For DVDs to be hits they need the aisle-caps of Wal-Mart and Best Buy. That's reality. Wal-Mart is going to look at the box office and say no thanks. That's the way it is.
That's funny; I learned about the release date from the poster put right at the front of my local Wal-Mart, on those "inventory protection" posts, where they market the upcoming movies and video games. Must only be my Wal-Mart, then.
That was when he figured that he needed to invoke the Dead and Evil Lesbian Cliche. And he did it an old and stupid way. At least when J. Michael Straczynski invoked it, he did so in a new and different way. (The Dead Lesbian and the Evil Lesbian were the same character.) I can't imagine what purpose it served or... or anything. It's like he fears that the fans will start adoring him too much, so he occasionally delivers a nut shot so they won't.
Sci-Fi is about breaking the constraints and tired plots of conventional stories. This means [constraints and tired plots of conventional sci-fi stories].
I do agree with you, by the way; I think tales of "eternal human verities" which translate into "people making the same stupid mistakes" aren't very inspiring or uplifting, even if they're supposed to be. I just don't think Firefly falls into that category simply because it lacks aliens, robots and time travel.
B5 was produced under its budget, which was half the budget of Star Trek:TNG, which was half the budget of Firefly. Firefly only avoided the issue with aliens in rubber masks because they had no aliens at all. You may complain about the makeup in B5, but they didwin three Emmys for it. (Well-deserved, I thought. Sometimes the effects didn't work at all, like N'grath in the first season, but sometimes they really did, like the Narn makeup.) Also, eight years in the evolution of cheap computer graphics is a long, long time. It'd be just as unfair to compare the effects from Battlestar Galactica (the new one) to those from Star Trek:DS9.
But some of the things that made Firefly great also made Babylon 5 great, like a series composer who could give a uniform feel to the show which you just can't get without a dedicated musician. (The X-Files and BtVS benefitted from Mark Snow and Christopher Beck, respectively, in the same way.)
What really got me about Firefly was that Babylon 5 was barely watchable in its first season. Oh, there were good ideas in there, but the acting was occasionally terrible, the tone was all over the place, and the creator didn't seem to have a consistent idea of what he was doing. But it picked up considerably from about episode 13 ("Signs and Portents"). Yes, there were bad episodes after that, but the arc had started up, and I was hooked. And unlike, say, on The X-Files, there was actually a plan behind the arc, other than "drag the audience around until they notice there's no man behind the curtain".
Firefly, by contrast, was dead brilliant from its very first act. And that's what made me so, so sad, because there's so much that's been lost, so much that could have been... and now won't be. Broke my damn heart at the end of "Objects in Space", when I knew there weren't no more t' be had.
Y'know, that's really, really interesting. I'd never thought of it that way, and if a bold of lightning falls from the cloudless sky and makes me into a TV writer, I promise that I will in fact explore character development through events that cast a long, long shadow.
... because somewhere between 500 and a couple of thousand people with possible / likely connections to terrorists didn't (allegedly) have all of the needed paperwork for proper surveillance filled out by the government?
Paperwork? Paperwork?Paperwork?! That "paperwork" you casually mention is the rule of law that separates us from the land of police-state Do-As-You-Please. There's a difference between being accused of a crime and convicted of one; no matter what the crime, it is never sensible to treat the former group as the latter.
I'm aghast. Are you bloody serious? By you, arresting and holding someone with neither charges nor a warrant is just a paperwork problem? Look at what you've become! If standing behind your president means a casual dismissal of the thin but so, so vital line separating us from rule-by-Kingly fiat... shouldn't that set off some kind of warning sign?
Where does Wikipedia show up on PeeJ? I had to view it through Google's cache, since the site is fritzing for me right now, and I didn't see anything about Wikipedia there. (As for the porn comment, note that the Sylvia Saint article features a picture from Bomis's portal. Ah, history.)
Java applets for web buttons that could be done in CSS really hurt it a lot (I can't even tell you how many websites were doing that at one point).
Damn skippy. And why is it that a relatively complete environment like Flash is so much quicker and more lightweight-feeling than Java? No, seriously! I remember the fifty-fifty chance of my browser shitting the bed when trying to run a simple demonstration of some graph algorithm. What on earth was the excuse for that?
