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Help wanted! Want a free digital VCR for stuff on TV?
Posted 14 years agoThis goes out especially to all Monty Python and Terry Gilliam fans!
I hope this is not gonna look like some commercial spam mail to you guys (Spam, spam, lovely spam...), but I need your help getting two files related to Monty Python and Terry Gilliam that look like they're not gonna be commercially available anytime soon and that you can have too once we're successful.
The two shows I'm talking about are Terry Gilliam's recent staging of Berlioz's opera The Damnation of Faust at the English National Opera, said to be very Pythonesque in how Terry pulled it off, and Holy Flying Circus, a TV dramatization of what trouble the Pythons ran in on the production and release of their cult film Life of Brain, both broadcast on BBC4 on October 14th (this Friday!) and 19th.
Now, I've been a member of www.onlinetvrecorder.com since 2009 now. It's a digital VCR where you can program stuff on TV (even from about 30 US and UK channels) to be recorded for you, and after the show is over, you can download it DRM-free.
But the system is competitive. Only the 100 most-wanted shows in a day are provided as HQ files, which is full DVD quality. All shows in lower demand are only provided as divx, which looks like a 320x240 MPEG-1 VCD.
So I need your help! See http://tinyurl.com/5w59h8b (12th post down the thread page) on how to display the onlinetvrecorder.com page in English and get a free account, so we can bump up the two shows I'm trying to get as HQ files. Watch out, the link to program Holy Flying Circus is outdated, the new link is in my next post further down.
Director Terry Gilliam is especially known for his three cult films Brazil (1985), 12 Monkeys (1995) and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), and of course for his work with the Pythons. The British Independent wrote that this staging of Berlioz's Faust "garnered some of the best reviews of Gilliam's career". For some of its most glowing reviews, even comparing it to Pink Floyd's The Wall, see http://tinyurl.com/6kxtb2j , http://tinyurl.com/3u6op3r , http://tinyurl.com/6zp7ac9 , http://tinyurl.com/674n99t , http://tinyurl.com/5vytoez , http://tinyurl.com/69na8s3 , http://tinyurl.com/3qpb7pp , http://tinyurl.com/6g945rn , http://tinyurl.com/6hkukl8 , and http://tinyurl.com/3lp32bm . Here's the staging's official site: http://www.gilliamfaust.com/
And here's some more information on the TV drama Holy Flying Circus: http://pythonline.com/media/exclusi.....hotos-released
As you can see, you can also use OTR to record about 30 US and UK channels. So in case some of you would like to further use it, I'd be glad to be of help via PM.
I hope this is not gonna look like some commercial spam mail to you guys (Spam, spam, lovely spam...), but I need your help getting two files related to Monty Python and Terry Gilliam that look like they're not gonna be commercially available anytime soon and that you can have too once we're successful.
The two shows I'm talking about are Terry Gilliam's recent staging of Berlioz's opera The Damnation of Faust at the English National Opera, said to be very Pythonesque in how Terry pulled it off, and Holy Flying Circus, a TV dramatization of what trouble the Pythons ran in on the production and release of their cult film Life of Brain, both broadcast on BBC4 on October 14th (this Friday!) and 19th.
Now, I've been a member of www.onlinetvrecorder.com since 2009 now. It's a digital VCR where you can program stuff on TV (even from about 30 US and UK channels) to be recorded for you, and after the show is over, you can download it DRM-free.
But the system is competitive. Only the 100 most-wanted shows in a day are provided as HQ files, which is full DVD quality. All shows in lower demand are only provided as divx, which looks like a 320x240 MPEG-1 VCD.
So I need your help! See http://tinyurl.com/5w59h8b (12th post down the thread page) on how to display the onlinetvrecorder.com page in English and get a free account, so we can bump up the two shows I'm trying to get as HQ files. Watch out, the link to program Holy Flying Circus is outdated, the new link is in my next post further down.
Director Terry Gilliam is especially known for his three cult films Brazil (1985), 12 Monkeys (1995) and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), and of course for his work with the Pythons. The British Independent wrote that this staging of Berlioz's Faust "garnered some of the best reviews of Gilliam's career". For some of its most glowing reviews, even comparing it to Pink Floyd's The Wall, see http://tinyurl.com/6kxtb2j , http://tinyurl.com/3u6op3r , http://tinyurl.com/6zp7ac9 , http://tinyurl.com/674n99t , http://tinyurl.com/5vytoez , http://tinyurl.com/69na8s3 , http://tinyurl.com/3qpb7pp , http://tinyurl.com/6g945rn , http://tinyurl.com/6hkukl8 , and http://tinyurl.com/3lp32bm . Here's the staging's official site: http://www.gilliamfaust.com/
And here's some more information on the TV drama Holy Flying Circus: http://pythonline.com/media/exclusi.....hotos-released
As you can see, you can also use OTR to record about 30 US and UK channels. So in case some of you would like to further use it, I'd be glad to be of help via PM.
Peter Sellers the most likable paedophile in US-UK cinema?
Posted 14 years agoDid Peter Sellers do the most likable portrayal of a paedophile in Anglo-American cinema?
(Sorry, whole title didn't fit FA's allowed character length)
I've just seen Stanley Kubrick's 1962 adaptation of Nabokov's Lolita, starring James Mason as Humbert Humbert. Both the novel and its two adaptations are notorious for "Humbert's despicable denial and advocation of his sick obsessions with little girls", which is why "he creates a Lolita in his dreams that has nothing in common with the real girl at all".
