The latter was advertised incessantly on niche cable channels like Comedy Central and Sci-Fi channel. Outside of there I don't recall seeing much in the way of advertising.
The advertising and marketing really did suck all the way around.
The opposite of "a religious person" is not "an atheist".
Not TECHNICALLY true. Since "atheist" literally means "non-theist", or a person who rejects or doesn't believe in a system of dogmatic faith. Technically "atheist" is in fact the opposite of "religious". Of course, reality is never as clear cut as labels we humans come up with, and it's true that you can, for example, consider yourself to be both an atheist and a, say, Unitarian at the same time, with really provoking much in the way of contradiction. That's why I tend to use the word 'atheist' more in a manner of "one who rejects religious dogma/religion" rather than "one who does not believe in god or a higher power or currently unknown levels of existence". I also tend to use "Secular Humanist" a lot, as it's a (marginally) less "loaded word" among those trying to demonize people who don't share their beliefs.
Why is the parent a troll? It's the truth. That's about the only place ID could or should be taught. I have no problems with ID being mentioned in mythology courses or even comparative religion classes. But it's not science (and in many ways is the opposite of science), and doesn't belong in ANY science classes.
Just to state the obvious, but nobody sells or buys cassettes any more, so they're effectively "gone" now. And while CDs are still around, they're used mostly as a storage medium... I don't know if it's "most people" yet, but it's rapidly becoming "most people" that get the CD, rip it, and then store it away, listening only to the resulting MP3 files from that point on.
Myself, I only use CDs in the car any more, because that's the only place I am where I don't have a built-in high-quality MP3 player that takes memory sticks or that can connect directly to an MP3 player. And even there I can use MP3 CDs stuffed with music and burned myself. I wish my car had an external jack for an MP3 player input (and/or bluetooth)
In my home, I either use digital cable music channels through the TV surround sound system, or I stream MP3s wirelessly from my computer to the sound system. When traveling, it's MP3 player all the way.
A heck of a lot of people are now buying music on-line without there ever being a physical medium involved at all (save for the hard disk and/or memory cards in their computers and MP3 players). There is NO reason to believe that movies and TV shows won't go the same way as bandwidth continues to increase with time.
They are planning on doing a.Net IDE that should completely replace VS.Net that they're planning on gteting that out sometime next year or something (no official date has been set).
If you are doing any.net programming, their "Resharper 1.5x" plugin brings a lot of IDEA functionality to C# in VS2003, and version 2.0 will bring it to VB and ASP.Net as well (yeah, I'm on the beta program, that's why I know about it, I'm not affiliated with JetBrains at all, so I'm not plugging).
But other than maybe doing some Managed C++, there's no plans to help C++ with some of these features, primarily due to the C++ syntax and its complexity itself.
No refactoring (somewhat remedied in VS2005)... this is a huge thing (no easy renaming of symbols and all references, no easy changing of parameters, parameter order, no easy ability to introduce variables, methods, parameters, etc, etc)
"Go to Definition" rarely works correctly, especially in the case of overloaded functions
No real-time syntax error highlighting (this is huge)
No "find usages" (again, remedied in VS2005)
Resharper adds automatic management of your "using" statements
No automatic flagging of unused variables, unused private methods, unused using statements, redundant casts
The intellisense isn't the greatest (the smart-complete in Resharper and IDEA is lots better) in VS2003... it could and should be smarter
Code navigation features are just not up to snuff (go-to file, go-to class/type, go-to symbol, go-to base, go-to inheritors, go-to declaration, next/prev-method, all with wildcards and completion active, go-back-to-last-edit-location, etc, etc)
Does that help? Most of these features I've taken for granted since around 2001, and thankfully Resharper makes VS2003 at least moderately usable.
Main changes for C# are support of parameterized types (generics), support for partial classes (a class can be split across two files, so, for example, machine generated code lives in one file, and human tweaked or written code lives in another), and support for nullible intrinsic types (so that, say, a bool can be either true, false, or null... an int can either have a value or be null, where 'null' is distinct from all other possible values).
There are also new globalization/localization features, new security features, new liberary routines, new classes in the.net class framework, etc.
There is also new support for "edit and continue" in the IDE for allowing changes when in debug mode and then continuing with the changes taking effect, rather than having to stop, recompile, and restart to pick up the changes.
