xhonzi

TV's Frink said:

I agree with you from the opposite end of the spectrum - I love TPM* despite knowing the flaws

 Really?  What do you like about it?  ;)

Just kidding.

TV's Frink said:

xhonzi said:

Regarding the Lost episode (or Star Wars, or my wife, or the 100 other things I like but can't quite explain why)...

I hope for your sake your wife isn't on the forum...

 I've flat out told her this.  Let me get all gross and romantic for a minute, but I think that any of the qualities which I like about my wife could (and probably will eventually) change and I would still love her.  I don't love her for her qualities, but rather I simply love her and am really glad she has the good qualities she has.  For that makes being married to her more bearable.  But if I were to sit down and explain WHY I love her, or WHY I love my kids... I can list things I like about them... but there could be other people with the same qualities and I wouldn't give two darns about them.

In a way, it's nice because it's not based on merit, so you don't have to worry about screwing it up.  In another way, it's incredibly scary since you don't know what makes you love that other person, you can't be sure that it will always be there.  But after 8 years of marriage, I'm as in love with her as I've ever been and I can't imagine ever feeling differently.

Now it's officially a good thing my wife doesn't read these forums.  :)

Well...

After my bro-in-law Brent left, it had me thinking that I was really close to being an "officer"* in the Halo 3 rankings and that I might as well dedicate a couple Saturday afternoon hours to "making the grade."  I had 80-something exp and 7 highest skill for those of you who know, and I simply needed 3 ranked wins to get to 10 highest skill and secure my place in the corps and 2 (two!) achievements. 

So Saturday, I entered the Ranked Lone Wolves playlist and started winning some games.  But after winning a couple of games and not seeing my skill rise... I had to go look up what my problem was.  Oh, so unlike EXP, SKILL only goes up by small amounts as determined by how soundly I beat or was beaten by others and what their comparative SKILL is.  So, in other words, if I deserve to be a 7, I'll be always be a 7 regardless of how much I play.  It's a measure of... erm... skill, and not...  ahhh....  experience.  (can you smell the lightbulb going off over my head?) 

Well, I persevered and made SKILL 10 after about 8 games or so and saw I got my "lightswitch" Lieutenant rank.  I waited for that little "pop" that tells you you're now just that much geekier than your peers who don't have as many achievements as you.  IT NEVER CAME!  Furious, I ran to Teh Innernets (LLC) to see why/how the achievements were glitched.  Well, despite what all of the achievements have to say, I guess you don't get the achievements for achieving Lieutenant rank globably.  You have to achieve it in any one of the super-many playlists.  And for that you need 50 wins on any playlist.  BLAST, I SPENT MY TIME GRINDING THE WRONG PLAYLIST!

Well, back to the salt mines.  I did "have fun" whilst "playing" the "game" so I guess not all is lost... I just failed to... "achieve" something "worthwhile".  The worst part is that I could have been spamming Team Slayer (my highest EXP at 25 or so) with friends and maybe having EVEN MORE FUN, but no... I went off and played Lone Wolves instead.  :(

Does anyone here besides C3PX have/play Halo 3?  We should set up an OT.com night sometime and get a bunch of players.

*That sound you hear is the sound of my non-cool geek factor going EVEN HIGHER!  I was so shamed to explain to my wife that I was trying to be, and then eventually succeeded in becoming, an officer of the Halo 3 corps.

The MacGaffer Group?

IRLogosphere?  (earl-og-o-sphere)

So... this isn't ground breaking philosophy or anything... but here it goes.

A coworker who hated last week's episode of Lost asked me if I also hated it.  I told him I did not and asked what he hated about it.  He rattled off a list of things I could understand even if I didn't ultimately agree...  Then he turned the tables on me and asked what I liked about it.  I felt like a deer in headlights.  Actually, more like those kids on Apple Jacks commercials in the 90s that were just confronted with the fact that the cereal doesn't, in fact, taste like apples (or "jacks" presumably).  I, like the kids in the commerical, eventually setteled on "I just did, alright?!  ALRIGHT!?!?".  Since this guy kind of works for me, he noted my raised voice and agitation... agreed with me... apologized and then bowed and backed down the hallway back to his desk.

It left me thinking for the rest of the day, however: if you can't justify why you liked something... can you really say you liked it?  And, to cut to the chase, I think you definitely can.  I think we "like" things, generally speaking, based on the degree of our emotional response.  It's often hard to explain or describe our emotional responses, so it's easier to list the ways we "rationally" responded to it, and so we often do that in it's place.  Regarding the Lost episode (or Star Wars, or my wife, or the 100 other things I like but can't quite explain why) there were definitely things I liked ABOUT it, and things that I admired and thought were well done... but when tempted to offer these items to my obediant underling as some kind of "cause" for my emotional response... well... not one item or combination of them felt like proper justification.  Just like his litany of things he didn't like didn't compell me to fall on the "didn't like" side of conclusion. 

It did make me think that I like everything unless I don't.  What I mean by that is that I'm emotionaly expecting to like something and I will as long as I don't have rational reasons not to. 

