Syndicate
Craig sent this ages ago, and it came up in a conversation I was having with some family a few weeks ago. I’m not exactly sure how I ended up in a conversation about camels being hit by trains, but it was annoying that I didn’t have a link to the very event I was trying to describe.
While the whole thing isn’t terribly funny on it’s own - for some stupid reason, the addition of a speech bubble is … pretty hilarious.
Hi. We need to have a talk. A serious talk.
What do you know about Avatar? No, not the blue-people Avatar. The other one. With the kid with the arrow on his head and the mastery of elements. That one. Hopefully, it’s more than just the movie. In fact, I’d really like to just pretend there was NO airbender movie.
Alright, let’s just get this out of the way. The movie is terrible. It is disjointed, incoherent and generally confusing. You only get some vague character development. The special effects are cool. Absolutely. But that’s it. I’d give that movie a 1/5. And it only gets 1 because the special effects are cool and I have a soft spot for the series.
The series? Yeah, the movie is based off a cartoon series. It’s not a particularly long running series - there were only 3 seasons of about 20 episodes each. But it’s AWESOME. It’s hilarious and creative and fun to watch.
Well, I’ll be fair - I’m only a few episodes into the second season right now. But I’m thoroughly enjoying the whole thing. The movie is supposed to take us up to the end of the first season (and it does) but it is such a poor representation of the series that I felt the need to actually speak up in it’s defence. Almost as if someone saw the potential of a movie that could be made about the Avatar, and then instead made a movie explaining how you should not make a movie about the Avatar. You know - to whoever actually does make the movie, don’t destroy the plot lines. Don’t skip the awesome fight scenes. Try to keep the humour and feel of the series.
It’s kind of like what happened with Battlefield Earth. Do you remember that? The book is spectacular, and the movie is probably the worst adaptation I’ve ever seen. Well, the worst adaptation of something that could have been cool.
The series gave a number of epic battles for the movie to use. The movie doesn’t use any of them. And the best of them all is at the end, which the movie shows, but CHANGES. Why do people have to do that?! And, why didn’t anyone speak up when this was being filmed? Surely, someone must have thought that it would be better to fix this up. I highly doubt they’ll be able to make a 2nd or 3rd movie now, which is too bad. It had such promise!
The general story here is that you’ve got this kid called an Avatar. He can control all four elements - Earth, Water, Fire, Air - in a world where everyone else can control one element. His role is to bring peace to a world at war. It’s all very awesome. The plot is fantastic, with lots of twists and great humour. None of which you can see if you watch the movie.
I’m not the only one who thinks this was an epic failure, either. Check out this review , which is a bit more detailed and has spoilers and generally says everything we’re all thinking. It makes me wish reviews could be somehow tied to petitions to give feedback to those who made the movies, or to be taken into account on movie review sites.
So, beware! Don’t bother with the flick. But I highly recommend picking up the TV series. It’s the best show I’ve seen in quite some time.
So, let’s say you build big things, that you send all over the place by freight train. Now, some of these things are heavy and built so that you have to transport them carefully. You know that an efficient way for train companies to sort cars is by pushing them up a hill, and then directing each car along a particular track as it comes down the other side. You also know that that process is unfortunately called “humping”. You know that you might want some of your cargo to not go through that process.
Naturally, this is what you’ll print on your cargo.
I give this a 4.5/5.
Great fun, and easily as good as the first. A rare sequel that’s a pleasure to watch, and not just because the first was spectacular.
In my opinion, if there was a weak point to Ironman, it was the epic battle at the end of the movie. Jeff Bridges rules, and he was a great bad guy, until the end. There, you had a corporate guy trying to fight a battle against someone who outmatched him in just about every way, using a machine he didn’t understand.
In the first Ironman, the focus is very much on Tony Stark becoming some sort of hero, and the development of the suit (mostly the hardware.) We don’t really see into the work that went into the software involved. Obviously, being a programmer, I take issue with some of that. I felt that the exploration of advanced software and hardware was quite a bit more balanced in this movie. It didn’t go into geeky details, but certainly made the software more of a focus. It becomes more apparent that the software running in Stark’s world are not just little programs he quickly whipped up - they’re things he’s very familiar with, which he has interacted with and built for a very long time. I very much enjoyed that.
Mickey Rourke as the bad guy is spectacular. He’s smart, focused and capable. I found his character to be non-trivial and very well done. I was a bit worried about that from the previews, but came away quite happy. Actually, on that note - there were quite a few things in the previews that didn’t show up in the movie. I don’t mind that kind of misdirection at all, especially when the result was so good.
The movie is great. It builds from where the first one left off, and gives us quite a bit of character development to get involved with.
The plot isn’t weak. It doesn’t have the shallow characters that you saw in the spiderman or xmen sequels. The movie is witty and fun.
I was lucky enough to go and see this at a midnight showing on Thursday/Friday. Needless to say, the place was filled with geeks. And that was highly entertaining to me. I mean, when you watch geeky movies with geeks - everyone gets all the little jokes and laughs along at the same things.
Even more fun, are the little side conversations going on before the movie. The people in front of me were talking about who was the best Dr. Who, to the difference between various Star Trek ships, and at one point were debating which of them had the best evil laugh. The people behind me were big into comics and were off having discussions about characters that I hadn’t even heard of. A couple of rows ahead of me, were a whole group of people who had their DS’s and were playing games against each other. And then, of course, there were Erin and Kris:
The whole Avenger avenue is explored a bit more in this movie, but it’s still very much about Tony Stark and Ironman.
And, as you might expect, there is a clip at the end of the credits.
Saw this on the North end of the Glenmore reservoir, about half-way along the bridge going over the dam.
I give this movie a 5/5.
