So How To Train Your Dragon 2 is burning...

[Killer Angel]

I won't go see it on the strength of Howard Taylor's review.

At least, he's right about one thing. I cannot think to a more bland title...

[Closet_Skeleton]

When a business fires people out of hand, for reasons of personal pettiness or shortsighted shifts in "strategy"--then yes, absolutely it's an imperfection, because they're wasting precious expertise and devotion. When a company can't recognize the value of employees who have helped it to become what it is--much less having given many years of their lives and souls--that company is crucially flawed.

Sony possibly massively screwed themselves over when they fired a lot of 'unnecessary' talent that then got jobs in Korea and SEA and helped build those industries to completely out compete Sony on the consumer electronics market

A company pretends to be a structure that does things for its own benefit but is in fact a collection of people doing things for their benefit.

Even if people choose the big and the dumb choices, or the choices that only feed into their stupid views, or choices that result in more problems, they're still people and should be treated as such. Neither of us is some special snowflake elevated above humanity and we shouldn't treat ourselves as such.

Sentience (if it even exists on a non-illusionary level) just isn't a continuous property of anything. Its something animals only really exhibit on an occasional basis. Saying they're not 'real' is silly but that's more of a dislike of a word choice than a rebuttal.

Misanthropy isn't inherently elitist, flawed humans just drag it in that direction

[Thrawn183]

I have not seen the movie yet, I loved the first one.
Reading Boxoffice Forums I see that it did VERY bad in the US, despite high praise from reviewers.

Well, I'm certainly not paying to see it. I saw the whole thing in the trailer before Godzilla.

[cobaltstarfire]

Well, I'm certainly not paying to see it. I saw the whole thing in the trailer before Godzilla.

No you didn't. The trailers had some spoilers, but they didn't spoil near the entire movie.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by cobaltstarfire
No you didn't. The trailers had some spoilers, but they didn't spoil near the entire movie.

Indeed. The trailers gave away one major plot point I wish they hadn't, but there's plenty more they didn't even touch.

[Scowling Dragon]

Having watched it I see why it did how it did. Not going into detail yet, but its critical flaw is in being very sloppy.

Not terrible, but sloppy. Like many of the Dreamworks films that are held back from greatness because of that.

[SiuiS]

Sorry, but that's not really gonna work for me. Partially because it's rather elitist and partially because it sounds like serial killer logic, to be blunt.

How so? Thinking otherwise is thinking all opinions are of equal merit. For the purposes of any discussion, some people will actally have education and forethought, and the rest will regurgitate what they think is the correct answer to fix a question existing.

We have people who honestly believe that you catch a cold by being cold. We have people who believe that girls shouldn't workout because they will get bulky. We have people who believe the most ridiculous fallacies of math, history, science, when the truth is right there to be found. We have people who quite literaslly devote their actual human intelligence into streamlining things that humans are needed for so they can get back to merely satisfying their animal drives and avoid thought and introspection.

These people are still people. They are just asleep, and not yet showing any of the traits that we value. There are millions of scientists. There are not millions of Einsteins. We do not go to them for Einstein-stuff. They live predominantly by rote, and do not take initiative nor accept responsibility for their lives. That is a pretty sound description for automota, isn't it? We value those people who wake up and see the truth of the world, but that means we have to admit that the rest of the time people are asleep.

By the by, "serial killers don't think people are real" is the same sort of regurgitated thing that gets passed around and never thought about, never evaluated. It's a buzz-phrase. You can do better.

This attitude won't get you far in life.

You'd be surprised. It's very easy to be accepting, forgiving and compassionate when you realize that the person doing the stupid thing is not willfully deciding to do a thing that is stupid. They are part of a system, and that means you can address the system, and you can show them so they can take control of their own lives and live for themselves,instead of continuing to remain asleep.

Oh?
*Re-reads Siuis' post.*
Wow, awesome! Saved. Thanks Siuis, that's gold. I love this forum sometimes.

You've heard it before, several times. This is just the dirty, abridged version that got a kneejerk reaction out of someone. Thanqol has a better description.
Actually, I'll probably bring this all up o'er there, been meaning to anyway. That way, I can laugh at how out of silly my writing gets when I'm tired. XD

[warty goblin]

I operate from the idea that most people aren't real. Sometimes they'll be elevated to Real status temporarily, and think actual thoughts, but there is a frighteningly accurate perspective where people are just individual circuits that have the standard society thoughts flow through them, unthinking. It's like some perversion of zen; information and thought and activity go into a person and come out and they play their part, but the actual person doesn't matter to what's going on.

I used to know a philosopher who was very big on individual thoughtfulness, and not mindlessly conforming to society's standards. When I was a wee lad, I found this rather impressive. Then I grew the hell up, took set theory, and realized he fit nicely into a quite homogeneous set of people who don't mindlessly conform to society's expectations. Which I've always thought begged the question, are the members of that particular set actually any more thoughtful, or are they just following a different script? And does it matter in the slightest?

