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Friends In Your Head | Forums → Posts by sellew
I was thinking it was nice tasteful callback to Jon Pertwee with the red lining, and then someone on the comments on tor.com found this old publicity photo:
If my math is right, Capaldi would have been about 11-12 when Jon Pertwee took over. Coincidence? I've always really liked his Doctor, so am happy to think it's deliberate
Well, given that the two movies together made something like $850 million worldwide, in truth it's probably more like
But seriously, though. If "Brain, brain, what is brain?!??" and cauliflower-eared hippies are the standard we have to meet to be as good as TOS, that's setting the bar pretty low.
Well, I AM one of those fathers, so I still say it is.
As am I, and when JJ Abrams does something as cool as Mirror Spock, call me.
2) The fact that American Hustle has 10 nominations is proof that God has abandoned us.
[....]
8) No, seriously, fuck American Hustle.
Haven't seen it, but it did well at the BAFTAs as well, nomination-wise, so I guess God abandoned the UK first. And Philomena also got a BAFTA Best Picture nomination (not just Best British Film), perhaps unsurprisingly. So maybe the signs were there.
sellew wrote:Rob wrote:George Walker Bush graduated from Yale, class of 68, and from Harvard Business School in 1975. Daddy helped him get into both. He also traded Sammy Sosa when he owned the Texas Rangers. One doesn't need to be a presidential historian to know these things. It's covered in Oliver Stone's biopic.
Ah, true enough. But everybody knows HBS doesn't count
[Edit: And neither does the Kennedy School
]
Spoken like a true Yale man.
Perish the thought, my good man! Now where's that monocle? I know I left it around here somewhere....
(But, you're right. It is at least in theory ambiguous.)
George Walker Bush graduated from Yale, class of 68, and from Harvard Business School in 1975. Daddy helped him get into both. He also traded Sammy Sosa when he owned the Texas Rangers. One doesn't need to be a presidential historian to know these things. It's covered in Oliver Stone's biopic.
Ah, true enough. But everybody knows HBS doesn't count. It's on the other side of the river
[Edit: And the Kennedy School doesn't really either ]
PHILOMENA sticks out like George W. Bush on the Harvard campus -- you think "Yeah somebody pulled some strings to get you here."
Particularly given that Bush pere and fils went to Yale, rather than Harvard. It's an important distinction. 
C'mon everybody! Get over to the Audience Awards and vote! It's a two-horse race now between Fighting in Plain Sight and Yours Truly, and Yours Truly is out in front. I'm sure it was made by nice people who are kind to children and small animals, but let me just say that it's not a patch on Fighting in Plain Sight and leave it at that.
Vote early! Vote often! The entire future of the internet is at stake!
Not to get too political, but I wonder if the shooter was a fan of the movie "God Bless America" or "The East"
I think he'd been playing violent video games.
sellew wrote:Alternatively, I assume there's no (easy) way to have the text in the pop-up be a different size from the main page text?
I've got you covered. Reinstall the script using the link in the first post. You can tweak the text size manually using the + and - buttons next to the title.
Gor bless ye, guv'ner! :hat tip:
Really neat little tool! A quick question just in case I'm missing something obvious. Can you scroll within the pop-up window? Whether it's my monitor or my failing eyesight or what, at the size I have the forum text at, the entire pop-up doesn't display. (Alternatively, I assume there's no (easy) way to have the text in the pop-up be a different size from the main page text?)
I'm already imagining the fun I'll have selecting random bits of text from people's posts and seeing what the movie is (if any) that has that as a title.
The Net (1995 - 5/10
90s thriller. Sandra Bullock comes over some computer floppy disk and becomes the center of attention of some bad people. Actually better than I remembered it, cheesy and corny, but it's actually the most realistic depiction of computers and hacking I've seen in a while, which is kind of sad. Some heavyhanded commentary on our digital identities and how easily manipulated the can be.
