Yukito-kun Posts

I didn't care much for the season finale. It felt incomplete, and done before.

"Okay, we got Cartman being racist, check! Gross out humor, check! Same joke reused over and over, check! Townspeople being idiots, check! Kyle being pissy about something, check! That's a wrap, people. Let's kick back for a couple of months and get baked."

Dances with Smurfs was a lot better. Good parody, good jabbing at idiots who should be wiped off the face of the earth, really good Cartman antics, and at the end, a reveal that the whole thing was a dig at Cameron's big Avatar movie, which I hope doesn't do well, because it is just good graphics with a subpar story wrapped about it.

" . . . even if it's for only one second" is probably a figure of speech. I doubt he'd be happy if the guy was only stopped for one second.

Perhaps it's a problem with translation. Japanese may have a phrase that means "hold him as long as possible, but it's okay if it's only a short time" but without being so long; the English equivalent would thus be, "hold him, even if it's for only a second." But I don't know. It just seems that the translation isn't god-tier, since "Although this is bad for you young people's pride, but I have to move on" is an incorrect sentence. (The "but" shouldn't be there.)

This sprang up from the Can You Waste Talent? thread.

You're walking down the street when you hear noise from a nearby alley. You peer in and see one man stabbing another to death. You walk away; you do nothing. You go home and act like you never saw it.

Are you indirectly responsible for that man's death?

The law says, yes, you are. If you do not attempt to stop someone from hurting/killing another, then you are an accessory to the crime. But that doesn't mean you have to wrestle the murderer and try to get him to stop. You just have to try to help. The easiest way would be to call 911 and tell them what's happening. This law doesn't just apply to murder though; if you let a wanted person stay with you, knowing that he is wanted by the police, that is illegal.

It makes sense, doesn't it? Doing nothing is an action that you have control over. If you walk away from someone being hurt, you are making the decision to not call the police or try to get help. While the culprit should bear most of the blame, you should share a little bit of it. You should be held accountable. I wouldn't call you a murderer if you didn't help, but I certainly wouldn't want to be around you at all.

Here's a less extreme example: Your friend throws a party, and a lot of people are there, including you. At one point, you're in your friend's bedroom, where some people are talking away from the noise of the music. You see another friend pick up your friend's wallet (which was laying on a table), look inside, and take out some money. You say nothing and do not stop the person. The next day, your friend discovers that his money is missing. He confronts the person who did it (lucky guess on your friend's part), and the thief tries to drag you down with him: "He saw me do it and didn't say anything." Does your friend have the right to get mad at you? Or at you not at fault at all, because you weren't the one who stole the money?

The way I see, if there are a hundred protests, and only one of them involves the police beating the peaceful protesters, that's too high a risk. Call me a coward, but I don't want to get hurt, and even if I did get hurt, only fringe groups would pay any attention to my side of things. Most people, I daresay, would side with the police and say some shit like, "Some people were rioting, you deserved it for being part of an angry group."

If I got on a roller coaster, and it malfunctioned and hurt people, at least I'd be able to get someone to pay for my medical bills. If the police beat the shit out of me at a protest, I'd be responsible for paying for any treatment I get, and that'd be worse than the actual ass-whupping.

It can be argued that if a person whose work would save lives does not do that work, then he is, indirectly, harming many people.

I've heard of this a lot. I knew several people in high school who said they dreamed the future. I never had a good conversation about the topic, however; a person would just say that they had a dream, and then it'd come true, and that's it. I wish I could get someone with the purported ability to volunteer for an experiment, to get a better idea of what the truth is.

It'd be a simple experiment. Person writes down everything they can remember from their dreams, every morning. If they ever experience something that they think was shown in a dream, we go over the past entries and see if anything similar was recorded. It would take a long time, since it can take a while for people to get good at recalling their dreams, and we'd need to keep the experiment going awhile to get any semblance of truth, to create more possibilities, more chances for the person to be proven right or wrong. And of course we'd have to keep the experiment going a long time to try to make up for the fallibility of memories and the fact that a lot of situations and scenarios are similar. Not something you could do just for a month, if you hope to get any significant results.