Hey, maybe you can answer this. I work at a helpdesk that does password resets for SAP (among many other things), and I still don't know--what the heck is SAP? All I can find about it is that (a) it's very expensive, and (b) it's for enterprises. Is it a programming architecture? Is it a database system? Is it a floor wax and a dessert topping?
This is something that really bothered me in hindsight. Lucy follows Tumnus because he's the first Narnian she meets. Edmund follows the White Witch because she's the first Narnian he meets. Lewis stacks the deck by making Lucy plucky and truthful, and Edmund kind of a dick, so that we don't really notice him poking about behind the scenes, ensuring that Edmund ends up on the bad guys' side, and Lucy on the good guys'.
Is the truth a defense for that kind of thing? I mean, it may be absolutely true that someone told me that John Seigenthaler Sr. eats pureed babies for lunch. It may not be true that he does, in fact, slurp down the occasional tasty baby-shake, but it may be quite true that someone told me that.
It's telling that half of your examples date back to the second world war. Here are a few more recent examples of the brilliance of American foreign policy.
My favorite part is when we hear crowing from the righties about how we're only having a terrorism problem because Clinton cut and run in Somalia, not wanting a lengthy and bloody engagement. (I don't recall any Republicans shouting "stay the course!" at the time, but I might be wrong.) This, according to the narrative, showed the world that America was a paper tiger, which would back down if you bloodied its nose a bit, and led to 9/11, 7/7, and whatever else happens.
However, nothing is said about Reagan's Iran-Contra deal. If you recall, this is where we traded arms for hostages. That is, Reagan appeased the terrorists. Which is just about the worst kind of message you can send. It's like writing a blank check to the bad guys. Look, if your citizens are held hostage by these people, plan a daring rescue mission if you can, but if that doesn't work out, mourn them, 'cause they're already dead.
Ah, I remember The Authority. I was all excited because, come on, Warren Ellis! But no, each event followed the same arc:
(1) Bad guys appear.
(2) Bad guys do evil. Ooh, evil! Aren't they evil! So evil! They usually knock down a major city of three, which will inexplicably be rebuilt for the next arc.
Hell, he's about the only guy Alan Moore's version of Swamp Thing was even slightly afraid of. (When Batman warns him never to threaten his city again, or he'll kill him, Swamp Thing say, "yes... yes, I do believe you would.")
In "The Dark Knight Strikes Again", he was in thrall to Luther, who held the threat of Kandor's destruction against him. In "The Dark Knight Returns", he worked for Reagan, because he was a tool. ("They'll kill us if they can, Bruce. Every year they grow stronger. Every year they hate us more. We must not remind them that giants walk the earth.")
The best part was Batman appearing as a crotchety anarchist dissident. Frickin' awesome. Especially the hat.
I liked the underlying message, that Superman isn't a really deep thinker; he's a believer in mom and American apple pie 'cause that's what he was raised on, but stick him in the Ukraine and he'll fight for truth, justice and the expansion of the Warsaw Pact.
Well, that's one tack to take. The other is to somehow nerf Superman. But how? I mean, you can't make him less invulnerable or strong or the like.
Aha! You can make him stupid. And, indeed, you'll frequently see that Superman is dumb as toast. Now, Batman has no superpowers whatsoever, so he doesn't actually need any nerfing. So he's way smarter than Superman, which is why he'd totally kick Superman's ass. (See The Dark Knight Returns.)
Well, algae ponds should be pretty good for that. Some folks from UNH are saying that you can yield biodiesel from algae at a rate that would imply, by my math, efficiencies of 13 to 26 percent.
And while it's plausible to grow algae ponds over thousands of square miles, it's less plausible to stick chips of difficult to manufacture, energy-intensive silicon over that same area. Not to mention that the energy comes out in an easy-to-use form that our current transportation infrastructure can make use of.
Although the Stirling solar looks quite promising. We'll see how the installation in California comes out.
Slashdot Mirror
For DVDs to be hits they need the aisle-caps of Wal-Mart and Best Buy. That's reality. Wal-Mart is going to look at the box office and say no thanks. That's the way it is.
That's funny; I learned about the release date from the poster put right at the front of my local Wal-Mart, on those "inventory protection" posts, where they market the upcoming movies and video games. Must only be my Wal-Mart, then.
I don't even want none of the above. I want to piss on you. ... R. Kelly?
