The anime target consumer is a child. The reason full-grown adults in America flock to anime is unknown at this time.
Yeah, children are also the target market for Star Wars, roleplaying, trading card games, most video games, your average action movie, the list goes on and on... all of which are drooled over by full-grown adults on Slashdot regularly. So, anime's no aberration on that account.
I don't have a problem with shortening the play times on games... if you "shorten" the cost appropriately, i.e. that game that's good for 10 hours of play isn't still going to be $50.
But of course, game companies aren't going to do that. Less money for less entertainment? Yeah, right.
Unless you don't want a cell phone, or aren't required to have one for your job.
I love my Zaire 71. It's a nice size, and does what I want it to (organize my crap) without a lot of extra BS. Cell phone? No thanks. I don't need one more thing to be forgetting to turn off and taking out to annoy my friends during dinner, movies, conversation, trying to take a dump in peace, etc.
And last time I checked, you didn't need a credit check and an $800 deposit to get a PDA like you do with a cell phone. (Of course, the last time I checked on getting a cell phone was 1997, so admittedly that's not saying much of anything.)
I'm 6'6", could you point some of those flinging-themselves girls over to me? Thanks.
And being tall is not without its own disadvantages, such as people rudely asking "how tall ARE you?" in the same tone as "WHAT is that thing on your nose?", not to mention the endless queries of "so you play basketball? Why not? Bump your head a lot, do you? Why not?"
Plus, I personally would have given a lot to be short the last time I had to take a 24-hour bus trip across the country with my knees jammed under my chin.
When I was a lab monitor at my university many years ago, every year at the end of the semester we'd have graduate students doing comp exams. This involved 3-4 hours of intense typing on the computer, composing lengthy Word documents.
Before the comp exams one year, the professor came up to me and asked, "Do the students need to know anything special about working on the lab computers?"
"Tell them to save their work."
"Anything else?"
"No. Save early save often."
He turns and tells them they may begin. He does not, in fact, tell them to save their work. At all.
Two hours later, a graduate student comes up to me, dissolved in tears, because Word has crashed and her paper is gone. I take a look. No saved document. No temp file. I tell her, though not in so many words, that she is screwed.
The professor, who has a Ph.D. and makes about six times what I do, demands in high dudgeon that I produce the document immediately, as the student "needs it to graduate." I shrug and say sorry, if she'd saved her work, she wouldn't be having this problem.
The punch line is the exact same thing happened the next semester. After that I started going around before comps and telling the students personally to save their work, as the professor apparently still considered it of no importance. What the students themselves were thinking, I have no clue.
A close cousin to this was when we'd redo the network at the end of every semester and clean off all the computers, asking the faculty first if they had any data they needed to preserve. How many times did they confidently say "no, nothing at all" and descend on us in a blind fury the next week when they discovered Invaluable Powerpoint Presentation X was missing? I lost count.
This will mark the return of Clippy, mark my words.
It appears you're trying to make toast. Would you...
A) Like advice on which bread to use? B) Adjust your toast settings (will require Microsoft TOAST(TM)(R) Install CD) C) Prepare your spread of choice? D) Just go make some damn eggs (Microsoft Eggs will open in new window)
If you want to make a point, try doing it without the ad hominem attacks next time, thanks. You have no idea what I do or don't understand, or my appreciation of subtlety, so let's not pretend you do.
I understand perfectly well how literature can be translated to the screen. I also understand part of the reason for LotR's enduring popularity is that it is different things to different people, and additionally, that any film adaptation of a work of literature is the interpretation of one person, or, in this case, three (Jackson, Boyens, Walsh). Jackson's vision of Lord of the Rings is not the same as my own, nor should it be.
Insofar as the scenes mentioned are concerned -- in some sense you are preaching to the choir. The changes made to Faramir, especially the trip to Osgiliath, was by far my biggest gripe with Two Towers. I was extremely irate about it, but on further reflection, could understand why Jackson made the decision. I just wish he could have handled it differently. For my part, I found the encounter with Faramir in the books to be devoid of suspense -- but likewise found the movie version swung too far in the opposite direction. Because I support Jackson's privilege to make changes to the original doesn't mean I worship them all as immaculate.
