Re:Warning to all mods: joke alert
on
Watchmen Watched
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· Score: 1
Yeah, this is the conventional wisdom. Unfortunately, what happens is that it raises expectations to such a degree that it's truly difficult to live up to them. And if you're not already into comics and graphic novels -- if you're someone who's perhaps just dipping his toe into the medium -- it's all but impossible for Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen to live up to everything you've heard about it. It's kind of like watching Citizen Kane or Casablanca for the first time: unless you know a little about WHY they're considered great, the first-time viewer/reader comes away thinking, "That's it? That's the best movie/graphic novel ever?"
By the way, as good as "Dark Knight Returns" is, I'd say "Batman: Year One" was actually better.
I read Watchmen when it first came out and in the years since I've revisited it a few times. Up until two or three years ago, I was all but certain that any attempt to make it into a movie would crash and horribly burn. But after seeing 300 and Sin City, I came around a bit, thinking, "Okay, some in Hollywood have finally learned to be faithful to the source material." Of course, Watchmen is not 300 or Sin City -- it's more complex than either of those -- but overall, I'd have to say that they did a better job with the movie than I ever dared hope 5 or 10 years ago.
You're right about the changes, but I don't think Snyder or the screenwriter ever thought they could write better than Moore. In fact, I think they showed immense respect to Moore's writing. They didn't tinker with the story very much at all, and the dialog in many, maybe even most, scenes was verbatim from the comic.
It would have been interesting to see them try to leave in the whole predestination thing (thus allowing for Manhattan's "we're all puppets" line), but I can understand why they chose not to take the film there. My biggest disappointment was Veidt. He looked weaselly from the beginning -- he had zero gravitas -- and they never really showed you what made him tick.
Re:Warning to all mods: joke alert
on
Watchmen Watched
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· Score: 1
Do you mean a la Persepolis? That would be interesting. In fact, I think that could really, really work. (And for once Pixar wouldn't win Best Animated Film.)
Oh my god, you've just deepened my appreciation for the graphic novel's ending by an order of magnitude. At least. For close to 20 years, "brain monster = 1st JLA 'villain'" has escaped me. I was never a big JLA reader but nonetheless, I think I might have to turn in my comic-book-geek card now.
The funny thing is that just this morning I was thinking how Ozymandias' plan in the Watchmen movie might have even been an improvement over his plan in the graphic novel. Your comment has very quickly disabused me of that notion. I still think the movie ending works, particularly for general movie-goers, but now that I'm finally really "getting" the comic-book ending, all I can say is that Alan Moore really is a genius.
Well, you did. You already decided what happens to that content when you uploaded it to Facebook. No one forced you to upload to that site, you did so of your own volition, and that implies that you agreed to their Terms of Service. If FB's ToS has a clause saying "hey, whatever you upload belongs to us, no ifs, ands, or buts" and if you still go ahead and upload, then you've made your choice to relinquish control.
The more difficult issue revolves around what happens when I register with, to stick with the example, FB under ToS X and FB then changes the ToS to Y. That's exactly what happened a couple of weeks ago. People screamed bloody murder and Facebook had to backpedal.
Yeah, it was apparent from early on that Slumdog was going to clean up, and you knew that Hollywood would give Penn Best Actor based more on who he played than on the merits of his performance, so there really weren't many surprises. I didn't see many of the movies this year, so it's not like I was really rooting for one movie over another, but I do have to say that I was disappointed that Wall-E didn't get an award for best screenplay. To have so much of a movie be totally without dialog, to have so much of the communication be with "body" language and sounds, and still have the film work? That's genius. That's a screenplay that much harder to craft than one based on a real-life personage (Milk).
I enjoy this sort of story every once in a while too. Here on Slashdot we're more than happy to talk all day about what technology is being used in making films or about Hollywood's often overzealous antipiracy efforts or any number of stories about the Watchmen movie, all of which just reinforce the fact that movies are part of our lives. So if Slashdot wants to toss in a story about the Oscars, which after all happens only once per year, I don't see it being all that big a deal. The way folks are reacting to the story, you'd think that Slashdot had just wholly subsumed the message boards of People magazine or something.
