Re:Saw it at 12:01
on
Watchmen Watched
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It has changed in america a lot since the 70's. there was a bloom of nudity in the 70's- tho mostly female. Even pg-13 movies had brief full frontal topless scenes.
I'm not sure how you read my reaction-- even rereading your post, it's unclear.
My reaction is this... minutes of swinging blue dong. A very realistic sex scene. Side and rear male and female nudity that is very clear and extensive.
Only the blue dong was anything new- and it was presented in an entirely non-sexual manner. but it felt a lot different than it did on the panel where it is 1/8" of an inch long and isn't bouncing and swing around.
Likewise- the violence was clearly extreme in the comic book- people bloodily and viciously killed, throats slit, etc. Some was explicit which made all the implied stuff more real. OTH, seeing compound fractures inflicted on screen is disturbing at any age. it violates my body image and squicks me. the arm cutting scene was a lot less intense (my main thought was... I don't remember that from the comic-- I think they slit his throat first there) than the very clear compound fracture breaking scenes.
The sex scenes I wouldn't want my 15 year old to see but the violence scenes I could do without them seeing until they are 17+.
That said- as an adult and fan of the comic book- it was incredible. And the editing was top notch. I hate movies where the fight scenes are so confused that you can't even tell who is fighting who. You had fight scenes with a dozen moving people and never ever lost track of what was happening. And it was very credible-- Rorschach vs the swat guys was bad ass, matched the comics, and ended just as it should too.
I recommend the film highly. it's the kind of film that *should* be made that we stopped making after the initial wave of "X" films in the 70's. This would have probably gotten an "X" back then. That's when "X" meant adult- instead of porno.
Re:It's just been reviewed - not good
on
Watchmen Watched
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
That's one of the major themes.
You had basically good normal people in costumes trying to save the world with rose colored glasses back in the 40's.
Before the 40's even ended, it started to go bad. Heroes in the real world face real world pressures.
by the time the 80's roll around, some of the "heroes" have been reduced to sociopaths by interaction with the real world.
Re:I think you jumped the gun a little.
on
Watchmen Watched
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The mask is a piece of scrap fabric that was intended to be used by a high fashion designer to make dresses but the patterns were unpleasant.
It's one of many tiny little tech touches that are taken for granted.
Picture it as some kind of nano-cloth most likely. We are close to making things like it now in real life.
It didn't react to his moods in the comic (tho the artist may have used it occasionally to do so).
Manhattan is a lot like Spock-- he claims he is disconnected and has no emotions but he really still has them. He fled to Mars because he was upset. He might have been able to heal his girlfriend-- but randomly he was emotional and didn't.
Manhattan in the movie and in the comic is sort of a prisoner of time and predestination-- he can see things that will happen- but can't change them. In the comic there are times where he will say "in a few minutes you are going to say something that pisses me off" and he is not pissed off at that point-- then when the person says "but why are you going to be upset when I say this"? And THEN he gets pissed off because now they actually said it. It was a cool concept.
The pyramid was a movie construct but there were pyramid references in the book. it was forgivable.
Very faithful except for the ending which is still faithful to the idea of the ending.
There were a few scenes in the first hour that were a little loose or slow. that's not it. Here it is: The movie had a great sound track but a lousy score. The background "emotion" music (that made star wars great) was average. the sound track was the biggest change in the "feel" of the novel to me.
The characters were great except veigt was about 20 pounds too light imho.
There is a lot of stuff there for the fan which is meaningless to someone who hasn't read the comic first. It's not bad- it just doesn't connect emotionally because you see some secondary characters or scenes without the 30 panels of buildup you got in the comic.
Some things were the same as the comic but came across a LOT differently. Never has so much swinging male private parts been on display. Much more impact when it's swinging around than on the printed page. The sex scenes had a lot more impact and were more *real* than many sex scenes in many other movies. the awkwardness of it is frequently dropped from "hollywood reality". it was amazing. this added a lot ot the suspension of disbelief for the rest of the film. The violence was extreme. In the panel, it's one thing-- on the screen- it's disturbing. This is not a kid's movie even if they edit out the nudity.
