I kind of get it. But on the other hand, every time you change mediums the way you tell the story changes. Every time a movie comes out based on a book (I mean an all-text novel, not a graphic novel / comic), most people that love the source book *think* that they want the movie to be a 100% verbatim adaptation. But the medium just doesn't work the same way.

Describing a setting or a character might take many paragraphs in a book, possibly spread out over multiple chapters or even multiple books. In a movie, *bam* -- you put it on screen, and you can see it. Done. On the other hand, describing a character's motivations can be done very succinctly or in great depth and detail in a book, but it is harder to do that in a purely visual medium like film.

Wolverine's color scheme and costume design works in comic books. His mask/hat thing with the horn-like points works in the comics. But in live-action film, what materials can look or behave like either or those things, and not be jarringly weird? Even cosplay type stuff is generally built to look good in still images -- not necessarily in video, being subjected to action-movie kinds of physical motion. I believe the directors / filmmakers when they say that they have tried more authentic costumes, and felt that they "didn't work".

Deadpool was a very good example of how it *can* work to move the imagery in a direction visually closer to the comic books. But I think the best we can hope for is a happy medium where *some* visual cues are adapted from the comics, in the situations where those things adapt well to the format.

Actually, I'd say looking like a creme puff is probably not the best evolutionary adaptation...

I treat movies like these (like Oldboy, Edge of Tomorrow) as basically adaptations of foreign stories to Western society. It's not at all a surprise that Western audiences will generally want a Western lead, and studio execs know this. Besides what would be the point of remaking the anime/manga verbatim (besides converting anime to live action)? The original stands by itself.

What bothers me more is the inevitable dumbing down of the material. You can bet philosophical discussion on the boundary between human and machine, dualism and emergent bandwagon will be replaced by actions, explosions and CGI.

They are going for a direct adaptation of the original rubber suit. Stupid grin, tiny arms and massive tail et all.

I'm pretty stoked TBH.

"oooh noh! GOOOOODZZZIIIIIUUUUAAAAA!"

I never got sold on motion control. It just has never been precise enough to feel like anything more than a gimmick to me. Maybe just confirmation bias, but everything I tried on Wii just felt really weird, clunky, and plasticky. I'll admit that I haven't really tried much of anything since then (and Wii is really old news by now).

Anyway, all the demos here looked cool for their 3D immersion, but my old bias against motion control kind of put a bit of an unfavorable spin on everything -- at least to me. Fine, small-scale motor skills are just going to be really hard to simulate with two wand-like things, even when they have multiple degrees of freedom and seemingly pretty solid accuracy.

...But, I'll admit that the archery mini-game looked like a really fun adaptation of that that wouldn't necessarily require *extremely* accurate fine control. Moving out of gimmick territory and into "ok, that could actually be extremely entertaining".

Why is there so much nuclear waste? Because we have so many people living in artificial environments that require tons of power.

Why is the Colorado river becoming almost drained and getting worse each year? Because of climate change, yes, but primarily because we have millions of people living in desert regions and agricultural crops like almonds that require laughable tons of water. Most of those almonds are turned into flour and milk products because people refuse to eat other food, or can't because they should be dead due to allergies.

Why are we overfishing and using such harmful methods as trawling? Because we have too many people that want a specific kind of food or can't afford a different type of food.

Could we switch everyone to insect proteins or other radical foods like spirulina? Yes, if you want riots. The technology doesn't exist that can make sustainable foods taste the same and people would go apeshit.

So to sum up, yes, we could feed people without damaging the environment, if you could get people to agree to it. Think of trying to force vegans to chomp on insects. As far as habitats, not so much. We don't have the room for the sheer numbers of people without either doing away with food producing land, destroying existing ecosystems like the rainforest, or putting them in artificially sustained areas like large cities or hot/cold desert terrain.

Nature used to take care of these situations via epidemics or natural selection. We have adapted to the point where we can beat most epidemics (although soon we will be hit with something bad if we look at the super bacteria we are creating) and we protect the people who should be dead against their own stupidity.

Climate change isn't going to kill this planet first, the sheer population rise will wipe it out much sooner than that. By 2030 it is estimated we will have 8+ billion people, by 2050 close to 10 billion. Exponential growth is going to suck this planet dry as a bone. The day is coming when we will HAVE to start supplementing food with non-standard food types and soon after that we will wipe out most of the living food items on this planet like a horde of locusts.

