Redbone
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Quote:Thank you very much. I appreciate that.Originally Posted by Captain-Electric
Redbone, this is unrelated but your Sabrina's Tale arc was one of the most memorable stories I ever played through, thanks.
I've always found it funny that even with the good word of mouth and the "good press" of the Arc of the Year thing it never passed 999 ratings.
(Edit- It is at 983 in fact) -
Quote:In the last 20 years, I've worked in some higher capacity for 3 different companies all of which had yearly profit (not income, profit) in the 9 figure range. They had 9 figure profits because, yes, 2% of their revenue counted and they watched it like a hawk. Heck, they went out of their way to hang on to $50,000 in customer service bonuses they refused to pay out to employees that earned them. So yes, they wanted to hold onto that cash that much. That's WHY they're a corporation, their entire reason for existence is to make giant gobs of cash and hold onto it as long as possible. There is no such thing as "insignificant" cash to a corporation especially when it's "free" money.Originally Posted by Kitsune Knight
CoH was 2% of their overall revenue. You think that the amount of income from Bio Armor is that significant that they'd actually care? That seems extremely doubtful to me.
Also, why do you assume the decision about VIPs was done by NCSoft? How do you know the community reps or Paragon didn't axe that plan (like they did with making everything in the store free)? Hell, they might not even be able to set everyone to VIP easily. I'm a bit skeptical that NCSoft management said NO VIP FOR YOU!, overruling the remains of Paragon (Paragon is only effectively dead).
If they can hold on to an extra 10 or 20 to 50 or 100 grand without seeming to be evil about it, they will and thats exactly what theyre doing. Rather than refunding the balance of unused points they just tossed in a buyers cutoff that conveniently was well after their last big store item releases.
As for ViP, I'm sure NCSoft actually said something familiar to "will ViP access have to be turned ON or can we just have it activate without effort? It has to be turned on? That's someone we have to pay, no ViP access." -
Quote:*thwaps Positivity in the back of the head* See? That's what you get for being... well... positive.Originally Posted by Positivity
Right after posting that I read Zwill's new announcement. No unlocks. Start sharpening those pitchforks and oiling those torches.
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Quote:If you've not noticed peopel are quite upset about the "arbitrary" date of cutoff for refunds (it's not arbitrary, they wanted to keep all the cash they squeezed out of the powerset released Aug 21 knowing they'd announce the close a week and a half later). People are unhappy with them not reinstating ViP to Premiums.Originally Posted by Kitsune Knight
What in this announcement digs the hole deeper?
Then there's the "corp-speak" bull about how hard and heartfelt this garbage is. Anyone who buys that is delusional and those that are bright enough not to buy it sees it as pandering and talking down to their customers as if their customers are fools. -
They're just digging the "we hate NCSoft" hole deeper and deeper. I can't believe such stupid people managed to get that high up in a corporation.
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They've gotten their last red cent out of me. NCSoft can burn for all I care. I will scream it from the rooftops, on facebok, on gaming blogs, in my blogs, in comment threads and anywhere a game they've evne looked at come up to stay as far away from them as possible if this is how they treat their customers. Greedy, money-grubbing, customer-hating practices like this should run them into the ditch.
If all of us slagged them off for a few years at every opportunity they'd seriously feel it. Get your money and time back from them by helping someone else save it. -
It rather sucks that after years of consecutive payments, I take a month off and then they close the game so I cannot have access to characters I spent years playing because I cant get ViP for the sunset. Kinda ruins the final CoH experience for people like me.
Not that NCSoft gives a flying damn about it. They have the money already. -
SSA 1 final mission.
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Quote:Not a direct reply to YOU per say, but more in your general direction (especially since I pretty much agree with you here).Originally Posted by De_monique
Yes, I am correct. I am both happy and unhappy to see that I am...
When you say things like "its not a WISE investment of my teams time"... I'm confused by this because isn't it WISE to keep your clientele base happy? Isn't spending time on your clientele actually a wise thing?... I'm not in business or have a masters for that matter but I would think keeping your paying customers happy is a wise thing to do. Yes there could be a better way to do so.