Still, if anyone claims to have this ability, it'd be good to keep a dream journal where you record your dreams, every morning. At first, it'll be hard, since most people don't remember a lot from their dreams, but you have to just write down what you can, even if it doesn't make sense. As you keep doing that, you'll start to be able to remember more of your dreams. Such a journal would be good if you ever wanted to see if your dreams yielded any warnings or whatnot, but even if they do not, your dreams can tell you a lot about who you are and what troubles you, pleases you, that sort of thing. Not every dream is important, but some are mirrors that reflect your mind.

Are you joking? I can't even tell. You listen to a podcast to get information? That's . . . very scientific of you.

I can't point you to one study that will reveal the truth because, you know, scientists tend to do a lot of experiments and tests. If there's only one study with results, you can't really say that that's the truth. And it's not like Dean Radin only researches one thing. It'd be better for you to do the research yourself and not get info second-hand. That is, unless you like to make judgments based on a very small amount of information and then declare that it's the truth. But I'm sure that isn't the case, since that's not something a real scientist or researcher would do.

It's "dark" because in America, you can't let kids know that anything bad happens, ever. They're a lot less strict about that sort of thing in Japan. Lot ZeroOBK said, the movies have always been dark.

You might want to put somewhere that this is a spoiler for the end of Death Note. Not everyone has seen it, and it'd be horrible if someone stumbled in here and watched the videos and ruined the series for himself.

The swimming lessons thing came about because someone read the end of Death Note and thought, "Light looks like he's teaching a swimming class. Imma use Photoshop and make for some lulz." The video version was made once the final episode of the anime came out.

This is a subject that's been brought up on House a couple of times, without a "right" answer ever being offered. It's always interested me when I've seen it, so now I'm sharing it with you.

Let's say that a man is a genius. He's a medical researcher, and given enough time, he may be able to find a cure for AIDs and cancer. At the age of 30, he decides that he doesn't want to do research anymore; he becomes a barber instead.

If he continues in the medical field, he will help save millions of lives. But he doesn't want to work in that field any more. Does anyone truly have the right to say that he is wrong in his decision, or to force him to do research?

Some people are really good at certain things, so good that it almost seems like they have an obligation to do what they're good at. But each person is in charge of his own life, and he can decide what he wants to do and what he doesn't want to do. If a person doesn't want to do that which he is good at, can anyone say that he is "wasting" his talent? It's his to waste, so to speak.

Or should people with extraordinary abilities give up their personal desires and do what is "better for the world"?

There doesn't need to be a riot for police to beat the shit out of people.

There have been a lot of cases where people were protesting peacefully, non-violently, and police would hit them with batons and toss tear gas at them. I've seen videos of cops even tearing gas masks off of the protesters (who sat quietly on the ground) so that the tear gas would affect them.

Is it okay to use violence in such a situation? Is it acceptable in any way to hit people who aren't even standing up, so long as they are against something that you are for?

There are a lot of people who give theories as to what causes purported paranormal events, but it's hard for them to be taken seriously because they can't be tested in a laboratory. There are a lot of theories about ghosts, for example, but they're just ideas. Even if you assume that ghosts exist, it's not like it's possible to catch one and perform tests on it. Of course, simply because they are ideas, that does not mean that they are wrong or have no weight. You just can't provide any substantial evidence to back up the claim.

When it comes to psychic abilities, it's a bit easier, but such research is still viewed as taboo, and people are quick to shoot it down instead of think about the possibilities. (Dean Radin is an example of a real scientist performing real tests and finding real results, as long as you don't expect the results to be lifting a ball into the air only with one's mind.) But an explanation is still hard to come by, because we don't know everything there is to know about the mind. So, the explanations for psychic phenomena rely on ideas about how things work, and, again, cannot be empirically tested.

In my opinion, paranormal theories are a lot like psychological theories. They're ideas, and some seem more likely than others, while the unlikely ones may end up being the right ones. But no matter how one feels about them, neither can be studied as rigorously or plainly as, let's say, chemistry. This makes some people view them as worthless or completely unscientific, while others try to study them as scientifically as possible, adjusting for the things we do not or cannot know.

