ESB is not cute. Look at some of the scenes in that movie. We have the Imperial AT-AT walkers. We have the asteroid scene. We have the escape-from-the-big-space-slug scene. The introduction of the Super Star-Destroyer, holograms, Vader becoming even MORE evil, brilliant light-saber battles.. I could go on and on, but I already have.
If The Empire Strikes Back is serious, it's chiefly because Lucas brought in other writers, Lawrence Kasdan and Leigh Brackett. Kasdan was a good writer in his day (he wrote the script for another little movie which came out around that time, Raiders of the Lost Ark.) Brackett had put in writing time on a number of Howard Hawks's movies, like The Big Sleep and Rio Bravo. ESB is the only Star Wars movie which doesn't give a writing credit to George Lucas.
By Return of the Jedi, although Kasdan is still co-writing, Lucas is back with a writing credit. Is it any great stretch to conclude that the goofier elements of RotJ are Lucas's?
And of course in The Phantom Menace Lucas is back to where he was with the original Star Wars, with (so far as the credits show) complete control over the screenplay. And the story of TPM is something of a mess. It's not just a mess because it's silly and juvenile in places (Jar-Jar, the two-headed pod-race announcer, etc.) It's full of gratuitous retconning; contriving to work both Threepio and Artoo into the story is bad enough, but placing Anakin Skywalker on Tatooine leaves me wondering how Obi-Wan Kenobi managed to survive so long in hiding on what is now Darth Vader's planet of birth. It spreads itself too thin, spending too little time on Tatooine to give us a real feeling for the quality of young Anakin's life there, but also giving too little development to the political subplot--just who is the Trade Federation, and what are the "trade routes" whose taxation supposedly provoked such a profound crisis?
The really frustrating thing is that occasionally The Phantom Menace touches upon powerful stuff, that same, potent _mythos_ which shines through at times in the original movies. When Anakin's mother tells him, "Don't look back," is this not echoing that moment in the Perceval of Chretien de Troyes, when the young Perceval leaves behind his mother to become a knight, and he looks back to see her fall? But there are few such moments in TPM, diluted by Lucas's frequent tries for cheap sentiment and cheap laughs.
It so happens that, when I was ill and confined to bed last week, to relieve the boredom I watched a videotape of a "60 Minutes" show from March of last year, a show devoted almost entirely to George Lucas and the upcoming Phantom Menace sensation. Watching it, I was taken with the eerie feeling that all the warning signs were there to be seen. He doesn't talk about story, and there's hardly any footage to be seen of Lucas directing the actors. There's tons of footage of Lucas playing with computer models, and of his animators talking proudly about how the pods in the pod-race all sound different or about how you can see Jar-Jar's clothes wrinkle. They're come across, not as people directing a movie and telling a story, but as people making a video game and obsessing over how detailed their game engine is.
Mercury oxidizes slightly, yes, but the real problem is that liquid mercury is a fantastically good solvent, especially for other metals. What's oxidizing, usually, isn't the mercury but dissolved base metals in the mercury. If the mercury were very clean (John Strong's _Procedures in Experimental Physics_ gives a technique for cleaning mercury), you wouldn't get that slag on top.
You could float a thin layer of oil on top to keep the surface away from air (and also to keep the mercury vapor levels in the air down.) The original news article mentions _casting_ a layer of epoxy resin on top, which seems a little odd--wouldn't you want the top layer to be liquid too? But they must know what they're doing,
obviously.
Not that it would matter if it were catenary or spherical (as most glass lenses are due to limitaitons [sic] of the grinding process)...
In truth, most professional glass telescope mirrors are ground to aspherical surfaces on a regular basis. Grinding produces a spherical surface; polishing and figuring can produce any number of surfaces, even surfaces which aren't conic sections (e.g. the surface of a Schmidt corrector plate.)
I already posted something about this in a different thread, so I'm repeating myself I know, but: liquid, metallic mercury is not an enormous safety hazard. Mercury is dangerous chiefly in chemical combination (and organic compounds of mercury are the real killers), and metallic mercury is quite inert. The chief danger is in prolonged exposure to mercury vapor; liquid mercury is slightly volatile at room temperature.
