He played memorable roles, and his legacy will definitely live on as Professor Snape - my kids are starting through the Harry Potter series and love/hate seeing him every time on screen.
As a bad guy he was amazing, Hans Gruber, Sheriff of Nottingham and Snape are probably the finest examples of his work in this area but he was never limited to just the bad guy he just played them so well when he did.
John Sessions told an anecdote on QI where a child asked Rickman why he always played villains, and he responded "I don't play villains... I play very interesting people".
Gruber killed people because it made his robbery more convenient. He shoots the corporate dipshit guy in the head just to emphasize that he is serious. How much more villainous can you get?
But if everyone has just given what Gruber wanted no one would have gotten hurt. They open the safe, move out with the money and everyone but Bruce Willis' career is happy.
GP likes to believe his generation was God's gift to Earth and seems to forget the generation above his probably didn't like rock and roll. Classic baby boomer.
By Grabthar's Hammer, by the Suns of Wavern -- you will be missed.
Like many really famous actors, at some point in his career it just became Alan Rickman, in <MOVIE-TITLE-HERE>
But that was okay. His Die Hard appearance was phenomenal. I'll never forget the movie Galaxy Quest.
I cannot miss Alan, for I did not know him. But I liked a bunch of art he created, and I will be sad thinking that he will not be able to create any more of it.
Bowie on Monday, now Rickman on Thursday. Both were 69. Both were fighting cancer. And both were veritable giants both on and off stage. I feel like someone's gutted me of emotion and left me cold and numb — which is kind of funny considering I've never met or spoken to either. It's truly a wonder how much celebrities and great artists can shape us and shape our society.
Today has been a dark, dark week for the world of performance art. He will be missed.
He was a stage actor. His career didn't start with film.
This article makes it seem like he was struggling to be a success long after he should have quit. They just have a completely wrong definition of success.
British actors jumping back and forth between TV, stage and film are far more common than in America. If they don't maintain a certain amount of stage work, they must lose some British acting creds.
If you look up the term "dies" in HN Search, you can find obituaries for all kinds of people submitted to HN in the past, from Gabriel García Márquez to Roger Ebert to Kim Jong Il.
It's not about edge. My children are free to make up their own minds about what they do with their lives when they reach an age where they can reason for themselves. Until then, I do my best to keep any ideological or religious influence from trying to exert itself upon them.
I don't think 'Be nice to others' is ideology. It may be part of an ideology, but I don't think that it an ideology in itself.
'Be nice to others' is also not a totalizing idea in the same way that Christianity is - not everything in the world happens because somebody was or was not nice to others. Christianity takes as its base that everything is/was the will of their god.
Narnia is only an "ideological or religious influence" if you're already very familiar with Christian symbolism. 99% of children will never get the references.
Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials is a solid choice. It gets dark, but so does Harry Potter, so fair game. I would say late grade school for the first book, adolescent for books 2 and 3.
Tamora Pierce has written a number of kid appropriate fantasy books with solid writing and strong female characters. I have seen countless grade school girls get hooked on her work. Some of her books just start to get into more mature relationship themes, but it's enough to embarrass your kid a bit, not scar them.
As a child I enjoyed C.S. Lewis, but was personally affronted when I got to the last Narnia book and discovered that good story had been compromised for christian allegory. Lewis won't make your child a bible thumped any more than Pullman will make them an atheist. Just make sure you know what your kid is reading, and find opportunities to discus the material with them critically!
Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series is another excellent option. I believe when I read it in grade school I found the pacing too slow, so I skipped ahead a lot and inferred a number of plot points. Nonetheless, I'm certain I enjoyed it the first time, it influenced my view of fantasy literature, and I have returned to reread the series multiple times since.
The Hobbit is a great kids book.
Alison Croggon's Pellinor series is less well known, but perfect for pre/early teens that love fantasy.
The Enchanted Forest Chronicles by Patricia Wrede feature a princess who runs away from home to work for a dragon. Solid writing, strong female characters, Pratchett-esque subversion of fantasy tropes. Fun and appropriate for grade school kids.
Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
That's off the top of my head. Of these books I consider Pullman, Le Guin, and Tolkien to be literature (worth an adult's time), while the others are just fun and well written.