I really enjoyed watching this movie, but I can't say that it's the best zombie movie ever. I honestly cannot see myself ever rewatching it. It's funny, but the jokes aren't the sort of thing you'd laugh at a second time, and the action is good, but the action scenes are too far apart to fulfill any desire you have to see zombies get slaughtered.

I've seen a lot of bashing towards this movie since it came out, and one question keeps swirling through my head:

Is this movie isn't good, then what is a good horror movie?

It seriously seems like, if you cannot enjoy this movie, then you cannot enjoy any horror movie, except for the gore porn movies like Saw and Hostel (which I hate to even call "horror").

I hear people complain about horror movies not being subtle and spelling everything out to the viewer. Then, a movie comes along that does not do that, and people still hate it? I just don't get it.

I can only think that it was the hype that did this, and a lot of people do complain about all the hype. "It didn't live up to the hype." Nothing could live up to the hype they dumped on this movie, but the way it was advertised had nothing to do with the actual film.

I would have preferred if this movie had stayed relatively unknown and only gotten released on DVD. If that had happened, I'm sure this would have become a cult classic, and then every time its name was mentioned, a shitstorm wouldn't ensure.

That's an insult to Running Man.

I haven't seen Gamer, never had any desire to, but I talked with a friend about the movie, and he said that not only is the movie bad, it's offensive to gamers, with inaccurate portrayals of gamers. I won't go into details so as to not spoil the movie for anyone, but one player in particular is such a stereotypical image of the typical gamer that it makes me think that the writer of this movie's script has never picked up a video game before in his life.

Bump because I love this fucking show!

When it first came on, I thought it looked horrible. 3D? Teenage characters? Fuck that. But after watching a bit of it, I began to see its appeal, and now, I eagerly await more episodes.

The art is good. It's nothing great to look, but it doesn't hurt to look at it (which is a change for 3D shows), and the characters move very well. Even their faces are animated well.

Pepper is also my favorite character, and apparently is the favorite character of a lot of people. She's cute but not so cute that you imagine her as your little sister or something. (What I mean is, you can jerk off to her.)

The show's taking a lot of liberties with the source material, but I think that's a good thing. A lot of things are different, and that makes it so that you can't compare it to the comic and say, "That makes no sense, because blah blah and blah." And you don't need to have an intimate knowledge of the comic to enjoy the series. If you do know, it just makes some things a little sweeter, like when they mention MODOK.

A lot of comic book and cartoon fans seem to like this series, and I'm glad I gave it a chance.

Rewrites are normal for any script. And it seems that this rewrite is due to budget concerns, which makes sense. It's easy to write about crazy shit and huge explosions without considering how much it'd cost to do.

Of course, it's entirely possible that the first script completely ruined everything good about the show, in which case this rewrite wouldn't fix anything. But who knows?

I'm not sure I completely understand what you're saying Unsigned, but I think what I have to say is somewhat related.

When I was young, I liked to play pretend. You know, tie a sheet around my neck and run around, saying I was a superhero. I'd physically act out what I was imagining. As an adult, I still imagine at times, but I never make it physical.

For example, I've been watching an Iron Man show lately, and I'll sometimes imagine how Iron Man would act in a certain situation or what it'd be like if he fought a certain enemy. But I never put a cardboard mask over my face and shout, "My metal beats your metal, Doctor Doom!" Partly because that would be incredibly embarrassing and partly because I don't feel the need to. Imagining it is good enough for me. I can be entertained by that little. As a kid, you need more than just your imagination to have fun. That's why kids get toys and play pretend.

Also, whenever I imagine characters and scenarios, I don't imagine it just as a way to pass the time or enjoy myself. I think, "Could I turn this into a story?" and "How would this work as a comic?" I think that's another part of being an adult, the desire and ability to turn what you like into something substantial, that other people could also enjoy. There certainly is a lot of this in the world of anime fandom, with fanfiction and fanart.

If I don't think about a series much, it means that I don't like the series very much. Because if I do enjoy it, my mind will spin with possibilities of how the characters would behave and what interesting things could happen to them.