Lurker > darkknight109

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/1/3/AABDhhAADO9h.jpg

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/0/3/6/AABDhhAADN0c.jpg

Neither.

There is not enough money in the world to pay me to live in the US.

The only one-off event I can think of that I would consider paying four digits for is seeing Rammstein - my favourite band - live for the first time and even I think I would cap out at ~$1200 (and, as it turned out, I managed to get a fantastic ticket to see them during their big show at MSG for $300, which actually turned out to be a bit of a steal).

adjl posted...

Meanwhile, the RCMP has snipers set up within minutes of the start of any anti-pipeline protest. It also says a lot to look at how O'Toole reacted to the CN blockade (effectively "blockades are never an acceptable form of protest and this should be illegal!") compared to how he's responding to these blockades.

The Alberta government is similarly "calling for calm" after RCMP were assaulted at the Alberta blockade recently, including an attempt by one of the rioters to ram (!!) RCMP.

One can only imagine the different messaging if this was being done by left-wingers.

You know, I've seen some pretty dumb protests over the years. This one is a pretty strong contender for the dumbest.

custard500011 posted...

If the pandemic was that serious

What do you mean "if" the pandemic was that serious?

It is the most serious contagion we have faced in almost 100 years. Did you somehow miss the millions of people who have died to it so far, or are you in denial about that too?

How surprising.

Yes.

When did they stop? I feel like that was a 90s thing.

Zeus posted...

It posits the false idea that everybody is equally qualified

No, it doesn't.

Zeus posted...

which certainly isn't the case when you're picking somebody with relatively little experience because they check off certain boxes (be it intangibles like beliefs or something like demographics) over a far more experienced candidate

Who said there are no female black judges with experience? Or that all the candidates who aren't black women are more experienced? That appears to have been something you made up yourself.

Zeus posted...

While there's always going to be gray room when it comes to the "best" candidate (and that can vary depending on expectations), there's obviously going to be some huge variation in terms of quality.

No one is saying that you should be picking a low-quality candidate; in fact, my post explicitly rules that out. I've said that if you can't find a high quality candidate who is also a black woman, it's because you're not looking very hard.

The fact that you don't think there are any female black judges that are qualified says a great deal about you, especially given that several names have already been floated as good candidates.

Zeus posted...

Women make up about 50% of the general population, but only 33% of judges. Meanwhile blacks account for 12-13% of the general population, they only make up THREE-PERCENT of judges.

Congratulations on identifying a big part of the problem this pick is aiming to rectify. You're so close to catching up to the rest of us now.

Zeus posted...

You're literally eliminating NINETY-NINE-PERCENT of all judges on the basis of those two criteria

99% of judges aren't qualified to be SCOTUS judges anyways, so this is just hysteria on your part.

Zeus posted...

Now I want you to sit there, think about what you just fucking tried to claim, and justify within your own mind why you're not completely wrong on every conceivable level before trying to convince me of that.

Based on previous experience, the fact that you're in vehement disagreement is actually one of the most reliable indicators I can think of that my post is correct.

Zeus posted...

Ideally, you should be looking for the best candidate

For a position like SCOTUS justice, there is no unarguably "best candidate" - just a bunch of very highly qualified candidates. If you can't find a candidate that meets the criteria of "black" (the second or third largest racial group in the US, depending on whether or not you're separating Hispanics from non-Hispanic whites) and "woman" (roughly half the population), it's not because there aren't any who are qualified, it's because you're not looking.

captpackrat posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/2/4/AAQwHjAAC2Ws.jpg

I don't think I ever read that Animorphs book. Looks like an interesting one.

Yeah, I worked with a guy who absolutely could not function without weed in his system. Which I found out about when he drove off to go smoke up a bowl *with me in the car next to him*. And I was the safety inspector for the job site.

So yeah, he got fired for that - honestly, as much for his stupidity as the drug use.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/6/5/AABDhhAAChzt.jpg

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/4/7/AABDhhAAC13z.jpg

HornedLion posted...

Where are these figures from?

