Carrie Fisher has died
theverge.com
theverge.com
I guess we need to get used to the rapid loss of famous personalities in the future. Stars are not in short supply because media is good at finding extreme talent and injecting them into our special moments. I remember seeing her on the big screen when I was a kid. I also remember listening to Leonard Cohen with my then-girlfriend and now-wife, or dancing to George Michael songs with friends in my youth. I can think of many great artists, and relate them to special moments. I'll surely miss the ones I'll outlive when the day comes.
60 for Carrie Fisher (or 53 for George Michael, for example) is too young of an age to die. I wish a longer and healthier life for others who make unforgettable moments for us, the audience.
I think whether it's a good thing depends on whether the important thing is to have access to some better art, or to have shared access to art, even if it's slightly less good.
In other words, art as a shared cultural discussion, vs art as individual consumption. I believe that even the best of art (from a technical standpoint) losses artistic power if it's just consumed by fewer people -- and I mean that it loses it even for those people that do consume it (e.g. they don't get additional layers of meaning/feelings etc by being exposed to the interpretations of the same piece by people and other artists).
Niche art in popular art forms, such as cult films and cult TV shows, easily reach tens of millions (eg Firefly). It's still totally niche compared to Star Wars, but I'm not sure that you can say in any way whatsoever that it loses power because "only" tens millions of people worldwide have seen it.
There are Pitchfork "Top albums of the year" than less than 5000 people ever listened to.
And it feels at best the current gen, ours, is only apply filter (no jab at instagram et al) to enhance old resolutions artificially.
The time were channels were limited, where access to production too, the constraints, the potential rigging all this, seems to me now that it had a strong effect on society.
When there was a limited choice, we wouldn't feed our desires directly, production couldn't be extremely tailored, they had to be reaching a broader audience to exist, while having a IT factor. And then people would discuss these things they shared because nothing else was there, and it made it resonnate.
Nowadays, we have all a thing that suits us more, people can produce at lower (artistic and infrastructure) cost. But now productions have less chances to become culturally as relevant as before.
It's just one impression that I have on the status of TV from the 80s and 90s.
With all technology/medicine advance it's incredible how many people heart disease still kills in 2016.
May Carrie and George Rest In Peace.
*I hold the theory she's been braindead since then, and the family made a decision today. It sounds cold, but it also means she hasn't been suffering for four days.
I'm sure the flight didn't help anything but from the timing it seems like it wasn't as big a factor as it could have been.
Meanwhile my mom is still kickin.
My understanding is a heart attack refers specifically to a blockage in the heart, some combination of narrowing arteries, a blood clot, etc.
Heart failure just refers to an inefficiency of the heart to pump blood. It's caused more by things like arrhythmias, issues w/ blood pressure, etc.
It seemed to me that the heart attack was the more serious of the two, as I believe it's more closely linked to tissue death. As I understood it: the heart attack weakened my grandfather's heart and left him more vulnerable to heart failure.
All colloquially used as synonyms. All different. I couldn't tell you which is which. Seems like its different between areas of the medical field as well. So thats problem number 1.
It's not. The generic term for death is death. Heart Failure is a real condition. A heart attack could be compared to a circuit overloading, while heart failure can be compared to lose of power.
You mean "partying our faces off for decades on end"?
Unfortunately no, we don't have a cure to fix a generally wrecked body.
Drugs are indeed bad, at least to the extent that this generation of stars used them.
Not as much these days and not of the same magnitude. When Carrie Fischer was made a star there were like half a dozen tv channels, movies and music releases were major events, and almost everybody heard the same songs on the radio or MTV (or Ed Sullivan etc before).
Now a song can be in the top 20 and most of the people might still have not heard it (being in top 20 takes much less units and attention is dispersed in micro-genres and 20000 different media outlets). We have 100x as much of everything on demand (including from other decades), internet, gaming, youtubing, social media, etc, all of which were not a thing back then.
