.......over the cliff

Yeah, I started with that one but chose the one with better resolution and two different engines. Unfortunately there was no sound.

I didn't know whether to be happy or sad. Like seeing your mother-in-law drive off a cliff in your new car.

Yeah, those ABS bags are pretty amazing, but they are ridiculously expensive ($1000+). I've given it a lot of thought and I know some people say you can't put a price on your life, but they're not without issues.

First, they can potentially put you in a worse situation then an avalanche! Being buried is obviously bad, but being carried over a cliff is worse.

But more insidiously, they can lead to poor decision making. I try to stay in a constant state of, if not fear, at least extreme caution in the back country. I'm actuated aware how easy it is to fuck yourself up, and I would always rather say "nah, let's come back another day" than ride in dodgy conditions. In short, I have all the gear, but I never want to rely on it.

It's weird, I can go up to the observation deck of the CN tower, stand at the edge of a cliff or building without any issue, but I feel nervous as shit hanging Christmas lights using an aluminum extension ladder (which never seem stable). lol. I guess as long as whatever I'm standing on is secure and stable, I'm good.

With that said, no way in hell would you get me doing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40F8mALRukA

Um.....comedy? Not to me....or those cows I would bet. I hope someone goes out with a bobcat and makes a ramp for them or airlifts them out before they fall off that cliff. Poor guys.
Not exactly pets either, but there's no livestock tag.

He wants to steer away from the cliff.

Hillary leaks flat out tell her truth that she want globalize and no boarders.

Her ideology will continue the lowering of the American standard.
Less pay and less jobs.

So... here's my take on the election.

The US is a car. Most people are unhappy with the direction the car is taking them, because it's been going that way for decades and they don't see any improvement, if anything things are getting worse. Now, the drivers have been by and large the same for the past 30 years or so, different name, same direction, some take shortcuts, some take a leisurely route, but the overall direction has remained the same.

This election cycle people look at Hillary and think (rightly) she's NOT going to take us in a better direction. So many of them choose Trump, because he's at least going to turn the car, maybe even take it back the way the country came (that's what he says). He points to the right and says, "Let's go that way!" And many people agree, without even looking in the direction he points because they figure any change is better than no change. Meanwhile, the majority takes a more measured approach, they actually LOOK where he's pointing and see they're at the edge of a cliff and he wants to drive off.

Who are you going to vote for?

Sweet zombie Jesus....talk about pushing your luck.
I tried to learn how to juggle from a book, and it suggested pretending you are standing on a cliff to keep yourself from moving forward, but warned you should never actually DO that.
Yikes!!!

Lemmings off a cliff

http://wgntv.com/2016/07/19/video-shows-man-falling-off-water-slide-down-cliff/

Your video, Guy falls out of waterslide and down a cliff, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

This achievement has earned you your "Pop Star" Level 69 Badge!

@Mordhaus

"We have always been a gun violence culture up until the post WW2 era. Think frontier, wild west, duels, and mafia shootouts. We glorify violence everyday, we even give sickos who shoot up groups of people mass media coverage. "

Don't you think that that idea is outdated in 2016? Fine, that's the culture. Change the fucking culture.

When I grew up in Ireland, nobody gave a second thought to driving drunk. Sunday after church, people went to the pub, had a few pints with the neighbours, the kids played space invaders and then the whole family got back in the car and drove home.

And most of the time, it was absolutely fine. People got home, there was the occasional accident, but ya know, what can ya do?

Until it wasn't fine. And it took decades, but eventually, it became socially unacceptable to drive drunk.

"I'm just extremely leery of package deals like lets ban everyone who ends up on a list from having weapons based on a government decision."
I get that. But be reasonable. You're ok with not letting people fly, but you draw the line at owning weapons?

That is some fucked up list of priorities. I would be far more concerned with restricting someones right to travel (essentially restricting their freedom of movement, or a lighter form of incarceration) than whether they can own a gun.

You say that owning a gun is a constitutional right whereas travel isn't. I say that freedom of movement is a fundamental basic human right... oh, look at that, Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights!
"Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state."

I'm completely willing to say that it should be a lot harder to put someone on this kind of list, but there's no way the right to own a weapon is more important than freedom of movement.

Finally, re: slippery slopes
"The Patriot Act, meant to be a well intended set of rules to help us protect ourselves, has been perverted to lessen quite a few of our rights."

The Patriot Act wasn't a slippery slope, it started at the bottom of the slope and went straight over a fucking cliff. It should never have been passed in the first place.

