Because that kit would cost around what a new Civic would cost, and you’re going to get a 16 year old car made worse.

EV components don’t really swap into the spots that ICE components do. An engine is relatively large, a motor is relatively small. A gas tank is relatively small, a battery is relatively large. Most ICEs designed from the ground up use a “skateboard”-like chassis with the battery taking up basically all the volume below the floor. The motor can be tucked away somewhere, and then the body built on top. You don’t need the volume in the nose for the engine so you get a frunk. a 15 year old ICE car didn’t portion out the room for the batteries, so you’ve got some of the area under the trunk occupied by the gas tank. That’s about the volume that the batteries in a golf cart take up.

Anyone who’s capable of designing and manufacturing that kit might as well go into production of new cars.

The closest to that I can think of is the Tesla Roadster. Which IIRC was basically an electric Lotus Elise, rather than a Mazda Miata. I wonder how popular electric Miatas would actually be, without a manual transmission.

The most “normal car that happens to be electric” I can think of is the Slate. With the exception of the powertrain and complete lack of a radio, the controls and mechanisms look like they’re from 20 years ago. The more I look at it though the more I think that car is DOA.

I think there’s also a problem with the kinds of EVs everyone tried to sell.

Tesla has seen legitimate success in making EVs a desirable luxury item. The Prius became something of a fashion statement among kale chip eating Californians in the 2000s because of its alleged economy, but it was still an economy car. It wasn’t that nice or luxurious. Tesla made cars people wanted to drive and be seen driving, with an all-electric powertrain.

Pretty much everyone tried to copy that business model, making excessively fast luxury sport sedanover blobs with price tags that make car shoppers start muttering the word “depreciation.”

Meanwhile, EVs tend to be the breeding ground for shit features everybody hates, like touch screen HVAC controls. Nobody wants to make a normal car that happens to be electric, which is what a lot of the buying public wants, but can’t find.

I mean, valid.

Sometime in the PS3 era, graphics got so realistic that…

Let’s back up a second. Go play Ocarina of Time. OoT has wall climbing mechanics, but Link can’t just climb any wall, it has to be a climbable wall, and that is denoted by a different texture. Most commonly vines, but there’s a ladder-like texture on a wall on Death Mountain and rough brick in the Spirit Temple. And one wall in a Skulltula nook that isn’t textured, but Link can climb it anyway.

The 3D environments on the N64 were pretty rudimentary; big chunky rectangles. A couple generations of console later, you get pretty realistically noisy environments. And you’ll have the exterior of a building or a pile of debris or some other set piece that has a single intended climbable path. Where older games would just…lay out a weirdly rectangular patch of climbing vines, now your character is supposed to climb pipes, ledges, window sills etc.

Not everywhere in the world is climbable, so they started tinting actually climbable surfaces a distinctive color, often yellow, sometimes white. The new Tomb Raider games do this, later Final Fantasy games do this, Horizon Zero Dawn/Forbidden West do it, etc.

The biggest extreme is Mirror’s Edge. The game’s primary mechanic is parkour, so the “paint climbable edges yellow” technique is elevated to the game’s whole aesthetic; the environment is stark white with parkourable elements tinted bright red. Looks cool and stylized while also allowing the player to process the visual information fast enough for a parkour game.

Just checking in…the meaning is that we’re not on some far off alien planet, we’re on future, post-apocalyptic ie post nuclear war Earth?

Ooooh, so people miss the fact that the POV character is mentally ill and that everything Tyler Durden does is literally insane?

How? The movie comes out and says that point blank.

Oddly enough, the Blue Man Group sums up the message of Fight Club the best - without even trying to - in their Complex Rock Tour:

Rock Concert Movement #237: Taking the audience on a Jungian journey Into the collective unconscious by using the ‘shadow’ As a metaphor for the primal self that gets repressed by the modern persona, and also by using an underground setting and labyrinth office design to represent both the depths of the psyche and the dungeon-like isolation of our increasingly mechanistic society Which prevents people from finding satisfying work or meaningful connections with others.