But...there's nothing else with mercury's properties. A eutectic alloy of gallium and indium (and possibly some other metal, I can't quite remember) is marketed as a kind of mercury substitute. Gallium melts somewhat above room temperature, but the gallium-indium eutectic melts lower. The difficulty is that, while mercury does not "wet" most surfaces, gallium does. Capillary action would distort the surface of a rotating gallium-indium mirror, especially if the layer of liquid were thin (to reduce weight and conserve the costly metals.)
hyacinthus
Re:NBC's coverage sucks!
on
IT Olympics
·
· Score: 1
For what it's worth, my mother, who was (and still is, so far as I know) a regular follower of the Olympics and other athletic events like the Pan-American Games, watched those events to see (surprise, surprise!) athletics. When US television began to run sappy human-interest sidebars instead of showing the competitions, she started watching the coverage on Mexican TV instead.
But then, that's just one woman (who's also a rabid soccer fan.) NBC must have done something right, considering that their 1996 Atlanta coverage got a 21.6 average rating, compared to 17.1 for the 1992 Barcelona games (see this old San Diego Union-Tribune article.). Oh, well. I'll stick to the newspaper reports.
Mercury _metal_ is not very toxic. Mercuric ion, e.g. from the mercuric chloride we splashed around carelessly in high school, is quite toxic, but not nearly as much as some of the organomercury compounds--it was these which were responsible for the Minamata Bay poisonings back in the 60's. But liquid, metallic mercury is quite inert. If you swallowed a few ounces of it, you'd excrete it all out, practically unchanged.
The chief danger is that mercury is slightly volatile at room temperature--it's the cumulative effect, of breathing in mercury vapor over long periods, that presents the real health hazard. That's why mercury spills are so dangerous--the mercury breaks up and beads of it settle in every crevice, where it sits and evaporates. Clean mercury exposed to air develops a thin surface layer which tends to inhibit evaporation, so that helps to mitigate the hazard. For use in the LMT, I wonder if they don't float a very thin layer of oil over the surface--but refraction of the light in the oil would hurt the optical quality of the mirror somewhat. Adequate ventilation would help too.
Well, I've got to agree, God's wrath, that's potent stuff to bring down upon oneself. You're right, let get on His side! But how? What if we pick the wrong religion? Every week, we'd just making God madder and madder!
hyacinthus (that last a paraphrase from Homer Simpson, I have to admit)
Is college about expanding your mind and your knowledge? It _can_ be. I daresay it _should_ be. But it's not that for everyone. I graduated from a large California State college and I'll wager that for every student who was there to expand his mind, there were ten who were drudging their ways to degrees in business or education, for no other reason than a vague sense of obligation towards "higher education".
My own education has been all over the map--I started in chemistry and ended with degrees in computer "science" and Classics, and I work today as a software engineer. No one should be surprised, given that background, that I feel very strongly that I value college education and would not have forgone it merely because I thought I could draw a big paycheck in the software industry straight out of high school. But--as much as it pains me to admit it--there's no moral obligation to force anyone through such an education if they don't want it. Hell, more power to them! it used to be that it was possible to find careers in scientific or engineering fields by working your way up through the ranks, without a higher education. If such a thing is becoming possible again in the computer industry, then that's good, I think.
Myself, however, I never really wanted to be a "techie" in the first place (I'm here because computer science was the quickest way to finance my escape from a city and a family situation I had come to loathe--let's face it, the Classics aren't about to finance anything.) I have no intention of staying a "techie" any longer than I have to--so one of these days I hope to be back in college, finishing that unfinished education in chemistry.
hyacinthus
I've never quite understood why people clamor for textbooks on CD-ROM (or other machine-readable medium.) A few observations:
1. I had to purchase my share of bulky textbooks in college, but I rarely needed to "lug them around". I didn't need to bring them to classes, usually--there were exceptions of course. My books stayed at home, in my room, where I got most of my studying done.