In fact I would like to offer a suggestion to Tweet Code Thursdays... perhaps it would be best to press the pause button on it until you can come up with a much better solution that will make those on twitter and your team much happier and not so salty or spicy. That would make much more sense and it would show your clientele that hmmm you do care and therefore will put TCT on hold for the moment.
What you guys are doing is great but you should remember that YOU (not you specifically just in general Paragon Studios Team) chose to give out free stuff, which is great cause who doesn't love free stuff? But its the manner in which you chose to go about doing so. Yes your new way of distributing the codes is a bust... "Epic Fail" in my opinion but whats done is done.
Whe they gave away the first costume codes online, they listed them in text. People copy/pasted them and pretty much before the bits were dry they were gone. Then they posted them as an image. Same thing. Then they got the bright idea of puttign them in screenshots fromt he game (I heard that was to confuse bots).
It slowed people down SLIGHTLY. However, instead of the codes vanishign instantly, now they vanished withing five to ten seconds. So they started postign them in screenshots upside down and backwards and all sorts of strange ways. Again, it slowed peole down, instead of 5 to 10 seconds the codes vanished in 10 to 15 seconds.
The real downside was, people didn't read what code it was. They woudl just grab a code and type it in. Ig they already had the item, the code applied and was gone "robbing" someone of it. If it was a US account and an EU code, it applied and did nothing robbign someone of it. I know a few people in game who were laughing because they snagged codes for stuff they already had.
In time it became "easy," if you were vigilant to get a code because most people simply stopped caring. They got so frustrated and angry they quit trying and just didn't care any more.
All of this has happened before and it will all happen again. It's a stupid way to give away codes, but they'll follow the same course with it, people iwll get just as peeved about it and the community team will not solve it just like they didn't solve it before.
The only innovation this time is that the mose reasonably equitable way of doing it (retweet and get one) was killed off with a shockingly honest admission that it took too much of their time so they came up with one that wastes the players' time instead. -
Can't get it to work very well. Can't even get past page one.
That said, more information on their items would have been appreciated. For instance, anything I have to pay extra for as a ViP will lose a few points in the "like" area compared to anything I will get with my sub regardless of how nice it is. Having to pay for a solid "10 out of 10" type homerun release will make it more like an "8 out of 10" for me and some things that I woudl be VERY happy to see added to the game for free hold zero interest for me if I have to pay - such as more enhancement slots. -
Quote:Given the way it used references, I would assume the "Angry Molesting Tree" thing was a reference to the infamous tree scene in the first Evil Dead.Originally Posted by Mental_Giant
Evil animated trees are a fairly old trope. Just take the Whomping Willow from Harry Potter marry it to a Hentai tentacle violation scenario and you'd come up with an Angry Molesting Tree.
Mermen would be cooler, though. -
What? No one is going to mention the "Anti-TARDIS" picture?
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About ten years ago (that long? REALLY? jeez...) i was running the entertainment side of a bar/restaurant/quasi-dinner theatre Minnesota. While we had weekly entertainment 9music in the bar and such) our "big events" were usually about 2 months apart thanks to rehersal time, casting, set construction and rehersal time. I cameup with the (admittedly somewhat crazy) idea of using October, which was an "open month" with nothing but the weekly music, as "Zombie Month" and every week, usually on Fridays and Saturdays, we had a special "Zombie Apocalypse Lock-In" startign at 11 o'clock. During those events we were open all night with food and drinks, special "survival fare" stuff, and we had a group of people "attacking" the place in full zombie gear. Tickets were something like 50 buciks per head and that included two drinks and an appetizer. At the end of the night, one of the groups of zeds woudl manage to breach the building and they'd slowly flood in driving everyone out the door. It was prety popular and a nice little money maker. We later armed guests with low-power paintball guns (there were some kid's guns at the time that were pretty popular) and they'd fight off the zombies on their way to their cars.
