You've hit on the biggest downside of the film. That kind of camera work was distracting, but I was able to not let it annoy me. As far as downsides go, though, it could be worse, and the whole experience was _unbelievable_.
Drat. The biggest problem with the last Bond movie is that all of the action was done Bourne-style. Casino's action was epic and dramatic yet also remained coherent. Quantum had some very expensive set piece scenes but the camera was so frantic that it was impossible to follow what was going on.
BSG's space action felt so artificial because they were desperately trying to make it feel like Top Gun with live camera crews flying out there in space to capture the action. You go from the tracking shots as the cameraman acquires a fighter, then the quick zoom to catch the close detail, etc. Now what I've found amusing is when they do this kind of stuff in anime, stuff that predated the full CGI crazy stuff available in Hollywood. They would still deliberately create shots that looked like what you would see in Hollywood. You have the fighter taking off with a camera strapped to the belly facing back so you can see the horizon rolling with the landing gear retracting, there will be other shots where the camera is obviously "mounted" to the aircraft.
A lot of people were tempted to do crazy shit as the technology allowed it to be done. You get crazy pans around aircraft in flight that could not have been physically accomplished, Lord of the Rings loved doing the computer-controlled camera pans over the ginormous models, moves that could not have been duplicated with a helicopter over a real landscape. Sometimes this works to sweep you into another world but other times the artificiality of the camera moves will emphasize that you're looking at something that couldn't be real. This brings the obvious reaction -- limit the camera only to what would be physically possible with a real film crew, then throw all the CGI crazy at it. This approach made Cloverfield feel realistic because you could suspend your disbelief and accept that there's a monster attacking New York and it just happened to be caught on a camcorder. But when BSG does this with the space shots, it ends up seeming as affected as the shakeycam on the interior shots.
There's a big Hollywood trend for shakey-cam shots, be it Michael Bay, the Bourne movies, Battlestar Galactica, whatever. It'd bad enough when the camera is bobbing and weaving in a conversation between two people sitting down in a comfortable room, absolutely nausea-inducing in an action scene, and seems to have made its way into space as well. Given the limitations of model work, the old Star Treks always had a sedate and stately feel. When Babylon 5 really blew the doors off the idea of using CGI for space battles, they still used admirable constraint while pushing boundaries. Some of the battles by season 5 got a bit muddled, though.
Just going from the trailers of this movie, it looks like we might almost have a Blair Witch level of confusion and nausea in the space battle. The frantic clips appeared to be a kaleidoscope of beams, explosions, and whirling pieces of ships. Does it get any better in context?
"I wish I could tell you that Optimus Prime fought the good fight, and the Decepticons let him be. I wish I could tell you that - but earth is no fairy-tale world. He never said who did it, but we all knew. Things went on like that for awhile - earth life consists of routine, and then more routine. Every so often, Optimus Prime would show up with fresh bruises. The Decepticons kept at him - sometimes he was able to fight 'em off, sometimes not. And that's how it went for Optimus - that was his routine. I do believe those first two years were the worst for him, and I also believe that if things had gone on that way, this place would have got the best of him."
And I'm imagining this combined with the Robot Chicken prostate cancer sketch.
"I'm a robot, don't have an ass and can't be raped. But YOU have and ass and YOU will be raped. Or maybe it'll just be your childhood memories, Lucas ain't the only one out there."
Reagan's solution to eliminate nuclear weapons: Create defenses that make them impotent, and trust but verify.
End result of Reagan's plan: Collapse of the USSR, and reduction of the probability of nuclear armageddon.
No, the Russians were already on the way to collapse. The failure of their economic theory was proven by the failure of their economy. Reagan had fuck-all to do with that. If anything, SDI destabilized the situation because it created the impression that the United States did think a nuclear war was survivable. This would then serve as an impetus for the Soviets to launch their attack first, before our defenses were perfected.
Official Soviet policy was that a nuclear war could be survived but they never acted on it so I don't think their leaders truly believed it.
Quit sucking off Reagan's corpse, it's embarrassing. You're entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts.
Actually the vast majority of the active arsenal are W88 and W78 warheads which are 475kt and 100kt respectively. The missiles have multiple warheads, but each warhead is less than a megaton.
Correct. The multi-megaton bombs lose too much of their energy upwards, towards space. It's considered more efficient per pound of explosive metal to use multiple smaller warheads and lay them down in a pattern over a target. When the Soviets were looking at taking out New York, it wasn't just one big bomb but a pattern laid down on the area. This would account for failed deliveries as well as making the commute a bit more difficult on doomsday.