Video game weapons all already have this adaptation.

As always, my views are just a layman's perspective with no claims to expertise.

@RedSky

You correctly point out the intent of the reform, to stop fractional banking which they diagnosed as a primary driver of volatility within the financial sector. They want to revert back to a system where the banks were intermediaries the way you described it: deposit leads to loan, in this case at a maximum ratio of 1:1, no leveraging.

Unlike the current system where bank deposits are mostly created by banks themselves -- the act of lending creates deposits. In fact, deposits are liabilities of the banks, not assets. Reserves are assets, but they are only traded between entities with accounts at the central bank. And, in normal times, are provided quite freely by the central bank in exchange for other assets.

Anyway, "Vollgeld" places the ability to create money exclusively in the hands of the central bank. Controlling the amount of money in circulation was a concept most central banks were eager to drop during the '90s, since it never worked. Demand for credit is volatile, central control is inflexible, even if they could somehow quanfity the need for it ex ante -- which they can't. Hell, they can't even do it ex post. You can't quantify the need for additional money beyond what's already in circulation if the central bank's action set the conditions for a dynamic development in the first place. You can't know in advance what increases in production need to be financed, you can't know how demand for liquidity evolves over time. The quantity theory of money was buried for a reason, it ignores reality.

Anyway, I applaud the proponents of Vollgeld for pointing out the dysfunctionalities of our fractional reserve system as well as how questionable it is, ethically, to hand over so much power to a small cabal of financial elites. In fact, I'm quite ecstatic to hear them point out that a nation with a sovereign, free-floating currency does not need to finance deficits through banks -- how very MMT of them. Go OMF!

But their proposed solutions are a fallback to "the market will stabilise itself if left alone, a completely independant central bank will keep the quantity of money in circulation at just the right amount". This hands-off approach resulted in absolute devastation whenever it was applied. They want to turn the state into a regular economic subject that has to adapt to the amount of money currently in circulation. It's (the illusion of) control by technocrats, where you get to disguise policies against the masses as "economic neccessities". Basically the German Eurozone on steroids.

As for the absolute independence of the central bank: you are right, that is not strictly part of the Swiss Vollgeld initiative. But it's what almost every proponent of Vollgeld within the German-speaking circles argues for, including major drivers behind the initiative. Can't let politicians have control over our central bank or else they'll abuse it for populist policies.

They are true believers in technocrat solutions, completely seperate from democratic control.

PS: I cut down my ranting to a minimum of MMT arguments, given that many people see it as just a different sort of voodoo economics.

Edit: Elizabeth Warren's 21st Century Glass Steagal Act strikes me as a rather promising way to solve a great number of problems with the financial industry without going back into the realm of monetarism.

Its much simpler actually: The circle of violence. It started when the west thought it could bring their ideology to those countries. But Sunnis didnt want to live together with Shiites (the forming of Iraq and others). They didnt want to have foreign soldiers on their soil and adapt western lifestyle (especially Saudi Arabia). They didnt want Jews to get Israel, they didnt like to get invaded (Iraq and others), they didnt like the western coup detats (Iran and others), they didnt like to be afraid of being struck by a drone or cruise missile strike any minute (pretty much the whole region), and they didnt have the means to defend against their corrupt governments established or supported by the west or the attacks by the west.
Before this they were living at relative peace. Much more peaceful than we did live together in Europe in the last 600 years for sure.
Its pretty much desperation and has turned into normality now. They are also filled with hate due to their way of life, which puts honor very high and which the west doesnt understand. But you would be too if you have seen your culture get destroyed by other completely different cultures and seen your family and friends die by their hands for hundreds of years.
ISIS only struck that nerve better than any before. And thats why so many people are leaving to join them who are even living in Europe. Yet the west created them with their despicable foreign policy. And instead of learning from it, they are only making it worse by using these people for their own goals in Syria (that includes Turkey) and not changing their foreign policy.

A smart man once said: We shouldnt be wondering why they bomb us, we should be wondering why they dont bomb us much more.

Argh. I hate it when people say that it "required" a very specialized set of conditions for life to arise on Earth. Instead, I would argue that life on Earth arose in a set of specialized conditions and is therefore accustomed to those conditions.

