Lurker > ParanoidObsessive

Mead posted...

Its nothing new. People are just more aware of things now.

I'd be inclined to argue the reverse - the real issue is that we're more aware of people now.

40 years ago, a lunatic could stand on a streetcorner shouting about whatever they wanted. Today, they make a website, attract other lunatics who agree with them, develop a subculture, throw hashtags up on Twitter, and then clickbait websites make inflammatory headlines about them and widen awareness of them even more.

The best thing about the Internet is that it gives everyone a voice. The worst thing about the Internet is that it gives everyone a voice.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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NachoVarga posted...

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Maybe you just need to stop hanging out in the shittiest places to discuss video games.

I hangout here on gamefaqs though.

I rest my case.
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The Wave Master posted...

I'm all for giving women a chance in a male dominated industry like Pro Wrestling, but she is just terrible at her job. Just awful. Her timing is horrible, she has no chemistry with anyone she works with, and offers no insight into the match at all. Also, her voice gets on my nerves lately. It's about as bad as Troy Aikman with Joe Buck doing football games.

She was great when she was doing Talking Smack.

The biggest problem she has is one that isn't actually her fault, and which ruins other commentators as well (Michael Cole specifically). Namely, when Vince MacMahon is shouting innate bullshit into your ear on a regular basis, it can be hard to actually do your job well. Because he is an insane old man who is 40 years out of touch and who has massive disdain for his audience, and doesn't tolerate free will or attempts to manifest personality from his toys. Even Corey Graves suffers from it - he's become way worse since coming to the main roster. It's also one of the main reasons why Mauro Ranallo is one of the better commentators on NXT but absolutely refuses to work on the main roster.

The other problem she suffers from is the same problem multiple other commentators suffer from as well - namely, being part of a three-man commentary team. A strong face/heel dynamic between play-by-play and color commentators tends to be the best combination in wrestling in terms of personality dynamics (which is why JR and Lawler and Gorilla Monsoon and Bobby Heenan are probably the two most beloved combinations to this day). Once you add a third commentator, they tend to wind up having trouble asserting themselves or finding their voice. Renee is basically stuck between Corey's strong heel persona and Michael Cole as Vince's official ventriloquist dummy, and it kind of screws her over (in the same way it hurt Percy Watson and it hurts Beth Phoenix in NXT, and part of why people have been complaining about AEW going the same room, leaving Alex Marvez the odd-man-out).

You won't have to worry about her much longer, though. She's going to be off commentary entirely once the network brand split comes (they're moving her to host a discussion show on Fox). They're also supposedly dropping back to a two-man commentary team for both shows, which is a 100% positive. Though knowing Vince, he'll change his mind about that after a week or two and probably turn them into four man teams or something.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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zebatov posted...

I understand obsession/collecting of swords, but I dont understand non-kitchen knives

So you don't understand why people might want something that actually has utility, versus something which literally has zero purpose or functional value in the modern world?
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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Maybe you just need to stop hanging out in the shittiest places to discuss video games.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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The downside of developing a culture of outrage which is constantly on the hunt for something new to be angry about and have hategasms over is the fact that most backlash, outrage, and scandal lasts for all of about 20 minutes before everyone moves on to the next hot thing to be pissed about.

If I were feeling particularly clever, I'd probably try to come up with some sort of pun combining lynch mobs and flash mobs to really hammer it home. But I'm lazy, so just pretend I did that.

The real problem is that most politicians and businesses are becoming aware of the fleeting nature of outrage in the modern era, so they're all fully clued in to the fact that if they can weather the initial storm and generally ignore the controversy it'll completely blow over in a week or two even if they don't do anything to actually change things. As a culture, we're effectively desensitizing ourselves to protests and social backlash and completely weakening their power as a tool of positive change.
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Korruptor posted...

E3 has already been dead for a while.

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Don't really have time to reply to everything, but:



Aaantlion posted...

...or they could have done X-Force's black & gray color scheme. It's still dark and subdued enough.

Yeah, but if they went that route, they could just as easily go the early X-Factor route and put them all in blue jumpsuits.

Or God help us, the more recent X-Factor costumes:

http://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/marveldatabase/images/5/5c/All-New_X-Factor_Vol_1_1_Larroca_Variant_Textless.jpg
http://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/marveldatabase/images/8/8f/All-New_X-Factor_Vol_1_12_Textless.jpg

The ones you were referring to were just individually modified versions of the original team costume anyway (in the same way that the original New Mutant costumes were just black-and-yellow X-Men uniforms - which have always kind of been my favorite variation).

