mormont
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Posts posted by mormont
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This is just sad.
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3 hours ago, Larry of the Lawn said:
For the sake of everyone's mental health might be worth managing expectations about any of this trump litigation amounting to anything.
Ormond could comment with more knowledge, but my understanding is that depressing expectations does not in fact have a signficant protective effect on mental health.
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23 minutes ago, Ran said:
I'm not sure the fact that it is a possible and reasonable, if unlikely, goal predicates letting them on.
Again, the captain is overconfident, so he dismisses the unlikely in favour of 'calling their bluff'.
It's not really a critical point, and it's exactly the sort of 'plot hole' that slides by if you're OK with the episode and only seems like a problem if you're looking for reasons why you didn't like it.
From a narrative point of view, it works very well. Skoll using an old Jedi code instead of the more complex solution you suggest (that needs a lot more exposition) plants the idea of his origins early with the audience. It's also not a stretch of the imagination to supppose that if it hadn't worked, Skoll had backup plans.
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1 hour ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:
The more I think about it, the more I think the prologue to the first episode is kind of idiotic. Two “Jedi” show up out of the blue and ask to board their ship? The captain knows it’s bullshit but he decides to let them board anyway? It could have been a suicide bomber or the ramp could lower and a dozen storm troopers pour out and just start blasting*. Oh, and they happen to be transporting a high-value prisoner to trial? Nothing to worry about there.
The captain is over confident and played as such. But it makes some sense. He pretends to have bought the 'Jedi' thing so he can find out what's going on, but is prepared for trouble. The ship isn't large enough to be carrying a force capable of overcoming his crew in combat. A suicide bomb is unlikely - that would kill the prisoner, which could possibly be the goal but a rescue attempt has to be the major concern.
The only reason the captain's actions seem unwise is that they worked out badly.
QuoteI realize the story required them to get on board and spring what’s her name but seriously? They couldn’t come up with something more clever than that?
Such as?
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8 hours ago, Rippounet said:
Why so? Genuinely curious.
Various reasons. In a lot of cases the suitable spaces for metro lines are already occupied by heavy rail or other infrastructure - including that devoted to cars, unfortunately. The cost of construction is high due to the age of the cities (which means complicated street layouts and lots of historically significant buildings) and high property prices. Some of the major cities without a metro are unsuitable for underground tunneling for geological reasons.
Trams are generally the best bet for UK cities - they mostly used to have them. But the funding issue means they need central government support to build, and that has not been forthcoming.
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Metros and trams are unsuitable for many UK cities, to be fair. But at the same time, public transport in most UK cities undoubtedly sucks and it is a significant drain on the UK economy.
We built the new Queensferry Bridge on (slightly under) budget and only a few months late because of weather delays. That was a huge infrastructure project. It can be done.
How nice it is to be discussing an actually important political issue in a civil way.
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41 minutes ago, Gorn said:
They matter in the primaries (maybe not these primaries where a Trump win is a foregone conclusion). A bad debate can end a candidacy, see Rick Perry.
They might also matter in this general election, since Biden's performance will be thoroughly analyzed due to his age.
They don't and won't matter. Trump has 'lost' every debate he participated in and it didn't hurt him one bit. His supporters don't care.
There's no reason to believe Trump will bother, no reason to pay attention to the Republican debates that occur without him, and no reason to think there will even be a general election debate. I appreciate I sound like Kal here, but on this one I agree.
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Re: the debates, a reminder that it doesn't matter whether Trump takes part or not (he won't) because the debates don't matter. There is scant evidence that they affect the election at all.
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7 hours ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:
- The lightsaber duel a the end of episode 1 was terrible .
In general the fight choreography hasn't been the best. I am making allowances for the fact that some of those involved are apprentices, so maybe that's on purpose? but even so.
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I was going to say that Ray Stevenson is by far the MVP of this series to date, but he has serious competition from Ray Stevenson's Beard. The two of them in combination have as much screen presence as any other five actors on the cast. Magnificent.
2 hours ago, HokieStone said:Hera's line "I'm a General, nothing is classified for me" was incredibly cringe-worthy. Just tells me that the writers know absolutely nothing about how intelligence classification works. (Not that this is anything new for Hollywood)
You don't know how intelligence classification works in the New Republic, though.
(I'll brace myself for an explanation of how it *must* work, nothing else makes sense, etc. ;))
Anyway my interpretation of that scene was that Syndulla is pushing Weaver with a bluff because she suspects the 'classification' is a bullshit excuse. And it is!
- horangi, Lady Anna, Jaxom 1974 and 3 others
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I can see how one might read it that way, but the issue is this:
If we assume that the hospital board were worried about reputational damage, something so obvious as to barely need stating, then that inclines them to not want to believe that they have a killer nurse on the ward, of course. But they still need to decide whether to believe the nurse's denials. That second decision is the one that is undoubtedly influenced by Letby's presentation, and as I noted earlier, that presentation includes her race.
I'm not going to defend the exact wording of the Tweet for the obvious reason that I didn't write it. But equally, I wouldn't expect anyone to throw out race as a factor because there was another motivating factor for the Board not to want to admit the problem. Most of us understand that there can be more than one influence acting at a time. if the author of the tweet words things such as to suggest she thinks there was only one, well, again, I'm not going to answer for her. But saying that doesn't mean that it is, in fact, an either/or, does it?
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11 minutes ago, SeanF said:
It seems more likely that the management were more concerned about the reputational damage of admitting to failings in their institution, than in giving Letby a pass because she was white.
It's not an either/or.
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16 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:
We'll see. Eventually his legal troubles are probably going to catch up to him.