If you think Visual Studio 2003 was a "fantastic" IDE, then you haven't used many modern IDEs. At the very least, you need to add something like "Resharper" to make it even remotely usable, imho.
I do love C# and the.Net framekwork though, I have to admit. I worked in Java for several years, and I think C# is just cleaner for a lot of things. And before Java I was C++ for a good many years, and C before that. I think C# is just about the easiest (while still being powerful) langauges I've ever used.
IntelliJ IDEA for Java is even better (but it costs money). And Visual Studio 2003, let's face it, SUCKS. After working in IDEA for 3 years, going to VS2003 felt like going back to stone knives and bear-skins. It was awful.
But thankfully, the IntelliJ IDEA authors at JetBrains came up with "ReSharper" as a plugin to Visual Studio 2003, which brought it up to the level of almost being usable.
Visual Studio 2005 is significantly better than 2003, but still nowhere close to Eclipse or IntelliJ IDEA. And also thankfully, the Jetbrains guys will be coming out with a ReSharper plugin to enhance VS2005 as well... though who knows when it'll be released (my guess: early 2006).
I have exactly three Dual Disc CDs (one being the new Rob Thomas CD, another being The Family Guy In Vegas CD, and a third I can't remember off the top of my head). Not ONE will play in ANY of the DVD/RW, CDROM, or CD-RW drives I have access to. The OS won't even recognize that there's a disc in the machine.
Are Dual Discs (CDs that are CDs on one side and DVDs on the other) all automatically DRM'd or something? Or did I just get unlucky? Anyone else have any problem ripping Dual Discs, or the specific CDs I mentioned above?
The good news is that it's not too late for you to see the complete FireFly series on DVD.
I saw the whole thing before seeing the movie, and yeah, there's much of the movie that I can't imagine had the same impact if you hadn't seen the series as if you had.
But since you liked the movie, you might enjoy going back and watching the entire series.
It was one of the only times I hated Joss for being Joss. I mean, he DOES that shit, right? He did it in Buffy, he did it in Angel, and now he's done it in FireFly. It's part of what makes Joss so great, in fact. Except this time I really wanted to punch him in the face for doing it. Just once, couldn't he be text-book, contrived, pat, predictable, and formula? Just ONCE?!?
I was shocked, annoyed, angered, frustrated, and disappointed not just once, but twice.
But it was a damn good movie. And it's not many movies, directors, or writers that can make me feel that way... make me feel ways I don't WANT to feel, take me in directions I don't WANT to go, but yet find myself going along with anyway. And still loving it even as I'm hating it...
You're absolutely right, though. DAMN that was cruel. I just wonder if there was some behind the scenes reason for it... actors who wanted out? I mean, it has to suck to be them, if this goes on to be a franchise, doesn't it? In on the ground floor and then axed just as its' resurrected?
Yes, that reaction is not uncommon. I've had several friends watch the first DVD and want to give up on it. I tell them to stick with it, and usually negotiate with them to give one more DVD a try. They watch the second one, and they're hooked, and watch the remaining two without any cajoling from me.
I would urge you to do the same. Each epsiode builds on the last and gets better and better. The final episode ("Objects in Space") is one of the finest hours ever broadcast on TV, imho.
consider myself a reasonably discriminating movie enthusiast, and I abhorred the "War of the Worlds" remake and enjoyed "The Island" (also a remake, btw). Of course, I was expecting "War of the Worlds" to be good and "The Island" to be bad, from their respective previews.
I just had to comment that I experienced exactly the same thing, on the nose. So you're not alone in that.
And I just got back from seeing "Serenity", and it was a packed house, and it was a really, really good time. I liked the original series on FOX (out of order and all), LOVED the series on DVD, and the movie is just fantastic. I'll definitely be seeing it again.
I don't know that it will do big boxoffice this weekend (they're predicting it to be number one for the weekend though)... there were only two evening showings tonight at my local theater (it was only showing in one theater unlike most new releases which get somewhere between two and four), but the theatre WAS packed. But not Sold Out. However, I also don't expect it to drop as sharply next weekend, due to word of mouth. The audience gave it a huge ovation when it was over. I'm sure word-of-mouth will be very good.
Yeah. I loved the movie, but this is one time when I really hated Joss for being Joss. You know what I mean. Not once, but twice. Ugh. But, again, Joss being Joss, that annoyance/frustration/shock did not in any way dilute my enjoyment of the movie, and I'm damn sure I'm going to see it again. It's probably the best movie I've seen this year.
