Marker Splotches

Ramblings of the markers

Thursday, May 19, 2005

oh no! sith!

so, this evening i went to see revenge of the sith with ella and jon... don't worry, i'm not going to reveal anything important. it was SOOOOO much better than episodes one and two!! why? it had several really good things going for it:

1. hardly any romance (thank god!)
2. only tiny tiny amount of child acting
3. pretty cool special effects
4. lots of dark shots of anakin's face
5. they really tried (and generally succeeded) to connect with the original trilogy

things they should have avoided:

1. chewbacca, for goodness' sake!
2. yoda's way of speech, overdoing
3. honestly, how many hands can you cut off in six movies?
4. "intimate" scenes with padme and anakin
5. this one green alien dude that had a really stupid voice

i'm sure more will come to me eventually, but please see the movie and let's have a lively conversation, shall we?

27 Comments:

Blogger puc said...

anna, i just thought i'd share our previous conversation with everyone.
anna: come see revenge of the sith with me tonight!
me: uh, i haven't seen episode one or two and i haven't seen the trilogy in ten years. i have no idea what's going on.
anna: that's okay. neither doesn't george lucas.

(badumpa ching!)(that was my drums and then cymbol to symbolize a good zing)

10:13 PM  
Blogger Anna said...

thanks for capturing me at my witiest. someday when i'm old you can help me write my clever, biting memoirs.

10:20 PM  
Blogger cmptrnrd16 said...

To truly appreciate the movie, I think a lot of backstory not covered in any movie is important. [spoiler]Like knowing that general grevious only has 10% of his orginal body(thats right, he is not a robot). Also knowing that palpatine is actually anakins father. They indirectly say it in the movie, pay close attention and you'll see it too. Also Chewbacka is awesome, and Kysheck(sp?) is one of the coolest star wars planets. I agree though yoda's speech was overdone. But that is because george just sucks at dialog. Alos he knows exactly what is going on, and that is that he is making a shit ton of money.

so anyway, i was talking with a friend tonight, and we were debating wether or not sidious planned on qui-gon finding anakin on tattoine. Shmi was a force senesetive low society figure in a non republic sector so sidious' choice for anakin's mother was appropriate. However, it is unclear when, if qui-gon had not come along, sidious would take anakin and train him...intersting to think about it is.
also another intersting little fact. Code 66 seems like a random number, but 66 actually refers to the number of sith lords killed by a jedi. Hows that one for ya.

10:45 PM  
Blogger puc said...

soooo bored.............must have non-nerd contact..............
(sorry jeff, whoever you are- i can't talk. i'm more of a nerd)

11:02 PM  
Blogger Anna said...

wow. what did i start...?

11:09 PM  
Blogger cmptrnrd16 said...

post-its, your own. We can have a compare nerdiness war once you decided to start talking again. For starters my name is computer nerd, I own a shirt with the WASD keys on it. I have over 75 unique AOL trial CDs. I own a mac. i own 2 xboxes. I still play my master system. I own pong(well odyssey 2000 actually). I own more than one complete series of Fantasy novels. I have had my own website for 2 and a half years. I have had the same screen name for 7 years. I had the internet when I was 8(i had to tunnel in via a dos prompt into my dad's company line). I helped set up over 25 networked computers at my grade school. I have seen SW ep1-3 and all there LOTRs on opening night. I'll save the rest to counter your rebutal, but Ill just mention again that I own a mac. Hell i actually own two.

10:42 AM  
Blogger cmptrnrd16 said...

not neccearily. I still use a unix shell, aka os 10.4, which is essentially all linux is. The reason it is more favorable to use 10.4 over linux is the marketplace interconectivity. While linux might do an excellent opensource job as a home or business computer, a computer out in the field aka, jobs, school, recreation, is better served to be a compatible platform. With 10.4 i have a much easier time colaborating. Plus I own a laptop, and you would be hard pressed to find any 'nix laptops. They are virtually unheardof in production terms untill the present(i belive ibm or dell might have one model shipping with a redhat or a suse). The most feasible 'nix system to run on a laptop is probably knopix, and well, if you know what that is, you know why it isnt very laptop practile. hint:spinning drives suck up lots of battery time.

and why does a true nerd choose linux as their distro over options like OS/2 or FreeBSD. wouldnt a true nerd actually just make his own 'nix distro?

