Actually, don't you think that your need to resort to personal insults to make your point and your ad hominem attack are what is really pathetic? Couldn't you have been civil or did you just feel the need to shut me up and suppress my opinion?
Anyway... after the movie was over, I sat and thought why I was angry. I already knew I would not be seeing the next star wars film.
While there was a lot of stupid shit, rey was a mary sue.. no really a MaRey Sue, tlj was a soft canon reboot, had a hopeless atmosphere, was obviously disconnected from the immediately prior movie, etc. that wasn't why I was angry.
I was angry mainly over the humiliation of Jake Skywalker (As Hamill calls him) and the failure to "pay" for the change in character with any kind of decent writing or back story. Also, scenes that could have been done in a positive light were specifically edited to have Rey literally curling her lip with disgust at him.
I knew the character from the movies and had a general idea of the character in the EU books. I don't agree a corporation can toss out approved canon and say now something else is canon. At best, it can fork the i.p. into a new canon.
Then over the course of discussion I realized that while Poe was correct in his assessment that the devastator had to be killed or it would destroy the fleet, he was treated as if was a bad move. Annoying- but not angering. Now, I'm not a big Poe fan but i am a former fortune 500 manager and the way he was treated by Holdo was inexcusable.
And that got me noticing that every male character was the butt of jokes, humiliated, or abused by females. Two of them tazed, one stapped. When I flipped those scenes (and the forced kissing scene) around in my head with reversed genders, I recognized that people would have been livid if the same treatment had been given to women.
So then I became angry about the unfairness of that.
I'm a liberal and proud SJW who fights for *fairness*. What I'm seeing over the last few years is leaving "fairness" behind.
Anyway... you can plug your ears and decide not to listen, but grossly unequal treatment of the male characters combined with the sainted treatment of women in the film did piss me off. Mainly it was Jake Skywalker, but on further thought it was bigger than just that one character. I like strong female characters. Big fan of Brienne. But I didn't find TLJ to be credible. It was grossly over the top misandry.
Infinity wars was down a few million a day. It did not explain Solo theaters with 22 tickets sold.
Solo suffered from the pansexual comment. Audience demographics showed families attendance was down 80%. What parent wants to discuss pansexuality with their 12 year old. Awkward. yea... I know... it really wasn't in the movie.. it was a forced error on the part of the writer who gave a bad off the cuff response to a question.
Solo suffered from fan anger over TLJ. There's no way around it. Many of the peple the angriest were the ones who typically see films opening night and then repeatedly afterwards. I've seen A:IW 5 times and Deadpool II, 3 times. (BTW: I'm hearing good things about "Upgrade" a little independent Sci Fi film and I'm going to see it before it vanishes from theaters).
I was angry because TLJ humiliated and ruined Jake Skywalker (as Mark Hamill called him). And generally because the film humiliated males (Poe, Hux, Kylo, even Snoke) without any corresponding humiliation scenes for females.
TLJ was independently a really dumb film that repeatedly broke my suspension of disbelief so often that I had none left for the last half hour. I was just debating.. "do I leave and wait in the lobby or do I just sit out the last bit to see how this shit show ends?". And I went into TLJ in a very positive mood. It had a lot of my good will and had burned it all by the 45 minute mark. By the time I walked out, I'd decided not to see or buy any star wars material based on TLJ canon.
So.. I'm going to Avengers and the Solo trailer came up (1st trailer) and I literally felt sick at my stomach from leftover anger at TLJ.
EU is my canon. To say it's not canon is like Disney buy the rights to shakespeare and saying Hamlet is no longer canon. It was canon for 40 years. Some dumb soulless corporation isn't going to tell me what canon is.
I am not interested in any "star wars" material based on the TLJ canon.
I'm pretty serious about this stuff. Once you lose me, I don't go back lightly.
I've never seen JLA. I decided *not* to see JLA before BvS ended. I was 70% done with DCU when Supes broke Zod's neck.
DCA knocks it out of the park constantly because they *respect* and *love* the characters, have good writers, and follow the comic books. Put the person in charge of DCA in the Kevin Feige role, start with a bunch of "Year One" low budget movies and watch the DCU become a franchise that turns out $2 billion dollar movies. But DC is about hope and brightness. It is not this dark dystopic shit Snyder wanted to explore. That's much closer to the Watchmen in tone.
