> The first Alien seemed too slow. It just dragged on until the Alien popped out.
I think a major problem with Alien for younger viewers is that Alien was so groundbreaking for its day. It was so groundbreaking that it became a cliché. We live in a cinematic world that was changed by Alien and thus its impact is blunted.
Also, pacing has changed remarkably. I was surprised by how long the scenes in the original Exorcist were shot. Jump cuts were unheard-of. Small wonder if movies before 1984 or thereabouts seems slow.
> The only sci-fi movie that I can think of that I enjoyed from that pre-CGI
> era was Star Wars and Star Trek 2.
That's amusing. I dug Star Trek II out a couple months ago and was actually rather impressed with it after 25 years. There was a pretty solid script. A meaty plot--the whole idea of Kirk finally facing up to his own mortality. The acting was... good. (Yes, good!) The F/X were also surprisingly realistic, which shows you what a talented modelmaker can do with a good cameraman. All in all, I think it's definitely a classic.
An even funnier clip I saw had the male bonobo minding his own business, eating a bunch of bananas. A female comes over to him, rolls over and spreads her legs. You could clearly see the male thinking, "Uh, okay, sure!" He drops the bananas, is all ready to get it on, and the female gets up and steals the bananas. The male is left with no bananas and a raging hard-on.
Occam's Razor says that someone Photoshopped larger pupils on the publicity still to make her seem more inviting. As is done with just about every photo for public consumption these days.
What you're doing, ArcherB, is kinda like Monday-night quarterbacking. You're digging for reasons to take Saddam out ex post facto, when there are several other countries who deserve no less of a respite from the despots in power. Why did we choose Iraq? Let's do a simple rundown of the facts:
The United States invaded a sovereign nation on shaky evidence of wrongdoing, when there were options available to the international community. Also, this supposed wrongdoing was completely separate from a recent attack on American soil, although this attack was conflated to include Iraq in just about all rhetoric we heard. The President of the United States is the direct relation of a man who had history with Iraq and the regime within. Many people whom our President was associated with in his first term regarded the elder Bush's Iraq policy "a mistake". Many commentators have mentioned the rough relationship between these two men (the "Mano y mano" episode). The Vice-President of the United States is a man, with energy industry ties, who quit his job as the head of a large multinational construction company in order to become Vice-President. This construction company received multibillion dollar no-bid contracts for the rebuilding of Iraq, including consolidating the oil fields.
I don't know how much dispute you can take with this. North Korea? Who the fark cares? Occam's Razor, folks. Occam's Razor.
Funny... a bioweapons program in N. Korea? With nukes and everything? Real, tangible weapons of mass destruction? With a prosperous true democracy only minutes away? Where's the sabre-rattling? Why hasn't Colin Powell been dispatched to the UN? How come Condi's not talking about mushroom clouds?
I'm cheered by this discussion of the Lambert Act because it sounds like maybe, just maybe, these thugs will possibly be brought to heel. Darl et al. are the worst kind of snake-oil salesmen and probably have millions salted away in some account in the Caymans. Someone needs to get this cash and return it to the shareholders.
However, they'll probably slither away, hopefully never to emerge into the light. C'est la vie.
Maybe we should have a clichés market where we can invest mod points in our favorites and reap the rewards. We can put the ticker below the Slashdot Poll.
I should think they should be happy enough with what they got. SoaP as the number one movie? That's pretty damn good for what should have been a crappy B-movie going straight, as one poster put it, to the bargin bin at Wal-Mart.
I never knew that the barycenter between Jupiter and the Sun was outside of the Sun. I didn't think that Jupiter was big enough. You learn something new every day!
And then you didn't jump on your land speeder or climb into your Xwing fighter, did you? No, you tried to kill a butterfly with your stupid melee knife and got killed.
Hahaha. My roommates did all those things and more. I remember watching them play once and being amazed at how boring it was. I've now seen WOW level-grinding and it still boggles my mind at how bad SWG was.
