Mission

Saffron may look attractive, but her characters (both of them)...yuck. Beauty is skin deep. (I know, I know, it's fiction. But fiction reflects our reality - which, interestingly enough, is entirely perceived and filtered through our personal lenses creating multiple, separate realities. But I digress...) The same thing happened with Cowboy Bebop. Unless it really clicks with me from the get go (The first season of The Pretender), they have to convince me. (Curiously, the latter seasons of The Pretender were diminished for me in that they got too involved with the backstory - or the mythology - and stopped focusing on the childlike character of Jarod and his personal mission.) Yeah...but she's the most interesting character by far. Plus she's hyper-intelligent. If you want to evaluate based on primarily on utility in crises situations, you'd probably have to go with the two most cardboard characters on the show: the cool chick and the greedy thief. Everyone else has utility, but they also have human flaws that will interfere with their utility in a crises. Yet these are the traits that give them dimension. You Perceivers always fascinate me. Oddly enough I HAVE seen Serenity. I suppose I'll have to see it again now. It spends a lot of time on the River story thread as I recall it.

Oh, it's getting good. Another thing that has always fascinated me: our greatest strength is also our greatest weakness. If you are exceptionally organized and punctual, you are also somewhat hidebound and unyielding. If you are completely open-minded and able to accept new ideas, you are also somewhat disorganized and unable to commit. I had dinner with friends last Friday at my 3rd Favorite (Known) Restaurant (Appeteaser in Milford, MI) and we were discussing just that. In the one couple, She is fairly well-organized and quick to make decisions while He is very open-minded yet is always changing His mind. As She put it, "If we were alike, we'd never make any decisions on anything. And He agreed - but only after thinking about it for awhile.

Gone. Please report them, it will be so much more effective than just complaining about them. That way we can eliminate them.

Sayyyyy...Doesn't Scaramanga have a solar panel attached to a solex agitator laser thingy hidden in there? And Tattoo...isn't he around there as well?

Well, I did explain the whole treasure chest thing near the bottom of the shelves page. The pirates probably rarely (if ever) had those curved top treasure chests from my research. They were more likely to have used regular footlocker-style boxes that were more common during the period. However, the real reason there isn't a full-sized chest is that there was no place to put it. It wouldn't fit. (The little brown one is pretty cool, though.) Thanks for the compliments! I have been working on and off on that room for over a year now. Hand finishing a floor and moldings is WORK.

[Er, not to interrupt your story - ignore this post - but this belongs in Rabble Rousing where, "General pyratical discussion & storytelling" occurs. Have fun with it. Mission out.]

Oh, I already own them. I've owned some of them since they came out. Thanks for the suggestions. I am leaning towards the pallet that Captain Sophia suggests. The ride, as I recall, on the skeletons tends towards dark and bland colors.

Actually, there be a lot of mundane talk here! In this forum, there isn't much else. Well, except my Chaos and the Brain Thread. Now that's anything but mundane. And the philosophy thread. Alas, I'll miss it...

Actually, there's two books that are useful in this capacity. The first is Rogozinski's Pirates! - An A-Z Encyclopedia which is actually an encyclopedia of terms, people and ideas associated with piracy and Gosse's The Pirates: A Who's Who which gives descriptions of various pirates mentioned throughout the literature - both fictional and factual, identifying them as being such. Neither book is perfect. Rogozinski's tome tends to state things a bit too broadly and sometimes takes what I consider liberties in the facts to make a point. Gosse's book is not complete, but it's a fairly good representation. On a related side note, I actually started a thread on another pirate site listing all the known pirates by name, sorted by nationality with users contributing. When I left there and came here, I drug my list over, but it never really took off here. It's in Captain Twill: Pirate Origins (Nationalities).

Huh. I tried rum, rum_ (space), "rum" and "rum "...dinna' work. Guess you're SOL Johnny-boy. Them's apparently the rules. (Rue, why put this here? Shouldn't it be in the Pub Management forum where members are to "use this section to post questions and comments about the Pub to the moderators?")

Hopefully, people have learned not to click on links that look even remotely suspicious, especially if there are several of them and they are from brand new users. However, it is my understanding that, for the most part, they cannot send stuff to your home computer based on your IP address. From http://www.whatismyipaddress.com/: "ISPs [internet Service Providers - whoever supplies your internet service] now issue IP addresses in a dynamic fashion out of a pool of IP addresses (Using DHCP). These are referred to as dynamic IP addresses. " Most likely your ISP is changing your address dynamically each time you log on. So the spammers can't send you anything. There are other things that protect your computer from this as well. From http://www.cert.org/tech_tips/home_networks.html: "Every computer on the Internet has an IP address associated with it that uniquely identifies it. However, that address may change over time, especially if the computer is * dialing into an Internet Service Provider (ISP) * connected behind a network firewall * connected to a broadband service using dynamic IP addressing." So between your ISP and your firewall software, you're pretty much safe from spammers. (You DO have firewall software, don't you? If you don't I highly, highly, highly recommend getting some. It often comes free with newer computers. A lot of ISP even provide free Firewall software on their site for download.) So, at the end of it all, spammers are just basically annoying. I know the mods are working dilligently to remove it when we catch it, but we're just regular users like you and only log onto the site so often.