First one is from Kingdom Death - figure is called "Pinup 3 Butcher". I'd link the page, but some of their models are NSFW (moreso than these ones, I mean).

Dunno about the second one. Looks like it could also be a KD mini, but I don't see it in their gallery.

InfernalFive posted...

I guarantee that antivax dumbfucks aren't "winning" at anything.

They're killing it in the "Speedrun life, any%" category.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/5/8/AABDhhAACzji.jpg

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/3/8/7/AABDhhAACzSz.jpg

I'd love to go back there, but not going to roll the dice during the pandemic, especially with Florida.

Nah, not into financial scams.

Nichtcrawler X posted...

Honestly thought it was closed years ago, what is it doing still being open?

Obama tried to close it and was thwarted by congress. Trump wanted it open and actually wanted to send *more* people there. Most of the people who are still there are stuck in this American catch-22 - there's not enough evidence to prosecute or convict them of any crime, but they're still considered too dangerous by the American military to be released. They're kept in Guantanamo because it's not on US soil and is therefore not subject to US laws about fair and speedy trials and bans on indefinite incarcerations.

Unbridled9 posted...

Does Amnesty actually hold the power to force America to do that?

"Force"? No, no body or group in the world has the power to "force" America to do anything. But they're not forcing, they're asking.

Zeus posted...

When the participants who attended the protest are involved in the riots, you can't pretend that there's a distinction.

This might be true if it was a singular event (like, say, the 1/6 Insurrection). But BLM was a protest movement, and over 93% of those protests were peaceful and absent any rioting or violence. Moreover, at places where violence did break out, BLM protesters were more likely to be victims of it than perpetrators, as violence often started as a police action to try to shut down or disperse the protesters (protesters or bystanders were injured in 1.6% of the protests; police were injured in 1.0% of the protests; 96.3% of protests involved no property damage, and in 97.7% of protests there were no reported injuries among protesters, bystanders, or police).

Remember "Umbrella Man", the guy in the Minneapolis who touched off looting and riots by smashing up an AutoZone? He was later identified as a member of the Aryan Cowboys, a white supremacist group who, obviously, aren't exactly ardent BLM supporters. There was that cop who was shot and killed in Portland, though... oh, except he was murdered by a member of the Boogaloo Boys, another far-right group that were hoping to touch off a race war.

Zeus posted...

And he even told them to go home after they broke in.

Yeah... a few hours later after watching it on TV, with a parade of aides and right-wing personalities begging him to do something. They even had to film multiple takes of his request to disperse, because the first few had him veering off-script into self-pitying narcissistic rage.

Zeus posted...

Trump almost certainly believed it, as did others.

Then you're conceding that Trump's a fucking idiot, along with those unnamed "others". All 50 states certified their election results as being free of fraud. He lost every single court challenge he made to the election results, save for one procedural victory that didn't actually prove any fraud. His own attorney general stated that the election was not fraudulent. The only fraud cases that have come up in the voluminous investigations that have taken place since have been a handful of cases of people voting multiple times or with other people's votes... nearly all of which were Trump voters. The widely touted recount that took place in Arizona by a Trump-favouring firm with no experience in election oversight wound up changing the results... in favour of the Democrats.

And seriously, if there was such massive fraud why didn't we see more of a tilt towards the Democrats? The Republicans overperformed in that election, compared to what the polls said they were going to do. The Democrats were supposed to expand their house lead and were favourites to have at least a 2-3 seat majority in the senate (with 4-6 being possible if everything went their way); states like Florida and Ohio were supposed to be nailbiters for the presidential race; the Democrats were expected to flip a large number of Governor's mansions into their column; yet all of those races swung for Republicans.

Did the people promulgating this fraud just forget to fill in the Democrat candidates for the downballot races or something? Because the Republicans won (relatively) the House and Senate contests, as well as the state-level contests, compared to what was expected, and yet you don't hear a whisper of objection from them about those races - just Cheeto Benito bitching about how he got thumped by Joe Biden.

That's the conspiracy theorist you're suggesting Trump is dumb enough to legitimately be suckered by. I guess you don't think very highly of his intelligence (which might be the first known instance of you being right about something involving him).

