Posts by Josh Addison
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A metronym, surely.
Touché.
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I'm not sure if you are being obtuse or not, but you do realise that there are two meanings for the noun / verb "Wellington"?
(Excellent - I don't know dick about mining or health care, but I can be a grammar pedant with the best of them!)
Both of those usages of "Wellington" are nouns; it's just that in the second case the word is being used as a metonym for the NZ government.
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Sometimes, the petulant liberals blaming Obama for everything were near as bad as the Republican nutjobs screaming "NO!" at everything that moved.
John Rogers has a quote for every occasion:
Last fall:
Republicans: Jesus, you're just voting for Hopey McChangey because he's a great speaker and he's promising unicorns and rainbows of change.
Democrats: How condescending. No, I'm voting for Obama based on his stated policy goals and his deliberative nature. We are, after all, the reality-based community.
Now:
Democrats: WHERE THE &#%&@ IS MY GODDAM UNICORN?!!
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My dad's a bit of a car nut, so he was pushing me and my brothers into cars as soon as we were able. This meant that at University, I was often the only guy with a car, which meant I'd be the one ferrying people around. Only very occasionally would I feel taken for granted - usually it just made sense.
Of course, now that we're grownups (for a given value of "grownup"), just about everyone has a car anyway, so the problem is rare enough that it's no big deal.
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your reactions to movies are SUBJECTIVE
Well, that's your opinion...Touché.
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You know one film that I loved? Torque, with our own Martin Henderson. By any objective measure, it's an awful, awful film - 2D characters, a plot driven largely by the inexplicably stupid actions of said characters, and some of the worst dialogue committed to film - and yet I still came out of it with a big fixed grin on my face, and that's all that matters to me. No such reaction to Avatar. For me.
I'm not sure why this seems to be a contentionous point here, but your reactions to movies are SUBJECTIVE, which means the people who didn't like Avatar are RIGHT and the people who did like Avatar are ALSO RIGHT. Obvious? Then why do people keep trying to tell other people that they are somehow wrong in enjoying/not enjoying a film?
Also: Tremors - \m/
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Avatar was flawed, yes, but it was soooo much better than any of the Star Wars prequels for instance, and involved an unprecedented massive leap of technology.
Personally, I enjoyed the Star Wars prequels more than Avatar (which isn't to say I enjoyed them lots and lots, just more than Avatar...)
While I'd believe that there was "an unprecedented massive leap of technology" behind the scenes, I didn't see it on the screen - really pretty CGI as opposed to pretty CGI; really good motion capture instead of good motion capture; and the 3D accented the visuals nicely but didn't do anything revolutionary with them. Where's the leap?
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Interesting. I remember ages ago reading an article on Real Dolls (it was on Salon.com - don't have time to hunt it down now). At one point, the guy who makes them mentioned that he gets asked every now and then if he could make child versions of his sex dolls, to which he always said "no". The same arguments showed up then: "Isn't it better that paedophiles have sex with a fake child instead of going and finding a real one?" vs "Won't having sex with a fake child reinforce their tendencies and make them more likely to eventually go and find a real one?"
Not sure if that's a different situation from looking at porn or not - it seems more active, but is that a relevant difference?
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There have been cases of girls below the age of 18 being charged with making child pornography for taking photos of themselves and circulating them.
Indeed - I've also heard of such cases in the US, where the prosecutors then pushed for them to be tried as adults. Could be an urban myth - surely that would have created enough of a logical paradox to destroy the world?