That was when he figured that he needed to invoke the Dead and Evil Lesbian Cliche. And he did it an old and stupid way. At least when J. Michael Straczynski invoked it, he did so in a new and different way. (The Dead Lesbian and the Evil Lesbian were the same character.) I can't imagine what purpose it served or... or anything. It's like he fears that the fans will start adoring him too much, so he occasionally delivers a nut shot so they won't.
Sci-Fi is about breaking the constraints and tired plots of conventional stories. This means [constraints and tired plots of conventional sci-fi stories].
I do agree with you, by the way; I think tales of "eternal human verities" which translate into "people making the same stupid mistakes" aren't very inspiring or uplifting, even if they're supposed to be. I just don't think Firefly falls into that category simply because it lacks aliens, robots and time travel.
B5 was produced under its budget, which was half the budget of Star Trek:TNG, which was half the budget of Firefly. Firefly only avoided the issue with aliens in rubber masks because they had no aliens at all. You may complain about the makeup in B5, but they did win three Emmys for it. (Well-deserved, I thought. Sometimes the effects didn't work at all, like N'grath in the first season, but sometimes they really did, like the Narn makeup.) Also, eight years in the evolution of cheap computer graphics is a long, long time. It'd be just as unfair to compare the effects from Battlestar Galactica (the new one) to those from Star Trek:DS9.
But some of the things that made Firefly great also made Babylon 5 great, like a series composer who could give a uniform feel to the show which you just can't get without a dedicated musician. (The X-Files and BtVS benefitted from Mark Snow and Christopher Beck, respectively, in the same way.)
What really got me about Firefly was that Babylon 5 was barely watchable in its first season. Oh, there were good ideas in there, but the acting was occasionally terrible, the tone was all over the place, and the creator didn't seem to have a consistent idea of what he was doing. But it picked up considerably from about episode 13 ("Signs and Portents"). Yes, there were bad episodes after that, but the arc had started up, and I was hooked. And unlike, say, on The X-Files, there was actually a plan behind the arc, other than "drag the audience around until they notice there's no man behind the curtain".
Firefly, by contrast, was dead brilliant from its very first act. And that's what made me so, so sad, because there's so much that's been lost, so much that could have been... and now won't be. Broke my damn heart at the end of "Objects in Space", when I knew there weren't no more t' be had.
Y'know, that's really, really interesting. I'd never thought of it that way, and if a bold of lightning falls from the cloudless sky and makes me into a TV writer, I promise that I will in fact explore character development through events that cast a long, long shadow.
... because somewhere between 500 and a couple of thousand people with possible / likely connections to terrorists didn't (allegedly) have all of the needed paperwork for proper surveillance filled out by the government?
Paperwork? Paperwork? Paperwork?! That "paperwork" you casually mention is the rule of law that separates us from the land of police-state Do-As-You-Please. There's a difference between being accused of a crime and convicted of one; no matter what the crime, it is never sensible to treat the former group as the latter.
I'm aghast. Are you bloody serious? By you, arresting and holding someone with neither charges nor a warrant is just a paperwork problem? Look at what you've become! If standing behind your president means a casual dismissal of the thin but so, so vital line separating us from rule-by-Kingly fiat... shouldn't that set off some kind of warning sign?
The Unusual Articles list has plenty in that vein. I'm especially fond of Toynbee tiles, John Titor and heavy metal umlaut.
Where does Wikipedia show up on PeeJ? I had to view it through Google's cache, since the site is fritzing for me right now, and I didn't see anything about Wikipedia there. (As for the porn comment, note that the Sylvia Saint article features a picture from Bomis's portal. Ah, history.)
'Course, it's not only from Firefly.
Dr. Lilian Thurman: What did Roberta Sparrow say to you?
Donnie: She said "Every living creature on earth dies alone".
Java applets for web buttons that could be done in CSS really hurt it a lot (I can't even tell you how many websites were doing that at one point).
Damn skippy. And why is it that a relatively complete environment like Flash is so much quicker and more lightweight-feeling than Java? No, seriously! I remember the fifty-fifty chance of my browser shitting the bed when trying to run a simple demonstration of some graph algorithm. What on earth was the excuse for that?
Hey, maybe you can answer this. I work at a helpdesk that does password resets for SAP (among many other things), and I still don't know--what the heck is SAP? All I can find about it is that (a) it's very expensive, and (b) it's for enterprises. Is it a programming architecture? Is it a database system? Is it a floor wax and a dessert topping?