Ironically, I think the best costumes they could have had for them were just plain-clothes. In a world without costumed heroes, the best possible way to blend in is to just dress normally (the only reason they wear costumes in the comics is because Xavier is deliberately trying to evoke the idea that they are "mutant heroes" in the vein of the Fantastic Four and Avengers). And it makes sense for a group that are just teachers and "normal" people 99% of the time - they're not fighting super-villains every week in the movie universe. Just like Logan spends a lot of time in his jacket and Rogue has her hooded deal that kind of evokes her comic costume and Cyclops is going to be Cyclops no matter what he's wearing as long as he's got the glasses/visor, they can easily fight in normal clothes without needing some kind of tactical uniform.

But if you went that route people would complain because people assume "superhero movie" must equal "costumes".



Aaantlion posted...

But they've also gradually been toning down or dropping the goofier elements of their changes. And part of it is likely less a matter of "this won't work!" and more a matter of what they think most movie-goers would prefer.

Yes, but that's sort of the point - most people prefer a more subdued version of most costumes, because most costumes don't really work on screen the way they do on the page.

That's pretty much the entire point of the scene in Captain America where they show him on-stage in what is the closest version to his comic outfit, to highlight how it sort of looks goofy, before switching him to something more functional but still era-appropriate. Then over various movies we see how they shift the design in an attempt to stay close to the comics while still having something that works on screen (and in the case of the first Avengers movie, to put him in something that evokes his Ultimates version, since that movie was basically a deliberate hybrid of 616 Marvel and Ultimate Marvel - which is sort of true of the MCU as a whole in a lot of ways).

Spider-Man may be the one character who seems to work with the tight spandex regardless - which might be something inherent to that character or costume, or just because we've kind of been desensitized to it over the years via cartoons and general live-action parodies and the like. He's kind of too iconic to look goofy.
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JCvgluvr posted...

@ParanoidObsessive, what are you trying to say, here? That Jews don't believe the world was created in 6 days?

Just for reference, I never see @ mentions. I have them deliberately turned off, and I refused to respond to them or ATTN topics even when those were a thing.

But as for your actual question, many don't. They're fully capable of understanding that phrasing can be used to refer to things figuratively. Some would argue that "days" in that context are just metaphorical stand-ins for unmeasured periods of time, others would argue that they refer to days from the perception of God, who can count a day lasting however the hell long he wants one to. Keeping in mind those stories evolved during a time when everything was oral and there was no writing, so precise reckoning was never going to be much of a concern. Especially when they lacked the technology to measure the exact age of the universe or the world anyway.

It's similar to how, in many modern languages, phrases like "ten thousand" don't literally mean 10,000, but just "lots and lots". Or how I can say "I'll be there in a minute" or "I need a couple things", and not literally mean I'll be there in exactly 60 seconds or that I need precisely two things.

There's also an implication that when the Old Testament said that "So-and-so lived for 900 years", that most Jews didn't take that literally either, and interpreted it as a deliberate poetic way of saying "Things used to be better in the old days, when Man was still closer to God before we faded." It wasn't really until the Christians came along, started taking things super-literally, and used that stuff to calculate that the world was created in 4004 BC that the literalist view sort of became the accepted one. And even then, the Jews themselves were still a bit like "lol silly Christians".

But yes, I'm sure there were Jews who took everything literally as well back in the day. But ancient people and cultures were way more capable of understanding subtlety and metaphor than we usually give them credit for, because we like to ethnocentrically think we're way better than them.



Miroku_of_Nite1 posted...

Siege of Baghdad (1258), also Hulagu Khan wasn't a Muslim.

Yeah, like I said, I was having trouble remembering the exact context. I knew it happened, and I remembered the quote (more or less), but I forgot exactly who said it, where, and when. I just threw the Siege of Baghdad out as a possibility because it came to mind as a famous book destruction.

It MIGHT have been the library of Alexandria instead.

...actually, checking Wikipedia now that I thought of it, it definitely was:

"If those books are in agreement with the Quran, we have no need of them; and if these are opposed to the Quran, destroy them." --- Caliph Omar
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I have enough knives to stockpile an army. My father actually used to sell them, and had stock left over when he died that I haven't gotten around to trying to sell/give away, so I've got boxes and boxes of stuff in storage. From tiny tactical knives to kitchen knife sets to straight-up katanas and fantasy broadswords.

I almost always have a tactical folder knife on my keychain because it's always super-useful for opening packages (and bags, and letters, and pretty much anything else that's sealed and can be cut open), sawing through ropes and ties, and for stabbing people on the off-chance that I'm ever attacked and need to defend myself.
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None of those seasons exist in my world.

For me, there's just:

"Air Conditioning"
"January"

And I'd probably vote for "Air Conditioning", because I don't have to shovel snow then.
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Raze_Razel posted...

Well, the deeper meaning with Soylent Green is that with over-population, food resources will dwindle to the point real food wouldn't be real anymore, that we have to rely on processed chemicals to stay alive, and they'd probably have to disguise it with clever marketing like "Plant Based Meats"

That's not really the deeper meaning. That's the very surface meaning people tend to read into it because it's the simplest theme to parse out.

