I feel like I’m the only person on the face of Earth that doesn’t hate Jar Jar Binks.
No, really, why? He’s a much more interesting character than the cardboard-cutout princess or poster-prodigy Anakin, or…
I didn’t hate Phantom Menace, though I didn’t like it as much as the original trilogy. Still, just because I liked it less than something doesn’t mean I disliked it.
For me, things began to take a sharp turn downhill around the Episode II.
But I still didn’t hate Jar Jar Binks. I hated Anakin. I wanted to punch his vacant pretty-boy expression. That movie should have packed so much punch - the reveal of the true motives; the threat; the clones; the fall-from-grace that will practically doom the whole world.
Eyeroll was the most dramatic reaction it managed to invoke in me.
And once again, I had more sympathy for Jar Jar than Anakin. Yes, I found CGI can play wide-eyed-innocent that gets duped and ends up screwing up the world out of best intentions better than Hayden Christensen. Deal with it. Oh, wait. Jar Jar Binks was acting with best intentions. Anakin screwed the galaxy over because of teenage angst. Ugh.
Not even combined powers of Samuel L. Jackson and Christopher Lee were enough to save the trainwreck. I still haven’t managed to force myself to watch Episode III in one sitting.
No, I have no opinion on the potential Disney-made continuation. I’ll wait and see how the end product will turn out.
Filed under sw Star Wars Prequels Star Wars
erindizmo:
There’s watching a fic devolve into more and more side-eye-y badfic, because with that you can at least derive some level of facepalm-amusement, and then there’s getting a big fat helping of NOPE.
I’ve actually had problems because I’m too lazy to log in for the starters. So often when I want to leave signed kudos and/or comment, I log in…and after login, it switches to another fic I had opened in another tab (sometimes fic I closed recently as well, I think). I can still hit the back button and return to the fic I really wanted to give feedback to, but I forgot myself and slipped up a few times.
(BTW that’s Godzilla toy he’s running away from.)
(Source: ForGIFs.com, via 4gifs)
Filed under animals puppies humour
quantumaniac:
Vestigiality and Evolution
Google Chrome, enough with the red line - vestigiality is a word, trust me on this one. Hearing people that say “whales have leg bones” or “dude, the appendix has no purpose” is pretty common nowadays - but people rarely know what this phenomenon is, or the implications of it.
What our good friends are thinking of is a phenomenon called vestigiality, which refers to genetically determined structures or attributes that have apparently lost most or all of their ancestral function in a given species. Therefore, throughout normal evolutionary processes, features and structures that once had a clearly defined purpose start to lose importance in a changing environment.
Many people use the phrase vestigial organs, when in fact vestigiality extends to include patterns of behavior, structures, or biochemical processes. Despite common belief, a vestigial feature need not be complete useless - it just simply serves a difference function than it would have in ancestral times. A classic example is the human appendix - though vestigial in the sense of retaining no significant digestive function, it still plays immunological roles.
Vestigiality need not even be macroscopic, as similar concepts apply at the molecular level — some nucleic acid sequences in eukaryotic genomes have no known biological function. Although some of them may be ”junk DNA”, it is very tricky to demonstrate that a particular sequence of a given genome is truly nonfunctional. As stated with macroscopic features, the fact that it is noncoding DNA does not mean that it is functionless - just that the sequence has lost its formal former function.
It is fairly easy to confuse the concept of vestigiality with that of a similar phenomenon - exaptation. In exaptation a structure originally used for one purpose is modified for a new one. For example, the wings of penguins would be exaptational in the sense of serving a substantial new purpose (underwater locomotion), but might still be regarded as vestigial in the sense of having lost the function of flight.
In Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man, he listed a number of human “vestiges,” including the muscles of the ear, wisdom teeth, the appendix, the tail bone, body hair, and the semilunar fold in the corner of the eye. Interestingly, the formation of goose bumps in humans under stress is a vestigial reflex; its function in human ancestors was to raise the body’s hair, making the ancestor appear larger and scaring off predators. These vestigial organs, Darwin argued, are evidence of evolution and represent a function that was once necessary for survival, but over time that function became either diminished or nonexistent.
It’s not “some sequences” that aren’t relevant (as in, never undergo transcription/translation into proteins) in human genome, it’s well over half of them.
Filed under science
Dear Gmail,
Fuck you for forcing me to change my password.
There was no “suspicious activity” beyond maybe me logging into third-party sites via account and perhaps using you from the company server. If you are going to make a problem out of third-party sites accessing the account, don’t allow the option.
This comes on the top of implied threat to people that don’t use their real name for Google Plus.
I wish I had a better alternative and didn’t use you everywhere already, or you and your declining quality would never see me again.
Filed under google google sucks gmail gmail sucks google plus me
webmiri:
‘My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people don’t know.’
He was so perfect I could cry.
When all is summed up, still the best.
(Love gifset-maker for inclusion of The Pink Scarf.)
(Source: mcfly-dougie, via pinkwa)
Filed under Sherlock Holmes SH Jeremy Brett Granada
Filed under Iron Man Creepy Santa
marysueproblems:
yuleite:
marysueproblems:
dappertea:
yuleite:
marysueproblems:
It’s established in the books that all dwarves (male and female) have beards.
Ahem.
“It was said by Gimli that there are few dwarf-women, probably no more than a third of the whole people. They seldom walk abroad except at great need. They are in voice and appearance, and in garb if they must go on a journey, so like to the dwarf-men that the eyes and ears of other peoples cannot tell them apart.” —Return of the King, Appendix A
So yes. Beards in book canon. No beards in movie canon. Also I highly recommend Appendix A to anyone curious at all about other things going on in Middle-Earth that didn’t make it into the books. The Gondorian history gets a little slow, but everything on the dwarves is p. cool.
They do mention the women having beards in the second movie LOTR movie.
Thought I reblogged this here, but no.
I need to check the box thingy first.
Yeah, Extended Edition Two Towers has Gimli mention it. So hell if I know what PJ thinks dwarfgirls are supposed to look like.
Like pretty princesses.
I’m really curious. Still haven’t seen The Hobbit yet. Sigh.
Believe me, I know very well that according to books, they should have beards. The problem is that in the intro part to the first Hobbit movie, the one that talks of Lonely Mountain and Dale, there were a couple of short and stout women without beards shown interacting with normal-human-sized inhabitants of Dale. I don’t know what else they could be. And if movie goes with “no beards”, it becomes “movie canon” and all complaints are invalid.
How does it match with LotR EE, I have no idea. But I guess they can always dismiss it because scenes in EE are extras.
I’m just going to go and seethe in my purist rage.
