@TheNewSun:
The main flaw with Ghostbusters II is that that the opening premise made no sense. At the end of the first they were heroes who saved the city from a giant Marshmallow Man that all of New York saw with their own eyes. In the beginning of the second, everyone thought they were frauds. WTF?
But controlling the Statue of Liberty with a NES advantage makes up for all that. It was an awesome movie.
The main flaw with Ghostbusters II is that that the opening premise made no sense. At the end of the first they were heroes who saved the city from a giant Marshmallow Man that all of New York saw with their own eyes. In the beginning of the second, everyone thought they were frauds. WTF?
But controlling the Statue of Liberty with a NES advantage makes up for all that. It was an awesome movie.
J.K. Rowling, for what it's worth, has earned my trust.
She doesn't seem like a person who's strongly motivated by money. So if she decides to set another story in the Potterverse, it'll be because she really wants to tell that story.
Which is good enough for me, and I'll judge it on its merites if/when it happens.
She doesn't seem like a person who's strongly motivated by money. So if she decides to set another story in the Potterverse, it'll be because she really wants to tell that story.
Which is good enough for me, and I'll judge it on its merites if/when it happens.
How in the heck can a sci fi blog not mention "Firefly" under "Shows that got a resolution after cancellation"?
@starbuck13: @pinkiedeathhead: The first episode after the Best of Both Worlds featured Picard going back to Earth to see his family as he worked through the emotional trauma. It was also one of the best episodes of the series.
Unfortunately, TNG mostly followed the 80's template where every episode had to end where it began, with major character/plot development kept to a minimum.
None of the characters really showed any signs of traumas or revelations that had happened in previous episodes.
Unfortunately, TNG mostly followed the 80's template where every episode had to end where it began, with major character/plot development kept to a minimum.
None of the characters really showed any signs of traumas or revelations that had happened in previous episodes.
The graph is meaningless without seeing the number of screens each movie was playing on.
Avatar had all the 3D enabled screens in the country completely to itself for weeks and weeks. All the other movies (except for maybe "How to train your dragon") would have had to fight for 3D showtimes among other movies that were/are playing at the same time.
Beyond that, dare I to suggest that the difference isn't between 2D and 3D, but rather a $10 ticket and $15 ticket?
3D is a reason to actually go to a theater, as opposed to waiting for Netflix. At least for now, it's something a theater can offer that my living room can't. But it simply can't demand the kind of premium Hollywood thinks it can. $15-20 simply isn't a reasonable price for a movie ticket (heck, even the $10 mark is too much, IMHO). There are very, very few movies that can demand that kind of premium. I paid it for Avatar, but would I pay it for any of the other movies on that list? Hell no.
Avatar had all the 3D enabled screens in the country completely to itself for weeks and weeks. All the other movies (except for maybe "How to train your dragon") would have had to fight for 3D showtimes among other movies that were/are playing at the same time.
Beyond that, dare I to suggest that the difference isn't between 2D and 3D, but rather a $10 ticket and $15 ticket?
3D is a reason to actually go to a theater, as opposed to waiting for Netflix. At least for now, it's something a theater can offer that my living room can't. But it simply can't demand the kind of premium Hollywood thinks it can. $15-20 simply isn't a reasonable price for a movie ticket (heck, even the $10 mark is too much, IMHO). There are very, very few movies that can demand that kind of premium. I paid it for Avatar, but would I pay it for any of the other movies on that list? Hell no.
@lostarchitect:
I haven't had too much luck with works where the formatting actually matters (Shakespeare's plays). But for regular public domain novels, the stuff from Project Guttenberg works pefectly fine on my Kindle.
You can download them from Guttenberg and use Calibre to transfer (and convert if necessary). You can also get them for free from Amazon's store in most cases and have them wirelessly delivered.
Sometimes someone goes through the trouble of making a more-nicely-formatted version with an active table of contents and sells them for a dollar, though I've found that the free versions are usually perfectly adequate.
I haven't had too much luck with works where the formatting actually matters (Shakespeare's plays). But for regular public domain novels, the stuff from Project Guttenberg works pefectly fine on my Kindle.
