2 paragraphs into your post, I thought this was going to be about naming sexual conquests. Neveeeerrrr mindddd....

PS, Stilton, Helvetica looks like shit on Vista and lower, because of its crap hinting. I don't know how it looks on 7's improved Cleartype. You might consider Corbel or Segoe UI, if you want something nice and non-standard.

I'll check out the girl later.

Bioshock?

Not 2?

I still need to try that.

Thanks, Scot, I was in need of a replacement beginner's acoustic.

grizzly bear, the dirty projectors, omar rodrigues-lopez quintet, karnivool, pivot, mondo cane

original godzilla

the thing abou the zazen's is how half their cd is amazing stuff i like and the other half is sickly melodramatic karaoke pop oh the contradictions

How can anyone be afraid of guacamole?

it's green and slimy. i was afeared.

actually, now that i think of it, i think i always related it to the green slime from You Can't Do That on Television. huh.

I finally watched District 9 . I fully expected it to suck. I was very wrong.

Posted By: BrandonI finally watched District 9 . I fully expected it to suck. I was very wrong.

I was fully expecting it to be the best sci-fi movie in a long time. I was disappointed.

My opinion really doesn't hinge on whether it was sci-fi or not (even though it was billed as sci-fi in just about every review I saw before it came out). Even if you remove sci-fi from the equation, I had high expectations and was disappointed.

I didn't really like the ending, I thought it was very unfulfilling. The movie should not have turned itself into a mediocre action movie like it did in the last half.

in math we are healed.

I figured Christopher took off with the ship because - hey, I'm spoiling a big part of the movie here, if you haven't seen it - I figured he took off because he wasn't really a Prawn, and wanted to go back to his own home planet to try to turn himself back into whatever he'd been born as.

Posted By: AndrewI figured Christopher took off with the ship because - hey, I'm spoiling a big part of the movie here, if you haven't seen it - I figured he took off because he wasn't really a Prawn, and wanted to go back to his own home planet to try to turn himself back into whatever he'd been born as.

I didn't get that at all. hrm. bears thinking about, though.

The dude came across as a locustoid Scotty to me, but not a leader of any kind.

Posted By: DorIf there had been any (ANY!) hint of that in the story, it would've been a lot better.

I thought it was pretty strongly hinted. The news people at the beginning suggested that it was a slave ship, and that the prawns had mutinied and killed off the crew, but in the process marooned themselves. That felt like a pretty big assumption for them to be making, which made me think that it was just a piece of exposition that the screenwriter had put into the mouths of the talking heads.

Then you had this bizarre Macguffin of the mysterious fluid that does two things: (1) fuels their ships, and (2) mutates people into prawns. That's pretty specialized. And not an evolutionary thing - it's not like the prawns secreted some kind of bio fluid that could be used as rocket fuel. It was a substance that had been deliberately cooked up in a lab to serve those two purposes.

Third, why weren't the prawns more of a threat? They were definitely dangerous - very strong, and they had access to caches of devastating weapons that only they could use. So why weren't they running the city, or at least the slum? I felt like there was a comment there on the nature of a slave mentality; in terms of plot, I thought they were suggesting that the prawns had been psychologically broken.

And the way they reproduce was utterly bizarre. They lay eggs, but then the eggs need to be mechanically incubated and fed. I don't see a way for a race like that to evolve - I think they had to have been genetically engineered.

I thought that the only thing it all could possibly add up to was a scenario where you had some kind of Dominion type race flying around the galaxy, landing on planets and spraying the natives with rocket fuel, turning them into prawns, and press-ganging them into service.

On the transparency/opacity scale, it's in the same neighborhood as "Deckard's a Replicant, right?" But I think it's definitely there.

wait, what if the slaves were all made prawns, but christopher was a born prawn? that might explain a few things.

I saw it in a theater a while back so I forgot alot of details, but maybe he doesn't care about his "people" apart from the lip service of getting other prawns to help him find the fuel and then get a dude to help him steal the ship and vamoose? I mean leaving all those other prawns behind isn't very populist at all.

I don't know... the rocket juice seems to be pretty potent stuff and awfully difficult to make. I don't see how it would be reasonable to regularly use it to make a slave who is essentially a mindless sadsack.

Power entire ship, or make a mindless sadsack. Hmmm... decisions, decisions.

It seems like the transformation stuff was intended to be little more than an unintended and highly implausible side effect of rocket juice.

For the record, I'm willing to admit that this may be my own crazy-ass fan theory, like James Bond is a Code Name or It All Happened In Cameron's Head.

Posted By: scotI saw it in a theater a while back so I forgot alot of details, but maybe he doesn't care about his "people"

There's a scene when they're breaking in to get the juice and Christopher sees the experiments the gov't is doing on the bugs and he goes into shock. That's when he makes a comment like "I can't let this happen to my people".

Posted By: Wookiee

Posted By: scotI saw it in a theater a while back so I forgot alot of details, but maybe he doesn't care about his "people"

There's a scene when they're breaking in to get the juice and Christopher sees the experiments the gov't is doing on the bugs and he goes into shock. That's when he makes a comment like "I can't let this happen to my people".

oh yeah... YOU WIN THIS ROUND, WOOKIEE.

but I'd also need the exact quote to sign on the dotted line, because it could still be a selfish situation since he knows he is just a prawn to humans no matter what and seeing bold evidence that you are trapped among brutal sadists who are ready to do horrific experiments on you at any moment is a hopeless thing whether you are a man of the people or just a dick who wants out.

also, to all the other theories, maybe the magic juice is only hard to make on earth. could be as bountiful as pine cones when you are a bug-man bouncing around the stars.

seeing bold evidence that you are trapped among brutal sadists

Out of ignorance, I'm afraid I have eaten some of the prawns. Had I known (I would have probably had them the same way...).

i have a tragic aversion to eating a rubbery bug out of the water.

Point of fact: water bugs are only rubbery when they are overcooked. Otherwise they are delicious.