In a world where the cause of literally every character’s misery is extreme loneliness, the one man who does anything about it is the guy who is also suffering from severe untreated schizophrenia. Domestic terrorism ensues.

I don’t dislike Paul Verhoeven. I think he’s bad at making his point though.

Communication is the art of making oneself understood. Paul Verhoeven, more than any other filmmaker I can think of, belongs in this thread. Because people miss the points of his films a lot. Because he’s bad at making his point.

Starship Troopers doesn’t come across as a satire of fascism to people who haven’t experienced fascism; it comes across as a big over the top dumb action movie. If you have to already know the message to get the message, you haven’t communicated an idea. Can you find me any evidence of Paul Verhoeven saying something on the order of “Watch, I’m going to make this movie and the Americans aren’t going to get it and that’s my real artistic intent”? Because if you can’t, that’s not the point. He set out to make the point that fascism is bad, then forgot what he was doing and made a blockbuster action movie that’s way to easy to turn your brain off and enjoy unironically.

Showgirls is a beautifully shot terrible film. It’s not an innovative story: Innocent young woman with stars in her eyes heads out west to seek fame, fortune and glamor in show business only to find a crass and cynical world that at first won’t even talk to her, so she eeks out an existence as a waitress, auditioning for parts where she can, only finding success by compromising her own values; a topless scene here, sucking a director’s dick for a bigger part there, until she’s finally the star and she’s just as corrupt and twisted as her environment now.

Showgirls is built on the bones of that story, by a man who doesn’t know much about storytelling but a lot about exploiting young women. You don’t get to tell me this movie was even intended as a satire of sexually exploitative Hollywood when they sold a special edition DVD that came with two shot glasses, a deck of cards with strip games on them, a nude poster of Elisabeth Berkley and a pair of tassels on suction cups so you could play Pin The Pastie On The Stripper. “Fresh off the back of my hit film The One With Sharon Stone’s Pussy In It, I’m going to satirize sexually exploitative Hollywood by sexually exploiting harder than any Hollywood director has sexually exploited before!”

There’s more to satire than making the biggest example of the thing you think you’re satirizing.

There’s some unreliable narrator aspects to Fight Club (the narrator is mentally ill) so there’s some ambiguity with events, particularly the nature of Tyler Durden that are open to audience speculation. For example, was the soap salesman on the plane actually real, and The Narrator latched onto his image to create the Tyler Durden persona?

Better question: Who cares? Does that change the theme or message of the film overall?

I think that’s Paul Verhoeven’s fault. He doesn’t understand the difference between satire and farce.

In a farce, the world the characters inhabit is entirely different to our own. In Airplane!, the characters are deadly serious, but the world and culture they inhabit is 1000% sillier than ours. You don’t watch Airplane! and come out of the theater thinking “man, air travel is the stupidest thing we could be doing, it’s time for anti-aviation social reform.” You spent your evening laughing at the ridiculousness of it all.

Compare that to Dr. Strangelove, which is also over the top ridiculous, but it has some serious and sane characters in it to help ground the satire. There’s a theme where the higher in rank a character is, the more crazy they are. The crew of the bomber, enlisted through lieutenant, are perfectly professional. Captain Mandrake is the movie’s straight man. Major Kong is a bit of a character but he takes his job seriously. Colonel Guano is checked out, General Ripper is elbow chewing insane, and The War Room is full of nutcases. The grounding in reality provided by the straight characters who respond realistically to the situation is what makes the satire effective.

Paul Verhoeven doesn’t let any normalcy into his movies. I think Showgirls is the worst for it because it doesn’t take place in a Sci-Fi future, it’s supposed to be the film’s present day…except people don’t talk like that. People don’t act like that. Sex doesn’t look like that. Vegas doesn’t work like that. So, this movie isn’t set in our reality. The closest thing the audience is familiar with to what’s actually on screen is a Skinemax flick. People don’t act like that and sex doesn’t look like that but the actress really took her clothes off, so…am I supposed to be whacking it right now? Metallica managed to get the point across more effectively in their music video for their cover of Turn The Page than Verhoeven did with a $45 million feature film.