Le_Corbeau posted...

How? Certainly not by loss of life.

Name a "BLM riot" where more than nine people died.

Moreover, name one where the BLM activists were trying to overthrow the American government and prevent a duly elected official from taking office.

Zeus posted...

Second, to the Hitler point -- lest anybody forget -- Nazi is short for National SOCIALIST.

...who were formed from the far-right "Freikorps" paramilitary groups that fought in WW1 and who pushed hard for right-wing policies in Germany. Notably, the Nazis biggest enemies were leftists - specifically socialists and communists, with members of both groups sent to the death camps as political prisoners if they weren't just killed outright.

Hitler was a darling of the American right-wing and the admiration was mutual (Hitler was a big fan of Henry Ford's right-wing views and antisemitism and Ford reciprocated by writing an article for Nazi publication) - prior to the war, elements of the American right viewed Hitler as one of the most effective right-wing, anti-communist leaders in all of Europe and his various writings denouncing socialism and leftism had numerous supporters on the other side of the Atlantic.

Please put this tired "Nazis were actually left wing, guys!!" bullshit to bed. It does nothing but expose your own historical ignorance.

Zeus posted...

Neither was the Jan 6 riots.

Literally an attempt to stop the certification of the election of the new president. That is 100% an attempted overthrow of the government and the sort of shit that would have gotten you hanged for treason 150+ years ago.

Zeus posted...

I'm not sure if that's more disingenuous or deliberately deceitful.

I get you're trying to worm out of this without actually lodging a meaningful rebuttal, but you're going to have to provide more substance to your post than that.

What are you actually objecting to? That four people died in the insurrection? I can give you links if you're too incompetent to find them yourself.

Zeus posted...

He literally shot needlessly into a crowd when his OWN fellow officers were right behind them.

Needlessly? No, when an insurrectionist who is trespassing on government property is violently smashing through a window to enter a chamber that the police have deliberately barricaded because civilians are inside that they are charged with protecting (civilians, mind, that the insurrectionists were chanting threats towards, saying they should be hanged on the gallows they'd brought for the occasion or just straight-up shot), that is 100% a justification for lethal force. If this moron didn't want to get shot, she should have made several better life choices leading up to that day.

Frankly, trying to smash through a police barricade in a secured building is one of the dumbest things I can think of doing if you're not trying to commit suicide-by-cop. I'm honestly kind of amazed more people weren't shot and killed under similar circumstances. Dunno whether to chalk that up to good restraint on the part of the capitol police or a result of the skin colour of the insurrectionists.

Zeus posted...

Propaganda 101.

Again, what are you objecting to with this vacuous statement?

Amuseum posted...

terrible day. only one person died--murdered by a rogue policeman.

Fact check: False.

-Four Trump supporters died - the lunatic shot for trying to enter congressional chambers, two more to heart attacks where paramedics could not quickly reach them, and one more to a drug overdose.
-The policeman who shot the lunatic wasn't "rogue" - he was acting entirely within the scope of his duties and his actions were investigated and found to be lawful.
-Five police officers that were at the riots died shortly thereafter - one of a stroke (likely induced or aggravated as a result of the stress of the day), and four suicides.
-Over 1000 documented assaults were committed against police officers that day, ranging from being beaten with metal poles to being sprayed with chemicals.
-It was also - and I feel you're giving short-shrift to this, so I do believe it needs to be highlighted - a violent insurrection against the duly-elected government of the United States. A gallows was erected. Pipe bombs were placed to try and blow up political offices. So, you know, there's that.

OneGrumpyUncle posted...

How was it any worse than any of the BLM riots that destroyed whole neighborhoods and killed multiple people and minority owned businesses.

The riots (labelling them "BLM riots" is a bit disingenuous, given that BLM was mostly involved in peaceful protests, not riots) weren't trying to deny the results of an election and overthrow the government.

Seems pretty straightforward to me.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

The EU is literally introducing breathalyser starters in the near future, it's very believable.

A car that won't start up for a drunk driver is very, very different than a car that shuts down in the middle of the road if it thinks the driver is impaired.