I've also never seen any star trek movie in the Kelvin timeline after the first one. It was a science fiction series that had Star Trek I.P. pasted over it but it was not star trek.
I still don't understand why they never made Axanar except pride. That story was pure gold. Even the youtube trailer sent chills up and down my spine. Instead, their reaction was 100% against taking the money from my pockets repeatedly without complaints.
I've also not seen any STD.
I will not see episode 9. They can't fix star wars for me.
There best plan to reduce damage to the franchise is to fire kennedy and johnson, then fake a heart felt apology and give some kind of "we are really going to listen to the fans going forward". I think that would get back half of the angry fans. For me, TLJ has to go too and I know realistically that won't happen. I don't accept Jake Skywalker. I prefer the EU Canon. Luke Skywalker is a great guy and has a nice life there. And he behaves like the character we saw in Return of the jedi.
TFA and TLJ were essentially a canon reboot that left the "resistance"/"rebellion" worse off than it was in "Star Wars" (episode 4 to you younger fellas) and killed off almost every existing character including Ackbar (pointlessly). I *hate* canon reboots. I stopped watching Sony Spiderman during the 2nd canon reboot and didn't see a single movie in the 3rd canon reboot.
So... anyway. Trust me.... there are many fans who will not see episode 9 as long as TLJ is canon.
Keep in mind that Rotten Tomatoes drops 1/2 star reviews.
For Example, You can go in and take a random sample of 100 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes yourself and the rating including 1/2 star reviews will be lower. It's an interesting math problem because movies that pull a lot of 1/2 star ratings are boosted but movies that don't pull a lot of 1/2 star rating are not boosted.
Anyway, in the case of The Last Jedi, the typical actual audience rating for a set of 100 randomly selected reviews which includes the 1/2 star reviews is typically about 25%. There's a video on Youtube where the youtuber pulls and calculates an example. It's kinda cool.
Keep this in mind when writing an audience review in the future and *never* choose the 1/2 star rating. Rotten Tomatoes also ignores 0 star reviews but I think most folks knew that already.
Rotten Tomatoes critics are useless to me in deciding to see a movie or not.
I trust and use Alachia Queen and SC Reviews. They typically buy their *own* ticket and see the movie with a real audience. I do not trust any reviewer who gets to see the film for free (recall how they felt Solo was a "blast" and a masterpiece, a triumph of our time...:-) ) . I kinda watch Beyond the Trailer (Grace) but don't think her taste in movies matches mine.
Kevin Smith is adorable but he loves *everything* so he's useless in deciding how to spend my time and money. Lol. That's the problem. A critic who loves everything is no use to me in deciding to go to movies or not. A critic who hates everything I love and loves everything I hate is very useful tho.
Rotten tomatoes critics are not useful to the amount they are like Kevin Smith.
There is more entertainment coming out every week than I can keep up with. I'm just getting to westworld S02e07 today. I'm way behind on Legion. Havn't finished season 2 of the Good Place.
BTW: "Upgrade" is getting real and very good buzz. It is a little indy sci-fi film with a terrible marketing budget but it's apparently pretty good. I'll probably see it later today.
Production costs are started at $250 million with marketing costs stated at $150 million. There's some scuttle butt that the production costs were actually higher but ignore that.
So $400 million to make and market.
Disney gets less than half of global box office and about half to a little over half of domestic box office. It varies because typically the studio gets more to all on the first 2-3 weeks for domestic screenings and the theaters get everything after that (so theaters love slow burn hits while studios love to have almost everyone see the film immediately).
So anyway... Disney gets half the gross which is projected to make $400 million or $200 million.
That's a $200 million loss- not a $50 milion loss.
Plus merchandising sales are apparently still in the toilet.
I stopped buying and playing new PC video games over 6 years ago.
The last game I bought was Minecraft.
The last game I payed money to play was Boom Beach. When they turned up the monetization on Boom Beach to ridiculous levels, I quit playing that because it had reached "pay to win" levels.
