NeverarGreat

Trump, probably:

DominicCobb said:

NeverarGreat said:

Yeah, if Trump did leak this anodyne part of his return himself, then Maddow played right into his hand.

I mean, I don’t usually like to feed into the “mastermind Trump playing 4D chess manipulating and distracting people” narrative, but this really couldn’t have gone better for him. I don’t really think it’s what happened, but it’s certainly possible this is his admin’s doing.

I also dislike the mastermind hypothesis, since it sounds like I’m awarding him credit for being a Machiavellian snake. The trouble is that the media consistently falls for his tricks. He really is like a third-rate magician, telling everyone where to look, and the media goes along with it instead of looking where they are supposed to, which would be literally anywhere else.

The truly horrifying thing about Trump’s manipulation of the media is that it appears that the media hasn’t operated in a free market of information until recently. What I mean by that is that there has always been the veneer, and occasionally the substance, of real journalism in this country, where reputable news outlets simply wouldn’t publish the manipulative utterances of a career con-man. News outlets would police each other so as to maintain their veneers, while gossip magazines gladly filled the public’s need for sensationalist and misleading alternative facts without the public mistaking it for actual fact. The often unwritten rules of journalism have prevented such a situation as this…until now.

Now the media has been so thoroughly discredited in the eyes of the American people that the unwritten rules of journalism have been, by necessity, discarded in favor of a market approach to information, where there are no gatekeepers guarding the public from statements designed to override their rational minds.

Once Trump could no longer be ignored in the Republican primary, it became inconvenient for any media outlet to ignore his engineered statements, and once a single media outlet reproduced them, the more ‘respectable’ outlets were crowded out of the market. Trump’s statements were so calculated that the public literally couldn’t help but pay attention in the way that people can’t help but look at a wreck in the middle of the road. Some outlets tried to ‘ban’ Trump from their news because of this (such as The Young Turks), but they soon realized that Trump was now vital to their cash flow.

Trump has now revealed the face of a media that is fast becoming an unregulated market. Now, quality reporting is being hidden behind paywalls and buttressed by subscriptions, while the truly viral news is dangerously misleading, endlessly partisan, and sometimes downright fake (in the actual definition of the word).

Why this is all so horrifying is that such a system rewards people like Trump instead of punishing them with obscurity and ridicule. A truly free press, like a truly free market, is a market which is blind to such nebulous and high-minded ideals as ‘truth’ and ‘compassion’. If a buck can be made off of someone’s ignorance, that is a buck a free market will gladly extract. If a click can be earned off of a fake headline, then by thunder in a free press it will be.

Yeah, if Trump did leak this anodyne part of his return himself, then Maddow played right into his hand.

I notice that the phonebooth shot has more natural lighting in the 35mm frame from what I can tell. Arnold’s face is quite red in the shadows, his jacket is more uniformly gray, and the trees appear more green, at least from what I can tell.

Your examples don’t include any shots with a lot of red, such as Sarah’s reaction to the explosion or the time-traveling photo. Including these shots (or shots with flames) would be helpful in determining if the red/orange side of the spectrum is where it should be.

Handman said:

I started watching Return of the Jedi at about 6am, and its issues outweighed the good for the first time. Honestly, it gets worse each time I watch it.

I had this experience the last time I marathoned the trilogy. In isolation, I can appreciate the charm of Jedi, but as the capstone of the trilogy it really drags.

While trying to get to sleep in the living room one night, the red light in our tortoise house came on as it does periodically, and I got to thinking about the red of lightsabers. It seems to me that apart from being culturally associated with evil, a red light in the dark allows one to see without requiring one’s eyes to adjust to the light. This would be a noticeable advantage to a Sith Lord who operates primarily in the shadows. A bright blue blade on the other hand is a blinding light in the darkness. It would please me greatly if the reason for the red lightsaber really came down to such a practical consideration.

doubleofive said:

NeverarGreat said:

I can only speak for the things I’ve found, but this one’s definitely a Deliberate Creative Decision:

What’s happening here is that there is a noticeable increase in brightness between the first and final frames of this shot, as if someone thought ‘hey, the door is opening but it’s not getting bright enough inside’. The SSE shows no increased brightness.