This one seemed overly tragic to me. My wife and I were in the theater watching Rogue One, along with many thousands world-wide, the night this happened. Unlike some other stars, she remained active and interesting and made her life story public record. She became relevant again since the new Star Wars movies, and not to spoil R1, I won't say more. She was more than likely going to be in the new Star Wars movie next year as well.
That said, we're seeing a lot of early deaths of celebrities lately. Mostly via the bum luck of cancer or heart disease[1] or, most commonly, the abuse of illegal and prescription drugs. A part of me thinks a lot of these characters were high-risk for ages and the odds finally caught up. I hope drug liberalization is in our future. At the very least it would help with harm reduction. Sadly, here in the states, the president-elect and the cabinet members he's picked are about as anti-drug as practically possible. Perhaps next election we'll get a POTUS and a congress that cares about ending the drug war, instead of fueling it.
[1] Some of which is caused by cocaine abuse decades before. Sadly, even going 'clean' for a long time doesn't undo damage.
There's a relatively small subset of stars I consider -- in some semi-unconscious and not thoroughly deliberated fashion, on my part -- to be central to the shift by at least a certain portion or segment of Hollywood et al. towards a more honest and open -- and interesting -- self-perspective and communication.
Like Craig Ferguson with his "Late Late Show", speaking to his own addiction and flying his crazy flag. Hollywood's still Hollywood, and its elite still have their privilege. But some of them have started talking in public like real people, and using their celebrity to put the light on real concerns -- concerns they themselves share, rather than some "charity effort" or preachiness from on high -- nor self-absorbed whining. Maybe.
Anyway, I always found this part of Fisher -- when I happened to catch a bit of it -- at least as interesting as what she did at 19 and into her early 20's.
Yes, the big cohorts of baby boomers are now getting older and we'll see more obituaries.
But it's mostly 2016 that's being talked about in such way.
If a 40 year old can "start to notice" that now, then a 45 year old could have "noticed" it 5 years ago. Didn't we have older people coming to the realization you present in 2012? Or 2008? Etc.
Either celebrity deaths is something like a probability distribution where big clusters can and do happen.
Or perhaps it's mostly that most mass media stars were created in an age when TV was getting widespread use (50s and 60s and onwards) and so they approach the end of their lives as we move on.
May the Force be with you Princess
Source: a Reddit comment [1]
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/5kkzmo/comment/dbon...
source: the comments in that thread.
... and the new Rogue One movie. If you haven't seen it -- it is worth watching.
Death is not 'a part of life', but a nuisance. Not all species 'die' (e.g. jellyfish, hydra, possibly lobsters, flatworms).
And 'the Force' is fictional and does not apply to Carrie Fisher.
As long as we have our species, it is enevitable we will be achieving immortality.
My point being - every death is a tragedy.
Its a metaphor for spirituality, and its pretty obvious that the strict deterministic materialist worldview is far from proven and that many people have spiritual beliefs that they feel 100% justified as having.
Not everything is horrible because we don't have immortality. If anything, we'll hit our extinction event well before then, assuming its even possible for complex mammals to have. No, we're not flatworms and can't have the aging solutions of flatworms.
I think its okay to feel comforted by death. When my dad died, it hurt, but I was happy his suffering has ended. I was happy he had a long life and raised three boys who loved him. You absolutely can accept and even welcome death in some ways. Life isn't all roses and chocolates. Death is currently the only solution we have to terminal suffering, for example.
People have spiritual beliefs when they try to explain things that they can not understand. Other people abuse this by telling them that they have special knowledge and that they can explain those phenomena, or even more subtle, that there is somebody out there who can explain it to them, at some point, in some manner. All this without providing the slightest chance of falsification, meaning basically they can assert whatever they like.
So in my eyes, no, people are not really justified in having those beliefs: they could just as well accept that certain things are (now, and possibly forever) unknowable.