ASIDE: I used to work shifts with a guy (we'll call him Joe (for that was his name)) who wanted to know what we had in common.  I told him I liked movies and he decided that was it!  He liked movies too!  Since that was out of the way, we then started discussing what movies we both liked.  It was 2004 and I ran down some of the geek favourites: Star Wars, Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Terminator, Aliens, etc...  He just stared at me and told me they were all aweful and he couldn't believe I was part of "the unwashed masses problem" and I was part of the reason theses movies made money AND his life miserable.  I continued to offer up other movies I liked and he shot them all down.  Eventually I asked him what movies he liked... He named some older movies, all prior to 1980 if I remember correctly.  I asked him to name a movie produced within the past 10 years that he liked.  He racked his brain and came up blank (that's actually not true.  We both really liked Matchstick Men, but we had already covered that at this point in time.)  He concluded: "In the past 10 years?  I didn't like any of them!  They were all terrible!"  At this juncture, I recommended to Joe that he cease telling other people that he "liked movies."  He may like a movie, here and there, but on the whole- he, in fact, did not like them.  I, on the other hand, like movies.  There are many that I don't like.   But, in gerenal, I like movies.

(back to my previous paragraph)

It did make me think that I like everything unless I don't.  What I mean by that is that I'm emotionaly expecting to like something and I will as long as I don't have rational reasons not to.  So, when I actually come out of something thinking/feeling that I did not like it- I can list the rational reasons that kept from my default behaviour- "liking it."  But I've decided that's not true either.  I think it goes back to the raw emotional response.  Sometimes it's good.  Sometimes it's bad.  But I think it's somehow easier in our minds to list the negative rational things about something/someone we don't like and call that the "cause" of our dissatisfaction than it is to do the converse.

Ultimately, this is my review of RedLetterMedia's Phantom Menace review.  He goes into insane detail to rationally pick apart the logic, story, sense, etc. of the movie.  90% of what he goes into, I never considered.  Once he brings it up, I readily agree with his point and throw it on the pile of my grievances against the movie... but it's really all unneccesary.  I simply hate the movie.

And I don't have to explain why... even if it doesn't taste like apples... I JUST DO.

Well played!  I try to use that quote all of the time, but no one in my immediate flogosphere knows it.

I'm also trying to establish the word "life-log" or "flog" and the derivative "flogosphere" basically just meaning the things I say outloud to people within earshot.  What do you think?

Oh...

I don't think I would have opened a thread called that.

Return of the Squeaky Chair?

"We're going to need another Timmy!"

Name that quote without googling it, I dare you!

Man!  She is little!

Alien and Aliens with the wife.  This might be an awkward time to admit this, but I have this software where I can "quickly" edit out the swears and the gore so my wife can stand to watch with me.  So she'd never seen either of them before... she still thought Alien was gross.  I think she liked Aliens the same way girls like any horror movie: it pushed her buttons and made her jump and scream.  It doesn't look like too much fun from the outside... but I'm sure it's what passes for fun.

The scene that scared her the most was in Aliens when the pair of facehuggers come after Ripley and Newt.

It really made me pine for old school Jim Cameron.  Just like old school Lucas and Spielbergo.

Where are the epic pictures?

xhonzi said:

Being polite, if you think about it, always is some kind of charade.  It's some kind of lie, right?  It's dishonest, as you said.  Bold faced honesty is not something we value much in society.

 Boost, I was disappointed you never commented on my claim above.  Care to now?

Is this on Edward Scissorhands?

doubleofive said:

skyjedi2005 said:

SilverWook said:

If that is the case, what was the big deal on the 1997 "restoration" with claims the films would be faded past the point of no return if they had not acted in time?

Because they chose to go back to the original camera negative, with no generation lost.  Also using this source they needed to redo the opticals and had to find all those lucas had saved and recomp them.

I'll never understand how they had to go back to the original opticals and redo them, but still have the same garbage mattes and transparent elements...

Oooohhh... Busted!

Did you take your ice cream maker?

Like my recommendation for Neal McDonough, I have to recommend Michael Biehn for: Anything.  He just wasn't in enough...  But if I were casting, I would put him in almost anything.

Don't know what specific role he'd play, but I think he's got that Star Wars look that he would fit in well enough.  Almost shares a ressemblance to Mark Hamill, so if you needed someone to play an elder member of the Skywalker clan...

KOTOR II?  I didn't get more than a couple of hours into it.  *shame*

Big mistake.

I've posted the ESB quiz: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Timing-Quiz-How-well-do-you-know-Empire-Strikes-Back/topic/11369/

Same as before (http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Timing-Quiz-How-well-do-you-know-Star-Wars-1977/topic/11353/)

Put the events in order and then guess the time each event starts. The correct order is worth 10 points, and any item out of order will lose you a point. Guess the time (the hours, minutes and seconds on the clock) each event starts. Each time is worth 3 points if within five minutes, 2 within ten minutes, and 1 point within 15 minutes.

Times are taken from the 1980 version of the film (TR47 DVDs).

Feel free to post your answers below. The only prize is knowing how awesome you are, so cheating is, of course, a no-no.

If you haven't created your answers yet, you probably don't want to read below.

I always got a strong Piett feel from him, but he's pretty consistantly drawn as a slightly plump, white haired, white mustached fellow:

In any case, this Edward Fox seems to be a decent match.

Tim Zahn as Karrde?  Doesn't that just fuel the Mary Sue accusations?

And how about Pellaeon?

Come on... you liked it in the day.  Tell me you've never done a Steve Urkel impression. 

And then tell me you didn't do the Macarena during that week in 1997 when EVERYONE did it.