No, this isn't particularly believable. Not at this stage. Get back to me when self-driving vehicles are more widespread.

Fauci did not, in fact, say that and it's an incredibly skewed interpretation of what he *did* say.

Yes. It's the law around here and even if it wasn't, I would anyways. I don't particularly feel like getting sick.

Dikitain posted...

The idea now is they are going to let the copyright expire but keep the trademark (which never expire). What does that mean?

Trademarks are a protection of a company's "brand" - i.e. their logos, slogans, name, etc., whereas copyright is a protection of a specific creative or intellectual work or expression. Much like copyright, specific characters cannot be universally trademarked, except as part of a work (so, for instance, Disney doesn't have a trademark on Mickey Mouse the character, but does have multiple trademarks on him for each medium he's in, from toys to video games to school supplies). And yes, Disney is free to keep their trademark in Mickey in perpetuity, even if the works he's in lapse into the public domain.

Copyright law and trademark law, as well as their intersection with the public domain, gets very tricky very quickly and I would be lying if I said I had an in-depth understanding of it, but my understanding is that if some of the older Disney works featuring Mickey Mouse lapse into public domain, others are free to create copies of that work without modification or may create derivative works (for instance, their own depiction of Steamboat Willie) so long as the work is sufficiently differentiated from Disney's work and nothing is present to suggest that the work was made by or sanctioned by Disney itself. You could keep the character of Mickey Mouse (since he's part of the original story, which is now in the public domain), but you might have to depict him differently than Disney (for the same reason why you can do an animated movie of Cinderella without Disney's permission - public domain story - but you can't draw her the way Disney does).

The governing rule of "trademark" is "likelihood of confusion" - i.e. how likely is someone to confuse your "knock-off" product with the real deal. For instance, let's say I run a plumbing business - I couldn't call it "Starbucks Plumbing" or "Wal-Mart Plumbing", because "Starbucks" and "Wal-Mart" are made-up words that are trademarked by their respective companies. However, I would probably be alright to call it "Apple Plumbing" or "Amazon Plumbing" - even though "Apple" and "Amazon" are company names for two tech giants, both are generic words (which cannot be universally trademarked) and neither of those two companies are in the plumbing business, so the likelihood for confusion is low. However, if I tried to use the same or similar-looking logos as Apple or Amazon, or if I switched from a plumbing business to a computer repair business, I would be much more likely to run afoul of copyright law, because now I'm entering into a business line Apple and Amazon do participate in and am using similar iconography, so the odds of a customer assuming I'm affiliated with their brand is much higher.

Complicating things further is that US trademark law affords wide latitude to particularly famous marks. The Trademark Manual of Examining Procedure has an entire section on Fame of the Prior Registered Mark (TMEP 1207.01(d)(ix)) which states, in part, "As the fame of a mark increases, the degree of similarity between the marks necessary to support a conclusion of likely confusion declines." Given how famous Mickey Mouse is and how integral he is to Disney's brand, Disney would have a strong case for trademark infringement for anyone who does decide they want to make their own variant of Steamboat Willie or other early Disney stories. Again, I'm not sure the particulars of how this intersects with laws regarding works in the public domain, but I'm guessing Disney's lawyers have already spent considerable time and effort figuring that out and preparing legal arguments for when it inevitably happens.

adjl posted...

I'm inclined to agree, but I feel like Disney's approach to effecting that is very much not the best.

The issue that I have is that the entire reason why Disney is one of the biggest companies in the world today is *because* of the public domain. Many of their big feature films, particularly in the formative years of their film department in the 40s-through-60s, were all taken directly from the public domain: Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Pinocchio, Alice in Wonderland, so on and so forth - all based on books and fairy tales in the public domain.

And that is exactly how it's supposed to work. The entire reason why we created copyright laws in the first place is to balance competing interests - it is in society's interest to have free access to someone's works and the ability to modify and tweak them to improve upon them and ultimately create a superior end product, but it is in an individual's interests to be able to profit off of their own work without having to compete with piggybackers who simply parasitize their product without doing any actual work of their own.

