Marvel often modifies the footage they show in trailers to mislead people. For example, they like to add or remove characters from scenes. They claim they do it to avoid spoilers or to make it more exciting or whatever. They think they’re being clever, but there is a much uglier word for it: misappropria-, I mean FRAUD.
People already find it extremely aggravating, even infuriating that trailers are misleading and make movies seem better than they are (*cough*Random Hearts*cough*), but it’s much worse than just being annoying, it’s illegal. There are truth-in-advertising or false-advertising laws that prohibit this behavior. Trailers are advertisements for a product like any other, and misrepresenting something they are trying to sell violates the law.
Movie trailers have gotten away with breaking the law for decades with impunity. This needs to stop. They should not be allowed to trick people into wasting their money. š
Nintendo just ended their Creator Program and released a general usage policy that applies to all. Now, everyone is allowed to publish videos that include Nintendo characters, which is nice, but unfortunately, their requirements are short-sighted and narrow-minded, and also discriminate against various people. As written, the policy states:
Q1: What types of content are acceptable under the Guidelines? What types of content are not acceptable?
A1: We encourage you to use Nintendo Game Content in videos and images that feature your creative input and commentary. For example, Let’s Play videos and video game reviews are within the scope of the Guidelines.
However, you may not simply upload or livestream an existing Nintendo video, gameplay footage without your own creative input, or a copy of content created by someone else. For example, mere copies of Nintendo promotional trailers, tournaments, music soundtracks, gameplay sequences, and art collections are outside the scope of the Guidelines.
Some of the things that they forbid make sense, like a copy of someone elseās video, and even a copy of trailers and soundtracks. Footage of a tournament on the other hand is restrictive, especially that unlike a music concert, there is no way for people to purchase a formal copy of it.
Worse, they forbid uploading gameplay footage without “your creative input and commentary”, which is short-sighted and narrow-minded, as well as discriminatory to various people.
It is short-sighted because even though it is vague and open to interpretation, you can certainly bet that Nintendo will not hesitate to attack videos that they claim are not sufficiently derivative and put the burden of proof on the creator to prove that it is.
It is narrow-minded because it does not account for what might count as creative. They say you cannot just upload gameplay footage without creative input and commentary, but gameplay (style) is creative input. For example, speed-runs are creative, as are other styles of play (e.g., playing the game backwards, 100%ing, going for minimal-score, playing with restrictions, and so on).
Worse, that conjunction is important; legally, saying and instead of or is significant because it requires both creative input and commentary, not one or the other. This is discriminatory because it essentially means that to post a video of a Nintendo game, you must include your voice. (Technically, you could probably get away with just onscreen text, but that is not usually practical, and Nintendo would probably attempt to discount such videos regardless.) Requiring a spoken commentary discriminates against people with medical conditions that prevent them from speaking, people who are shy (or have social-anxiety disorder), people with unusual voices, and such.
Legal documents are tricky, and this one definitely needs a bit of tweaking to be more fair and considerate to players.
I can’t stand it when perforated papers are folded near the perforation. For example, a lot of checks/cheques or other government documents often have a tendency to do this. It’s absolutely infuriating because it makes it extremely difficult to properly tear the paper at the perforation and quite easily end up tearing the whole paper badly.
Fold things at the perforation! (or at least far away from them).
This is stupid, it will only lead to ruining the paperThis is inevitable because the fold is too close to the perforation
Something has always annoyed me about a scene in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. In the episode āChain of Commandā, Gul Madred tortures Picard to force him to say there are five lights instead of four (a 1984 reference). He tells Picard he can be treated well. Picard asks what he has to do. Madred says to tell him how many lights there are.
Just then, the guards come to take Picard home. Before he leaves, Picard defiantly shouts āthereā¦ areā¦ fourā¦ lights!ā
That doesnāt count; he said four only because they told him heās going home, so he had nothing to lose by saying four again. If they had not told him heās going home, he very well might (and probably would) have said five.
Gul Madred trying to break Picard Picard is about to give in That doesnāt count Ā¬_Ā¬
If you see an error in Google Images, you can submit feedback to (ostensibly) have someone check it and fix it, but to do so, you need to submit far too much information, including pretty much every scrap of data that the webpage can scrape from your system. So, sorry Donna Summers, I guess youāll just have to stay sodomized.
Google wanted too much information to correct them, so sorry Donna Summers
It is really annoying when television channels āevolveā to be something other than what they are supposed to be. It is one thing for a generic station to change, but many channels are subject-specific, so changing doesnāt make any sense. In fact when a subject-specific channel changes its subject, it renders the channelās name meaningless, yet they almost never change their names to reflect their new material. Hereās a few examples:
Channel
Former Subject
Current Subject
Bravo
High culture programs like operas and Inside the Actorās Studio
Inane reality shows like Real Housewives ofā¦ Pretty Much Everywhere
TLC
Educational programs like Operation
Inane reality shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, Sister Wives, 19 Kids and Counting, Say Yes to the Dress, Rich Bride-Poor Bride, Breaking Amish, Storage Wars, Little People Big-World, and so on
Discovery Channel
Educational programs like Inventions that Shook the World , Curiosity, Cash Cab, etc.