Maybe it has to do with the fact that comparatively few people saw Slumdog Millionaire. Did Slashdot run a story when LOTR: Return of the King won Best Picture, and if so, did everyone still rail against an Oscar-related story being on Slashdot?
[T]he words "geek" and "nerd" exchanged status positions. A nerd was still socially tainted, but geekdom acquired its own cool counterculture. A geek possessed a certain passion for specialized knowledge, but also a high degree of cultural awareness and poise that a nerd lacked.
From The Alpha Geeks, an op-ed piece by David Brooks. It's actually an interesting read -- worth checking out.
Geekdom has always had its camps: you've got your computer geeks, music theater geeks, comic book geeks, fantasy geeks, and so on. Basically if you were interested in something that wasn't considered cool (i.e., something other than cars, sports, cheerleading, binge drinking), you were a geek of one stripe or another.
Of course now, in some sort of wicked irony, it's cool to be a geek. Part of it is a reflection that so much of our lives have become so closely intertwined with technology and gadgets. For example, around here there's a nice restaurant whose bar area has become a very popular spot to take in Sunday football games. Just about every NFL game can be seen on one screen or another, and the beer is pretty good, so if football is your thing, you could definitely do worse. What's interesting is that the folks who are deeply involved in watching the games are also multitasking on their uber-phones or netbooks: they're tracking their fantasy football stats and trash-talking (trash-texting, actually) the guys in their league. With gadgets being ubiquitous now, the cultural valuation of having technical know-how has shifted.
Another thing that's interesting is that geeks have really taken over pop culture too. Graphic novels are now mainstream. Video games are outselling DVDs. When you go to the movies to see the big summer flick, chances are it's science fiction or fantasy of based on a comic book.
I hope I speak for the silent majority here in expressing my interest.:)
I've actually been very interested in e-books in general for quite some time. Despite my longtime interest, it was only about 6 or 7 months ago that I finally invested in an e-book reader. Concerns about DRM certainly gave me pause, but I did end up going with a Kindle for reasons I briefly listed in another Slashdot discussion. One of those reasons was my (perhaps naive) belief that Amazon may ultimately be on the consumers' side on the DRM issues. You probably have a better perspective than anyone else here on whether that might truly be the case.
There's no question that the Kindle has fired up interest in e-books, including among those for whom gadgets are not necessarily a way of life, but unfortunately as we see all too often in today's digital world, a burgeoning market frequently is an invitation to a format war, which can prevent or at least slow more widespread adoption. Like most of us here, I think open standards are the way to go, and I truly do hope that you can swing more of the e-book market, including Amazon, over to ePub; at the same time, however, I can also see the e-book market devolve into two camps: Amazon, which from an outsider's perspective seems to very quickly have become the heavy in the arena, and everyone else.
I think it's important for open standards to take hold in the e-book world, but it's equally important that the market achieve the critical mass necessary for publishers that might not be as technologically aware as O'Reilly to really take notice.
I've got a pretty big library too, acquired much in the same manner as yours -- used-book stores, library sales, etc. As a percentage, the number of books that I've bought at full price is pretty small. Nonetheless, I did go ahead and buy a Kindle about 8 months ago, this despite my reservations about DRM. My reasoning in buying the Kindle basically boiled down to:
- I wanted to see some sort of e-book reader and platform remain viable in the marketplace. Every other attempt has either failed (Rocket Reader, for example) or has negligible market presence. With Amazon's name behind it, I felt that Kindle would be the first e-book reader/platform not to fold after a couple of years and to have a reasonable chance for success.
- Given the technology currently available, I think Amazon got most of the features right: non-backlit display, search functionality (which IIRC, is or was lacking on the Sony), etc. Yes, color would be nice, but e-ink's not there yet.
- I wanted to reward Amazon for understanding that e-books should not cost nearly as much as dead-tree books. I think, also, that this is something that Amazon is trying to get through to publishers.
- I felt reasonably confident that the DRM issues would gradually be resolved -- maybe not today or tomorrow, but eventually. Case in point: much of the music you purchase online is now DRM-free; this of course wasn't the case when iTunes and such first came about. Also, I think that Amazon understands where the consumer is at on the DRM issues. When they started selling MP3s, it was DRM-free from the get-go.