"Serenity" Review from Salon.com
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Serenity Opens Today
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Joss Whedon's feature-film debut, the science-fiction western "Serenity," is beautifully made, written with more wit and intelligence than we get from most contemporary movies of any genre, and features an ensemble of actors whose rhythms are almost supernaturally in tune. There's only one problem with "Serenity": It's not "Firefly," the TV show that first gave these characters, and this story, life in autumn 2002 on the Fox network.
Both "Firefly" (which is available on DVD) and this new movie incarnation of it detail the adventures and tribulations of a loner-rebel named Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) and the ragtag crew of his space vessel, Serenity. Their story unfolds in a future world -- the 26th century, to be exact -- in which humans have left an uninhabitable earth to populate a new-old, way-out-there solar system. More Sam Peckinpah than "Star Trek," this isn't a shiny, sleek vision of the future: For one thing, the various planets in this new world have been recently divided by a brutal civil war, and the winning side -- the Alliance -- is now trying to gather all the outlying hoi polloi planets under its rule. Many of these planets are hardscrabble frontiers whose citizens still ride horses, use old-time firearms, and even, occasionally, wear sunbonnets. The idea isn't just that civilization as we know it has largely disappeared, but that people have been so buffeted by hardship that they've had to start practically from scratch.
The "Firefly" episodes burn slowly at first, but their emotional heat intensifies as you learn to live, and breathe, with the show's characters. That's an ancient narrative strategy, and one that Whedon had clearly mastered with his earlier series, the magnificent "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and its less resonant but still deeply enjoyable spinoff, "Angel." But apparently, this newfangled mode of storytelling intimidated Fox executives. They pulled the plug on "Firefly" after airing only 10 of the 14 episodes Whedon and his cast had completed -- and broadcasting them out of sequence. "Firefly" was seen by almost no one when it aired, partly because even those who desperately wanted to watch it -- namely, the many fans Whedon had earned with his previous series -- couldn't even find it when they turned on their TVs at the appointed time: The episodes were shown in fits and starts, several of them having been preempted by the World Series.
That's probably the worst thing you could do to a Whedon show, considering that he builds his narratives with the dramatic precision of 19th century novels. They don't always grab you with the first episode -- they're not made that way. Whedon prefers to reel us in gently, first setting the scene and then, week by week, drawing us into a web of complex character relationships that become a kind of home for us. Fans of Whedon's shows are the modern-day equivalents of those readers who so long ago got hooked on Dickens, people who would wait on American docks for the next installments of his newspaper serials to arrive on these Godforsaken shores. (Dickens biographer Edgar Johnson recounts how "waiting crowds at a New York pier shouted to an incoming vessel, 'Is Little Nell dead?'")
That's how it should have worked with "Firefly." The show finally did find its audience when it was released on DVD in late 2003, and Whedon, who had never given up on the show and its extraordinarily well-matched cast, sought ways to spin its posthumous success into another project. And almost against all odds, a major movie studio, Universal, put its money (perhaps not a whole lot, but enough) on a show that had earned lots of love but not a whole lot of cash.
"Serenity" -- which Whedon wrote as well as directed -- is both a primer on "Firefly" and an extension of it, a picture carefully calibrated to satisfy fans without leaving newcomers stranded. Whedon sets up the back story neatly at the beginning, introducing all of his characters in a few fleet scenes. Their dialogue comes off as casual, but it's really tightly scripted, a compr
The cost of the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station over the last 20+ years is roughly equivalent to what we've spent on the Iraq war (another mistake in many people's opinions) in the last 2 years.
So the space program was rougly one tenth the cost (and less one one-hudredth the cost in American lives) over-all, of the Iraq war. So far, anyway.
That's a half trillion dollars that could have been better spent.
Now it looks like Hurricane Katrina is going to cost potentially another $250 million.
It does no good, really, to play "woulda, shoulda, coulda" games with this information. We need to make sure we learn the lessons here, and not make similar mistakes in the future. Personally, I think a manned mission to the Moon and/or Mars is wasteful at this point in time. We're running massive budget deficits, and I don't think it's right to ask China and Japan and Saudi Arabia to subsidize our moon mission, given we've been there and done that, and there isn't a horribly compelling reason to send men back there right now. I'm a big space booster, personally, but we have more pressing priorities down here on earth at the moment, dealing with very expensive messes in our own country and elsewhere. Instead I think we should continue to focus on probes and robotic missions that can get us a lot more scientific bang for the buck, and only consider sending people back up once we have our financial house in order back down here on earth.
