deanb

Errrmm.... You sure you've not read the book? I'm not really up on the lore aside from what's in LotR and the Hobbit, but I thought part of that was because You don't even need to be up on the lore; just watching the film both Gandalf and Aragon, a wizard/maia and a numenor who hangs around with elves, comment on how how truly magical the power of invisibility is. Gandalf also expands his comment on this with a fact of there not being many magical rings in the world (there's not many magical items full stop.) @TN: I can't be bothered to re-read through the hobbit again but I'm pretty sure he finds out about the ring. Unless Gandalf is to assume Bilbo learnt to go invisible on his own.

Well it's a joke. Not sure it's the joke.

Yeah.

I'm not comparing it to Avatar, Ethan just asked which film has better CGI of which Avatar obviously comes to mind (I could potentially name dozens more had I a copy of the film and time to blast through a bunch of others, but it's not really a worthy endeavour). The combination of CGI and live action is where part of the issue comes in. Azog is a particular issue, it's like he never leaves Moria. I expect the CGI work in the next two films will be better though given they'll have shy of a full year each for post, since all the filming is done. (Unexpected Journey had the post finished only two days before premier). Yeah the plot/story get's a lot of leeway in the fact that it precedes Lord of the Rings and thus isn't as fully fleshed out nor is Tolkien as adept at writing. Jackson has obviously done a lot of work, where possible, in fleshing out and polishing the story and he's done a good job.

Minor reminder: as n when you donate you might want to hit me up on PM with what you wish your member title to be.

The Mil V-12 exists (40 years ago too). And that's pretty damn big. And without the bonus support of lots of hot air/helium. We';ve also made vast leaps and bounds in structural engineering,able to create buildings that extend over half a mile into the sky without crushing in on themselves, and bridges are getting longer every year too, mainly in China as well and they strike me as a country crazy enough to be bale to pull something like this off. Submersible wise there's Sealab, which ended in failure once they tried to get near 150M below, nowhere near the depth you'd want for Rapture given that'd have plenty of the buildings sticking out above the water, and nowhere near the size you'd want for even a small village never mind a city (they're smaller than the helicopter even).

Well Avatar will be the biggy for a while. And it's not exactly the issue of whether the CGI is particularly worse or better than other films, The Hobbit's main issue is that it's largely inappropriate. Real life is pretty much always going to look better than CGI, yet with The Hobbit they seemingly chose to use CGI for pretty much everything which is a huge shame as they've got WETA on-board and they're master practical effects guys. Sure when doing massive amounts of goblins and armies of dwarfs use CGI, it's hard to get that many extras. But what was wrong with LotRs use of having close-ups being prosthetic dudes or animatronics trees? It certainly tied the scenes together a bit more in making the other 10,000 orcs "real". Out of the Frying Pan was particularly overdone.

So Radio 1 made "A Perfect Christmas Single" (it's a song about someone who is single over Xmas...and also aims to be the perfect xmas song) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwP7KRT-dGo And today they ran the " " on the radio which was a good breakdown of the various elements of Xmas songs (e.g a large chunk start out stating " " in some form or another), a chat with some of the top Xmas folks (which turns out includes Spice Girls, and of course Noddy Holden), and following the process of making a song from idea, to writing, to production and release. It's quite amazing to see how organic the process is. Oh you can download it here if you wish (internationally, BBC are feeling festive it seems)

Via Royal Mail: What is the best Christmas gift in the world?

It would certainly be interesting for researchers to follow, you'd get to see the social contact in action. See what elements it is that makes us not just go and kill someone better off than us and take their belongings or descend into anarchy on a daily basis. As for the game itself, yeah I'm gonna guess somewhat infeasible. Especially as at the moment it's pretty much just an idea and a video. If it was somewhat feasible they'd have something to show off. It's probably worth mentioning that at the moment there's no singleplayer game that matches what they're aiming to do, let along doing it in an MMO.

A floating city is much more feasible than an underwater one. Fuel is pretty much the only major issue*. You're not having to build it to withstand hundreds of atmospheres, and should shit hit the fan you're able to escape a falling city much simpler than flooding under-the-sea one. It's also much simpler to get people and supplies to, no dealings with the bends and submarines are much fewer in number than aircraft. *though you can supply electricity via wind turbines, and an underwater city lacking any natural sunlight would require constant lighting which eats up a fair chunk of fuel too.

Funny that it's the lesbian couple that bothers him more than the alien and prior earth race.

Sure the CGI is about on par with LotR, a decade old film. Also in LotR there was a lot less CGI, the close-ups were prosthetic humans. Unlike Hobbit where pretty much every one that's not a dwarf, hobbit or human is fully CGI.

I had the same view as FDS. It's maybe worth mentioning that when there's a broken link I'll normally swap out the image for a working one, but in this case the image was like 1037813476983479.jpg so I had no idea what it was to even begin looking for a replacement.

I think you might have missed my joke.

@HH: Not getting defensive, just not liking the implication that I've spoiled something when it's shown in the film. @TN: Book spoiler As for the film btw would you like me to shift this discussion over to the Hobbit thread?

Surely in america they use it as a term for jumping upon your prey?

Did you blink during the scene where and then nip for a loo during the scene where You see in the books

See Thursday I was trying to keep suspense by not pointing out exactly Also

Well more like if the digital camera had a huge amount of internal storage (model permitting) that had a chunk partitioned off specifically for the purpose of storing panoramas.

The Tories are being Tories again. http://www.guardian....-tax-credit-ads Also the BPI (British Phonographic Industry) is seemingly aiming to bankrupt an entire UK political party on an individual basis. http://torrentfreak....members-121215/ Certainly one way of showing that media organisations have a bit too much power afforded to them. edit: Oh yeah for those of you that follow sport (but will likely already know) Bradley Wiggins is Sports Personality of the Year. http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/sports-personality/20748902'>http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/sports-personality/20748902 You can view rest of the results on the Beeb hub page: http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/sports-personality/

A reply to what your wrote. Another reply but a spoiler for future films edit: addition to the "spoiler for future films:

I'd say they run about the same. As noted I store all my apps in in the App "partition" on my Note except the large games, which have no choice in. The Wildfire they loaded about the same because it was slow anyway, but on initial boot up of the phone you'd have to wait a while before everything kinda figured itself out. It's flash storage, reads are going to be pretty damn quick. Also I would say it's not so much a case of limited app storage, since the apps as noted can be shifted over to other internal and SD storage, but a case of a guaranteed minimum app storage. Since it's not sharing the space with your photos, music, downloads, cache, data etc your app space isn't going to be infringed upon by the fluff. (though yes that does limit the space for the fluff, but hey MicroSD cards)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS2z8Aeck-M Soo errrm. Black Blotter eh. Oh and for next week: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zA6DDEOY84

Yes, no. There's no point, as mentioned you can install/move apps to SD card, so it's as big as your SD card is. I had a Wildfire with 125MB of App storage, but you could install a ton of apps since I had an 8GB MicroSD card. And here's breakdown on my Note atm: Which on an individual app breaks down like so: So the 13MB is in the App storage partition, with the rest being on the SD card (this is common with a lot of larger games, most small games will be stored purely within App storage)