Isn't this the film where they need to establish that she's a borderline-autistic, anti-social internet recluse, and they do that by showing her ordering books and groceries from the internet instead of going to an actual store? My, times have changed. (Or am I thinking of something else?)
This one just came into my head the other day, from the first NuWho episode:
Rose Tyler: If you're an alien, how come you sound like you're from the North?
The Doctor: Lots of planets have a North!
Christopher Eccleston has a strong Manchester accent, and it's a nice little indirect callback to the fact that, up until relatively recently in the grand scheme of things, if you wanted to work as an actor in the UK you had to lose your regional accent. Many people who you think of as having very typically plummy Received Pronunciation British accents didn't grow up speaking that way. Tom Baker, for example, is from Liverpool and Patrick Stewart is from Yorkshire. (And actually the Sixth Doctor, Colin Baker, was also from Manchester.)
I am soooooo glad I didn't see Speed Racer in the theater. I completely totally love it (even if it does drag a bit toward the end), but I can easily imagine that it's just too bright and too loud and too crazy on the big screen. On my 42" plasma TV (small in the grand scheme of things), it's exactly the right amount of bright and loud and crazy.
Yeah, Jupiter Ascending could easily be a trainwreck, but, at least if it is, it should be an interesting trainwreck, unlike, say, the prequel trilogy. I'm hoping for at least The Fifth Element.
Happy to help out however I can, assuming I can even get the basics figured out. I assume that once I get a Google+ account it'll be magically obvious what to do? ('Fraid I have basically zero experience with social network sites. Being basically an anti-social bastard with no interest in networking, I never felt the need That plus a diffuse philosophical objection to handing over shedloads of personal information to be monetized by a for-profit company.)
As far as prizes go, I always thought that a poster version of the schedule graphic that Teague did would be really nice. (I'd happily buy one as a way of raising extra money.) And it must be easy in this day and age to just take whatever the image file is and make posters, assuming the resolution is OK.
Well, the big day has arrived, so there's nothing else to say but:
BigDamnArtist wrote:SPOILEROkay, why does everyone keep talking about his face?! An old face, that face, wrinkled face, a face for all ages bring the kids and buy some popcorn, wth is this obsession with his face?!Listen close.
SPOILER
Doctor - I never forget a face
Curator - I know you don't. And in years to come you might find yourself revisiting a few, but just the old favorites, eh?
Yeah, though I don't know how much of it was just a throwaway bone to the old fans in what was otherwise a very NuWho 50th anniversary celebration.
And the unpopular (at least around here, I assume) answer is "That's no bad thing".
This by now has a few out-of-date references, and is mostly about music, but I would have thought directly speaks to issues like fan films.
I think the problem with that argument, though, is that, because we haven't seen many of her outlines, you could still make the claim of it being an ass-pull that she made look good, no matter how detailed her planning was, unless she were being incredibly obvious with her foreshadowing. The whole point of good foreshadowing is that it isn't obvious the first time around; if it were, it would be clunky.
I can't speak for Zarban or others, but I think one of the main problems for me is just there's almost nothing that I'd call foreshadowing. It's just a ton of references to things, some of which get picked up later but the vast majority of which don't, and then it just becomes the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy, like the people who claim to find hidden anagrams or something in the works of Shakespeare or The Bible, but then just forget to mention the 99.9% of cases where the hidden anagram is "ASQJHDIZUDHHUASD".
As I said before, I'd be interested to hear arguments about specific references and plot threads, and why the "Rowling had it all planned out from Day 1" theory is more plausible than various alternatives.
Now showing on the Sydney Morning Herald TV site...
Sadly the video is not authorized for my location, but it looks like the Sydney Morning Herald TV site is doing an Asylum season. I recognize MegaPiranaha from the commentary and Mega Shark vs Crocosaurus sounds like variations on a theme. And "Almighty Thor" clearly not starring Chris Hemsworth can only be an Asylum production, yes?
It's possible that she may have done this occasionally -- referencing Stan Shunpike beyond his first appearance in Azkaban could easily have been a spur of the moment decision -- but the number of early seeds planted for major plot points is so extensive it would require Rowling to be significantly more of a genius to pull them together with no plan at all than to have planted them deliberately, and is frankly the less plausible explanation.
