The Testing Chat III: The Time of Great Chatting

[Jung]

Really it seems to me the system as seen on its face provides a lot of opportunities for "passive resistance".

I mean, the talk show thingy alone seems like it would provide plenty of opportunity to say stuff the regime wouldn't want people to hear in a very public venue. Yeah, you have to "make people like you" to get better kit in the game, but the kind of passive resistor I talked about wouldn't care about that. I wonder if they have some other kind of leverage over you, like punishing your family if you don't cooperate or something.

[Dooey Jo]

seems to me that the point isn't so much "how would you win battle royale" as it is "you gotta stand up to this fucked up society"

i mean they don't spend even half the film in the actual hunger games and even then they still emphasize what dicks the rich outside are and what a broken person you'll become if you play their game

as such having katniss become a cold-blooded power gamer that could conceivably win would be quite pointless and depressing

although i agree there were some forced circumstances, my main gripes with the film was that that damn love story (seemed at first she was just being nice, and then playing along, but then...) and they didn't really go anywhere with that rebellion

though since the rebellion caused the rule change, i'm sure it should be interpreted as meaning that her humanity and compassion was what saved her

fair enough, i just think it would have been cooler if (through some restructuring of the story) the rebellion could have spread and busted them all out of there

but then that'd be the end of it and you can't make four movies when the point of the story is already fulfilled in the first one

[Jung]

as such having katniss become a cold-blooded power gamer that could conceivably win would be quite pointless and depressing

Yeah, that wasn't necessarily what I was thinking, but it would have been nice to get more acknowledgement of the issue.

Like maybe change the "hey, there's a campfire over there" scene so campfire girl gets killed by some random who then is visibly discomforted at having taken a human life, instead of Mr. and Ms. Moustache Twirler and company.

Or making the careers less blatant assholes. I remember the same review I mentioned earlier mentioning that in the books the districts got food or something if their tribute won so it would actually make sense for the most impoverished districts to invest in sending careers. If their motivation is "make sure my town doesn't have a famine if the crops fail next year, also nice opportunity to take out my resentment on some random kids from better off places and earn a small measure of symbolic victory over the system" instead of "uphold the system" it would make them more ambiguous while still letting them work as the main enemies in the game.

[Manus Dei]

I wonder if they have some other kind of leverage over you, like punishing your family if you don't cooperate or something.

I am like 90% certain this is implied a bunch of times in the books. Also anyone trying this would almost certainly get fucked over by the gamemakers once the game itself is underway, though the hypothetical passive resister would be expecting to lose and would be less fussed about this. It may undermine the point being made if they are undramatically killed in an apparent accident straight away, however.

seems to me that the point isn't so much "how would you win battle royale" as it is "you gotta stand up to this fucked up society"

Yeah, it's always seemed to me that Hunger Games is more about how fetishisation of violence in media is pretty fucked up and does bad things to people, rather than about how extreme circumstances makes people do extreme things like Battle Royale. Probably because they realized that BR did it very well and wanted to hit something else.

[adr]

so i disassembled that playstation and it kinda looks to me that the thermal paste on the processor needs replacing and maybe that will fix it

problem is i don't have any of that shit in the house. or if i do it is lost cuz i thought i did. but now i have a stack of playstation parts on my desk and im prolly gonna forget how it went together by the time a new order of that crap arrives

god damn it



but you'll never guess what awesome thing i found in one of my boxes while looking for it

A SAILOR MOON ACTION FIGURE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

worth it

edit: i just noticed she isn't wearing a skirt. it must have fallen off but isn't in the box

[Darksi4190]

they sold sailor moon action figures in the states?

[Veef]

yeah for a little while they did

hey adr are you excited for the upcoming s.h. figuarts sailor moon

http://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-news/2 ... oon-photos

[adr]

whoa i am now


but yeah the comic book store had all kinds of sailor moon stuff for a while. most of it was too rich for my blood tho so i only have a lil bit.

[Akhlut]

Speaking of more of a literature analysis of things rather than jiggawatts and what you would do to win, I'm glad to see that I tried to talk about something interesting and it's completely ignored.

On the plus side, they do seem to be talking about systemic racism, even if they don't quite realize it.

http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=158285

As for the Hunger Games: I thought Katniss was supposed to be a pretty explicit woman of color, so why'd they hire an Aryan Ubermensch to be her?

[Infinity Biscuit]

On the plus side, they do seem to be talking about systemic racism, even if they don't quite realize it.

It seemed like only one or two people even touched upon the kind of crime this focuses on and the disturbing message that creates.

[Jung]

Speaking of more of a literature analysis of things rather than jiggawatts and what you would do to win, I'm glad to see that I tried to talk about something interesting and it's completely ignored.

On the plus side, they do seem to be talking about systemic racism, even if they don't quite realize it.

http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=158285

The premise seems pretty obviously based on the hydraulic theory of violence: that humanity has some kind of natural killer instinct or something that causes evil and eventually will find release. The Purge reduces the behaviors it permits the rest of the year as it allows a controlled release instead of mostly trying to supress this instinct 24/7/365 as our society does.

It would potentially be an interesting examination of utilitarian morality: if it actually worked as advertised, would it be justifiable?

I find it somewhat interesting that this has not come up in the SDN thread; I figured that "hydraulic theory of violence" thing in about five seconds so I doubt it's any kind of stunning insight. I wonder if the reason is it contradicts the worldview of a lot of SDNers, and a lot of nerds (maybe just a lot of people in general) have trouble engaging with fictional premises that do that except to reject it as bad/wrong/stupid.