Well, it's a stretch, but when I saw Die Hard I just barely caught the BSD reference when they log into the CEO's terminal. I found a screen shot on flickr:
That's a pretty hackerish reference for a film made in 1988 that wasn't particularly about computers or tech. There was probably a BSD fan at the company that created the computer screens. FreeBSD 9.2 had a tribute to this in it's boot screen:
You haven't "lived" (period) until you're dead, and it's settled.
You might have e.g. "lived in London" (if you don't know, so it's a settled thing and a specific period of your life). Or "I've lived in poverty", etc.
But "I've lived", period, without such a qualifier is not that common or useful when one is still alive.
If you truly want to argue that the verb tense chosen means "Everyone who ever lived [and then died] has died," then the statement becomes a tautology: "Everyone who has died has died."
All true equivalency statements are tautologies -- since both sides "resolve" to the same thing. That doesn't mean they are useless.
In this case, though, it's not "Everyone who has died has died", but "To have lived means you're dead".
The same way that "to be a corpse means that you've died". That's not a tautology (it's not "to be a corpse means you're a corpse"), just informs us of a prerequisite for the other thing to happen.
The article seems to say that the estimate of all who have lived is about 106 billion, so the number of currently-alive is estimated at about 6% of those who have ever lived.
Arthur C. Clarke wrote "Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living." I wondered if that ratio needed updating. It does, but not, it seems, in the direction I expected.
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
I never understand comments like these. It's on HN because someone found it interesting enough to submit. It gained traction because enough someone's found it interesting enough to upvote.
I'm not sure much more explanation is required. If you disagree, you can downvote the story and / or not click through.
I think it would have been hard for that movie (and Bruce Willis' movie career for that matter) to have been as successful if anyone else had tried to pull off that combination of intelligence, charm and malevolence.
Yes, actor. On a site about programming ( or derogatory slang: hacking). On first page, first item. It's not even science, let alone computer science.
A CGI article would be more on topic.
between david bowie and this, cancer seems to be the midlife killer of choice . Much process has been made in heart disease, but cancer? Not so much. Once it's spread, you're dead. (2 years usually)
> Once it's spread, you're dead. (2 years usually)
OK, this is completely wrong. There are several cancers which do not kill THAT fast in the first place, and several that can be cured with pretty good confidence. And it's often a matter of how soon you detect it - if you find it at Stage I, you have much better odds than if you find it at Stage IV.
Yes, I understand that, but your comment is easy to read as being about all cancer, and an awful lot of treatment is done prior to it spreading.
Much process has been made in heart disease, but cancer? Not so much. is really the problem, as early stage treatment has gotten vastly more effective over the last 20 years (My father succumbed to metastatic cancer in 1994, I pay some attention to the overall progress in addressing cancer).
Sort of. If it's limited to only metastasis, then the original statement "Much process has been made in heart disease, but cancer?" is pretty silly, as it's comparing the worst of cancer cases with all of heart disease.
> if you find it at Stage I, you have much better odds than if you find it at Stage IV.
Very true, however, Stage I cancer is still localized, Stage IV cancer has spread to other organs.
To your point though, Lance Armstrong beat cancer after it had metastasized. He was an exception. He was in stellar condition. I doubt most folks would be able to endure what he could.
For colon cancer, bleeding is sometimes unnoticed or written off as hemorrhoids, so it is ignored and given time to grow and spread. This, I believe, is the chief reason why it's so lethal (there are exceptions, of course). Colon cancer is curable if found early enough. Sharon Osbourne has been cancer free for 13 years only because she caught it early.
How is 69 "midlife?" 40's is midlife. These guys hit their midlife in the 1980's. Bowie's midlife was 'Let's Dance' not 'Blackstar.' Rickman's midlife was 'Die Hard' not 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.'
I suspect we're looking at these guys with their dyed hair, fit bodies, plastic surgeries, etc and thinking they're much younger than they truly are. These are 70 year old. They're old, old men. They died only a few years before the men in my family typically do. They just didn't look very old, nor were any photos release of them looking sick.
I always find it amusing how Charlie Watts gave up on all this with the Stones and just doesn't dye his hair and doesn't dress like a 1970s hipster woman or have a woman's haircut. He has this very dignified look, but certainly looks older than the other Stones. He's easy to spot. If he died tomorrow, no one would act surprised because he, well, looks old.
EDIT: HN won't let me reply (goddamn posting too much error), so I'll reply here:
Avg male lifespan in the US is 78. So yes, while your father is an exception, its not remotely typical. Most men don't even hit 80, let alone reach their 90s.