But Trump has already said he'd run from prison if necessary, and he legally could. His voters wouldn't desert him if he did, not in the numbers required to make any of the other Republican candidates a viable option. So I'm not sure his legal troubles make last night's debate any less of a sideshow.
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8 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:
Everyone else not mentioned above does not matter.
As well as everyone else actually mentioned above.
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2 hours ago, Heartofice said:
'Dr' Shola who is a pretty well known race baiting grifter,
I've never heard of her before now. She undoubtedly has a PhD though, so the scare quotes there are a choice.
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11 hours ago, Heartofice said:
Agree, it's pretty awful when people use tragedy to push their own agendas and grift their way to more clicks and views.
The quoted tweet is a reasonable, pertinent and obvious observation. We know that Letby got the benefit of the doubt in part because people thought she was 'nice' and found it hard to credit her as a killer. Part of that was her appearance, and part of that was that she was white. White women, particularly young, able-bodied white women, are very much the avatars of innocence in our culture.
I would have to say that if there's an agenda being pushed here, it is the idea that Letby's whiteness didn't matter.
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47 minutes ago, Gaston de Foix said:
This is all in furtherance of the the "I genuinely believed there was fraud and I was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election so no corrupt intent" defense he's going to be running.
Right, but that defence doesn't work, is my point.
It doesn't matter what Trump believed or what his motive was in committing crimes. And in any case if his motive did matter, it has to be things that he knew at the time. It can't be something he only found out about later! But that's what he's saying now, that he's only just discovered this proof.
I know it's all chaff, flailing around as is Trump's normal M.O., and that logic and reason don't matter to him or his supporters as much as vague feelings and warm bullshit. But still.
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1 hour ago, Mindwalker said:
Donald Trump responded to his latest round of criminal charges by going on Truth Social Tuesday morning to announce an upcoming “major News Conference” at which he would present “A Large, Complex, Detailed but Irrefutable REPORT on the Presidential Election Fraud which took place in Georgia.”
This is it, guys—this report will make all those pesky Georgia charges go away: “Based on the results of this CONCLUSIVE Report, all charges should be dropped against me & others — There will be a complete EXONERATION!”
Obviously he has no evidence of fraud, but does he realise that even if he did, that wouldn't exonerate him of the charges against him? Two wrongs don't make a right. Even if the result was fraudulent, corrupt attempts to overturn it would still be a crime.
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Musk was always a libertarian. Like many libertarians, he has made the journey to being a right-wing reactionary. Not a huge surprise.
He did used to disagree with the right on some issues, but he has either changed his mind or doesn't discuss those issues at all any more. Again, this happens to a lot of 'libertarians'.
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3 hours ago, Caligula_K3 said:
the general internet consensus
With this and a couple of pounds, you can buy a coffee.
Seriously, identifying 'the general internet consensus' on anything is a pointless exercise. It's almost impossible to objectively identify what it is, and it tells you nothing of real value even if you can. Like fishing for used boots.
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Many if not most of those starving kids she's so concerned about are on benefits, and if they were well fed, Platell would be whinging about that because their parents are lazy scroungers. It's so transparently 'why don't you all fight over scraps?' it's barely worth bothering with.
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12 hours ago, Kalnak the Magnificent said:
I don't see why Ben Grimm is particularly good, especially compared to all the other characters they have out there.
I could write a lengthy answer about how Ben embodies the best of Lee and Kirby in terms of their character tropes, but the shorter response is: as we all know, the whole reason the Avengers were the basis of the MCU was that Marvel had sold off the really popular properties' film rights. X-Men, Spider-Man, and yes, the Fantastic Four. The Avengers were the remnants that nobody wanted. They're now the leading IP, but for decades they were behind the FF in popularity (and the FF in turn were behind the X-Men and Spidey).
It wasn't Iron Man on all the lunch boxes and duvet covers in those days: it was Bashful Ben Grimm. Along with Spidey and the Hulk, he was the face of Marvel for years.
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Saying the FF are boring is just not true at all.
Ben Grimm is easily one of Marvel's best characters, just on his own. He held down a team-up title twice, something only Spider-Man has been given otherwise. Sue is a fantastic character when written well: very few superheroes get to be mothers and almost none get to be one and not be defined by it. Written properly, she's literally the heart of the team. Reed is often, lazily, written as a sort of uncaring monster (or worse, the secret villain which is a boring, edgelord idea, typical of Ellis, who is overrated IMO) but written well is a keystone of the Marvel universe, the inverse of Doom, the man Doom wants to be but never can be. Even Johnny, Valeria and Franklin can be and have been written well. And the team, as a concept, has been very adaptable, switching out membership and working well despite it. Ryan North's run right now is getting rave reviews.
The FF are absolutely a great team, better with Doom, sure, but a keystone of the Marvel line even without him.
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I'm in the 'rather enjoyed this' camp. I liked the Ciri solo episode, the battle, and Cavill's last fight at the end. I tend to enjoy fight scenes in fantasy for what they are: few of them make any real sense if you know anything about medieval combat so the best way to view them is as entertaining choreography, rather like a dance but with more fake blood.
Anyway, I was entertained.
Star Wars: Critical Divide (This is the way)
in Entertainment
Posted
None of them work, though. By which I mean none of them do what the writers need to do here, which is establish the characters of Skoll and his apprentice.
As noted, the use of the Jedi codes establishes for the viewer the idea that Skoll has links to the Jedi. The captain's preparedness, and Skoll's ability to handle that reaction with ease, besting all of the New Republic troops easily, establishes his power levels. And the fact that he tried the deception when he could simply have killed them all to start with, establishes that he doesn't want to kill for the sake of killing.
Writing needs to do more than satisfy your version of credibility. I've said it before, people on this board get too hung up on 'plot' and 'plot holes' as the be-all and end-all of good writing. It's a blinkered view.