2. One thing I did choose to "lug around", for a while anyway, was a laptop. Mind you, this was 1993, and the state of the art in laptops has advanced considerably since then. But, for a time, I attempted to use a PowerBook for classwork. It weighed nearly seven pounds. (By comparison, the Dell Inspiron 7500 laptop I was issued for work weighs more than nine pounds. It stays on the desk in my office--I never take it anywhere.) It was nearly useless for most note-taking work and it didn't take me long to get thoroughly sick of carrying it around. Occasionally I get to thinking that some new device might do the trick--make no mistake, as skeptical as I am, I'm still somewhat attracted to the idea of carrying around a portable computer. I liked the look of the "Clio", for example (until I got a chance to practice the thing's handwriting recognition.)
3. Nobody likes reading online documentation _now_. What's the first thing anyone does when confronted with a hundred-page online manual in PostScript or PDF format? Print the damn thing out.
4. Books are also suited for quick searching in a way that electronic documents, even those with a table of contents and a good keyword search engine, aren't. It is possible, for example, rapidly to flip through a book and narrow down on a particular page (watch someone flip through the White Pages, for example, looking for a name.)
5. Books in machine-readable format introduce a number of troublesome dependencies--upon the medium of storage, upon the application required to read the format, possibly upon the platform in which that application is written. Paper books do not suffer from these dependencies.
Is Mary Gentle a nice person? Quite probably. I know that she posted to the newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written, when GRUNTS was the subject of contention, and she defended her work calmly and lucidly. (I _would_ insert, at this point, a Dejanews URL, but since any posts more than about a year old are "temporarily unavailable" through Deja, and have been so "temporarily unavailable" for quite some time, I can't.) Gentle's gentleness has little to do with the quality of GRUNTS, however...
Is GRUNTS funny? To some, obviously. For me, the joke of Orcs saying "fuck" every few lines and spouting tough-guy drill-sergeant dialogue grew old after the second chapter of it. I still remember a few lines as funny (e.g. the "Black Squads, Dark Squads, Ebony Squads, &c.,...and one Pink Squad--we're a little worried about Pink Squad.") But after a certain scene which I'll mention below, I didn't find much in GRUNTS to laugh at.
Gentle, in that same Usenet discussion, said that she wrote GRUNTS in part to answer the weaknesses of Tolkien's work; I remember that one of the things she said was that THE LORD OF THE RINGS had barely a half-dozen female characters of any complexity, "and that's counting Shelob". She's right--but then, GRUNTS doesn't have any strong characters either! They're cliches themselves--different ones, from the usual hackneyed fantasy types, but cliches all the same.
As for GRUNTS being a "fucking JOKE", I will say, right now, that I stopped laughing at the "fucking JOKE" right after Gentle saw fit to give us murderous, thieving hobbits who enjoy a spot of cannibalism. I thought it revolting, I still think it revolting, and I'll not shy from telling anyone the same--even at the risk of being called a humorless "lame-ass whimpering uptight git" by someone who can't bear criticism of one of his beloved books.
If this was a company taking IP from another company they would be sued. If this was a student taking from a student or professor (in higher edu) they would be kicked out of school.
If source is offered, then it becomes shared material. If it is not then it is NOT part of public domain... period. If I have a jar of candies in my living room, does that mean everything in the house can now be taken ??
Web sites are sticky because their content is freely available. And I have used other peoples sites to gather info on "how did they do that?" issues. However, direct copying of a web site (even with minor changes) should be treated the same way as with books. I can at any time visit a library and see how other authors presented their ideas, but copying is illegal - and it should be. Period.
Cameron S. Bahan
My boyfriend is about halfway through the second book of THE SECRET HISTORY right now; he seems to enjoy it, but I won't go near the books for a different reason. Some months ago I picked up an earlier Mary Gentle book, GRUNTS. So ugly a book is GRUNTS, so much "in the spirit of Mordor" to quote a friend of mine, that I wasn't able to read more than a page or two of THE SECRET HISTORY before my simmering antipathy towards Gentle came to the surface.
GRUNTS, for those not in the know, is Gentle's answer to LORD OF THE RINGS. It would be a better answer if Gentle had managed to create real characters and an original story. Instead, GRUNTS reads like Gentle had watched FULL METAL JACKET one too many times. She seems to think that, merely because her characters talk and swear like Marines, in a fantasy setting, she's accomplishing something new and original.