The big multi-megaton warheads were considered bunker busters, the only job where bigger still is better, despite any inefficiencies. I don't know what they were planning on throwing at Cheyenne Mountain but I know I wouldn't want to be anywhere near it.
You can't. There is no controversy. There are a bunch of rumors and nonsense and a smear campaign and a bunch of hysterical idiots who either can't do any research or are unwilling to believe despite any evidence presented. He released his birth certificate [fightthesmears.com]. He did it a long time ago, and we still have morons claiming he didn't or that it is a forgery or that a "certificate of live birth" isn't a birth certificate, despite that being what mine says on it. Please spend 30 seconds doing research next time something comes up, instead of 10 minutes writing a completely misinformed rant.
It's never going to get any better. The Obama hate has become almost religious in its irrationality and fervor. I've never seen anything like it. The Bush hate was strong but it was factual. It's like asking people why they don't like eating cyanide and they'll be adamant about it but have simple facts at their command like "It will fucking kill you dead." Good, solid facts that cannot be refuted. With Obama it's like asking kids why they don't eat beets -- same attitude but no factual grounding, they just don't happen to like beets.
That was stupid of him. What did he expect would happen?
The leak is news. I suppose that he might also have been fired if he was reporting on the wide availability of sexual services downtown and picked up a hooker to prove it. But when it comes to journalistic ethics and integrity, for Faux News to jump on this while ignoring the contemptible bullshit spewing from their cable channel on a 24/7 basis... That'd be like CNBC firing the intern for walking home with paperclips in his pocket while continuing to laud that fraudulent little imp Jim Cramer.
Websphere [ibm.com], on the extreme other side of the spectrum, was the bane of my existence for a very short time in my life causing me to lose sleep night after night. I would take Weblogic, Tomcat, Resin, anything over Websphere. Please, baby Jesus, if you can hear me do not let this happens and if it does, let Glassfish be the source code they stick with moving forward.
I will concur. Websphere seemed less like a serious product and more like a torture from myth and legend, some malign god's idea of a just punishment. Loki with the serpent forever dripping poison in his face, Prometheus getting devoured and reborn anew the following day to be devoured again, and we poor bastards tasked with writing an ecommerce site with Websphere. Whenever I saw the little blue letterbox commercials with trendy business people intoning "We are so ready for IBM," I felt like punching a kitten in the face.
This was a billion dollar module meant for serious scientific research and NASA, itself a multi-billion dollar publicly funded institution, had chosen as it's first choice of name, that of a fictional spaceship from some bubblegum space opera made for teenagers, which pays only lip service to scientific fact and theory.
Fact #1: The test airframe of the Shuttle Orbiter was named Enterprise after a write-in campaign by Trekkies. Precedent has been set. Fact #2: There's no sound in space in Firefly, which is better than 99% of science fiction shows depict. Show some love. Fact #3: NASA could dearly use a Colbert bump. Fact #4: Firefly kicked ass. Neer-neer.
NASA should take this ball and run with it. It's lovely and whimsical farce that puts the agency in a mirthful light. One of the ISS astronauts already did a phone-in segment with Colbert. Last January we saw the clip of the Steelers fan up there waving his Terrible Towel in orbit.
This is a win-win sort of thing. Costs nothing, hurts nothing, gives people a smile when they think of a government agency that's gotten more press for fuckups than successes of late. The only kind of person who could be against this is some humorless old shit.
Not exactly news. Ray Bradbury said all sorts of horrible things about Michael Moore and Fahrenheit 911 and was a huge supporter of the Bush wars. Issac Newton believed in alchemy and conducted all sorts of pseudo-scientific experiments in nonsense. Edison spent the last years of his life working on a spook phone to talk to the dead. Orson Scott Card is a Mormon and says bad things about gay people. George Lucas went from Beloved Creator of Star Wars to the Beard, Defiler of the Films.
People start saying and believing stupid shit when they pass their prime. They'll also mistake specialist expertise in one field for generalist expertise in everything.
"There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music, movies, microcode, and high speed pizza delivery."
The former hedge-fund managers are hogging all the pizza delivery jobs, guess that means the coders are going to have to stick with crimes you can prepend with "cyber."
The ability to "steal" content unfortunately is a necessary part of it being accessable and usable.
How true that is. When you look at the effort involved in keeping all your little registration codes straight for buying games online or keeping all CD's paired with their authentication keys versus pirating a game, piracy is the least hassle hands down. They're teaching everyone the wrong lesson here.