I've always decided that the main problem with eBooks was the form-factor and display.
Give me an "eBook" that's about the size and weight of a standard paperback. Open it up, and there should be electronic paper on both sides. Visible in normal light and bright sunshine. Minimum 300dpi resolution. The two facing screens should display type much like a paperback does, with a nice mat finish (no shiny stuff). And it should be augmented by touch sensitivity, so I can "change pages" with "gestures"... by swiping across the right hand page (top corner down towards center) in the standard "turning the page" gesture. There should be touch sensitive spots along the bottom that allow me to call up the table of contents, an index (that also allows searches), and tools to allow me to highlight and bookmark passages. When I open the eBook it should open to right where I left off. It should be water resistent, shock resistent, and the screen should be flexible enough that I don't have to worry about breaking the damn thing.
New books should be just a pluggable memory cartridge away. The memory cartridges should also store the bookmarks and highlights and "current position" so I can flip through several books at any time without losing my place in any one of them.
Once an eBook experience is like THAT, then watch out, they'll actually start to catch on. Or at the very least, *I* would suddenly be interested in owning one.
- When in a multi-line edit box (exactly like the one I'm typing into right now), the scroll wheel doesn't work at all. In IE6, the scroll wheel will scroll the cursor up and down, and when it reaches the beginning or end of the text in the box, will then proceed to scroll the page. In FireFox I have to click outside the box (to change focus) and THEN use the scroll wheel to scroll the page. I find this to be such a pain in the ass that I acutally dumped FireFox and went back to IE *just* because of this.
- The scroll wheel scrolls a LOT more slowly, making it laborious to scroll down long pages (which I frequently have to do).
- The drop down list in the Address Bar is badly organized. I want "Most Recently Used" up top. I never EVER was able to figure out how those items were ordered, but I almost always had to scroll down to go to the pages I go to all the time. They'd build up with a lot of pages I visted exactly once, and then suddenly disappear several weeks later. This was frustrating, annoying, unintuitive, and just plain amateurish.
- Clicking on a movie file doesn't launch the media player, but plays it "in place" on a page. I actually dislike that. In addition, it would frequently not play the entire media file. I use VIOP and can listen to my messages via the web. In FireFox, I'd only ever hear the first 7 seconds of the message. It was always truncated at that point. Under IE, I always heard the full message, every time, no problems.
- I was never able to see or experience any advantage to "Tabbed" browsing, and nobody has been able to satisfactorily explain to me why it's a good thing. I foudn it to be a nusance, so I ended up not using it. In other words, this wasn't something that would make me switch or ignore other flaws.
- I really hated the download manager. Maybe I'm just USED to the way IE works, but I found the FireFox way to be quite annoying and intrusive, while the IE way just seems simple and logical. When grabbing files from web-pages (which I also do a lot), I prefer the IE way.
I really wanted to like FireFox. I really wanted to switch. But I'm damn near uninstalling it at this point. I still try to use it from time to time, but I usually end up frustrated and switching back to IE because sites don't work, or because of all the scroll wheel problems, etc.
You make some excellent points. But we really don't know exactly how this works just yet... what the options are, or whether the traditional menus are really gone. In fact, I think it mentioned that the traditional menu shows itself when you press Alt, which would imply the keyboard short-cuts are still around.
Actually, I'd be fine with 4-grayscale if it were at 300dpi.
That'd make a perfectly usable eBook type display, for example.
The problem is far more with the resolution than with the number of shades of gray. Heck, black and white at 300dpi would make a great eBook, and have many other applications.
I'm with you. I've played through Diablo 2 (and its expansion pack) numerous times. I love that game. It's very satisfying.
I bought Dungeon Siege 1, and found it to be tedious and dull beyond believe. I never finished it. I doubt I even made it half-way. I've never had any desire to pick it up again.
Quite unlike Diablo 2, which I still play from time to time.
I doubt I'll be giving Dungeon Siege 2 much of a look, given this review.
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"Firefly" is the TV show.
"Serenity" is the movie.
The latter was advertised incessantly on niche cable channels like Comedy Central and Sci-Fi channel. Outside of there I don't recall seeing much in the way of advertising.