A character hardly anybody ever seems to notice is that played by Peter Sellers, a character named Clare Quilty. Most people who notice the character of Quincy at all do so only because Sellers would go on to star in Kubrick's next film, the 4-times Oscar-nominated satire Dr. Strangelove and hence, all they do is compare Sellers's earlier role with that of the mad German scientist everyone knows. It is suggested that Humbert and Lolita first have sex when she is 14 in the film and 12 in the book, but towards the end, Lolita tells Humbert that she "had it going" with Quincy "long before that", and that's why she can't love Humbert, only Quincy. Many people might say that "have it going" could mean just about anything, but on the other hand they wouldn't go as far as saying that Humbert and Lolita didn't have sex, and yet Lolita pretty much makes it clear to Humbert that he left her pretty unimpressed because of what went on between Quincy and her earlier.
My guess is that people never noticed Peter Sellers's character much, and in wider culture only refer to Humbert as "the typical paedophile" because of their pretty opposite characterizations. Humbert is characterized as an unlikable, bumbling, jealous, possessive control freak obsessed about Lolita whom he "promises" himself to as the only person in his life.
Quincy, on the other hand, is shown as a liberal, smart, free-thinking, attractive bohemian, artist, and Sellers-like lovable trickster with many love affairs who pretty much saves Lolita from Humbert. Not only is Quincy married, Sellers himself later referred to the character as "partly homosexual": At one time under the guise of getting him a role as an actor, he appears to so obtrusively yet charmingly engage in entirely unrelated, yet intent prolonged chatter with a male receptionist whom he's just met as to suggest rather forward flirting behavior with the man. Further, he apparently knows no such thing as possessiveness and obsessive jealousy as does Humbert, and doesn't force Lolita to stay with her when she decides to leave his free-spirited artists commune. Finally, Kubrick even encouraged Sellers to base his interpretation of Quincy upon Jazz musician and producer Norman Granz who as a white was known as an outspoken supporter of the black civil rights movement, whereupon Kubrick even went so far as to have Granz record Quincy's lines from the script for Sellers to study his voice and mannerisms. With no sudden plot twist of turning "evil" and unlikable in appearance (notice the contradictions between the character's characterization and how, in contrast, his acts would be traditionally perceived!) sometime throughout the movie, Sellers thus appears to me throughout the whole film to have given Anglo-American cinema's most likable portrayal of a paedophile until today.
To me those seem the reasons as to why most people prefer to ignore Quincy's earlier relations with Lolita, or even completely miss his character's involvement in the story overall, and only obsessively focus upon the character of Humbert as "Lolita's abuser" and "the typical paedophile".
This is not about whether I think whether paedophilia, as a preferential attraction, ever shows in real life as an attraction of adult males towards younger females, whether adolescent, puberal, or pre-puberal, as it does with Humbert or Quincy in Kubrick's film or Nabokov's novel. It's about that most people seeing the film or reading the book consider a man, such as Humbert or Quincy, having sex with a 14-year-old or 12-year-old (or, as in Quincy's case, "long before that", whatever that may mean) a paedophile, Sellers's rather likable portrayal of his character, and the fact that most people can't believe that somebody having sex with someone aged 14 or younger could be so likable, gentle, and permissive as Quincy is portrayed (as long as no clumsy Humbert could invite trouble and public scandal for everyone involved and thus has to be quietly removed from the equation).
Speaking of Nabokov, interestingly enough he hid his own name in the novel, which appears in an anagram as the name of Quincy's wife. Thus, the man Nabokov's name for Quincy's wife is in sharp contrast with a rather female sounding handle of Clare Quilty for Sellers's character that phonetically closely resembles one that Nabokov considered fitting for a type that he saw ignorant society usually de-"clare guilty" while overall presenting the character as one of the most likable in his narrative.
(Sorry, whole title didn't fit FA's allowed character length)
I've just seen Stanley Kubrick's 1962 adaptation of Nabokov's Lolita, starring James Mason as Humbert Humbert. Both the novel and its two adaptations are notorious for "Humbert's despicable denial and advocation of his sick obsessions with little girls", which is why "he creates a Lolita in his dreams that has nothing in common with the real girl at all".
A character hardly anybody ever seems to notice is that played by Peter Sellers, a character named Clare Quilty. Most people who notice the character of Quincy at all do so only because Sellers would go on to star in Kubrick's next film, the 4-times Oscar-nominated satire Dr. Strangelove and hence, all they do is compare Sellers's earlier role with that of the mad German scientist everyone knows. It is suggested that Humbert and Lolita first have sex when she is 14 in the film and 12 in the book, but towards the end, Lolita tells Humbert that she "had it going" with Quincy "long before that", and that's why she can't love Humbert, only Quincy. Many people might say that "have it going" could mean just about anything, but on the other hand they wouldn't go as far as saying that Humbert and Lolita didn't have sex, and yet Lolita pretty much makes it clear to Humbert that he left her pretty unimpressed because of what went on between Quincy and her earlier.
My guess is that people never noticed Peter Sellers's character much, and in wider culture only refer to Humbert as "the typical paedophile" because of their pretty opposite characterizations. Humbert is characterized as an unlikable, bumbling, jealous, possessive control freak obsessed about Lolita whom he "promises" himself to as the only person in his life.
Quincy, on the other hand, is shown as a liberal, smart, free-thinking, attractive bohemian, artist, and Sellers-like lovable trickster with many love affairs who pretty much saves Lolita from Humbert. Not only is Quincy married, Sellers himself later referred to the character as "partly homosexual": At one time under the guise of getting him a role as an actor, he appears to so obtrusively yet charmingly engage in entirely unrelated, yet intent prolonged chatter with a male receptionist whom he's just met as to suggest rather forward flirting behavior with the man. Further, he apparently knows no such thing as possessiveness and obsessive jealousy as does Humbert, and doesn't force Lolita to stay with her when she decides to leave his free-spirited artists commune. Finally, Kubrick even encouraged Sellers to base his interpretation of Quincy upon Jazz musician and producer Norman Granz who as a white was known as an outspoken supporter of the black civil rights movement, whereupon Kubrick even went so far as to have Granz record Quincy's lines from the script for Sellers to study his voice and mannerisms. With no sudden plot twist of turning "evil" and unlikable in appearance (notice the contradictions between the character's characterization and how, in contrast, his acts would be traditionally perceived!) sometime throughout the movie, Sellers thus appears to me throughout the whole film to have given Anglo-American cinema's most likable portrayal of a paedophile until today.