It's seems to me to be pretty clearly the opposite case -- the piles of throwaway detail are there to disguise important clues. If the only details she ever mentioned were the ones that would later be important, there'd hardly be any mystery at all (this was a major problem with the Hunger Games books).
Yeah, I can certainly imagine that it would be kind of obnoxious if everything had a big sign on it saying "This will be important later", but I'm not convinced that you have to do what Rowling does purely for misdirection. At the very least, it's misdirection of a very brute-force and unsubtle sort. Your average 'fair' detective story (i.e., one that doesn't rely on a surprise revelation that the reader didn't know about) has to do exactly this sort of thing but doesn't, say, give a list all 25 volumes that were in the victim's study or something. (Yes of course, to the extent that the first book at least was conceived of as more of a children's/young adult book, you have different standards that you hold it to, but that almost mitigates against the idea that there was a plan from the beginning about a dark epic journey about death, etc.)
Let's take a look at the cases that you mention in your spoiler tag. I know these were just a couple for illustration, but to start:
Re the duel with Grindelwald, all that's mentioned in Philosopher's Stone is he defeated a dark wizard called Grindelwald in 1945. I'll give you the "connection between major events in the Muggle and Wizarding worlds" from the date, but that strikes me as a looooong way from saying that the intention down the line was for that to take on the significance that it does later. It seems more plausible to me that the main point of the card was the Nicholas Flamel reference, which is entirely book-internal, but then, yes, of course later on it made sense to come back to the Grindelwald reference and have it be a thing.
And on "the wand choosing the wizard thing", that strikes me as such a fantasy trope (the mystical connection between people, especially Our Hero, and specific magical items) that I find it hard to hang much on that. And I'd argue that, in the specific sense that Ollivander is talking about, it actually *isn't* the key to the conclusion, if I understand what you're referring to. Rather the key to the conclusion is that if you obtain a personalized magical item from someone under certain circumstances it becomes yours, which is different, and doesn't necessarily follow from what Ollivander says. (And possibly makes various things in the earlier books problematic (like the capture and escape of Wormtail at the end of Azkaban -- shouldn't Sirius or whoever 'know' that Wormtail's wand is now his to control, etc.? We know from the passing of the Elder Wand from Gregorovich to Grindelwald that you don't have to kill the user.))
Anyway, this is probably the sort of discussion that is impossible conclude definitely (absent some dated drafts of outlines etc. from Rowling's personal papers -- as distinct from anything she might have said after the fact). Truthfully, I'm vaguely suspicious that some of the "it was planned all along" is just confirmation bias. However, like I say, I'm open to hearing arguments about specific references and plot threads, and how the balance of the evidence renders the "it was there all along" theory more plausible than the "it was a retcon from the shit ton of stuff she had to choose from" theory.
This is all of course as distinct from the point at which she would have known from sales, her publisher, etc. that there was going to be an extended series, at which point I'm perfectly happy to accept the "clues + misdirection" theory.
bullet3 wrote:I hope you mention some of this long-term stuff during the podcast, because I completely do not remember any of these "hidden seeds" that you're talking about from the early books. I'd imagine it's the kind of thing you'd only pick up on in a re-read as an adult, so I'm real curious what kind of stuff was set up early.
Many of them will have to be remarked upon in their absence, since the filmmakers didn't know they were important either and left many of them out.
SPOILERFor quick examples -- Hagrid says in the very first chapter of Philosopher's Stone that he borrowed the flying motorcycle from "young Sirius Black;" Mrs. Figg from Order of the Phoenix is introduced in the second chapter of Philosopher's Stone; and Dumbledore's duel with Gellert Grindlewald -- which as we learn in the latter half of the final book is how Dumbledore became master of the Elder Wand -- is mentioned on his chocolate frog card in chapter six of book one. Not to mention the fundamental principle that the wand chooses the wizard, which is key to the conclusion, is very nearly the first thing we learn about how magic works.