The biggest thing we need to do about rape is fund processing rape kits. Those are rapists (and murderers) who would be taken off the streets if we would just process the kits. About a hundred million would clear every kit in every city in the united stated and prevent a lot of further crimes.
There are some technical problems relating to the age of the u.s. service. The system is too trusting. Businesses are able to send different numbers as their identity than the number they are calling from for very good reasons.
Personally, I think I should have the option to block private, unavailable, and "unusual" phone numbers automatically.
The metrics would be wealthy people who fly into the u.s. from all over the world for treatment.
One big difference from some other countries is if you have money and you want surgery next week, you'll get it. In some countries, you'll be in pain for months before you get much less expensive treatment.
That said, there are some treatments available in other countries that are not (and may not ever) be available in the states.
You mean unless you become unemployed... especially because you got sick. Like my 50 year old friend who died of a curable cancer.
With insurance provided by business, you are fine until you are not.
Even my 30 year old friends with the $89,000 accident were saved by the ACA. They didn't care insurance until it required it. Then they bitched about it. Then they were in a horrific car accident. If not for the ACA, they would have gotten much less treatment and they would have been bankrupt.
That isn't 7.5 hours per person. It's 7.5 hours per household.
So let's see. family of four... that's under 2 hours a day.
If you consider saturday and sundays, that's pretty low.
Now- a one person household (like myself) is watching about 3 to 6 hours a week. (westworld, legion, father brown on netflix).
I probably watch more Youtube user created content than that. I'm disturbed that Youtube is trying to become a cable channel and demonetizing everyone. Even more so when it *continues* to run ads on the channels it demonetizes. Like the mousetrap channel which has pest control advertisers yet Youtube demonetizes many of it's videos while continuing to make money off of him and his tens of thousands of viewers.
there should be but american society currently seems divided into really cruel sociopaths who don't care and marshmallow gooey softheads who can't make the tough calls.
Then you develop a chronic condition that the insurance company assures you is definitely not catastrophic but you find the bills certainly are.
What we need is to quit messing around with individual insurance and just socialize the whole damned thing.
Yup.. and just a couple months ago some 25 year old died because he wasn't covered and couldn't get diabetes medicine. Totally avoidable. Happened in america.
---
That said- we have to be rational. We can't spend a billion dollars a year to keep someone alive. As a society, we decide where the line is and then we have to make those hard choices. For example, we can't cover medical expenses greater than per capita GDP. In reality we probably can't cover medical expenses greater than 10% of per capita GDP.
And that means some really cute young kids will die because they would run tens of millions of dollars in medical bills each and every year to keep alive.
It really sucks. But reality is harsh.
But we can have reasonable coverage, especially basic stuff, for everyone without bankrupting them when they have a car accident with an uncovered driver, when they need $40 a month blood pressure pills, etc.
Sure. And it's terrible to the national health care provided by two dozen other countries.
Catastrophic care is 2 to 3 times as costly to per citizen with much worse results for most citizens- eno, less coverage, higher infant and child mortality, and higher adult mortality rates.
Also, those "mcplans" often bankrupted people and left hospitals with huge unfunded costs.
---
Look, I'd be fine if people like you were really exposed to bleeding out because you didn't have coverage. Instead, you go to the emergency room, run up 3x to 10x the costs and then don't pay them. Which means *I* pay them in my taxes or my insurance premiums.
*My* college was almost free. So was the boomers. We should have a federal college system that is free and which gives basic useful degrees. High school isn't enough. And the extra tax income from a degree pays for itself.
Slashdot Mirror
I think there was a good story to be told between Phasma and Finn.
They could have not had rose and spent time on that instead.
As we take off and land mostly. I no longer look out at clouds or ground while flying.
Actually, don't you think that your need to resort to personal insults to make your point and your ad hominem attack are what is really pathetic? Couldn't you have been civil or did you just feel the need to shut me up and suppress my opinion?
Anyway... after the movie was over, I sat and thought why I was angry. I already knew I would not be seeing the next star wars film.
While there was a lot of stupid shit, rey was a mary sue.. no really a MaRey Sue, tlj was a soft canon reboot, had a hopeless atmosphere, was obviously disconnected from the immediately prior movie, etc. that wasn't why I was angry.