I'm relatively happy with the conclusion that it doesn't. Partly because 'thoughtful' is, as words and concepts go, somewhere between a purity test and a circlejerk. Find some folks who think like you do, promote each other to thoughtful status, and you've got yourself a nice little ingroup to flog your own thoughtfulness in. Person A thinks B is a brainless pillock who would lose a higher reasoning contest to a pithed frog, and A's friends all agree. B, for their part, has decided that person A couldn't be trusted to pour piss out of a boot with the instructions written on the heel, and B's friends all agree on that point. They know B after all, and because they are thoughtful, they make sure to only have thoughtful friends. Logic says that B must be thoughtful, so B is almost certainly right about A. The two circles are happily enforcing their purity standard, and jerking. One may be 'right' for some definition (probably both are right by theirs), one may even be objectively right by some verifiable standard of evidence, but what they're doing is exactly the same. Jerk jerk jerk.

So we've got all these people out there, all convinced they and theirs are are the lone thinking exceptions amid the vast herd of society's mindless cattle. Most of whom are convinced of exactly the same thing, just thinking a different group of people are the mindless ones. Is everybody thinking? Is anybody thinking? If one accepts that multiple viewpoints can be logically maintained, it's possible everybody is thinking, and reaching differing conclusions. It's also possible nobody is, and there's just a couple of cultural scripts floating around out there, and some people follow this one, some people follow that one. Both hypotheses produce much the same conclusions.

So when somebody says to me that most people don't think, I thoughtlessly stuff them in the same set as all the other people who say that. Maybe because I thought my way to this position, maybe because I study set theory and took political science from an institutional elitist.

[Scowling Dragon]

Back too the movie: it feels like 5 episodes of a series where lumped together into a general shape of a 1:45 minutes movie. Each part could be removed with minimal hassle like lego bricks:

Hiccup needs to be cheftain.
Hiccup meets his mom
Hiccups Dad dies
Hiccup fights bludfist
Hiccup fights the alphapa.

Some pieces are good, others are ok, others dont make sense and suck (mom plot cough cough),

[Avilan the Grey]

I was quite disappointed when I realized his mom would come back. Felt cheap to me.
Also to kill off his father just because Hickup needs to be chief seems cheaper still.

[Scowling Dragon]

What felt the most cheap for me (All centered around the terrible mother character) is how she re-contractualized the previous movies smart interpretation of the "Dances with ____" story into something with a balanced cast (No evil sides. Just misunderstood but reasonable conflict), into a cliche. Also the touching father son story into a "Father or Mother?" story.

[SiuiS]

I used to know a philosopher who was very big on individual thoughtfulness, and not mindlessly conforming to society's standards. When I was a wee lad, I found this rather impressive. Then I grew the hell up, took set theory, and realized he fit nicely into a quite homogeneous set of people who don't mindlessly conform to society's expectations. Which I've always thought begged the question, are the members of that particular set actually any more thoughtful, or are they just following a different script? And does it matter in the slightest?

So when somebody says to me that most people don't think, I thoughtlessly stuff them in the same set as all the other people who say that. Maybe because I thought my way to this position, maybe because I study set theory and took political science from an institutional elitist.

Yep! It's a fun paradigm. Never at rest.

I was quite disappointed when I realized his mom would come back. Felt cheap to me.
Also to kill off his father just because Hickup needs to be chief seems cheaper still.

Exactly. Remember what I said before?

If you cut everythig between "Toothless gets hypnotized the first time" and "toothless gets hypnotized but breaks out of it and goes old school Godzilla reboot" you'd have just as good a movie with none of the stupid.

[MLai]

After reading the spoilers, now the movie sound even worse...
Basically, it's "well constructed and mature"... if I am 10 years old. At that age I'm sure I'd love it and it would shape my own storytelling direction for years. But at my current age, I've seen these shonen plot points done 100 times before, and done just was well as this movie. What made me like the first movie wasn't because it was "cool shonen" but exactly because it wasn't. It was something different and something that I don't see too often.

Which I've always thought begged the question, are the members of that particular set actually any more thoughtful, or are they just following a different script? And does it matter in the slightest?

This assumes both groups are objectively right, and that there's no empirical way to prove one group is wrong. This assumption is false.
For example take Climate Change, one (of many) scientific topic that is erroneously categorized as a political topic (therefore I can mention it on this forum as science). One side is right, the other side is wrong. It doesn't matter which side you're on, eventually Mother Earth WILL tell you in no uncertain terms how one side IS wrong.

[warty goblin]

Yep! It's a fun paradigm. Never at rest.

What on earth does this have to do with what I said?

[Kislath]

I liked it. It did some things I never expected a "kid's movie" to do, but I got over it.

The Princess Bride only grossed 30 million, by the way. Box office receipts aren't always indicative.

[Joran]

I didn't know it even came out, which is a bad sign for its marketing. I've even bought two Happy Meals with the crappy frisbees and I still didn't know it was out.