Video of the crash here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uz5ji__mY5Y

Bad karma, irony’s hand, or just retribution from above? Speculate as necessary >:D

Legos were always a primary target of Christmas and Birthday wishes, as well as one of my top picks for spending money. There was always a new set to buy; new themes to explore. Until, one day, the harsh truth occurred to me – the Lego Company retires lego sets. First, it was the disappearance of truly classic Space legos – then, the Pirate and Castle sets faded out of existence. Legos became more and more commercialized and dumbed down. Lego’s philosophy became not, ‘how can we build this with existing pieces,’ but ‘what new, large, chewing-toy size legos can we make to fit this piece?’ The quality of legos declined, and with it, the inventiveness and “art” of their sets. Their designs plummeted in originality and popularity.

Then, a bright spot occurred – Star Wars Lego. For a time, these heralded the return of more complex and challenging sets with creative designs. It wasn’t long, however, that even these became simple conglomerations of large, ugly, and single-use pieces.

Now, I can’t see Legos appealing to anyone anymore – unless those with “old-school” legos. The most popular Lego line is the bionicle line – nearly indistinguishable from action figures and barely more difficult to put together. Gone are the days when one could buy a Castle Set and (nearly) turn it into a spaceship; nowadays, most of the pieces are so specialized that it takes an extra level of creativity just to use them in any other non-related theme.

Is this a problem with the research and design? Target audience? Marketing? Have the lego designers of the past merely been replaced with computer-enhanced morons, or are they limiting the scope and diversity of the lego pieces to appeal to a younger generation? The latter bodes ill for that generation. I have to assume it’s the latter, as making a comprehensive series of sets built into a theme isn’t difficult.  Are more complex legos less profitable for their target audience? Perhaps. It sure isn’t related to the piece count; small pieces of plastic can’t cost more than a percentage of a cent apiece. Maybe they should outsource to China. They’ve recently come out with completely plagiarized legos under a Chinese company name. Sadly, they’re probably equal quality for cheaper, too.

Either way, despite how often I use legos, whether as a diversion or in the process of animating, I haven’t bought a lego set in 5 years or so. The only sets I bought in the recent time period before then were re-sales of “retired” legos. Oh well, the illiterate masses can have their modern legos; I’ll appreciate my own while looking forward to the upcoming castle legos this fall… ^^

And yes, I do still “design” with legos.

Unfortunately, all the R-rated content makes it unrecommended, so you didn’t hear my recommendation from me ^_^

Glad to know our justice system is ensuring that overrated celebrities get to avoid jail time AND get more publicity out of it.

Why?

So the millions of people that watch the Superbowl see the commercials.  Simple, isn’t it?

Not really.  Now take a nice brand-name store – for the sake of an example, we’ll pick our favorite American Eagle.  Here, for a nice sum of money, one can buy a shirt imprinted with the trademark eagle logo and personify “cool.”   Rather than spending a much smaller amount of cash at a different store, fashion-minded consumers can buy a nice shirt with the eagle logo and satisfy the wants of the ego.  Nice, huh?

Now, have you ever seen an American Eagle advertisement?  Probably not.  Have you ever seen someone wearing the famous eagle?  Most likely.

All it takes is a little bit of marketing to make the product appear “cool.”  Then, rather than spending millions of dollars on advertising, the clever capitalists sell their clothes at high prices.  The consumers, satisfied with their purchase, wear the  article of clothing.  In effect, the consumer pays the company to advertise for them.  Nifty?  I think so.  Who needs to spend millions of dollars on marketing when one can simply sell brand-name clothing at ridiculous prices and get the advertising done that way?

And the consumer, fickle as he is, buys into it.  Literally.

So, characters.  So in PoTC we have all these great characters, such as a high/drunk sea captain, an emotionless blacksmith-turned-mythical immortal sea lord.   Then we have this great bossy Elizabeth whose only purpose in the movie is to somehow weasel her way into more treachery.  Then of course we have the evil corporation, random assortments of pirates, and other bizarre characters.