I work with the occasional 70 year. Yes, they are absolutely old men. They can't remotely keep up with guys in their 50s and early 60s, let alone 30s and 40s. There's a reason retirement age is usually pegged at 65.
I am very sad for this (I am a huge Harry Potter fan), but I can not let pass a curiosity of which this event is part of.
Aaron Ramsey (Footballer player for Arsenal, UK) has a reputation for apparently killing off famous people when he scores. Whenever he scores someone famous tends to pass away, of course it is a big coincidence, but he did score yesterday too.
Also scored last week, and David Bowie passed away.
If you google it, he scored the previous day of the deaths of Colonel Gaddafi, Steve Jobs Osama Bin Laden and Whitney Houston, among others.
Yes, but there is also a theory that celebs die in three's which is pretty interesting. A lot of researchers say this is because we as humans love patterns:
“Patterns in death, patterns in misfortune – those are things that help us try to understand the universe or reality in a way that makes sense of it,” explains John Hoopes, a professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas who has written about the concept for Psychology Today. “In general, we’re very uncomfortable dealing with randomness.”
I recall seeing a suggestion that "everything" happens in threes, in a meaningful sense. Something along the lines of: you take events which happen according to a poisson distribution with parameter L, and you define a cluster to be "any group of events which happen with no more than time L between adjacent ones", and then the expected size of a cluster is a little less than three.
I'm probably misremembering the details, and I can't immediately find a source, but I thought this was interesting.
You know what is the funniest fact? There is Ramsey Theory stating chaos is impossible and you'll always find patterns even in the most unpredictable things. Now the footballer is called Ramsey as well... Another Ramsey Theory coincidence?
Personal aside: When driving, my partner and I always refer to a certain town west of London as Alan Richmansworth, I think simply because it is nice to think about him. Sad news.
My favourite bit of that movie (Rickman plays Sir Alexander Dane, a proud thespian whose once illustrious career has been destroyed by Galaxy Quest typecasting him into this humiliating role):
Jason Nesmith: You WILL go out there.
Sir Alexander Dane: I won't and nothing you say will make me.
Jason Nesmith: The Show Must Go On.
Sir Alexander Dane: ...Damn you.
No, it's Leonard Nimoy. This is a Trek TOS satire, and he's the alien sidekick who hates his catchphrase "Live Long and Prosper" or, in this case, "By Grabthar's Hammer, you shall be avenged".
It's possibly worth pointing out in later life he seemed happier about it -his second autobiography was called "I am Spock" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Spock
It actually kinda shows in the new movie. I mean, I was happy to see the old cast back, but Ford didn't really seem to be feeling it a lot of the time.
But on the other hand, that might just be an oldish man not really feeling comfortable playing an immature character (that's part of Han's charm, really).
I'd wager his dislike of the Han Solo character had more to do with working with George Lucas.
(Jason is fighting the rock monster)
Jason: Alexander, you're supposed to be my adviser, advise me!
Alexander: Well, you're just going to have to figure out what it wants. What is its motivation?
Jason: It's a rock monster, it doesn't *have* any motivation!
Alexander: Well, there's your problem, Jason, you were never serious about the craft!
When the elevator to the spaceport goes down and the ship is revealed, Rickman's character says "Oh, my God... it's real." It's such a little line but it encapsulates the whole spirit of the film. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrYsg2RFL30
"Due to the Nakatomi Corporation's legacy of greed around the globe, they are about to be taught a lesson in the real use of power. You will be witnesses."
188 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 233 ms ] threadVideo: https://youtu.be/5BYeI6Cn6dk?t=46s
The only really bad guy I can remember he was playing was the judge in Sweeny Todd.
The Sheriff was also a proper villain, doing whatever he could to try and ensure he ended up on the throne.
I concede on Snape.
At least we still got the Kardashians and EDM. /s
RIP Hans Gruber :')
GP likes to believe his generation was God's gift to Earth and seems to forget the generation above his probably didn't like rock and roll. Classic baby boomer.
Like many really famous actors, at some point in his career it just became Alan Rickman, in <MOVIE-TITLE-HERE>
But that was okay. His Die Hard appearance was phenomenal. I'll never forget the movie Galaxy Quest.
I cannot miss Alan, for I did not know him. But I liked a bunch of art he created, and I will be sad thinking that he will not be able to create any more of it.