Young Anakin was annoying at times, yes, but I don't think it's entirely just to blame this on the "horrible acting" of Jake Lloyd. (Aside: am I the only one who thinks of another child actor, Danny Lloyd, _alias_ "Danny Torrance" from Kubrick's THE SHINING, when I see Jake Lloyd? They even look a bit the same. And some might say that young Danny was every bit as annoying as young Ani.)
It's fashionable too to scorn Mark Hamill for his horrible acting, especially in A NEW HOPE; but is this entirely Hamill's fault? He was quite good in another film which appeared a few years later, Sam Fuller's THE BIG RED ONE; but then Sam Fuller was a better director by far than Lucas.
And this, I think, is the problem. To get good performances from actors, good direction helps, a lot. A good director can flog a decent performance out of a mediocre actor (consider Ray Liotta in Scorsese's GOODFELLAS, or Ryan O'Neal in Kubrick's BARRY LYNDON--they're good in those movies, and forgettable in almost anything else.)
George Lucas, though...consider, for example, Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor in PHANTOM MENACE. Both have superb performances to their credits (e.g. SCHINDLER'S LIST for Neeson, TRAINSPOTTING for McGregor.) But, if you'd seen these actors for the first time in PHANTOM MENACE, would you have seen _anything_ which suggested that they had great talent? Hardly! I can only conjecture that so uninspiring was Lucas's direction that Neeson and McGregor didn't feel themselves called upon to expend more than the minimum effort needed to act out their parts.
And now I'm remembering Hamill's words to the effect that if Lucas could make movies without actors, he would. I suspect that Lucas doesn't really know _how_ to direct actors, perhaps feels uncomfortable doing so; he'd rather play with computer graphics. It's not just the creation of fully animated characters like the androids or Jar Jar; if the IMDb is to be believed, Lucas also resorted to computerized "directing" (altering Natalie Portman's voice electronically, altering which way Jake Lloyd's eyes looked in a particular scene. And need I mention the alterations to the "Special Editions"?)
I'm a little saddened. STAR WARS holds a special place in my heart, all the more so because I'm a latecomer to it (I first saw all three films, in their entirety, only upon the theatrical release of the Special Editions.) But THE PHANTOM MENACE left me with little hope for the second and third films. I'm pinning my big-budget fantasy-film dreams to Peter Jackson's LORD OF THE RINGS movies:]
Slashdot Mirror
If The Empire Strikes Back is serious, it's chiefly because Lucas brought in other writers, Lawrence Kasdan and Leigh Brackett. Kasdan was a good writer in his day (he wrote the script for another little movie which came out around that time, Raiders of the Lost Ark.) Brackett had put in writing time on a number of Howard Hawks's movies, like The Big Sleep and Rio Bravo. ESB is the only Star Wars movie which doesn't give a writing credit to George Lucas.
By Return of the Jedi, although Kasdan is still co-writing, Lucas is back with a writing credit. Is it any great stretch to conclude that the goofier elements of RotJ are Lucas's?
And of course in The Phantom Menace Lucas is back to where he was with the original Star Wars, with (so far as the credits show) complete control over the screenplay. And the story of TPM is something of a mess. It's not just a mess because it's silly and juvenile in places (Jar-Jar, the two-headed pod-race announcer, etc.) It's full of gratuitous retconning; contriving to work both Threepio and Artoo into the story is bad enough, but placing Anakin Skywalker on Tatooine leaves me wondering how Obi-Wan Kenobi managed to survive so long in hiding on what is now Darth Vader's planet of birth. It spreads itself too thin, spending too little time on Tatooine to give us a real feeling for the quality of young Anakin's life there, but also giving too little development to the political subplot--just who is the Trade Federation, and what are the "trade routes" whose taxation supposedly provoked such a profound crisis?
The really frustrating thing is that occasionally The Phantom Menace touches upon powerful stuff, that same, potent _mythos_ which shines through at times in the original movies. When Anakin's mother tells him, "Don't look back," is this not echoing that moment in the Perceval of Chretien de Troyes, when the young Perceval leaves behind his mother to become a knight, and he looks back to see her fall? But there are few such moments in TPM, diluted by Lucas's frequent tries for cheap sentiment and cheap laughs.