Was very satisfied- understood the edits and changes that were made. Recommend it- but you'll get more out of it if you read the graphic novel first.
And what is with hendrix being the new SF catch song...
I've worked at multiple companies with complete idiots for executives. They fell for every salesperson that walked in the door. Made the same idiot mistakes over and over.
And look across the expanse of companies in the US now going bankrupt because of idiocy. From idiots who got huge bonuses because they and their friends control their own pay.
It's not what they are worth.
They are now actively damaging their companies, their countries, and their societies.
A couple centuries ago they would have been dealt with by a mob by this point.
Because we treat corporations legally as people and because they had almost unlimited wealth for the last 30 years, they changed the laws to destroy capitalism wherever they could.
We are now free to choose from LeftSockPuppet or RightSockPuppet. If either sockpuppet looks dangerous to the corporations then they flood their news stations with damaging stories about the sockpuppet and we obediently vote for the other sockpuppet instead.
You realize that the vast majority of CEO's did not found their companies?
You realize that some senior executives in the financial companies had been working less than a year and got over 10 million dollars (of tax payer money) this fall?
---
And even then I still disagree with you. The rest of society is impinged by your efforts. What I have seen over my life is that once you get beyond a certain level of wealth, you become bad for society. You break laws with impunity, get away with murder, turn out drugs that kill people, break the law and pay the fine, get the city to take people's beach front property so you can build condominiums there, everything except (well probably including when you consider the cosmetic companies) torturing puppies.
If we are to have a free society, with the maximum benefit for all, then there must be a limit on how wealthy any one person or corporation can become.
If you rob and destroy 10,000 people's lives via fraud, your odds of serving over 5 years is slim.
If you rob one liquor store or convenience store and get caught, your odds of serving 2 years the first time and then 5 to 10 years the second time is quite high.
If you smoke one joint, you could do 26 years (tho those days are fading).
It's only rational to risk 5 years in jail in return for tens of millions of dollars.
People like Bernie Madoff cross another line tho- he even screwed many of his friends. That's beyond low.
Lots of very smart kids have had their lives destroyed now (huge debt unforgivable debt, no job prospects)
Meanwhile, somewhere, some lucky person just won a large lottery. Another idiot has invented some stupid product that will be wildly popular for no good reason.
Life isn't fair.
You can only play the odds. I assume bad luck is going to hit me. I have almost no debt, nice house, good job, and take very little risk. I'm in the top 20% of the country-- I'll never be in the top 10% but I'm okay with that.
The people who take the risks (like gates and others) get very rich- and a lot of them end up with huge debt and/or go bankrupt.
And many of them try again- and get rich- while some others commit suicide.
Most highly prepared, smart, hard working people do okay. Some do everything right and end up screwed anyway.
most clueless or lazy idiots will end up poor with crappy lives. But a few will be multi-millionaires.
until very recently, the typical compensation was about 10x. in many other countries, the typical compensation for the same job in equally large companies is a fraction of what it is in america.
and yet, they find people to do those jobs well enough that they are kicking our asses.
our executives apparently only know how to take large paychecks for destroying the companies they run.
---
And who says our shareholders are going to continue buying shares in companies unless the law changes. a lot of people are leaving the market and will never come back. And so our solution is to give billions of tax payer dollars to keep these poorly run companies (by grossly overcompensated executives) in business.
Hard workers should get multiples of income. heck 2 even 5 times as much.
Nothing justifies over 400x. That just represents that the wealthy have gotten control of their own pay raises. They did this by incorporating in states where shareholders have no rights.
You misunderstood the most basic point I'm making.
Given a large population of potential achievers and a larger period of time (a couple of decades), you can model their decisions probablistically. I chose 50% to make it obvious, but it even applies if the odds are 99% to 1%.
I did ignore that the winners of the first few decisions would benefit in further rounds. You can observe that in the 'winner take all" nature of our society.
With regard to gates, there were several other potential candidates. Some of them achieved net worths in the billions.