- An e-book reader is great for reading works that are public domain and no longer in print. Go into a bookstore, even a used-book store, and see what you can find by, say, Jules Verne. Probably the three or four titles that everyone knows: 20k Leagues, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Around the World in 80 Days, maybe Mysterious Island. Verne wrote something like 50 other titles, though, and dead-tree versions of them aren't terribly easy to find. (Thanks Project Gutenberg and manybooks.net!)
You appear to be conflating conservative with Republican, but the two are not interchangeable, particularly with respect to the administration that just left office. There are plenty of conservatives that took issue with the warrantless wiretapping because it represented exactly the sort of governmental encroachment into private life that their ideology opposes.
Why would it be a good idea to go to a partisan journalist? If you're going to blow the whistle on something and you want to be taken seriously, then doesn't it make sense to take it to a journalist who is generally respected regardless of one's political leanings?
Why Keith Olbermann? Why not a less biased journalist? Any journalist at the Washington Post, Washington Times, etc would have been happy to get this information and run with it. Keith Olbermann's name brings with it a certain amount of partisan baggage.
The problem is who or what is considered to be a reliable source. I'm not saying that Wikipedia is without value -- I use it about as much as the next guy -- but Wikipedia does make it easier to spread misinformation. For example, let's say some "expert" talking head on NPR states something as fact when in actuality, its veracity is questionable. Maybe the talking head has an axe to grind or maybe he's incapable of seeing things other than through his politically tinted glasses. Someone can then go to the Wikipedia page for whatever this "expert" is talking about and pop in the pseudo-fact, complete with citation.
The problem with Wikipedia these days isn't so much a lack of citation, it's that the citations themselves can be pretty flimsy.
A significant portion of most curry powders is made up of turmeric. I'm not sure how researchers have come to pinpoint turmeric in that melange, but it seems to be the ingredient that continues to draw their focus.
I remember reading a couple of years ago that India has the lowest incidence of Alzheimer's in the world. There's been some consideration that turmeric may have certain properties that can help stave off Alzheimer's.
Change the habits that are obviously bad for you -- smoking, for instance (not that you said you smoke) -- but otherwise live your life. That's my general take.
As for Alzheimer's/dementia specifically, I try to stay informed on the topic. My grandfather also indirectly died from Alzheimer's, and my mom was diagnosed with dementia, which is probably Alzheimer's in actuality, at a remarkably early age (mid-fifties). In any case, there are a lot of resources being put into Alzheimer's research, and there appear to be some very promising treatments on the horizon. Should you or I have to worry about Alzheimer's, we'll have the benefit of having far more effective treatments available to us. (I just hope that something comes to market in time for it to be of material benefit to my mother.)
No question that Moore is well aware of Galileo's other achievements. But I sort of regard this accomplishment of Harriot's in the same way I do the Norse exploration/colonization of North America. Yes, it was quite a feat, and yes (to acknowledge the point of TFA) it deserves to be known, but did it fundamentally change what came after? Not really. History focuses on those who affect other people and the course of later events.
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it...
Galileo stuck his neck out for his views and incurred the wrath of the Church. Of course his achievement would be better known than that of someone who was keeping a low profile.
Now hang on just a second. You've got a 4-digit ID. Aren't you supposed to be sitting atop some mountain, impervious to cold and clime, telling all those dedicated enough to seek your wisdom how the meaning of all human existence can be expressed in one beautifully simple line of perl?
Yeah, With it being a new year and all, I thought at first the computers themselves were shutting down a la Zune. Maybe "MPC Computers Going the Way of the Dodo" would have been a better title.
Re:Someone actually listens to NPR?
on
Penny Arcade On NPR
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Agreed. I'm middle-of-the-road politically and I would say that as a whole NPR is slightly left. I won't say the bias is willful and deliberate and diabolical and all of that, but I do believe it exists.