It so happens that, when I was ill and confined to bed last week, to relieve the boredom I watched a videotape of a "60 Minutes" show from March of last year, a show devoted almost entirely to George Lucas and the upcoming Phantom Menace sensation. Watching it, I was taken with the eerie feeling that all the warning signs were there to be seen. He doesn't talk about story, and there's hardly any footage to be seen of Lucas directing the actors. There's tons of footage of Lucas playing with computer models, and of his animators talking proudly about how the pods in the pod-race all sound different or about how you can see Jar-Jar's clothes wrinkle. They're come across, not as people directing a movie and telling a story, but as people making a video game and obsessing over how detailed their game engine is.
Mercury oxidizes slightly, yes, but the real problem is that liquid mercury is a fantastically good solvent, especially for other metals. What's oxidizing, usually, isn't the mercury but dissolved base metals in the mercury. If the mercury were very clean (John Strong's _Procedures in Experimental Physics_ gives a technique for cleaning mercury), you wouldn't get that slag on top.
You could float a thin layer of oil on top to keep the surface away from air (and also to keep the mercury vapor levels in the air down.) The original news article mentions _casting_ a layer of epoxy resin on top, which seems a little odd--wouldn't you want the top layer to be liquid too? But they must know what they're doing,
obviously.
hyacinthus
In truth, most professional glass telescope mirrors are ground to aspherical surfaces on a regular basis. Grinding produces a spherical surface; polishing and figuring can produce any number of surfaces, even surfaces which aren't conic sections (e.g. the surface of a Schmidt corrector plate.)
I already posted something about this in a different thread, so I'm repeating myself I know, but: liquid, metallic mercury is not an enormous safety hazard. Mercury is dangerous chiefly in chemical combination (and organic compounds of mercury are the real killers), and metallic mercury is quite inert. The chief danger is in prolonged exposure to mercury vapor; liquid mercury is slightly volatile at room temperature.
But...there's nothing else with mercury's properties. A eutectic alloy of gallium and indium (and possibly some other metal, I can't quite remember) is marketed as a kind of mercury substitute. Gallium melts somewhat above room temperature, but the gallium-indium eutectic melts lower. The difficulty is that, while mercury does not "wet" most surfaces, gallium does. Capillary action would distort the surface of a rotating gallium-indium mirror, especially if the layer of liquid were thin (to reduce weight and conserve the costly metals.)
hyacinthus
For what it's worth, my mother, who was (and still is, so far as I know) a regular follower of the Olympics and other athletic events like the Pan-American Games, watched those events to see (surprise, surprise!) athletics. When US television began to run sappy human-interest sidebars instead of showing the competitions, she started watching the coverage on Mexican TV instead.
But then, that's just one woman (who's also a rabid soccer fan.) NBC must have done something right, considering that their 1996 Atlanta coverage got a 21.6 average rating, compared to 17.1 for the 1992 Barcelona games (see this old San Diego Union-Tribune article.). Oh, well. I'll stick to the newspaper reports.
hyacinthusMercury _metal_ is not very toxic. Mercuric ion, e.g. from the mercuric chloride we splashed around carelessly in high school, is quite toxic, but not nearly as much as some of the organomercury compounds--it was these which were responsible for the Minamata Bay poisonings back in the 60's. But liquid, metallic mercury is quite inert. If you swallowed a few ounces of it, you'd excrete it all out, practically unchanged.
The chief danger is that mercury is slightly volatile at room temperature--it's the cumulative effect, of breathing in mercury vapor over long periods, that presents the real health hazard. That's why mercury spills are so dangerous--the mercury breaks up and beads of it settle in every crevice, where it sits and evaporates. Clean mercury exposed to air develops a thin surface layer which tends to inhibit evaporation, so that helps to mitigate the hazard. For use in the LMT, I wonder if they don't float a very thin layer of oil over the surface--but refraction of the light in the oil would hurt the optical quality of the mirror somewhat. Adequate ventilation would help too.
hyacinthus
Well, I've got to agree, God's wrath, that's potent stuff to bring down upon oneself. You're right, let get on His side! But how? What if we pick the wrong religion? Every week, we'd just making God madder and madder!