So the original copyright laws were an attempt to strike a balance between that. For the first 20 years after a product was released, the exclusive rights of publication and copying existed with the original creator (or whoever they sold the copyrights to). That gave them two decades of unhindered ability to profit from their work, after which it was assumed that the majority of the profits would have been acquired and anyone else was then free to copy, modify, and distribute it as they pleased.

From an archival perspective, I dislike the idea that a corporate entity can sit on copyrights effectively in perpetuity. Again, this is especially galling given that Disney made their billions off of public domain works and is now effectively trying to "pull up the ladder" behind them. Society's interests are in the free flow of information and free access to creative works and that is not outweighed by Disney's corporate interests in maintaining their monopoly on their creative products. And it's worth noting that any new stories involving Mickey Mouse don't immediately enter the public domain, instead being subject to the usual waiting period (which is, what, 95 years now?), so it's not like Disney loses the right to their character or suddenly can't profit off of him anymore, it's just that others can now derive works based on their stories.

Also also, it's worth clarifying that characters specifically cannot be copyrighted, only the works in which they are featured. Currently the reason why Mickey Mouse cannot be used in non-Disney work isn't because Mickey Mouse the character is copyrighted, but because all works featuring him are privately owned by Disney and he would be considered a fundamental part of those works.

Judgmenl posted...

How long now until the mouse is Public Domain?

Never, if Disney's lawyers have their way. They've already got copyright law changed several times to keep their hold on their IPs.

MartianManchild posted...

I just thought it was interesting because for the longest time I heard from this board and other places that we had to reach 80+% vaccination rate in order to get this thing to end.

It's almost like a new, highly-contagious variant surfaced in the last six weeks that is better able to avoid vaccines and that people's comments before that didn't take into account a variant that didn't exist at the time.

Soul Calibur is fun. My favourite in the series is probably 3, but 1 is on the next tier down.

The series kinda fell apart after 4, though. SC5 was awful and SC6 was one of those "Pay out the nose for everything" games that comes out to, like, $200+ if you actually want all the characters and stages.

Baardmeester posted...

They have about the same mortality rate.

This is wrong.

https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20201218/covid-19-is-far-more-lethal-damaging-than-flu-data-shows#1

COVID-19 is roughly 3-to-4 times deadlier than influenza based on hospitalized patients, and that was based on the 2018/2019 flu season, which was a particularly deadly one.

Baardmeester posted...

And the average age of people dying due to covid is 82.

This is also wrong.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-from-covid-by-age-us/

Of the roughly 800,000 deaths in the US caused by COVID, roughly half of them are in people over 70. I have no idea what the mean age of death is, but it sure as fuck isn't 82.

Baardmeester posted...

If you are under 50 covid is a big fat nothing burger.

Unless you die, of course. Which over 50,000 people in the US (under 50) have.

MM is the best Zelda game, and Link's Awakening is the best 2D Zelda game.

wolfy42 posted...

Was it better? Is getting old the reason why new music just doesn't have the same impact?

I can think of a few reasons why.

One is, yes, you're getting old and one of the side effects of that is you remember the more memorable music you experienced when you were younger while forgetting the overwhelming volume of garbage that was playing at the same time. Every once in a while I hear a song from my childhood that wasn't one of the "hits" that's stood the test of time and I think, "Oh, God, I remember this song. Fuck me, who thought this was a good idea?"

Another is that music (and pop culture in general) is a lot more fragmented today. Assuming you grew up in the pre-streaming era, we largely relied on radio stations to distill the massive amounts of new music down into a digestible amount and they would figure out what was popular (or what they were trying to make popular) and repeatedly play that. Contrast that to today, where you literally have access to more music than you could ever listen to in your lifetime, all available for free online. That flexibility is lovely, but it comes at a cost of a loss of cohesion and an inability for "big hits" to truly reach the public zeitgeist the way they used to. In the pre-internet and early internet eras, even when I was out of school I still knew what music/artists were popular, even if I didn't like them; today I don't even know what genre of music is popular, nevermind who the big names and songs are. I'm not even sure there *are* big names and songs anymore - at least, not in the way there used to be when I was younger.

adjl posted...