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Quote:Given what we curently have in existence today, there's also parasitic infection like toxoplasmosis with an attitude (and toxo does seem to effect human behaviour in ways similar to what it does to rats in some minor ways according to some studies), fungal infection like some insects get which take over their bodies to assist it in reproducing and Prions like Mad Cow Disease which seem to be able to do a host of insane things we've only scratched the surface of. It's also possible (but VERY unlikely) that a disease from any of the usual known disease causes could mutate into something that damages parts of the brain creating "zombie-like" symptoms as a mental illness. Then there's the possibility of mass hysteria on a so far unseen scale.Originally Posted by Frost Warden
So, in the vein of how it all started:
How would a zombie apocalypse start? We always see an apocalypse after it has gotten going in movies, TV, etc., but how would you imagine a patient zero?
1. Superbug created by some government gets out. (Think The Stand by Stephen King.)
2. Virus mutation and/or combination.
3. 1 & 2
A lot of the older movies used radiation/radioactive materials, an astronomical event (comet, etc.), or supernatural event. However, since we can pretty much rule these kinds of events out, are viruses really the only way this could happen? -
Quote:It is somewhat amusing to think back at how many times the producers did point out "by the way, you should know that the living, if they die, can become Walkers" that the characters did miss and assumed automaticaly that walkers had bitten or scratched the ghoul they found.Originally Posted by Rylas
Well, we know that turning can take different lengths of time to take place. So maybe they don't see a body long enough for it come back when they know it shouldn't. We also have little to assume from that our group on the show has seen that many people killed from natural causes or by being murdered without being scratched or bitten.
Shane saw military shooting up citizens in the hospital, but he didn't stick around long to see if any get up. And while murder has taken place a couple of times on the show, it hasn't been that much. And hardly without zombies around. So, in the few times they've seen re-activated victims, I doubt the need to look for bite marks has been there.
I think only now did Daryl stop to look because he saw things weren't adding up with Shane's story (foot prints being in tandem and a scuffle in the tracks). Had he not been suspicious of Shane, he might not have bothered to search the body.
So, while out there in the rest of the world, people might have noticed this. I can see how our group, being smaller and through its own path through survival, hasn't seen it yet.
Just my 2 cents on the topic. -
Quote:It's possible people haven't been coming back or people coming back have been fairly rare. Ths could be a recent mutation in the *insert cause here* that causes it. I doubt they put that much thought into how the whole thing works though.Originally Posted by Lothic
It still just strikes me as terribly improbable that this key "fact" about how the Zombie Apocalypse works could be kept a secret from all the characters (in either the comicbook or the TV show).
Even if you can make the case that comicbook Rick was the only one who didn't know then why didn't anyone bother to mention that tiny bit of info to him while Shane was being buried? You'd think someone would ask him "Hey Rick, did you make sure to crush Shane's head before you buried him first?"
Again there's a difference between having a mystery for the audience to be kept in the dark about versus what the characters in the story would know - I think during the weeks that all hell was breaking loose that how people become zombies would have become very general knowledge to any survivor who lived through the chaos of that.
It's also possible for such basic knowledge to simply have gotten past this group of survivors. They've had a fairly small group that seems to have bolted fast when things started going down. They've had no accidental deaths or deaths from natural causes and most of them that did die, died from ghoul attack. The others have (coincidentally) died from head trauma.
Given that, if the communications and media went down fast enough or the *insert cause here* that makes people become walkers spreads to the living slowly enough, it's very likely that an isolated, somewhat lucky group of survivors would be slow to figure out that pretty much everyone who died from there on out would be coming back. It also assumes noone in the group was genre savy (I'm pretty sure a large percentage of the people on this board would be spiking people's heads in that situation just to be safe without any evidence that the formerly alive returned without ghoul bites).