You can download them from Guttenberg and use Calibre to transfer (and convert if necessary). You can also get them for free from Amazon's store in most cases and have them wirelessly delivered.
Sometimes someone goes through the trouble of making a more-nicely-formatted version with an active table of contents and sells them for a dollar, though I've found that the free versions are usually perfectly adequate.
eInk, for whatever its faults, is a reasonable replacement for books. The battery lasts forever and a day and you can read it anywhere you might read a real book. It's well suited for long form reading and portability.
LCD screens (the iPad), for whatever its virtues, is *not* a replacement for books. The screen is wrong and the battery life is too short. You can read books on it, sure, but as a book lover such a device could never substitute entirely for books.
Books, by the way, are 100,000+ words usually presented as black text on white paper. This doesn't require any sort of animation ability or video or web surfing capability or anything else that the iPad can do but the Kindle can't.
Was I the only one who liked the last movie? It felt like a really well done stand alone episode from the peak of the series. At this point I really don't care about the alien mythology, I was just happy to see Mulder and Scully in one more mystery/adventure, and the movie delivered.
e-ink readers might not ever reach iPad-like mainstream adoption. But I'm pretty sure the market for them isn't going away. My Kindle goes weeks on a single battery charge, is readable in bright sunlight, and it's easier to use one handed while standing on the train (killer feature for me).
And as long as the Amazon can offer an either/or, Kindle will be the superior eBooks platform. Amazon doesn't need the Kindle to be the dominant reader so long as Amazon itself is the dominant eBook retailer.
Interestingly, I think the Kindle hardware is just a marketing tool to get people to buy eBooks from them, which is where they're making most of their money. By contrast, iBooks is a marketing tool to help Apple sell more iPads, where they make their money.
My prediction is that five years from now, Kindle hardware will be a relatively small but stable niche, mostly for book lovers who read 50+ books a year. Consequently, Amazon will be the dominant eBook retailer. The 90% of people who only read 1-2 books a year probably won't be buying Kindle hardware - but I doubt they'll do all that much reading on their iPad either. But those are the people iBooks and the Kindle app will duke it out for. I'd still give Amazon the edge because of the cross platform advantage, and Amazon really does seem dedicated to making sure you can get your eBooks *everywhere* DRM notwithstanding, which makes it more attractive. But then again Apple might take its early advantage (color) and completely own the market for stuff like cookbooks, comic books, illustrated books, etc, which I think casual buyers are more interested in. But I guess we'll just wait and see - I think the competition is a great thing and I hope it continues.
How about just restoring the last session? I can't even tell you what my start page is set to because I always just load up whatever tabs I had open the last time I closed it.
Oh and resolve the damn time travel paradoxes, or at least come up with a consistent theory of time travel.
The first film was a gem because it made sense. Fixed timeline, everything that happened was meant to happen. Yeah, there was a causal loop, but in of itself that's not a paradox.
Terminator 2, in addition to changing the future history, wasn't nearly as consistent. And T3 and T4 just made no sense.
TSCC did manage to consistently stick to a "many worlds" interpretation and played with that brilliantly - like when Derek Reese realized he made things worse by coming back, and everyone who subsequently came back came from a timeline altered by his actions in the past.
But I think if we're going to do a movie, there ought to be one time travel event and that should be it. It's simply too hard to explain the second, third, etc. in a way that makes any sense.
Here's a story idea. Remake T1 basically following the same plot. For T2, instead of "Hey look they sent another Terminator back in time even though the first one was supposed to be a last ditch effort" - instead focus on Sarah Connor the terrorist trying to stop the apocalypse only she knows is coming (something left woefully unexplored). Use a proto-Terminator as the villain in that movie. And maybe somewhere in the course of it, she meets the proto-Skynet AI and gives it the idea for the apocalypse. Make her the mother of both mankind's savior *and* mankind's destructor. T3, if they're going to round out the trilogy, should then take place in the future and be the movie that Salvation would have been if it didn't suck. Single timeline, no paradoxes.
And if it sucks, well I'll always have my beloved 1984 "The Terminator" and I can continue to pretend it's the only thing in the franchise.
@Aidan_Loves_Books: Yeah, till he gets replaced by Jay Leno in Space.
My main gripe is how much I wish it was its own universe rather than forced into the BSG universe, which I feel constrains its potential.