That said, relativity has nothing intrinsically non-deterministic about it [1], and whether quantum mechanics is deterministic or not is open to debate [2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indeterminism#Classical_and_re...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mec...
The two notions are orthogonal. Nuisances of every kind are regular parts of life.
If it's a procedure and not inherited, either it goes along with technology supplying humanity with cheap nigh-unlimited energy and thus space travel, uploading of minds or it's a two-caste world in which the same immortal persons hold the mortal masses at bay with any means necessary. If it's immortality for all (say through a virus that spreads naturally), it's a world where people have to be naturally sterile and only the priviledged get to have children, you get to wait thousands of years before you can procreate due to a place being free because of accidental deaths or no one gets to have children (but a governing body through technical means, arifical wombs).
Also, I can imagine relative immortality would render global nuclear war an inconvenience, with proper protection you could maybe wait out the aftermath and start again?
[0] "history doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes"
Our triumph over death will be met with a similar awe as our successful invention of the hedonovat, a device that suspends a living creature in goo while supplying everything it needs to live forever and supplying sensory inputs of nothing but pleasure and happiness.
The idea that "residual potential lives on in others" is irrelevant - there should be no need to die to inspire someone else. Moreover, even if inspired by Einstein, no-one will not produce exactly the same work as Einstein would have, had he lived. So that notion is refuted, and would become ever more definitively so over the accumulated years and contributions of an indefinite lifespan.
Solving the problem of death includes removing the overwhelming preference for death in cases where it is the only relief from a terrible quality of life, so your chronic pain example gets swept aside.
The is no such thing as a "hedonovat" and your depiction of it sounds frankly ridiculous. Hoping to enable an indefinite human lifespan with a high quality of life is not ridiculous.
Death is only loss and pain.
Why would you want to live forever? The human condition is predicated on birth and death. As an academic exercise, I think birth without death would be a bit like moving from a northern climate to a southern climate, where work ethic goes out the window because there is no season in which work cannot be done (winter).
If we live forever, at what point do we taste the urgency of living?
On a film-related note: I'm assuming any role she might've had in Episode 8 might've already been shot since the film is in post production, but given that she's passed away and (I figure) Leia almost certainly won't be recast, how might Disney rejigger the storyline going forward? Furious 7 handled Paul Walker's death through CG and the use of Paul's brother to stand in for missing shots, but that was to close out a single film rather than to adjust for broader plot gaps in an overarching series.
The face2face[1] tech looks pretty convincing to me and it already works in real-time (which isn't necessary for films) and you have plenty of old footage of them.
Personally, I hope that never really becomes popular. Culture is already far too backwards looking and nostalgia filled for my taste. I'd hate for us to get stuck using dead actors providing something mimicking a performance.
Far more interesting will be the possibility of wholly CGI actors with artificial vocaloid voices. That'll be a ways off since a voice actor would be cheaper.
It's funny to think about it now, but Peter Cushing and Alec Guinness were the two "big name" actors in Star Wars, and provided some of the best acting in the entire series. The look on Alec Guinness' face when he mentioned Luke's father being his good friend said more than the accumulated total of prequel movies and spinoffs could ever hope to.
As experienced professionals (with experience working in low budget action films in Peter Cushing's case) they added a lot of nuance to and took ownership of their roles that I doubt face-swapped actors will have the authority to for a long time, if ever. To be honest, it feels kind of weird to me that they are resurrecting an actor who has been dead for such a long time.
Having said that, I think the actual technology is good enough for de-aging when the actual actor can give a performance; realistic CGI replacements for actual people have been improving since 2009 when a cameo by THE Terminator was believable enough (somewhat because it conveniently got its face blown off immediately). Jeff Bridges in Tron Legacy was not bad: http://www.danplatt.com/?cat=91, and you won't notice the de-aged actors in the latest Marvel movies unless you are actively looking for them.
I went to Rogue One with 8 people. 3 could tell me which prominent character was CG when asked. And those 3, it was because they knew the actor was diseased.