We see him because he's the biggest. And he was the luckiest one. Things could have gone differently.
An easy example is that any one of several random managers at IBM could have squashed bill gates and we would have never heard of him.
He "won" every random situation until he got big enough to make his own luck.
And he has stunk it up for several years now- making a lot of wrong guesses and bad decisions.
There are a thousand actors equally qualified to be a tom cruise or julia roberts.
T&C luckily got the right role, so then they had an audience who would build on that in future roles.
You could argue that tom has destroyed his career ( with the argument with Brooke Shields mainly ) tho while julia has protected hers.
Thousands of highly qualified people start businesses every day and fail.
I think a better way of putting it is...
unless you do all the preparation work, your odds of success are 1:1,000,000 (so several hundred lucky successes a year). However, if you do all the preparation work, your odds of success are 1:1000 (so 999 highly prepared failures for every success).
Some people do everything right, research, come to correct conclusions, and yet random events destroy them.
Other people make a series of long odds, even terrible choices and yet do great because of random events.
Given classic random theory, given a series of 50/50 type decisions, out of 32 people, one person will be completely screwed and one person will win every time. For larger data sets, the lucky runs are only longer.
I'm sure Gates determination and business acumen made a difference. But winning so big had a lot to do with luck.
> Even if the judge completely agreed with you, being a copyright-bashing libertarian or whatever, he or she would apply the law
[ as negatively as possible if he or she felt you were disrespecting the court. Because judges have power and will crucify you if you disrespect them. Best case would be finding in your favor and holding you in contempt of court, etc.
Policemen, judges, and others are as much about power and authority as they are about actually enforcing the law.
Seriously-- if the chinese had not been playing games with the currency for the last decade, then the yan (sp) would have gone up and chinese compensation levels would not be so crazy low relative to ours.
It's likely to happen really fast at some point when they stop buying our treasuries.
A recent law (ruling?) requiring drug companies to register any study they intended to publish *before* they started the study revealed that about 19/20 studies go unpublished.
So only science that supports the desired goal of the drug or insurance company will be published. A little bit of bias there.
Warren has so much more to lose from civil disorder however.
There is a social contract and the wealthy have broken it.
They've won so badly that even they are beginning to realize that ( Warren Buffet has said he feels it is wrong that his tax rate is so much lower than his secretary ).
The top 1% now have 95% of the wealth and the top 5% have 70% of the income. And both those are up dramatically from only 31 years ago in 1978.
Further tax cuts for the wealthy won't help a bit- because they've taken not only every penny we have- but every penny we WILL have for the next 20 years.
And we are about to skip on the bill for those 20 years very soon.
Electricity in areas with Hydro, etc. tends to be stable/ cheap.
Areas based on fuel (like mine) have tripled in 25 years from about 6 cents to about 18 cents. And they did some scams at the peak last august that made people pay 24 cents.
And when it is all said and done, people will *still* only have the same amount of money to spend on entertainment.
So if they completely lock everything down- at great and ongoing expense to themselves and their customers- it won't significantly increase revenues anyway.
So it makes their entertainment more expensive than other entertainments and people will choose accordingly-- leading to a drop in sales- unless they drop their prices (I'd say.01 for songs from before 1960,.10 for songs before.1980, and maybe.25 for songs up to about 1990 is fair. $1.00 is only fair for the first year a song is out-- it's value falls rapidly as it falls out of sync with the culture.)
Using a switchback circuit box, an inverter, and no batteries, you could lower your daytime electricity sufficiently to insure your rates were all at the lowest generated rates. The real electrical sting in my area comes when you go over 750kwh (apologies if my unit is off).
Slashdot Mirror
It has changed in america a lot since the 70's. there was a bloom of nudity in the 70's- tho mostly female. Even pg-13 movies had brief full frontal topless scenes.
I'm not sure how you read my reaction-- even rereading your post, it's unclear.
My reaction is this... minutes of swinging blue dong. A very realistic sex scene. Side and rear male and female nudity that is very clear and extensive.
