Roderick

I am pretty thrilled that Jumanji is getting remade though.

When it comes to saving the environment and bettering the world: besides my already, let's face it, pretty awesome standards for not eating meat and other fantastic, character-building features, I am going to out-do most all people out there with the biggest boon to the world a person can give: not having god damned children. You want to shrink your ecological footprint? How about NOT creating additional feet.

I didn't get the vote every day badge =( And I cannot believe the Steam Summer Sale is ended =(((

I just came back from The Dark Knight Rises and THIS is what I have to say about it: (Actually written for a blog I'm thinking of setting up, so I've already begun writing little bits about what I see. Also: SPOILER ALERT!) --- In 2008 I called it: there was no way they’d be able to top The Dark Knight and they should leave it alone. It was a perfect storm of acting talent, writing, theme, characters and timing. After Heath Ledger’s Joker, the only way was down. My predictions proved on the ball. But The Dark Knight Rises does not merely fail to live up to its predecessor: it disappoints with a vengeance. This movie is an exercise in testing the audience’s patience. For two-and-a-half hours it barrages us with boring characters, tedious storytelling and insulting plot twists. The back-and-forth patter, usually possessing Nolan-brand smarts, comes across as smug and clichéd. All the players have become laughable parodies of themselves. Mentor Alfred seems eternally stuck in giving solemn advice through recounting details of his life. Dr. Jackstraw Scarecrow comes up for another cameo, but has unfortunately devolved into a comedy character rather than the sinister presence he once was. His appearance in The Dark Knight was good storytelling, as the ease with which he was disposed of told how much Batman had grown. In Rises, he’s just there for a chuckle. It’s funny, no doubt, but also a depressing use of the delightful Cillian Murphy. Everything about the way this movie works speaks of how rushed it was. The ideas that fuel it are shallow and needed a lot more maturing. The plot is an unorganized mess that smacks of reheated leftovers from the previous film. Characters are just there for god knows what reason. What exactly is Catwoman adding to the theme of the film? Batman Begins was an investigation of fear and how it could be harnessed. The Dark Knight ingeniously explored the cutting edge between order and chaos. What exactly is this one trying to tell us? Besides which, the Joker was a truly menacing villain. His insidiousness lay in the fact that he forced Batman to make decisions that tested his morality. Contrast that to the flimsy evil of Bane, whose idea of torturing his enemy’s ‘soul’ is to put a television in front of him so he can see how he has failed. Not even Tom Hardy can make that work. This dark knight hardly rises above the level of a Saturday morning cartoon. The fantastically dull, overlong climax centers around a ticking time bomb threatening to blow up Gotham. After Joker’s crafty mind games Nolan devised in the previous film, nothing could be more drab. The worst crime is how incredibly uninteresting it all is. I shouldn’t be this disappointed though: after all I already knew it in 2008.

When I was in the US I was confused about the term 'whole foods', when the supermarkets selling them also sold heavily refined products. You know, every culture has its own terms and hypes.

On top of that, that might be too rushed for a book cast? If the idea is to give people the chance to read the book and participate with questions, two weeks is a stiff deadline on both ends.

Yuck, I didn't know that. I drink soy milk most of the time anyway.

Should we get rid of the cattle, we would see a huge beneficial effect on our environment, seeing as how the methane gas emissions from the enormous amount of animals we keep are a big factor in Co2 pollution. Nachimir; obviously we would need to weed out the harmful practices surrounding any animal husbandry.

By cockblocking, of course, I refer to both the usual sense of the word and 'cock' as in a rooster. It has a double meaning, appropriate to the context of farm animals.

Didn't mean to ignore you, Erkki. Regarding your earlier post: it's well-established that raising a kilo of meat costs anywhere from six to ten kilos of vegetable matter. Should we overnight stop eating meat and all livestock be erased, our food surplus would actually dramatically increase, not to mention the pastures freeing up valuable fields for raising crops. Of course, this is all a fantasy, since there is no scenario where any of this would happen instantly. Say that we as a society wean ourselves off eating meat, and perhaps even off of using animals for non-murderous production entirely. That is a process that will slowly evolve over the decades and society will have ample time and room to adjust. New industries will rise to fill the voids of the old. Whether we should stop milking cows and keep chickens to lay eggs is a strange case, by the way. Millennia of breeding and human selection have made these creatures so docile and so fit for captivity that some species wouldn't be able to survive in the wild. Keeping these animals in pastures might actually be best for them. As far as I know (do correct me if I'm wrong), milking a cow isn't annoying to it, and might actually be useful. Cows originally didn't produce milk continuously, we bred them for that purpose. No matter how our relationship develops to involve rights and whatnot, we need to keep servicing the cow in this way (and gaining wholesome milk in the process). All of the above being predicated on the 'not going to happen within the next century' scenario that animals do gain legal rights and that extends to cows, and that it all passes and that powerful meat lobbies don't cockblock it which they inevitably, aggressively will.

SInce I'm reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet now, I think anything by David Mitchell would be interesting.

