CatBus

Holland ain’t looking bad, even without taking the cheese into consideration.

Fang Zei said:

I guess my main question - and I’ll try to word it better this time - is whether Harmy will still be using “recreated” shots (like he did with the dewback outside the cantina) or if he’s going to keep that kind of thing to an absolute minimum.

I understand that the majority (the roughly 80% of the film that remains unaltered) will be sourced from the blu-ray. But what I’m wondering is if the newly available print scans will fill in all the missing pieces or if Harmy will still need to do some recreating like he did with that dewback shot.

I can’t see how he wouldn’t keep it to a minimum. If we’d had adequate film footage back when 2.5 was released, I doubt that would have been done in the first place.

So… mixed into the CBO report which says so-and-so-million will lose insurance, such-and-such money will be saved, is a really standout number. They project that Social Security outlays would fall by $3 billion. That’s part of their “Yay for the impact on the budget” numbers.

Now, the CBO can only deal with the impact of the law as written, and the law as written doesn’t really touch Social Security (one third rail at a time, get in line). So, please tell me if I’m missing something, but to me that says that the number of people receiving social security payments will fall, and fairly sharply. I mean, the actuarial numbers are out there–the mortality rate of seniors with insurance vs. those without–but ick. But at least they’re gonna put a stop to those death panels.

Only Harmy can say for sure, but he has said he’s not likely to do an all-film-sourced DeEd, because at that point, lots of others could do that work (although I’d personally still encourage him to go for it, because he has demonstrated solid skills beyond despecializing). I expect we’ll see something more like Jedi 2.5, where lots of pure film footage was mixed in, but only where it blended well with the surrounding footage. I’m sure film sources will be heavily used in despecializing Blu-ray footage though. Complete lack of GOUT is a pretty safe bet though.

The current plan has Empire 2.5 first, then 3.0 for the trilogy (order of films not yet determined, but I’m guessing Star Wars gets priority for 3.0 due to the already damn near perfection of the others).

DominicCobb said:

How can you not hate a culture that doesn’t easy access to cheese? Those bastards.

They do make an effort, which is why I said “proper” bread and cheese. But… yeah, it’s even less convincing than Wonder Bread and American Cheese. By the end of my visit, my arteries were too soft for me to get worked up about it.

Warbler said:

moviefreakedmind said:

I was never saying that American culture is better in all aspects. The familial bonds of foreign cultures is one of the positives of other cultures that I was thinking of. My main points was that I can’t think of any other culture that I’d rather live in. So far no one has even told me that they disagree with that.

The problem with this is, that you don’t just live in a culture, you live in a country and under a government. So again is the culture the problem(and maybe some cases it is and maybe some cases it is not) or the country/government?

Not only that, but living in a culture other than the one you’re used to is often enough of a turn-off, all other things being equal. I loved my time in Indonesia and in many ways could see living there, but the lack of easy access to proper bread and cheese pretty much settles it. It’s not because I think we’re superior, it’s because mmmmmm cheese.

Yeesh. What a mess. People load up the word culture with lots of extra meanings. When people like Steve King talk about cultures or civilizations, what they really mean is races–that much is pretty obvious to everyone. But adding these meanings is easy to do even without his special brand of malice. People can equate cultures and countries (American culture vs. Canadian culture, when Seattle honestly has a lot more in common with Vancouver than it does with Tallahassee). People can equate culture with history, where, for example, societies can be thrown into turmoil by events, but the culture of that society is not necessarily chaotic.

And talk of comparative cultures is an anathema to pluralistic ideals–where it is just assumed that culture will end up a mish-mash, ideally taking the best from each and continually re-making itself into a greater whole. Sure, there’s something about every culture (no matter how you define it) that sucks. The idea of pluralism is that we learn from each other and everyone benefits, and the world sucks a little less over time. But not everyone accepts pluralistic ideals–in fact the last election was in many ways a wholesale rejection of pluralism and a return to naked identity politics.

PM sent.

Disagree on many, many points.

First, Germany. Immigrant minorities gravitate more to the SPD than Merkel’s CDU, so if Merkel’s trying to pad her party’s demographics through immigration, that would be a stupid strategy. Also, it’s much harder to become a citizen in Germany than the US, so many immigrants, whose families have lived in Germany for generations, cannot vote. No birthright citizenship. Immigrants have even less electoral influence there than the US.