Fox will probably beg to differ.
Of course, I was expecting to notice it. If I hadn't known about it, maybe it would have gone right by me.
But once you figure out something is out of place, you can't break that thought process.
The weirdest thing about Leia was her smile...I mean that she smiled at all. Real Leia would've told the guy to shut up and do his job.
Much more likely that part of Episode 8 would be reshot to kill her character off and leave the rebels at a nadir. For example if there's any scenes of her traveling from A to B, just reuse part of that material and blow the ship up as it approaches its destination. Reshooting to solve story problems in post is quite common and losing the leader of the rebel alliance is the sort of narrative problem that would fit right in with the series' ethos.
That said, the CG Leia was poorly executed, which was a surprise considering how well Tarkin was done. She really looked like a video game character. I would have preferred showing her head covered by her scarf and only showing her hands, like her intro in Episode 4. Maybe the production was worried casual fans wouldn't know who it was if they didn't show the face and goofy side-buns?
http://postnewsgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/CGI-Pete...
It was CGI over a mo-capped live actor.
I certainly didn't notice it was CG while I was watching the film. Nor did my wife, who was watching it with me.
But Mons Mothra looked fine, and I didn't get to see enough enough of Leia to tell --- and the other CGI actors I didn't know were CGI and completely failed to notice.
So it's definitely getting better. This was no _Polar Express_.
No CGI trickery here.
Well, that does explain why she looked so realistic!
https://moviepilot.com/p/unused-new-hope-footage-rogue-one/4...
http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2016-12-19/the-unseen-star-wa...
It was the other way around. They found the old footage of the actors, and "CGd" the new cockpit etc. onto them.
I'm glad she lived long enough to get her new memoir out. Sounds like a must-read, with her affair with Harrison Ford being the least interesting part of how she dealt with Star Wars at the age of 19 http://themuse.jezebel.com/carrie-fisher-fucks-han-solo-figh...
[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/carrie-fisher-pressured-to-lo...
Watching caloric intake and exercising tends to decrease your chances of heart attack.
tldr: Fisher had plenty of experience in losing weight, even being Jenny Craig's spokesperson in 2011. For her to have been publicly denigrating TFA at the time of its release (even before it, IIRC), doesn't make it sound like it was the healthy kind of weight loss:
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/movies/carrie-fishe...
"They might as well say get younger, because that's how easy it is."
As an aside, she played a character who had forgone the luxuries of "being a princess" for a life living in the field with the troops, fighting or training every day. I am not into this Hollywood body-shaming crap at all, but a character who lived that lifestyle would look tough and lean.
Weight loss != getting fitter. You can be an unhealthy weight.
Not sure if this was the case though.
Viseral fat is the biggest issue with being overweight. Organs have to work harder because of it.
"I’m in a business where the only thing that matters is weight and appearance. That is so messed up. They might as well say get younger, because that’s how easy it is."
Keep in mind that she's no stranger to weight loss regimens, something she's probably been used to through her peak acting days. In fact, she was Jenny Craig's spokesperson in 2011 and claimed to have lost 50 pounds at that time. The 35 pounds for TFA was either in addition to that, or a swinging of the pendulum since 2011.
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/movies/carrie-fishe...
It depends how much time she had to lose 35 pounds for TFA. If she was complaining that much about it publicly around the time of the movie, it doesn't sound like it was the sustainable kind of weight dropping, at any age. The logic that her weight loss regimen may have saved her life seems counterintuitive...TFA was just a few years ago, and since then, she's probably had to keep the regimen up for VIII. If this weight loss helped her, are you suggesting she was at death's door at the age of 55, until having committed to appearing in TFA? I guess it's pointless to argue causality...for all we know, the heart attack was a freak thing unrelated to weight loss or gain.