Yeah, that's the thing that always destroys me about the US: how expensive vegetables are in comparison to meat. Vimes is also right that the health benefits or detriments of eating meat versus other foods are disputable, i.e. there is little causation proved. There is however a growing list of correlation that links eating (lots of) meat to many illnesses such as cardiovascular diseases and cancer. It's true that things as the China Study have room to poke holes into, but it's silly to completely ignore the vast material of work that points to eating lots of meat is bad for you, and eating lots of vegetables and a little bit of fish will prolong your healthy life. I also thought about the anthropomorphosis of animals yesterday (and let's face it, I had a ton of things to consider through this topic yesterday, holy shit). It's safe to say that pretty much each animal will be the apex of something. Just because mankind is one of the more successful beings (alongside bacteria, certain worms, cockroaches, &c), doesn't mean our standard is suddenly the highest aspiration. It is, however, a crucial way in which we are wired to understand the world. We see humanity in things, we want to recognize it. Our empathy is based on it, and a huge part of our morality too. It might not be completely fair and a shortcut, but it is understandable why it is so important to us and why we would use it as the foundation of legal (human) rights. If you want a cleaner way to 'rank' animals, Bentham provided an alternative: rather than the ability to reason, he pointed to the capacity for suffering as the benchmark.

Oh man, I do apologize for that. I did not mean to be douchebaggy with that remark, it was an honest question in my head that I should've kept locked inside. No snippiness intended, very sorry if it was a stupid thing to write. As for my answers, I don't think 'because I care' was the gist? In any case, I feel this is getting really far from the topic. If you feel like it, we can discuss some further, if not we can just let it rest.

Those are easy baby questions! 1. Because that's the power level of this topic. It's annoying if we're all discussing along a certain intellectual wavelength and then someone else comes in and doesn't want to play along. Those oneliners are bothersome for that very reason. 2. It was logical step to think that because you didn't want to discuss it. If you had a solid, well-thought out philosophy to back up your opinion it would've been very easy to post it and prevent a lot of bother. I was actually wondering about Twig's age as well. It would not surprise me if he turned out to be a few years younger than most of us.

I so desire a Kindle. And Infinite Jest is on my list for footnoting pleasure.

Twig, I don't hate you, nor do I think you must stop eating meat, nor am I bothered that you eat meat. What bothers me is that you don't seem to be willing to engage in an actual discussion about it, but post oneliners and don't reply to valid insights about the nature of animals. If it hasn't been made clear enough at this point, no one here is trying to make people switch to different eating habits - all I ask is that you try thinking about it on a different level, a level beyond 'I like meat and that's why I eat'.

I may or may not be currently making a small drawing for a Lego contest in the local toy shop, which is obviously meant for eight-year-olds and not twenty-eight-year-olds. But you can win prizes!

Why do you have a framed picture of your back in the room? That's just weird man.

My presumption is only matched by your rudeness when, rather than committing to an intellectually honest discussion, you chose to respond to my carefully constructed rebuttal with 'well, I don't care'. Consider that you have given me no reason to assume anything else than laymanship when it comes to being educated about any of this. Consider also that this is the second time that you've entered a topic with strong views, only to ignore what others are saying and kill further discourse by stating how impossible it will be to change your mind. If this is how you are going to act, please stay out of future discussions and save everyone including yourself a lot of grief.

My post said that reading up on the odd 200 years of thought about animal sentience and animal rights would make them more conscious human beings, not that they should give up on eating meat. Obviously, if you've thought about it properly and came to the conclusion that you want to continue to eat meat for utilitarian reasons, that's fine and many people do that. Everyone may decide for themselves what they want to eat and where they draw the line - but it should be an informed decision.

I'd say it's one part shop markup, one part getting back expenses (Hitchhiker sold so much already they can offer it for less, in theory, because all the costs have been redeemed a long time ago) and one part because they want to make a living out of it. The fact of the matter is, you're not paying for the physical product at all, that's dirt cheap. Same goes for games. You're paying for the salaries, the advances, the author's cut, the shares, the office, the profit.

I think you are cutting yourselves short with that attitude. There is a whole world of thought out there that you're (purposefully?) not tapping into, that would enrich you and make you a more conscious human being. Don't be contented with your views so easily.

I was worried more about the 'I don't care' attitude, but I'm actually willing to own this one too: why wouldn't it be? What does respect for animals mean? Respect and care for their wellbeing and sanctity? I would say breeding, keeping, killing and eating them would constitute a violation of both, no matter how 'respectful' you drop the cleaver. Furthermore, I suspect this attitude is a result of the disconnect we have in our society between actual live animals and the unrecognizable bits of meat that we purchase in stores. It's easy to rationalize that away as not the same thing. If we'd follow the animal from baby to boiling pot, raising and killing them ourselves, maybe then one would be able to use the 'I kill and eat animals with respect' argument. In our fucked up, clinically clean, bio-industrial meat-machine society, where eating meat is a capricious luxury, it's too easy and disingenuous.

Did you even read anything I wrote, Orv? This is a goddamned mess of reasoning you have there. First you use an assumption about what animals feel as a reason to classify them as objects. Then you assure us that animals do deserve respect, but follow that up with 'if it's not human, I don't really care if we kill and eat it'. I think what may be very useful to you is if you read some articles about animal sentience. Then at least you don't have to assume anymore, because I get the feeling you haven't actually delved into any of this. Your opinion smacks of ignorance. Edit: This is a glossary on the ideas surrounding animal rights: http://en.wikipedia....i/Animal_rights And the paragraph on consciousness here is concise: http://en.wikipedia....nimal_cognition

Very cool, Empika! Did you take inspiration from the official Battle of Endor set? Lego City Undercover has my interest as well. The Lego games have been hit and miss so far. They're all relatively good games, but they've grown a little stale through repetition. Undercover seems like it's breaking out of the (plastic) mold with an open world and missions.