Kick-Ass is to super-hero movies what Zombieland is to zombie movies. Or, what Kiss-Kiss, Bang-Bang is to detective movies.
As with any funny movie, the company is very important. Luckily, I was able to check it out with a crowd of people who laughed a lot. Erin and B-man had lots of candy with them, and I’m pretty sure I’d had 2-3 coffee’s. The perfect set up for this flick.
It’s harsh. It’s angry. It’s gory. And it’s plot is not quite serious, but not quite a joke. It’s very, very funny. It’s graphic. It’s laced with apathy and realism.
It’s fantastic.
In my opinion, definitely worth the price of the theatres to check out.
I am sure, like me, you think of yourself as “smarter than average”. You would never fall for a phishing scam or give your bank account number to Nigerian royalty. But the fact is, everyone has their weakness, and someone has found a way to exploit you. Perhaps you’ve been called and told you’ve won a prize and that got you excited. Or maybe you were told about a club discount you could receive, but only by paying huge membership fees. Maybe you’ve fallen for a few of these things. You might still be smarter than average, but even above average people have below average moments.
Mine came in the form of a banner ad. I was told I could buy a Macbook for under $100. I clicked it only because I wanted to know what the scam was this time. The scam was an auction site. I should have clicked ‘back’ right away, but I kept reading. I saw usernames of people who seemed real (and probably are real) winning auctions for big-ticket items like laptops and flat-screen TVs for only a tenth of the retail price.
And that was my weak spot. The idea that this site buys so much stock that they can sell for low prices somehow made sense to the little person inside me who wanted a 50” LCD TV for $150 bucks. The longer I was on the site, the more I felt like I had stumbled upon a gold mine. How did I not know about this place before?
That’s the moment the warning bells should go off. If someone makes you an offer that you can’t wait to tell your friends about, then you are being scammed. As the adage goes, if it seems too good to be true, it is.
I got myself a username and thought it was time to start winning some TV’s and laptops. This was going to be the best Christmas ever. I tried to register a bid, when I was hit by the catch: you had to pay to bid.
Pay to bid? Seemed a little strange. But, hey, each bid was only like 10 cents, so what’s the harm? I’ll pay for a few bids, snipe one of these auctions right before it ends, and I will bringing home some luxury items. So I payed for some bids and began. “Yeah, $60 worth of bids… that’s like 6,000 bids, that’s going to last me a lifetime on this site”.
I started bidding on a Macbook. The bidding started at $0.02. I threw my bid down. Now it was at $0.04 with 20 hours to go. 20 hour until I win my $100 laptop with free shipping!
But why wait 20 hours? Why not go snipe an auction that’s almost ending? There was a TV auction ending in 30 seconds. I entered the room. 3. 2. 1. BID! Yes, I am the high bidder. I WON! Oh wait, the auction has 30 more seconds, how did that happen? Did I read that time wrong? Nope… now the auction has 2 minutes, now 5, now 20. What is going on?
Well, every time you bid, it adds 10 seconds to the auction. In order to win, you need to be the high bidder and stay the high bidder for 10 seconds. But with each auction being watched by 100 other suckers, um, I mean, people of above average intelligence, the auction was never going to end. Once the clock hits 3 seconds, the whole room would bid, pushing the price up another $2 and adding another 10 to 30 minutes to the auction time.
This is going to take forever, I thought, I need to go to bed. The owners of the site had foreseen this problem and created a solution for me. I could buy blocks of bids. I could setup a “bid butler” to bid for me while I dreamed of my new TV. Well, do the math, how long do you think those 6,000 bids I bought lasted? Not very long. Oh, and guess what I won? That’s right, nothing. $60 down the drain.
I started thinking about how much this site was selling these laptops for, in reality. Let’s say the auction ended finally at $200, which for a Macbook would be an amazing deal. 100 people bidding at $0.10 a bid, each time moving the price up only $0.02.
$200 / $0.02 = 10,000 (number of bids)
10,000 bids * $0.10 = $1000 on bidding alone
$1,000 + $200 = $1,200
So, these guys sold that laptop for $200. And out of those 10,000 bids, what are the chances yours will be the winner? Very slim.
Also, $200 as a winning price is a very conservative price. Some were as high as $600, still an outstanding deal. But a $600 final price means the site made $3,600 on that laptop. Sure, a few went for $90, and those are the ones mentioned on the banner ads to get you there. The only way to guarantee a win is to pay 3 times the retail price.
Wow, do I feel stupid. Not only am I down $60, but I was beaten by 6th grade math. Don’t click banner ads.
I was just standing in line at Safeway, picking up an assortment of healthy foods. Cheesies, cookies, ginger-ale, chocoalte, etc.
As I’m standing in line, a couple comes up behind me and they stand there. What else can you do, to avoid looking at, or talking to, the person standing a foot away? Well, you start looking at all the really funny magazines they have there. The girl looks at them and sees a little book called “Natural remedies”. She picks it up and says - “Oh, cool - natural remedies!” The guy openly laughs, and then says: “What, are you an idiot?”
With considerably more restraint than I could have mustered - she puts the book back and says “Why? ’cause of the book? I guess so, then.” And he responds with “I’ve got a book you should read.” Which, of course, is ridiculous, since she was just trying to pick up a book about the very subject and read it.
Now, at this point, I really wanted to know - other than that being a ridiculously rude way to talk to someone you’re with - is it the concept of natural remedies that he’s against? Or is it this particular book? And why would either of those cause him to think she’s an idiot if she felt like reading the book?
If I wasn’t so immersed in reading about Angelina Jolie’s weight problems, I totally would have said something. Actually, no - I wish I had the guts to stand up for random strangers, but I really don’t. So, to compensate for my general cowardice and inability to say anything that might actually matter to the people it applied to, I will just randomly post this on the Intertron.