Posts by B Jones
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Good question, Craig. If it weren't for Lindsay (who could almost have been me at age 17, minus the stoned babysitting episode), I'd say no, but there she is. Perhaps there's less studio interest in exploring girls' coming of age in a realistic (and therefore funny) way.
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What I liked about F&G the most was Lindsay - a really well written, realistic character. Judd Apatow seems to have lost his understanding women as people powers since then - his recent female characters are pretty much cardboard cutouts for his male leads to get amusingly tangled up over.
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Hee. At least it ended well. No cliffhangers or, say, getting locked in yet another prison. The season end for F&G was lovely.
And you can see practically the entire cast today on How I Met Your Mother, ER, Bones, Knocked Up, Spiderman, and so on.
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Jones' law - as an internet discussion progresses, the probability of it turning into a discussion about science fiction approaches 1 :-)
I recall a dystopian British kids' show in the early 80s that sounds like The Survivors, although I remember it as The Changes. For some reason, pylons featured in it as images of evil. As in, the camera would zoom in on a pylon and the scary music would play. No idea what it was about, but I've never been keen on pylons since (also that educational safety film with the kid who goes to get his frisbee in the substation, whose trousers catch on fire. Brr).
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I realised in the library the other day (while borrowing Perdido Street Station - talk about putting the dys in dystopia) how much I prefer crossover SF/F to hard examples of either fantasy or science fiction.
I think the thing with hard-science SF is that the authors (and fans) can get so caught up in the freaky science of the whole thing that they forget about telling a decent story. Things like characters and so on. Sword and sorcery perhaps also gets caught up in the tropes of the genre. The crossover territory is where authors go that don't quite care so much about the rules and just want to tell a good story.
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Just getting on with it, to me, means it's receded from the political environment - it's a matter of personal choice (up to a point), and while there's plenty of informal judgement about what people are into, there's less of things like "mixed flatting" being a public issue that anyone talks about banning.
Where our personal lives intersect with the state, we can still find examples of private life being used to deny access. Marriage, court proceedings, licence applications, custody battles, adoption, immigration (really? is that about how many spouses they can bring on family reunification?) - there's plenty of scope for the private to be interfered with by the public there.
There's also scope for the state to cut across private judgement, to punish discrimination on the basis of family status, gender identity, and so on.
There's ongoing battles on both fronts, but while there's a lot of co-ordination and commonality on the social conservative side, there's not so much on the liberal side. You've got the Prostitutes Collective, various proponents of marriage equality, feminists, health groups, and hotbeds of liberality like PA, not to mention Steve Crow et al, but it's more like an accidental alliance, with whoever's in the firing line taking the lead on a particular issue, and sometimes outright conflict between them. There's no equivalent to Family First/Kiwi Party/Destiny/Maxim on the liberal side. Perhaps that's inevitable given that liberalism is a bigger and more diverse movement.
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I remember enjoying the commentary of Fight Club and a couple of Kevin Smith movies. And the post-production commentary on LOTR was a surprising winner. The directors were too prone to making up stuff that sounded cool but was contradicted elsewhere, I'd already heard half of what the design team had to say, and the cast were a bit chaotic.
It all feels like so long ago. I've been a fangirl in recovery for nearly as long as I was a fangirl, now.
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Hasn't anyone tried anything like this before? I don't mean in quite such a flamboyant sort of way, but explicitly (sorry) going head to head with the social conservatives as a political party?
Even the Greens are a bit shy of the social liberalism causes listed above, in NZ. Maybe the Values Party had different things to say in its time - free love was a bigger cause back then, rather than something people just got on with.
But it makes sense to fill that niche, especially in Australia's preferential system that shuts out the small parties, but incentivises the big parties to campaign for the small party supporters' second preferences.
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Aerial - you can get Freeview|HD.
Satellite - you can get a perfect signal even if you live in one of Wellington's reception-free valleys, without shelling out for Sky or Cable. Plus a couple extra channels. But as far as I can tell, no HD, or plans for HD in the foreseeable future. I can't see why, but I guess the flash incentives go first to those who need a little more than just decent reception full stop to make the switch.
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It's a really bad analogy. In real life, the siege of Stalingrad was ended because it failed. The besiegers had their supply lines cut, and the 6th Army basically starved once they were trapped against the city, and ate a lot worse than rats - there are reports of cannibalism. Whereas the Russians could keep resupplying over the Volga, when it wasn't running with icebergs. </history nerd>