Actually, I've been thinking about this again as I've been trying to re-read the books, and now noticing things like that that I would have missed the first time. Just to play devil's advocate though: for those people who've thought a lot more about the stories and their structure than I have, how do we distinguish the "seeds planted as early as Book 1, page 1" theory from a theory which says that Rowling just vomits throwaway detail (which she clearly does), some of which is later appropriated and quasi-retconned into something meaningful? I'm only up to Phoenix in my re-read, but one of the things that's actually bugging me a bit is the seemingly endless references to names, places, books, events, etc. which I precisely don't recall ever paying off.
So, I watched a 90's sci-fi action flick titled The Guyver. It's about a young man who discovers a device that merges with his own body, turning him into a cyborg superhero, "The Guyver". The device is of alien origin, as is the entire human race. Yes, that's right... in the movie we learn that humanity was created by a race of alien beings (has Ridley Scott seen this film?)
So then Angus MacGyver is that guy's son? Guess I sorta see the resemblance:
Sorry about the delays on this one, folks, but here's Back To The Future, including the bits that BTA mentioned a page or so ago, all uploaded:
00:06:31 - 00:08:12 Dorkman on BTTF (including "if you don't like it, you're Hitler") (1m40s)
00:20:10 - 00:22:05 Why BTTF is a perfect movie (1m56s)
00:44:40 - 00:45:18 Conceptual inconsistencies about BTTF's time travel (1m38s)
01:00:04 - 01:02:51 Gift shops which should have BTTF/Star Trek merchandise and don't (2m47s)
01:05:34 - 01:06:44 Trey on working with Christopher Lloyd (1m07s)
01:30:22 - 01:31:59 Enchantment under the seat and solar powered lightsabers (1m37s)
01:32:00 - 01:33:46 Trivializing rape (by all concerned really) (1m 46s)
01:59:11 - 02:00:49 Crass 80's materialism is a valid life goal (1m38s)
02:03:48 - 02:04:30 What *really* matters: fonts (42s)
To me, having come out of this view of the world (after I was no longer a Christian I still believed there must be a God for exactly this reason), the need for a creative being comes from the basic assumption that the universe had to be the way it is. Obviously to start from "nothing" (not literally nothing, but not the universe as we know it) and get to the universe the way it is now as an ultimate goal, you'd have to have a plan and therefore a planner.
It's hard, especially when brought up religious, to wrap the mind around the idea that the universe had no plan and where we are now was nobody's goal. It's just a thing that happened to turn out this way, and everything in it is a series of things that happened to turn out the way they did. We are looking at the end of a chain of events that we can choose to view as auspicious (and we certainly should, as one of the "things that happened" is us) but were unplanned.
It wasn't completely random, though, due to what we as humans think of as the natural laws. To say that nature requires a creative mind is effectively to say that the natural laws are impossible, to say that 2+2 cannot equal 4 without a mind to make it so, that the force of gravity is unsuitable to the tasks our model of the force of gravity clearly indicates it is quite capable of accomplishing. If a universe with a creative mind behaves identically to a universe without one -- and we are not required to assume a creative mind before we can build an accurate and predictable model of the universe or its interactions (see: physics) -- how can we tell the difference between a universe with a creative mind and one without one?
Yeah, in particular I think that a lot of the developments in the last 20-30 years on fractals, non-linear dynamical systems, etc. take a good chunk of the visceral force out of the First Cause argument. I don't really understand it anywhere nearly as well as I want to or ought to, and goodness knows it's a much abused concept, but the gist of it is that you can show mathematically that local pockets of order can and do arise in certain kinds of systems (like the universe, by hypothesis) despite a general trend toward overall disorder. Ultimately, I think that's probably what we are -- a pocket of local order.
And just because it's hilarious, and tangentially related to this issue:
(Brian Cox has made it across the pond, right?)
Friends In Your Head | Forums → Posts by sellew
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