hyacinthus (that last a paraphrase from Homer Simpson, I have to admit)
Is college about expanding your mind and your knowledge? It _can_ be. I daresay it _should_ be. But it's not that for everyone. I graduated from a large California State college and I'll wager that for every student who was there to expand his mind, there were ten who were drudging their ways to degrees in business or education, for no other reason than a vague sense of obligation towards "higher education". My own education has been all over the map--I started in chemistry and ended with degrees in computer "science" and Classics, and I work today as a software engineer. No one should be surprised, given that background, that I feel very strongly that I value college education and would not have forgone it merely because I thought I could draw a big paycheck in the software industry straight out of high school. But--as much as it pains me to admit it--there's no moral obligation to force anyone through such an education if they don't want it. Hell, more power to them! it used to be that it was possible to find careers in scientific or engineering fields by working your way up through the ranks, without a higher education. If such a thing is becoming possible again in the computer industry, then that's good, I think. Myself, however, I never really wanted to be a "techie" in the first place (I'm here because computer science was the quickest way to finance my escape from a city and a family situation I had come to loathe--let's face it, the Classics aren't about to finance anything.) I have no intention of staying a "techie" any longer than I have to--so one of these days I hope to be back in college, finishing that unfinished education in chemistry. hyacinthus
I've never quite understood why people clamor for textbooks on CD-ROM (or other machine-readable medium.) A few observations:
1. I had to purchase my share of bulky textbooks in college, but I rarely needed to "lug them around". I didn't need to bring them to classes, usually--there were exceptions of course. My books stayed at home, in my room, where I got most of my studying done.
2. One thing I did choose to "lug around", for a while anyway, was a laptop. Mind you, this was 1993, and the state of the art in laptops has advanced considerably since then. But, for a time, I attempted to use a PowerBook for classwork. It weighed nearly seven pounds. (By comparison, the Dell Inspiron 7500 laptop I was issued for work weighs more than nine pounds. It stays on the desk in my office--I never take it anywhere.) It was nearly useless for most note-taking work and it didn't take me long to get thoroughly sick of carrying it around. Occasionally I get to thinking that some new device might do the trick--make no mistake, as skeptical as I am, I'm still somewhat attracted to the idea of carrying around a portable computer. I liked the look of the "Clio", for example (until I got a chance to practice the thing's handwriting recognition.)
3. Nobody likes reading online documentation _now_. What's the first thing anyone does when confronted with a hundred-page online manual in PostScript or PDF format? Print the damn thing out.
4. Books are also suited for quick searching in a way that electronic documents, even those with a table of contents and a good keyword search engine, aren't. It is possible, for example, rapidly to flip through a book and narrow down on a particular page (watch someone flip through the White Pages, for example, looking for a name.)
5. Books in machine-readable format introduce a number of troublesome dependencies--upon the medium of storage, upon the application required to read the format, possibly upon the platform in which that application is written. Paper books do not suffer from these dependencies.
hyacinthus
Hm. How to respond?
...and one Pink Squad--we're a little worried about Pink Squad.") But after a certain scene which I'll mention below, I didn't find much in GRUNTS to laugh at.
Is Mary Gentle a nice person? Quite probably. I know that she posted to the newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written, when GRUNTS was the subject of contention, and she defended her work calmly and lucidly. (I _would_ insert, at this point, a Dejanews URL, but since any posts more than about a year old are "temporarily unavailable" through Deja, and have been so "temporarily unavailable" for quite some time, I can't.) Gentle's gentleness has little to do with the quality of GRUNTS, however...
Is GRUNTS funny? To some, obviously. For me, the joke of Orcs saying "fuck" every few lines and spouting tough-guy drill-sergeant dialogue grew old after the second chapter of it. I still remember a few lines as funny (e.g. the "Black Squads, Dark Squads, Ebony Squads, &c.,
Gentle, in that same Usenet discussion, said that she wrote GRUNTS in part to answer the weaknesses of Tolkien's work; I remember that one of the things she said was that THE LORD OF THE RINGS had barely a half-dozen female characters of any complexity, "and that's counting Shelob". She's right--but then, GRUNTS doesn't have any strong characters either! They're cliches themselves--different ones, from the usual hackneyed fantasy types, but cliches all the same.
