yo. I posted this as an announcement, but it occurred to me that nobody may even see it. So, here we go:
In an effort to preserve server storage space, I've decided to clear out all attachments. Of the roughly 500MB used by the forum, close to half of this is attachments. Many of them are years old.
If you are an admin, please log into the Control Panel. From there, go to the Attachments sidebar, click Search, and then enter your username in the field. Set the number of results high to see them all (default is only 10). This will allow you to view every attachment you've ever uploaded, and give you the opportunity to save anything you wish to preserve. On July 16th, I will delete whatever is left. As such, you guys do not have to delete them yourselves, but feel free to do so if you want.
If you are not an admin, you're probably a mod. ;D
If enough of you guys are interested in viewing and saving attachments, contact me via PM. I will grant temporary (24 hour) admin privileges individually. You can follow the instructions above.
A lot of attachments are in the Comics forum. I won't delete those, so don't worry.
This really is an interesting model the US should adopt. Protecting copyright is important, yes, but just as important is protecting consumers from the excesses of DRM schemes, which this goes a long way towards. It also would nullify the worse parts of the DMC act. (For the record, the DMC isn't all bad. The safe-harbor provisions allowing content providers online to not be held accountable for individual user's violations so long as they take reasonable action in removing the content when it is reported. However, even that has the flaw that anyone can report anything, whether they own it or not, and the provider is forced to take all of it equally seriously. Numerous groups are already using it to silence criticism on Youtube, for example.)
Shrek 4 was very mediocre, but Pixar shows every year that they're still great, and this one was no exception... Toy Story 3 is a very good movie by any standards. It really blew away my expectations... it's got both great action and a real, deep plot. Brilliantly done. I was sad at the end... :(
I've reached the point where I consider ol' Missingname there a one-hit wonder.
Well, I enjoyed The Sixth Sense. It was a good movie where the mood fit the basic premise pretty well. The big reveal was also well done (though I ruined it by having watched too much Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits when I was younger), and even if you knew the ending going in, it was still well done. Yes he had some movies before this, but nobody cares.
Unbreakable tried to pick up on that, and again I have to say the story was pretty well told. I thought the ending was extremely lame, but I consider it a good movie in spite of that, if not as good as his first.
His next big thing is Signs. Here's where a lot of people started seeing problems with him not thinking some of his endings through. While it was still pretty good in some ways, and the idea of looking at one of these things from the perspective of just some random family that isn't "the great group of heroes" does have merit, there's just so much overdone drama that, in retrospect, really is kinda dumb. There's that whole prolonged bit about cutting off one of the alien's hands, which aside from being way too overdone, really called into question JUST how effective these great alien invaders actually were. They travel a billion light years only to be stopped by doors? Really? They have NOTHING at all? Random wild beasts could kill them. Really, it's so lame. The ending is the lamest of all, finding out water, WATER, can kill them. Yes, you have War of the Worlds with some bacteria the aliens never adapted to wiping them out, but at least that's a bit more understandable. These aliens never noticed the planet they wanted to invade was 70% HORRIBLE MELTING ACID, and that this substance that MELTED them sometimes FELL FROM THE SKY? It would be like us deciding to invade Venus! How stupid and incompetent are these aliens? Yes at a certain point you have to suspend your disbelief, but this movie was an M Night movie, he wanted to make it believable, he wants to make stuff that's (supposedly) realistic with people reacting to strange situations in realistic ways. However, during all of his character writing not once did he ever stop to think about the alien's personalities, and perhaps thinking that not a single person in the audience is going to buy aliens who MELT IN WATER invading Earth? I make a big deal even though it only really comes up at the end, but really the behavior of the aliens the entire movie is completely incomprehensible, and not in the "beyond our understanding" way, but in the "that is completely idiotic" way. Again, there's a lot to like about it, but stupid aliens end up ruining it. They'd probably have done equally well using the aliens from Mars Attacks.
From there the guy releases this steady stream of progressively worse "twist ending" movies. With The Village it started getting dumb, to the point where the moment I saw the preview I already made a prediction on the ending. I based that on already seeing that exact storyline ON AN EPISODE OF THE JOHNNY QUEST CARTOON. They advertised a big secret behind the main threat in this (their emphasis) "Isolated town
", and it was just SO obvious. For those who didn't figure it out instantly, it's not worth even putting in a spoiler tag, the town is actually a lost town literally just a couple of miles or so from modern civilization, and the "monsters" they hear are just passing traffic from a nearby road. The sad thing is, the reveal at the end was far lamer than I could have imagined. I at least tried to give it the credit of thinking maybe someone FROM modern society gets lost and ends up here, and has to spend some time convincing everyone their flashlight isn't witchcraft, but no, it's just a reveal of the highway, a truck, and then credits roll. It's so lame, and again the whole town is full of depressing sad people. The Johnny Quest cartoon episode I saw did a better job than this movie. At least that had a bigger breadth of human emotion to draw from than "depressing gritty depression".