As far as the Lord of the Nazgul scene goes, that remains to be determined -- I am anxious to see what Jackson does with it. In my opinion, the strength of the written word is that it can support the sort of subtle, existential horror and dread such as you describe far more reliably than a visual medium, because they rely on the reader's imagination.
You can bank on that tension more or less forever in the written word -- in Tolkien's work, the Nazgul are mostly a non-existent threat until the (very brief) confrontation on the Pelennor Fields, where the fearsome Lord is undone by a stab to the ankle and one swipe from a sword. To his credit, Tolkien still manages to pull them off as dreadful despite the fact that they never actually do much but ride around and slaughter the occasional Prancing Pony bed-bolster.
While this approach might work for the die-hard enthusiast (as might a 15- or 20-hour faithful adaptation of the work), the LotR film is an expensive project that needs to make a profit, and that means placating the majority of moviegoers who expect a bit more action from their fantasy films. I think it's the price we pay for having a film adaptation at all, and though I have problems with Jackson's interpretation as well, I think we as an audience could come off much worse than we have. Again, I point to Jackson's precursors, Bakshi and Rankin-Bass. You want to see a filmmaker taking some liberties with the story? Watch Bakshi's LotR sometime. Saruman becomes "Ahriman" (sometimes), Treebeard is supremely comical, Elrond wears a tee-shirt to the council at Imladris, and Boromir is a shrieky nincompoop who dresses like Hagar the Horrible. Jackson is a purist by comparison.
I didn't go into the Lord of the Rings movies expecting the book to be retold in movie form. Not only is that impossible, it would hold few if any surprises for someone who's read the books as many times as I have. If I wanted that precise experience, I'd just read the book again. Instead, I got to see Boromir as a slightly more sympathetic character, Faramir as slightly less (again, that didn't work out so well), Aragorn a bit more conflicted, and the Nazgul a little more active, and a pretty fantastic Watcher in the Water, while still (in my opinion) maintaining quite a few (not all) of the book's original themes.
It's not a faithful adaptation, but I don't believe a faithful adaptation could or should be filmed, nor would it be interesting even if it was. That's just my opinion. I believe that people who want the experience of the novel should read the novel. A movie of the novel is going to involve some retelling and some shuffling of the elements, because one medium is of the eye and ear, the other is of the imagination. Anyone goin
What I want to know is, will they call it Anduril?
I think the whole point is that Jackson is trying to draw the transformation of Aragorn from ranger to king closer to the climax of the story. I can see the appeal of that.
Aragorn in the books is a flawless, comic-book hero by the time of the Council of Elrond, and is waving Anduril around at every opportunity (at Eomer, at Hama, etc.) The only real moment of any drama concerning Aragorn (as far as I'm concerned) is where he shows himself to Sauron and the Paths of the Dead. I think both moments become more interesting if Aragorn is a more vulnerable, conflicted character than he is in the books.
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love the book version of Aragorn, but I think the movie version of Aragorn is just a bit more interesting. He's more conflicted. I like that. And the sword ties into that vulnerability. Jackson has made it symbolic of his transformation, and delayed that transformation enough to make it interesting.
That's totally unfair and uncalled-for. Peter Jackson is an ENORMOUS Lord of the Rings fan, and that's about the only reason you're not hearing Frodo say "talk to the hand" and Gandalf drinking a refreshing Pepsi-Cola (TM).
Stanley Kubrick himself once called the Lord of the Rings completely unfilmable -- and, in the books' original form, he's right. Many things which make the book great will simply not fly in a movie medium. You might think they will -- thirty minutes of a guy in a yellow jacket and pointy shoes talking about sheep and Goldberry, and Faramir finding Frodo and Sam in Morder and going "aw shucks! Get out of here with that Ring of Power, you scamps!" In a lengthy, leisurely book like Lord of the Rings, that's fine, but in a movie that already clocks in at three hours a pop with tons of stuff cut out, you'd be bored out of your nitpicking skull. I love Tolkien dearly, but most of his material is as dramatic as a flapjack, because Tolkien was ultimately a lover of the slow and pastoral life of the English countryside. Which is great, but doesn't make good film. Sorry.