The “good guys” of the series, namely Will, Jack, and Elizabeth are the most worthless heroes of any movie I’ve seen.  Not only are they happy to be “free” as pirates, with liberty to plunder other men’s life, liberty, etc., but they can’t even keep a friendship going for longer than 15 minutes of screentime.  It’d be almost impossible to count the number of betrayals through out pirates two and three, but it’s deep into the double digits.  Elizabeth turns on Will, Will turns on Jack, Jack turns on both of them, Barbosa turns on Jack, Will turns on Barbosa, Jack’s crew turn on Will….is this supposed to be a plot??

Then we have the great fight scenes.  With a swordfight on top of a ship’s rigging between an octopus man in the middle of a maelstrom………….what?!?!?!  Is this the Matrix?!?!?  Iron Monkey??  Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon?  But, we can assume that with ninja-esque balance and  force powers they could really fight up there.  So, we go on to the end battle.  We have this great fight in the middle of a whirl pool between two ships.  The two ships get close, and crew members from both ships start swinging tarzan-style from the masts.  What?!?!  Is this supposed to make sense??  Not only that, but during this 15 minute fight absolutely nothing happens between the tiny pirate fleet and the massive East India company fleet.  I mean, they have like 200 + ships…what?!?!?  I don’t even think the combined fleets of Europe were that big :S.  Anyways, after the black pearl defeats Davy Jones’ ship, they get out of the whirlpool and destroy the flagship of the “bad guys.”  Then, the bad guys, seeing as how they outnumber the pirates something like 10 to 1, lose all morale at seeing their flagship getting teamed 2-1 and run.

what.

what.

what.

Many more examples could follow, except that this would get boring.  So we’ll move onto the plot.  Oh wait, there isn’t one.  We just have a bunch of random scenes strung together in some semblance of a plot.   The whole movie is so convoluted that it seems like they just took scenes and pieced them together at random.  Huh!?!?!?

We also get to see Captain Jack’s completely random hallucinations for about 15 minutes or more, then we see dozens of crabs appear from nowhere and carry his ship out to sea.  WHAT?!?!?!

And of course there’s all the humor they inject into every scene.  Smart move, seeing as how that’s the only way they could keep people’s attention.  Why do we need a cheap  joke every couple minutes?  It’s supposed to be a BATTLE SCENE, not a slapstick show.

I could go on forever but this post is getting more convoluted than the film’s plot.  Don’t see it unless you just HAVE to see the rest of the trilogy, in which case go see it on video.  I give it like a 3/10 stars.

BTW, funniest part of the movie is at the endish when Elizabeth starts giving an inspiring speech about how pirates should fight for there freedom (go figure).  So then Jacob starts going, ” they may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom!” (from braveheart) and I say, “A red sun rises – this day, we fight!”  Funniest part of the whole movie.

-30 years ago scientists and the media were terrified about “global cooling.”

-Humans are responsible for less than 5 percent of all CO2 emissions.

-Cooling and warming comes in cycles, for example the “middle age warm period” and a cooler period from the middle ages until recently.

-The cost of reducing what emissions we do put out would be catastrophically high and devastating to developing countries.

-Global warming is a logarithmic phenomenon, meaning that it isn’t linear, as predicted, but slowly levels off to the point where it barely climbs.

Instead, we get more bias and rhetoric. Let’s talk facts, eh?

My philosophy as to global warming can be summed up as follows:

1. If global warming is indeed occurring (which is debated anyways), then it is not at a rate which will devastate the globe nor is it proven to be caused by humans.

2. Even if we know that we, as humans, are causing it with our emissions, the cost of fixing it is massive. Instead of spending literally billions and trillions of dollars to cut back on carbon emissions (as specified by the Kyoto Protocol) let’s start stopping hunger in Africa, which is killing millions of people a year. Global warming may kill millions in the distant future, we know for sure hunger is killing millions right now. Call it pragmatism, call it common sense.

In the 1980s this song was used by African protesters in South Africa as an anthem of sorts as they fought against racial bias and prejudice in school textbooks.  We need more of it today.