Today has been a dark, dark week for the world of performance art. He will be missed.
I was recently surprised to learn that pancreatic cancer is becoming treatable, at least in some cases:
http://www.cancermoonshot2020.org
Rickman will be missed. He managed to put a lot of life into any story.
http://www.cracked.com/article_19655_5-famous-late-bloomers....
This article makes it seem like he was struggling to be a success long after he should have quit. They just have a completely wrong definition of success.
This is a semi-dupe of this, btw: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10900974 (different source but same real-world event).
That assumes that reason, not emotion, is the primary motivator, no?
> Until then, I do my best to keep any ideological or religious influence from trying to exert itself upon them.
'Be nice to others' is ideology (albeit very weak). I imagine that you don't keep that from them.
I don't think 'Be nice to others' is ideology. It may be part of an ideology, but I don't think that it an ideology in itself.
'Be nice to others' is also not a totalizing idea in the same way that Christianity is - not everything in the world happens because somebody was or was not nice to others. Christianity takes as its base that everything is/was the will of their god.
By the way, I wasn't asking to challenge you... I'm just a big fan of childrens' fantasy!
A lot of the more recently written books my kids read now are formulaic crap, but at least they're reading books.
Tamora Pierce has written a number of kid appropriate fantasy books with solid writing and strong female characters. I have seen countless grade school girls get hooked on her work. Some of her books just start to get into more mature relationship themes, but it's enough to embarrass your kid a bit, not scar them.
As a child I enjoyed C.S. Lewis, but was personally affronted when I got to the last Narnia book and discovered that good story had been compromised for christian allegory. Lewis won't make your child a bible thumped any more than Pullman will make them an atheist. Just make sure you know what your kid is reading, and find opportunities to discus the material with them critically!
Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series is another excellent option. I believe when I read it in grade school I found the pacing too slow, so I skipped ahead a lot and inferred a number of plot points. Nonetheless, I'm certain I enjoyed it the first time, it influenced my view of fantasy literature, and I have returned to reread the series multiple times since.
The Hobbit is a great kids book.
Alison Croggon's Pellinor series is less well known, but perfect for pre/early teens that love fantasy.
The Enchanted Forest Chronicles by Patricia Wrede feature a princess who runs away from home to work for a dragon. Solid writing, strong female characters, Pratchett-esque subversion of fantasy tropes. Fun and appropriate for grade school kids.
Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
That's off the top of my head. Of these books I consider Pullman, Le Guin, and Tolkien to be literature (worth an adult's time), while the others are just fun and well written.
J.R.R. Tolkien's Hobbit
None others really come to mind, although I'm sure that they must exist.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/armenws/9516176127/
That's a pretty hackerish reference for a film made in 1988 that wasn't particularly about computers or tech. There was probably a BSD fan at the company that created the computer screens. FreeBSD 9.2 had a tribute to this in it's boot screen:
https://mebsd.com/make-build-your-freebsd-word/freebsd-9-2-d...
Besides that, all people still currently living have not died.
Parent didn't put it in time terms. Just noted that everyone who ever lived, has also died ("A && B", as opposed to "A then B").
>Besides that, all people still currently living have not died.
Yes, though one could say that those people are still "living", not yet in a state having "lived" (past tense), as parent put it.
You might have e.g. "lived in London" (if you don't know, so it's a settled thing and a specific period of your life). Or "I've lived in poverty", etc.
But "I've lived", period, without such a qualifier is not that common or useful when one is still alive.
In this case, though, it's not "Everyone who has died has died", but "To have lived means you're dead".
The same way that "to be a corpse means that you've died". That's not a tautology (it's not "to be a corpse means you're a corpse"), just informs us of a prerequisite for the other thing to happen.
Either way, the statement as given does not support the unstated implication that everyone now living will eventually die.
Arthur C. Clarke wrote "Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living." I wondered if that ratio needed updating. It does, but not, it seems, in the direction I expected.
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
I'm a hacker. I found this interesting (and sad).
I'm not sure much more explanation is required. If you disagree, you can downvote the story and / or not click through.
Dammit, this makes me really sad.
Losing Bowie, now Rickman, 2016 starts with a heavy heart...
His expression of surprise was real in Die Hard as the stunt crew dropped him on the count of one instead of three!