The advertising and marketing really did suck all the way around.
The opposite of "a religious person" is not "an atheist".
Not TECHNICALLY true. Since "atheist" literally means "non-theist", or a person who rejects or doesn't believe in a system of dogmatic faith. Technically "atheist" is in fact the opposite of "religious". Of course, reality is never as clear cut as labels we humans come up with, and it's true that you can, for example, consider yourself to be both an atheist and a, say, Unitarian at the same time, with really provoking much in the way of contradiction. That's why I tend to use the word 'atheist' more in a manner of "one who rejects religious dogma/religion" rather than "one who does not believe in god or a higher power or currently unknown levels of existence". I also tend to use "Secular Humanist" a lot, as it's a (marginally) less "loaded word" among those trying to demonize people who don't share their beliefs.
I agree with most of the rest of what you say.
Why is the parent a troll? It's the truth. That's about the only place ID could or should be taught. I have no problems with ID being mentioned in mythology courses or even comparative religion classes. But it's not science (and in many ways is the opposite of science), and doesn't belong in ANY science classes.
Just to state the obvious, but nobody sells or buys cassettes any more, so they're effectively "gone" now. And while CDs are still around, they're used mostly as a storage medium ... I don't know if it's "most people" yet, but it's rapidly becoming "most people" that get the CD, rip it, and then store it away, listening only to the resulting MP3 files from that point on.
Myself, I only use CDs in the car any more, because that's the only place I am where I don't have a built-in high-quality MP3 player that takes memory sticks or that can connect directly to an MP3 player. And even there I can use MP3 CDs stuffed with music and burned myself. I wish my car had an external jack for an MP3 player input (and/or bluetooth)
In my home, I either use digital cable music channels through the TV surround sound system, or I stream MP3s wirelessly from my computer to the sound system. When traveling, it's MP3 player all the way.
A heck of a lot of people are now buying music on-line without there ever being a physical medium involved at all (save for the hard disk and/or memory cards in their computers and MP3 players). There is NO reason to believe that movies and TV shows won't go the same way as bandwidth continues to increase with time.
They are planning on doing a .Net IDE that should completely replace VS.Net that they're planning on gteting that out sometime next year or something (no official date has been set).
.net programming, their "Resharper 1.5x" plugin brings a lot of IDEA functionality to C# in VS2003, and version 2.0 will bring it to VB and ASP.Net as well (yeah, I'm on the beta program, that's why I know about it, I'm not affiliated with JetBrains at all, so I'm not plugging).
If you are doing any
But other than maybe doing some Managed C++, there's no plans to help C++ with some of these features, primarily due to the C++ syntax and its complexity itself.
No refactoring (somewhat remedied in VS2005)... this is a huge thing (no easy renaming of symbols and all references, no easy changing of parameters, parameter order, no easy ability to introduce variables, methods, parameters, etc, etc)
... it could and should be smarter
"Go to Definition" rarely works correctly, especially in the case of overloaded functions
No real-time syntax error highlighting (this is huge)
No "find usages" (again, remedied in VS2005)
Resharper adds automatic management of your "using" statements
No automatic flagging of unused variables, unused private methods, unused using statements, redundant casts
The intellisense isn't the greatest (the smart-complete in Resharper and IDEA is lots better) in VS2003
Code navigation features are just not up to snuff (go-to file, go-to class/type, go-to symbol, go-to base, go-to inheritors, go-to declaration, next/prev-method, all with wildcards and completion active, go-back-to-last-edit-location, etc, etc)
Does that help? Most of these features I've taken for granted since around 2001, and thankfully Resharper makes VS2003 at least moderately usable.
Main changes for C# are support of parameterized types (generics), support for partial classes (a class can be split across two files, so, for example, machine generated code lives in one file, and human tweaked or written code lives in another), and support for nullible intrinsic types (so that, say, a bool can be either true, false, or null... an int can either have a value or be null, where 'null' is distinct from all other possible values).
.net class framework, etc.
There are also new globalization/localization features, new security features, new liberary routines, new classes in the
There is also new support for "edit and continue" in the IDE for allowing changes when in debug mode and then continuing with the changes taking effect, rather than having to stop, recompile, and restart to pick up the changes.
Here's a link with more info
If you think Visual Studio 2003 was a "fantastic" IDE, then you haven't used many modern IDEs. At the very least, you need to add something like "Resharper" to make it even remotely usable, imho.