Only the blue dong was anything new- and it was presented in an entirely non-sexual manner. but it felt a lot different than it did on the panel where it is 1/8" of an inch long and isn't bouncing and swing around.
Likewise- the violence was clearly extreme in the comic book- people bloodily and viciously killed, throats slit, etc. Some was explicit which made all the implied stuff more real. OTH, seeing compound fractures inflicted on screen is disturbing at any age. it violates my body image and squicks me. the arm cutting scene was a lot less intense (my main thought was... I don't remember that from the comic-- I think they slit his throat first there) than the very clear compound fracture breaking scenes.
The sex scenes I wouldn't want my 15 year old to see but the violence scenes I could do without them seeing until they are 17+.
That said- as an adult and fan of the comic book- it was incredible. And the editing was top notch. I hate movies where the fight scenes are so confused that you can't even tell who is fighting who. You had fight scenes with a dozen moving people and never ever lost track of what was happening. And it was very credible-- Rorschach vs the swat guys was bad ass, matched the comics, and ended just as it should too.
I recommend the film highly. it's the kind of film that *should* be made that we stopped making after the initial wave of "X" films in the 70's. This would have probably gotten an "X" back then. That's when "X" meant adult- instead of porno.
That's one of the major themes.
You had basically good normal people in costumes trying to save the world with rose colored glasses back in the 40's.
Before the 40's even ended, it started to go bad. Heroes in the real world face real world pressures.
by the time the 80's roll around, some of the "heroes" have been reduced to sociopaths by interaction with the real world.
The mask is a piece of scrap fabric that was intended to be used by a high fashion designer to make dresses but the patterns were unpleasant.
It's one of many tiny little tech touches that are taken for granted.
Picture it as some kind of nano-cloth most likely. We are close to making things like it now in real life.
It didn't react to his moods in the comic (tho the artist may have used it occasionally to do so).
Manhattan is a lot like Spock-- he claims he is disconnected and has no emotions but he really still has them. He fled to Mars because he was upset. He might have been able to heal his girlfriend-- but randomly he was emotional and didn't.
Manhattan in the movie and in the comic is sort of a prisoner of time and predestination-- he can see things that will happen- but can't change them. In the comic there are times where he will say "in a few minutes you are going to say something that pisses me off" and he is not pissed off at that point-- then when the person says "but why are you going to be upset when I say this"? And THEN he gets pissed off because now they actually said it. It was a cool concept.
The pyramid was a movie construct but there were pyramid references in the book. it was forgivable.
Very faithful except for the ending which is still faithful to the idea of the ending.
There were a few scenes in the first hour that were a little loose or slow. that's not it.
Here it is: The movie had a great sound track but a lousy score. The background "emotion" music (that made star wars great) was average. the sound track was the biggest change in the "feel" of the novel to me.
The characters were great except veigt was about 20 pounds too light imho.
There is a lot of stuff there for the fan which is meaningless to someone who hasn't read the comic first. It's not bad- it just doesn't connect emotionally because you see some secondary characters or scenes without the 30 panels of buildup you got in the comic.
Some things were the same as the comic but came across a LOT differently.
Never has so much swinging male private parts been on display. Much more impact when it's swinging around than on the printed page.
The sex scenes had a lot more impact and were more *real* than many sex scenes in many other movies. the awkwardness of it is frequently dropped from "hollywood reality". it was amazing. this added a lot ot the suspension of disbelief for the rest of the film.
The violence was extreme. In the panel, it's one thing-- on the screen- it's disturbing. This is not a kid's movie even if they edit out the nudity.
Was very satisfied- understood the edits and changes that were made. Recommend it- but you'll get more out of it if you read the graphic novel first.
And what is with hendrix being the new SF catch song...
Want to get rich quick?
Get born wealthy
Get admitted to one of a few particular schools.
Graduate straight into the executive class.
---
I've worked at multiple companies with complete idiots for executives. They fell for every salesperson that walked in the door. Made the same idiot mistakes over and over.
