Of course, I can't wait to be fleeced of $70 for the ultra-mega-super-duper edition 6-disc trilogy set coming out after the release of the "The Matrix: Revolutions."
Yeah, it's a real shame you don't have free will or anything, that'd really help you avoid having to buy every edition.
If you actually read my posts you'll see I did no such thing. I was very specific in saying some people with cell phones can act this way, not all people with cell phones, and that cell phones in and of themselves can be great tools and are not inherently bad.
Lucky for me, everyone I know personally who has a cell phone is very considerate in how they use them in public. They bear absolutely no resemblance to the people bellowing into their phones during a movie, and thank God for that.
The problem is if you need to be talking to someone on the phone while in public, all the time, every day. In restaurants, in movie theaters, on the bus, etc. I think there's a level of excess where it stops being about plain old loneliness and starts being about neurosis.
Also, people who call their friends to assuage loneliness don't usually do it very loudly in front of other people so everyone can be impressed with the fact that they can talk on the phone. I see cell-phone users doing this all the time.
It's articles like this that make me glad I don't have to have a cell phone for work (because I wouldn't choose to have one on my own).
Feeling like you "have to" have your little digital gadget in order to feel "connected to the world" is something I find not only humorously ironic, but it also smacks of being a slave to your own technology, which is an idea I find unpleasant. Cell phones can be great tools, but they're not status symbols anymore (at least, not in the positive sense), and they should not be running your life.
I think you make a great point. Cell phones can easily be used as a social crutch, whether to assuage loneliness or just plain old insecurity. In one article I read, Maria Kalman referred to cell phones as "pacifiers for adults". It's an assessment that I by and large agree with. Plenty of people use their cell phones for perfectly legitimate, business-related uses or whatever. Others are just obnoxious turds who are still laboring under the mistaken impression that a cell phone is a status symbol.
I don't blame the technology as such, but the technology does bring out behavior in certain people that makes them more annoying than they would be without the cell phone.
See the article for examples of what I'm talking about. My personal favorite:
During a recent performance of "Death of a Salesman," its star, Brian Dennehy, was startled to hear a cell phone ring near the end of the second act.
Even more disturbing was to hear the phone being answered, and a woman in the audience clearly saying, "It's almost finished," and going on to make dinner plans.
Say what you want about the technology not being to blame -- without a cell phone, this woman would not be engaging in this type of behavior.
And yes, this is speaking as someone who's currently in, and has had a few, long term (>1 year) relationships. Maintain your personality, your uniqueness, your vigor that makes us human. The boobies, the body parts, will sag -- make sure your personalities (you know, the things that you really fell in love with) don't!
Funny, I'm in love too, and my biggest problem is getting the girlfriend to stop playing Vice City long enough to get the controller in my hands.
So while I'm certain we all appreciate that you sacrifice your game-playing privileges in order to get some, understand that not everyone has to. So there's no need to crow quite so loudly.
The annoying bouncies of OS X are easily turned off. They were fun to look at for awhile, and I don't mind having a UI that's pleasant to look at, but eventually I just turned them off.
Now, I have OS X's dock hidden all the time and use a quasi-command-line tool called LaunchBar to run all my applications. Empty desktop, empty dock, no bouncies, no expando-compresso. So, I have a minimalist UI, but I actually had to add features from a third-party vendor in order to get the functionality I wanted.
So it seems to me that more features does not always equal bloat, nor fewer features the superior UI.
I am a big fan of Alan Moore's work, and I like League of Extraordinary Gentlemen a lot. Mina Harker, the Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll and Captain Nemo team up to fight crime on the subway. Frankly, I just love the idea behind it, and, like everything Moore does, it is smart and snappily written.
But this trailer looks like garbage. From what I've heard, they've moved the venue from London to New York (thus removing a lot of atmosphere and taking ALL the characters out of their environment), and added a grown-up, two-fisted Tom Sawyer, because you need an American in this mix... for some reason.
