Main Menu
Menu

Show posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.

Show posts Menu

Messages - Professor Bear

#871
Film & TV / Re: Last movie watched...
02 February, 2019, 10:21:16 PM
Quote from: Dandontdare on 02 February, 2019, 09:50:37 PMin timethough , as always, the next HUGE pop-culture thing happened and took the limelight.

Which is sort of my point.  Lots of songs are epic in their day, and many of those even get to enter the charts a second time years - even decades -  later, but the trajectory you describe for BR before it got its Wayne and Garth relaunch, people who were kids at different times could easily ascribe to any number of songs from Number of the Beast to Macarena.
I personally live in dread of hearing once again that the Vengabus is coming.
#872
Film & TV / Re: Last movie watched...
02 February, 2019, 04:31:34 PM
Despite being made by an utter monster, I enjoyed Bohemian Rhapsody, but it's very glossy, everyone is very British and affable and in its own way it's just as big a spoof of the British rock star as Spinal Tap, though apart from a few parties in Freddie's house, there's not much in the way of excess on show, nor is there much of a struggle to get famous, they just meet Freddie, he pushes them to record an album, and then everyone is married and thinks they're over the hill dinosaurs because all the kids of the time are into REO Speedwagon and they just can't top the masterpieces they've already recorded - even though the movie itself shows you onscreen how the music press shat all over what they did and Bohemian Rhapsody - while a cracking track and deservedly acknowledged as a classic - didn't really achieve epic status until Mike Myers and Dana Carvey turned it into a pop culture joke.
I'm no big city Queen scientist, but it seems that a lot of this is all over the place, with Who Wants To Live Forever presented anachronistically as predating Live Aid when it was notoriously written in the back of Brian May's car after watching a rough cut of the film Highlander a couple of years later, and Mike Myers shows up as a record executive announcing that Bohemian Rhapsody was not a song that kids would "bang their heads to in their cars", which is cute, certainly, but again, I'm not sure that white trash heavy metal was something that greatly concerned record execs in 1975.
But okay, it's glossy, that's fine.  It's very enjoyable and the Live Aid sequence is very well done and caps the film off nicely.  I don't know how accurate Rami Malek's depiction of the real-life Freddie Mercury is, but as a character performance it's fantastic, and I don't know why, but the guy who plays Brian May is just hilarious to behold - like he watched the Star Fleet video and decided that was enough research.
Best bit: Freddie's wife finally twigging that Freddie is a gay man because he gets along with Kenny Everit.  They really put that in the film.
#873
Games / Re: Warhammer 40K Conquest magazine
02 February, 2019, 12:15:34 PM
I've never got WH, either, but of late I've noted a lot of white supremacists on that there internet seem to be into it, so I presume it involves fighting factions of orcs dedicated to eating soy products and/or propagating feminism.
Or they've had to go to something that greatly divests from reality in order to find something analogous to their toilet philosophy.
#874
Film & TV / Re: Netflix recommendations
01 February, 2019, 06:31:52 PM
It's fine as a cartoon, I guess, though even then there are plenty of better efforts to get through, like She-Ra and the Princesses Of Power, which is meant to be one of those shows whose heart is in the right place, but the makers for some reason chose to double down on the camp original's troubling Aryan imagery and themes (the main character's name is literally She Ra) by adding many of their own on top of the new setup of the various scions of dynastic privilege attempting to slow the progress of their enemies by arming undeveloped cultures and using them as cannon fodder.
#875
Film & TV / Re: Netflix recommendations
31 January, 2019, 04:21:42 PM
There are many wonderful things on Netflix, but for some reason I am watching Death In Paradise.  I know it's shit and I can't stop.  Send help.