It would seem we have several pet pic threads running around here, then. I'm going to combine The Timekeeper's thread with the one started a few months ago to keep things tidy and (hopefully) keep this topic from getting chopped due to inaction in the future. BTW, Iron Bess's dog really does look like a pirate.

Ah, it was "ass." It's clearly understandable in the movie, but not so much so in the trailer. Pretty good flick! A bit of a departure from the previous Bonds with low gadgets (no Q!), more than the usual character development and some nice little (very little) twists here and there. The action sequence running through the contruction site was pretty amazing. They must have hired olympic athletes to do it. It was about 20 minutes too long with three times as many endings as it needed, but other than that...good stuff. I liked the mysterious Mr White's role. I almost wish they'd have explained him a little better, but it probably would have detracted from the character.

Mission gives his advice: trust no one. Or throw caution to the wind and don't (trust no one)

jim, I'm afraid you lose your turn. I'm throwing out a quote to keep the topic alive. "We've been going about this all wrong... He's a sailor, he's in New York. We get this guy laid, we won't have any trouble!"

I'm merging this new topic with the old one to keep all the MySpace stuff together for convenient reference and readability.

Hester, we only do one quote at a time in this post or it gets really confusing. Plus you're only supposed to post a quote when you've gotten the last quote right or the post has been dead for several days and no one's guessing. Giving away hints for someone else's quote isn't cricket either. (You should at least let people have a crack at it before you give away clues.) (Besides, your quote is not easier. I haven't the faintest clue what it's from. It's almost as bad as Blackjohn's quote. )

Not to get OT...oh, hang it...To get OT, has anyone seen the series Dead Like Me? The girl becomes an undead reaper who still inhabits the earth in a new corporal form. She goes back to her old house to find her mom is selling her personal stuff at a yard sale. Creepy. I'm not much for garage sales. Setting fire to the house...that might be different. "$2 for this vase? Yarr!" *Whoosh*

Actually, the writers explain this in their VO for the original movie. Each person/group who takes something from the chest is covered by their own curse. They talk about this specifically in regard to Jack taking a coin - Jack had one curse on him, Barbossa's crew had another curse on them. The writers realized that this was confusing, so rather than explain it, they just had Jack put both coins back simultanously, removing any obligation to explain the complicated way the curse works. This saves the audience from having to think too hard. Now the monkey has a new curse on him. If someone else takes a coin, they'll have a curse on them, seperate from the one on the monkey. (The newly accursed do not have to find the monkey and repay his blood in order to lift their curse according to what was said on the writer's VO. Seriously, go listen to it when the end scenes are taking place.) Same as how Jack got into the coffin. Somewhere I read that Jack, Ragetti and Pintel's escape was written and possibly filmed, but it was cut out because the movie was too long. If it was filmed, I bet it will be in the Extras on the DVD.

People get the "Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor" auditory reference without knowing it. They see a really big pipe organ, and a villanous character playing it, so you get this "Phantom of the Opera" vibe, yeah? It's not a rip-off, per se. Yeah, it's a circuitous route, but it works! Oh, I misunderstood - I thought you were referring to sections of the music other than the Phantom of the Opera stuff. (While I own more soundtracks than I can count, I have never been very interested in classical music. Well, except Gershwin who basically did soundtracks from what I hear when I listen to him.) I still think it would have been far more appropriate to Davy Jones. The Kraken is just a big monster, Jones is the soul twisted by madness. He's more phantom-esque. Layers within layers of meaning.

It's not really all that amazing. Zimmer produced the first POTC soundtrack, so he should have been very familiar with it and involved in creating it. Compare POTC to the soundtrack for The Rock (where Zimmer was one of the composers) if you want proof - particularly the Rock House Jail and Hummel Gets the Rockets tracks. From what I've read on the soundtrack site where I hang out, Zimmer's a bit of a glory hound. He has a whole stable of up and coming composers to whom he farms out projects that he doesn't want to compose himself. He probably even farms out parts of soundtracks he puts his name on as composer as well (a recent trend in soundtrack composition.) I don't think anyone expected the first movie to do as well as it did, so he farmed it out to Badelt and put his name on as producer. Now the sequels...well they're a bit more high profile...

Well, it wasn't as good as I hoped, nor was it as bad as I feared. It was certainly an action movie. It was also a mid-series sequel in the standard tradition IMO. The scene where Captain Jack's Delorean gets struck by lightening and they find out they have to send Lando and Leia to the Jabba's lair which is off the edge of the map were particularly telling. If they have to defeat Eris the goddess of chaos when they get there, I'm gonna send Ted and Terry a letter containing a straight-lined mouth smiley with a raised eyebrow. (Although a duel between Aris' hair (Sinbad) and Davy Jones' 'beard' might be an SFX extravaganza worth watching.)

I think we're going to have to wait for 3 to find out the answer. -Mission (who has a long memory )

65% Quizes are SO confining. (But I like labels. ) (My pirate dog Fydo apparently also likes labels.)

You know...I can agree with most of this. Religion is a loaded word, though. My initial thought is that "the top" consists of find a way to do what you love to do in a way that truly benefits everyone else.