The comic book was clever and had a very nice high-adventure, pulpy Indiana Jones kind of feel. This looks like more Matrix knock-off garbage. When I saw the big steely letters "L X G!!!" I groaned aloud.
I'm not a huge comic book geek, and I do think that League would definitely need some punching up to make the transition from comic to film -- but I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that the film at least be vaguely recognizable as being somehow related to the comic book. If I had seen this trailer without knowing what it was, I would have had no clue it was based on League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
In short, it looks really bad. But, when I heard what they were doing to "adapt" it, I figured it would be, so this trailer doesn't come as much of a shock.
I don't know whether to point out that I believe the previous poster to be talking about story explanation, not real-world explanation, or to just assume that you're being witty. I guess I'll do both.
I don't think making your own Star Trek episode is THAT profound by any means. Nor would I endeavor to do it. Nor am I even jealous. I just think it's cool that someone had the cajones to start, and then finish, such a crazy plan. But, all respect to the filmmakers, world-changing stuff it sure ain't.
I'm sure many of the comments here will amount to "these guys have too much time on their hands" or "haw-haw, these guys can't get laid," but I say good for them. Criticizing and tearing something down by making snarky comments on the Internet is the easiest and least impressive thing in the world.
Actually doing something is hard. Especially something as eccentric as this. These guys had the passion and the perseverance to make something -- to start a project many people would consider too expensive and time-consuming to bother with, and they saw it through to completion. I have to respect that.
More than once I've heard people say something like "wouldn't it be cool to build some cheap sets and make our own episode of (Star Trek, Star Wars, X-Files, My Mother the Car)", but these guys actually went ahead and did it. Which, despite whatever shortcomings the film project might have, is a hell of a lot more impressive than sitting around talking smack about it.
I watched this a few days ago, actually, and it was fun to watch. The people who made it have a lot of love for their subject matter, and put a lot of work into the little details, which I appreciate. And that big pink dinosaur is a riot -- and as special effects go, still beats the heck out of that "lava monster" Spock mind-melded with in that classic Trek episode.
So I say good for them, and I hope it doesn't take another seven years for the sequel.
I think "verisimillitude" or "suspension of disbelief" might be a better word than "realistic." I don't think we're talking about realism in terms of whether or not it's believable that a fictional universe has Jar-Jar and the Force, but realistic in terms of whether or not it's believable that a fictional universe has a section of the populace that exist for no other reason than to stand in one place forever and hold valuable loot for one other person.
I think that's a significant difference. I can accept that a fictional RPG universe has Trandoshan bounty hunters, but that the same universe has Trandoshan bounty hunters lounging around in people's living rooms just holding all their crap is a different issue.
You can't make a Star Trek movie that you guys will like. Nothing will ever live up to the stuff you saw as a kid.
No, but I'd settle for something that lived up to what I saw in 1996 when First Contact came out. And I assure you, I was not a kid.
There has barely been a single year since the premiere of TNG in the late 80s when Star Trek has NOT been on television or the big screen in some form or another. Indeed, there was a time, not so many years ago, when there were two Trek series AND a movie available all at the same time! So it isn't as if good Trek is some kind of distant memory that's had 25 years to accumulate unrealistic expectations, like Star Wars has.
Trek is capable of being good, and it has been capable of being good quite recently, by comparison -- at least to my mind. I have not been "building up" any image of Trek -- it's always been there, from TNG up on to Voyager and Enterprise. And if I feel it's declined in quality, that isn't necessarily nostalgia talking.
I recently purchased a couple seasons of TNG on DVD, and while it's not perfect, it's every bit as good as I remember. And if Enterprise had the same caliber of writing, I would not be panning it. Instead I'm just not watching it.
So, I'm sorry, but I don't think the "oh you were but a wee lad when you liked Star Trek" argument holds water. Star Trek: The Motion Picture came out when I was a kid, and I thought it was junk even then. And I think First Contact is right up there with Wrath of Khan -- they're both excellent.
Time has no meaning with Trek -- either it's good, or it isn't. I don't know a single person who liked Trek V because they happened to be young when they saw it.