The entire assault on the Death Star feels like an addendum. It's a good addendum, but it definitely feels odd that the movie keeps going.

I strongly disagree. I mean... it would feel very strange if the movie ended without resolving the principle conflict, that being the presence of a planet-destroying superweapon. The entire reason why Luke was pulled into his journey was to save the princess and help her complete her mission of bringing the Death Star plans to the rebels so that they could find a way to destroy or disable it. He completes the former, but if you end it after they flee the Death Star the latter is left entirely unresolved.

Like... where in the movie would you even put the credits? There's no natural ending point after the Death Star escape. The gang fights off a whopping four TIE Fighters and has a quick cheer, but there's no denouement - from there we immediately cut to the Death Star and learn that the ship is being tracked, then Han, Luke, and Leia discuss their next moves, they land on Yavin and from there we transition immediately into the planning for the Death Star assault.

In RotK, if you stop at any of the points I mentioned and stick the credits there, the movie would still "feel" complete; I can't say the same for ANH.

I fix it.

FrozenBananas posted...

I dont mean to be rude here but youre really saying Return of the Jedi was a flawless masterpiece? (And influential in any way at all?)

Flawless? No, I never said that. Jedi is where a lot of Lucas's sloppiness catches up to him (the entire scene with Obi-Wan's ghost and Luke in the Dagobah swamp is easily the clumsiest writing in the entire trilogy, as Lucas desperately tries to wallpaper over a bunch of plot-holes he hadn't thought through).

Masterpiece? Yes. The Battle of Endor is fucking phenomenal and is a masterclass in how to do a compelling cinematic climax with several different scenes all interlinking (you had the battle at the shield generator on the forest moon, the fight in space, and Luke's confrontation with the Emperor and Vader all playing out simultaneously and the movie blends them seamlessly).

Influential? Absolutely. This is the first real fleet battle we get to see in Star Wars (kind of hard to believe, but it's true) and that was hugely influential on sci-fi going forward in terms of what a "space battle" was supposed to look like. This is also where we get pay-dirt on the big twist revealed at the end of Empire, with Luke and Vader reaching the zenith of their respective character arcs, and that had reaches far beyond just sci-fi in terms of storytelling habits. ANH is far and away the most influential of the three movies, but Jedi isn't a slouch in that category.

FrozenBananas posted...

whatever, everyone is entitled to their opinions, but you complain about multiple endings in one movie but dont even mention Ewoks orthisfrom Jedi. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PiDRgDmXGi4

I'm assuming we're talking about the cinematic cuts of the Star Wars movies, not whatever dogshit Lucas churned out after 1990. If you want to compare the special editions of the Star Wars movies to LotR, then yeah, LotR takes it easily, but that's not the version of the movies that most people venerate and cite as legendary.

KaijunoKami posted...

The acting in A New Hope is pretty damn cringy at times whereas the acting in LotR never dropped once.

I mean, if we're going the nitpicky route the LotR would occasionally have these little moments where a 10 year old seemed to sneak into the director's chair for a spell, like when someone decided it would be great to have Legolas start shredding on an Urak-hai shield down a flight of stairs right in the middle of the otherwise-serious Battle of Helm's Deep while the imperious "fellowship" fanfare blares loud and at a ridiculous double-speed so they can fit it all in before he jumps off the shield and decapitates an orc in the process. I love that movie, but I swear my eyes almost rolled out of my skull when I saw that.

KaijunoKami posted...

Not to mention all three LotR movies were consistent in style from start to finish while each Star Wars movie had a different look and feel to it.

That's a feature, not a bug.

A PO pointed out, Star Wars "feels" like a trilogy, whereas LotR "feels" like one extended movie chopped up into three parts. I don't hold one of those as inherently superior to the other, they're just different ways of storytelling (and also display, very clearly, the differences between a B-movie series that surprised everyone to become the most successful franchise in human history versus a well-financed, well-planned three-movie-series that was always intended to be a box-office blockbuster).

adjl posted...

Criticizing RotK for having multiple endings, but not ANH?