And look across the expanse of companies in the US now going bankrupt because of idiocy. From idiots who got huge bonuses because they and their friends control their own pay.
It's not what they are worth.
They are now actively damaging their companies, their countries, and their societies.
A couple centuries ago they would have been dealt with by a mob by this point.
No, it's more of a fascist corporatist model.
Because we treat corporations legally as people and because they had almost unlimited wealth for the last 30 years, they changed the laws to destroy capitalism wherever they could.
We are now free to choose from LeftSockPuppet or RightSockPuppet. If either sockpuppet looks dangerous to the corporations then they flood their news stations with damaging stories about the sockpuppet and we obediently vote for the other sockpuppet instead.
You realize that the vast majority of CEO's did not found their companies?
You realize that some senior executives in the financial companies had been working less than a year and got over 10 million dollars (of tax payer money) this fall?
---
And even then I still disagree with you. The rest of society is impinged by your efforts. What I have seen over my life is that once you get beyond a certain level of wealth, you become bad for society. You break laws with impunity, get away with murder, turn out drugs that kill people, break the law and pay the fine, get the city to take people's beach front property so you can build condominiums there, everything except (well probably including when you consider the cosmetic companies) torturing puppies.
If we are to have a free society, with the maximum benefit for all, then there must be a limit on how wealthy any one person or corporation can become.
If you rob and destroy 10,000 people's lives via fraud, your odds of serving over 5 years is slim.
If you rob one liquor store or convenience store and get caught, your odds of serving 2 years the first time and then 5 to 10 years the second time is quite high.
If you smoke one joint, you could do 26 years (tho those days are fading).
It's only rational to risk 5 years in jail in return for tens of millions of dollars.
People like Bernie Madoff cross another line tho- he even screwed many of his friends. That's beyond low.
17 years is bad. but it ends comparatively soon.
i'm sure if they touch it , it is going to come out at 50 years or longer.
Exactly!
Like the old joke, even god can't win you the lottery if you don't buy a ticket.
hard workers have better odds but their are no guarantees.
hard work + luck is awesome.
Provided enough luck, you don't need skill.
You can count on your own skills and abilities- you can't count on luck.
Lots of very smart kids have had their lives destroyed now (huge debt unforgivable debt, no job prospects)
Meanwhile, somewhere, some lucky person just won a large lottery. Another idiot has invented some stupid product that will be wildly popular for no good reason.
Life isn't fair.
You can only play the odds. I assume bad luck is going to hit me. I have almost no debt, nice house, good job, and take very little risk. I'm in the top 20% of the country-- I'll never be in the top 10% but I'm okay with that.
The people who take the risks (like gates and others) get very rich- and a lot of them end up with huge debt and/or go bankrupt.
And many of them try again- and get rich- while some others commit suicide.
Most highly prepared, smart, hard working people do okay.
Some do everything right and end up screwed anyway.
most clueless or lazy idiots will end up poor with crappy lives.
But a few will be multi-millionaires.
until very recently, the typical compensation was about 10x.
in many other countries, the typical compensation for the same job in equally large companies is a fraction of what it is in america.
and yet, they find people to do those jobs well enough that they are kicking our asses.
our executives apparently only know how to take large paychecks for destroying the companies they run.
---
And who says our shareholders are going to continue buying shares in companies unless the law changes. a lot of people are leaving the market and will never come back. And so our solution is to give billions of tax payer dollars to keep these poorly run companies (by grossly overcompensated executives) in business.
Hard workers should get multiples of income. heck 2 even 5 times as much.
Nothing justifies over 400x. That just represents that the wealthy have gotten control of their own pay raises. They did this by incorporating in states where shareholders have no rights.
No.
You misunderstood the most basic point I'm making.
Given a large population of potential achievers and a larger period of time (a couple of decades), you can model their decisions probablistically. I chose 50% to make it obvious, but it even applies if the odds are 99% to 1%.
I did ignore that the winners of the first few decisions would benefit in further rounds. You can observe that in the 'winner take all" nature of our society.