To me those seem the reasons as to why most people prefer to ignore Quincy's earlier relations with Lolita, or even completely miss his character's involvement in the story overall, and only obsessively focus upon the character of Humbert as "Lolita's abuser" and "the typical paedophile".
This is not about whether I think whether paedophilia, as a preferential attraction, ever shows in real life as an attraction of adult males towards younger females, whether adolescent, puberal, or pre-puberal, as it does with Humbert or Quincy in Kubrick's film or Nabokov's novel. It's about that most people seeing the film or reading the book consider a man, such as Humbert or Quincy, having sex with a 14-year-old or 12-year-old (or, as in Quincy's case, "long before that", whatever that may mean) a paedophile, Sellers's rather likable portrayal of his character, and the fact that most people can't believe that somebody having sex with someone aged 14 or younger could be so likable, gentle, and permissive as Quincy is portrayed (as long as no clumsy Humbert could invite trouble and public scandal for everyone involved and thus has to be quietly removed from the equation).
Speaking of Nabokov, interestingly enough he hid his own name in the novel, which appears in an anagram as the name of Quincy's wife. Thus, the man Nabokov's name for Quincy's wife is in sharp contrast with a rather female sounding handle of Clare Quilty for Sellers's character that phonetically closely resembles one that Nabokov considered fitting for a type that he saw ignorant society usually de-"clare guilty" while overall presenting the character as one of the most likable in his narrative.
Translations and lettering, anyone?
Posted 14 years agoI've recently seen a banner here on FA that advertized a "furry word editing service". Now, that banner only directed me to a 404, but it's given me the idea to turn a livelong hobby into business and test the waters about providing an own service.
So, who's looking to get their pix and comics lettered in maybe a more professional style? This offer applies to dialogue in speech bubbles, titles of your stories, signs in your panels, and not-too-sophisticated soundwords. Mind you, for as long as I've been doing simple dialogue lettering, more professional soundword design is still a bit outta my reach.
In addition to this, I'm also willing to provide a back-and-forth English-German translation service, another hobby of mine, which includes lettering. When translating, I'll always try to match your original lettering style.
To make this clear, we're talking about comics and pix here, as I don't know whether I'd have the time to devote myself to *WRITTEN* stories.
Now, as I've said above, I'm just flying a kite to see whether any demand would be there, and what people would be willing to pay for this. If there's any interest in this service from me, I'll upload a few examples of what I've done in the past, and what font styles will be available. For years, I've been working with Carl Barks Script (see http://www.donald.org/barks/font/ ), then Letter-O-Matic ( http://www.urbanfonts.com/fonts/LetterOMatic!.htm ) as default, until recently I've switched to Anime Ace ( http://www.1001fonts.com/font_detai.....ml?font_id=667 ), although of course many other fonts are available, including serifs, sans serifs, Celtic, Gothic, Medieval, and modern blackletter (Fraktur) fonts, fonts imitating hand-writing, decorative initials, decorative fonts, etc. etc.
Well, except for Comic Sans: http://bancomicsans.com/main/
So, who's looking to get their pix and comics lettered in maybe a more professional style? This offer applies to dialogue in speech bubbles, titles of your stories, signs in your panels, and not-too-sophisticated soundwords. Mind you, for as long as I've been doing simple dialogue lettering, more professional soundword design is still a bit outta my reach.
In addition to this, I'm also willing to provide a back-and-forth English-German translation service, another hobby of mine, which includes lettering. When translating, I'll always try to match your original lettering style.
To make this clear, we're talking about comics and pix here, as I don't know whether I'd have the time to devote myself to *WRITTEN* stories.
Now, as I've said above, I'm just flying a kite to see whether any demand would be there, and what people would be willing to pay for this. If there's any interest in this service from me, I'll upload a few examples of what I've done in the past, and what font styles will be available. For years, I've been working with Carl Barks Script (see http://www.donald.org/barks/font/ ), then Letter-O-Matic ( http://www.urbanfonts.com/fonts/LetterOMatic!.htm ) as default, until recently I've switched to Anime Ace ( http://www.1001fonts.com/font_detai.....ml?font_id=667 ), although of course many other fonts are available, including serifs, sans serifs, Celtic, Gothic, Medieval, and modern blackletter (Fraktur) fonts, fonts imitating hand-writing, decorative initials, decorative fonts, etc. etc.
Well, except for Comic Sans: http://bancomicsans.com/main/
Creative help for a class project urgently needed!
Posted 14 years agoHelp! Our educator has given each student in our class to conceive and realize a factual 2-3 minute TV report about "GLASS ITSELF" (think news report, or short educational clip), and I have absolutely no idea what to tell of within that report!
The requirements are such:
- It must be FACTUAL
- It must be 2-3 MINUTES IN LENGTH (so it's pretty much unfeasible to cover the sparkling history of glass making)
- It must be about GLASS ITSELF, i. e. it MUST NOT be about a company that MAKES or SELLS glass, and it CANNOT be about what things you can make out of glass OR how you can tint glass OR what liquids you can fill into a glass vessel!
The whole thing is further complicated by the fact that we're not very mobile with our equipment, i. e. we can only shoot in our "studio" (which is a room with a wall painted blue) at our school/college, and maybe a few hundred yards of street downstairs. Zero budget to buy any transportation or fancy glassware.
All the rest of the class finds this task "so exciting" because of "the many fancy light reflections you can create in glass". But what about the whole NARRATIVE aspect required for a "factual report"?! Heck, just some silent pictures is not a "factual report" about "glass itself"!