With Lady in the Water I started to pick up on the fact that the ONLY personality and social interactions this guy can write are dour serious depressing things. It worked in Sixth Sense best, but with each new movie it seems that's the only note the guy can sing. It's not "realistic" at this point, it's just boring. Human behavior and emotion is a little WIDER than the net he casts in all these movies, and Lady in the Water, while it DOES have some good reason to be depressing, ALSO has a bigger group of characters, and at least some of them should be a little more easy going than that, but here it really starts to strike me just how depressing such a wide group of characters ALL are, ALL the time, the entire movie, and while some have good reason, a lot don't really have that except for the sake of some lesson about how life is pain or something. At least a story about telling a story is somewhat interesting, if not as original as the weird fans like to claim it is.
The Happening, as far as I can tell, is M's way of saying "I can do endings other than trick endings". The moment I saw the previews, which consisted of explaining the horrors of how people are starting to randomly and inexplicably commit suicide and how everyone's starting to panic about it, I predicted what sort of twist and moral it might have. I was wrong, way wrong. However, that's only because the "reveal" (not a twist this time) was just so... so... lame. The reason everyone is dying is due to some weird pollen plants are releasing that's causing people to kill themselves, carried on the wind. That's it. The rest of the movie is the main characters running from... wind. It's all so stupid. At some point the characters wonder if this is evolution/nature's way of eliminating "the greatest threat to life on Earth", which basically means they fail biology forever, completely misunderstanding evolution, and nature, and all that stuff. There's no basis for it, no plant communication, it's literally explained as just a weird genetic fluke. Gaia doesn't appear, there's no concentrated war like in Avatar with animals running amok. Just some people doing bad philosophy, and it's lame. It is one thing to give a message about protecting the environment, it's another to do something this ignorant of how nature actually works and pass it off as profound when it's actually just the dumbest sort of hippy nonsense. The worst thing? The worst thing is the twist I expected would have made for a MUCH better movie. In my version, the twist is that the main "cause" is actually mass panic. Everyone is committing suicide in waves because everyone is terrified of whatever's causing people to commit suicide, and people one by one either try to kill themselves before it "hits" them or just give up and give into their fear. It would be a message about not getting caught up in mass hysteria, that sort of thing. I thought THAT was what the movie would be, and while I still didn't really want to see it, as I thought that twist was "obvious and a little played out", it STILL would have made for a far more interesting and entertaining movie than what we actually got.
Now there's this Last Airbender thing. Never even heard of the series it was based on until the previews for the movie came along. It's apparently some anime. I have yet to see it, but I don't want to now. Everyone, and i mean everyone, hates it. Professional critics, casual reviewers, fans of the show, people who've never seen the show, and even little kids all seem to be saying it's a terrible movie. What little I can get about it is so much story is removed that a lot of stuff doesn't make any sense (kinda like the really poor movie version of Golden Compass a few years back), and that others finally noticed what I did a while ago, that Night can only do sad and serious characters. Apparently there's barely any humor or "fun" in this KID'S MOVIE because M. Night can't imagine anyone still being able to, um, enjoy life, in a war situation. Heck life still goes on man. Learn about other emotions! Love can exist even on a battlefield after all (there's a number of historical accounts of this sort of thing, just because you can't imagine it doesn't mean it can't happen, it just means you don't understand humans as well as you like to think you do). You can call me Pollyanna say I'm crazy as a loon, I believe that emotions like happiness aren't frickin' lies disguising "deep depression, the only real emotion in the universe".
And so it's been. M. Night had ONE excellent movie, a couple that had some good moments, and it's gotten worse and worse at such a pace that I think the next thing he makes will make Manos: Hand of Fate look like Schindler's List.
Pope Rat, Hopes to sway sexual deviants in the priesthood away from pedophilia by adopting bestiality, a Vatican spokes person has dubbed the new plan "the Khomeini/Irwin" initiative.
Hmm... this is messed up. Stripping people of their anonymity? Well, they'll still get a lot of comments, but a whole category of people called "cautious" aren't going to be heard.
Oh, and by the way, do you really think that a name alone isn't enough to find someone?
Put your name in there. Think about how many people online you've casually mentioned the state you live in to, assured in the knowledge that THAT'S not enough information to find you. Now be terrified.
Yep, it's that easy. There's a reason I have never bothered with the social networking sites. Starcraft II may be a fun game, but I won't be using this "RealID" system. Well, I might, but I'll be making up a nickname to put in my "put your real name here" slot like I always do.
![[Image: pope-koala.jpg]](http://www.therecord.com.au/site/images/stories/pope-koala.jpg)