And when considering issues of bias, whether we're talking about left bias or right bias, it bears mentioning that often the issue of bias has as much to do with what's NOT reported as what is reported.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, this is the conventional wisdom. Unfortunately, what happens is that it raises expectations to such a degree that it's truly difficult to live up to them. And if you're not already into comics and graphic novels -- if you're someone who's perhaps just dipping his toe into the medium -- it's all but impossible for Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen to live up to everything you've heard about it. It's kind of like watching Citizen Kane or Casablanca for the first time: unless you know a little about WHY they're considered great, the first-time viewer/reader comes away thinking, "That's it? That's the best movie/graphic novel ever?"
By the way, as good as "Dark Knight Returns" is, I'd say "Batman: Year One" was actually better.
I read Watchmen when it first came out and in the years since I've revisited it a few times. Up until two or three years ago, I was all but certain that any attempt to make it into a movie would crash and horribly burn. But after seeing 300 and Sin City, I came around a bit, thinking, "Okay, some in Hollywood have finally learned to be faithful to the source material." Of course, Watchmen is not 300 or Sin City -- it's more complex than either of those -- but overall, I'd have to say that they did a better job with the movie than I ever dared hope 5 or 10 years ago.
You're right about the changes, but I don't think Snyder or the screenwriter ever thought they could write better than Moore. In fact, I think they showed immense respect to Moore's writing. They didn't tinker with the story very much at all, and the dialog in many, maybe even most, scenes was verbatim from the comic.
It would have been interesting to see them try to leave in the whole predestination thing (thus allowing for Manhattan's "we're all puppets" line), but I can understand why they chose not to take the film there. My biggest disappointment was Veidt. He looked weaselly from the beginning -- he had zero gravitas -- and they never really showed you what made him tick.
Do you mean a la Persepolis? That would be interesting. In fact, I think that could really, really work. (And for once Pixar wouldn't win Best Animated Film.)
Oh my god, you've just deepened my appreciation for the graphic novel's ending by an order of magnitude. At least. For close to 20 years, "brain monster = 1st JLA 'villain'" has escaped me. I was never a big JLA reader but nonetheless, I think I might have to turn in my comic-book-geek card now.
The funny thing is that just this morning I was thinking how Ozymandias' plan in the Watchmen movie might have even been an improvement over his plan in the graphic novel. Your comment has very quickly disabused me of that notion. I still think the movie ending works, particularly for general movie-goers, but now that I'm finally really "getting" the comic-book ending, all I can say is that Alan Moore really is a genius.
Well, you did. You already decided what happens to that content when you uploaded it to Facebook. No one forced you to upload to that site, you did so of your own volition, and that implies that you agreed to their Terms of Service. If FB's ToS has a clause saying "hey, whatever you upload belongs to us, no ifs, ands, or buts" and if you still go ahead and upload, then you've made your choice to relinquish control.
The more difficult issue revolves around what happens when I register with, to stick with the example, FB under ToS X and FB then changes the ToS to Y. That's exactly what happened a couple of weeks ago. People screamed bloody murder and Facebook had to backpedal.
Yeah, it was apparent from early on that Slumdog was going to clean up, and you knew that Hollywood would give Penn Best Actor based more on who he played than on the merits of his performance, so there really weren't many surprises. I didn't see many of the movies this year, so it's not like I was really rooting for one movie over another, but I do have to say that I was disappointed that Wall-E didn't get an award for best screenplay. To have so much of a movie be totally without dialog, to have so much of the communication be with "body" language and sounds, and still have the film work? That's genius. That's a screenplay that much harder to craft than one based on a real-life personage (Milk).
I enjoy this sort of story every once in a while too. Here on Slashdot we're more than happy to talk all day about what technology is being used in making films or about Hollywood's often overzealous antipiracy efforts or any number of stories about the Watchmen movie, all of which just reinforce the fact that movies are part of our lives. So if Slashdot wants to toss in a story about the Oscars, which after all happens only once per year, I don't see it being all that big a deal. The way folks are reacting to the story, you'd think that Slashdot had just wholly subsumed the message boards of People magazine or something.
Maybe it has to do with the fact that comparatively few people saw Slumdog Millionaire. Did Slashdot run a story when LOTR: Return of the King won Best Picture, and if so, did everyone still rail against an Oscar-related story being on Slashdot?