Re:I wonder how much of this is quality . . .
on
Critics Pan Nemesis
·
· Score: 2
While we're at it, there's a lot of other good writing out there. Have you read Voltaire, Dickens, Bronte, Shelly, Twain, Crane, Poe, Swift, Doyle, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Morrison, Moliere, Angelou, Morrow, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Pope, Perleman, Woodhouse, Dahl
There are plenty of people out there willing to peg us sci-fi fans as being illiterate to everything but sci-fi. Let's not do it to one another. Maybe it's a generational thing, but most of the hardcore sci-fi fans that I know are very literate and well-educated, and often criticize shows like Star Trek for not being as scientifically valid as they'd like. So I think it's poor judgment to assume sci-fi enthusiasts are not well-read in other areas.
Because if you're the kind of person who likes to share your favorite things with friends, and Hollywood makes an extremely bad movie out of one of your favorite books, chances are the people you know who haven't read the book are going to laugh and scoff when you mention one of your favorite things. Not worth weeping tears of blood over, but disappointing nonetheless.
That, and for some people, movies tend to imprint images on their imaginations that become somehow indelible. For example, Judge Dredd might be terrific, but I find it impossible to even think the words "Judge Dredd" without envisioning Stallone bellowing "I AM DA LAW!"
If they had cast Stallone as Aragorn in the LOTR movie, and I had seen him bellow "YO, ELENDIL!" as he fights some Orcs -- yes, I might very well think of that every time I read Fellowship again. And that would be bad.
Subsequent drafts of the script have been done by Hillary Seitz ("Insomnia") and Oscar-winning "A Beautiful Mind" scribe Akiva Goldsman, who wrote the last draft and is expected to be a prevailing presence on the picture.
Funny that it's Akiva "A Beautiful Mind" Goldsman, not Akiva "Batman and Robin" Goldsman or Akiva "Lost in Space" Goldsman or Akiva "Practical Magic" Goldsman.
Sure, he wrote one passable movie, but... We must never forget!
Slashdot Mirror
He's just a troll trying to get a rise out of you. Pay them no mind.
Well, I'm no film geek, but I took that "fake" look to mean that it was a magic staff projecting magical illumination, not a MagLite.
Yeah, it's a real shame you don't have free will or anything, that'd really help you avoid having to buy every edition.
Lucky for me, everyone I know personally who has a cell phone is very considerate in how they use them in public. They bear absolutely no resemblance to the people bellowing into their phones during a movie, and thank God for that.
Also, people who call their friends to assuage loneliness don't usually do it very loudly in front of other people so everyone can be impressed with the fact that they can talk on the phone. I see cell-phone users doing this all the time.
It's articles like this that make me glad I don't have to have a cell phone for work (because I wouldn't choose to have one on my own).
Feeling like you "have to" have your little digital gadget in order to feel "connected to the world" is something I find not only humorously ironic, but it also smacks of being a slave to your own technology, which is an idea I find unpleasant. Cell phones can be great tools, but they're not status symbols anymore (at least, not in the positive sense), and they should not be running your life.
I don't blame the technology as such, but the technology does bring out behavior in certain people that makes them more annoying than they would be without the cell phone.
See the article for examples of what I'm talking about. My personal favorite:
During a recent performance of "Death of a Salesman," its star, Brian Dennehy, was startled to hear a cell phone ring near the end of the second act.
Even more disturbing was to hear the phone being answered, and a woman in the audience clearly saying, "It's almost finished," and going on to make dinner plans.
Say what you want about the technology not being to blame -- without a cell phone, this woman would not be engaging in this type of behavior.
Even if you get modded down to -1 later... that was awesome :)
And yes, this is speaking as someone who's currently in, and has had a few, long term (>1 year) relationships. Maintain your personality, your uniqueness, your vigor that makes us human. The boobies, the body parts, will sag -- make sure your personalities (you know, the things that you really fell in love with) don't!
Amen to that.