With regard to gates, there were several other potential candidates. Some of them achieved net worths in the billions.
We see him because he's the biggest. And he was the luckiest one. Things could have gone differently.
An easy example is that any one of several random managers at IBM could have squashed bill gates and we would have never heard of him.
He "won" every random situation until he got big enough to make his own luck.
And he has stunk it up for several years now- making a lot of wrong guesses and bad decisions.
Apply your model to actors and actresses.
There are a thousand actors equally qualified to be a tom cruise or julia roberts.
T&C luckily got the right role, so then they had an audience who would build on that in future roles.
You could argue that tom has destroyed his career ( with the argument with Brooke Shields mainly ) tho while julia has protected hers.
Thousands of highly qualified people start businesses every day and fail.
I think a better way of putting it is ...
unless you do all the preparation work, your odds of success are 1:1,000,000 (so several hundred lucky successes a year).
However, if you do all the preparation work, your odds of success are 1:1000 (so 999 highly prepared failures for every success).
Some people do everything right, research, come to correct conclusions, and yet random events destroy them.
Other people make a series of long odds, even terrible choices and yet do great because of random events.
Given classic random theory, given a series of 50/50 type decisions, out of 32 people, one person will be completely screwed and one person will win every time. For larger data sets, the lucky runs are only longer.
I'm sure Gates determination and business acumen made a difference. But winning so big had a lot to do with luck.
> Even if the judge completely agreed with you, being a copyright-bashing libertarian or whatever, he or she would apply the law
[ as negatively as possible if he or she felt you were disrespecting the court. Because judges have power and will crucify you if you disrespect them. Best case would be finding in your favor and holding you in contempt of court, etc.
Policemen, judges, and others are as much about power and authority as they are about actually enforcing the law.
Nah...
The RIAA companies (SUE-W) will declare bankruptcy and we, the u.s. tax payers will give them several billion dollars..
Oh waiter... "Bitter, party of one!"
lol
Perhaps you need to try a crew cut?
Seriously-- if the chinese had not been playing games with the currency for the last decade, then the yan (sp) would have gone up and chinese compensation levels would not be so crazy low relative to ours.
It's likely to happen really fast at some point when they stop buying our treasuries.
A recent law (ruling?) requiring drug companies to register any study they intended to publish *before* they started the study revealed that about 19/20 studies go unpublished.
So only science that supports the desired goal of the drug or insurance company will be published. A little bit of bias there.
Warren has so much more to lose from civil disorder however.
There is a social contract and the wealthy have broken it.
They've won so badly that even they are beginning to realize that ( Warren Buffet has said he feels it is wrong that his tax rate is so much lower than his secretary ).
The top 1% now have 95% of the wealth and the top 5% have 70% of the income. And both those are up dramatically from only 31 years ago in 1978.
Further tax cuts for the wealthy won't help a bit- because they've taken not only every penny we have- but every penny we WILL have for the next 20 years.
And we are about to skip on the bill for those 20 years very soon.
Electricity in areas with Hydro, etc. tends to be stable/ cheap.
Areas based on fuel (like mine) have tripled in 25 years from about 6 cents to about 18 cents. And they did some scams at the peak last august that made people pay 24 cents.
and a german ultility bought up every cell nanosolar will make for the next two years for a solar power plant.
And when it is all said and done, people will *still* only have the same amount of money to spend on entertainment.
So if they completely lock everything down- at great and ongoing expense to themselves and their customers- it won't significantly increase revenues anyway.
So it makes their entertainment more expensive than other entertainments and people will choose accordingly-- leading to a drop in sales- unless they drop their prices (I'd say .01 for songs from before 1960, .10 for songs before .1980, and maybe .25 for songs up to about 1990 is fair. $1.00 is only fair for the first year a song is out-- it's value falls rapidly as it falls out of sync with the culture.)
Using a switchback circuit box, an inverter, and no batteries, you could lower your daytime electricity sufficiently to insure your rates were all at the lowest generated rates. The real electrical sting in my area comes when you go over 750kwh (apologies if my unit is off).