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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • The cast of Blacklist was amazing. The writers, less so. They spent so much time telling us how brilliant Elizabeth was, but barely ever showed us. What they showed us most often is that the only way they knew to create conflict was to have her do the absolute stupidist thing possible in nearly every situation.


  • Frodo and the party at Weathertop - in the books Frodo shouts Elbereth’s name as a war cry and stabs at a wraith, rather than cowering and falling down as in the film.

    Ent moot results and dramatic reversal - in the books, the Ents knew what Saruman had been up to and decided to go to war at once. They didn’t passively decide to do nothing then change their minds.

    Faramir bringing Frodo and Sam (and the ring to Osgilath). In the books, Faramir recognized the threat the ring posed and let Sam, Frodo and Gollum go on with their quest without hinderance.

    The books had no nonsensical scene with Gollum framing Sam for illicit lembas consumption.

    The books had no stupid dwarf tossing jokes.

    While Aragorn has periods of self doubt in the books, none of these inhibited him from taking action. In the film he has a long sequence of scenes where he’s basically paralyzed by self doubt.

    No scourging of the Shire in the films. These scenes were crucial to showing just how much each of the hobbits had developed as characters and in what ways.

    I could go on, but hopefully these are sufficient to illustrate the point.

    The films were great with respect to casting, cinematography, art design and location. Jackson and Boyens seemed to have forgotten however that Tolkien was the master and they the students with respect to writing.



  • You can also get extended service updates from Microsoft for at least a year. $30 for up to 15 computers, although there are also a couple of ways to get then free. 1000 bing rewards points, or enabling Backup to sync your settings to OneDrive are supposed to both means to get them that will become available soon.



  • Sertou@lemmy.worldtoaww@lemmy.world•We all need that
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    1 year ago

    That sort of misidentification is another reason that dog bite statistics are unreliable; they depend not on rigorous breed identification but on amateurs’ identification based on physical traits shared by bull dogs, mastiffs and terriers. Artificially group dog bite reports involving a dozen unrelated breeds or mixes together under the misidentification “pit bull” and yeah, you make pit bulls sound scary.

    Even when properly applied to pit bull type dogs, the term “pit bull” is imprecise because as wikiipedia states “pit bull is an umbrella term for several types of dog believed to have descended from bull and terriers. In the United States, the term is usually considered to include the American Pit Bull Terrier, American Staffordshire Terrier, American Bully, Staffordshire Bull Terrier, and sometimes the American Bulldog, along with any crossbred dog that shares certain physical characteristics with these.”

    Anyone who argues that breed is a reliable indicator of violent behavior and refuses to acknowledging the lack of reliability of eye witness breed identification on the basis of appearance is arguing in bad faith.


  • Sertou@lemmy.worldtoaww@lemmy.world•We all need that
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    1 year ago

    That’s not a pitbull, it’s a Cane corso or another type of mastiff. That people so frequently misidentify various breeds as “pit bulls” is one of the factors that makes the statistics you cite unreliable. Even “pit bull” isn’t a specific breed designation. Any breed or mix with a boxy head and deep chest is likely to be mistaken for a pit bull.



  • It’s not what I read for primarily, nor did I say so. Your supposition is something of a strawman argument. There’s no need to be defensive on McCarthy’s behalf. Any writer receives much worse criticism than that no matter how good they are, often from themselves. We tend to be our own worst critics.

    That said, poor grammar pulls me out of a story and that’s a common reaction.

    A good writer might use such run on sentences sparingly as a matter of style, to good effect. William Kennedy’s opening paragraph in Quinn’s book is a good example. The quoted passage from Blood Meridian may be another such. As I said, I haven’t read McCarthy and don’t know if such run-on sentences are typical of his writing, so I asked.