.Net framekwork though, I have to admit. I worked in Java for several years, and I think C# is just cleaner for a lot of things. And before Java I was C++ for a good many years, and C before that. I think C# is just about the easiest (while still being powerful) langauges I've ever used.
I do love C# and the
IntelliJ IDEA for Java is even better (but it costs money). And Visual Studio 2003, let's face it, SUCKS. After working in IDEA for 3 years, going to VS2003 felt like going back to stone knives and bear-skins. It was awful.
But thankfully, the IntelliJ IDEA authors at JetBrains came up with "ReSharper" as a plugin to Visual Studio 2003, which brought it up to the level of almost being usable.
Visual Studio 2005 is significantly better than 2003, but still nowhere close to Eclipse or IntelliJ IDEA. And also thankfully, the Jetbrains guys will be coming out with a ReSharper plugin to enhance VS2005 as well... though who knows when it'll be released (my guess: early 2006).
I have exactly three Dual Disc CDs (one being the new Rob Thomas CD, another being The Family Guy In Vegas CD, and a third I can't remember off the top of my head). Not ONE will play in ANY of the DVD/RW, CDROM, or CD-RW drives I have access to. The OS won't even recognize that there's a disc in the machine.
Are Dual Discs (CDs that are CDs on one side and DVDs on the other) all automatically DRM'd or something? Or did I just get unlucky? Anyone else have any problem ripping Dual Discs, or the specific CDs I mentioned above?
The good news is that it's not too late for you to see the complete FireFly series on DVD.
I saw the whole thing before seeing the movie, and yeah, there's much of the movie that I can't imagine had the same impact if you hadn't seen the series as if you had.
But since you liked the movie, you might enjoy going back and watching the entire series.
Ah, so it's a chick flick then.
Not by any stretch of the imagination.
Trust me, your $10 wouldn't be wasted. The movie rocks.
It was one of the only times I hated Joss for being Joss. I mean, he DOES that shit, right? He did it in Buffy, he did it in Angel, and now he's done it in FireFly. It's part of what makes Joss so great, in fact. Except this time I really wanted to punch him in the face for doing it. Just once, couldn't he be text-book, contrived, pat, predictable, and formula? Just ONCE?!?
I was shocked, annoyed, angered, frustrated, and disappointed not just once, but twice.
But it was a damn good movie. And it's not many movies, directors, or writers that can make me feel that way... make me feel ways I don't WANT to feel, take me in directions I don't WANT to go, but yet find myself going along with anyway. And still loving it even as I'm hating it...
You're absolutely right, though. DAMN that was cruel. I just wonder if there was some behind the scenes reason for it... actors who wanted out? I mean, it has to suck to be them, if this goes on to be a franchise, doesn't it? In on the ground floor and then axed just as its' resurrected?
I'm so conflicted.
Yes, that reaction is not uncommon. I've had several friends watch the first DVD and want to give up on it. I tell them to stick with it, and usually negotiate with them to give one more DVD a try. They watch the second one, and they're hooked, and watch the remaining two without any cajoling from me.
I would urge you to do the same. Each epsiode builds on the last and gets better and better. The final episode ("Objects in Space") is one of the finest hours ever broadcast on TV, imho.
consider myself a reasonably discriminating movie enthusiast, and I abhorred the "War of the Worlds" remake and enjoyed "The Island" (also a remake, btw). Of course, I was expecting "War of the Worlds" to be good and "The Island" to be bad, from their respective previews.
I just had to comment that I experienced exactly the same thing, on the nose. So you're not alone in that.
And I just got back from seeing "Serenity", and it was a packed house, and it was a really, really good time. I liked the original series on FOX (out of order and all), LOVED the series on DVD, and the movie is just fantastic. I'll definitely be seeing it again.
I don't know that it will do big boxoffice this weekend (they're predicting it to be number one for the weekend though)... there were only two evening showings tonight at my local theater (it was only showing in one theater unlike most new releases which get somewhere between two and four), but the theatre WAS packed. But not Sold Out. However, I also don't expect it to drop as sharply next weekend, due to word of mouth. The audience gave it a huge ovation when it was over. I'm sure word-of-mouth will be very good.
Yeah. I loved the movie, but this is one time when I really hated Joss for being Joss. You know what I mean. Not once, but twice. Ugh. But, again, Joss being Joss, that annoyance/frustration/shock did not in any way dilute my enjoyment of the movie, and I'm damn sure I'm going to see it again. It's probably the best movie I've seen this year.