I remember, as a younger lad, playing games like Cyberpunk and Shadowrun and thinking that these future-fantasy worlds where megacorps ruled the world, competing and colluding with each other in a massive game, with governments relegated to the role of their legislative pawns was a lot of fun but far out there and obviously fictional.
On the plus side, I wasn't jumped on my way in to work today by two street samurai and an elf mage.
I want to see flyback boosters! There was a design they had for the shuttle boosters that would replace them with liquid-fueled models and they would also come equipped with jet engines. Launches as a liquid-fueled rocket, separates from the shuttle stack, deploys swing wings (which were flush with the airframe at launch) and fire up the conventional jets to make a powered return flight, landing at the Cape pretty as you please.
I think they scrapped this plan because it would be too much development for a program near the end of its life but you'd think it would be viable for the boost stages of newer vehicles. The first stage has got to be the heaviest, most expensive part of the stack. The refurb cost on the shuttle makes you think it might just be cheaper to throw it away but maybe we could actually save some money with better engineering on something like this?
I believe the correct term is actually "damaged Cylon" you insensitive frakin' clod.
Better throw it into the sun cuz we don't need technology no more. We's gonna make lurv to the big hairless monkeys here, make lots of little waterhead toaster-hybrid childrens! And now you know where neckties came from -- space robots.
I read something a while back that absolutely seemed like it had to be wrong. Someone casually mentioned how plants transmute elements into different elements naturally. As far as I am aware, there are only two ways elements transmute in nature:
1.a) Inside a normal star, fusing merrily from hydrogen on up to iron 2.b) Inside super-nova, still a matter of stellar fusion but this is how we get anything heavier than lead. 3. Radioactive decay, heavier elements decaying into stabler lighter elements, no star required.
Disregarding the claims of this article for the moment, the above is true and leaves nothing out, right?
Slashdot Mirror
You've hit on the biggest downside of the film. That kind of camera work was distracting, but I was able to not let it annoy me. As far as downsides go, though, it could be worse, and the whole experience was _unbelievable_.
Drat. The biggest problem with the last Bond movie is that all of the action was done Bourne-style. Casino's action was epic and dramatic yet also remained coherent. Quantum had some very expensive set piece scenes but the camera was so frantic that it was impossible to follow what was going on.
BSG's space action felt so artificial because they were desperately trying to make it feel like Top Gun with live camera crews flying out there in space to capture the action. You go from the tracking shots as the cameraman acquires a fighter, then the quick zoom to catch the close detail, etc. Now what I've found amusing is when they do this kind of stuff in anime, stuff that predated the full CGI crazy stuff available in Hollywood. They would still deliberately create shots that looked like what you would see in Hollywood. You have the fighter taking off with a camera strapped to the belly facing back so you can see the horizon rolling with the landing gear retracting, there will be other shots where the camera is obviously "mounted" to the aircraft.
A lot of people were tempted to do crazy shit as the technology allowed it to be done. You get crazy pans around aircraft in flight that could not have been physically accomplished, Lord of the Rings loved doing the computer-controlled camera pans over the ginormous models, moves that could not have been duplicated with a helicopter over a real landscape. Sometimes this works to sweep you into another world but other times the artificiality of the camera moves will emphasize that you're looking at something that couldn't be real. This brings the obvious reaction -- limit the camera only to what would be physically possible with a real film crew, then throw all the CGI crazy at it. This approach made Cloverfield feel realistic because you could suspend your disbelief and accept that there's a monster attacking New York and it just happened to be caught on a camcorder. But when BSG does this with the space shots, it ends up seeming as affected as the shakeycam on the interior shots.
There's a big Hollywood trend for shakey-cam shots, be it Michael Bay, the Bourne movies, Battlestar Galactica, whatever. It'd bad enough when the camera is bobbing and weaving in a conversation between two people sitting down in a comfortable room, absolutely nausea-inducing in an action scene, and seems to have made its way into space as well. Given the limitations of model work, the old Star Treks always had a sedate and stately feel. When Babylon 5 really blew the doors off the idea of using CGI for space battles, they still used admirable constraint while pushing boundaries. Some of the battles by season 5 got a bit muddled, though.
Just going from the trailers of this movie, it looks like we might almost have a Blair Witch level of confusion and nausea in the space battle. The frantic clips appeared to be a kaleidoscope of beams, explosions, and whirling pieces of ships. Does it get any better in context?