The original deadline to turn in the written concept (including, among other things, treatment, detailled shot-by-shot script including word-by-word off-stage narration and dialogues, and a complete cent-by-cent budgeting) was more than a week ago, and I have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA what "story" to tell!
Right now, it's Sunday noon, and if I'll turn up empty-handed AGAIN on Monday morning tomorrow, I'll be in for ANOTHER half hour of getting myself publically ripped a new one in front of the whole class.
Help!
The requirements are such:
- It must be FACTUAL
- It must be 2-3 MINUTES IN LENGTH (so it's pretty much unfeasible to cover the sparkling history of glass making)
- It must be about GLASS ITSELF, i. e. it MUST NOT be about a company that MAKES or SELLS glass, and it CANNOT be about what things you can make out of glass OR how you can tint glass OR what liquids you can fill into a glass vessel!
The whole thing is further complicated by the fact that we're not very mobile with our equipment, i. e. we can only shoot in our "studio" (which is a room with a wall painted blue) at our school/college, and maybe a few hundred yards of street downstairs. Zero budget to buy any transportation or fancy glassware.
All the rest of the class finds this task "so exciting" because of "the many fancy light reflections you can create in glass". But what about the whole NARRATIVE aspect required for a "factual report"?! Heck, just some silent pictures is not a "factual report" about "glass itself"!
The original deadline to turn in the written concept (including, among other things, treatment, detailled shot-by-shot script including word-by-word off-stage narration and dialogues, and a complete cent-by-cent budgeting) was more than a week ago, and I have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA what "story" to tell!
Right now, it's Sunday noon, and if I'll turn up empty-handed AGAIN on Monday morning tomorrow, I'll be in for ANOTHER half hour of getting myself publically ripped a new one in front of the whole class.
Help!
Need computer help!
Posted 14 years agoEver since I've installed a new virus scanner (AVG), my comp immediately has a 75% physical memory usage upon system boot, which goes to 95% and up as soon as I open my browser. It's really physical memory usage, not CPU usage. Due to this, my system keeps locking up and freezing up most of the time.
Specs: Windows7, AMD 2.80GHz, 2GB RAM, 431 GB of HD space left on C (that's more than 75% left).
Specs: Windows7, AMD 2.80GHz, 2GB RAM, 431 GB of HD space left on C (that's more than 75% left).
Seen [i]Primer[/i], need explanations
Posted 14 years agoOkay, I've seen Primer on DVD tonight. It's by far not my first time-travel movie, or time-travel fiction in general. I know all about immutable timelines and timelines mutable because with every change, you create a new universe.
But I have no idea how Primer is supposed to work, both in theoretical physics AND narratively. Actually, it feels like the director had a very good thing going but with only 10 or 15 more minutes to go, he realized that he had too many lose ends and no way to fix anything, so he decided to make the final 15 minutes just some jumbled mess without any sense or meaning to it at all, just throwing in some bizarre, non-sensical images and words to baffle his audience and then leave it all at that.
The only thing where the director didn't mess up was on the actual audio-visual level, which is the most basic skill in film-making. There were no grave mistakes in those areas, but nothing grand either. It was the handling of this most basic issue of film-making that actually kept me at it, whereas the plot was so full of holes there was more of a hole than any plot at all.
When I'd finished watching it, I immediately went to Wikipedia which I always do after a viewing in order to get answers on things still unclear. But the plot description didn't make any sense either, and I came upon this fan-made graphic which was the first hint to me that James Berardinelli was right when he said that only those people can like the film that don't understand it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:T.....l_Method-2.svg I mean this chart basically says that time-travel is the same thing as death! "The original loses his existence in the loop". Just where the hell did somebody get that messed-up idea?
Then I went to the official website to the film, with its official forum, to seek some definite answers. After about three hours of reading through that forum, it became clear to me that none of the fans there had much of an idea of the most basic foundations of time-travel theory, such as that they were unable to grasp the concept of a mutable or an immutable timeline, of physics (the forum is plastered with weird statements revealed a muddled understanding at best, such as "Einstein's theory basically says that we all travel through time at the speed of light", I mean WTF?!), and often-times, their sentences don't even make much sense on a grammatical level. Not to mention the fact they often mention whole SCENES that I don't remember from this film but from others, or entirely mix up the order of scenes in this film.
I don't even wanna talk about the unexplained "Granger incident" where a mostly unrelated character suddenly turns up as a time traveller from the future even though the two protagonists pretty much vowed to each other to keep the time machine's existence a secret, and this mysterious time traveller even falls comatose from the very moment they encounter him, and he obviously comes from a future that no longer exists. I mean as I've said, I'm used to time travel fiction, and that seems a totally plausible thing to happen with time travel, even if you wanna add suspense to your plot by never fully showing the background from where that came from or why he went back in time or even give him just a few lines to explain what happened.
There's far worse plotholes to boggle your mind.
To start it off, how do the two protagonists figure they have a time machine at hand? They observe that things age much faster inside their box, so POW! It must be a time machine! Their reasoning for it is weird: They kinda argue that objects must be "bouncing back and forth" between the moment the object is placed inside the box, and the moments it's removed from it. Just how they get this idea just from the fact that things inside the box age 13,000 times as fast as outside of it is never explained, and to call it "creative thinking" is a very nice way of putting it.
So, what we've seen is a machine within which things age much faster. From there, we suddenly jump to the phenomenon that time runs backwards within the box, and thus, it really IS a time machine, in that time inside it runs backwards between the time you stepped in and some time in the past that it's been turned on. How this follows from the fact that things age much faster in it is not explained.
In fact, it would be much more logical to FIRST have them see that time runs backwards inside the box until the moment you've turned it on, then see that if they don't remove the object at the right time, it goes "bouncing back and forth" in time within the box. That would be a much more logical way of thinking for them than have them see a machine which ages things faster and have them conclude from that that it must be a time machine within which time travel backwards.