The main theme is addressing deeper implications of the dehumanization of people by society, the destruction of the environment and squandering of resources, and the social impact of overpopulation. The "hey, guess what Soylent Green is made of?" part is almost an afterthought. It's basically only the MacGuffin that propels the story (by establishing a secret that people are willing to kill to preserve). As much as people focus on the ending, it's most of the stuff leading UP to it that you're more supposed to be paying attention to.

The book is mostly just about overpopulation and global resource inequality, and doesn't really even mention Soylent at all.
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shadowsword87 posted...

Soylent Green was also... explicitly not about vegetarianism.

If what you got out of Soylent Green was "wow fake food is bad", and not "wow overpopulation is bad", you should really rewatch the scene where they literally use dump trucks to just... pour humans into the truck.

To be fair, what the book was intended to be about and what the movie was about are also two entirely different things.
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Officially, most of September is part of Summer, because Fall doesn't start until September 21st.

As far as I'm concerned, though, Summer ends the moment school starts, and that starts at the very beginning of September, so September has always been a "Fall" month for me.

In fact, this is a pretty good breakdown of the year:

Spring: March, April, May
Summer: June, July, August
Fall: September, October, November
Winter: December, January, February

It doesn't quite match the official calendar definitions, but those were invented for the weather patterns in Europe anyway, so I really don't give too much of a shit.
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WastelandCowboy posted...

Democracy.
Bipartisanship.

Well I didn't vote for you!
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WastelandCowboy posted...

You cant have both. Choose.

Who died and made you the arbiter of binary?
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MICHALECOLE posted...

Why were they the butt of every food joke when I was a kid? Them and Brussels sprouts, and those are delicious as well

Probably because a lot of people don't like them.

The funny thing is, people have different taste buds. And they change over time, based on your prior diet and your age in general. So you may love both, but someone else might loathe both.

Brussels sprouts actually fall into another category - where they tend to have a bitterness to them that adults don't necessarily taste as much as some kids do (children can often taste bitter flavors stronger in general, which is why the whole "kids hate vegetables" idea is a thing). So adults force their kids to eat them, the kids find them disgusting, and then never want to eat them again. But then some of those kids try them again years later, after their tastes have changed, and wind up liking them. But some people will never like them.

How you cook foods can also go a long way to whether or not people wind up liking or hating them. You can easily change the flavor of foods if you overcook them, undercook them, or even just broil versus boil them. Someone may hate a food because their mother always overcooked and ruined it when they were kids, while someone else may love it because their mom cooked it perfectly and made it taste much better.
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Zikten posted...

yea I heard that in the Koran (muslim bible) that it mentions a sister. and that the reason for Caine and Able fighting was cause they both wanted to fuck her. and then Caine won, killed his bro, banged his sis and made kids

Seth is also a thing.
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Raze_Razel posted...

ITT: no one ever saw "Soylent Green"

I have.

Part of why I've often joked about how delicious it is.
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captpackrat posted...

No one would ever eat veal if they had to see the calf first.

I'm not a huge fan of veal. But one of the first thoughts I ever had when I saw the pig from Babe was "Man, that would make a delicious sandwich."

I've also literally raised chickens and geese from almost birth to eventually eat them. Named them, hand-fed them, petted them, etc. So sentiment really isn't going to stop me from eating anything. Nor did it stop most human beings throughout the entirety of human history when people had to raise their own animals on farms rather than allowing machines to do most of the slaughtering and selling meat en masse.
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Expected.
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Firewerx posted...

They don't have much choice except to take that position. Otherwise, there'd be some very awkward attempts to explain where the hell Cain's wife came from after he was exiled into the wilderness.

aka the question teen atheists always bring up thinking they've somehow defeated the entire concept of religion entirely, in spite of the fact that people had an answer for that thousands of years ago.

Ironically, it's actually a very modern concept that people in the past were too stupid to understand metaphors and thus had to interpret the Bible purely literally. Even prior to the era of Jesus, Jews were fully aware that the message was more important than the explicit words, and didn't take every single aspect of it literally. Like the whole "world created in six days" thing.
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I_Always_Die posted...

i fucking hate PO lol

If you were someone whose opinions I actually gave anything resembling a shit about, I might even have my feelings hurt by that.
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I_Always_Die posted...

Why is reddit so heavily moderated?

To keep shitposters from being shit.

But the fact that it's almost always the inmates running the asylum with no real accountability there means there's always going to be times when mods go a little power mad.

On the other hand...



I_Always_Die posted...

I told a mod to eat shit and they banned me from the iPhone sub. Cant even ask a simple fucking question. Told the mod that I was gonna use an alt to get around it and then the little nerd reported me to reddit. Jesus fuck people are such losers

Yeah, gee, I wonder why you apparently keep getting modded everywhere.

When will the oppression ever end?
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Lokarin posted...

But if they're not in the bible... they don't exist to biblical literalists.