"I wish I could tell you that Optimus Prime fought the good fight, and the Decepticons let him be. I wish I could tell you that - but earth is no fairy-tale world. He never said who did it, but we all knew. Things went on like that for awhile - earth life consists of routine, and then more routine. Every so often, Optimus Prime would show up with fresh bruises. The Decepticons kept at him - sometimes he was able to fight 'em off, sometimes not. And that's how it went for Optimus - that was his routine. I do believe those first two years were the worst for him, and I also believe that if things had gone on that way, this place would have got the best of him."
And I'm imagining this combined with the Robot Chicken prostate cancer sketch.
"I'm a robot, don't have an ass and can't be raped. But YOU have and ass and YOU will be raped. Or maybe it'll just be your childhood memories, Lucas ain't the only one out there."
Blender 2.5 is coming closer with a complete architectural redo that will boost its developement even further.
Wow, looks like they forgot about the hookers and blackjack and got down to business.
Reagan's solution to eliminate nuclear weapons: Create defenses that make them impotent, and trust but verify.
End result of Reagan's plan: Collapse of the USSR, and reduction of the probability of nuclear armageddon.
No, the Russians were already on the way to collapse. The failure of their economic theory was proven by the failure of their economy. Reagan had fuck-all to do with that. If anything, SDI destabilized the situation because it created the impression that the United States did think a nuclear war was survivable. This would then serve as an impetus for the Soviets to launch their attack first, before our defenses were perfected.
Official Soviet policy was that a nuclear war could be survived but they never acted on it so I don't think their leaders truly believed it.
Quit sucking off Reagan's corpse, it's embarrassing. You're entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts.
Actually the vast majority of the active arsenal are W88 and W78 warheads which are 475kt and 100kt respectively. The missiles have multiple warheads, but each warhead is less than a megaton.
Correct. The multi-megaton bombs lose too much of their energy upwards, towards space. It's considered more efficient per pound of explosive metal to use multiple smaller warheads and lay them down in a pattern over a target. When the Soviets were looking at taking out New York, it wasn't just one big bomb but a pattern laid down on the area. This would account for failed deliveries as well as making the commute a bit more difficult on doomsday.
The big multi-megaton warheads were considered bunker busters, the only job where bigger still is better, despite any inefficiencies. I don't know what they were planning on throwing at Cheyenne Mountain but I know I wouldn't want to be anywhere near it.
You can't. There is no controversy. There are a bunch of rumors and nonsense and a smear campaign and a bunch of hysterical idiots who either can't do any research or are unwilling to believe despite any evidence presented. He released his birth certificate [fightthesmears.com]. He did it a long time ago, and we still have morons claiming he didn't or that it is a forgery or that a "certificate of live birth" isn't a birth certificate, despite that being what mine says on it. Please spend 30 seconds doing research next time something comes up, instead of 10 minutes writing a completely misinformed rant.
It's never going to get any better. The Obama hate has become almost religious in its irrationality and fervor. I've never seen anything like it. The Bush hate was strong but it was factual. It's like asking people why they don't like eating cyanide and they'll be adamant about it but have simple facts at their command like "It will fucking kill you dead." Good, solid facts that cannot be refuted. With Obama it's like asking kids why they don't eat beets -- same attitude but no factual grounding, they just don't happen to like beets.
That was stupid of him. What did he expect would happen?
The leak is news. I suppose that he might also have been fired if he was reporting on the wide availability of sexual services downtown and picked up a hooker to prove it. But when it comes to journalistic ethics and integrity, for Faux News to jump on this while ignoring the contemptible bullshit spewing from their cable channel on a 24/7 basis... That'd be like CNBC firing the intern for walking home with paperclips in his pocket while continuing to laud that fraudulent little imp Jim Cramer.
Websphere [ibm.com], on the extreme other side of the spectrum, was the bane of my existence for a very short time in my life causing me to lose sleep night after night. I would take Weblogic, Tomcat, Resin, anything over Websphere. Please, baby Jesus, if you can hear me do not let this happens and if it does, let Glassfish be the source code they stick with moving forward.
I will concur. Websphere seemed less like a serious product and more like a torture from myth and legend, some malign god's idea of a just punishment. Loki with the serpent forever dripping poison in his face, Prometheus getting devoured and reborn anew the following day to be devoured again, and we poor bastards tasked with writing an ecommerce site with Websphere. Whenever I saw the little blue letterbox commercials with trendy business people intoning "We are so ready for IBM," I felt like punching a kitten in the face.
So falling into a black hole looks and awful lot like a slashdotting. Good to know!
Tracert to determine answer?
(o)(o) - here's a vulnerability encoded in bewbs.