Joss Whedon's feature-film debut, the science-fiction western "Serenity," is beautifully made, written with more wit and intelligence than we get from most contemporary movies of any genre, and features an ensemble of actors whose rhythms are almost supernaturally in tune. There's only one problem with "Serenity": It's not "Firefly," the TV show that first gave these characters, and this story, life in autumn 2002 on the Fox network.
Both "Firefly" (which is available on DVD) and this new movie incarnation of it detail the adventures and tribulations of a loner-rebel named Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) and the ragtag crew of his space vessel, Serenity. Their story unfolds in a future world -- the 26th century, to be exact -- in which humans have left an uninhabitable earth to populate a new-old, way-out-there solar system. More Sam Peckinpah than "Star Trek," this isn't a shiny, sleek vision of the future: For one thing, the various planets in this new world have been recently divided by a brutal civil war, and the winning side -- the Alliance -- is now trying to gather all the outlying hoi polloi planets under its rule. Many of these planets are hardscrabble frontiers whose citizens still ride horses, use old-time firearms, and even, occasionally, wear sunbonnets. The idea isn't just that civilization as we know it has largely disappeared, but that people have been so buffeted by hardship that they've had to start practically from scratch.
The "Firefly" episodes burn slowly at first, but their emotional heat intensifies as you learn to live, and breathe, with the show's characters. That's an ancient narrative strategy, and one that Whedon had clearly mastered with his earlier series, the magnificent "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and its less resonant but still deeply enjoyable spinoff, "Angel." But apparently, this newfangled mode of storytelling intimidated Fox executives. They pulled the plug on "Firefly" after airing only 10 of the 14 episodes Whedon and his cast had completed -- and broadcasting them out of sequence. "Firefly" was seen by almost no one when it aired, partly because even those who desperately wanted to watch it -- namely, the many fans Whedon had earned with his previous series -- couldn't even find it when they turned on their TVs at the appointed time: The episodes were shown in fits and starts, several of them having been preempted by the World Series.
That's probably the worst thing you could do to a Whedon show, considering that he builds his narratives with the dramatic precision of 19th century novels. They don't always grab you with the first episode -- they're not made that way. Whedon prefers to reel us in gently, first setting the scene and then, week by week, drawing us into a web of complex character relationships that become a kind of home for us. Fans of Whedon's shows are the modern-day equivalents of those readers who so long ago got hooked on Dickens, people who would wait on American docks for the next installments of his newspaper serials to arrive on these Godforsaken shores. (Dickens biographer Edgar Johnson recounts how "waiting crowds at a New York pier shouted to an incoming vessel, 'Is Little Nell dead?'")
That's how it should have worked with "Firefly." The show finally did find its audience when it was released on DVD in late 2003, and Whedon, who had never given up on the show and its extraordinarily well-matched cast, sought ways to spin its posthumous success into another project. And almost against all odds, a major movie studio, Universal, put its money (perhaps not a whole lot, but enough) on a show that had earned lots of love but not a whole lot of cash.
"Serenity" -- which Whedon wrote as well as directed -- is both a primer on "Firefly" and an extension of it, a picture carefully calibrated to satisfy fans without leaving newcomers stranded. Whedon sets up the back story neatly at the beginning, introducing all of his characters in a few fleet scenes. Their dialogue comes off as casual, but it's really tightly scripted, a compr
Of course a director's cut can foul up a movie as well.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind comes to mind. I always liked the original version a lot better.
The cost of the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station over the last 20+ years is roughly equivalent to what we've spent on the Iraq war (another mistake in many people's opinions) in the last 2 years.
So the space program was rougly one tenth the cost (and less one one-hudredth the cost in American lives) over-all, of the Iraq war. So far, anyway.
That's a half trillion dollars that could have been better spent.
Now it looks like Hurricane Katrina is going to cost potentially another $250 million.
It does no good, really, to play "woulda, shoulda, coulda" games with this information. We need to make sure we learn the lessons here, and not make similar mistakes in the future. Personally, I think a manned mission to the Moon and/or Mars is wasteful at this point in time. We're running massive budget deficits, and I don't think it's right to ask China and Japan and Saudi Arabia to subsidize our moon mission, given we've been there and done that, and there isn't a horribly compelling reason to send men back there right now. I'm a big space booster, personally, but we have more pressing priorities down here on earth at the moment, dealing with very expensive messes in our own country and elsewhere. Instead I think we should continue to focus on probes and robotic missions that can get us a lot more scientific bang for the buck, and only consider sending people back up once we have our financial house in order back down here on earth.
