Comments by "Jim Luebke" (@jimluebke3869) on "Overly Sarcastic Productions" channel.

  1. Has Red seriously never watched The Empire Strikes back? The hostage-friend thing is the turning point of the whole film.
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  2. Batman and Joker aren't the same. They aren't even opposites. The Joker is chaos. Order is... Commissioner Gordon. And Batman is the dynamic force that mediates between them.
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  3. I'd recommend Connie Willis' books dealing with time travel -- "To Say Nothing of the Dog" is really, really funny; "Blackout" and "All Clear" commemorate the Blitz in a very powerful way. I still haven't picked up "Domesday Book" but will get around to that eventually.
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  4. Red, these are FICTIONAL CHARACTERS. You don't have to be disturbed by the unsavory tales attributed to them. They're no more "true" than the most cringe-inducing Harry Potter slashfic.
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  5. Protests don't appear in a vacuum. They required an economic shutdown that shoved tens of millions of people out of work, destroying their hopes and dreams, and denying them daily constructive purpose that allows them to support themselves and their families with dignity. The idea that an evil that claimed the lives of 10 people last year is a larger cause than an evil that has thrown tens of millions into existential turmoil, is propaganda spread by actors who expect their political power to be enhanced by that narrative, the actual problems of the country or any of the people in in be d*mned, and the useful idiots who get swept up in the story-of-the-week without looking out at what is happening in the world and thinking it through. Blue, I don't know if you really are better than this, but you should be. We deserve better, from someone attempting to educate the public about history.
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  6. Accents can give a work some exotic charm, when you're being pushed a little bit outside your linguistic comfort zone. Howard Pyle's "The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood" is a work I enjoyed for this reason. The nautical jargon of O'Brien's Aubrey and Maturin series was fun too.
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  7. Merry Christmas, everybody! =)
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  8. Scotland had the last laugh though, as the United Kingdom was united under the Stuart monarchy. Huh, didn't know Henry VII was Welsh. Are you sure England conquered these other kingdoms, and not the other way around?
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  9. So, remind me again why Malvolio's treatment in Twelfth Night is funny, but Katherine's can't possibly be? In each case, their crime is being a killjoy.
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  10. An immortal might still be as pain-averse as anyone, keeping the stakes in a fight something you could identify with.
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  11. "Archetypes are a lazy way to create characters" -- Eh, not really. The fewer dimensions a character has, they're less a character study (because the story is exploring that particular character) than they are a tool for the author to explore something else through. Ivan's strongly-drawn atheistic intellectualism and Dmitri's strongly-drawn material pleasure-seeking could be considered one-dimensional if you look at them in isolation, but when you combine them with Alyosha's spiritualism and seeking nature, they become a way to externalize Dostoevsky's internal debates about the nature of religion and faith. Is an animator going to stop using the x-axis because it's one-dimensional, or is that animator going to use the x, y, and z axes, to make all his creations come to life and explore vast worlds?
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  12. Space is horrifying because it makes us very, very helpless, and will do so very, very quickly if we don't have our technology with us and in good working order.
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  13. Hold on, San Francisco has its own dialect? Really?
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  14. (Duplicate comment for some reason)
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  15. "I will not turn into a snake. It never helps." - The Top 100 Things I'd do if I were an Evil Overlord, #34.
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  16. Somehow in Avatar: The Last Airbender, they make critter-mashing cute instead of scary.
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  17. So has the parting of the Iron Curtain given us any more information about the Silk Road? Any digs opened up in the vicinity of old Samarkand?
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  18. It's worth noting that the "Common Coal and Steel Community" started on the resource theory of war -- Germany and France were mostly fighting over the coal and iron rich regions right along their border. Giving everyone (who could pay for it) access to those resources was one of the major innovations of decolonization. Empires were founded to assure access to resources, and if those resources were available on a free market, well, empire (and war) just wasn't as necessary. Capitalism leads to peace, sometimes.
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  19.  @alexemy2463  "Already wealthy"? Europe was anything but that, at the beginning of the colonial era. More technologically advanced, sure, more capable of organizing effective people across the globe, sure, but not wealthy. The whole reason India and China (and parts of Africa and the Americas) were attractive to European adventurers is specifically because those regions were wealthier than Europe. Of course, that changed quickly because of that technological edge. It's worth noting that the countries that got the richest (notably Spain) were actually hamstrung in the long-term great power competition by a lack of attention to capitalism and technology. When other parts of the world (Japan in the mid-19th century, China in the late 20th-early 21st) changed their entire societies to follow the Western model -- science / technology, plus market capitalism, if a very authoritarian form -- that those parts of the world started to be able to deliver a Western standard of living to their people. The rising authoritarian / militaristic power of Japan had to be stopped by force, which (along with their subsequent integration into a constructive global system that benefits them as well as everyone else) are more lessons we need to keep in mind.
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  20.  @alexemy2463  ? The already-wealthy classes within English society (and many others) were the landowning class, whose property declined in value as competition from colonial agricultural goods. If anything, colonial expansion provided a means of social mobility for an up and coming business class. The production "Hamilton" does a pretty good job of getting across how this happened for the settlers, and novels like Vanity Fair give a good idea of how this happened on the European side of the Atlantic.
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  21.  @alexemy2463  As far a the Spanish story goes, the conquistadors were typically of a knightly class, but completely impoverished, which is why they tried their luck in the New World.
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  22. You miss the part where "dhimmi" are second-class citizens, subject to taxes, discrimination, etc. You wouldn't want to be one yourself.
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  23. "Since superheroes started existing, there have been more supervillains" So, drawing a connection between the Patriot Act and the brouhaha we're making of the day after January 5?