[T]he words "geek" and "nerd" exchanged status positions. A nerd was still socially tainted, but geekdom acquired its own cool counterculture. A geek possessed a certain passion for specialized knowledge, but also a high degree of cultural awareness and poise that a nerd lacked.
From The Alpha Geeks, an op-ed piece by David Brooks. It's actually an interesting read -- worth checking out.
Geekdom has always had its camps: you've got your computer geeks, music theater geeks, comic book geeks, fantasy geeks, and so on. Basically if you were interested in something that wasn't considered cool (i.e., something other than cars, sports, cheerleading, binge drinking), you were a geek of one stripe or another.
Of course now, in some sort of wicked irony, it's cool to be a geek. Part of it is a reflection that so much of our lives have become so closely intertwined with technology and gadgets. For example, around here there's a nice restaurant whose bar area has become a very popular spot to take in Sunday football games. Just about every NFL game can be seen on one screen or another, and the beer is pretty good, so if football is your thing, you could definitely do worse. What's interesting is that the folks who are deeply involved in watching the games are also multitasking on their uber-phones or netbooks: they're tracking their fantasy football stats and trash-talking (trash-texting, actually) the guys in their league. With gadgets being ubiquitous now, the cultural valuation of having technical know-how has shifted.
Another thing that's interesting is that geeks have really taken over pop culture too. Graphic novels are now mainstream. Video games are outselling DVDs. When you go to the movies to see the big summer flick, chances are it's science fiction or fantasy of based on a comic book.
All in all, it's a pretty good time to be a geek.
I hope I speak for the silent majority here in expressing my interest. :)
I've actually been very interested in e-books in general for quite some time. Despite my longtime interest, it was only about 6 or 7 months ago that I finally invested in an e-book reader. Concerns about DRM certainly gave me pause, but I did end up going with a Kindle for reasons I briefly listed in another Slashdot discussion. One of those reasons was my (perhaps naive) belief that Amazon may ultimately be on the consumers' side on the DRM issues. You probably have a better perspective than anyone else here on whether that might truly be the case.
There's no question that the Kindle has fired up interest in e-books, including among those for whom gadgets are not necessarily a way of life, but unfortunately as we see all too often in today's digital world, a burgeoning market frequently is an invitation to a format war, which can prevent or at least slow more widespread adoption. Like most of us here, I think open standards are the way to go, and I truly do hope that you can swing more of the e-book market, including Amazon, over to ePub; at the same time, however, I can also see the e-book market devolve into two camps: Amazon, which from an outsider's perspective seems to very quickly have become the heavy in the arena, and everyone else.
I think it's important for open standards to take hold in the e-book world, but it's equally important that the market achieve the critical mass necessary for publishers that might not be as technologically aware as O'Reilly to really take notice.
I've got a pretty big library too, acquired much in the same manner as yours -- used-book stores, library sales, etc. As a percentage, the number of books that I've bought at full price is pretty small. Nonetheless, I did go ahead and buy a Kindle about 8 months ago, this despite my reservations about DRM. My reasoning in buying the Kindle basically boiled down to:
- I wanted to see some sort of e-book reader and platform remain viable in the marketplace. Every other attempt has either failed (Rocket Reader, for example) or has negligible market presence. With Amazon's name behind it, I felt that Kindle would be the first e-book reader/platform not to fold after a couple of years and to have a reasonable chance for success.
- Given the technology currently available, I think Amazon got most of the features right: non-backlit display, search functionality (which IIRC, is or was lacking on the Sony), etc. Yes, color would be nice, but e-ink's not there yet.
- I wanted to reward Amazon for understanding that e-books should not cost nearly as much as dead-tree books. I think, also, that this is something that Amazon is trying to get through to publishers.
- I felt reasonably confident that the DRM issues would gradually be resolved -- maybe not today or tomorrow, but eventually. Case in point: much of the music you purchase online is now DRM-free; this of course wasn't the case when iTunes and such first came about. Also, I think that Amazon understands where the consumer is at on the DRM issues. When they started selling MP3s, it was DRM-free from the get-go.