This is one place where the very slow timetable of the show works against it with the audience. For us, it's been almost two years since Z-Day, for the characters in the show, it's been a few months, tops and maybe as little at 4 to 6 weeks. They're still in traumatic shock from the world sliding down into hell and just now starting to sort themselves out about it. They're still smarting from the loss of their families and friends. They're still figuring out a world without instant communications, without instant access to information and without someone learning something new and an hour later the rest of the planet being able to know it too. -
Quote:I have no clue who those people are (I don't watch Scrubs) but anyone with the word "doctor" on their name can order such tests, especially in an ER situation. Outside the ER it will depend on hospitla pecking order. Again, in my area, any doctor working a particular patient's case could order such tests if they were deemed necessary (regardless of insurance, in fact). different hospitals will have different "access" to testing based on state and federal law (and in come cases county or city laws as well) and hospital policy, but it will be fairly universal over a given state.Originally Posted by Kitsune9tails
I am not doing a Scrubs fanfic (nor is the hospital a teaching hospital), but the principle applies: Would JD or Cox be able to order the MRI/CAT, or would they need Bob Kelso's say so?
Moreover I am thinking a relatively young/naive nurse, possibly one who was briefly homeless herself. Definitely not someone with decades of emotional calluses (callouses?) built up.
As a rule of thumb, generally any doctor on a case can order any test they can medically justify without insurance and any test they can handwave well enough to make it seem diagnostically necessary if good insurance is present. It is better to overtest, overcharge and get called on it than undertest and get sued for malpractice.
Since there are two known general causes of memory loss, one is head trauma and the other is psychological breaks, it is pretty much a given she'd be x-rayed, then CAT scanned and then MRIed and possibly fMRIed as each previous test would show a need to furthur investigation with the next "level" of test and most likely admitted as a patient (rather than an ER patient) after the CAT.
As for the nurse, odds are she'd be even more restricted in what she could do than an older more experienced one. The Nightingale Effect is well known and well undertstood in medical circles and is guarded against fairly well by not just policy but culture. That doesn't just include love or sexual situations but feeling they need to continue caring for a patient after they're discharged. If a caregiver acts on such an impulse it is considered highly unethical and termination usually follows swiftly. In mental health facilities, they're even more on guard for it and termination is even swifter since it's viewed (rightly or wrongly) as a caregiver taking advantage of a mentally ill patient. There are entire training programs nurses (and doctors in some cases) are put through to teach them to guard against the Nightingale Effect and how to deal with Transference.
It is POSSIBLE a nurse would take her in. Yes. Is it very likely that a nurse would do something that will very likely kill her career, blackball her from the profession forever, act as a serious ethical black mark on her job record, make years of training and schooling useless and throw her entire life out the window in favor of a single patient? Not likely at all, vanishing small in fact.
However, this is your story. You can decide what bits and bobs of reality to ignore and what bits and bobs of ignored reality the reader will give you a pass on without breaking suspention of disbelief. -
Quote:The answer is going to vary from work to work.Originally Posted by Kitsune9tails
Quite frequently a story (or any work of art, really) can be analyzed, praised and condemned for possessing elements that the author did not intend.
For instance, it is pretty much a given that Frank Baum did not intend The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to sync up with Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, nor is vice versa likely (and to what extent they sync is debatable), yet many people see that in there.
In another example, comic books were nearly banned entirely around the Mc Carthy era for storytelling elements that were seen as a literal and literary danger to society.
Many people see romantic subtext between characters in a work that the author never intended (or did they), and the motivations of good and bad guys alike can have many interpretations that utterly change the meaning of a story.
So my question is: if a large volume or percentage of readers see an element of a story that is in contrast to or orthogonal to the author's intent (or deliberately left vague), is it possible that the element exists in the story regardless of authorial canon?
or to put it another way,
Can the story itself "decide" to contain elements regardless of authorial intent?
Piece A may have no unintended subtext, but thanks to culture, psychology and style people read into it something that's just not there.
Piece B may have no unintended subtext, but thanks to the author unconsciously inserting an unintended subtext one exists anyway in just enough detail for people to pick it up and run with it.
Piece C may have no unintended subtext according to the author, but it's there intentionally, and hidden away by the author.
Basically, the story itself doesn't "decide" anything in that sense. Decisions are imposed on it from the outside (either before or after creation) by very powerful and subtle cultural and psychological forces. For instance, there's a robust school of thought that views a large number of Shakespearian male characters are bi-sexual or gay even though it is highly unlikely that was the intent and is an artifact of the language and the structure of the verse used when modern culture looks at it. Batman and Robin's relationship is viewed by some as "a bit gay" in the older comics for the same reason.