Inane reality shows like Deadliest Catch, Gold Rush Alaska, Moonshiners, American Loggers, Finding Bigfoot, Amish Mafia, etc.
History Channel
Educational programs about history like Museum Secrets
Inane reality shows like Swamp People and Ice Road Truckers, and inane non-history (and non-reality Ā¬_Ā¬) shows like Ancient Aliens
Space
Science-fiction, horror, and fantasy shows
Anything that is even slightly related even indirectly to the appropriate subject matter like the crime-drama Castle simply because it stars Nathan Fillion who was in one sci-fi show for a few episodes before it was cancelled
It looks like the worst offender is The Learning Channel. It has gone from being a specifically educational channel to a pointless reality-show channel with absolutely no educational content whatsoever anymore. š
For the past while now, Iāve been hearing a lot of people on television nagging about when someone quotes the line about giving 110% or something similar. Itās happened numerous times in the past year or so where someone would nitpick that āmore than 100% is by definition impossibleā.
This is absurd. If amounts more than 100% were impossible, then how does tax work? If an item is $10, but tax is 20%, you have to pay 120% of the itemās price, or $12. Is it impossible to pay more than 100% of the price for the item? The government certainly doesnāt think so.
Likewise, if there are twice as many sales as last year, then sales are up 100%, to 200% of what they were last year. Companies regularly report sales higher than 100%. Are they performing magic? Of course not.
Obviously amounts higher than 100% are indeed possible, so what are people nagging about? One explanation could be that tangible, physical objects are limited. For example, if you have 10 boxes, then you can give no more than 100% of them away. How could you give away 150%? Simple: debt. You give all 10, and owe five more. Another explanation is that you can only do up to 100% of your ability and not beyond that. However even that is not a valid reason to complain because you can indeed give more than all of your ability sometimes; just ask anyone who got a surge of adrenaline and performed the impossible (like the classic example of the parent lifting a car off of their child or running faster than they ever have).
Granted, it can end up turning into an argument about semantics, but nagging that more than 100% is impossible is pedantic at best and generally foolish.
I frigginā HATE selfish, greedy, inconsiderate, self-centered Rogers! Iām glad that Ted Rogers died and hope that they rest of those bastard executives die as well. I would be happy to have no phone, Internet, or TV if it meant that stupid, frigginā Rogers were bankrupt and out of business.
(I will note that I do not know the internal workings of Rogers or Tedās personal life, and that Ted may actually have stepped down some time before his death at the end of 2008. If so, then it could be that his stepping aside probably coincides with the downward spiral of the company which was not tooo bad up until about the mid 200xās. If so, then I withdraw my invective about Ted and redirect it toward Nadir Mohamed, the man who took his place, especially since most of the worst degradations and customer abuse occurred directly during his reign, and that as an absurdly generous and undeserved severance package, the companyāor should I say, customersāare paying him $16 Million. I would be enthusiastic about Mohamed leaving, but as they say, nothing bad ever left without being replaced with something worse.)
It seems that film and television directors, especially American ones, are very narrow-minded and self-centered. I have seen countless instances of shows and movies recently where a character checks their mobile-phone to see a message but the text was too damned small to read. What makes it all the more irritating is that the phone is usually large enough on the screen that it could have been legible, but they wasted most of the phoneās screen with blank space.
Apparently directors are not aware that not everybody has a 72″, high-definition LCD flat-screen television or high-resolution āRetina displayā iPad. Directors are self-centered and think of themselves and their rich friends and family and forget that many viewers may be watching on small and/or low-definition/resolution screens. They also forget that not everybody will be watching on a 100′ movie-screen or on an iPhone 3″ away, but maybe on 19″ televisions from 6′ away on their couch. Even with good eyesight, the tiny text on the phones in these shows and movies is difficult, and often impossible to read which makes it hard for the viewer to follow the story (let alone for people whose sight is not perfect).
Directors need to put themselves in other peopleās shoes and think of how others who are not rich may be experiencing their works. Website designers frequently examine what their sites look like in other browsers to ensure an optimal experience for the maximum number of people, but directors donāt seem to bother at all. This is all the more annoying because fixing it is almost always exceedingly easy, fast, cheap, and trivial. They already often have to make up a fake phone screen to avoid unintended product-placement as it is, so they could easily just make the fake screen contain larger text. Even with actual screens, it should not be difficult to make the text larger and more legible because most devices include accessibility features to assist users with poor vision.
While Iām ranting about the poor choices that directorās make, Iāll add another one: making things too dark. There are few things more annoying to watch than a scene that is too damned dark. I hate having to watch a screen of almost all black with the occasional flash of meaningless bright area, wondering what the hell is going on. It is aggravating to have to turn up the brightness and gamma (and thus wash the screen out) to be able to see whatās happening. This goes for movies, shows, and even video-games. They already went to all the trouble of creating the sets, makeup, and costumes (or models and level geometry) in which to shoot the scene, why would they then make it too dark for anybody to actually see their workā½ Thatās just a waste and causes frustration. (Obviously I am not talking about the occasional scene which is meant to be completely dark so that the viewer is not supposed to know what is happening other than through sounds.)