As a side note, I find astonishing that she says she was asked to lose 10 pounds to get to 95 for the original trilogy. I had to cut roughly that percentage of body weight for wrestling and that wrecked me, even though most of the weight was lost through extreme exercise and forced dehydration.
Edit: I think the downvotes misunderstood the intent of my comment. I'm glad she was able to enjoy the new Star Wars movie, and I'm glad her friends, fans, and family also were able to enjoy it without mourning.
huh? why would that matter?
Well, it's nice that she lived long enough to see the part that her character played in the movie, and that her family was able to enjoy it for a brief time without her death casting a pall over it.
I bet there are plenty of actors who said, on their death bed, "I wish I had spent more time on stage".
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-carrie-...
When some moviegoers complained on social media about how much older she looked in “The Force Awakens” than when she had last played the character more than three decades earlier, she retorted on Twitter with her typical sharp wit, “Please stop debating about whether or not I aged well. Unfortunately it hurts all 3 of my feelings.”...
...“It's not always fun, but it’s certainly life-changing,” she told The Times last year. “I have been Princess Leia exclusively. It’s been a part of my life for 40 years…. I’m like the diplomat to a country that I haven’t been to yet. I am that country.”
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/12/28/movies/debbie-reynolds-...
[edit: what kind of person down votes a book written by the deceased?]
http://www.tmz.com/2016/12/23/carrie-fisher-heart-attack-pla...
Since they were performing CPR on her, it's likely she had a very weak or no heartbeat (asystole), which defibrillators are no good with.
Defibrillators are only good when your heart is working erratically, not when it doesn't work at all.
Asystole is when there is no electrical activity in the heart. You are correct that that asystole cannot be shocked, but it definitely won't result in a 'weak' heartbeat (nor should you do CPR on someone with a weak pulse).
Absolutely untrue. CPR is recommended by the AHA for anyone who isn't breathing, regardless of whether they have a pulse [0].
By "she may have had a weak pulse", I mean that she may have had a weak pulse that wasn't felt. That's not asystole technically, but it results in the same treatment.
Emergency situations are, understandably, high-adrenaline scenarios and mistakes get made. Even professionals aren't great at detecting carotid pulses properly all the time [1].
> In both of those cases, the patient will have no pulse
Absolutely untrue as well. Only VF is pulseless. VT can present both ways [2].
0: http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/122/18_suppl_3/S640
1: http://www.emsworld.com/article/10320480/the-vital-signs-par...
VT with a pulse is not defibrillated, it is cardioverted. If someone is being defibrillated, they are either in VFib or pulseless VTach. In either case, no pulse. Do not ever, ever, ever defibrillate someone with a pulse.
Both are untrue.
> But if you know they have a weak pulse, then clearly you did a pulse check, and CPR would not be indicated.
Re-read the AHA guidelines I linked to. CPR is indicated for apnea or agonal respiration. Pulse or not.
You are absolutely supposed to do CPR for someone with a pulse if they aren't breathing, because as you probably recall if you're not breathing your pulse is going to disappear shortly anyway.
> VT with a pulse is not defibrillated
Right. You said (emphasis mine):
> Defibrillators are used in cases of ventricular fibrillation and ventricular tachycardia. These are lethal heart rhythms where the heart is either quivering uselessly, or beating too fast to allow the heart to fill with blood between beats. In both of those cases, the patient will have no pulse.
Which is untrue, as you noted: VT isn't always treated by defibrillation. And, as I noted, VT doesn't always present with no pulse. The distinction is important, because someone reading that paragraph may be confused and think "VT is always treated with defibrillation". Which is absolutely untrue.
We are making orthogonal points...
If someone is being defibrillated, then they have no pulse. The person using the AED may not know that, but the AED does.
You initially said:
> Since they were performing CPR on her, it's likely she had a very weak or no heartbeat (asystole), which defibrillators are no good with.