On the other hand, sometimes it's intended by the author and not widely noted for years or decades. Wonder Woman was based in part on bondage scenes. Dumbledor is gay. Culture of the time blinds itself to the subtle and not-so-subtle clues left behind and misses it.
A lot of authors talk about character and stories "taking on a life of their own" and it does feel that way, like things suddenly got out of your control and wandered off where they wanted to, but that's another artifact of the writing process. Some things just make more sense than others and trying to shoehorn them where they don't flow naturally becomes very difficult.
Then there's cases where viewers see something unintended by anyone involved on an ongoing project and those involved play up those elements. Xena originally wasn't intending to have any sexual overtures between the two leads, but the audience decided something was there because they wanted something to be there and then the show decided to run with it.
In short, the author's intention will always trump what the audience thinks so long as the author still has control of the story. They can always make a second one that utterly devistates the fan theories. Once it exits the author's control, the copyright holder determines "canon." Once it exits copyright, it's a free-for-all and becomes up to individual interpretation and literary criticism for those who care about what really is there and what's not.
PostScript Note: There's a reason I mostly focused on subtext (and overt text, really) concerning sexual orentation. They're very easy to notice right now bcause of the gay right's movement and the current trends in popular entertainment. It applies to subtexts across the board, but culturally, we're at a stage where those are just more noticable and receive a great deal more attention and analysis. -
Quote:Agreed. A Doctor taking her in, definately not, but nurses operate under far fewer restrictions. It would stretch creduility a good bit though since nurses do tend to compartmentalize work from home fairly well. While there may be some in some area, I cannot think of a law against it, but hospitals may have rules against it. I simply do not see how a nurse who would do such a thing would have maintained herself in the job (psychologically) long enough to do it.Originally Posted by Dark One
I can't see any reason that it would be "illegal" (just my opinion). It might be against hospital policy to fraternize with patients though.
What you describe woudl keep her in the hospital for at least a week, yes with much of that time being spent in their psych eval ward. Even a busy hospital with a lot of "flow through" would make room for someone with that sort of brain damage. A teaching hospital woudl not only make room for her, but she'd be a star attraction. -
Quote:What is "realistic" is going to come down to WHERE it is. Regions have different proceedures and states in those regions will have variations. What I've said is pretty much SOP up and down the east coast (call it east of the Mississippi) with some regional or state variation on the same theme. It is as close to accurate without variation as you can get without being very location specific for pretty much anywhere on the east coast south of the Mason-Dixon Line. This is due to the combination of the involvement of SLED (South Carolina Law Enforcement Division) in not just training but also in loaning out their people and resources to most Southern states and also a quasi-unimind politically for decades which effects hospitla policy (the south is pretty much a block vote red state area these days whereas 40 years ago it was a block vote blue area).Originally Posted by Durakken
RedBone and Hyperstrike seems to have medical profession experience and have completely different and opposing ideas of what will happen... This seems to me that this means regardless of what you do you'll be realistic...
For instance, almost none of what I've said except some of the general police proceedures will be accurate for Las Vegas (Vegas has a LOT of unidentified individuals thanks to its history) because of the sheer volume of people who aren't who they say they are.
If you're talking the upper mid-west, like North and South Dakota the proceedure flow is completely different because of the low population density. If you're talking Utah, one of the first places the police will look is the Mormon Church even before they get full reports back on prints. If you're in California, DSS services will generally be more aggressive in taking part but the hospitals will be a bit more lax in deeper testing unless it's seen as necessary or ordered by the police (thank you Keiser medical services).
If you're in Louisiana the DSS will generally suck. They're still covered up with Katrina fallout. -
Quote:The surgeon gives a general location (IE where she's a local) from there widely circulating an image would lead to identification. People, even in big cities, normally have enough interaction that someone has seen them even if they don't know the name (the guy at the gas store, the girl at the coffee shop). Every positive ID would narrow down her local area, so keep that in mind and have a work around if you want to keep her ID unknown. One of the great truisms of police work is it's easier to find a living person's ID than a dead person's because they can be photographed as they are now and someone, somewhere has interacted with them recently.Originally Posted by Kitsune9tails
The dental work once traced would lead to an extremely wealthy and uncooperative surgeon who is known, Er, alleged to be in the pocket of organized crime.
On the subject of social security. Per Wikipedia there is a guy known as 'benjaman k' who was found behind a burger king 6 years ago. He has yet to be assigned a number and is still unidentified and unable to legally work and still homeless.
As for Social Security, yep, there are some isolated cases of "John/Jane Doe"s staying off the grid for years despite trying to get back on it. They're vanishingly rare though since there's systems in place to "reidentify" people with new IDs in the case of unknown individuals (especially in big cities) that are similar to the methods used in New York at the turn of the century (LOTS of name changes then). Most will be RE-IDed in under a year, often under 3 months.
Fact is, a patient advocate and DSS social worker WOULD pin her with some identification even without her real ID being known just to keep her in the system and identify her case. The folks who fall through the cracks in the system are the rarity, not the norm. That's a minor point though since it doesn't lead to IDing her just gives her a "name" to go by. It's still a common joke to name people after the hospital where they were initially sent and the doctor or a nurse that worked her initial admittance. -
Quote:And that's hte ID right there. Dental implants are fairly specialized and the higher the quality of the work the fewer places that can produce it. Implants take about 3 to 6 months for the bone matrix to set and produce stable enough bone for implantation and after implantation they take 3 to 6 months to heal to the point of being able to be used to chew properly.Originally Posted by Kitsune9tails
All of her teeth are implants a few weeks old.
The posts for implants are specialized and only produced in a few places (IIR there's only 3 companies in the US making them and only 1 or 2 in Europe). The crowns that go on top of them can be produced all over the US, but again, the higher the quality the fewer places and the mix used in the caps will pin it down very quickly to a smaller number of places that use it.
Those aren't devices that can be made in your back yard. The posts alone are highly specialized requiring some pretty specific metalurgy or they won't seat and set properly (the bone has to accept and bond to the surface or they slide out easily). Most implant posts have markings that can even be read on a dental x-ray (my one implant can easily).
Implant quality materials are not somethign you can knock off easily unless you have an eccentric millionare with about 50 mil to spare and the capacity to hire a dozen specialists on the sly.
Quality caps are the same way. The material is fairly twitchy since it has to be strong enough to withstand chewing but not brittle. Again, that takes some pretty specialized equipment to manufacture and the materials in it aren't purchasable at the local Home Depot.
Then there's the bone matrix itself. Again, very specialized and there's only a few types avaliable on the market with a very limited market to sell to on the high end. Again, the matrix used for my implant could be pinned down to ONE manufacturer and given it's age, only about a dozen dentists.
Even the local yokel cops here can track down a person's identity from a single implant in about two weeks (and it just happened a few months ago with an unknown body that was nothing but rags and bones when found). -
In my local area the flow would be something like this assuming she went to one of the larger regional hospitals (the smaler ones woudl typicaly send her to one of the larger regionals after the first few steps).
She woudl be seen by an ER physician and her medical "history" taken (in this case, she only has this incident.)
She would be visually inspected for injuries.
She would be given an MRI/CAT Scan (and since she has extensive brain damage she'd likely be subjected to several including fMRIs over the course of several hours or days).
They would run any tests she requested (in this case, she'd be checked for sexual assault).
With the brain damage she would be admitted and the local police called.
Local police would take her data (description, anything she recalls, fingerprints and so on). Should that data be useless they may later request dental x-rays as a last resort. She would be assigned a police psychologist and a DSS social worker. Police would file a missing person's report on her, slowly expanding their search from the local, to county to state to region and eventually to the federal level. Odds are they would eventualy get most newspapers in the state to run her picture with a "fluff' story, that would be picked up sporatically in other areas and on the internet. If all efforts in the irst month or two failed, she'd be issued a temporary identification that, assuming she doens't recover her memories, woudl become somewhat "her" inclusing a SS number, ID card and such.
The hospital would remand her to the psych ward for evaluation. Given her complete lack of memories, it woudl most likely recommend she be remanded to the state's care in a nearby mental health facility.
The hospital would assign her a patient advocate. The patient advocate would normally act on her behalf due to the extensive brain damage detected under the sssumption she could and likely does have some sort of impairment.
The patient advocate would get her into the DSS system. She'd be issued whatever state assistance was avaliable, likely Medicade and food stamps and usually she'd be placed on the rosters for utilities assistance. There is a very good chance with her medical conditions the Patient Advocate woudl also try to get her on SS Disability (she'd be turned down at least twice and likely a third time even with legal assistance from the sounds of your description).
She would be held in a "waiting tank" for anywhere from a few days to a week. During that time she would be under hospital and psychiatric doctor's care. This would last until a place in a state run facility opened up.
She would stay from two weeks to three months in a "short term care" facility. Length of time would depend on her cooperation and her mental state and if she showed any memory recall of the past. She would not enjoy the experience as most of those places are described as "the waiting room for hell."
After she'd stayed her limit in that facility she would either be determined to be no threat to herself or others and remanded to a half-way house for the functionally mentally ill (limited to a 6 months or so stay), tossed out the front door on her keister if the half-way houses were full (VERY likely) or remanded to long term care in another state (the east coast likes to send people to a facility group in Virginia for some reason but it takes some serious mental illness or several hospital stays to get sent there).
After that, she'd likely drop out of the system if she didn't establish herself in some way. She'd need a job, an adress, utilities and all the "stuff for normal living" even though she'd be at least partially cared for by state services like food stamps and welfare. Her missing person's file woudl be anywhere from a month or two old to a year old by the point and be quickly slipping into "cold case" turf. If it reached a year without any leads coming up, it would be converted to the cold case files and revisited MAYBE once a year. -
Quote:Cars 2 is one of those great examples of shooting yourself in the foot with your own success. Pixar's worst film at that point was Bug's Life (critically speaking) with Cars a very close second and their scores weren't that low. Out of 11 films, their worst films were still good movies. People said Pixar seemed incapable of making a bad film. and they had a point, the amount of time, care and money that went into making them led to a lot of good people going over every aspect of a new film with a fine tooth comb.Originally Posted by Coin
Am I alone in that I really enjoyed Cars 2??
OK, it's not as good as the rest of the Pixar movies, but that's not saying much,is it! Pixar movies are all great!
Then came Cars 2. By itself it's not a bad film. It's not a good one either. It's pretty much a run-of-the-mill kid flick with better than average animation and voice work. Had Dreamworks done it, very little would have been said. But this was Pixar, the guys who cannot fail, who are pathologically incapable of making a mediocer film. Worse, it was a send-up of spy movies, something Pixar could do in spades (The Incredibles did it so well it may as well have been a James Bond movie from the 60s). When you tack on the merchandising blitz that came with it, some ire begins to form.
Pixar was so good and such a winning horse, when they stumbled and fell off the purer path they caught a whole lot of grief for it, and Cars 2, a fairly bog standard film on it's own, caught the lion's share of that grief.
It's like when the straight A student brings home a B+ and is yelled at because "we expect better from you" while his brother brings in straight Ds and is praised for a D+. -
Quote:It's in one of the Making Of documentaries. It's stated that Cars merchandising alone made more than all the previous Pixar films and merchandising combined; so, naturally, Cars was the most attrative one to make a second film for.Originally Posted by Father Xmas
I would love to see the article where Pixar says that Cars 2 was simply a money grab for their new Disney masters.
From a business standpoint, that's fine. And it was a good move. Right now, out of 12 films, the total is about 7 billion dollars at the box office. Cars merchandise alone is about 10 billion.
What made matters a bit hard to swallow is watching Cars and Cars 2 with the knowledge they were so heavily merchandised and turned into cash cows. Remember, Cars is about friends being more important than fame and money.