot episode when a reaver ship passes nearby) right in the chest just as everything looks like it will be okay, then you weren't watching the show very closely. Sensless brutality is the world in which Joss Whedon pretty much always sets his stories.
Slashdot Mirror
Who wants to bet the low/no tax conservatives will let this thing through?
I'd take that bet. Almost every time an Internet tax is brought up, it's by some Democrat jackass like Senator Mark Dayton, and done in the name of "protecting" local merchants. (Never mind that most of the smartest mom & pop stores are already doing a lot of e-commerce on the side themselves.)
When these proposals get shouted down, they are typically shouted down by conservatives and libertarians, who see that the Internet is to the US as Hong Kong is to China: A petri dish of glorious less-regulated commerce, which will continue to make us all richer if we can just be smart enough to leave it the fuck alone.
The real solution is to put an end to sales taxes. Sales tax is regressive.
Correction: Sales taxes on essential commodities, such as food, energy, and clothing, are regressive. Poor people spend a greater portion of their income on survival than do the rich.
If you are middle-class or below, sales taxes on non-essential items might sting you pretty hard, but only according to how much non-essential crap you consume. Live the non-materialist life which floaty-headed liberal rags like to advocate, and you'll hardly pay a cent in sales taxes.
You got modded as a troll, but your comment is 100% correct. Dvorak has made a career out of spouting sensational bullshit (which even he must know is nonsense) in order to generate more hits for his site. He's one of the most successful trolls on all of the Internet.
If the editors are going to pay any attention whatsoever to submissions about his articles (and they ought not), then Slashdot needs a "Dvorak" category, so we can filter it out.
It's before 5:00 in most of the US. Some of us are reading from work during our down-time.
My wife would kill me, if I tried to set up the PC in the living room.
Two words:
Mac
mini
It's the ultimate "wife friendly" HTPC. Set it up properly, program your remote with the Keyspan buttons and the thing looks (and works) exactly like a DVD player when you're watching movies.
Pull out the bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and you've got an okay game machine for World of Warcraft, the Sims, Halo, etc.
Connect an EyeTV 500, and you've got PVR functions for the free over-the-air HDTV signals. (Yeah, yeah... box specs say you need a G5 for 1080i. Guess what, the mini downscales smoothly and good LCD's upscale well enough that you'll probably never notice the difference. "1/4 Def" is still a higher res than you get from a DVD.
The only pain-in-the-ass element is audio. If you want DTS or Dolby Surround you will need to buy a USB-TOSLink converter box, and the only company who makes such a creature for the Mac right now is M-Audio, who makes okay "pro" devices, but flimsy consumer gadgets with clumsy driver software.
Still, a media room computer plus marital bliss just might be worth the $1140 you'll spend. ($600 mini, $100 RAM, $300 EyeTV box, $60 Keyspan remote, $80 USB audio box.)
Better still, wait until the mini "2" comes out sometime after next month. If the current iMac is any indicator, it might very well save you the trouble of buying either the remote or the M-Audio box, while handling HD signals even better thanks to a spiffy new dual-core Intel chip.
Gee, only 11?
Actually, there's only one.
The X-Box 360 clearly has heat management issues in some models (not most, but the early scuttlebut seems to be that it's more than one would expect.)
The author goes on some weird rant, based on the one and only 360 he has access to, speculating that other people's reports about overheating power supplied must be bullshit because his problem happened to seem to be with the CPU and/or graphics card.
So, why 10 more "problems"?
So you will have to load 10 more pages to read this useless "article." Nobody gives a fuck that there's not web browser built in to this game console (just like there's none in any other major console on the market), but you will need to load ad after ad to discover that such nitpicks are the best this joker can come up with.
Pathetic.
(Disclaimer: I don't own a 360, and won't unless or until there's a better selection of games available for it.)
Is today pro-Microsoft or anti-Microsoft?
I left my cheat-sheet at home...
Today is "different people have different opinions" day. Same as any other day.
Glad I could clear up that confusion of yours.
I wonder how they will wrangle their way out of this one?
Easy. Don't pay it.
What would be news-worthy is if a blockbuster-action-movie-based console game actually turned out to be fun.
Every one I've ever played is a total piece of steamy, brown, nutty, moist, dogshit, and I suspect that's likely to be the case here, too. In the rare cases where I bothered to buy them, I always ended up wishing I hadn't.
Yes, Knights of the Old Republic, too. T3h. suck.
Oh, and that game with the hot ninja chick in the short red kimono... That was a another disaster.
Using sex or nerdy movies as a hook to draw my interest is all fine and dandy, but could somebody please bother to come up with a game worth playing while they are at it!?!?!?
Hey console makers? Want to raise prices? Fine. Make games that are worth it. I'd gladly pay $80 for a good game rather than pay $40 each for two games which are likely to stink on ice.
Oh, and Rockstar? Knock that LA Gangs shit off and get back to the heart and soul of the GTA franchise: Dago mobsters shooting the hell out of everything. I want to play a spaghetti-eating gangster in pinstripes driving cool sports cars and blowing up buildings, not some "street-wise" retard on a bicycle.
