ThunderPeel2001

That's true. Fair enough, then. I actually wouldn't mind seeing The Avengers AGAIN. Yes, that would be a fourth time. Clearly I'm a bit of a fan Also, the news is reporting that it's been a huge success in the parts of the world it's been released in. I'm SO glad that Joss Whedon should now be taken seriously in Hollywood.

I loved Epitaph. I thought they did a great job doing something interesting with the premise. *shrugs* As unrealistic as they may be, I'm a fan of post-apocalyptic settings. I'm not particularly unhappy in my life at all, or angry with the world.

Speaking of Dollhouse, how do people feel about Season 2? Whedon fell into the same situation with Fox that he did with Firefly: The network suddenly decided they didn't want the show he'd pitched, after all. Apparently they were so not paying attention that they wanted to turn it into a procedural without sex in it, which given the premise is damned retarded. Anyways, I felt Season one had a VERY rocky start, but later found its feet. So did Season two continue that, or did it get rocky again? The reason I ask is that I'm considering rewatching the show and finishing it this time, but I hated the first few episodes so much (although they're well made), that I want to make sure it's worth it. Orvidos, what say you?

To be fair to everyone else on Twin Peaks, Lynch and Frost set the tone. If Laura Palmer came from Lynch, then I'm pretty sure that Cooper came from Frost (at least judging from his other works). Frost may have directed of the first season episode like an episode of Dallas, but the rest of the directors did great jobs, I think. Lynch is a guy who falls in love with ideas, he's not a guy to work on a TV show and come up with new stuff to a deadline. He's an artist. When the Palmer story concluded, he lost interest, although I think he was still in love with the place and the characters.

Yes. It's not just that he's flamboyant, though, it's . I totally agree. Both Thor and Captain America were hard sells for me, but they managed to make me care about both the characters. No mean feat for such lame ideas for super-heroes (well, I'm thinking of Thor, specifically).

Allow me to put forward a different way of looking at it:

There's a short story which shows Mary Gay's story from her point of view, apparently. I've not read it, though.

Nah, there's more to it than that. MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD -- Do NOT read if you haven't seen the film! It's got a really nice structure, really. I think maybe you should give it another couple of watches if you think the plot wasn't very defined. I've found three to be a good number, and I may go for four

Not sure where you heard that. The original idea actually sprung out of a biopic on Marilyn Monroe that Lynch and Frost were working on, based on the book, "Goddess". It's unclear how far they got with that, but it never happened, and the idea evolved into Laura Palmer: The perfect prom queen with dark secrets. Lynch never wanted to resolve the murder, but Frost and ABC felt that the show couldn't continue forever with an unsolved murder mystery -- and ABC really wanted to push it because they knew it's what people wanted. (I remember Frost saying something along the lines of, "Gee, let's tune in this week to still not find out who killed Laura Palmer".) So for the second season they set about starting to resolve it, and Lynch began to lose interest in the project, and drifted away. Additional problems hit the second season when the Cooper/Audrey storyline was nixed by Kyle MacLachlan, meaning that a ton of lacklustre B and C stories suddenly got promoted to major A stories. According to what I've read, he was against it because he felt an upstanding FBI agent like Cooper wouldn't ever get involved with such a young girl. Rumours abounded that it was actually because of pressure from his then girlfriend, Lara Flynn Boyle, and indeed, Cooper's later love interest, Annie (Heather Graham), was pretty much the same age (18) -- this time with no protests from MacLachlan. It was never the original plan for it to be ongoing soap opera with loads of different mysteries, and indeed one of the weakest aspects of the second season was the lame reason they came up with to keep Cooper in the town. When Lynch got to make his movie, he went straight back to the part of the show he loved the most: Laura Palmer's story. Frost has since admitted that it was a mistake to reveal the killer, and that Lynch turned out to be right. It's true that the directors that came in for Season 2 ended up making the show more of a parody of itself, though. According to my ex, they would just come in and try to think of "kooky" things to do with the camera for the sheer sake of it -- as if that's all Twin Peaks was. As I say, I think the LOST folk got to learn from the mistakes of Twin Peaks, and instead of resolving the central mystery, they tried adding new mysteries, which worked brilliantly for most people.

The last episode, directed by Lynch, was pretty good, but you're right. Revealing the killer was a big mistake. Mark Frost agrees with that now (Lynch never wanted it revealed). It became a joke in Season 2. Such a shame. LOST did a great job of selling a mystery, though. If they'd had the experience of hindsight, I'm sure they could have let the series run for many years by introducing new mysteries, rather than solving them. I'm pretty sure LOST learned from their mistakes. Anyways, there was this sci-fi Western that I can't remember the name of, but aside from that (and Twin Peaks), I really enjoyed Bakersfield PD.

Shame you're not learning C, because this book utterly rocks: http://www.amazon.com/C-Programming-Language-2nd-Edition/dp/0131103628 Something far more useful is this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/388242/the-definitive-c-book-guide-and-list

Real life The Day Today... GFELLK8htKM

AVENGERS! (I wouldn't mind seeing Salmon Fishing, but you should see Avengers now before everyone starts going on about it and ruins it for you with hype.)

That or legally change your name to "Zorro" so your contract gets really confusing.

Nooooo!

I think it's because Kojima wasn't really involved, and has apparently distanced himself from it. Also apparently Peace Walker just goes and does what Portable Ops attempted. I've no idea how true any of that is, however.

Second viewing of Avengers tonight. Still gets a from me.

Yup, I think we do.

TextEdit does whacky things with line ending and encoding, but Notepad doesn't. Actually spacer gifs are still alive and well in emails. I recently had to use them for something because Outlook 2007 and 2010 use the Microsoft Word rendering engine.

The HD collection sort of steers you towards playing 3 first, which works, I think. What did you make of Portable Ops? I've not played it, and some folk seem to think it's not really canon. I think Kojima has had enough of Snake... at least according to this guy: http://metagearsolid.org/reports_mgs4_kojimaVSmgs4.html

Looking at that list, there's too many improvements for the crazy cut scenes and dubious music/voice overs to ruin the experience. It's interesting to compare the differences... Twin Snakes: lXISD1jXDjU The original: 5sny3RfMYMU

I eagerly await your incorrect response ;-P I've been building websites since 1998, and I've used Notepad when I've had to. It's not perfect, but if you know what you're doing, it's fine. You can't debug PHP or ASP.Net with Notepad, so and IDE is needed in those situations.

That's an absurd comparison. The only difference between Notepad and Eclipse when it comes to pure HTML is syntax highlighting. Yes, it would be dumb not to make it easier on yourself, but it's nothing like creating the text from a command line. Additional features, such as debugging and autocomplete, only come in handy when you're using PHP or ASP.Net. It would be perfectly acceptable to piece together a small site, like Yufter's proposing, in Notepad if that was all you had access to. It would NEVER be acceptable to start piecing it together with the command prompt if that's all you had access to. That would be insane.

It's worth noting that Kojima productions got serious death threats when Hideo said he wasn't going to be directing MGS4. The fact that his name is featured prominently might be a reaction to that. "The staff heard about this and got very nervous," said Kojima. "We talk today as if it was a joke, but at the time, it was not a joke at all. It was serious."

What minor stuff did they change for the Twin Snakes, do you know? Also, holy crap, I REALLY had trouble when I first played MGS3: MGS3: Fail? I can't believe how different my impression of it was this time around. I'm so glad I finally got to experience it the way it was meant to be experienced.