My favorite memory was coming up to one roommate playing Enemy Territory on one computer while another made bleeping noises as his SWG character sat and kinda twitched. He was running a macro to level and it was going to take a couple of hours.
I hear what you're saying. However, IMHO, from what I've read, a trait that confers a genuine disadvantage on individual members will be weeded out rather quickly in a population. Those that confer slight disadvantage or are survival neutral will persist. In modern society, granted, our superior medical care will convert many afflictions to survival neutral, but the prevalence of things like cystic fibrosis or Tay-Sachs are much much less than simple myopia or presbyopia. In other words, the prevalence of bad eyesight is much much higher than could be supposed if it was truly deleterous.
In other words, the genes for bad eyesight had to come from somewhere, i.e., the population that existed before modern science. For bad eyesight to manifest itself at the level it does in modern populations, either it was prevalent before or it is controlled by a single (or very few) mutation(s) on one (or very few) susceptible gene(s).
I think it's possible that another modern invention, affluence, may have made it more obvious that the population has a range of eyesights. Before a certain time (maybe WWII? Maybe the 1920s?) eyeglasses were too expensive to be readily available to the masses, or were expensive enough to warrant their use only when absolutely necessary. After incomes went up, or manufacturing costs went down, everyone could afford them and suddenly a bunch of people had glasses. OMG!! EVERYBODY PANIC!! ; )
One fallacy here is that humans have been susceptible to sabre-tooth tigers until the near past. (Haha, that's a joke.) If we look at humans as a wild population, non-norm eyesight might be a detriment. But we're talking about humans in their natural setting, that is, within bands or tribes that have division of labor.
Let's look at the breakdown of possible eye problems. Presbyopia, or "far-sightedness", precludes easy detail work because the eye cannot focus closely but excels at focuses near infinity. Myopia, or "near-sightedness", precudes distance vision but provides magnified detail vision. Those with neither problem have no specialization but no handicap.
So, let's construct a thought-experiment, similar to your thought-experient of tigers and spiders, to illustrate the point. Those with presbyopia were selected for jobs within the social structure that required such eyesight: hunting, fighting, etc. Those with myopia were selected for jobs that didn't require perfect distance vision: butchery, making arrows, making armor, or working as scribes. Those with normal vision could do either, which gave them a slight advantage.
However, myopia and presbyopia cancel each other out when mixed, so any given person could have children with any range of eyesight. If an individual excelled at his or her role within the group, near- or far-sighted, he or she would have an excellent chance of progeny, who would have a decent chance of decent eyesight. If not, they could always specialize as their progenitor had. Plus, many times vision problems do not manifest until puberty, which would keep the children so afflicted plenty of time to avoid spiders and tigers until they were mature enough to learn coping skills.
This is why I think that conflating eyesight with diabetes or cystic fibrosis, two diseases that definitely will kill in childhood if not infancy, to be specuous. But even those two diseases, which on the face of it look like genetic dead ends, may provide adaptations for surviving famine and tuberculosis. Natural selection is never easy to tease out.
> Seriously tho. I'm the only person in my circle of friends with 20/20 vision.
> And none of them have light prescriptions. None of them can drive without their
> glasses. how fucked up is that, evolution?
This is a fallacy that many people like to use as a proof of the (genetic) degeneracy of these End Times. If someone could show me statistics that prove that bad eyesight (or another supposed modern degenerate trait) was actually selected against in a way that affected breeding populations before the advent of modern medical science, then I'll agree with this take on evolution.
I'm pretty sure that people with bad eyesight back in the day just coped, and went about their lives, because they had no other way to imagine things being.
Slashdot Mirror
> The first Alien seemed too slow. It just dragged on until the Alien popped out.
I think a major problem with Alien for younger viewers is that Alien was so groundbreaking for its day. It was so groundbreaking that it became a cliché. We live in a cinematic world that was changed by Alien and thus its impact is blunted.
Also, pacing has changed remarkably. I was surprised by how long the scenes in the original Exorcist were shot. Jump cuts were unheard-of. Small wonder if movies before 1984 or thereabouts seems slow.