Okay, so you'll turn the machine on, then at some later time step in and you travel back to the moment you've turned the machine on. That means you can never go further back than when you've turned the machine in order to prepare your immediate trip. There might be a very complex set-up where you step into another time machine that has been turned on even earlier upon your way out of one, but it requires very meticulous scheduling, planning, and preparing way ahead, most likely from the very earliest moment in time on that you wanna head back to. Not even the fact you have time travel on your hand can change that fact.
Anyway, it all boils down to that you can't go back any further than to the moment the very first time machine was turned on, and from what we see in the film, most likely nobody ever stepped directly from one time machine into another.
What we are shown very late in the film is that the one of the two protagonists that does the first time travel has a so-called "failsafe machine" set up, which is a time machine he started way before any other, never used it, and never told his friend, the other protagonist and time traveler about, so in case of emergency, he'll have a way of erasing everything that went wrong.
What is revealed towards the end is that his friend DID find out about it somehow. How? We're never told. Okay, I'm still with you, and you don't need to explain everything. So what does his friend do? He travels back all the way to the beginning of the story, obviously due to some ethics disagreements on what to do and what not to do if you have time travel. He replaces his own past self, but only to do what? To record his conversations with the protagonist, and THEN go back AGAIN, eliminate his SECOND self in order to become the THIRD self and FAKE the same conversations by listening to his recordings on earplugs.
I mean WTF? What for? Obviously to tell the past version of his friend that they can record everything and then go back to fake-repeat conversations with other people over and over by listening to their recordings of the conversations the first time around. The connection between that and trying to prevent the shooting of the wife of one of them seems vague at best, and the whole thing of this shooting seems so casual to the whole story that you have no idea what they're actually doing there, or what for.
It seems more like that for some reason, the one guy who used the "failsafe machine" for some reason was trying to trick his friend into something. Trick into what? We'll never know. All we know is it leads into both friends repeatedly knocking their own former selfs out (really their OWN, future A knocks out past A, and future B knocks out past B), without the other one knowing, or us knowing why the heck and what for. Even though they're portrayed as trying to trick each other, they're only knocking out past versions of THEMSELVES, not of the other, or prevent them from doing anything. They're only preventing THEMSELVES from doing anything, not EACH OTHER. By this time, it's all such a jumbled mess, we don't even know WHAT it is they're trying to prevent or make happen. Nor did we ever know.
Not to mention the fact that they obviously did all this with a now seemingly infinite number of "failsafe machines" they had to have set up immediately every time they exited their last one. If you really think this through, there must have been huge fields of time machines pretty close to each other for both of them in the last changed or created universe (one more time machine in each new universe created with each new travel), and out of all of them, new versions of the same guy exit at pretty much the same moment.
To top it all of, the idea of "using a box inside another box" is mysteriously named as central to this whole weirdness. I don't even know what that could be good for. It still can't change the fact that you can't travel back any further then when you've turned onn the outer box, so what use could "a box inside a box" ever be other than make some obscure, non-sensical, and non-relevant reference to those Russian dolls? Also, this is the latest moment in the movie where nobody in that fan forum seems to be aware of the fact anymore that you can't go back any further than when you've turned on the time machine you're travelling in.
All this weirdness ends with them both at some airport, where the "good" guy tells the "evil" guy (let's call these two the "final versions") to take one of the planes and leave him the heck alone, while at the same time some earlier versions of them are waking up from having been knocked out and free themselves from where they've been locked in. We then see the final version of the "evil" guy set up some building-sized time machine in some (far-away?) Francophone country with the help of many construction workers.
The whole thing is narrated in retrospect by the "evil" guy as a phonecall to somebody who is never identified, obviously in an attempt to undo the whole thing altogether. Thus, this phonecall must have been made before all this happens. Not to mention the fact this must be a version of the "evil" guy from even further into the future than where we see him having a building-sized time machine built (and thus, it would be even harder, close to impossible for him to go back THAT far), what reason could there possibly be for suddenly having changed his mind about all this and go from "evil" to "good"? This seems just so unlikely and even more ridiculous compared to the fact his evilness and resulting adamantness is so great throughout the movie he betrays his friend, knocks out people, even kills people, and obviously even several times himself.
That's just the last plothole in a movie that in its last 15 minutes is more of a hole than any plot at all. Now, I don't only know about time travel sci-fi, I do also know about surreal to dadaist fiction and intoxicating mysteriousness. You don't have to explain everything. But that's no excuse to make things as unlikely, impossible, and ridiculous as possible, give it a bland, run-off-the-mill cinematography like for a perfectly logical, linear, and coherent drama, and pass it off as being all serious and "making perfect sense", as the director does such as by saying that he put all this work into it to "make perfect sense", that he could only do this because of "having studied math and physics" (I wonder if he even ever graduated from just one out of the two) to work this out, and Wikipedia does too, reading like an advertizement for the director's smartness in logics and coherence. Again, it feels like he completely lost all control and sense during the last 15 minutes when he realized he had no idea at all on how to go on or finish this thing.
The fans over at the forum are in on it, too. They keep uttering that it makes "perfect sense", but when trying to explain it to newcomers, they're forced to admit they understand only maybe ten percent of the plot themselves, and that it must be because they're all so stupid and the director is so smart because "it all makes sense", after all!
I find it no surprise that the director as the owner of the forum shut it completely down years ago. Obviously, it had gotten too obvious that his little film doesn't "make perfect sense", in fact makes little sense at all, with no coherence to it, making it obvious the reason why it's beyond everybody to make any sense of it is NOT that he himself is "so smart", and then shut down the only place to discuss that fact.
But I have no idea how Primer is supposed to work, both in theoretical physics AND narratively. Actually, it feels like the director had a very good thing going but with only 10 or 15 more minutes to go, he realized that he had too many lose ends and no way to fix anything, so he decided to make the final 15 minutes just some jumbled mess without any sense or meaning to it at all, just throwing in some bizarre, non-sensical images and words to baffle his audience and then leave it all at that.