Matt Groenig's Disenchantment was very enjoyable, though, and for all its faults and lack of imagination, I did like badly-dubbed German post-apocalyptic drama The Rain, and Indian crime thriller Sacred Games.
Old enough to remember being hungover and watching Diagnosis Murder and Monk, I found The Good Cop reassuringly familiar, as was the rather brief The Indian Detective (featuring The Shat as a ruddy-faced drug kingpin!).  Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina is far more enjoyable than it should be, Glow is fantastic 80s-themed sleeze & cheese, The Break With Michelle Wolf was fun while it lasted, and Ozark is good and would be much better if you had the option to skip all the bits with the boring and dreadful kids, but I found it to be a really good background watch while working.

Anime is a bit of a marmite thing but if you can bear it, you could do worse than One Punch Man or Knights of Sidonia.  I did also enjoy the Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters trilogy.  Do not watch Castlevania, it is utter fucking pish and you will only encourage them to make more.
#876
Off Topic / Re: The Political Thread
31 January, 2019, 03:51:41 PM
Quote from: Dandontdare on 31 January, 2019, 02:30:25 PM
Quote from: Professor Bear on 30 January, 2019, 06:50:29 PM
Sharky, austerity measures have killed 120k people in the UK,

Where does this figure come from? I'd like some evidential ammunition before quoting it myself.

"The paper identified that mortality rates in the UK had declined steadily from 2001 to 2010, but this reversed sharply with the death rate growing again after austerity came in."

As a counterpoint, I can't say I know if Full Fact has a reputation for impartiality, but they are signatories to the International Fact Checking Network, and they have a more reserved and cautious response to the claims that basically amounts to "we can't say for sure that slashing funding to the services need to prevent those deaths was what caused those deaths, but 120 thousand deaths happened, they shouldn't have happened based on pre-2010 data, and something must have happened in 2010 to cause the drastic switch from death rates that were lowering to death rates that were skyrocketing - though we cannot possibly say what that thing which happened in 2010 might have been."
#877
Off Topic / Re: RIPs
31 January, 2019, 11:26:46 AM
Sorry to hear about that, Sharky, but please don't read anything into it beyond that this can be a difficult time of year for those with mental health issues.
#878
Off Topic / Re: The Political Thread
31 January, 2019, 01:46:59 AM
There's some Swedish bloke on Youtube called the Golden One who makes ranty vids about how Cultural Marxism sucks because its wrong to impose all this foreign cultural hegemony and I'll skip to the punchline he fetishises Vikings.  Bodybuilds like crazy, has swords, skull ornaments, plays Skyrim as a Nord and sides with Ulfric Stormcloak in the civil war quest - the full nine yards.
#879
Film & TV / Re: Last movie watched...
31 January, 2019, 01:07:52 AM
You're right, Tips, that was an ill-advised gag and I apologise.
#880
Off Topic / Re: The Political Thread
30 January, 2019, 09:52:04 PM
I recall in the last election, when Amber Rudd lost her seat, she burst into tears and then demanded repeated recounts until they told her she'd won - not just one recount "just to be sure", but at least two going by reports (and scuttlebutt at the time was that the actual number of recounts was 8).  Not so keen on do-overs now.
#881
Film & TV / Re: Last movie watched...
30 January, 2019, 09:39:57 PM
The problem with Solo was that Rogue One was a war movie with Star Wars trimmings and everyone knew what they were getting.  I liked Solo, but it starts out an urban crime drama, then it's a war movie, then it's a heist movie, then it's a kung fu movie, then it's a space opera - who's the audience for this?  Not every movie has to be stuck in a particular box, but some movies - tentpole releases with a budget of a quarter of a billion dollars, for example - arguably benefit from it.
Likewise with the world of Harry Potter, you knew what you were getting into with the adaptations of the famous children's books, but with Fantastic Beasts, who is it aimed at?  Kids?  Adults?