> The only sci-fi movie that I can think of that I enjoyed from that pre-CGI
> era was Star Wars and Star Trek 2.
That's amusing. I dug Star Trek II out a couple months ago and was actually rather impressed with it after 25 years. There was a pretty solid script. A meaty plot--the whole idea of Kirk finally facing up to his own mortality. The acting was... good. (Yes, good!) The F/X were also surprisingly realistic, which shows you what a talented modelmaker can do with a good cameraman. All in all, I think it's definitely a classic.
"Minority Report" - last half-hour = decent flick "War of the Worlds" - half-hour with Tim Robbins = decent flick
"I Think We're Alone Now" by Tiffany and "Venus" by Bananarama.
And because of this, they can't get the nuts on the bolts, so they have no use for washers.
An even funnier clip I saw had the male bonobo minding his own business, eating a bunch of bananas. A female comes over to him, rolls over and spreads her legs. You could clearly see the male thinking, "Uh, okay, sure!" He drops the bananas, is all ready to get it on, and the female gets up and steals the bananas. The male is left with no bananas and a raging hard-on.
Salon, Slashdot, Fark, the Economist and whatever else I find on those sites.
I wonder if they squirted him his pink slip.
Occam's Razor says that someone Photoshopped larger pupils on the publicity still to make her seem more inviting. As is done with just about every photo for public consumption these days.
Nice to see I ignited a flamewar. ;)
What you're doing, ArcherB, is kinda like Monday-night quarterbacking. You're digging for reasons to take Saddam out ex post facto, when there are several other countries who deserve no less of a respite from the despots in power. Why did we choose Iraq? Let's do a simple rundown of the facts:
The United States invaded a sovereign nation on shaky evidence of wrongdoing, when there were options available to the international community. Also, this supposed wrongdoing was completely separate from a recent attack on American soil, although this attack was conflated to include Iraq in just about all rhetoric we heard. The President of the United States is the direct relation of a man who had history with Iraq and the regime within. Many people whom our President was associated with in his first term regarded the elder Bush's Iraq policy "a mistake". Many commentators have mentioned the rough relationship between these two men (the "Mano y mano" episode). The Vice-President of the United States is a man, with energy industry ties, who quit his job as the head of a large multinational construction company in order to become Vice-President. This construction company received multibillion dollar no-bid contracts for the rebuilding of Iraq, including consolidating the oil fields.
I don't know how much dispute you can take with this. North Korea? Who the fark cares? Occam's Razor, folks. Occam's Razor.
Funny... a bioweapons program in N. Korea? With nukes and everything? Real, tangible weapons of mass destruction? With a prosperous true democracy only minutes away? Where's the sabre-rattling? Why hasn't Colin Powell been dispatched to the UN? How come Condi's not talking about mushroom clouds?
Yeah, Iraq had nothing to do with Bush's daddy.
I'm cheered by this discussion of the Lambert Act because it sounds like maybe, just maybe, these thugs will possibly be brought to heel. Darl et al. are the worst kind of snake-oil salesmen and probably have millions salted away in some account in the Caymans. Someone needs to get this cash and return it to the shareholders. However, they'll probably slither away, hopefully never to emerge into the light. C'est la vie.
Maybe we should have a clichés market where we can invest mod points in our favorites and reap the rewards. We can put the ticker below the Slashdot Poll.
It looks to be a spoonerism away from "vagina".
Shouldn't Jupiter have a top-level domain? blackmonolith@L2.jupiter
I should think they should be happy enough with what they got. SoaP as the number one movie? That's pretty damn good for what should have been a crappy B-movie going straight, as one poster put it, to the bargin bin at Wal-Mart.
I actually remember reading a biography of Sikorsky in 4th grade. Helicopters were teh kewl!
I never knew that the barycenter between Jupiter and the Sun was outside of the Sun. I didn't think that Jupiter was big enough. You learn something new every day!
Hahaha. My roommates did all those things and more. I remember watching them play once and being amazed at how boring it was. I've now seen WOW level-grinding and it still boggles my mind at how bad SWG was.