Funny, I'm in love too, and my biggest problem is getting the girlfriend to stop playing Vice City long enough to get the controller in my hands.
So while I'm certain we all appreciate that you sacrifice your game-playing privileges in order to get some, understand that not everyone has to. So there's no need to crow quite so loudly.
Yes, she really does like you. You will realize this in another ten years and kick yourself that you did not ask her out. So go do it.
(this advice multiplied by 3 or 4...)
The annoying bouncies of OS X are easily turned off. They were fun to look at for awhile, and I don't mind having a UI that's pleasant to look at, but eventually I just turned them off.
Now, I have OS X's dock hidden all the time and use a quasi-command-line tool called LaunchBar to run all my applications. Empty desktop, empty dock, no bouncies, no expando-compresso. So, I have a minimalist UI, but I actually had to add features from a third-party vendor in order to get the functionality I wanted.
So it seems to me that more features does not always equal bloat, nor fewer features the superior UI.
I am a big fan of Alan Moore's work, and I like League of Extraordinary Gentlemen a lot. Mina Harker, the Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll and Captain Nemo team up to fight crime on the subway. Frankly, I just love the idea behind it, and, like everything Moore does, it is smart and snappily written.
But this trailer looks like garbage. From what I've heard, they've moved the venue from London to New York (thus removing a lot of atmosphere and taking ALL the characters out of their environment), and added a grown-up, two-fisted Tom Sawyer, because you need an American in this mix... for some reason.
The comic book was clever and had a very nice high-adventure, pulpy Indiana Jones kind of feel. This looks like more Matrix knock-off garbage. When I saw the big steely letters "L X G!!!" I groaned aloud.
I'm not a huge comic book geek, and I do think that League would definitely need some punching up to make the transition from comic to film -- but I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that the film at least be vaguely recognizable as being somehow related to the comic book. If I had seen this trailer without knowing what it was, I would have had no clue it was based on League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
In short, it looks really bad. But, when I heard what they were doing to "adapt" it, I figured it would be, so this trailer doesn't come as much of a shock.
Go back to Massachusetts, pinko!
MS SQL Slammer story (posted Saturday)
Your rant would be more credible if you gave any evidence you actually read Slashdot or were paying any attention at all.
I don't know whether to point out that I believe the previous poster to be talking about story explanation, not real-world explanation, or to just assume that you're being witty. I guess I'll do both.
Ah yes, the horta. I couldn't quite recall what it was called, and didn't think it was worth looking it up. Thanks for that.
Please, God, no, that was not my intent.
I don't think making your own Star Trek episode is THAT profound by any means. Nor would I endeavor to do it. Nor am I even jealous. I just think it's cool that someone had the cajones to start, and then finish, such a crazy plan. But, all respect to the filmmakers, world-changing stuff it sure ain't.
I'm sure many of the comments here will amount to "these guys have too much time on their hands" or "haw-haw, these guys can't get laid," but I say good for them. Criticizing and tearing something down by making snarky comments on the Internet is the easiest and least impressive thing in the world.
Actually doing something is hard. Especially something as eccentric as this. These guys had the passion and the perseverance to make something -- to start a project many people would consider too expensive and time-consuming to bother with, and they saw it through to completion. I have to respect that.
More than once I've heard people say something like "wouldn't it be cool to build some cheap sets and make our own episode of (Star Trek, Star Wars, X-Files, My Mother the Car)", but these guys actually went ahead and did it. Which, despite whatever shortcomings the film project might have, is a hell of a lot more impressive than sitting around talking smack about it.
I watched this a few days ago, actually, and it was fun to watch. The people who made it have a lot of love for their subject matter, and put a lot of work into the little details, which I appreciate. And that big pink dinosaur is a riot -- and as special effects go, still beats the heck out of that "lava monster" Spock mind-melded with in that classic Trek episode.
So I say good for them, and I hope it doesn't take another seven years for the sequel.
Looks like publishers are really looking forward to cashing in on the Tolkien-hype we've been getting nowadays.
Looking forward? Have you even stepped in a bookstore since December of last year?