This is something that really bothered me in hindsight. Lucy follows Tumnus because he's the first Narnian she meets. Edmund follows the White Witch because she's the first Narnian he meets. Lewis stacks the deck by making Lucy plucky and truthful, and Edmund kind of a dick, so that we don't really notice him poking about behind the scenes, ensuring that Edmund ends up on the bad guys' side, and Lucy on the good guys'.
Huh. I thought "it's the girl from Orbital's video for 'The Box', the one with the funny hat and the live-action stop-motion animation".
However, I think BIND works okay, and I am perfectly happy with my DNS the way it is.
"Not connected to the internet", then? BIND is notorious for remote root exploits. This by you is "okay"?
Is the truth a defense for that kind of thing? I mean, it may be absolutely true that someone told me that John Seigenthaler Sr. eats pureed babies for lunch. It may not be true that he does, in fact, slurp down the occasional tasty baby-shake, but it may be quite true that someone told me that.
It's telling that half of your examples date back to the second world war. Here are a few more recent examples of the brilliance of American foreign policy.
Guatemala. Iran. Dominican Republic. Chile. Nicaragua. Panama. Afghanistan. Angola. Pretty much anywhere the disgusting, disgusting Kirkpatrick Doctrine took effect.
I find myself trying to look up an instance where the CIA did something right for a change.
My favorite part is when we hear crowing from the righties about how we're only having a terrorism problem because Clinton cut and run in Somalia, not wanting a lengthy and bloody engagement. (I don't recall any Republicans shouting "stay the course!" at the time, but I might be wrong.) This, according to the narrative, showed the world that America was a paper tiger, which would back down if you bloodied its nose a bit, and led to 9/11, 7/7, and whatever else happens.
However, nothing is said about Reagan's Iran-Contra deal. If you recall, this is where we traded arms for hostages. That is, Reagan appeased the terrorists. Which is just about the worst kind of message you can send. It's like writing a blank check to the bad guys. Look, if your citizens are held hostage by these people, plan a daring rescue mission if you can, but if that doesn't work out, mourn them, 'cause they're already dead.
Reagan? Goddamn appeaser.
Deep Throat cost $22,500, and likely made over $100 million--in 1970s money. (According to Wikipedia.)
Ah, I remember The Authority. I was all excited because, come on, Warren Ellis! But no, each event followed the same arc:
(1) Bad guys appear.
(2) Bad guys do evil. Ooh, evil! Aren't they evil! So evil! They usually knock down a major city of three, which will inexplicably be rebuilt for the next arc.
(3) The Authority arrives and kills the bad guys.
Well, that was fuckin' boring.
Hell, he's about the only guy Alan Moore's version of Swamp Thing was even slightly afraid of. (When Batman warns him never to threaten his city again, or he'll kill him, Swamp Thing say, "yes... yes, I do believe you would.")
In "The Dark Knight Strikes Again", he was in thrall to Luther, who held the threat of Kandor's destruction against him. In "The Dark Knight Returns", he worked for Reagan, because he was a tool. ("They'll kill us if they can, Bruce. Every year they grow stronger. Every year they hate us more. We must not remind them that giants walk the earth.")
The best part was Batman appearing as a crotchety anarchist dissident. Frickin' awesome. Especially the hat.
I liked the underlying message, that Superman isn't a really deep thinker; he's a believer in mom and American apple pie 'cause that's what he was raised on, but stick him in the Ukraine and he'll fight for truth, justice and the expansion of the Warsaw Pact.
Well, that's one tack to take. The other is to somehow nerf Superman. But how? I mean, you can't make him less invulnerable or strong or the like.
Aha! You can make him stupid. And, indeed, you'll frequently see that Superman is dumb as toast. Now, Batman has no superpowers whatsoever, so he doesn't actually need any nerfing. So he's way smarter than Superman, which is why he'd totally kick Superman's ass. (See The Dark Knight Returns.)
Well, algae ponds should be pretty good for that. Some folks from UNH are saying that you can yield biodiesel from algae at a rate that would imply, by my math, efficiencies of 13 to 26 percent.
And while it's plausible to grow algae ponds over thousands of square miles, it's less plausible to stick chips of difficult to manufacture, energy-intensive silicon over that same area. Not to mention that the energy comes out in an easy-to-use form that our current transportation infrastructure can make use of.
Although the Stirling solar looks quite promising. We'll see how the installation in California comes out.