I was angry mainly over the humiliation of Jake Skywalker (As Hamill calls him) and the failure to "pay" for the change in character with any kind of decent writing or back story. Also, scenes that could have been done in a positive light were specifically edited to have Rey literally curling her lip with disgust at him.
I knew the character from the movies and had a general idea of the character in the EU books. I don't agree a corporation can toss out approved canon and say now something else is canon. At best, it can fork the i.p. into a new canon.
Then over the course of discussion I realized that while Poe was correct in his assessment that the devastator had to be killed or it would destroy the fleet, he was treated as if was a bad move. Annoying- but not angering. Now, I'm not a big Poe fan but i am a former fortune 500 manager and the way he was treated by Holdo was inexcusable.
And that got me noticing that every male character was the butt of jokes, humiliated, or abused by females. Two of them tazed, one stapped. When I flipped those scenes (and the forced kissing scene) around in my head with reversed genders, I recognized that people would have been livid if the same treatment had been given to women.
So then I became angry about the unfairness of that.
I'm a liberal and proud SJW who fights for *fairness*. What I'm seeing over the last few years is leaving "fairness" behind.
Anyway... you can plug your ears and decide not to listen, but grossly unequal treatment of the male characters combined with the sainted treatment of women in the film did piss me off. Mainly it was Jake Skywalker, but on further thought it was bigger than just that one character. I like strong female characters. Big fan of Brienne. But I didn't find TLJ to be credible. It was grossly over the top misandry.
Pretty much every male in the movie was humliated (including hux, kylo, and snoke). No corresponding humiliation for the female characters.
Hux and Poe were humiliated in front of their entire bridge crews.
Still looking for the scene were a female character was stunned and slapped by a male character.
Always gets me how people call a successful run over 20,000 years a failure.
lol.
Infinity wars was down a few million a day. It did not explain Solo theaters with 22 tickets sold.
Solo suffered from the pansexual comment. Audience demographics showed families attendance was down 80%. What parent wants to discuss pansexuality with their 12 year old. Awkward. yea... I know... it really wasn't in the movie.. it was a forced error on the part of the writer who gave a bad off the cuff response to a question.
Solo suffered from fan anger over TLJ. There's no way around it. Many of the peple the angriest were the ones who typically see films opening night and then repeatedly afterwards. I've seen A:IW 5 times and Deadpool II, 3 times. (BTW: I'm hearing good things about "Upgrade" a little independent Sci Fi film and I'm going to see it before it vanishes from theaters).
I was angry because TLJ humiliated and ruined Jake Skywalker (as Mark Hamill called him). And generally because the film humiliated males (Poe, Hux, Kylo, even Snoke) without any corresponding humiliation scenes for females.
TLJ was independently a really dumb film that repeatedly broke my suspension of disbelief so often that I had none left for the last half hour. I was just debating.. "do I leave and wait in the lobby or do I just sit out the last bit to see how this shit show ends?". And I went into TLJ in a very positive mood. It had a lot of my good will and had burned it all by the 45 minute mark. By the time I walked out, I'd decided not to see or buy any star wars material based on TLJ canon.
So.. I'm going to Avengers and the Solo trailer came up (1st trailer) and I literally felt sick at my stomach from leftover anger at TLJ.
EU is my canon. To say it's not canon is like Disney buy the rights to shakespeare and saying Hamlet is no longer canon. It was canon for 40 years. Some dumb soulless corporation isn't going to tell me what canon is.
I will not watch episode 9.
I am not interested in any "star wars" material based on the TLJ canon.
I'm pretty serious about this stuff. Once you lose me, I don't go back lightly.
I've never seen JLA. I decided *not* to see JLA before BvS ended. I was 70% done with DCU when Supes broke Zod's neck.
DCA knocks it out of the park constantly because they *respect* and *love* the characters, have good writers, and follow the comic books. Put the person in charge of DCA in the Kevin Feige role, start with a bunch of "Year One" low budget movies and watch the DCU become a franchise that turns out $2 billion dollar movies. But DC is about hope and brightness. It is not this dark dystopic shit Snyder wanted to explore. That's much closer to the Watchmen in tone.
I've also never seen any star trek movie in the Kelvin timeline after the first one. It was a science fiction series that had Star Trek I.P. pasted over it but it was not star trek.