“Open borders” is a heavily abused term these days, so I don’t blame you at all for this. Nevertheless, the only open borders the US has are between one state and another state (same in Germany). The international borders are absolutely not open, nor is there any significant group advocating for that in either country.

The US has quite a lot of undocumented immigrants, but at least lately it’s a fairly static amount. The net amount of undocumented immigration into and out of the US for the past decade has been approximately zero–with possibly slightly more leaving than arriving. So the presence of undocumented immigrants is actually a very different issue than border security.

I think “social consequences” needs a better definition. The economic consequences of immigration has been well-studied and there really isn’t much one way or the other. Immigrant communities (documented, undocumented, refugee, etc) do have a lower crime rate than the general population, but I don’t think the numbers are such that they lower the crime rate of the country they live in by any significant amount.

Now I’d agree on some points–the coalitions are shifting, but not as much as they appear to be. Even back before unions had their backs broken, the upper midwest white working class was a solidly Republican demographic, the only question being how many votes the Dems managed to peel off. Reagan Democrats and Trump voters–in that demographic, it’s the same thing really. I’d like to say they loved Dems for strong union support/good jobs and abandoned them over free trade/job losses or somesuch, but AFAICT the evidence doesn’t really support that narrative. They mobilized against welfare queens in the 80’s, and bad hombres today. Lee Atwater was absolutely correct in his assessment of the electorate, and it’s still true today.

Well, we do have a nod-and-wink economy, and that’s a genuine problem. Huge sectors of our economy rely heavily on undocumented labor precisely because they’re undocumented. Undocumented means various legal protections afforded to documented immigrants are more flexible–wages, leave, insurance, workplace safety. Do they report abuses? Pfft, no. Immigrants come here undocumented because there’s a demand for exactly that. If they had legal status, the under-the-table economy wouldn’t want them nearly as much.

Like the drug war, the problem needs to be addressed at the demand side. It’s not a choice between undocumented on one side and documented labor on the other. It’s a choice between livable wages and decent workplaces on one side and cheap food and labor on the other. We’ve chosen the latter, via a two-tier economy, one for us, one for them.

If it helps–people can always use help, but you’re not always the right person to provide it. It sounds to me like she’s going through some sort of crisis herself–cause and nature unknown–but I’d say it’s pretty certain you can’t help her, and she’s sure as hell not helping you. My advice: Walk away, stay away, protect yourself, but don’t do anything that could be interpreted as unkind. It may be she comes out the other end of whatever this is months from now and will tell you what it was all about, and it will suddenly all make sense. But probably not.

Long story short, I think you’re doing the right thing. Don’t demonize her, she may have serious shit going down you don’t know about. And shouldn’t know about for a while at least.

SilverWook said:

People are actually buying this?
http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/09/us/book-best-seller-trnd/index.html

I dunno. Stack it up against most of the other recent conservative political bestsellers out there: Coulter, Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Yiannapoulos. For the target audience, this book is the cream of the crop. Sure, it’s ultimately one single lame joke that’s really long and shockingly expensive, but it’s not easily disproven revisionist history, pseudoscience, conspiracy theory, or white supremacist propaganda, so grading on that curve it’s a pretty impressive literary achievement.

Chris Botcheos said:

If someone ends up with a copy of the despecialized edition, what happens to them?

Well, when a fan and a movie love each other very much…

Oh, er, you mean legally? IANAL, but IMO the biggest risks are in distributing it/showing it to others, not in having it yourself. If you’re really worried, when you’re done watching them, just eat them.

While on a road trip driving from San Diego all the way up I-5, I composed this letter to Governor Schwarzenegger (it was several years back), in my best cranky old guy voice.

Dear Governor Schwarzenegger,

I am currently having a very serious problem with your state. I got up at the crack of dawn this morning and started driving north through your state. I continued driving north throughout the day and now it is nighttime again. And I am still in your state. Do you see the problem, Governor? Your state is far too big. Unacceptably big. Now I get it, you can’t just shrink a state, I’m not an idiot, but surely you can do something about the shape. East-west travel through your state is fine–it’s only north-south travel with this problem. I recommend simply using a far more sensible shape, like the ones employed by Colorado and Wyoming, keeping the size more or less the same. That way, I could actually get out of your state within a day, which is something I’m sure you’d agree I should be able to do.