The only thing where the director didn't mess up was on the actual audio-visual level, which is the most basic skill in film-making. There were no grave mistakes in those areas, but nothing grand either. It was the handling of this most basic issue of film-making that actually kept me at it, whereas the plot was so full of holes there was more of a hole than any plot at all.
When I'd finished watching it, I immediately went to Wikipedia which I always do after a viewing in order to get answers on things still unclear. But the plot description didn't make any sense either, and I came upon this fan-made graphic which was the first hint to me that James Berardinelli was right when he said that only those people can like the film that don't understand it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:T.....l_Method-2.svg I mean this chart basically says that time-travel is the same thing as death! "The original loses his existence in the loop". Just where the hell did somebody get that messed-up idea?
Then I went to the official website to the film, with its official forum, to seek some definite answers. After about three hours of reading through that forum, it became clear to me that none of the fans there had much of an idea of the most basic foundations of time-travel theory, such as that they were unable to grasp the concept of a mutable or an immutable timeline, of physics (the forum is plastered with weird statements revealed a muddled understanding at best, such as "Einstein's theory basically says that we all travel through time at the speed of light", I mean WTF?!), and often-times, their sentences don't even make much sense on a grammatical level. Not to mention the fact they often mention whole SCENES that I don't remember from this film but from others, or entirely mix up the order of scenes in this film.
I don't even wanna talk about the unexplained "Granger incident" where a mostly unrelated character suddenly turns up as a time traveller from the future even though the two protagonists pretty much vowed to each other to keep the time machine's existence a secret, and this mysterious time traveller even falls comatose from the very moment they encounter him, and he obviously comes from a future that no longer exists. I mean as I've said, I'm used to time travel fiction, and that seems a totally plausible thing to happen with time travel, even if you wanna add suspense to your plot by never fully showing the background from where that came from or why he went back in time or even give him just a few lines to explain what happened.
There's far worse plotholes to boggle your mind.
To start it off, how do the two protagonists figure they have a time machine at hand? They observe that things age much faster inside their box, so POW! It must be a time machine! Their reasoning for it is weird: They kinda argue that objects must be "bouncing back and forth" between the moment the object is placed inside the box, and the moments it's removed from it. Just how they get this idea just from the fact that things inside the box age 13,000 times as fast as outside of it is never explained, and to call it "creative thinking" is a very nice way of putting it.
So, what we've seen is a machine within which things age much faster. From there, we suddenly jump to the phenomenon that time runs backwards within the box, and thus, it really IS a time machine, in that time inside it runs backwards between the time you stepped in and some time in the past that it's been turned on. How this follows from the fact that things age much faster in it is not explained.
In fact, it would be much more logical to FIRST have them see that time runs backwards inside the box until the moment you've turned it on, then see that if they don't remove the object at the right time, it goes "bouncing back and forth" in time within the box. That would be a much more logical way of thinking for them than have them see a machine which ages things faster and have them conclude from that that it must be a time machine within which time travel backwards.
Okay, so you'll turn the machine on, then at some later time step in and you travel back to the moment you've turned the machine on. That means you can never go further back than when you've turned the machine in order to prepare your immediate trip. There might be a very complex set-up where you step into another time machine that has been turned on even earlier upon your way out of one, but it requires very meticulous scheduling, planning, and preparing way ahead, most likely from the very earliest moment in time on that you wanna head back to. Not even the fact you have time travel on your hand can change that fact.
Anyway, it all boils down to that you can't go back any further than to the moment the very first time machine was turned on, and from what we see in the film, most likely nobody ever stepped directly from one time machine into another.
What we are shown very late in the film is that the one of the two protagonists that does the first time travel has a so-called "failsafe machine" set up, which is a time machine he started way before any other, never used it, and never told his friend, the other protagonist and time traveler about, so in case of emergency, he'll have a way of erasing everything that went wrong.
What is revealed towards the end is that his friend DID find out about it somehow. How? We're never told. Okay, I'm still with you, and you don't need to explain everything. So what does his friend do? He travels back all the way to the beginning of the story, obviously due to some ethics disagreements on what to do and what not to do if you have time travel. He replaces his own past self, but only to do what? To record his conversations with the protagonist, and THEN go back AGAIN, eliminate his SECOND self in order to become the THIRD self and FAKE the same conversations by listening to his recordings on earplugs.
I mean WTF? What for? Obviously to tell the past version of his friend that they can record everything and then go back to fake-repeat conversations with other people over and over by listening to their recordings of the conversations the first time around. The connection between that and trying to prevent the shooting of the wife of one of them seems vague at best, and the whole thing of this shooting seems so casual to the whole story that you have no idea what they're actually doing there, or what for.
It seems more like that for some reason, the one guy who used the "failsafe machine" for some reason was trying to trick his friend into something. Trick into what? We'll never know. All we know is it leads into both friends repeatedly knocking their own former selfs out (really their OWN, future A knocks out past A, and future B knocks out past B), without the other one knowing, or us knowing why the heck and what for. Even though they're portrayed as trying to trick each other, they're only knocking out past versions of THEMSELVES, not of the other, or prevent them from doing anything. They're only preventing THEMSELVES from doing anything, not EACH OTHER. By this time, it's all such a jumbled mess, we don't even know WHAT it is they're trying to prevent or make happen. Nor did we ever know.
Not to mention the fact that they obviously did all this with a now seemingly infinite number of "failsafe machines" they had to have set up immediately every time they exited their last one. If you really think this through, there must have been huge fields of time machines pretty close to each other for both of them in the last changed or created universe (one more time machine in each new universe created with each new travel), and out of all of them, new versions of the same guy exit at pretty much the same moment.
