Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda

How much of “Shape of Water” was practical?

No, my work obligations and publisher’s deadline consumed my every waking moment. I just got my manuscripts submitted, and my wife and I are now taking 2 weeks vacation. When I return, finishing ROTP is the first on my list.

Based on the thread title, I thought TLJ was no longer standards compliant, and that we will need to download a newer version.

Yesterday was listening to a bunch of Sun Ra.
Really like his early stuff from the 1950s.
Sounds like a swinging big band on an LSD trip.

If the NK talks fall through, we will certainly see the republicans saying that it is a GOOD thing, then giving Trump credit for it, and then nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize for rebuking a dictator.

joe12stories said:

“May the Force Be With You”, “Battle in Hyperspace”, and “Destroy Death Star” were all horizontally flipped in the toy cartridges compared to the theatrical versions. “Assault on Death Star” and “Danger at the Cantina” had the proper orientation. Preserving the horizontal flip in the first three is critical if the desire is to preserve the sequences as they were in the toy.

Ok, that’s great information. I’ll probably re-capture the first one anyways, since I have hi-def now.

It is still my plan to digitize all of the other Kenner cartridges. I believe that I have all of the SW ones.

BTW, is it really true that I flipped parts horizontally? I don’t remember doing any scene by scene changes. I do remember it being rather hard to feed because it was wound backwards from normal on the spool and thus curled the wrong way.

Dek Rollins said:

Puggo - Jar Jar’s Yoda said:

darthrush said:

Puggo - Jar Jar’s Yoda said:

darthrush said:
I’ve got to say that it does sound a bit harsh to deny the opportunity of life to someone who might grow up in hard conditions. Is it better that they never lived or to give them a shot despite the chances of being miserable?

One could use that sort of logic to conclude that using birth control is immoral. After all, what if your parents had used birth control? Then you wouldn’t have had a chance at life.

Good point.

I guess it really all comes back to the issue of when does a life truly begin. And to that, I do not know. Any time I define a point along the development of a human, I always feel unsure.

Right. This is why I prefer that laws on this follow scientific opinion rather than religious opinion.

And by science, doesn’t life begin at conception? That’s when the child starts growing anyway, which sounds pretty scientific to me.

“Life” begins long before conception. The unfertilized egg - heck even a red blood cell - is alive, but that doesn’t make it a person. Is it immoral to allow a blood cell to die? Is it immoral to get your hair cut because of the living hair cells that then are killed? The question isn’t whether it is “alive”, the question is at what point does a single fertilized cell become a human being.

Most religions have chosen to define that moment as the time of conception, but that is a wholly spiritual marker, since the only unique marker at that point is DNA - which is present in every cell of our body that we seem to be perfectly ok with when it dies (such as a blood cell or hair cell). In my opinion (and in the opinion of the courts), there are many other more reasonable points along the growth path that are less arbitrary, such as when the brain becomes active for the first time.

darthrush said:

Puggo - Jar Jar’s Yoda said:

darthrush said:
I’ve got to say that it does sound a bit harsh to deny the opportunity of life to someone who might grow up in hard conditions. Is it better that they never lived or to give them a shot despite the chances of being miserable?

One could use that sort of logic to conclude that using birth control is immoral. After all, what if your parents had used birth control? Then you wouldn’t have had a chance at life.

Good point.

I guess it really all comes back to the issue of when does a life truly begin. And to that, I do not know. Any time I define a point along the development of a human, I always feel unsure.

Right. This is why I prefer that laws on this follow scientific opinion rather than religious opinion.

paja said:

This one is still making me laugh.

darthrush said:
I’ve got to say that it does sound a bit harsh to deny the opportunity of life to someone who might grow up in hard conditions. Is it better that they never lived or to give them a shot despite the chances of being miserable?

One could use that sort of logic to conclude that using birth control is immoral. After all, what if your parents had used birth control? Then you wouldn’t have had a chance at life.

Currently making my way through the Mosaic Dial box set. Lots of Charlie Parker on it.

Johnson? Wilson? I’m confused.

I was never a Reagan fan, but I would confess to having been moved by his speech after the challenger disaster.

suspiciouscoffee said:

I was raised to be a weird sort of fair-weather literalist. As in my dad said things like “Maybe fossils are just decoration God put there, and maybe the world is only about 10,000 years old. Maybe.”