My favorite memory was coming up to one roommate playing Enemy Territory on one computer while another made bleeping noises as his SWG character sat and kinda twitched. He was running a macro to level and it was going to take a couple of hours.
To think I was actually excited about blue-laser media a couple of years ago. Well, I'll see the first actual workable products around 2011.
Uh, Admiral Weirdbeard wasn't trolling, and he wasn't talking about entropy or any other creation science red herrings.
Yes, you can mod me "Troll" for this.
I hear what you're saying. However, IMHO, from what I've read, a trait that confers a genuine disadvantage on individual members will be weeded out rather quickly in a population. Those that confer slight disadvantage or are survival neutral will persist. In modern society, granted, our superior medical care will convert many afflictions to survival neutral, but the prevalence of things like cystic fibrosis or Tay-Sachs are much much less than simple myopia or presbyopia. In other words, the prevalence of bad eyesight is much much higher than could be supposed if it was truly deleterous.
In other words, the genes for bad eyesight had to come from somewhere, i.e., the population that existed before modern science. For bad eyesight to manifest itself at the level it does in modern populations, either it was prevalent before or it is controlled by a single (or very few) mutation(s) on one (or very few) susceptible gene(s).
I think it's possible that another modern invention, affluence, may have made it more obvious that the population has a range of eyesights. Before a certain time (maybe WWII? Maybe the 1920s?) eyeglasses were too expensive to be readily available to the masses, or were expensive enough to warrant their use only when absolutely necessary. After incomes went up, or manufacturing costs went down, everyone could afford them and suddenly a bunch of people had glasses. OMG!! EVERYBODY PANIC!! ; )
One fallacy here is that humans have been susceptible to sabre-tooth tigers until the near past. (Haha, that's a joke.) If we look at humans as a wild population, non-norm eyesight might be a detriment. But we're talking about humans in their natural setting, that is, within bands or tribes that have division of labor.
Let's look at the breakdown of possible eye problems. Presbyopia, or "far-sightedness", precludes easy detail work because the eye cannot focus closely but excels at focuses near infinity. Myopia, or "near-sightedness", precudes distance vision but provides magnified detail vision. Those with neither problem have no specialization but no handicap.
So, let's construct a thought-experiment, similar to your thought-experient of tigers and spiders, to illustrate the point. Those with presbyopia were selected for jobs within the social structure that required such eyesight: hunting, fighting, etc. Those with myopia were selected for jobs that didn't require perfect distance vision: butchery, making arrows, making armor, or working as scribes. Those with normal vision could do either, which gave them a slight advantage.
However, myopia and presbyopia cancel each other out when mixed, so any given person could have children with any range of eyesight. If an individual excelled at his or her role within the group, near- or far-sighted, he or she would have an excellent chance of progeny, who would have a decent chance of decent eyesight. If not, they could always specialize as their progenitor had. Plus, many times vision problems do not manifest until puberty, which would keep the children so afflicted plenty of time to avoid spiders and tigers until they were mature enough to learn coping skills.
This is why I think that conflating eyesight with diabetes or cystic fibrosis, two diseases that definitely will kill in childhood if not infancy, to be specuous. But even those two diseases, which on the face of it look like genetic dead ends, may provide adaptations for surviving famine and tuberculosis. Natural selection is never easy to tease out.
Is that better?
> Seriously tho. I'm the only person in my circle of friends with 20/20 vision.
> And none of them have light prescriptions. None of them can drive without their
> glasses. how fucked up is that, evolution?
This is a fallacy that many people like to use as a proof of the (genetic) degeneracy of these End Times. If someone could show me statistics that prove that bad eyesight (or another supposed modern degenerate trait) was actually selected against in a way that affected breeding populations before the advent of modern medical science, then I'll agree with this take on evolution. I'm pretty sure that people with bad eyesight back in the day just coped, and went about their lives, because they had no other way to imagine things being.
created by the Kludgiest Random Acronym Producer, probably.