Consider how moving and exciting the Lord of the Nazgul scenes from RotK would be if Jackson adapted them faithfully. He rides into Gondor, Gandalf says "you cannot come in here," a rooster crows, some trumpets play, and the Nazgul turns and leaves. Yeah. Thrilling stuff. The crowd would be on the edge of their seats.
Listen to Jackson's DVD commentary on Fellowship sometime, with the other two writers, and how much they agonized and labored over every change that they made, and how many things Jackson wanted to leave in but simply couldn't and deeply regrets. He even laments having to take out Glorfindel and Gildor Inglorion.
I am a big fan of the books, and I was disappointed with a few of the changes too, especially in Two Towers. But Jackson and everyone else have labored very hard to bring as faithful a movie adaptation as they could to a book that is, fact's a fact, completely impossible to adapt faithfully and still have it be any good. Go watch the Rankin-Bass or Ralph Bakshi adaptations of LotR sometime if you want to see how truly, awfully BAD an adaptation could have been. Tolkien fans got very, very lucky when Peter Jackson landed this project, and sorry -- he deserves better than "oh he probably never even READ the books." That is pure bunk.
It gets past the spam filter, sure, but it really makes me wonder, who on earth would ever click on that?
I recently got a spam that combined "you are a winner" with viagra, porn, and something else -- I couldn't even figure out what it was they were trying to sell. I'm not sure even they knew.
I wonder if the spammers aren't getting a little self-defeating in trying to get past the filters.
Slashdot Mirror
The anime target consumer is a child. The reason full-grown adults in America flock to anime is unknown at this time.
Yeah, children are also the target market for Star Wars, roleplaying, trading card games, most video games, your average action movie, the list goes on and on... all of which are drooled over by full-grown adults on Slashdot regularly. So, anime's no aberration on that account.
Yeah, Slashdot trolls are big old stockholders. When they're not day-trading, they're pasting "penis bird" ASCII into Slashdot comment boxes...
You're giving them way too much credit IMHO.
I think this comic , also from Penny Arcade, sums up the Phantom more neatly even than that press release.
I don't have a problem with shortening the play times on games... if you "shorten" the cost appropriately, i.e. that game that's good for 10 hours of play isn't still going to be $50.
But of course, game companies aren't going to do that. Less money for less entertainment? Yeah, right.
They'll just appeal.
Unless you don't want a cell phone, or aren't required to have one for your job.
I love my Zaire 71. It's a nice size, and does what I want it to (organize my crap) without a lot of extra BS. Cell phone? No thanks. I don't need one more thing to be forgetting to turn off and taking out to annoy my friends during dinner, movies, conversation, trying to take a dump in peace, etc.
And last time I checked, you didn't need a credit check and an $800 deposit to get a PDA like you do with a cell phone. (Of course, the last time I checked on getting a cell phone was 1997, so admittedly that's not saying much of anything.)
You calling me a troll is the second funniest thing I've heard today.
Microsoft preaching about giving users a choice. That's the funniest thing I've heard all day.
I'm 6'6", could you point some of those flinging-themselves girls over to me? Thanks.
And being tall is not without its own disadvantages, such as people rudely asking "how tall ARE you?" in the same tone as "WHAT is that thing on your nose?", not to mention the endless queries of "so you play basketball? Why not? Bump your head a lot, do you? Why not?"
Plus, I personally would have given a lot to be short the last time I had to take a 24-hour bus trip across the country with my knees jammed under my chin.
When I was a lab monitor at my university many years ago, every year at the end of the semester we'd have graduate students doing comp exams. This involved 3-4 hours of intense typing on the computer, composing lengthy Word documents.
Before the comp exams one year, the professor came up to me and asked, "Do the students need to know anything special about working on the lab computers?"
"Tell them to save their work."
"Anything else?"
"No. Save early save often."
He turns and tells them they may begin. He does not, in fact, tell them to save their work. At all.
Two hours later, a graduate student comes up to me, dissolved in tears, because Word has crashed and her paper is gone. I take a look. No saved document. No temp file. I tell her, though not in so many words, that she is screwed.
The professor, who has a Ph.D. and makes about six times what I do, demands in high dudgeon that I produce the document immediately, as the student "needs it to graduate." I shrug and say sorry, if she'd saved her work, she wouldn't be having this problem.