Life similar to what we have seen on Earth might "require" those conditions, but why should we assume that those conditions are required for life in general? We have discovered life here on Earth that falls outside of the hospitable conditions that we have previously thought of as being "required" for life. For example, consider extremeophiles like the organisms that live around deep ocean vents, and can survive and thrive in water well over the boiling point, with no sunlight, etc.

There is a limited range of conditions present in Earth environments; a maximum and minimum temperature likely to be encountered on Earth, varying amounts of light or other sources of energy, etc., and we can find life adapted to wildly varying positions within that range. Why do we continue to assume that Earth-like conditions are some sort of magic combination for life? For life "as we know it", ...maybe. But I figure there is a probably a lot of stuff out there that we would recognize as alive, but which is adapted to very different conditions than anything considered hospitable to any life on Earth.

I agree about the over-reaction to the "white slavers" comment, which I think just got hyper-PC types riled up.

And he does seem pretty humble and wise, although if he was really going to practice what he's preaching he would just butt out and not say anything. To be fair, he probably got invited on the show and is just responding honestly to the questions -- which is a fair bit different than if he sought out a soapbox to complain from.

I think Lucas had a fantastic combination of Tolkien-esque level creativity AND knew how to adapt his specific creations to the broadly appealing "Hero of 1000 faces" fantasy prototype AND got lucky in many ways. He deserves a LOT of praise for all of that. ...BUT, for the original movies he knew how to delegate things that he doesn't do well -- dialog, directing, etc. He was reined in by internal and external constraints. When those largely went away, we got the prequels.

I love Star Wars and am very grateful to George Lucas for creating that universe. And I'm pretty much equally grateful that he isn't at the helm anymore.

Edited propaganda, but thanks for the general warning.

Anyhow, either we can protect our borders or our way of life will soon end. Mexicans dont want to destroy the USA. Black people in the USA just want to live a normal life. Muslims definitely appear to be set to destroy our society one way or another.

What I do not understand is why they (muslims) want to do this (besides being batshit crazy religious people). Most refugees run from something bad to a better place, adapt and do their best to live happily ever after. These morons run from a horrible place with the aim of making another area just as bad or worse than what they run from. Strange people.

American natives were (are) not very happy about how america was colonized. If we cant start doing a better job of protecting our interests we will end up much like they have - a minority living by the rules of a foreign religion. And any jewish people left will be ****ed, again.

RedSky: 1) we (Europe, specifically Sweden, Germany and France, also Belgium, possibly others) are not managing the situation and have not been for a couple of decades, the situation is well out of hand in many city boroughs. One can not integrate people who dont want to be integrated.
2) extremism is not a solution, that is part of the problem.
3) the only way forward is to start doing what we were meant to be doing from the start, protect "Schengen" borders, throw any country that does not comply with "Schengen" rules out of "Schengen" immediatelly and let it keep any refugees that want to stay. Of course we have to help countries that already have more refugees than they can handle (even though they invited them and now they complain). Obviously we want to help war refugees but we cant possibly invite them all.

No sane person in Europe wants more illiterate muslim economic refugees - no economic sense, no national security (public safety) sense, and no humanitarian sense - they dont want our help, they want our income level and they want us to be muslims. If we do want to help these people can we please help them to try to live better in their own countries?

Political correctness and NATO interest in Greece and Turkey are not insurmountable obstacles, after all we still have democratic elections every 4 or 5 years in most european countries. People rarely vote that stupidly but right now anything is possible.

"Southern look" is incredible newspeak.

Hahaha... seriously, what kind of passive aggressive bullshit is that? "Ignoring the theoretical underpinnings of socialism, because I've decided that that's waffling, I say Jesus was a socialist." Next time, maybe just write TL;DR and make a farting noise while rolling your eyes.

You can't dismiss the actual meaning of the word Socialist as 'semantics', if you're talking about whether or not something is socialist. That doesn't help the discussion.