Where are the multiple ending points in ANH? The only alternate I can think of to ending it where they did would be to cut it after Obi-Wan gives his "The Force will be with you... always" line and Vader's TIE Advanced is seen flying off into the void. If you move past that, there's really no other natural ending point other than where the film actually ends.

By contrast, take a look at RotK. Since they cut out the entire "Scouring of the Shire" subplot (and, honestly, good riddance - I have no idea why Tolkien thought that was a good note to end the books on), we know they're not going to follow the books in terms of writing the ending. So where do you end the movie? Well...

If you want to go dark (and controversial), you could end it with Frodo and Sam lying next to each other on Mount Doom, surrounded by lava, with Frodo's "I'm glad I'm here with you, Sam... at the end of all things" line. Fade to black, roll credits. But you're probably not going to take that one.

The next natural ending point is where Frodo wakes up in Rivendell and the Fellowship all come in one by one to celebrate. You have the scene of them all standing around Frodo's bed, fade to white, roll credits.

...no, nevermind, now we're in Minis Tirith, watching Aragorn's coronation. "My friends! You bow to no one," the new king says, before the entire human court bows before the humble hobbit heroes. Slow zoom on Frodo, the former hobbit-boy from the Shire, now the greatest hero in Middle Earth. Fade out, roll credi-

OK, let's go back to the Shire. All the hobbits return home, the greatest heroes in the land... except no one realizes it. They all head back to the pub, with seemingly nothing changed from when they left. They share a knowing look and a nod, kick back a drink, fade out, roll cre-

Wait, no, we're going to the Grey Havens now. The hobbits bid Frodo a tearful goodbye as he sails with Bilbo, Gandalf, and the elves off to the undying lands. We get a nice shot of the boat sailing off into the horizon, fade to white, roll-

Back to the shire! "I'm home." Door closes. FINALLY, we roll the credits.

That's six possible points where the movie could have stopped (and most of them, acted like it was going to stop), before we suddenly get another screen transition and a new scene. Like, I love RotK, but man does that ending drag...

MechaKirby posted...

Advent Children One Winged Angel is still the best remix ever. Borderline perfect

I've never heard a rendition of One Winged Angel I like better than that one.

That said, I think one of the FF7 Remake versions of the Boss theme ("Airbuster") manages to be an even better remake. That song is absolutely nuts.

MICHALECOLE posted...

They were like damn the story of ff7 is pretty confusing, lets make a movie that explains nothing and convolutes everything ten times more and then forever ignore it!

Don't ever watch Advent Children for the plot; watch it for the anime guys swinging big swords around at each other. The plot is an excuse to get to the fight scenes, which is basically the only reason to watch the movie.

Star Wars is perfection - a cinematic masterpiece and some of the most influential movies of all time.
The Lord of the Rings films were extremely good, but not flawless, particularly with how the last one had, like, seven endings.
The Matrix trilogy was very good, but had issues. Definitely the weakest of the three.

Matrix Revolutions was an excellent movie and no one will ever convince me otherwise.

11110111011 posted...

I think Metallica fans just don't like Black because it was the turning point and actually landed on some charts.

I don't think that's accurate. I got into Metallica with Black, but when I started listening to their older stuff I realized how much better it was, so you can't really make the argument that I was a hipster fan who thought the band "sold out" when they went mainstream.

The Black album (and, to a lesser extent, ...And Justice for All) had a very different sound to their first three albums. They basically switched from a true metal band to hard rock (and then again to... whatever the fuck you want to call the dark ages that were the albums that came after). I found Black to be alright, but their older stuff just hit harder (Master of Puppets, in particular, is a fucking legendary album).

BEERandWEED posted...

Yup, especially since its deadliness is all hype.

Dude, it is literally the deadliest plague we've had in the last 100 years going by deaths over time (and if you go by raw deaths, the only thing that passes it is the HIV/AIDS pandemic, which has killed six times as many people... but took 15 times as long to do it).

Of course he knew.

What was he going to do, chew out some asshole on national TV after he'd just wished the guy's kids a Merry Christmas? Yeah, because that would have looked so much better.