Thank you.
Sorry, my bad.
Save the gay whales. The planet needs you to.
It sounds like you and Joss both need to get your philosophies straight.
No, just me.
That sounds considerably more reasonable than your earlier posts did. I also agree that only one of us was starting to sound crazy. Comparing the death of a character on a sci-fi show to defacing one of the greatest works of art in history... sorry dude, but that's nuts. I stand by my incredulity.
but rather about the people who will be taking care of YOU in your old age- YOUR grandchildren.
My grandchildren will not be taking care of me in my old age. I live in a post-industrialist country where the old are generally richer than the young. If you live in a pre-industrialist country where people don't have IRA's, 401K's, etc., then I could see you wanting to live in the loft above Junior's kid's house someday.
If those people are in slavery to a trade deficit, you're fsckd.
Trade deficit is not slavery. It just means that we have a lot of our national currency floating around in other countries, where it can only be used to buy stuff from us. All trade balances in the long run, that's why they call it trade.
If those people don't exist- don't expect any help from governments bent on no longer providing services.
I would love it if the government gave up on "providing services" to me. The sooner the better. I could use the tax savings to fatten up my retirement account and live like a king.
If you're in a country that is currently growing in manufacturing, instead of shrinking, then you've got a half a chance at having an ok retirement.
Manufacturing!? You mean like working is sweat shops & clean rooms to build hardware? No thanks. We've got poor countries to do that for us. Laborious work is what you do when you don't have better options. By 100 years from now, robotics will likely take all of that shit over, so we might as well get used to having an economy which doesn't depend on making people sit on assembly lines and bolt things together sooner rather than later.
That the whole sub-plot was an utterly anti-objectivist plot about learning to accept River into the crew and care about her as a person and not evaluate her as a mere threat?
Required listening before we go on: The commentary track of "Objects In Space" on the DVD.
There was no anti-objectivist message to the show, in spite of the fact that the villian of the piece presents the case. The entire episode was EVANGELIZING objectivism, and Joss Whedon came right out and said this was his intention. It was a 43-minute long tribute to "Nausia", his favorite philisophic work.
No, this is analogous to you screaming that the color of God's beard on the Cistine Chapel was a HUGE MISTAKE and therefore a big FUCK YOU from Michelangelo to the churchgoers.
Many of us really liked the movie, and Wash's death scene contributed to it being a movie which moved and impressed us. You obviously didn't. That doesn't make Joss Whedon some kind of antichrist for telling the story in a way you don't approve of.
I mean, Janeane Garafolo on prozac!!! If you take a minute to go back and re-read your posts, I think you'll be forced to admit that you're starting to sound like the Kathy Bates character in "Misery."
people get killed ... but serve no greater purpose.
Goddamn, you can stop repeating that any time now, it won't make it true.
Wash's death served the purpose of moving the story to where the storyteller wanted to move it. Just because the purpose was lost on you (because it crushed your fantasy of the show someday coming back on TV with all your favorite characters intact) doesn't mean that the purpose wasn't there.
I *loved* the series, and Wash was my second-favorite character after Kaylee. Women in the crowd audably gasped in horror at his death, as if an actual family member died right in front of them. The death of that character made the movie a better movie, which is the only reason to have anything happen in a movie.
I think he was once an operative just like Mal's nemesis in "Serenity" but something happened...
It's fairly clear that that was was the conclusion we were meant to draw. I kind of love the fact that we'll never get to know that that "something" was.
But in every OTHER movie everyone dies. From Predator to Aliens (every movie in the series) it's a STAPLE of sci fi to kill off main/supporting characters in sci-fi movies.
Correction: It's a staple to kill disposable henchmen. You knew Aaahnold would survive through the end of Predator, you knew Sigourney Weaver would not abruptly die in the first ten minutes of Aliens.
In Serenity, a character which everybody (both in the story and in the audience) knew and loved was the one to buy the farm. It came out of nowhere.
Funny you should hold up Star Wars as an example of where "everybody lives"... I seem to recall an equally important and beloved character, played by a well-liked actor, getting chopped down by Darth Vader in the third reel of that particular movie, and existing only as a ghost for the rest of the trilogy. That death, like the death of Wash, served to highten the drama for the rest of the film, and add a melancholy tone to the victory.
More to the point, the movie was the first time we got to see "the real Mal" as Whedon intended. On the TV series, he was constantly told to nice-up the character as a quirky and lovable anti-hero, rather than the broken man that he was supposed to be.
We got to catch glimpses of it, such as the scene when he locked Jayne in the airlock, but for the most part "Captain Thight-pants" was a rather happy-go-lucky character on the TV series, and it suffered for it.
I loved the series, but the movie finally allowed Whedon to do a lot of things he clearly had wanted to do with the show from the beginning, but lacked the free hand to do so.
Killing Wash established that "all bets are off." It was just about the last thing any fan of the show expected...