Even Bible literalists tend to acknowledge that things could happen contemporaneously that weren't necessarily in the Bible. They just don't view anything that happens that isn't in the Bible as being all that important.

It's similar to the story (which I absolutely can't remember the details of now, which is annoying the hell out of me) where a Muslim general basically conquered a city and had all of the books thrown into the river, to the point where they say the river ran black with ink for weeks (it might be the Siege of Badhdad and the destruction of the House of Wisdom, but I'm not 100% sure).

When asked why, he said "All of these books either agree with and support the Qur'an, in which case they are unnecessary. Or they contradict it, and are lies. Either way, they serve no purpose." (or something like that, again, I'm having a hard time pinning the precise details down in my brain - getting older sucks).
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Judgmenl posted...

$60? Better have at least an hour and a half of content.

I think it's been at least 30 years since I'd be willing to pay that much for that little.

These days, I barely even give a $60 game a second look unless it seems like I'm getting 40+ hours of quality entertainment (as opposed to hours of filler or grind) out of it.
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Aaantlion posted...

but then I was even more surprised to see Apocalypse there. Wtf? Since when is he a hero?

I don't actually know anything about the specific context of the book, but I DO know that there's a kid version of Apocalypse running around that has been generally presented as being a bit more "good", so it might be him instead. If so, he's probably going to call himself Genesis.

Or it might be an outgrowth of the Age of X-Man storyline where Apocalypse 60s-era hipster - maybe he "redeemed" himself in some way and is now a good guy, at least until the next writer comes along and decides to undo any and all character growth.



Aaantlion posted...

When was the last time you watched it, though? 1992? Are you sure your disdain will hold up against Devito's delightfully off-key performance as the Penguin and Chris Walker's deadpan delivery of "Bruce Wayne? Why are you dressed up like Batman?

But again, that's sort of confusing "good movie" with "so terrible it's fun to make fun of" movie.

I REALLY dislike DeVito's performance in Batman Returns, and Walken is kind of terrible. I'm also not a huge fan of Michelle Pfeiffer in general (and I really dislike the interpretation of her character in this), and I was never really that big a fan of Michael Keaton as Batman (though I do think he's good as Bruce Wayne). To some extent, I dislike Jack Nicholson's performance in the first movie in the same way, for the same reason - it feels like Nicholson doesn't even remotely give a fuck (because he didn't, and has admitted this - he also encouraged DeVito to not give a fuck and just cash the check as well).

I CAN enjoy those performances - in the same way I can enjoy Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze - as ridiculously over-the-top weirdos blatantly fucking around and devouring the scenery like giant hams. But that doesn't make the movie as a whole GOOD - to the contrary, it makes it worse.

Almost any bad movie can be enjoyable if you laugh at it or mock it in an MST3K sort of way, but it's still a bad movie.

Burton's movies are mostly just self-indulgent gothy weirdness that happens to have Batman in it.
It seems pretty clear that Burton finds Batman to be the least interesting part of those films.



Aaantlion posted...

When X1 came out, I defended the leather outfits (which some friends called bondage gear or gimp suits), but XM: First Class kinda showed that they didn't have to go that spartan with the outfits.

Yeah, but even there, they change them and justify them to some degree. In X1, the X-Men are trying to be more of a covert team, so the black looks more subdued and doesn't draw attention as much. Whereas in First Class, they're wearing tactical suits provided by the government as officially sanctioned operatives, so they're willing to be more visually obvious. But even there, the costumes have been changed from the comics - in the comics they're skin-tight spandex, but in the film they're more like certain types of sporting gear.

Ironically, the best possible scenario might be if they had suits made from the same material as the tactical outfits in First Class, but black like the X1 suits. Which would sort of make them look like Rumlow in Winter Soldier. That would make the most sense from a tactical perspective, and could be more easily passed off as government, military, or SWAT/police officers if they're trying to maintain a bit of subtlety (which you don't get as much from leather gimp suits).

But I've always been a proponent that most comic costumes don't look as good in 3D in a more realistic-style film. Even the MCU feels the need to adapt.

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Ferarri619 posted...

Bet it wasn't as good as D2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D_(video_game)
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Aaantlion posted...

Alright, I'll bite, what did you consider the flaws.

There are a number of scenes where the movie actually tries to adhere to the comic too literally and it messes with the pacing and flow a bit (ie, a case where adaptation has to compromise to the new medium and not just copy everything over verbatim). Ironically, the movie also hurts to some degree because some things happen that lack context because other scenes from the comic were cut for time (which goes back to a case of knowing what to cut and what NOT to cut - which is why you need to understand the material at more than a superficial level). All of that feels like it stems from Snyder only understanding the source on its most superficial level, and picking scenes because they "look cool" and not necessarily based on their importance to the overall story.

