New Testingstan

evilsoup wrote:Iron Man Three was pretty good
well, up until the half-hour action sequence at the end, but I think those are mandatory for superhero films (I mean: it was executed well enough, but I just don't really like those sequences)
The Mandarin was Marvellous

Did Iron Man 3 come out early in other countries or something? I keep checking theaters for showings but there's nothing listed.

It came out last week (04-24) here.

For some reason us Americans are getting shafted on the release date. We don't get it until Friday.

RogueIce wrote:Hey adr did you toss any money at this?

you could say that....

i'm a GOLD supporter

That was an awful pun and you should feel awful.

i got a better one i thought up last night

"I said 'get a job', not 'get a Job'!"

Adr is a beautiful flower that the world just isn't ready for yet

Unrelated...

So, this isn't plasma guns yet, but we're getting close.

Losonti Tokash wrote:Adr is a beautiful flower that the world just isn't ready for yet

A turd blossom?

Zod wrote:So I went and saw Oblivion over the weekend. This was a mistake. Don't go unless you want to spend two hours of watching Tom Cruise jerk off to himself.

So it's like most other Tom Cruise movies?

so speaking of puns i've been working a little bit on my fictional language these last several days and i gotta tell you it's been really great

doing language itself is kinda interesting but the real fun comes from the stuff around the language which is virtually everything, including but not limited to:

1) comrade
2) dear
3) darmok
4) languagegate


think about what flood of meaning each of those words has and the amount of background needed to really understanding it. ....translators have a difficult job.

anyway allow me to expand

1) there's a whole mess of politics behind the specific word 'comrade'. they didn't want to call ppl things based off "my lord" to show moar equality and so on. huge story behind it so when a character calls someone "comrade" that one word can tell you a lot about him and point toward a fun political history as to be most meaningful there's gotta be some contrast in there

2) the words you use also can reflect upon personal relationships, showing a level of familiarity or respect. use of these words can be milestones in a romance arc, and the reason has to do with all kinds of background cultural details

3) a lot of what we say are actually references to something else, not literal phrases. to really know a language, you've gotta know popular idioms and influential literature and so on, so that's all kinds of stuff to build up, and the literature also has a symbiosis with history and politics.

4) and of course, it isn't just literature, but more recent history including overuse - x-gate doesn't make sense if you don't know the Watergate scandal, recent history, but it is also a mistake to think it is at all as significant. language is always changing


soooooo yeah at first glance you might think creating a language is a pointless exercise in made up words and syntax but the truth is there's LOTS of story and worldbuilding that comes with it that'd be fun to think about even if the language itself didn't add a little nice flavor from time to time

Djinnkitty83 wrote:

Zod wrote:So I went and saw Oblivion over the weekend. This was a mistake. Don't go unless you want to spend two hours of watching Tom Cruise jerk off to himself.

So it's like most other Tom Cruise movies?

I'm not sure. Usually I tend to avoid Cruise flicks. Now I know why.

adr wrote:x-gate doesn't make sense if you don't know the Watergate scandal

http://youtube.com/watch?v=vB9JgxhXW5w

oxy does this provide an adequate grounding in your language and culture


http://youtube.com/watch?v=K5RsaOOsZFk

evilsoup wrote:oxy does this provide an adequate grounding in your language and culture


http://youtube.com/watch?v=K5RsaOOsZFk

I'll take that as a oui

Stofsk wrote:Guy Pierce doesn't get cast in enough films.

good bloke

seriously though stofsk did you watch Jack Irish when it was on the ABC? Pearce was quality.

"When you peel back the layers religion does nothing that a secular alternative couldn't, and when you see this you understand that you can no longer defend religion."

Man, I wouldn't be at all surprised if belief in the possibility of survival after death of the body tended to make people happier. Fear of death is kind of a big thing with humans, y'know.

I guess you could hold out hope for technological immortality like the transhumanists. Because that's totes rational and not basically religious-like faith in PROGRESS! and SCIENCE! and not driven by the same desires as religion.

My issue with religion is that it generally tolerates the worst kinds of activity. Yes the vast majority of adherents are good, decent people, but the ones that aren't are a bane on civilization.

My issue with atheism is that it generally tolerates the worst kinds of activity. Yes the vast majority of atheists are good, decent people, but the ones that aren't are a bane on civilization.

My issue with politics is that it generally tolerates the worst kind of activity. Yes the vast majority of politicians are good, decent people, but the ones that aren't are a bane on civilization.



let's run this into the ground

adr wrote:My issue with atheism is that it generally tolerates the worst kinds of activity. Yes the vast majority of atheists are good, decent people, but the ones that aren't are a bane on civilization.

Yeah, except it doesn't hold up to reality. Go suck Ron Paul's cock or something.

Jung wrote:"When you peel back the layers religion does nothing that a secular alternative couldn't, and when you see this you understand that you can no longer defend religion."

Man, I wouldn't be at all surprised if belief in the possibility of survival after death of the body tended to make people happier. Fear of death is kind of a big thing with humans, y'know.

I guess you could hold out hope for technological immortality like the transhumanists. Because that's totes rational and not basically religious-like faith in PROGRESS! and SCIENCE! and not driven by the same desires as religion.

Old-school Judaism doesn't really have much of a thing with survival after death- yeah, there's going to be a resurrection, but it's in the indefinite future and until then the dead sit in Sheol waiting. There are all sorts of religions that don't have a positive view of the afterlife, so I'm interested in seeing the raw data and what their sampling drew upon. According to the abstract, there's also correlations between belief in a higher power and expectations for treatment and credibility assigned to the treatment, so I find Stark's idea that the materialist perspective leads people to downplay the capabilities of psychology and psychiatry credible. It also doesn't have any links to a particular religion, but again, I doubt their dataset is likely to have the cross-sections that would really test this. (Nor are they likely to! There aren't any extant societies in which atheism is normative, which rules out testing at least one hypothesis. And the officially atheist-normative China has a fairly flawed medical research establishment, so getting good data might be difficult.)