But beyond that, the world building bugs me a bit.
This is supposed to be a separate world, populated by humans but completely independent of anything we've seen on Earth. So when I see suits and ties, American-made automobiles, and so much else that doesn't differentiate it from western society in 2010, it breaks my suspension of disbelief.
Okay, it's a TV show, and I know they have to be pragmatic and what they can depict. And I don't favor shows that go for silver jumpsuits and other tacky tropes, which break suspension of disbelief from the other direction. But I think they could have struck a better balance than they have. It just doesn't feel like an alien world. It feels like it's taking place in some middle-tier city in the present day US.
(And I still don't get all the hate for the BSG ending.)
Tribbles.
@Yerzriknot: 53,792 at the moment - a combination of RAW images from my D70 and D300, TIFF files which I've edited, and processed JPG's I've published.
The BSG finale doesn't belong on the list.
Watchmen was doomed either way. It would either be a faithful adaptation and have all the problems of translating something from one medium to another, or else it they could have properly adopted it to a new medium and lost the fanboys. It was lose-lose, though I happen to be pleased it got made at all - so it's not really a disappointment.
Star Trek Enterprise, and Star Trek Nemesis do belong on the list. We got a decent-ish reboot at the tail end of the decade, but overall it was a horrible decade for the Trek franchise that quite nearly saw the end of it thanks to the one-two punch of a flawed series and a terrible movie, and doomed any chance at seeing TNG cast in anything else.
Also, the Terminator franchise was a huge disappointment. I'd have loved to have seen a movie that reconciled T1 and T2 and lived up to those movies. Instead we got T3, which made no sense, Batman vs. Transformers which was simply awful, and The Sarah Connor Chronicles which had the most potential but never quite hit the mark and was snuffed by Fox.
Firefly... we should be glad we have 15 great episodes and a movie that at least gave it some closure. We should at least consider the possibility that by season 5, 6, 7 it would have become Buffy's season 5, 6, and 7, and we'd be lamenting the disappointment of what became of it. Dollhouse, on the other hand, never really shined and *that's* the bigger disappointment, IMHO.
The rule of thumb is you should have one local backup and one off site backup. I think that holds for everybody.
What varies is backup needs, which vary greatly by individual and use case. I don't image my drives because I have no problem rebuilding my system from scratch, but other users might not be so inclined. It's generally worth versioning office documents, but not mp3's. Online backups work well for small amounts of data, not so for those of us filling terabyte drives with RAW photos and HD videos. I don't think there's a one size fits all solution.
Also, there's another issue that people don't think about enough - backing up their cloud data. It's rare, but Gmail has been known to lose data - people should get in the habit of downloading copies of their email to a local client.
Personally I keep all my important data on a Drobo and back it up locally to another external drive regularly, (using synback SE) which I swap out with another drive that I keep at my office every couple of days. For me, it's mostly RAW photos that I worry about plus the odd assortment of documents. Dropbox offers an extra layer of redundancy for the smaller files, though I use it mostly for the syncing rather than as part of my backup strategy.
Any of the "unlimited" services are basically a rip off, because there's still a very real limit to the amount of data you can back up - upstream bandwidth.
Yes, I could *theoretically* use Mozy or Carbonite to back up all ~700 GB of RAW photos that I have in my library. But the reality is that it'd take the better part of 4 months to upload them, and then another 4 months to restore them should I ever need to. It simply doesn't work. (Part of the limitation for me being Comcast's idiotic 250 GB monthly cap)
So in reality, any online backup solution is only going to be good for something on the order 10, 20, maybe 30 GB of data, at least until consumer broadband stops sucking so much.
If you're under 2 GB, Dropbox works great and is completely free. If you're under ~25 GB, then Amazon S3/Jungledisk is the cheapest. And if you're over that, buy yourself two external hard drives and keep one at your office or a friends house. As they say, never underestimate the bandwidth of a mid size car carrying a terabyte hard drive. #onlinebackup
So when will "extensions are coming" finally become "extensions are here"?
Ted: OK wait. If you guys are really us, what number are we thinking of?
Bill, Ted: 69, dudes.
Bill, Ted: Whoa.