Other than that, the biggest flaw is that, in at least some cases, the acting performances aren't quite what they need to be. Rorschach, Manhattan, and the Comedian are great choices, Nite Owl is serviceable, but Ozymandias tends to play his role a bit too hammy for what he's supposed to be (which kind of makes his turn more obvious in advance), and Silk Spectre... is what it is.

The one HUGE complaint most comic fans have is changing the ending from the giant space squid to being Dr. Manhattan, which can fall apart if you really pick the logic apart - but that's the one criticism I actually tend to disagree with, because I think it works better aesthetically and is more concise that way, especially since I think the squid would look goofy as fuck on screen and would undercut a lot of the movie (again, a case where understanding when to deviate from the source and when not to helps the product - and one where Snyder actually did something positive.

It's not a BAD movie. But it's not really a GREAT movie, either. It sort of hovers around above average - though that admittedly probably ranks it higher in comic movie terms, because there've been so many stinkers.

And to be perfectly honest, it's the only comic movie Snyder has been involved with that wasn't painfully bad. Other than 300, of course, but that's helped by the fact that it's almost entirely visual with almost no subtle subtext whatsoever. Again, Zack likes visuals. The thinky stuff, not so much.

Actually, in retrospect, most of his non-comic movies are kind of terrible as well, so it kind of begs the question why someone would put him in charge of one of the most potentially profitable franchises in the history of film. I get that the original 300 was popular and made money, but that was a long time ago.



Aaantlion posted...

Otherwise, I've seen Thor 1 & 3, IM 1&2, Cap 1, Civil War, Doctor Strange, Avengers 1, and everything falls way, way short.

I'd easily rank every single one of those way, way, way, way higher than Watchmen. Except maybe IM2.

Hell, I'd also throw Avengers 3 and 4, GotG1 and 2, Cap 2, Ant-Man, 4 out of 7 Spider-Man films, 3 out of 7 X-Men films, and the first Blade into that mix. Maybe Blade 2, if I'm having a really good day and am in JUST the right mood.

About the only thing Watchmen really has going for it is high concept, but it's not even the film's own original concept, and it isn't really done all THAT well. Worse, what was an incredibly influential deconstruction 30 years ago feels a lot less meaningful after a thousand other stories have come along since doing the exact same premise. Which blunts some of its edge (which probably helped contribute to it ultimately bombing at the box office).

Again, it's not a BAD movie. But it's not really a GREAT movie, either. And ultimately, it's mostly just a forgettable movie.
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Aaantlion posted...

Then perhaps you need to see it again.

Why would I do that? I have self-respect, I'm relatively fond of myself, and I'm not into masochism.



Aaantlion posted...

Kevin Smith being snarky, that's a refreshing change. At any rate, I have more faith in Burton than Smith to make any movie, excluding maybe a lackluster stoner comedy.

I wouldn't necessarily disagree with you - Kevin Smith's relative creative output took a huge dump after he discovered the joys of marijuana and started burning off 90% of his creative energy doing his podcast.

Though to be fair, Burton should be pretty good at making films regardless. He's been making the same one over and over again for 30 years, you'd think all that practice would pay off eventually.



Aaantlion posted...

100% worth the sacrifice

It really, really wasn't.



Aaantlion posted...

Oh, no, a comic book fan might be displeased by something! That can't happen!

If you have such disdain for the fans of a medium, to the point where you're willing to generalize and dismiss them all, why should anyone have a massive hard-on for adapting every single story the medium has ever shat out?



Aaantlion posted...

Has there been a single movie where comic book fans didn't find fault?

Quite a lot, actually. Mainly the good ones.

The trick is, you have to differentiate between the Simpson's Comic Book Guy type fans who will literally hate everything, and the more temperate comic fans who are more than willing to accept adaptations in cases where it feels like the adaptation captures the feel of the original comic even if it doesn't literally mimic every single facet of it.

For instance, most comic fans loved the first two X-Men movies, the first two Spider-Man movies, and most of the MCU movies. Aside from the pedants complaining that they gave Spider-Man organic web-shooters (even as the sane and rational fans accepted it worked better in the context of the movie), or the real dorks who whine because the X-Men were wearing black leather instead of yellow spandex (and again, movie compromises), most fans were cool with them.

It's in the same vein where most Tolkien fans loved the LotR movies.... while a lot of them hated the Hobbit movies. There's a difference between an adaptation coming from a place of love trying to maintain or even improve on the feel and essence of the original, and a half-assed adaptation coming from someone who's sort of stopped caring and is just trying to get the movie out on-time and under-budget while in the middle of a nervous breakdown.



Aaantlion posted...

I greatly favor the film.

You may be the first human being on the entire planet who has ever said those words in that context and actually mean them.



Aaantlion posted...

And sure, I can't remember if I read the comic before the movie so maybe part of it is having seen the film first.

I'm willing to say this is almost certainly the case.
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Aaantlion posted...