As for GRUNTS being a "fucking JOKE", I will say, right now, that I stopped laughing at the "fucking JOKE" right after Gentle saw fit to give us murderous, thieving hobbits who enjoy a spot of cannibalism. I thought it revolting, I still think it revolting, and I'll not shy from telling anyone the same--even at the risk of being called a humorless "lame-ass whimpering uptight git" by someone who can't bear criticism of one of his beloved books.
hyacinthus
If this was a company taking IP from another company they would be sued. If this was a student taking from a student or professor (in higher edu) they would be kicked out of school. If source is offered, then it becomes shared material. If it is not then it is NOT part of public domain ... period. If I have a jar of candies in my living room, does that mean everything in the house can now be taken ??
Web sites are sticky because their content is freely available. And I have used other peoples sites to gather info on "how did they do that?" issues. However, direct copying of a web site (even with minor changes) should be treated the same way as with books. I can at any time visit a library and see how other authors presented their ideas, but copying is illegal - and it should be. Period.
Cameron S. Bahan
My boyfriend is about halfway through the second book of THE SECRET HISTORY right now; he seems to enjoy it, but I won't go near the books for a different reason. Some months ago I picked up an earlier Mary Gentle book, GRUNTS. So ugly a book is GRUNTS, so much "in the spirit of Mordor" to quote a friend of mine, that I wasn't able to read more than a page or two of THE SECRET HISTORY before my simmering antipathy towards Gentle came to the surface.
GRUNTS, for those not in the know, is Gentle's answer to LORD OF THE RINGS. It would be a better answer if Gentle had managed to create real characters and an original story. Instead, GRUNTS reads like Gentle had watched FULL METAL JACKET one too many times. She seems to think that, merely because her characters talk and swear like Marines, in a fantasy setting, she's accomplishing something new and original.
hyacinthus
Young Anakin was annoying at times, yes, but I don't think it's entirely just to blame this on the "horrible acting" of Jake Lloyd. (Aside: am I the only one who thinks of another child actor, Danny Lloyd, _alias_ "Danny Torrance" from Kubrick's THE SHINING, when I see Jake Lloyd? They even look a bit the same. And some might say that young Danny was every bit as annoying as young Ani.)
:]
It's fashionable too to scorn Mark Hamill for his horrible acting, especially in A NEW HOPE; but is this entirely Hamill's fault? He was quite good in another film which appeared a few years later, Sam Fuller's THE BIG RED ONE; but then Sam Fuller was a better director by far than Lucas.
And this, I think, is the problem. To get good performances from actors, good direction helps, a lot. A good director can flog a decent performance out of a mediocre actor (consider Ray Liotta in Scorsese's GOODFELLAS, or Ryan O'Neal in Kubrick's BARRY LYNDON--they're good in those movies, and forgettable in almost anything else.)
George Lucas, though...consider, for example, Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor in PHANTOM MENACE. Both have superb performances to their credits (e.g. SCHINDLER'S LIST for Neeson, TRAINSPOTTING for McGregor.) But, if you'd seen these actors for the first time in PHANTOM MENACE, would you have seen _anything_ which suggested that they had great talent? Hardly! I can only conjecture that so uninspiring was Lucas's direction that Neeson and McGregor didn't feel themselves called upon to expend more than the minimum effort needed to act out their parts.
And now I'm remembering Hamill's words to the effect that if Lucas could make movies without actors, he would. I suspect that Lucas doesn't really know _how_ to direct actors, perhaps feels uncomfortable doing so; he'd rather play with computer graphics. It's not just the creation of fully animated characters like the androids or Jar Jar; if the IMDb is to be believed, Lucas also resorted to computerized "directing" (altering Natalie Portman's voice electronically, altering which way Jake Lloyd's eyes looked in a particular scene. And need I mention the alterations to the "Special Editions"?)
I'm a little saddened. STAR WARS holds a special place in my heart, all the more so because I'm a latecomer to it (I first saw all three films, in their entirety, only upon the theatrical release of the Special Editions.) But THE PHANTOM MENACE left me with little hope for the second and third films. I'm pinning my big-budget fantasy-film dreams to Peter Jackson's LORD OF THE RINGS movies
Hyacinthus
What about GOOD OMENS? Was that less than four years ago? I don't remember....
I like Terry Pratchett. He's sort of like Douglas Adams would be if Adams had talent and brains, and anything important to say.
hyacinthus.