I've always decided that the main problem with eBooks was the form-factor and display.
Give me an "eBook" that's about the size and weight of a standard paperback. Open it up, and there should be electronic paper on both sides. Visible in normal light and bright sunshine. Minimum 300dpi resolution. The two facing screens should display type much like a paperback does, with a nice mat finish (no shiny stuff). And it should be augmented by touch sensitivity, so I can "change pages" with "gestures"... by swiping across the right hand page (top corner down towards center) in the standard "turning the page" gesture. There should be touch sensitive spots along the bottom that allow me to call up the table of contents, an index (that also allows searches), and tools to allow me to highlight and bookmark passages. When I open the eBook it should open to right where I left off. It should be water resistent, shock resistent, and the screen should be flexible enough that I don't have to worry about breaking the damn thing.
New books should be just a pluggable memory cartridge away. The memory cartridges should also store the bookmarks and highlights and "current position" so I can flip through several books at any time without losing my place in any one of them.
Once an eBook experience is like THAT, then watch out, they'll actually start to catch on. Or at the very least, *I* would suddenly be interested in owning one.
Most have to do with the scroll wheel:
- When in a multi-line edit box (exactly like the one I'm typing into right now), the scroll wheel doesn't work at all. In IE6, the scroll wheel will scroll the cursor up and down, and when it reaches the beginning or end of the text in the box, will then proceed to scroll the page. In FireFox I have to click outside the box (to change focus) and THEN use the scroll wheel to scroll the page. I find this to be such a pain in the ass that I acutally dumped FireFox and went back to IE *just* because of this.
- The scroll wheel scrolls a LOT more slowly, making it laborious to scroll down long pages (which I frequently have to do).
- The drop down list in the Address Bar is badly organized. I want "Most Recently Used" up top. I never EVER was able to figure out how those items were ordered, but I almost always had to scroll down to go to the pages I go to all the time. They'd build up with a lot of pages I visted exactly once, and then suddenly disappear several weeks later. This was frustrating, annoying, unintuitive, and just plain amateurish.
- Clicking on a movie file doesn't launch the media player, but plays it "in place" on a page. I actually dislike that. In addition, it would frequently not play the entire media file. I use VIOP and can listen to my messages via the web. In FireFox, I'd only ever hear the first 7 seconds of the message. It was always truncated at that point. Under IE, I always heard the full message, every time, no problems.
- I was never able to see or experience any advantage to "Tabbed" browsing, and nobody has been able to satisfactorily explain to me why it's a good thing. I foudn it to be a nusance, so I ended up not using it. In other words, this wasn't something that would make me switch or ignore other flaws.
- I really hated the download manager. Maybe I'm just USED to the way IE works, but I found the FireFox way to be quite annoying and intrusive, while the IE way just seems simple and logical. When grabbing files from web-pages (which I also do a lot), I prefer the IE way.
I really wanted to like FireFox. I really wanted to switch. But I'm damn near uninstalling it at this point. I still try to use it from time to time, but I usually end up frustrated and switching back to IE because sites don't work, or because of all the scroll wheel problems, etc.
You make some excellent points. But we really don't know exactly how this works just yet... what the options are, or whether the traditional menus are really gone. In fact, I think it mentioned that the traditional menu shows itself when you press Alt, which would imply the keyboard short-cuts are still around.
Actually, I'd be fine with 4-grayscale if it were at 300dpi.
That'd make a perfectly usable eBook type display, for example.
The problem is far more with the resolution than with the number of shades of gray. Heck, black and white at 300dpi would make a great eBook, and have many other applications.
I'm with you. I've played through Diablo 2 (and its expansion pack) numerous times. I love that game. It's very satisfying.
I bought Dungeon Siege 1, and found it to be tedious and dull beyond believe. I never finished it. I doubt I even made it half-way. I've never had any desire to pick it up again.
Quite unlike Diablo 2, which I still play from time to time.
I doubt I'll be giving Dungeon Siege 2 much of a look, given this review.
Or does "grow the market" mean "try to steal Sony's market"?
Bingo.