12:06 PM  
Blogger etepetete said...

Jeff, you do know that you spelled Chewbacca wrong on your comment right? I mean such an avid fan such as yourself should know how to spell Chewie's name....

1:20 PM  
Blogger Reine said...

wow nerd overload. didnt see star wars. probably never will.

2:00 PM  
Blogger Byrne Hobart said...

Jeff, the purest definition of 'nerd' is "One who invests absolutely no time or effort in marketing himself." This excludes just about everyone who claims to be a nerd. And that includes you.

2:38 PM  
Blogger puc said...

uh, sorry byrne, but dictionary.com defines nerd as "an insignificant student who is ridiculed as being affected or studying excessively". having said that, i think studying fictional fantasies excessively makes you even more of a nerd, so thus, here i go.

lotr. you've seen the movies? bully for you. i've memorized them. read the books? i've got them tatooed on my ass (figure of speech- i'm trying to get it to catch on). i know the three different types of the elvish language and can say phrases in all of them. i was president of middle-earth and editor of the middle-earth times. on another note... i read biographies for fun. john adams is my ultimate homeboy (with adam smith a close second). i own a mac too. all i've ever know is macs. presently, there are four ibooks and one g5 in my house. (and the door is unlocked, if anyone wishes to steal them...althought i can't imagine why...)

that's it for now. oh wait, did i mention that when i get a tatoo it will be a pokeball? (i still wake up early on sat. mornings to get my ash fix)(and i will maintain that the new episodes are the best)

3:29 PM  
Blogger Byrne Hobart said...

Dictionaries are notorious for writing definitions that give lots of false positives and lots of false negatives, but if you're going to study something instead of just talking about it, you need a pure definition that doesn't allow for extraneous data. And nerd-studiers -- who tend to be nerds themselves -- are the ones who come up with definitions like that. Most of us instinctively recognize nerds when we see them, and dictionary.com's definition is a good cutoff point for those who are nerdier than not. But when you get involved in degrees of nerdiness, you'll find that the people who are nerds par excellence are the ones who don't give any consideration whatsover to what other people say about them.

And yeah, studying fictional fantasies makes you a nerd. But honestly, LotR's history is way cooler than 'real' history, so fantasy fans may have a point.

6:00 PM  
Blogger cmptrnrd16 said...

So the argument seems to be in defining terms, and that is a useless argument imo. Depending on how you define nerd, either one of us could fit the bill. A dictionary is useless (even urban dictionary suggetss that a nerd is one who's IQ exccedes their weight) in this discussion, so byrne go away. And the spelling thing, read my posts, i spell a lot of words wrong.

no offense but you sound more like a fanatic then a nerd. I mean lotr is cool as a culture thing(aka seeing them opening night and owning the dvds that you wont ever watch) but honestly the movies were cool at best(the third one was disapointing). but the books sucked hugely. I couldnt even get into them when i tried to read them THREE DIFFERENT TIMES.

shout out for Mac users.

about the pokemon thing, ya...well we wont go there. and biographies...well i dont see how that fits any definition of nerd.

6:11 PM  
Blogger puc said...

how can you say the movies were "cool at best" but say the books sucked? i'm in utter disbelief. if i knew you and you were sitting next to me, i'd smack you (don't be offended...i'm a very violent person. and according to obtuse, everytime you get hit, you have to pop your collar for five minutes). anyway, the movies wouldn't be possible without the books. tolkien is god. period.

okay, so i probably am a fanatic, maybe not a nerd. but i guess that's a good thing. wait, i once had a conversation about the conditional tense. is that nerdy?

6:22 PM  
Blogger Byrne Hobart said...

Aw, Jeff... basing an argument on well-defined terms is the only way to go about it, since otherwise you literally don't know what you're talking about. Take everyone's favorite Econ teacher: By the end of the year, she'd neglected to define so many terms, she eventually used "Diversify" and "Specialize" as synonyms. And argued that this was correct. Now, those words are antonyms, and if you don't define your terms correctly you'll run into the same problem -- your arguments will become a mush of meaningless verbiage, and your friends will all leave you and you will die alone. So yeah. Define your terms, or I'll kill a puppy.

6:24 PM  
Blogger cmptrnrd16 said...