It's time for tea. Epic tea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eob7V_WtAVg
OK, this is completely wrong. There are several cancers which do not kill THAT fast in the first place, and several that can be cured with pretty good confidence. And it's often a matter of how soon you detect it - if you find it at Stage I, you have much better odds than if you find it at Stage IV.
Please stop generalizations like this.
Much process has been made in heart disease, but cancer? Not so much. is really the problem, as early stage treatment has gotten vastly more effective over the last 20 years (My father succumbed to metastatic cancer in 1994, I pay some attention to the overall progress in addressing cancer).
If it's metastatic, you've had it... doesn't quite trip off the tongue.
Very true, however, Stage I cancer is still localized, Stage IV cancer has spread to other organs.
To your point though, Lance Armstrong beat cancer after it had metastasized. He was an exception. He was in stellar condition. I doubt most folks would be able to endure what he could.
For colon cancer, bleeding is sometimes unnoticed or written off as hemorrhoids, so it is ignored and given time to grow and spread. This, I believe, is the chief reason why it's so lethal (there are exceptions, of course). Colon cancer is curable if found early enough. Sharon Osbourne has been cancer free for 13 years only because she caught it early.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cancer_mortality_rates...
Prostate cancer has a 0.8% mortality rate in 5 years. Very few types have even 50% five-year mortality rates these days.
I suspect we're looking at these guys with their dyed hair, fit bodies, plastic surgeries, etc and thinking they're much younger than they truly are. These are 70 year old. They're old, old men. They died only a few years before the men in my family typically do. They just didn't look very old, nor were any photos release of them looking sick.
I always find it amusing how Charlie Watts gave up on all this with the Stones and just doesn't dye his hair and doesn't dress like a 1970s hipster woman or have a woman's haircut. He has this very dignified look, but certainly looks older than the other Stones. He's easy to spot. If he died tomorrow, no one would act surprised because he, well, looks old.
http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/r/rollingstones-80s-50...
http://www.gq.com/gallery/charlie-watts-style-photos-rolling...
EDIT: HN won't let me reply (goddamn posting too much error), so I'll reply here:
Avg male lifespan in the US is 78. So yes, while your father is an exception, its not remotely typical. Most men don't even hit 80, let alone reach their 90s.
I work with the occasional 70 year. Yes, they are absolutely old men. They can't remotely keep up with guys in their 50s and early 60s, let alone 30s and 40s. There's a reason retirement age is usually pegged at 65.
Age manifests very differently in people.
I wouldn't say that late sixties is midlife; it's well into the end-of-life period.
Aaron Ramsey (Footballer player for Arsenal, UK) has a reputation for apparently killing off famous people when he scores. Whenever he scores someone famous tends to pass away, of course it is a big coincidence, but he did score yesterday too.
Also scored last week, and David Bowie passed away.
If you google it, he scored the previous day of the deaths of Colonel Gaddafi, Steve Jobs Osama Bin Laden and Whitney Houston, among others.
“Patterns in death, patterns in misfortune – those are things that help us try to understand the universe or reality in a way that makes sense of it,” explains John Hoopes, a professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas who has written about the concept for Psychology Today. “In general, we’re very uncomfortable dealing with randomness.”
http://www.nbcnews.com/health/celebrities-dont-really-die-3s...
I'm probably misremembering the details, and I can't immediately find a source, but I thought this was interesting.
Personal aside: When driving, my partner and I always refer to a certain town west of London as Alan Richmansworth, I think simply because it is nice to think about him. Sad news.
Very sad month, I have to admit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_Quest
"... By Grabthar's hammer... what a savings."
It's like he's contemplating his entire acting career and questioning how he got to this point in his life.
That's my favorite Rickman scene as well.
It takes a fine actor to pack 30 years of fictional history into a single line. I'll greatly miss his tremendous talents.
Rickman clealy had a lot of fun playing villains; apparently he improvised or re-wrote most of his lines in Robin Hood, making it hilarious.
No, it's Leonard Nimoy. This is a Trek TOS satire, and he's the alien sidekick who hates his catchphrase "Live Long and Prosper" or, in this case, "By Grabthar's Hammer, you shall be avenged".
Nimoy had a reputation for being quite sick of being Spock. It was even the title of his biography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Not_Spock
But on the other hand, that might just be an oldish man not really feeling comfortable playing an immature character (that's part of Han's charm, really).
I'd wager his dislike of the Han Solo character had more to do with working with George Lucas.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/songoflunch/
"You did, when you murdered my boss."