Added

Anything else?

That’s all I know for sure that was intentionally changed. The removal of the single frame laser blast from the TIE cockpit might have been intentional, but I doubt it.

Puggo - Jar Jar’s Yoda said:

Urban legend?
http://www.throwcase.com/2014/12/21/that-five-monkeys-and-a-banana-story-is-rubbish/

That criticism of the original story doth protest too much, methinks, particularly with regards to how the original experiment has ‘nothing at all’ the same as the modern tale. In fact, the male monkeys, when placed with a naive newcomer, would actually use physical force to deter the newcomers from the unique object. Female monkeys would sit back and observe newcomers manipulating the object and allow themselves to unlearn their previous behavior.

So there is a seed of truth to the idea that a learned behavior can be transferred to others in this way. In fact, there is an example from my time in college that I find particularly enlightening of herd mentality: If just one student thinks that a classroom door is locked, they will wait outside of it and in many cases other students will gather with them in the shared assumption that the door is locked. This was particularly humorous when some students had already entered the classroom before the student thinking the door was locked, and particularly when class was about to begin and the teacher had to ask everyone what they were doing standing outside like a bunch of sheep.

JEDIT: I am also baffled by the debunker’s vitriol towards TED talks.

flametitan said:

NeverarGreat said:

See also: Luke’s clever use of foresight in knowing the outcome of a complex web of cause and effect in Jabba’s palace which culminated in an almost miraculous rescue of Han Solo with no Rebel casualties.

That just made me realize. Han chides Finn for not understanding how the Force works, when in reality, how many harebrained schemes do we see in the OT that seem to rely on sheer luck, i.e. using the Force?

Yet more vindication that Finn is the best character in TFA, in addition to being my personal favorite.

She was obviously wearing it underneath her combat uniform in case the need arose for a formal dinner. Since she was able to predict so precisely the type of dinner she was to attend, this is yet another piece of evidence in favor of her relation to a Force-sensitive bloodline. See also: Luke’s clever use of foresight in knowing the outcome of a complex web of cause and effect in Jabba’s palace which culminated in an almost miraculous rescue of Han Solo with no Rebel casualties.

TV’s Frink said:

I just watched Moana last night and it was pretty great…so, no.

Moana is the same on Blu-ray as I remember it being in the theater: wonderful.

Also, a random Star Wars pic:

It would have been cool if they had been overseeing construction of the Imperial Fleet, consisting of thousands of Star Destroyers and support craft. Something like this:
except that the planet would clearly be a non-Coruscant world such as Corellia.

JEDIT: Looks like Bingowings beat me to it by about 8 years: http://originaltrilogy.com/topic/The-Prequel-Radical-Redux-Ideas-Thread/id/9911/page/15

dahmage said:

hm. interesting thoughts. so Jedi are like the nerds of the galaxy. they think they are smart and great and all that. meanwhile everyone else just ignores them and gets shit done without any need of the Jedi. hm. 😃

I figured that they were just too absentminded/incompetent to actually show up on time to a rendezvous, and every time they participate in a covert operation they inevitably blow their cover by drawing the attention of a Sith lord. Seriously, this happens in 3/3 of the original movies. Jedi are not worth the hassle in a secret Rebellion.

lovelikewinter said:

I did a quick check of sold listings on Ebay. The GOUT Trilogy goes for about $75 on average, oftentimes more. There is demand, and you can’t pretend that its just hardcore fans. Each round of changes alienated and pissed off more and more people. Almost makes me wish Lucas had gotten to another revision- almost.

I got the trilogy for about $45 total from 2 different used video stores a few years back. I can only imagine that they’ve gotten harder to come by as time has gone on.

SilverWook said:

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

I thought about saying something derogatory about it, but then I realized it made a fair point. But then I read this book and it convinced me that I should actually vote for a Democrat, since there are plenty of reasons to vote against a certain Republican.

DominicCobb said:

Puggo - Jar Jar’s Yoda said:

moviefreakedmind said:

Alderaan said:

You should probably look up the definition of the world “or”.

Again, I don’t even quite get what this is supposed to mean. I know what “or” means.