To top it all of, the idea of "using a box inside another box" is mysteriously named as central to this whole weirdness. I don't even know what that could be good for. It still can't change the fact that you can't travel back any further then when you've turned onn the outer box, so what use could "a box inside a box" ever be other than make some obscure, non-sensical, and non-relevant reference to those Russian dolls? Also, this is the latest moment in the movie where nobody in that fan forum seems to be aware of the fact anymore that you can't go back any further than when you've turned on the time machine you're travelling in.
All this weirdness ends with them both at some airport, where the "good" guy tells the "evil" guy (let's call these two the "final versions") to take one of the planes and leave him the heck alone, while at the same time some earlier versions of them are waking up from having been knocked out and free themselves from where they've been locked in. We then see the final version of the "evil" guy set up some building-sized time machine in some (far-away?) Francophone country with the help of many construction workers.
The whole thing is narrated in retrospect by the "evil" guy as a phonecall to somebody who is never identified, obviously in an attempt to undo the whole thing altogether. Thus, this phonecall must have been made before all this happens. Not to mention the fact this must be a version of the "evil" guy from even further into the future than where we see him having a building-sized time machine built (and thus, it would be even harder, close to impossible for him to go back THAT far), what reason could there possibly be for suddenly having changed his mind about all this and go from "evil" to "good"? This seems just so unlikely and even more ridiculous compared to the fact his evilness and resulting adamantness is so great throughout the movie he betrays his friend, knocks out people, even kills people, and obviously even several times himself.
That's just the last plothole in a movie that in its last 15 minutes is more of a hole than any plot at all. Now, I don't only know about time travel sci-fi, I do also know about surreal to dadaist fiction and intoxicating mysteriousness. You don't have to explain everything. But that's no excuse to make things as unlikely, impossible, and ridiculous as possible, give it a bland, run-off-the-mill cinematography like for a perfectly logical, linear, and coherent drama, and pass it off as being all serious and "making perfect sense", as the director does such as by saying that he put all this work into it to "make perfect sense", that he could only do this because of "having studied math and physics" (I wonder if he even ever graduated from just one out of the two) to work this out, and Wikipedia does too, reading like an advertizement for the director's smartness in logics and coherence. Again, it feels like he completely lost all control and sense during the last 15 minutes when he realized he had no idea at all on how to go on or finish this thing.
The fans over at the forum are in on it, too. They keep uttering that it makes "perfect sense", but when trying to explain it to newcomers, they're forced to admit they understand only maybe ten percent of the plot themselves, and that it must be because they're all so stupid and the director is so smart because "it all makes sense", after all!
I find it no surprise that the director as the owner of the forum shut it completely down years ago. Obviously, it had gotten too obvious that his little film doesn't "make perfect sense", in fact makes little sense at all, with no coherence to it, making it obvious the reason why it's beyond everybody to make any sense of it is NOT that he himself is "so smart", and then shut down the only place to discuss that fact.
Free commishes for all (shemale) Gadget lovers!
Posted 14 years agoAs I've mentioned here before: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/5149399/ , I'm willing to pay Neo to commish your shemale Gadget pic ideas from him. Check out his gallery (and partly scraps): http://www.furaffinity.net/user/neokat/ to see what justice he can do to our favorite cutey. You want Foxglove in there too? Sure thing!
However, here's some limits for me as the guy paying for your commishes: Please go mostly vanilla though, so no gore, vore, torture, etc. Gadget MUST be shemale. And it'd be great if any other female characters would be shemales too.
It's mostly alright too if your commish ideas contain cub next to Gadget (note: no NC, anal, and/or vaginal relating to cub bodies! that goes on top of the other conditions above), Neo'd only have to upload your pix over at InkBunny then.
However, here's some limits for me as the guy paying for your commishes: Please go mostly vanilla though, so no gore, vore, torture, etc. Gadget MUST be shemale. And it'd be great if any other female characters would be shemales too.
It's mostly alright too if your commish ideas contain cub next to Gadget (note: no NC, anal, and/or vaginal relating to cub bodies! that goes on top of the other conditions above), Neo'd only have to upload your pix over at InkBunny then.
For all people exiled by the recent cub ban!
Posted 15 years agoMany people have been talking about moving to InkBunny, but before you'll go there, you should all have a look at this:
http://www.furaffinity.net/user/cubaffinity/
Please spread the word!
http://www.furaffinity.net/user/cubaffinity/
Please spread the word!
On FA's cub ban
Posted 15 years agoSo yeah, I'll be following 
Looqdrake (and hundreds of other artists) to other shores. Here's my rant on the entire thing: http://forums.furaffinity.net/threa.....49#post2264449 Somehow, I don't feel like many people talking after me in the thread had read even just some of it.
Looqdrake (and hundreds of other artists) to other shores. Here's my rant on the entire thing: http://forums.furaffinity.net/threa.....49#post2264449 Somehow, I don't feel like many people talking after me in the thread had read even just some of it.Smoke on the water
Posted 15 years agoGame nicked from :DrakeDragon:
1. Put your media player of choice on shuffle.
2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer.
3. YOU MUST WRITE THAT SONG NAME DOWN NO MATTER HOW SILLY IT SOUNDS!
IF SOMEONE SAYS "IS THIS OKAY" YOU SAY?
And it's one, two, three, what're we fightin' for...
WHAT WOULD BEST DESCRIBE YOUR PERSONALITY?
Far, far away
Yeah with my head in the clouds :P
WHAT DO YOU LIKE IN A PARTNER?
Three Lions '98 (Football's coming home)
Huh? I don't even LIKE soccer...
WHAT IS YOUR LIFE'S PURPOSE?
(Player crashed when I tried to skip to next song here...kinda appropriate)
WHAT IS YOUR MOTTO?
Love is on our side
WHAT DO YOUR FRIENDS THINK OF YOU?
Hideaway
Are they hiding from me, or do they think I'm a save haven?
WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT VERY OFTEN?