You seem to be saying that if a person doesn't have a pulse, they must be in asystole, and don't need a defibrillator, which is dangerously untrue. The only reason you do CPR is to preserve the heart and brain long enough to use a defibrillator. In fact, the only circumstances under which someone should be defibrillated are certain types of pulseless cardiac activity.
Luke Cage
Dr. Strange
hm, need to call Marvel about this
With George Michael passing, and now Carrie Fisher - it makes me think of the rule of '3'. It always crops up.
Call it dark humor. No-one truly believes 2016 is sentient and murdering people.
Personally its the number of outright confusing/heartbreaking global events such as Aleppo, Brexit, the Trump election/"presidency," that has made the year seem particularly unbearable. Losing Carrie Fisher, George Michael, David Bowie, Alan Rickman, among others just gives more reflection to how bad it's felt, not if its actually a bad year statistically.
For you, perhaps.
Where were all these not-Star-Wars Carrie Fisher fans before she died? Where were these George Michael fans before he died? This is not to say they aren't deserving of being mourned. This is to say, the people who take 5 seconds to post on social media are transparent and only cheapen the mourning of these people's real families.
> Where were all these not-Star-Wars Carrie Fisher fans before she died? Where were these George Michael fans before he died?
I don't know; where are you? Whose death would sadden you, and why are you not praising them and cheering on their accomplishments right now?
People who take 5 seconds to post on social media are mourning. What do you expect them to do? Shave their eyebrows, write essays, get tattoos? I'd wager that George Michael's and Carrie Fisher's families are probably buoyed by the support they see for their family members, and for the outpouring of love for them.
Sorry if our grieving process, or our celebration of someone's life, is slightly inconvenient for you.
Because it's all about you? People who say that don't know whether your son was born, and could not care less.
>Where were all these not-Star-Wars Carrie Fisher fans before she died? Where were these George Michael fans before he died?
Buying millions of CDs for decades and filling in stadiums?
Heck, Wham! are even presented as the "greatest band ever" in Deadpool, a 2016 movie.
This isn't the only reason people are saying "fuck 2016."
I think "most" anyone who lived through the years 1914-1918 or 1939-1945 (and was >= 4 years old at the time) would beg to differ. The world was literally tearing itself to shreds, and I'm sure somewhere & time during WW2 it looked like there was no end in sight.
The lives lost this year (especially in places like Syria) and personal grief is immeasurable, but it can be important to keep perspective.
I understand that the culture of celebrity tickles a primitive part of our brains, and that it's impossible to prevent on a site like reddit. But it bothers me more than it should to see this drivel on a site driven by technophiles.
Why is this death any more significant than any other human being who wasn't lucky enough to be in show business?
Based on the comments and voting, though, I appear to be an extreme outlier in this opinion.
A lot of people became technophiles because of the cultural influence of films like Star Wars. Perhaps you haven't noticed how every new claim of holographic display technology, for example, is held up against the imaginary example from that film. Star Wars was unique for its time in presenting the future as combining both breathtakingly advanced technology with industrial decay and totalitarian oppression. The series also signaled a dramatic change in how women were portrayed on screen. The dominant communication medium has substantial power to shape society.
While the on-screen technology is fictional, the Star Wars series was also hugely innovative in terms of film production technology, giving rise to modern video editing software, sound design techniques, and many digital workflow techniques. It's had a massive impact on film technology and everything to do with it.
But the death of a celebrity is exactly the sort of mainstream, intellectually vacant news that this site is supposed to avoid.
The death of a woman who was chained in a bikini to a pretend space slug gets this much attention, but the death of the woman who confirmed the existence of dark matter in the actual, not fictional universe is barely being discussed, on what's supposed to be a forum that values substantive intellectual content over trivia.
yeah, that's kind of my complaint. we give these individuals an oversized amount of influence over public decisions. should jenny macarthy really be the one who advises us about vaccinations? IMO: no. And if jenny mccarthy doesn't deserve reverence, why does carrie fisher? because her role was in a different film? that doesn't even make sense.