Yours truly,
CatBus

Warbler said:

huh?

This is a pretty clean link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump–Russia_dossier

Footnote 19 gives a hint.

I’m way ahead of you guys. But I’m also soaking wet and wishing they hadn’t eaten all that asparagus.

Warbler said:

CatBus said:

Warbler said:

So basically to you have two systems because your government is in a spat with the political parties. nice.

Not the government. Elected officials are squarely on the side of the parties (that’s who they are). Ballot initiatives bypass the legislature and the governor here. This one was written, I believe, by the state Grange. So it’d be pretty fairly described as a spat between the state parties and the state population.

state Grange?

Never particularly heard of them either until they ran the initiative:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Grange_of_the_Order_of_Patrons_of_Husbandry

Also, this is a bit of a western state phenomenon too. Out here, a guy and thirty friends can get an initiative on the ballot (slight exaggeration). It’s super-easy, which is good when you’re dealing with an issue that every state elected official from both parties violently opposes such as open primaries. But it’s bad in the sense that we get SEVERAL “free ponies for everyone” initiatives every year, which end up in the courts or ignored or whatever. i.e. we get initiatives to cut taxes or improve education without any indication of how to pay for them, and those are treated more like political statements than actual law.

EDIT: Found a reference to the court case:

https://www.oyez.org/cases/2007/06-713

Warbler said:

So basically to you have two systems because your government is in a spat with the political parties. nice.

Not the government. Elected officials are squarely on the side of the parties (that’s who they are). Ballot initiatives bypass the legislature and the governor here. This one was written, I believe, by the state Grange. So it’d be pretty fairly described as a spat between the state parties and the state population.

DominicCobb said:

You’re telling me that who people vote for doesn’t really matter in regards to who gets elected‽‽‽ Here‽‽‽ In America‽‽‽

Yerp. Well, I believe the story goes like this. We used to have an open primary, back in the day. It was the awesomest primary system ever. Basically you got a combo ballot, where you could choose a Democrat for one office, a Republican for another, etc IN THE PRIMARY. You could end up with two Democrats running against each other in the general, or two Republicans (you still can, but it’s harder). Basically party was irrelevant. The two most popular candidates faced off against each other and people cared about the result, because it was, for example, two qualified Dems instead of one qualified Dem and some guy who got on the ballot because he paid the $50 filing fee and put an ® next to his name so he could catch all the protest votes. The best thing was there was no such thing as a safe seat–you could be in a 98% Dem district, be a five-term incumbent, and you’re pretty safe in the primary because primary turnout is never great, but you could still lose in the general election to the other Dem who came in a distant second in the primary.

Both parties HATED the open primary (see: party irrelevance), sued, and it was shitcanned. Then we had an initiative that restored something very much like the open primary, but technically meeting all the requirements from the lawsuit. The parties still hate it. So, the state Democratic party completely, and the Republican party partially, took their balls and went home. We’ll do our own thing, thanks, and now they do the caucus. But the primary was established by popular initiative, making it really hard to get rid of, so we have the dual system. The caucus is the “real” method for selecting candidates, and the primaries are euphemistically called the “beauty contest”. i.e. a measure of how much people like the candidates, but with no weight.

Not that there haven’t been attempts to get rid of it, but it’s hard. I forget if the Republicans still use the primaries for some percentage of the whole for one thing, which means it still has some minimal value for some people, but also people are super-shy of repealing initiatives here. Heck, it’s still popular here even though nobody uses it–most people in the state would likely support a constitutional amendment bringing back the open primary (those that remember it anyway) and prohibiting the caucuses – and if both parties said they would still refuse to accept the results, we’d say don’t let the door hit you on the way out, we’ll vote for the Freedom Socialists or somesuch until you come crawling back. We’re that kind of state, politically. Ornery.

Warbler said:

You have primaries AND caucuses??? How does that work?

Badly 😃

Basically some snafu (honestly not sure of the details) means the state has to keep printing ballots for the primary even when the party has said in no uncertain terms that they will pay no attention to the primary results. So people keep throwing their votes away in the primary, and we get split decisions where the primary goes one way, and the caucus goes the other way, and people who voted in the primary suddenly realize this system sucks because the caucus is all that matters. But just because it’s completely meaningless doesn’t mean it doesn’t factor into a lot of political commentary about mandates and demographic differences, the political anachronism of caucuses, etc. We get it every. four. years.