[RogueIce]

guys the youtube just started playing a sailor stars episode. I heard these weren't even translated so i'm like wtf but i'm also like "omg" because they are using the music and stuff from the first season dub (which is diff from the sailor moon s episode that preceded it in my random youtube)

and whoa they even did a SAILOR SAYS SEGMENT!!!!!!111111!!1!!!


so who the fuck made this amazing video? the credits look like.... internet usernames... omg

turns out it is a fan production! LOL AMAZING

http://www.starsfandub.com/


I applaud them, this is fucking awesome

That...really is pretty awesome. I'm surprised, in a good way, to see fandubbers embracing the first run DiC dubs. Gives me a warm fuzzy.

A SAILOR MOON ACTION FIGURE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

worth it

edit: i just noticed she isn't wearing a skirt. it must have fallen off but isn't in the box

And I'm sure that skirt fell off entirely by accident, right?

[adr]

As for the Hunger Games: I thought Katniss was supposed to be a pretty explicit woman of color, so why'd they hire an Aryan Ubermensch to be her?

Moreover I heard on the internet that the casting call was specifically for white people - it wasn't even they saw a bunch of auditions and coincidentally (lol) liked her best, they made the decision ahead of time.

[evilsoup]

...are you sure about that, Akhlut? That seems like the kind of thing the internet would get up-in-arms about, and I don't remember hearing about it.

[RogueIce]

Wasn't she the Twilight chick? I figured it was just that, hardly something sinister.

[Akhlut]

...are you sure about that, Akhlut? That seems like the kind of thing the internet would get up-in-arms about, and I don't remember hearing about it.

There was backlash among a fair amount of people, but because a lot of Katniss's traits can apply to Mediterranean white people (along with biracial people, Hispanic people, North Africans, and Levantine people), they decided to only interview white women and then hire an Aryan.

Plus, there were THG fans who called Rue's actress a nigger, so making Katniss white probably doesn't piss off that demographic.

http://m.aol.com/moviefone/default/arti ... =mf_newart

http://jezebel.com/5781682/the-imminent ... es-heroine

[Dooey Jo]

i hear the internet went batshit insane over the fact that Rue was black in the film

even though that was also how she was described in the book

but of course i was ninjad by Akhlut



also, 44% of jihadis found to be engineers

[evilsoup]

also, 44% of jihadis found to be engineers

have you posted that over on teo yet?

[Oxymoron]

Don't do this at home, kids

[RyanThunder]

also, 44% of jihadis found to be engineers

have you posted that over on teo yet?

What the hell is that article trying to say? It's just a collection of vague ramblings about engineers?

[Jung]

There was backlash among a fair amount of people, but because a lot of Katniss's traits can apply to Mediterranean white people (along with biracial people, Hispanic people, North Africans, and Levantine people), they decided to only interview white women and then hire an Aryan.

I wonder what drives that kind of decision. Do Hollywood people fear that lots of white moviegoers couldn't identify with a protagonist who wasn't white and so wouldn't want to watch their movie as much, and so prefer white characters as safer from a money-making perspective? Is it a product of lack of thought and whiteness being the default?

------

Speaking of movies, I just got around to watching that prequel to The Thing last night, and is it just me or did they play up the sexualized/rapey elements of the Thing more in that one?

I'm particularly thinking of the part where the two-faced Thing-beast comes to be via the Thing forcibly amalgamating another person into itself in a way that looked to me more than a little like homosexual rape, but also more generally the aesthetic of the monsters, and the dissection scene, where it seemed like they were cutting into a kind of womb and had found a kind of fetus inside, which isn't something I got a sense of in the "that isn't dog, it's imitation" scene in the first movie.

I'm curious whether this is a real difference or just a result of me not having watched The Thing for a long time so when I saw the first film I brought different attitudes to the table than I do now and hence remember it differently.

I wonder if it might have something to do with the decision to break away from the first film's presentation of an isolated all-male group, or maybe is a reflection of differences in Hollywood or society as a whole between now and then.

PS by "original/first movie" I mean the Carpenter version, not the really old version.

[evilsoup]

Look, having a female protagonist is already seen as a risky move by Hollywood
having her be from a minority too would give the execs panic-induced heart attacks

[Oxymoron]

I wonder...

Execs don't take decisions just out of inertia or stupidity. There's, at least originally, a reason why they do things.

Do they really think that that kind of casting details could have such an importance on the potential commercial success of their movies ? What kind of facts / observations would these choices be based upon ?

[evilsoup]

For example: when Green Lantern flopped, it was because it was a shitty film.
When Catwoman and Elektra flopped, it was because people don't want female superheroes.

[Jung]

also, 44% of jihadis found to be engineers

have you posted that over on teo yet?

While that accounted for the preponderance of degree-holding jihadis, it did not explain the dominance of engineering. For that, the social scientists turned to what they called the “engineering mindset”. “Engineering is a subject in which individuals with a dislike for ambiguity might feel comfortable,” they wrote. According to a US survey, engineers were “less adept at dealing with the confusing causality of the social and political realms and . . . inclined to think that societies should operate in an orderly way akin to well-functioning machines”.

I know who that reminds me of! [/cheap shot]

Seriously I remember hearing somewhere that engineers tend to be one of the most conservative of the "educated" demographics, so I have on occassion wondered about this kind of thing. Another thing that occurs to me is that engineering may be a relatively unthreatening "intellectual" profession for the maintenance of weird and reactionary beliefs because it doesn't really involve thinking about people, and hence the kind of questioning and thought that might undermine such beliefs can be avoided. This, I suspect, is also one reason why it's a branch of the educated that conservatives tend to have less contempt and distrust of, or at least that's the impression I get. You can be a textbook reactionary who knows intimately the nature of car engines but has all sorts of terrible ideas about the nature of women and gays and Jews and blacks and poors that you never really question, whereas interest in something like biology or literature or sociology might steer you more in the direction of thinking about people-related issues which might lead to all kinds of naughty thoughts.