In order to use socialism as you appear to be doing, you would have to first:
- ignore the history of socialism and its political development,
- ignore the entire body of academic work, current and past, on socialism, and
- ignore how the word socialism "IS used now, like it or not" in actual socialist or semi-socialist countries

By doing that you end up at your definition of the word, yes. But you had to take a pretty long detour to get to that point

Marx's quote on religion is pretty straightforward - it can be, as you say, open to interpretation, but it's generally agreed that he didn't say that your Jesus was a stand-up socialist. He is more commonly taken to mean that religion is a false response to the real suffering of the oppressed; religion provides a fiction of suffering and a fiction of redemption/happiness, that will never translate into real change. It makes the oppressed feel like they are bettering their lives, while actually keeping them passive and preventing them from changing anything.

The slightly larger context of the quote is this: "Das religiöse Elend ist in einem der Ausdruck des wirklichen Elendes und in einem die Protestation gegen das wirkliche Elend. Die Religion ist der Seufzer der bedrängten Kreatur, das Gemüth einer herzlosen Welt, wie sie der Geist geistloser Zustände ist. Sie ist das Opium des Volks."

I don't know how to make that more plain, but I can try. Religious suffering is on one hand a response to real suffering (wirkliche Elend, by which one would mean a materialistically determined actual lack of freedom, resources, physical wellbeing, etc), but it is also a false reaction against that real suffering. Real oppression creates suffering to which there could be a real respones, but religion instead substitutes in false suffering and false responses - it tries to tackle real suffering with metaphysical solutions. He goes on to say:

"Die Aufhebung der Religion als des illusorischen Glücks des Volkes ist die Forderung seines wirklichen Glücks."

This, too, seems pretty straightforward to me, but you might see 4 or 5 different things there. Religion teaches the people an illusory form of happiness, which doesn't actually change or even challenge the conditions of suffering, and must therefore be tossed out, for the people to ever achieve real happiness.

A fundamental difference here is that religious goodness is internally, individually, and fundamentally motivated. 'Good' is 'Good', and you as a Christian individual should choose to do Good. A goal of Marxism is to abolish that kind of fundamentalism and replace it with continuous criticism; creating a society that always questions, together, what good is, through the lens of dialectical materialism.

You might recognize this line of thinking* from what modern Europeans call the autonomous left wing, or what Marx and Trotsky called the Permanent Revolution, which Wikipedia helpfully comments on as "Marx outlines his proposal that the proletariat 'make the revolution permanent'. In essence, it consists of the working class maintaining a militant and independent approach to politics both before, during and after the 'struggle' which will bring the 'petty-bourgeois democrats' to power." Which sounds great, except it can also lead to purges, paranoia, and informant societies.

My entire point is that socialism and Christianity are entirely different beasts. One is a rich, layered mythology with an extremely deep academic and political history, but no modern critical or explanatory components.** The other is an academic theory of economics and politics, with all the tools of discourse of modern academia in its toolbelt, and a completely different critical and analytical goal.

TL;DR? Well, Jesus (in a lenient interpretation) taught that we should help the weak. Marx explained that the people should organize to eradicate the conditions that force weakness onto the people. Jesus
taught that greed would keep a man from heaven, Marx explained that religion, nationalism, tribalism and commodity fetishism blinded the people to its common materialist interests. Jesus taught that the meek will be rewarded for their meekness, and while on earth we should render unto Caesar what is Caesar's; Marx explained that meekness as a virtue is a way of preventing actual revolutionary change, and that dividing the world into the spiritual and the materialistic helped keep the people sedate and passive, which plays right into the hands of the Caesars.

*I'm just kidding, I know you don't recognize any of this


**There probably are modern scholars of Christianity who adapt and adopt some of the tools of modern academic discourse; I know too little about academic Christianity.

Exactly! the implications are huge in the understanding of evolution and even society, since say, the selfish gene in humans/red hair/disease/etc can be triggered or turned off, or say that there is an extra feedback mechanism in males´offspring! It could explain the enormously fast adaptability in the evolution of species and the programmed role of males in society and their EXPERIENCES/fears/emotions! Sperm production (gametogenesis) is constant in males, and nature is no dummy; one could hypothesize nature finds feedback mechanisms into genetics to compete and gain advantage with other males, even for future generations (?). This should have huge implications if the proper research is continued and these very interesting hypotheses and other´s are seriously questioned.

I love how he says, "Studios don't waste time in adapting it." As the film playing is of Spartan soldiers.

2000 years is fast! You should have see the production schedule for The Land Before Time!