They totally missed a good ending. I'm sure there's a clip of Stannis spinning around, from overlooking a cliff or a balcony or something.

The way things are looking with regards to her e-mail server, all the shit she's desperatly trying to hide will either kill her campaign directly or it'll provide Trump with all the fuel he'll need to bury her in 10 seconds flat. Open every speech with a call for the Clintons' indictment, both of 'em.

Would be interesting to watch the establishment Dems drive the corpse of their party off a cliff as a means to push Hillary, only to have her then be reduced to a toupé for Emperor Donald, First of his Name. And by interesting I mean horrifying.

"Automatically ok"? Not necessarily. But in cases where it makes sense, at a stretch even "plot sense" for the character to be there; yeah, I think that is OK.

The Last Samurai isn't a documentary. But, the general historical justification for Tom Cruise's character being in Japan is pretty much valid. Meiji was interested in the West -- clothes, technology, weapons, and military. He actually did hire Westerners to train his army, although from what I read it sounds like they were German, French, and Italian rather than American. Still, the movie portrays the general situation/setting with at least *decent* broad-strokes historical accuracy. LOADS of movies deviate from even this degree of historical accuracy *way* more without drawing complaints; particularly if their main purpose is entertainment and not education / documentary.


Your hypothetical reverse movie makes some valid criticisms. Even though it would have been historically possible for a Westerner to be in Japan at the time -- even to be involved with training a Western-style military -- it would be unlikely for such a person to get captured, run into a Shogun that speaks English, become a badass (or at least passable) samurai warrior, and end up playing a major role in politics and significantly influencing Emperor Meiji.

My defense against those criticisms is that, for me at least, the movie is entertaining; which is kinda the point. Your "Union Samurai" movie might be equally entertaining and therefore given an equal pass on historical inaccuracies by me.

The whole characters as a "lens through which the audience can appreciate a culture/history outside their own" issue is (slightly) more weighty to me. I don't think those are often necessary, but I don't feel like my intelligence is being insulted if the movie maker feels that they are in order to sell tickets.

I love the Chinese historical novel "Three Kingdoms". A few years ago, John Wu made the movie "Red Cliff", mostly about one particular battle in the historical period portrayed in that book. For the Chinese audience, Wu made the movie in two parts, summed up about four and a half hours long. For the US / West, he made a version trimmed to just over two hours. Why? Because he (and a team of market researchers, I'm sure) knew that very few Westerners would go to see a 4+ hour long movie, entirely in Mandarin Chinese (with subtitles), about a piece of Chinese history from ~1800 years ago that very few in the West have ever heard of or know anything about.

I think the full 4+ hour long movie is great. In my personal top 10 favorite movies of all time, ahead of most Hollywood stuff. But I also understand that there's no way that movie would appeal to all but a tiny, tiny fraction of Western viewers in that full-on 4+ hour format. But, even though I personally think the cut-down 2 hour "US" version is drastically inferior to the full cut, I am glad that he made it because it gives a suitably accurate introduction to the subject matter to more people in the West (just like the "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" and "Dynasty Warriors" videogames do), and makes that tiny, tiny fraction of Western people that know anything about it a little less tiny. While being entertaining along the way.

For other movies, sometimes the best way that a filmmaker can sell a movie to an audience that otherwise might not accept it (at least in large enough numbers to justify the production costs) may be to insert one of these "lens" characters for the audience to identify with. I don't think there is inherently anything wrong with that. It might not work for movies that are taking a more hardline approach to historical / contextual accuracy (ie., if Tom Cruise showed up in "Red Cliff" in circa 200AD China), but outside of those situations, if that is what the studio thinks it will take to sell tickets... Cool.

The Last Samurai is, like @ChaosEngine said, a movie primarily about an outsider learning a new culture (and accepting his own past). He serves as that lens character, but actually the hows and whys of his character arc are the main points of interest in the movie, at least to me.

I'm sure that an awesome, historically accurate movie could be made dealing with young Emperor Meiji, Takamori (who Katsumoto seems to be based on in The Last Samurai), and the influence of modernization on Japanese culture at the time. It could be made with no Western "lens" character, no overt influence by any particular individual Westerner, and be entirely in Japanese. But that movie wouldn't be The Last Samurai, wouldn't be attempting to serve the same purpose as The Last Samurai, and very likely wouldn't sell as many tickets (in the US) as The Last Samurai (starring Tom Cruise!) did. That wouldn't make it a worse movie, just an apple instead of an orange.