Warbler said:

Everyone who is registered as a Democrat went to polls and voted for which Democrat they wanted to represent the Democratic party in the General Election.

Out west, things get murkier. At least in my state, you don’t register as a member of a particular party at all, so technically everyone in the state is an independent. At primary time, you basically decide right on the spot which party’s primary you’d like to influence this year and choose that ballot (or attend that caucus, or both because yes we’re weird that way). It’s not quite an open primary, but we love open primaries out here and it’s the closest we can get to that ideal without the parties suing the crap out of the state. The parties claim they can restrict primary access to their own members; the public reminds the parties who’s paying for these elections in the first place, and a tense standoff is maintained.

Now some of that independence is obviously fictional. We have more self-reported independents (as opposed to the meaningless registration numbers) than most states, but lots of those are leftists who are choosing between third parties and Democrats, and rightists choosing between third parties and Republicans. The percentage actually choosing between Democrats and Republicans probably isn’t that different than other states, although we do have a lot of ticket-splitters, and we were one of the last refuges of the fabled liberal Republicans before they went extinct (or more accurately became Democrats).

We also have a long history of messing with the primaries of other parties. Since the primaries are occasionally just formalities with a single plausible candidate, and you can choose at the last minute which primary to vote in, people often talk about crossing over to the other side to vote for the weakest/craziest candidate on the other side, to improve their own party’s chances. However, that sort of talk has lately fallen out of fashion since it makes the situation a lot more dire when your party loses. Now people talk about crossing over to vote for someone they could stomach, if not vote for, which I guess is moderation coming back into fashion.

lovelikewinter said:

So if Cher announces Star Wars, will BlondieBonnie Tyler do Empire Strikes Back and Cyndi Lauper Return of the Jedi?

While I do hold some degree of respect for both Cher and Cyndi Lauper, they are not even remotely in the same league as Debbie Harry. I just couldn’t let that stand.

The descriptive audio tracks I had, I just transcribed the description (with edits for despecialization, inaccuracies, etc) and the tracks are long gone. If I recall correctly, cutting them to match the GOUT (the frame reference for the Despecialized Editions) might be doable, but not without even more compromises than we already make for despecialized dubs. For example, in a dub, we replace entire sections of the audio in Jedi (musical number, celebration). Easy enough when there’s no dialogue, but the voiceover would be lost. Same for the credits, none of the scores for the SE credits match the originals.

For better or worse, I’m pretty married to the “make our own” idea. I’m willing to wait a long time for a volunteer, but feel free to ask around on my behalf.

mallanikkelsen1 said:

Hello there!

I am so happy for this SW release! Being completely blind, it really Means alot to me that the author of this release did actually take the time to include the original WGBH descriptive audio for blind people!!
I was on this forum a long time ago originally whare I was looking for described versions of all 3 films, and over the years, I managed to find them and also did update a thred about it regularly. Unfortunatlly only the original EP 4 has description, and I believe some members onhere also did wanted to have a listen to it at that time, so, I am very delighted to see the description actually appearing in a release!
One big question though, can anyone tell me why the reading of all of the end-credits are missing? Given that the release otherwise is so perfect in any way (also with the many audio tracks to choose from , I love it and wish there were more), I am a bit pusseld as to why this last bit of the description track has not been included?

All the best from Allan

Not quite sure, but there are some problems with the descriptive audio tracks as we have them, and it’s quite possible the credits were missing and then tacked on from an alternate source. Empire and Jedi are much worse off because the only descriptive tracks we have are Special Edition tracks, and also the quality isn’t so great.

If you’re interested, I’m actually trying to completely remake the descriptive audio tracks, by finding someone to read the voiceover. Then I’ll mix the voiceover with one of our much-better quality audio tracks so you can get the full Star Wars audio experience. I have scripts, I just need the voice talent.

So not necessarily you, but if you know anyone who’d be interested in helping out here, I’m willing to do all the editing, I just need the raw voice recordings. PM me if you’re interested.

Link to descriptive audio thread: http://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/879413

EDIT: Oh, and ironically, I don’t actually have scripts for the complete credits, just the major initial parts. We can address that when it comes to that point.