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  24. The problem with depression is, it's tough to tell the difference between a "darkest hour" someone can pull themselves out of (made dark by your brain not producing enough of the right neurotransmitters in the right amounts) and that same condition caused by illness. Get the diagnosis wrong, and you've either not given the medically depressed person proper treatment which means their depression will not go away, OR you've just given drugs to someone whose life really is just screwed up. A decent rule of thumb is always work the "life is screwed up" angle, and if that doesn't work (or you can run some actual objective diagnostic tests) go for the drugs.
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  25. Communism's authoritarianism has never been avoided. Stalin wasn't an outlier.
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  26.  @lexingtonbrython1897  You know what happened to the POUM at the hands of the Stalinists, don't you? Didn't end well for Zapata either, iirc.
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  27. You didn't include the pre-WW2 map of Germany when you talked about how it was partitioned.
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  28. The Persian justice system was highly elitist, as was their entire bureaucratic system. Persia is beloved of urbanists who believe that common people should be obedient to their betters -- the "best" people should rule unquestioned by the rabble. The Greeks disagreed. This is why we count our descent from the Greeks, and should be thankful for it.
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  29. Wow, you resisted the temptation to make a pun on "Norman Keeps". I'm impressed.
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  30. Come on Red, boys really ARE vampire werewolves, and girls really ARE succubus banshees. At least they are because you're a teenager who doesn't really know what the world actually is like yet, so why not? That's what they seem like.
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  31. Spain and Portugal didn't "swiftly" lose anything, it look a looooong time for their empires to go kaput. Not a long time by the standards of Asia Minor, but still a long time.
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  32. Was Rey ever annoyingly whiny? Did her Obi-Wan equivalent have to fish her out of lethal trouble ... twice? (RIP Max von Sydow. You deserved so much better.) Did she ever get tagged in the rear end by a mini-blaster shot from of a drone? In short, did the story treat her with anything other than kid gloves?
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  33. "The horror of Cthulu is not that he is an octopus dragon man, it's that him just rolling over in bed and checking the alarm clock does tremendous damage to humanity." There is a real-world equivalent to this danger -- immense amounts of methane are captured in clathrate structures along the ocean floor. Should these ever be released, humanity is doomed. So, add "oceans f*rt, everybody dies" to your list of horrifying ways the human race could go extinct.
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  34. By the way, Scrooge McDuck has a Scots accent because Scots are supposed to be cheap. Don't tell Disney though, they might cancel him because that's racist or something. =(
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  35. The "Hawaiian League" consisted of the immigrants who found themselves the majority? Interesting to hear that you think this gives them less political legitimacy.
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  36. If you like challenging people's assumptions, answer their rhetorical questions in a way that's honest but was clearly not what they expected.
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  37. "Most of the time wolves are not dangerous to humans." The rest of the time, they will tear humans apart, especially enjoying the sport of carrying off preschoolers. Yeah, there's a world of difference between "most of the time" and "never".
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  38. So Zeus was trying to cheer up / distract Demeter, and didn't think to try getting one of the other goddesses to perform a striptease? You'd think Zeus, of all people, would come up with this one. Seems like the Japanese gods are much more creative that way.
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  39.  @bluerosevideos4164  It would fit with Zeus' typical levels of empathy, for him to get someone else a gift he liked better than they did.
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  40. A few words in defense of Wernher von Braun: - He was more interested in space travel than war. He was arrested by the SS for saying "I wish Germany would hurry up and lose, so we could get back to exploring space." - He was in fact concerned about the ideologies he served. He joined America because he thought "The technology that I possess is not safe in the hands of any government not guided by the precepts of the Bible." I can't vouch for every paperclip, but von Braun deserves better than he gets.
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  41. Isn't Medea's "chariot of Helios" the original Deus Ex Machina?
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  42. Apparently regular people can have a "time slows down" sort of mode on occasion, according to Bernie Goetz.
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  43. The fact that no culture who built ziggurats survives to this day, proves one thing: Ziggurats are hazardous to your health.
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  44. A woman whose desk is covered in pictures of her family AND STILL DECIDES TO WRECK HER FAMILY is only connected to her family on the shallowest possible level.
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  45. Is Tripitaka a MacGuffin? Or is the allegorical point of the story that Buddhist wisdom is not only useful, but exactly what Sun Wukong (and the rest of the externalized Self that the crew represents) needs in any given situation?
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  46. Guido? His name was GUIDO Fawkes??
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  47. Mentors die so much because human life is multi-generational. One generation gains wisdom with age, and another rises in an ever-replenishing fountain of enthusiasm, ignorance, and yes, potential. In many cases the whole point of stories is to show how aged wisdom combines with youthful energy (in a realistic way), not just because a mentor / student trope is the best way to bring that across, but also because older people die in the real world, and passing on that wisdom before that happens is just a much of a problem to be explored as anything else that might happen in a story. So, aged wisdom dies, not to dismiss that wisdom, but to reflect the fact that that's the way it goes in life. Also, love interests die because up until modern medicine, childbirth was incredibly dangerous and stories are a way to explore ways to deal with this.
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  48. How DARE a cultural supremacist such as yourself impose your values and derogate the ancient customs of my people's culture! I love the fact that I'm descended from Vikings, we get to do so much cool s**t in contexts that valorize indigenous cultures and pre-Christian value systems. =)
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  49. A Dragon is just a chimera with a better graphic designer.
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  50. Vengeance has a deterrent quality to it. If you want to maximize evil in this world, allow everyone who acts in an evil way, to get away with it.
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