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Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Bought a cold sandwich at a quick-service place in England.

    There's your problem. This one has a certain appeal, though. I'd pay eight pounds just to be spared the usual pile of cucumber slices, old egg, and obscene quantity of mayonnaise.

  • I almost think it works well that he was in a completely different headspace than the rest of the actors. It made him effortlessly bizarre when he could have come off more as mailing it in.

  • It's fairly subtle on my monitor, but I can definitely see some cell-shading, almost resembled Don Bluth rotoscoping.

    Gotta admit, it felt like a half measure, and I didn't love what little I saw. Looked more like saving money than innovating. Willing to be convinced otherwise though.

  • Sorry, but even he must bow to the might that is Chiss Gaines.

  • A jump to the past is a nice trip for a 2 or 3 parter in Trek, but a whole season just didn’t jive that much for me.

    Same. To me, a sci-fi series or season set in the past just screams, "Somebody is over this shit." Whether that's the actors, writers, or (most likely) the money, somebody didn't want to build a bunch of god-damn sets, or get up at fuck o'clock to go into prosthetics, or pay for any of that nerd nonsense.

  • Good catch! I'd never heard of him. Looks like his patreon subscribers could get a hard copy sent to them.

  • This is a pretty funny little deal, on several levels. At one level it's obviously sending up the suburbanites lifestyle, but it also has a subtext gently teasing New Yorkers about how they see the rest of the country, like the old "View of the World from 9th Avenue" magazine cover. Probably depends on the audience, I reckon.

    My favorite is probably the fake address. 24th street cuts across Manhattan, at roughly 900 feet per long block, each of which corresponds to a building number 100 higher than the previous block. Extending it out to the fake address, you end up about 90-100 miles away, in the suburbs of Scranton, Pennsylvania, the far hinterlands where people practice weird religions, play with "Toy Men," and pursue their hobby of "Car Engines" with their shoe-collecting wives who are either teen mothers, being cutely faux-29 forever, or probably both. They live in huge houses on isolated plots of land like an eighth of an acre or more, and they never talk to each other. It's all really pretty much the same as Michigan or Minnesota or Montana, I think.

  • NO YOU'RE RIDICULOUS! PIMENTO64 HAS NO HEART! THEY'RE A CHUMP! A CHUMP I TELL YOU! HOW MANY RINGS DOES PIMENTO64 EVEN HAVE??!?!?!

  • I think what they're saying is that there is a certain tolerance for silence from the Play-by-play and analyst in a football (soccer) broadcast in Europe. Part of it is style, but another part is simply the cadence of the game and the way crowd noise works. American fans tend not to (sonically speaking, and in aggregate) sort of hum and buzz in time with the tension of the play, and frankly most of our sports don't have that same rhythm. Gridiron football and baseball in particular would be bad TV if they were announced the way soccer can be, doubly so with the weight of audience expectation. I do think an ice hockey broadcast can sort of sound like a soccer broadcast on meth, though, and thinking about the structure and cadence of play, that makes sense. In some sense, they're the same sport with a different config file. :-)

  • If you were looking to add data, and certainly it's already appreciated as-is, budget is always relevant. I assume production budget at least is usually not too terribly hard to find.

  • Han was promoted for the mission on Endor.

    This. It says a lot about the personnel available to the Alliance and the optics, namely the importance they placed on the ground mission, and the fact that they needed to set expectations for how Han would be treated by his new troops.

  • I think you've got that a bit turned around. I don't think Luke was ever referred to as a "Captain" so if indeed they're roughly mapping to US ranks, he would be the O5 (or possible O4 as Lt. Cmdr.s are often referred to as Commander for convenience) and then, as you say, separated or inactive in ROTJ.

    If we assume Han had formal ranks and wasn't just being called Captain to acknowledge he was captain of the Falcon, he would have been the O6 in ESB and received probably some sort of brevet or field promotion to O7+ because of the importance the Alliance assigned to the ground operation on Endor. It's conceivable that he was in the "Army" track all along though and was the O3 in ESB, but I think either the honorific or Naval track is more likely.

    Lando, if the scriptwriters put much thought into it, was either rolling with a title earned at Tanaab or was on a USAF track, which builds off its heritage as the Army Air Corps and Army Air Forces.

  • Late 70s here, with a brother several years older. We were an Atari house, for instance.

    I like Burr in small doses, and I don’t think the overall theme of this will be particularly regressive, so I don’t want to overstate it. That said, I do think there’s gonna be a shrill, loud tone that doesn’t work for me and a lot in the first two acts for the Joe Rogan crowd to sink their teeth into.

  • I'm an Xennial dad whose kiddo was born when I was in my mid-30s. Now at some level, I certainly identify with a lot of the stuff in this trailer, but I dunno, it also kinda feels like Gen X moving into the thoughtless (Edit: Let's say, "occasionally pandering" instead) "yay for people our age!" generational comedies that the Greatest Generation (Grumpy Old Men, etc.) and Boomers (Meet the Parents, etc.) loved so much.

    I am imagining that by the end of the movie, Bill Burr will have a reckoning that he can't continue to rage (at least not quite so earnestly) against the changing of the world for his son's sake, but one or more younger parents will realize there is some value in his old school tough approach. Meanwhile, we get a trailer's worth of the no-BS old guys laying hilarious truth bombs on the overly soft young people that actual Millennials and especially Gen-Z'ers will find to be tedious stereotypes.

  • Too many of those, and people might say Ta-ta!

  • It's hard to explain what an absolute paradigm shift Gmail was. It was about as drastic a difference as you could have with personal email without altering the core service. Orders of magnitude more storage, completely free to the end user, a responsive and usable web interface, a single unobtrusive 1-line text ad when we were used to at least half a dozen that were often full-size banners or even popups, and a good search tool.

    My wife (then fiancee) got us invites, and it was like Christmas. And all from the company that was way less creepy than Microsoft! I'm sure that part would never change.

  • IIRC, that was rolled out as a surprise after a few years. People were just like, "WTF, my capacity is getting bigger?". For a while there, Goggle could do no wrong from a marketing standpoint. That, uhh, changed.

  • The sad thing is, if they'd thought even a tiny bit laterally and leveraged the fact that Google Reader was getting a lot of traction and a core of people were beginning to use its social functions, they could have backdoored themselves into being Digg/Reddit/Etc. and had the social media userbase to take on Facebook organically.

    Instead, they fought the last war (Gmail vs Hotmail), intentionally eroded and then killed Reader, and with G+ they completely fucked up what was a cleaner interface (if not all that special) and a better technological experience, all while they were a brand that was at that time more trusted than their competitors.