I still don't understand why they never made Axanar except pride. That story was pure gold. Even the youtube trailer sent chills up and down my spine. Instead, their reaction was 100% against taking the money from my pockets repeatedly without complaints.
I've also not seen any STD.
I will not see episode 9. They can't fix star wars for me.
There best plan to reduce damage to the franchise is to fire kennedy and johnson, then fake a heart felt apology and give some kind of "we are really going to listen to the fans going forward". I think that would get back half of the angry fans. For me, TLJ has to go too and I know realistically that won't happen. I don't accept Jake Skywalker. I prefer the EU Canon. Luke Skywalker is a great guy and has a nice life there. And he behaves like the character we saw in Return of the jedi.
TFA and TLJ were essentially a canon reboot that left the "resistance"/"rebellion" worse off than it was in "Star Wars" (episode 4 to you younger fellas) and killed off almost every existing character including Ackbar (pointlessly). I *hate* canon reboots. I stopped watching Sony Spiderman during the 2nd canon reboot and didn't see a single movie in the 3rd canon reboot.
So... anyway. Trust me.... there are many fans who will not see episode 9 as long as TLJ is canon.
Keep in mind that Rotten Tomatoes drops 1/2 star reviews.
For Example, You can go in and take a random sample of 100 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes yourself and the rating including 1/2 star reviews will be lower. It's an interesting math problem because movies that pull a lot of 1/2 star ratings are boosted but movies that don't pull a lot of 1/2 star rating are not boosted.
Anyway, in the case of The Last Jedi, the typical actual audience rating for a set of 100 randomly selected reviews which includes the 1/2 star reviews is typically about 25%. There's a video on Youtube where the youtuber pulls and calculates an example. It's kinda cool.
Keep this in mind when writing an audience review in the future and *never* choose the 1/2 star rating. Rotten Tomatoes also ignores 0 star reviews but I think most folks knew that already.
Rotten Tomatoes critics are useless to me in deciding to see a movie or not.
I trust and use Alachia Queen and SC Reviews. They typically buy their *own* ticket and see the movie with a real audience. I do not trust any reviewer who gets to see the film for free (recall how they felt Solo was a "blast" and a masterpiece, a triumph of our time... :-) ) . I kinda watch Beyond the Trailer (Grace) but don't think her taste in movies matches mine.
Kevin Smith is adorable but he loves *everything* so he's useless in deciding how to spend my time and money. Lol. That's the problem. A critic who loves everything is no use to me in deciding to go to movies or not. A critic who hates everything I love and loves everything I hate is very useful tho.
Rotten tomatoes critics are not useful to the amount they are like Kevin Smith.
There is more entertainment coming out every week than I can keep up with. I'm just getting to westworld S02e07 today. I'm way behind on Legion. Havn't finished season 2 of the Good Place.
BTW: "Upgrade" is getting real and very good buzz. It is a little indy sci-fi film with a terrible marketing budget but it's apparently pretty good. I'll probably see it later today.
The film is expected to gross $400 million.
Production costs are started at $250 million with marketing costs stated at $150 million. There's some scuttle butt that the production costs were actually higher but ignore that.
So $400 million to make and market.
Disney gets less than half of global box office and about half to a little over half of domestic box office. It varies because typically the studio gets more to all on the first 2-3 weeks for domestic screenings and the theaters get everything after that (so theaters love slow burn hits while studios love to have almost everyone see the film immediately).
So anyway... Disney gets half the gross which is projected to make $400 million or $200 million.
That's a $200 million loss- not a $50 milion loss.
Plus merchandising sales are apparently still in the toilet.
I stopped buying and playing new PC video games over 6 years ago.
The last game I bought was Minecraft.
The last game I payed money to play was Boom Beach. When they turned up the monetization on Boom Beach to ridiculous levels, I quit playing that because it had reached "pay to win" levels.
The biggest thing we need to do about rape is fund processing rape kits. Those are rapists (and murderers) who would be taken off the streets if we would just process the kits. About a hundred million would clear every kit in every city in the united stated and prevent a lot of further crimes.
There are some technical problems relating to the age of the u.s. service. The system is too trusting. Businesses are able to send different numbers as their identity than the number they are calling from for very good reasons.