I think "verisimillitude" or "suspension of disbelief" might be a better word than "realistic." I don't think we're talking about realism in terms of whether or not it's believable that a fictional universe has Jar-Jar and the Force, but realistic in terms of whether or not it's believable that a fictional universe has a section of the populace that exist for no other reason than to stand in one place forever and hold valuable loot for one other person.
I think that's a significant difference. I can accept that a fictional RPG universe has Trandoshan bounty hunters, but that the same universe has Trandoshan bounty hunters lounging around in people's living rooms just holding all their crap is a different issue.
You can't make a Star Trek movie that you guys will like. Nothing will ever live up to the stuff you saw as a kid.
No, but I'd settle for something that lived up to what I saw in 1996 when First Contact came out. And I assure you, I was not a kid.
There has barely been a single year since the premiere of TNG in the late 80s when Star Trek has NOT been on television or the big screen in some form or another. Indeed, there was a time, not so many years ago, when there were two Trek series AND a movie available all at the same time! So it isn't as if good Trek is some kind of distant memory that's had 25 years to accumulate unrealistic expectations, like Star Wars has.
Trek is capable of being good, and it has been capable of being good quite recently, by comparison -- at least to my mind. I have not been "building up" any image of Trek -- it's always been there, from TNG up on to Voyager and Enterprise. And if I feel it's declined in quality, that isn't necessarily nostalgia talking.
I recently purchased a couple seasons of TNG on DVD, and while it's not perfect, it's every bit as good as I remember. And if Enterprise had the same caliber of writing, I would not be panning it. Instead I'm just not watching it.
So, I'm sorry, but I don't think the "oh you were but a wee lad when you liked Star Trek" argument holds water. Star Trek: The Motion Picture came out when I was a kid, and I thought it was junk even then. And I think First Contact is right up there with Wrath of Khan -- they're both excellent.
Time has no meaning with Trek -- either it's good, or it isn't. I don't know a single person who liked Trek V because they happened to be young when they saw it.
While we're at it, there's a lot of other good writing out there. Have you read Voltaire, Dickens, Bronte, Shelly, Twain, Crane, Poe, Swift, Doyle, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Morrison, Moliere, Angelou, Morrow, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Pope, Perleman, Woodhouse, Dahl
Yes. And Asimov, Heinlein, Bear, Benford, Brin, Adams, Niven, Pournelle too.
There are plenty of people out there willing to peg us sci-fi fans as being illiterate to everything but sci-fi. Let's not do it to one another. Maybe it's a generational thing, but most of the hardcore sci-fi fans that I know are very literate and well-educated, and often criticize shows like Star Trek for not being as scientifically valid as they'd like. So I think it's poor judgment to assume sci-fi enthusiasts are not well-read in other areas.
Because if you're the kind of person who likes to share your favorite things with friends, and Hollywood makes an extremely bad movie out of one of your favorite books, chances are the people you know who haven't read the book are going to laugh and scoff when you mention one of your favorite things. Not worth weeping tears of blood over, but disappointing nonetheless.
That, and for some people, movies tend to imprint images on their imaginations that become somehow indelible. For example, Judge Dredd might be terrific, but I find it impossible to even think the words "Judge Dredd" without envisioning Stallone bellowing "I AM DA LAW!"
If they had cast Stallone as Aragorn in the LOTR movie, and I had seen him bellow "YO, ELENDIL!" as he fights some Orcs -- yes, I might very well think of that every time I read Fellowship again. And that would be bad.
Subsequent drafts of the script have been done by Hillary Seitz ("Insomnia") and Oscar-winning "A Beautiful Mind" scribe Akiva Goldsman, who wrote the last draft and is expected to be a prevailing presence on the picture.
Funny that it's Akiva "A Beautiful Mind" Goldsman, not Akiva "Batman and Robin" Goldsman or Akiva "Lost in Space" Goldsman or Akiva "Practical Magic" Goldsman.
Sure, he wrote one passable movie, but... We must never forget!