The punch line is the exact same thing happened the next semester. After that I started going around before comps and telling the students personally to save their work, as the professor apparently still considered it of no importance. What the students themselves were thinking, I have no clue.
A close cousin to this was when we'd redo the network at the end of every semester and clean off all the computers, asking the faculty first if they had any data they needed to preserve. How many times did they confidently say "no, nothing at all" and descend on us in a blind fury the next week when they discovered Invaluable Powerpoint Presentation X was missing? I lost count.
No, the Comic Book Guy would never have anything positive to say about anything.
Which is why he's such a popular Slashdot icon, incidentally.
Don't give that figure too much creedence.
...eh forget it.
Gee, not even "Bad Moon Rising"? How about "Run Through the Jungle"?
If it was Windows we were talking about I could crack a joke about "Looking Out My Back Door"...
+1 Funny
But not funny, Iliad.
This should have been the review. It sums up my feelings about User Friendly nicely.
Well, that and this.
Can you recommend any alternatives to ZoneAlarm, then?
Yeah, many people, just not the mainstream media. But the mainstream media uses the term "hackers" all the time. And that's the difference.
TV is the retina of the mind's eye and all that.
This will mark the return of Clippy, mark my words.
It appears you're trying to make toast. Would you...
A) Like advice on which bread to use?
B) Adjust your toast settings (will require Microsoft TOAST(TM)(R) Install CD)
C) Prepare your spread of choice?
D) Just go make some damn eggs (Microsoft Eggs will open in new window)
unlike you, who only knows how to tear other people's solutions down, apparently.
Those who can't do, teach.
If you want to make a point, try doing it without the ad hominem attacks next time, thanks. You have no idea what I do or don't understand, or my appreciation of subtlety, so let's not pretend you do.
I understand perfectly well how literature can be translated to the screen. I also understand part of the reason for LotR's enduring popularity is that it is different things to different people, and additionally, that any film adaptation of a work of literature is the interpretation of one person, or, in this case, three (Jackson, Boyens, Walsh). Jackson's vision of Lord of the Rings is not the same as my own, nor should it be.
Insofar as the scenes mentioned are concerned -- in some sense you are preaching to the choir. The changes made to Faramir, especially the trip to Osgiliath, was by far my biggest gripe with Two Towers. I was extremely irate about it, but on further reflection, could understand why Jackson made the decision. I just wish he could have handled it differently. For my part, I found the encounter with Faramir in the books to be devoid of suspense -- but likewise found the movie version swung too far in the opposite direction. Because I support Jackson's privilege to make changes to the original doesn't mean I worship them all as immaculate.
As far as the Lord of the Nazgul scene goes, that remains to be determined -- I am anxious to see what Jackson does with it. In my opinion, the strength of the written word is that it can support the sort of subtle, existential horror and dread such as you describe far more reliably than a visual medium, because they rely on the reader's imagination.
You can bank on that tension more or less forever in the written word -- in Tolkien's work, the Nazgul are mostly a non-existent threat until the (very brief) confrontation on the Pelennor Fields, where the fearsome Lord is undone by a stab to the ankle and one swipe from a sword. To his credit, Tolkien still manages to pull them off as dreadful despite the fact that they never actually do much but ride around and slaughter the occasional Prancing Pony bed-bolster.
While this approach might work for the die-hard enthusiast (as might a 15- or 20-hour faithful adaptation of the work), the LotR film is an expensive project that needs to make a profit, and that means placating the majority of moviegoers who expect a bit more action from their fantasy films. I think it's the price we pay for having a film adaptation at all, and though I have problems with Jackson's interpretation as well, I think we as an audience could come off much worse than we have. Again, I point to Jackson's precursors, Bakshi and Rankin-Bass. You want to see a filmmaker taking some liberties with the story? Watch Bakshi's LotR sometime. Saruman becomes "Ahriman" (sometimes), Treebeard is supremely comical, Elrond wears a tee-shirt to the council at Imladris, and Boromir is a shrieky nincompoop who dresses like Hagar the Horrible. Jackson is a purist by comparison.