Personally, I think I should have the option to block private, unavailable, and "unusual" phone numbers automatically.
Plus they are automating away the jobs (and votes) anyway.
This plan doesn't even support Mr. Trump politically. I'd start looking for large payments to trump associates from this industry.
It doesn't make sense unless he's getting a cut somehow.
The metrics would be wealthy people who fly into the u.s. from all over the world for treatment.
One big difference from some other countries is if you have money and you want surgery next week, you'll get it. In some countries, you'll be in pain for months before you get much less expensive treatment.
That said, there are some treatments available in other countries that are not (and may not ever) be available in the states.
It's already been shown above that we pay the same per capita as the U.K. for federal health care costs.
And then we pay over that amount privately on top of that cost.
UK per capita health care is $4100. U.S. per capital health care is $9800. As of last year.
And except for the top 10%, we get *worse* health care results.
Our health care system is *great* for the top 10%. Best in the world.
If you are not top 10% then you get to die early like my friend who couldn't get treatment for her curable cancer in time.
You mean unless you become unemployed... especially because you got sick. Like my 50 year old friend who died of a curable cancer.
With insurance provided by business, you are fine until you are not.
Even my 30 year old friends with the $89,000 accident were saved by the ACA. They didn't care insurance until it required it. Then they bitched about it. Then they were in a horrific car accident. If not for the ACA, they would have gotten much less treatment and they would have been bankrupt.
You are ignoring that the u.s. then also pays additionally per capita where UK does not in the private market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
United Kingdom 4,192
United States 9,892
In other words, U.K. citizens pay *less than half* what we do.
Because of 77 bushels of wheat.
That isn't 7.5 hours per person. It's 7.5 hours per household.
So let's see. family of four... that's under 2 hours a day.
If you consider saturday and sundays, that's pretty low.
Now- a one person household (like myself) is watching about 3 to 6 hours a week.
(westworld, legion, father brown on netflix).
I probably watch more Youtube user created content than that. I'm disturbed that Youtube is trying to become a cable channel and demonetizing everyone. Even more so when it *continues* to run ads on the channels it demonetizes. Like the mousetrap channel which has pest control advertisers yet Youtube demonetizes many of it's videos while continuing to make money off of him and his tens of thousands of viewers.
there should be but american society currently seems divided into really cruel sociopaths who don't care and marshmallow gooey softheads who can't make the tough calls.
It worries me.
Then you develop a chronic condition that the insurance company assures you is definitely not catastrophic but you find the bills certainly are.
What we need is to quit messing around with individual insurance and just socialize the whole damned thing.
Yup.. and just a couple months ago some 25 year old died because he wasn't covered and couldn't get diabetes medicine. Totally avoidable. Happened in america.
---
That said- we have to be rational. We can't spend a billion dollars a year to keep someone alive. As a society, we decide where the line is and then we have to make those hard choices. For example, we can't cover medical expenses greater than per capita GDP. In reality we probably can't cover medical expenses greater than 10% of per capita GDP.
And that means some really cute young kids will die because they would run tens of millions of dollars in medical bills each and every year to keep alive.
It really sucks. But reality is harsh.
But we can have reasonable coverage, especially basic stuff, for everyone without bankrupting them when they have a car accident with an uncovered driver, when they need $40 a month blood pressure pills, etc.
Sure. And it's terrible to the national health care provided by two dozen other countries.
Catastrophic care is 2 to 3 times as costly to per citizen with much worse results for most citizens- eno, less coverage, higher infant and child mortality, and higher adult mortality rates.
Also, those "mcplans" often bankrupted people and left hospitals with huge unfunded costs.
---
Look, I'd be fine if people like you were really exposed to bleeding out because you didn't have coverage. Instead, you go to the emergency room, run up 3x to 10x the costs and then don't pay them. Which means *I* pay them in my taxes or my insurance premiums.
Seems like a problem with society- not with kids.
*My* college was almost free. So was the boomers. We should have a federal college system that is free and which gives basic useful degrees. High school isn't enough. And the extra tax income from a degree pays for itself.
Uh... what kind of society results where our choice is to have no kids?
seems like a dead end to me.
I've never understood it.