I thought we had a thread for this film already, but I can't find it, dammit.
Okay, Peggy and I finally got a chance to see the movie tonight.  Beautiful film, way too much stuff left out.
At the very least, they could have explained why Snape called himself the Half-blood Prince...
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

Isnt there a wiki for Fenspace? Where?
Hear that thunder rolling till it seems to split the sky?
That's every ship in Grayson's Navy taking up the cry-
NO QUARTER!!!
-- "No Quarter", by Echo's Children

Warning: I wrote in my Book of Shadows later that night. Further testing of future mage tools and equipment is to be carried out in a large open area with nothing to burn - Hino-san does not
appreciate explosions in the shrine.

I decided to let go of my 15mm and some 25 mm Napoleonic collection after gathering dust for 15 years. As soon as I finish cataloging and taling pictures, I plan to ebay them.  I'll have to retake shots but these came out decent.

[


__________________
Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell

http://www.cbc.ca/arts/media/story/2009 ... nutes.html]Don Hewitt, creator of 60 Minutes, died today at age 86.

Tell me a story...
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

...by suggesting that allowing the ruling to stand threatens the economy, the tech sector, life itself and will cause the end of the world as we know it.
Article on Corporate Bully whining here.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

In having a distinct....mental twitch whenever I hear someone claim their story is a deconstruction of "Genre/Concept/Character X"? It's funny,
because as an avid reader and contributor of TV Tropes, I'm well familiar with the concept of a deconstruction. But it seems that I keep classifying them
as subversions, because deconstruction seems to have taken on a sort of different meaning.

Doing your own thing is hardly new. Walt Disney is the world's most profitable fanfic writing group thanks to their interpretations of classic fairy tales.
And doing things a different way because it's always been done that way is also, in and of itself, not bad. It's quite good in some cases. We
wouldn't have the "He starts monologuing!" joke from The Incredibles if not for the concept of being aware that concepts exist and that they may
or may not make sense entirely but are part of a given genre.

However, more and more often, whenever I see something being claimed as a deconstruction, I wind up seeing something where you get the feeling the author
either A. wanted very much to write something in a different genre or B. has a distinct distaste for a given genre and is merely applying his personal
"logic" to it in order that we might see how it should REALLY happen. In some cases, this presents interesting alternate takes. The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow and others were useful in the sense that they provided something new and different, but
it seems almost to have produced a second genre. The "deconstruction", where deconstructing a genre just really means you can't stand it and so
you throw out almost everything about the genre you dislike in order to make it into something you like, and then claim deconstruction because, hey, that's
what deconstruction is, right? It means that the end result doesn't have to look like the original. Several comics concepts have become this of late.
Spider-Man: Reign, Warren Ellis's run on Thunderbolts, Identity Crisis, Infinite Crisis, Marvel: Ruins, and more. It's almost like considering that taking something happy and
enjoyable, ripping out the happiness by its spine, and cybernetically augmenting it with enough metric tons of angst to fill a Final Fantasy fanfic section to
overflowing is somehow "art" and "making something meaningful out of childish things".

Except it's not.

Hating a genre doesn't work when you want to deconstruct it. The audience should not be wondering "why do you hate this so much if you're writing
it?". If one wants to deconstruct something, they should at least be neutral to the concept, not hostile. And the best deconstructions tend to come from
people that genuinely enjoy the genre they're deconstructing. That know the idiosyncracies and little quirks of a given setting that we make jokes about
because they don't make sense but they're part and parcel of what makes the thing what it is. The Incredibles
is a wonderful, stupendous deconstruction and reconstruction of the superhero genre in one movie, but it's not a grim and gritty pile of angst that makes
me wonder why people actually pay money for this.

It almost seems that the term deconstruction is only used when someone wants their given project to be seen as "art" rather than entertainment, and
that people who are genuinely deconstructing various genres and concepts are avoiding the term due to that association. Given my own knee-jerk reaction to the
word itself, I suppose I can't blame them.
---
"Oh, silver blade, forged in the depths of the beyond. Heed my summons and purge those who stand in my way. Lay
waste."

It is, as far as I can tell, the first evidence of organic chemistry (by which I mean the chemistry of life, as opposed to "anything involving
carbon") in extraterrestrial material.

NASA announcement here.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

Well, do you?

----------------

Epsilon

Apparently directed by Joss Whedon.

Dance to the Music by Sly and the Family Stone - Otto's Irresistable Dance, basically, as with Kate Bush's 'The Red Shoes.' Dance, Dance,
Dance! (I think?) by Gimeroqoui - A much more subtle effect, persueding targets in the AOE "Eh, why not? Got nothing better to do..." Unless somthing
dangerous or distracting happens they're apt to keep dancing as long as there's music, though they get an immediate 'save attempt' on leaving
the AOE and/or at the end of the song.
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows