Tag: Quora

Deano’s answer to: “In what situations is it OK for a man watching a movie to cry “manly tears” and not look like a big baby?”

Posted on by Deano in Q & A

Empirically, the only time man-tears are allowed at the movies:

  • When Kirk Douglas gives the order to attack the Japanese fleet approaching Pearl Harbor in The Final Countdown (1 manly tear from each eye)
  • When Chewbacca screams at the end of Star Wars IV: A New Hope, because he’s the only one who doesn’t get a medal (2 manly tears from each eye)
  • Whenever Tom Cruise is in an F-14 that blows something up in Top Gun (1 manly tear per eye per instance, no more than 3 tear-pairs per viewing unless advised by a physician)
  • Steel Magnolias, Opening credits until fade out (sometimes, the manliest thing is not to count the tears at all)
  • The scene where Rell allows himself to be crushed to death by stone doors in order to allow comrades Colwyn, Kegan, Titch, Ergo, Torquil and Oswyn entry to the Black Fortress, wherein they can use the magical Glaive to confront The Beast, and rescue Lyssa, the woman foretold to someday bear the child of destiny in a film that, of course, need not even be named* (a single tear from one eye, with the other held closed, in honor of the valiant cyclops)

(* Seriously, you wouldn’t believe how many people I run into who can’t remember this movie, or claim never to have seen it. I mean, really, you know, like I’m supposed to believe that?)

This answer originally appeared on Quora: In what situations is it OK for a man watching a movie to cry “manly tears” and not look like a big baby?

Deano’s answer to: “Do people still want to read ongoing soap opera-like comic books or only self contained stories?”

Posted on by Deano in Q & A

This is, to me, more an issue of economics than anything else – as the cost of production, printing, and distribution of paper comic books continues to rise, it’s harder and harder to profit from a “B-tier serial”, or to expand the audience for any comic outside of hardcore fandom (though it does happen).

“Self-contained stories”, or at least “digestible compilations” such as graphic novels of serializations, however, have taken off in the last decade for a few simple reasons:

  • economies of scale allow for a much cheaper $/page ratio for the reader ($3/32 pp for comics vs. $10/200 pp for GNs)
  • the larger format GNs look a LOT like “regular paperback books”, which is a product that all kinds of retailers, not just bookstores, already know how to shelve and sell.
  • Comics, on the other hand, typically require specifically constructed wall displays, or space-inefficient and clumsily-operated spinner racks… They are smaller and more fragile than other magazines, and while their content should be more evergreen (a big problem with selling older/out of date print mags like Time, say), there are so damn MANY of them, it’s just too hard to keep track of inventory/stage them nicely/etc.
  • For non-serialized single volume work of appropriate length (150-300 pp), it’s also now possible to make a profit with the more friendly book/box store/discounter/toy and game channels to exploit on top of the dedicated comic book market.

Simply put, it’s easier to display, sell, and manage inventory of graphic novels/longer form comics, and theoretically no less so for a single volume work (especially at book retailers – keeping all 42 volumes of Dragonball in stock at a given Barnes location, for example, is a complete NIGHTMARE).

But, you say, this has not answered the question “do people still WANT to read…”, and you’re right: what people want is not the same as what the publishers want, which also differs from what the retailers want. It’s a game of finding equilibrium between all three, and a messy game at that. Perhaps I could simplify it further: what people want in comics, and how much they are willing to pay for that stated want, are often out of alignment.

This is one of the reasons why digital and online publishing hold so much promise (outside of, er, monetization) – they are FAR more closely linked between creator and reader, with fewer middlemen taking a cut, or enforcing limitations over content or frequency.

Do people want daily/weekly/monthly “chunkable” serials? YES. Do they want nice, tightly wrapped stories/arcs, even if that means a year between releases? YES. Are you more likely to find the latter at Target, or even Amazon.com? Most certainly!

This answer originally appeared on Quora: Do people still want to read ongoing soap opera-like comic books or only self contained stories?

Deano’s answer to: “Why do parents let their kids watch Star Wars at such a young age (4-7 years old, for example)? Isn’t all the Darth Vader / killing stuff psychologically not good for little kids?”

Posted on by Deano in Q & A

My daughter is currently rolling along just fine with old Tom Baker Doctor Who episodes… Which fall around the same era/level of violence. Based on her total lack of reaction to the violence and “scary monsters”, I’ve settled on her turning three as the time most appropriate to opening the original trilogy can of worms.

Far more than the content, though, is HOW it is consumed. When she watched Ghostbusters the first time, we stopped it twice when it got too scary – and we talked through the story whenever she was confused or had questions. We do the same with Doctor Who, and now she’s the one explaining the basics of time travel to mommy whenever we’re watching a 20 minute episode while waiting for dinner to come out of the oven.

Watch it with your kids, watch their reactions, and be ready with a pause or stop when things need explaining, or get to be overwhelming. And yeah, if they start having nightmares, or freaking out their teachers/fellow students at school, maybe tone things down for a bit. 😉

UPDATE:

After her birthday, my daughter was home sick from preschool for a few days, and we went ahead and tested the waters, watching Star Wars. I told her as we started, and consistently during the tense parts of the movie, that she could let me know, or just turn away from the screen if it got too scary.

Her thoughts on Star Wars:

  • the only things that are definitively killed are robots (Storm Troopers, droids) bugs (Greedo) and maybe Obi-Wan Kenobi (though she also theorized that he simply jumped out of his clothes, and was running around the Death Star naked).
  • Darth Vader dresses a lot like Batman, and might be a ninja.
  • “When the orange guys go ‘pew-pew’ on the skeletons house, and they fly in the hole, and then the other man and his doggy comes in and scares away Darth Vader and he spins and spins, and then and then it all goes boom and the doggy doesn’t get a medal from Princess Leia.†“

In short, kids often make different connections with narrative works, and Star Wars is no different. Where you may see a movie depicting at various points

  • planetary genocide,
  • good guys shooting first (if you still watch on VHS, anyway),
  • and of course adults playing in wet garbage,

it’s more likely that your kids are seeing something else (okay, they probably also see the garbage thing, and are plotting how to replicate it on trash day using the garden hose and a city sanitation vehicle). The key job for you as a parent, is to understand what it is they see, and help “nudge” their potentially harmful interpretations back on track.

Again, as I mentioned prior to my update, it’s much more important that whatever you let young children watch, you watch together. Even something seemingly innocuous like the Berenstain Bears(*) can off “go off the rails”, or significantly diverge from what you would consider “healthy messaging” on a given topic, so simply looking for and relying on a movie rating or age advisory is bad, lazy parenting, and often worse than letting your kids see fictional battle stations housing thousands of living beings blow up to the cheers of the protagonists.

(* see: http://www.toplessrobot.com/2008… for the proof)

(† that part still pisses me off, every time, and she noticed it too! Made me so proud…)

This answer originally appeared on Quora: Why do parents let their kids watch Star Wars at such a young age (4-7 years old, for example)? Isn’t all the Darth Vader / killing stuff psychologically not good for little kids?

Deano’s answer to: “How did the misconception that DEFCON 5 is the “worst possible situation” get ingrained in popular culture?”

Posted on by Deano in Q & A

Perhaps the movie DEFCON 4 can shed some light on this phenomenon somehow?


Given the consistently low ratings of the movie, it is easy to understand how one might think that “DEFCON 5” would be even worse, as a potential sequel.

This answer originally appeared on Quora: How did the misconception that DEFCON 5 is the “worst possible situation” get ingrained in popular culture?

Deano’s answer to: “Does Luke Skywalker have a middle name?”

Posted on by Deano in Q & A

You would initially think, as an attempted assassin of the Emperor, he would need to follow the standard “three names” rule, at least for the intergalactic evening news. Especially given the vast number of inhabited planets in the galaxy, you’d think there’d be hundreds, if not thousands of people with the same first-last combination among the stars.

But you’d be wrong, for two simple reasons:

  • It is Darth Vader who actually kills the Emperor, though it’s fair to assume no one but Luke actually knows this and lives to tell the tale.
  • This all happened a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. Before the three name rule went into effect.

This answer originally appeared on Quora: Does Luke Skywalker have a middle name?