I didn't go into the Lord of the Rings movies expecting the book to be retold in movie form. Not only is that impossible, it would hold few if any surprises for someone who's read the books as many times as I have. If I wanted that precise experience, I'd just read the book again. Instead, I got to see Boromir as a slightly more sympathetic character, Faramir as slightly less (again, that didn't work out so well), Aragorn a bit more conflicted, and the Nazgul a little more active, and a pretty fantastic Watcher in the Water, while still (in my opinion) maintaining quite a few (not all) of the book's original themes.
It's not a faithful adaptation, but I don't believe a faithful adaptation could or should be filmed, nor would it be interesting even if it was. That's just my opinion. I believe that people who want the experience of the novel should read the novel. A movie of the novel is going to involve some retelling and some shuffling of the elements, because one medium is of the eye and ear, the other is of the imagination. Anyone goin
What I want to know is, will they call it Anduril?
I think the whole point is that Jackson is trying to draw the transformation of Aragorn from ranger to king closer to the climax of the story. I can see the appeal of that.
Aragorn in the books is a flawless, comic-book hero by the time of the Council of Elrond, and is waving Anduril around at every opportunity (at Eomer, at Hama, etc.) The only real moment of any drama concerning Aragorn (as far as I'm concerned) is where he shows himself to Sauron and the Paths of the Dead. I think both moments become more interesting if Aragorn is a more vulnerable, conflicted character than he is in the books.
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love the book version of Aragorn, but I think the movie version of Aragorn is just a bit more interesting. He's more conflicted. I like that. And the sword ties into that vulnerability. Jackson has made it symbolic of his transformation, and delayed that transformation enough to make it interesting.
That's totally unfair and uncalled-for. Peter Jackson is an ENORMOUS Lord of the Rings fan, and that's about the only reason you're not hearing Frodo say "talk to the hand" and Gandalf drinking a refreshing Pepsi-Cola (TM).
Stanley Kubrick himself once called the Lord of the Rings completely unfilmable -- and, in the books' original form, he's right. Many things which make the book great will simply not fly in a movie medium. You might think they will -- thirty minutes of a guy in a yellow jacket and pointy shoes talking about sheep and Goldberry, and Faramir finding Frodo and Sam in Morder and going "aw shucks! Get out of here with that Ring of Power, you scamps!" In a lengthy, leisurely book like Lord of the Rings, that's fine, but in a movie that already clocks in at three hours a pop with tons of stuff cut out, you'd be bored out of your nitpicking skull. I love Tolkien dearly, but most of his material is as dramatic as a flapjack, because Tolkien was ultimately a lover of the slow and pastoral life of the English countryside. Which is great, but doesn't make good film. Sorry.
Consider how moving and exciting the Lord of the Nazgul scenes from RotK would be if Jackson adapted them faithfully. He rides into Gondor, Gandalf says "you cannot come in here," a rooster crows, some trumpets play, and the Nazgul turns and leaves. Yeah. Thrilling stuff. The crowd would be on the edge of their seats.
Listen to Jackson's DVD commentary on Fellowship sometime, with the other two writers, and how much they agonized and labored over every change that they made, and how many things Jackson wanted to leave in but simply couldn't and deeply regrets. He even laments having to take out Glorfindel and Gildor Inglorion.
I am a big fan of the books, and I was disappointed with a few of the changes too, especially in Two Towers. But Jackson and everyone else have labored very hard to bring as faithful a movie adaptation as they could to a book that is, fact's a fact, completely impossible to adapt faithfully and still have it be any good. Go watch the Rankin-Bass or Ralph Bakshi adaptations of LotR sometime if you want to see how truly, awfully BAD an adaptation could have been. Tolkien fans got very, very lucky when Peter Jackson landed this project, and sorry -- he deserves better than "oh he probably never even READ the books." That is pure bunk.
I for one welcome our new meteorite overlords
It gets past the spam filter, sure, but it really makes me wonder, who on earth would ever click on that?
I recently got a spam that combined "you are a winner" with viagra, porn, and something else -- I couldn't even figure out what it was they were trying to sell. I'm not sure even they knew.
I wonder if the spammers aren't getting a little self-defeating in trying to get past the filters.
Easy, that was John Travolta's race in Battlefield Earth!