- An e-book reader is great for reading works that are public domain and no longer in print. Go into a bookstore, even a used-book store, and see what you can find by, say, Jules Verne. Probably the three or four titles that everyone knows: 20k Leagues, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Around the World in 80 Days, maybe Mysterious Island. Verne wrote something like 50 other titles, though, and dead-tree versions of them aren't terribly easy to find. (Thanks Project Gutenberg and manybooks.net!)
Oops. And now all Slashdot knows what typos lurk in my hastily-typing fingers.
(Yes, bad form, I know...)
Oh wait, I think that's The Shadow. When does that OS come out?
You appear to be conflating conservative with Republican, but the two are not interchangeable, particularly with respect to the administration that just left office. There are plenty of conservatives that took issue with the warrantless wiretapping because it represented exactly the sort of governmental encroachment into private life that their ideology opposes.
Why would it be a good idea to go to a partisan journalist? If you're going to blow the whistle on something and you want to be taken seriously, then doesn't it make sense to take it to a journalist who is generally respected regardless of one's political leanings?
Why Keith Olbermann? Why not a less biased journalist? Any journalist at the Washington Post, Washington Times, etc would have been happy to get this information and run with it. Keith Olbermann's name brings with it a certain amount of partisan baggage.
The problem is who or what is considered to be a reliable source. I'm not saying that Wikipedia is without value -- I use it about as much as the next guy -- but Wikipedia does make it easier to spread misinformation. For example, let's say some "expert" talking head on NPR states something as fact when in actuality, its veracity is questionable. Maybe the talking head has an axe to grind or maybe he's incapable of seeing things other than through his politically tinted glasses. Someone can then go to the Wikipedia page for whatever this "expert" is talking about and pop in the pseudo-fact, complete with citation.
The problem with Wikipedia these days isn't so much a lack of citation, it's that the citations themselves can be pretty flimsy.
A significant portion of most curry powders is made up of turmeric. I'm not sure how researchers have come to pinpoint turmeric in that melange, but it seems to be the ingredient that continues to draw their focus.
I remember reading a couple of years ago that India has the lowest incidence of Alzheimer's in the world. There's been some consideration that turmeric may have certain properties that can help stave off Alzheimer's.
Change the habits that are obviously bad for you -- smoking, for instance (not that you said you smoke) -- but otherwise live your life. That's my general take.
As for Alzheimer's/dementia specifically, I try to stay informed on the topic. My grandfather also indirectly died from Alzheimer's, and my mom was diagnosed with dementia, which is probably Alzheimer's in actuality, at a remarkably early age (mid-fifties). In any case, there are a lot of resources being put into Alzheimer's research, and there appear to be some very promising treatments on the horizon. Should you or I have to worry about Alzheimer's, we'll have the benefit of having far more effective treatments available to us. (I just hope that something comes to market in time for it to be of material benefit to my mother.)
No question that Moore is well aware of Galileo's other achievements. But I sort of regard this accomplishment of Harriot's in the same way I do the Norse exploration/colonization of North America. Yes, it was quite a feat, and yes (to acknowledge the point of TFA) it deserves to be known, but did it fundamentally change what came after? Not really. History focuses on those who affect other people and the course of later events.
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it...
Galileo stuck his neck out for his views and incurred the wrath of the Church. Of course his achievement would be better known than that of someone who was keeping a low profile.
Now hang on just a second. You've got a 4-digit ID. Aren't you supposed to be sitting atop some mountain, impervious to cold and clime, telling all those dedicated enough to seek your wisdom how the meaning of all human existence can be expressed in one beautifully simple line of perl?
Yeah, With it being a new year and all, I thought at first the computers themselves were shutting down a la Zune. Maybe "MPC Computers Going the Way of the Dodo" would have been a better title.
Agreed. I'm middle-of-the-road politically and I would say that as a whole NPR is slightly left. I won't say the bias is willful and deliberate and diabolical and all of that, but I do believe it exists.
And when considering issues of bias, whether we're talking about left bias or right bias, it bears mentioning that often the issue of bias has as much to do with what's NOT reported as what is reported.