I would have more examples but Slashdot refuses to render characters in a fixed-width fashion, foiling any further attempts at character art jokes.
It's so hard to tell which ones are too stupid to be true and so stupid they probably are true.
This was a billion dollar module meant for serious scientific research and NASA, itself a multi-billion dollar publicly funded institution, had chosen as it's first choice of name, that of a fictional spaceship from some bubblegum space opera made for teenagers, which pays only lip service to scientific fact and theory.
Fact #1: The test airframe of the Shuttle Orbiter was named Enterprise after a write-in campaign by Trekkies. Precedent has been set.
Fact #2: There's no sound in space in Firefly, which is better than 99% of science fiction shows depict. Show some love.
Fact #3: NASA could dearly use a Colbert bump.
Fact #4: Firefly kicked ass. Neer-neer.
NASA should take this ball and run with it. It's lovely and whimsical farce that puts the agency in a mirthful light. One of the ISS astronauts already did a phone-in segment with Colbert. Last January we saw the clip of the Steelers fan up there waving his Terrible Towel in orbit.
This is a win-win sort of thing. Costs nothing, hurts nothing, gives people a smile when they think of a government agency that's gotten more press for fuckups than successes of late. The only kind of person who could be against this is some humorless old shit.
As has been said above the number of Mandarin speakers dwarves the numbers of English speakers, even as a second language.
And the number of Sindarin speakers elves them.
Everyone should use English. It's the lingua franca of the world now.
*ducks, runs*
Not exactly news. Ray Bradbury said all sorts of horrible things about Michael Moore and Fahrenheit 911 and was a huge supporter of the Bush wars. Issac Newton believed in alchemy and conducted all sorts of pseudo-scientific experiments in nonsense. Edison spent the last years of his life working on a spook phone to talk to the dead. Orson Scott Card is a Mormon and says bad things about gay people. George Lucas went from Beloved Creator of Star Wars to the Beard, Defiler of the Films.
People start saying and believing stupid shit when they pass their prime. They'll also mistake specialist expertise in one field for generalist expertise in everything.
"There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music, movies, microcode, and high speed pizza delivery."
The former hedge-fund managers are hogging all the pizza delivery jobs, guess that means the coders are going to have to stick with crimes you can prepend with "cyber."
The ability to "steal" content unfortunately is a necessary part of it being accessable and usable.
How true that is. When you look at the effort involved in keeping all your little registration codes straight for buying games online or keeping all CD's paired with their authentication keys versus pirating a game, piracy is the least hassle hands down. They're teaching everyone the wrong lesson here.
We should NEVER have developed human-cotton hybrids.
And they have a plan.
ting-ting tingtingting ting-ting
I remember, as a younger lad, playing games like Cyberpunk and Shadowrun and thinking that these future-fantasy worlds where megacorps ruled the world, competing and colluding with each other in a massive game, with governments relegated to the role of their legislative pawns was a lot of fun but far out there and obviously fictional.
On the plus side, I wasn't jumped on my way in to work today by two street samurai and an elf mage.
Second was a big pile of meh. Quit stripmining the past, people. Come up with a new idea. Max Payne was a new idea, once.
I want to see flyback boosters! There was a design they had for the shuttle boosters that would replace them with liquid-fueled models and they would also come equipped with jet engines. Launches as a liquid-fueled rocket, separates from the shuttle stack, deploys swing wings (which were flush with the airframe at launch) and fire up the conventional jets to make a powered return flight, landing at the Cape pretty as you please.
I think they scrapped this plan because it would be too much development for a program near the end of its life but you'd think it would be viable for the boost stages of newer vehicles. The first stage has got to be the heaviest, most expensive part of the stack. The refurb cost on the shuttle makes you think it might just be cheaper to throw it away but maybe we could actually save some money with better engineering on something like this?
I believe the correct term is actually "damaged Cylon" you insensitive frakin' clod.
Better throw it into the sun cuz we don't need technology no more. We's gonna make lurv to the big hairless monkeys here, make lots of little waterhead toaster-hybrid childrens! And now you know where neckties came from -- space robots.
I read something a while back that absolutely seemed like it had to be wrong. Someone casually mentioned how plants transmute elements into different elements naturally. As far as I am aware, there are only two ways elements transmute in nature:
1.a) Inside a normal star, fusing merrily from hydrogen on up to iron
2.b) Inside super-nova, still a matter of stellar fusion but this is how we get anything heavier than lead.
3. Radioactive decay, heavier elements decaying into stabler lighter elements, no star required.
Disregarding the claims of this article for the moment, the above is true and leaves nothing out, right?