You say that, but Burton's first two Batman films turned out great

I'd strongly disagree, but that's mostly because I've seen Batman Returns.

But my statement there wasn't that his movies were terrible (though I'd be willing to argue that as well), but that he straight up gloated that he'd never read a comic. Which is what prompted this exchange:

Burton: "Anybody that knows me knows I do not read comic books"

Smith: "Which, to me, explains fucking Batman."

Though I suspect what Smith was really thinking about was the clusterfuck that was Burton's Superman attempt (which actually involved Kevin Smith). But since that never came out and no one else ever got to see it, it didn't make as effective a "gotcha".

But either way, he's still the earliest example of a DC/WB director kind of showing open disdain for the very medium they're attempting to adapt.



Aaantlion posted...

(the latter two he only produced, but I will say that B&R is fantastic in its own way)

Yes, but "its own way" is "This is such a phenomenal clusterfuck of terrible movie that it comes out the other side and becomes an awesome unintentional comedy". Which isn't the best look unless your master plan is to kill one of your most lucrative franchises completely dead for nearly a decade.

And let's be honest, if Nolan's film hadn't been... well, Nolan's film, it probably would have stayed dead. It would have been less Batman Begins and more Superman Returns.



Aaantlion posted...

Zack Snyder's *other* work aside, I'd easily put Watchmen over ANYTHING in the MCU.

Most fans of the Watchmen comic would disagree with you. As would most people who had no investment in the comic at all and were tricked into the movie by trailers that basically told them it was going to be a movie like X-Men, because the studio had zero faith anyone would ever want to watch the actual movie.

Hell, for that matter, I actually liked Watchmen (the movie), and I'd still disagree with you. It was a pretty flawed movie in a lot of ways, and a lot of that goes back to the source material itself. I'd be hard-pressed to rank it over anything in the MCU, other than maybe Thor: The Dark World. Or The Incredible Hulk.

But let's be honest, Zack Snyder hating and misunderstanding comics and the only comic movie he's ever made that was worth anything at all being the one based on the comic that existed solely to kind of shit on comics and which ushered in one of the worst periods of comic history may not be unconnected concepts.

Snyder's pretty much the living avatar of 90s grimderp.

And again, he's the recent example of a director who is overly contemptuous of both the medium and the fans of the medium, which suggests he may not be the best person to be adapting the medium.



Aaantlion posted...

And, notwithstanding, comic fan doesn't always mean quality.

It doesn't. But adaptations between different media are tricksy things to pull off successfully in the best of cases, and almost only ever work when someone who actually loves and understands the source material makes a good-faith effort to try and translate what made it work into a new medium. Peter Jackson and LotR is a good example here.

People who hate the source tend to fail to understand it, and thus only adapt superficial elements while changing important elements, or otherwise cynically exploit the brand rather than making any real effort to translate it well.
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LinkPizza posted...

Like cold turkey. Thats not always good. They say its safer to do with cigarettes and alcohol.

Hardcore alcoholics with a history of heavy usage can risk dramatically increased risk of seizures if they quit cold turkey.

Cold turkey in general is easier to do psychologically but less healthy than a slow phasing out that gives your body time to readjust.
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wwinterj25 posted...

WastelandCowboy posted...

But whos to say what people shouldnt do? Nobody.

It is indeed their own choice. I don't care if folk smoke/vape or not. Hell I don't even care if they take all the drugs.

The problem is, what happens when you develop illnesses based on your behavior, which in turn raises your insurance premiums, IS it just "your problem"? Or worse, what if you lack insurance entirely, and wind up being supported by the state in some way, ultimately being passed on to other people, who in turn are now paying for your decisions?

There's a really blurry line when we get into "What I do to myself in the privacy of my own home should be no one else's business", because it also tends to go hand-in-hand with your effect on other people. If someone else is being forced to deal with your second-hand smoke, or you injure someone else because you're drunk/stoned/etc, or you injure yourself so bad that society as a whole now has to deal with you, at that point your decisions DON'T just affect you.

I'm actually pretty social liberal/libertarian in the sense that I think the government should stay the fuck out of people's lives as much as possible, but even I can't deny that there are cases where it's not that simple.
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Ewan McGregorKorruptor posted...

The DCAU was mostly good, pity that DC couldn't do the same in its cinematic universe like Marvel did.

The main difference is, the DCAU and the MCU were mostly being run by people who were actually comic fans. Whereas the people who run the WB and who make the DC movies are pretty much ashamed of what they're doing, and in some cases self-admittedly hate the very comics they're adapting.

All the way back to Tim Burton (who boasted that he'd never read a comic in his life) up to Zack Snyder (who has pretty much openly admitted to either hating or not even remotely understanding any comic character he's ever mentioned in an interview), it's pretty clear that no one in Warner Brothers actually likes comic books. Which shows in the majority of their movies.
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Phantom_Nook posted...

WastelandCowboy posted...

the complete opposite of what his party (Republican) wants.