Computer scientists and electronic engineers are aware that there are two definitions of “or”… inclusive-or and exclusive-or. “OR” by itself is ambiguous, except in digital logic, wherein inclusive-or is assumed. To wit:

“you can have cake OR you can have candy” (exclusive or, both not an option)
“applicants must have a PhD OR equivalent experience” (inclusive or, both an option)

The interpretation of your earlier post depends on which “or” you intended, which presumably is why you were asked if “both” was an option.

Maybe we just need to start using “and/or” and/or “nor” more.

Yeah, I momentarily forgot the order of operations as well, and it was only a tiny gif of a wall coming toward me.

A more detailed breakdown of the footage screened at the Disney Conference:

http://www.slashfilm.com/star-wars-the-last-jedi-footage-description/

Puggo - Jar Jar’s Yoda said:

There is an aspect to this Obamacare/repeal/replace effort that I haven’t seen discussed, so here goes:

Every time I talk to someone that is angry about Obamacare, their reason is simple: “my premiums went up”. Well, of course they went up. Requiring coverage for pre-existing conditions, and expanding health care for the previously uninsured was certain to raise premiums for those who previously were insured. How could it not?

Right now, a lot of reports seem to assume that if Obamacare is repealed, then the sudden loss of insurance for 20 million people will backfire on Trump and the Republicans. Hogwash! There are over 300 million people in the U.S., so by that math less than 10% of people would lose their insurance. Heck, if 100 million people lost their insurance, that would only be 33% of the people. And then what would happen?.. a huge majority of people will see their premiums go back down. All those people who complained that Obamacare caused their premiums to go up - surely the vast majority of Americans - will rejoice that Trump saved the day and their premiums went back down, “correcting” the wrong done by Obama.

All that is required to stay in power is to make the majority happy. How did slavery manage to last so long? Because most people vote their pocketbook. The republicans are going to be heros.

One factor to take into consideration: the cost of health insurance has continued to rise for decades, so I doubt that it would decrease with the repeal of the ACA. Perhaps it wouldn’t rise as fast, but there are factors other than the ACA to take into account.

We know that Kylo is obsessed with the Sith of the past, primarily his grandfather. However, since Snoke appears more interested in Rey than Kylo at the end of TFA, perhaps Kylo will eventually find himself cast aside by Snoke or himself become disillusioned when he discovers that Snoke isn’t a Sith. If this is the case, he could devote his energy to uncovering the secrets of the first Sith, and his journey would be a dark parallel to Luke’s in wanting to find the first Jedi temple. They, along with Rey, would meet at the place where the Jedi and Sith broke into two factions, and the three would have an explosive confrontation, eventually culminating in an apotheosis where they reconcile their differences and turn to confront Snoke.

Yet you should always reaffirm your love.

In Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses, he lists as #5:

“…require that when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject at hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say.”

During the reading of this rule my mind went directly to Attack of the Clones.

This feels political, even if it’s a comic about a fictitious land:

There are a lot of compression artifacts in the video, so much so that I can’t comment with certainty on the dirt and grain in all shots, but overall it looks quite good. Some shots are very crisp and clean, others are grainy as I expect they would have been in the theater. The highlights seem clipped on Hoth, but perhaps that’s just because of the colorspace. All in all, I wouldn’t mind this being my go-to version 😉

It’s not exactly easy for most people to burn a blu-ray disc, heck I still just watch Despecialized on my computer. Also, it’s not obvious where to get the how-to guide on burning Despecialized to disc. For example, on the first page there are several broken links:

The ISO image can be burned to a DVD-DL and should work in most Blu-Ray players.

To burn, you can use image burn following thse instructions: http://onlineitpro.com/?p=181

and

More information can be found here:

http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Harmys-STAR-WARS-Despecialized-Edition-HD/topic/12713/

Also, you must first go to the Ultimate Introductory Guide (an excellent source btw) then another site to get to the disc burning instructions.

I expect that this is too much for many people who aren’t expecting so many technical steps. I think it could be more streamlined from the first post, perhaps listing the resources needed before detailing the steps kind of like the ingredients in a recipe.