It's also typical of Whedon's M.O.
Pick one please.
Whedon's M.O. is to move against audience expectaions. Therefore, those two sentences do not contradict.
This is what I mean when I talk about misery-loving Wheddonites. You can rest assured that I have NO INTEREST WHATSOEVER in seeing anything else Wheddon has done.
Fair enough. You'll miss out on a lot of quality entertainment and witty dialog in the name of avoiding art which troubles and upsets you, but to each his own.
I can like Firefly without liking Wheddon. Just like I can like Star Wars (original and unedited) but still hate Lucas for what he did to the show - both in "improving" the originals and creating the prequals.
Firefly is just a story which Joss Whedon chose to tell us. Star Wars is just a story which George Lucas chose to tell us. Neither tale came about on their own, but were products of the imaginations of their writers. You can dislike other works by the same authors, but it's rather silly to try to create an artificial distinction between a story you liked and a storyteller you sometimes don't. The fact that you are so upset about them ruining the stories you followed is actually a pretty good indicator that you LOVED their work, with great passion. You simply can't pay a writer a higher compliment than to be utterly pissed off at a plot twist you didn't like in one of their stories. It's rock-solid proof that these writers managed to engage you on a deeply personal level, which is the ultimate goal of anybody who tells a story in any medium.
First of all, I disagree that nihilism can't render good art. Alan Moore's "The Watchmen" is nothing if not a 12-issue meditation on nihilism and it's a brilliant work.
Secondly, I disagree that the underlying philosophy of the film is all that different from that of the series. If anything, "Objects In Space" was a far more heavy-handed declaration of objectivism (of the Freshman Philosophy 101 variety) than the movie ever was. Jubal Early's line "well... here I am" as he drifts in space waiting to die pretty much summed up everything you need to know about what Whedon was trying to say with both the series and the film. You are welcome to not like it, but I think it's silly to trash the movie while holding the series (which contained all the same strengths and weaknesses) up on a pedistal.
"Outlaws" by LucasArts (once I applied the 3DFX patch) was far and away the most fun solo FPS I ever played. The various X-Wing games were also oodles of fun, especially deathmatching in LAN parties on X-Wing v.s. Tie Fighter.
Whatever you think of Lucas's movies, I'm always going to give games from that company a close look.
I thought the death of Book without his backstory revealed to anybody on the crew (or even the audience) was a terrific statement about the way people really relate to each other. We all have people we are close to in spite of being completely ignorant about vast swaths of their life. If you pay close attention, you can piece together a pretty good picture of the man Book most likely was, but you can't be sure.
That's how it is in life. The Jesus-freak chick you dated in college might have had an abortion two years before you met her. Your grandpa's best drinking buddy might have once crawled behind German lines doing recon, killing enemies by slitting their throats because WWII silencers overheated too quickly. Your oldest brother might be a transvestite who is considering a sex change. The truth is, we usually don't know every detail about each other, and having things we didn't know about some of the characters on Firefly made them more real.
Wash was Joss Whedon's proxy in the cast. He looked like a young Joss Whedon, talked like him, had his attitude, and got all the funniest lines.
In short, that character was the author's voice.
Killing Wash established that "all bets are off." It was just about the last thing any fan of the show expected, and Whedon had to do something on that scale of unexpected tragedy to change the tone and make it clear that you weren't just watching a two-hour TV epdisode and paying eight bucks to do so.
It's also typical of Whedon's M.O. Everything you said so far throughout these threads sounds exactly like the complaints of thousands of angry lesbians which erupted when Tara (Willow's girlfriend) was shot in Season 7 of Buffy. "It wasn't needed" "the show will be weaker now" "it seemed meaningless to the story." Heck, do a global replace of "Wash" with "Tara" and throw in a little whining about how big media hates real lesbians, and your posts would fit right in to the whine-fests from back then.
News Flash: Whedon is not only willing to kill off well-loved characters, he's actually eager for the chance to do so. He's an evil god who never wants his creations to be happy. Bear that in mind when watching anything he makes.
I was just really, really hoping for the movie to be popular in order to bring back the TV show.
Then you were full of false hope. Joss Whedon only got the movie deal by signing an agreement not to bring it back as a TV show. Furthermore, he had been expressing an interest, ever since the "Firefly" cancellation, in getting out of the TV business entirely and just doing movies. Notice how he hasn't started anything new in the wake of both Buffy and Angel ending?
If "Serenity" did really well, it might have meant two more movies, but that's about it.
Killing Wash was a brilliant move. The fact that it was a "meaningless" death feeds directly into the almost nihilistic worldview which Whedon (a militant athiest with a fetish for objectivism) had been injecting into Firefly almost from the beginning.
If you don't see how perfectly it fits in to his universe to have Wash take a reaver grappling hook (just like the one he pointed out in the pilot episode when a reaver ship passes nearby) right in the chest just as everything looks like it will be okay, then you weren't watching the show very closely. Sensless brutality is the world in which Joss Whedon pretty much always sets his stories.