You mean what they claim to be against, but are actually fine with.

"Both parties want to take away your freedoms. They just disagree on which freedoms they want to take away."

"Both parties are extremely quick to condemn their opponents as uncaring bureaucrats who don't care about the common man, and are more interested in playing politics and pushing their own agendas no matter how harmful. The best part is, they're both right."
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Yas.
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dedbus posted...

But theyre not wrong.

This.

Society can facilitate or even encourage crime in any number of ways.

The real question is what crime the person making that claim is actually guilty of, and whether they're clearly trying to use it as an excuse for their behavior. A kid who grew up in an inner city ghetto and has literally never known anything other than violence and fear basically WAS made the way they are by society - whereas a rich kid who kills someone in their Ferrari and tries to claim they suffer from "affluenza" to avoid prosecution, not so much.
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They're on PC as well, aren't they?
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Metalsonic66 posted...

That was a good episode

It helps that it was based on a famous comic book of exceeding quality. Written by Alan Moore before he fully completed his journey into madness.
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Cotton_Eye_Joe posted...

Current Events is full of sex havers.

From what I've seen of CE, I kind of doubt it.

Of those three boards and solely those three boards, I'd probably give it to RI. But there are other social boards on the site which might be more likely to have a larger proportion of users who are actually capable of interacting with people in the real world well enough to naked bad touch them.
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"Fall for", no. Because most of the clickbaity videos have blatant red flags (like the blatant arrows in thumbnails), and will never, ever pay off on the implications of their title, so I have no real interest in seeing what they have to say, and don't want to reward them for being manipulative assholes by driving up their views.

I do occasionally watch list videos from specific channels I already like and trust, though. Though that's mostly just WhatCulture and it's associated related channels.
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Metalsonic66 posted...

Aerith

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TheWorstPoster posted...

You decide to build a swimming pool moat around your house

I would literally never do that, though.

I don't even want the pool I do have.



TheWorstPoster posted...

You need to swim to get to your house.

Then I would either die, or have to move to a completely new house.



TheWorstPoster posted...

Filling it up will cause a nuclear detonation that will destroy the entire city.

I don't live in a city, so whoever lives in whichever city gets destroyed can go fuck themselves because I'm concreting this magical hypothetical bullshit pool.
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Lokarin posted...

ParanoidObsessive posted...

This is one of the major problems.

I was more saying that whenever people demand a long term study they never state the term they want... so it's an easy out if they don't like the results of the test.

And I was sort of pointing out that no study is ever going to really be long enough in a realistic sense, because no scientists are ever going to do a 50+ year study, and no corporation would ever wait for the results even if they did. So we're always going to be in a situation where we're never entirely sure of the long-term repercussions of new technology being introduced.

It's like with the recent rise in autism. IS it related to vaccines, like some people claim? (the answer is no) Is it a long-term and poorly understood symptom stemming from kids basically being weaned right out of the womb and directly onto TV and computer screens in modern times? Might it be related to changes in diet and food production? Is it at exactly the same level of occurrence it's always been, but we've simply gotten better at identifying it, so it seems to be more prevalent than before (but isn't)? It's an extremely difficult factor to isolate, and it would take elaborate longitudinal studies lasting for decades to ever really know for sure, but we're never going to do that.
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Mead posted...

Some of it is fear that the crops are somehow bad since theyve been modified, but people have been modifying produce for as long as people have been farming. Were just better at it now.

I mostly agree - but to be fair to the other side, there's kind of a difference between deliberately cross-breeding two crops with features you like in the hopes of creating a hybrid that have the best of both, versus being able to directly modify something at the genetic level by injecting entirely new DNA into a strand.

There's also the question of whether or not the people doing the splicing have considered all of the possible negative side-effects of the changes they're making, thus introducing hidden risks into the food that wouldn't have been present via more natural breeding methods.

Which ties into this:

Lokarin posted...

The other concern is that when people ask for a long-term study they never set a time limit... 10 years? 40 years?

This is one of the major problems. They can test, retest, and guarantee that something is completely safe, but they're studying it in the short-term and looking for dramatic immediate reactions. What they can't tell you is if you're doing damage that is going to result in consequences 20-30 years from now. Certain negative side-effects would never show in the short term (like increased risk of certain cancers, Alzheimer's, etc), because they do damage incrementally. What we'd essentially need is long-term longitudinal and cohort studies, but we'd never, ever do those because they'd cost way too much and prevent corporations from profiting from their research for decades.

And unfortunately, "Is this something that is going to prove to be really, really bad over the long term?" becomes an even more important question to ask when modified plants can effectively crossbreed with other plants in nature, spreading their modified DNA far beyond anyone planting the initial crop. As Mead mentioned, Monsanto was notorious for trying to sue farmers who wound up growing Monsanto's "intellectual property" crops entirely by accident (because Monsanto-approved crops cross-pollinated with their existing crops), and that highlights just how easy it can be for that to happen by accident.