What incorrect message or theme is commonly found by viewers of Fight Club?

I mean, it’s narrated. The movie directly tells you what it’s thinking.

The twist ending that was on the movie poster?

Ultrasonic kitty.

I ripped my DVD collection a couple years ago, and I watched that change over time happen.

The earlier DVDs in my collection came in bespoke packaging designed specifically for the film, they had properly interactive menus complete with easter eggs, commentary tracks, alternate angles, remember when DVD player remotes had an “Angle” button? DVD was a prestige format, it was actually as cool as LaserDisc was supposed to be.

There was the early mass market phase when older movies, or lower budget current releases were put out on double sided discs that had widescreen on one side and “fullscreen” 4:3 on the other, in those half plastic half cardboard cases, remember those? Higher end stuff would be released in what I think of as the standard plastic DVD case. How much plastic was wasted selling them in packaging other than CD jewel cases?

Later on, you got the cases that had the recycling logo cut out of them, the discs got cheaper, features started disappearing, because it was now the budget option. “It’s just on DVD.” DVDs were cheap to make, everybody had a player for them, Blu-Ray now had the prestige releases. The Direct To Bargain Bin releases weren’t exactly the high point of the format but there’s still fun to be had there.

DVD still staggers on, they’re not dead the way VHS is, but it didn’t make it as long. DVDs could do things VHS couldn’t, like TV shows. The advent of binge watching happened on DVD; complete TV series on VHS wasn’t feasible but it works great on DVD. On the other hand, because VHS was the only widely adopted vdieo format for most of its run, you can find weird stuff on VHS that never got pressed onto DVD.

I could argue that VHS was a superior format to both Beta and Laserdisc because it offered a better blend of features.

Laserdisc offered cinemaphile farkles like perfect pause and frame by frame, additional audio tracks etc. but a movie required at least three sides of a disc, and thus two discs with at least two changes. Laserdisc was read-only and thus useless for timeshifting and camcorders. The tape-based formats were slightly worse in quality but could hold an entire movie in one go.

VHS was superior for timeshift and camcorder use than Beta because of the longer run time. There was a mini cassette for miniature VHS camcorders which could be played back on a standard deck with an adapter, Beta never got there AFAIK and insetad Sony went to Hi 8, which never really took off as a home video format the way it frankly should have. VHS was better than Beta at movie distribution because a longer film could fit on an SP VHS cassette, often with room to spare for some commercials at the beginning which helped subsidize the cost.

VHS was at least capable of everything.

DVD didn’t fully kill VHS; It unceremoniously killed LaserDisc and shouldered VHS aside a little. Through most of the 2000s VHS was still going strong, DVD-RAM is surprisingly old but wasn’t adopted that widely. Hard drive based DVRs and smart phone based video recording finally did VHS in.

I don’t think we even need to go that far. They were almost constantly making those direct to VHS movies and such they churned out in huge numbers, and I don’t think it was easy on them. I’m convinced they were overworked as children.

It narrows it down to a delivery truck at least.

Wow, Slavic girls, ya basic.

I’ve been gaming on Linux for over ten years now: It has gotten to the point where the only major hurdle is kernel-level anti-cheat. Which does work in Linux, but the developer has to enable it to work in Linux, and most don’t. This is only a factor in competitive multiplayer games. I’m not into those so basically I haven’t noticed, I want to run a game, it runs.

I’ve had one longhair my entire life and he wasn’t too bad; he needed weekly brushing, more during the shedding seasons, and he’d get matts under his armpits and around the base of his tail. He was pretty good about it though. Otherwise I’ve had shorthairs; I brush my current cat mostly as an anti-hairball exercise.