Speaking of grown-up versions of children's worlds: Christopher Robin.  Did we need to see a beloved children's book character reinvented as a PTSD-stricken adult wrestling with the evils of capitalism?  Apparently we did.
Some of the animals are terrifying in their new live-action washed-out grey tones, like Tigger, whose white snout makes him look like he's a thousand years old, and the comfortable marriage of cuddly innocent animals and melancholic real-world drama reminded me initially of Adventure Time, but by the end it just reminded me of those buzzkills on the internet who were utterly outraged by Hobbes and Bacon because it acknowledged the passage of time.
God knows what Americans made of a CGI-led children's film that didn't have twerking or fart noises, but I enjoyed this just fine.  Fun fact: Chinese president Wing Jun Ping Chun Li whatever the fuck I dunno is nicknamed Winnie The Pooh by sassy kids on the internet* because of his portly shape and he so despises it that censors banned this film in China even after the makers avoided any reference to Pooh in the name.

* Or "domestic terrorists" as they're known in China.
#882
Off Topic / Re: The Political Thread
30 January, 2019, 06:50:29 PM
Sharky, austerity measures have killed 120k people in the UK, and those measures were relatively restrained (so we're told).  Will Brexit result in a literal Thunderbirds-style catastrophe full of pyrotechnics?  Probably not, but there will be people who will face disruption to their needs, and it won't take much for them to suffer a disaster of some sort, be it a lack of funds to buy food or a sudden urge to walk under the wheels of a truck so they can stop letting their family down.
Society is maintained in a delicate balance of multiple moving parts and I would expect an anarchist to understand that.  Any disruption to its mechanisms can have knock-on effects that could affect thousands - if not millions.
#883
Off Topic / Re: The Political Thread
30 January, 2019, 04:40:51 PM
Quote from: Theblazeuk on 30 January, 2019, 12:44:03 PMFor all those people who cry out for an Opposition thats worth talking about, I think the real issue is that this is how monumentally shit the Conservatives can be and still be described as winning.

For the last couple of decades, anything in the mid-30s range of the polls for Labour is Doing Quite Well, anything around the mid-20s is Doing Quite Bad, and anything over 40 is This Is Never Gonna Happen territory - they are currently averaging between 38-40 in most polls.
You will note, however, that the same people who cry about the Opposition not doing better against the current government are the same people who spend all their time bitching about the opposition and insisting that they'll fail, that they can't be elected, that their leader is shit, that the supporters are thugs, etc, and then when the opposition does actually do well in any way at all, it's decried as Fake News from Owen Jones, a junior column writer for the Guardian upon whom they seem to have some sort of fixation.
#884
Off Topic / Re: The Political Thread
29 January, 2019, 09:41:51 PM
#885
Off Topic / Re: The Political Thread
29 January, 2019, 12:19:43 PM
QuoteMaybe I'm being naive, but I had hoped that after using the referendum to gauge the public feeling (as was its sole purpose seemingly) the government would then work to find the best solution,

Cameron already tried negotiating better terms with the EU, but because it was Cameron, he fucked it up.
To be fair, the UK already had a pretty sweet EU deal, wanting better terms despite being a glorified money laundering operation was just taking the piss.

Quote from: The Legendary Shark on 29 January, 2019, 10:31:19 AMI admittedly don't follow this very much because it smells like a huge pile of bullshit to me so I don't understand why a deal is needed anyway. The referendum, as far as I recall, was about leave or remain - not remain or partially leave (which is what leave with a deal seems to be).

Trade deals are needed because we have borders.  You can, technically, just ship something into a country and sell it directly to your customer, but then where does the government get its cut?  Taxing billionaires might be off the table, but taking a slice of Joe Schmoe's pie is how politicians' salaries get paid.

QuoteWe have a country that voted leave and politicians who want to remain, so the politicians seem to be making a complete pig's breakfast of the whole thing in order to bore or scare people into eventually remaining.

If you're wealthy enough to survive this comfortably and have the army to protect you, what's the downside to Brexit?  Why would you stop it?
From the point of view of the ideologically-committed capitalist, austerity was a huge success that led to the tripling of the incomes of top earners.  The bigger the disaster that Brexit is, the better, as it becomes an automatic sanction for the previously-unthinkable, such as selling off the NHS.