Yeah, with logic like that, maybe the Flying Spaghetti Monster put the Bible there for decoration.

CatBus said:

Yeah, that’s just it. Taking a well-designed, modern nuclear carrier and parking it offshore to power a remote town doesn’t actually sound like a half-bad idea, at least as some sort of stopgap. But this thing? They just launched it and it looks like a Soviet-era museum piece.

I hate to judge a book by its cover, but come on.

It looks like it’s already had a major nuclear accident.

There needs to be a thread about Kim Jong Un’s portable toilet.

Nah, the response-du-jour is that we need to arm the customers. Surely the most logical path to tranquility in our coffee shops and delis, is mutually assured destruction.

The moon is made of green cheese!

This bit about the cool people dying young is nonsense. Certainly there are myriads of uncool people who die young.

As for people who are(were) just as cool (or even cooler) at an old age: Paul McCartney, Stephane Grappelli, Maggie Smith, Vladimir Horowitz, Clint Eastwood, Samuel Jackson, Leonard Cohen, Michelangelo, Orson Welles, John Wayne, Sean Connery, Ella Fitzgerald, etc etc.

Perhaps an individual sasquatch pops up occasionally via time travel.

Along Frink’s line of reasoning, I also consider the various religious gods to be highly unlikely, for the very reason that their descriptions are comprehensible to us. Any being that could create our universe must be so many intellectual/evolutionary rungs above us, that we couldn’t possibly understand essentially anything substantive about it.

Further, I see no reason for god to try explaining anything to us. If we found some sort of primitive protozoic life on Europa, would we try explaining anything to it? Its life is all about eating, pooping, and splitting. We might feed it, but in so doing we wouldn’t be revealing anything of substance to it about us. Similarly, our life of physics, math, art, etc. would likely be so primitive compared to whatever thoughts/processes god utilizes, that I see no point in him “communicating” at all with us. I think we are just patting ourselves on the back if we think that god wants a relationship with us.

chyron8472 said:

ZigZig said:

it seems to me that you do not understand that your “opponents” are not opposed to the idea of God,

It seems to me that they are opposed to the idea of a God who desires relationship with us, if even exists at all.

I’m not sure what you mean by “opposed to the idea”. I’m opposed to privatizing social security, and I’m opposed to mandating prayer in schools. By contrast, I don’t believe in God, but that doesn’t mean that I am “opposed” to there being a God. If there is, great! What I oppose is passing laws based on the assumption that there is a God, especially some alleged particular God.

As far as whether he desires a relationship with us, that would be awesome. But it seems to me that if he does exist, he isn’t making that desire clear at all. It seems more like a claim made by some people.

People believe many things that aren’t proven, even in science. For example, much of computer science is based on the belief that P is not equal to NP, even though that hasn’t been proven. All of math and science includes certain assumptions that must be made in order to make progress. So saying that it is being overly-critical to require “proof in a lab” to believe in God (or ghosts) is a red herring. People don’t require that level of proof to believe things.

However, testimony about ghosts is un-compelling – not because it isn’t “proven in a lab”, but because there is no clear tangible evidence to corroborate that testimony. Also, testimony about ghosts is wildly inconsistent.

In my opinion, testimony about god is also uncompelling for the same reasons. It makes zero sense to me that a god who wishes to be revered would leave no clear and tangible evidence of his existence. It also makes no sense that there would be over 4000 religions in the world, and god expects us to believe the testimony from one of them while discounting the testimony from the other 3999 – especially when most people in the world are guaranteed to not have even been exposed to that one or its adherents’ testimony.

Further, using the concept of “faith” to circumvent the above reasoning is something that I find disturbing. Being asked to believe something so important, specifically in the absence of evidence or logical support, is far more easily explained by it being a historical mechanism for people to control other people. And for that, there is plenty of corroborating evidence.

It’s an age-old tactic – when the scandals are closing in, bomb someone to keep your base waving the flag and screaming your support. U - S - A ! U - S - A ! Mission accomplished.

Unfortunately, the current political climate (white house, senate, congress - and soon the supreme court) is to deregulate everything, especially the internet, so that mega-billionaires can become as rich as possible. That is not compatible with requiring companies to waste their time with annoyances like protecting consumers’ personal data.