I thought the movies were cool yes, good action, good acting, well done. I think peter jackson is an arogant prick and don't like him. As for the books, I tried to read the fellowship 3 times and could not get past tom bombadil before bursting into tears of boredom.

i suppose nerds usually are catagorized into well categories. I consider myself a computer nerds cause i feel i know more than average about computers whereas you might be a nerd of well, crappy fantasy series and um...biographies. and i think i should get hit because apparently i am an asshole.

10:43 PM  
Blogger Byrne Hobart said...

LotR is a magnificent series because of bore-you-to-tears scenes like that. They create a contrast with the rest of the book, and let Tolkein show off his creativity in coming up with weird characters.

post-its, have you read any biographies by William Manchester? They are superawesome.

7:30 AM  
Blogger cmptrnrd16 said...

I must have missed something, but the LOTR chars are pretty standard stuff through fantasy. You have your dwarves, halflings, elves, orcs, wizards, etc. I suppose he had what. Talking trees? well shit thats creative I suppose, even though they were probably the lamest race in the movies. Greek mythology had more intersting characters than that hundreds of years prior. And I think the sci-fi worlds have much more interesting characters.

10:42 AM  
Blogger Byrne Hobart said...

Right. It's all standard stuff because it set the standard. It's still the greatest fantasy work ever, simply because it created so many new characters and plotlines -- the entire genre has spent the last sixty years exploring the precedents LotR set.

11:54 AM  
Blogger puc said...

yes byrne, you are so right. lotr is so amazing because it was the first. just because people have been copying it doesn't make it less in quality. and another thing, greek mythology pretty cool stuff, i've giv eyou that. but it all developed over hundreds of years by thousands of storytellers. lotr? one guy. in a lifetime. he created a world with creatures and languages no one had ever seen before. he's amazing. he's god.

and as for william manchester- no. i do more of david mccollough and steven ambrose.

12:14 PM  
Blogger cmptrnrd16 said...

While tolkien may get credit for the creation of a few races, he is hardly the first. I mentioned in particular greek mythology, but faries, elves, magic, and evil have all existed in mythologies of different contries long before tolkien finished the LOTR in 1948(correct me if i got the date wrong, the books were published later, but i belive he finished writing them in '48). The problem with most mythology that he was influenced by, was that it was never, or rarely written down in published story form, and thus word of mouth was its carrier. Tolkien was the first to write an epic in this fantasy world, but hardly, IMO, the best. I support my opinons on the fact that after 3 tries i could still not find interest to continue. Whereas other authors (I will name R.A. Salvatore) kept my intrest through over 10 books.

as for the languages he created, well, i belive that to be ultimately a faliure seeing as how I know not of any nation that uses it as an offical language, nor do I know of any languages that derive from it. Admitedly it is quite awesome that someone can creat a language, but like klingon it is quite useless. While i have heard people claim to know these fantasy languages, I have yet to see anyone actually converse in them.

3:25 PM  
Blogger pipsqueak said...

I can't believe I just read all of those comments even though I had no idea what these three uber-freaks were talking about. I guess that says something about how I spend my time.....Shut up, I'm cool.

1:40 PM  
Blogger Anna said...

hey guys, let's just be clear here. according to our standard rules, you guys are geeks, not nerds. Ok?

nerds=people who study very hard at school and tend to hang out with other smart people who do less on weekends. example-miryam. she does stuff on weekends, but works hard on school, like staying up til 5 or so working on homework, and actually cares.

geeks=people who take a deep interest in one or more of the following, and then become involved in fanatiscism or just really bizarre stuff revolving around said topics: computers, star wars, star trek, fantasy, sci-fi, anime, tech crew, etc. example-me. I can say several things in klingon and nadgat, have tried twice to invent my own language, dressed up as a spider for trotk, read robert jordan for christs' sake, and can argue the difference between a geek and a nerd, to name a few reasons.

so there.

p.s. i am also an egghead.

5:58 PM  
Blogger cmptrnrd16 said...

geek is a derogatory term. I belive your definition of geek is mine of nerd, and yours of nerd is mine of an intellectual. People who study hard are not nerds, unless of course they are studying the childhood of Drizzt Do'Urden(my all time fav fantasy character).

10:12 PM  
Blogger puc said...

can't we all just agree that we're dorks? i think that'd work...

12:35 AM  
Blogger Byrne Hobart said...

Fair enough.

9:30 AM  
Blogger puc said...

thank god that post died

7:35 PM  

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