When it comes to unforeseen consequences, consider the "Africanized bee" - an attempt to hybridize different species to create a breed that would generate more honey, where the end result wound up being a far more aggressive breed that spread across thousands of miles and displaced existing colonies to the point of becoming dominant in many areas. If a GMO crop winds up spreading as effectively but also has unforeseen negative side-effects that weren't detected during testing, it can potentially hurt a LOT of people.



Mead posted...

Another reason is that some corporations like Monsanto are very controversial for their habit of putting patents on specific modified versions of crops, and then they do things like sue farmers or landowners if that crop is discovered to be growing on their land, even if they didnt plant it.

It's worse than that. They also engineered certain crops to specifically not reproduce naturally, where the seeds all come out sterile, so that farmers can't just harvest their own crops and replant, but have to buy seeds directly from Monsanto every year.

Monsanto is the largest supplier of seeds in the world - which is why they tend to come up in these sorts of conversations. They're a HUGE force in the marketplace, and have influence over almost every aspect of the subject.
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faramir77 posted...

If you don't mind, what physical condition were you in before the surgery? I'm a healthy weight and I'm fairly active, and not much older than you were with that surgery (I'm 27). I've booked a week off of teaching and I'm hoping that's enough time to recover (surgery on a Friday, back on the next Monday after that next week).

I don't teach anything physically strenuous and I probably could be allowed to spend a bit of class time sitting if need be, so I'm sure I'll be fine.

I was actually in pretty good shape (possibly the best shape of my life). I was 21 (about a month before turning 22), a relatively ideal weight for my body type, I basically had to walk about a mile or so to get from my apartment to class (and on some days did it multiple times a day, both ways), and I was playing street hockey on-and-off so I was used to running around a fair amount.

One week off seems like it might not be enough - I had my surgery on Thursday, and was kicked out of the hospital on Saturday (and had a lot of trouble getting into the car I rode home in). I spent most of that week just trying to sleep and heal as quickly as possible, and I'm not sure I would have been able to fully resume normal activity by that point. Like I said, I was still a fair bit fatigued and bent over even two weeks later.

A lot of it depends on how you get to/from work, whether or not you stay in one classroom all day or will be moving from room-to-room, whether it's going to be a problem if you're moving much slower than usual, etc. Also keep in mind you're not supposed to be carrying anything heavy or otherwise exerting yourself too much, so carrying a lot of books might be a problem, depending.

It's hard to generalize one person's experience to everyone else, though - you might take 2-3 times as long to recover as I did, or you might be healing in half the time and feel completely fine in just a couple weeks. You'll never really know until after you've had the surgery and see how you're progressing.

It may also help that you're not an emergency case, if you're scheduling your surgery 2 months ahead of time. For me, I basically woke up in the middle of the night on Monday in agonizing pain, went to the doctor on Tuesday and he sent me to the hospital immediately, they did the surgery on Thursday, and when I went to the doctor for a follow-up check-up afterwards he told me my gall bladder had actually gone necrotic and if I'd waited another week or so to have surgery I'd likely be dead. So it's possible my body had way more stress on it, which in turn made the impact of the surgery worse, so my recovery took longer. But that's just speculation, and could be entirely wrong.
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Mead posted...

Strange things always happen

This, plus this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
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ANW posted...

Which game would you want?

Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem and Resident Evil 4 are about the only exclusive games on the console I ever gave a single damn about (and RE4 eventually wound up on the PS2).

I'd kind of like to see Eternal Darkness get a graphic upgrade remake on the PS4, but a) it will never happen because the company went bankrupt and the rights are a mess, and b) a lot of the things it did well would probably feel passe today in a world of hundreds of YouTube-bait jump-scare horror games flooding the market for nearly a decade.
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Mead posted...

something shouldnt be completely decriminalized in some states but in other states in our country it will land you in prison for years

Unfortunately, the alternative is to just make every facet of life a federal concern and eliminate "state rights" entirely, but that creates an entirely new host of problems.

Generally, the idea of different states having different standards really only becomes a problem if there's a huge difference in penalties (like you say, where possession of a substance in one state might be perfectly legal but somewhere else it's a multi-year prison sentence, where just forgetting you have something in your bag when you fly can fuck you), or when they're geographically close.

Like how, back in the early 80s, NJ had a drinking age of 21 while NY had a drinking age of 18, so every week hordes of teenagers would drive to NY, get drunk then drive home (which is a major reason why the federal government basically strong-armed the federal drinking age of 21 on all of the states, to prevent that sort of thing). Or similarly, how fireworks were illegal in NJ but legal to sell in PA, so every 4th of July thousands of people would just cross the border to buy fireworks and smuggle them home (which has, after decades, finally resulted in both NJ and PA lightening up their laws regarding fireworks).
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