Summertime blues
WHAT IS 2+2?
Rain
Yeah, math does make me cry...
WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR BEST FRIEND?
Still loving you
WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE PERSON YOU LIKE?
Let's call it quits
Nuhhh... ;.;
WHAT IS YOUR LIFE STORY?
I love Rock'n'Roll
WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP?
I am the walrus
XD
WHAT DO YOU THINK WHEN YOU SEE THE PERSON YOU LIKE?
When I was young
Uhhhh...let's not go there...
WHAT DO YOUR PARENTS THINK OF YOU?
St. James Infirmary
Ouch...I can see that... -.-
WHAT WILL YOU DANCE TO AT YOUR WEDDING?
Baby's in black
WHAT WILL THEY PLAY AT YOUR FUNERAL?
Introduction
My funeral will be an introduction to something? XD
WHAT IS YOUR HOBBY/INTEREST?
Lovin' you
WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST SECRET?
Santa Claus is coming to town
XD
WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR FRIENDS?
Cinq etudes de brutes
I don't even speak French... 0.o
WHAT'S THE WORST THING THAT COULD HAPPEN?
Pretty little angel eyes
Yeah, pretty little angle eyes, and the game's over XD
HOW WILL YOU DIE?
Cocaine
Must be some forced intake, with my chronically inflamed sinuses I'd never sniff anything... 0.o
WHAT IS THE ONE THING YOU REGRET?
Radio wall of sound
Could be, I guess I keep turning deaf slowly from compressing my music's dynamics too much...
WHAT MAKES YOU LAUGH?
Congratulations
Well...I kinda hardly ever get any IRL, so they do make me kinda nervous...
WHAT MAKES YOU CRY?
My favorite things
WILL YOU EVER GET MARRIED?
At the hop
Wow, must be a quick one :P
WHAT SCARES YOU THE MOST?
Hurdy-gurdy man
Scary Donovan down in the alley, keeps playing his hypnotic, psychedelic hurdy-gurdy XD
DOES ANYONE LIKE YOU?
Soul kitchen...blood in the town of Chicago, blood in the streets of New Haven, blood's all up to my ankles...
0.o
IF YOU COULD GO BACK IN TIME, WHAT WOULD YOU CHANGE?
Run, run away
Yeah, I do think I could get lost in history from indulging too much in it...
WHAT HURTS RIGHT NOW?
I need you
Oh yes...oh yes...
WHAT WILL YOU POST THIS AS?
Smoke on the water
1. Put your media player of choice on shuffle.
2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer.
3. YOU MUST WRITE THAT SONG NAME DOWN NO MATTER HOW SILLY IT SOUNDS!
IF SOMEONE SAYS "IS THIS OKAY" YOU SAY?
And it's one, two, three, what're we fightin' for...
WHAT WOULD BEST DESCRIBE YOUR PERSONALITY?
Far, far away
Yeah with my head in the clouds :P
WHAT DO YOU LIKE IN A PARTNER?
Three Lions '98 (Football's coming home)
Huh? I don't even LIKE soccer...
WHAT IS YOUR LIFE'S PURPOSE?
(Player crashed when I tried to skip to next song here...kinda appropriate)
WHAT IS YOUR MOTTO?
Love is on our side
WHAT DO YOUR FRIENDS THINK OF YOU?
Hideaway
Are they hiding from me, or do they think I'm a save haven?
WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT VERY OFTEN?
Summertime blues
WHAT IS 2+2?
Rain
Yeah, math does make me cry...
WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR BEST FRIEND?
Still loving you
WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE PERSON YOU LIKE?
Let's call it quits
Nuhhh... ;.;
WHAT IS YOUR LIFE STORY?
I love Rock'n'Roll
WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP?
I am the walrus
XD
WHAT DO YOU THINK WHEN YOU SEE THE PERSON YOU LIKE?
When I was young
Uhhhh...let's not go there...
WHAT DO YOUR PARENTS THINK OF YOU?
St. James Infirmary
Ouch...I can see that... -.-
WHAT WILL YOU DANCE TO AT YOUR WEDDING?
Baby's in black
WHAT WILL THEY PLAY AT YOUR FUNERAL?
Introduction
My funeral will be an introduction to something? XD
WHAT IS YOUR HOBBY/INTEREST?
Lovin' you
WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST SECRET?
Santa Claus is coming to town
XD
WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR FRIENDS?
Cinq etudes de brutes
I don't even speak French... 0.o
WHAT'S THE WORST THING THAT COULD HAPPEN?
Pretty little angel eyes
Yeah, pretty little angle eyes, and the game's over XD
HOW WILL YOU DIE?
Cocaine
Must be some forced intake, with my chronically inflamed sinuses I'd never sniff anything... 0.o
WHAT IS THE ONE THING YOU REGRET?
Radio wall of sound
Could be, I guess I keep turning deaf slowly from compressing my music's dynamics too much...
WHAT MAKES YOU LAUGH?
Congratulations
Well...I kinda hardly ever get any IRL, so they do make me kinda nervous...
WHAT MAKES YOU CRY?
My favorite things
WILL YOU EVER GET MARRIED?
At the hop
Wow, must be a quick one :P
WHAT SCARES YOU THE MOST?
Hurdy-gurdy man
Scary Donovan down in the alley, keeps playing his hypnotic, psychedelic hurdy-gurdy XD
DOES ANYONE LIKE YOU?
Soul kitchen...blood in the town of Chicago, blood in the streets of New Haven, blood's all up to my ankles...
0.o
IF YOU COULD GO BACK IN TIME, WHAT WOULD YOU CHANGE?
Run, run away
Yeah, I do think I could get lost in history from indulging too much in it...
WHAT HURTS RIGHT NOW?
I need you
Oh yes...oh yes...
WHAT WILL YOU POST THIS AS?
Smoke on the water
25 journals skipped
