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Comment by gokhan | Hacker News Reader

RIP. She is, of course, someone special for many of us because of her role in Star Wars.

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.

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I have a feeling that that we'll have fewer celebrities that have the same magnitude of the ones in Fisher's generation, or prior to it, mostly because we have a much more splintered entertainment world. Which is a good thing, because today's world allows for us to be exposed to so much more talent and genre that the movie and music industries would have previously ignored. But it's hard to imagine anyone who is famous right now, in their 20s and 30s, having the same grip on American culture as Michael Jackson or Muhammad Ali.

>Which is a good thing, because today's world allows for us to be exposed to so much more talent and genre that the movie and music industries would have previously ignored.

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).

I feel that you underestimate how large the world is. Niche art easily entertains millions.

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.

I'm not talking about Firefly level niche (which still has millions of fans).

There are Pitchfork "Top albums of the year" than less than 5000 people ever listened to.

I don't disagree with you, necessarily, but the other factor is that everyone has less time and attention to divvy up among the many more celebrities and niches. That's why newspapers and network news will never reach the mindshare that they once had, not even if you resurrected Walter Cronkite and cloned him, because people not only are fine getting their news on Facebook, they're spending a lot of time on FB that might have been spent on other media consumption. Hell, there's a lesson within the old days of newspapers: Afternoon newspapers, almost without exception and regardless of comparative quality, died out compared to morning rivals with the onset of radio and changes to American life schedule.

I told this already many times, it feel a golden period is going http://scifioutpost.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/force-gho...

And it feels at best the current gen, ours, is only apply filter (no jab at instagram et al) to enhance old resolutions artificially.

Whilst I generally agree with you, my grandparents said the same thing back in the day about Kirk Douglas, Richard Burton, Gene Kelly, Audrey Hepburn...

Kirk Douglas is still alive

And just celebrated his 100th birthday earlier this month!

Oh, I guess I implied they were all dead when I didn't mean to. I meant more that the stars of the day are always seen as the pinnacle of Stardom.

ps: I'd like to bring something about the structure of medias before and now.

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.

I don't know, I think Emma Watson would be a hard loss or Jennifer Lawrence, or Chris Pratt. Also Paul Walker was 40 or so, but that was a major loss. I think it is even harder when someone dies young because it's such a shock.

Both her and George Michael died of heart attack.

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 noticed that George Michael died of heart failure. As far as I understand it, this is a generic term for death. Perhaps the actual cause will be revealed at some point when it is more appropriate.

Seems quite likely it was drugs or suicide.

> heart failure. As far as I understand it, this is a generic term for death

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.

Nah, my grandpa and mom both suffered from heart failure and lived to tell the tale. My grandpa went on to live another 7 years after his heart failure to the age of 79. (Which I find fairly remarkable honestly.)

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.

Heart Failure, Cardiac Arrest, Heart Attack, etc

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.

We all have a bunch of organs which are single-point-of-failures to our lives. It's crazy, I know.

Technology's all very nice, but she died* during a long-haul flight. That severely limits options.

*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.

Probably right. She suffered what medical professionals call a "witnessed arrest" and while the chances of survival are slightly greater than "unwitnessed arrest" (no bystanders; 100% fatal), the odds are only slightly higher. To survive, she would have needed exquisite CPR with no-pause compressions, followed by AED as quickly as possible. Any pauses in CPR would most likely result in brain death.

The heart attack happened about 15 minutes before the flight landed and CPR was started virtually immediately by a medic on the flight with a medical crew at the gate when it landed.

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.

It only takes a few extra seconds to go from recoverable to unrecoverable. Human life is a delicate thing.

There is artificial oxygen carrier based on some close hemoglobyn molecule developped right now. That could help as a temporary solution while someone is applying compression to circulate oxygen rich blood and avoid brain damaging hypoxia.

> heart disease

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.

>Stars are not in short supply because media is good at finding extreme talent and injecting them into our special moments.

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.

>I guess we need to get used to the rapid loss of famous personalities in the future.

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.

For me, Fisher was one of the early female stars to begin speaking smartly and frankly about her own life. Rather than self-absorbed, this seemed to be part of her relating to other people and to her/our contemporary world.

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.

People write about fantasies like Star Wars, but now also the mysterious girlfriend of Joliet "Jake" Blues has passed away.

Yes, the big cohorts of baby boomers are now getting older and we'll see more obituaries.

Just for correctness' sake, and to engage in utterly unnecessary and ultimately meaningless pedantry, it's the "Joliet" that should be in quotes. "Joliet Jake" was Jake Blues' nickname, taken from his frequent home away from home, Joliet Prison/Correctional Facility.

Thanks, yes, I mis-typed. And originally, I think the names are related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joliet_Army_Ammunition_Plant in Elwood, south of Joliet, Illinois.

She was a prepper pin-up before either prepper or its older incarnation "survivalist" (Think Burt Gummer in Tremors) were known to the language. "I remained celibate for you." in all black with an AR15. Not a bad runner-up to her scene as Jaba's concubine.

People aren't dying any more rapidly. You're just getting older, so you're starting to notice the famous people you looked up to in your formative years dying off.

Eh, that's not true. It's more of an issue that there are more famous people now. I'll be honest, I don't know most of the people I see pop up on sites about them dying (I suck at names), all I know is they are a star. I notice there are more are coming up in media, though.

What you write doesn't make much sense actually. Let's say the parent is of age X. If what you say was the case, then we would be having this conversation every year, for people of X-1, X-2, X-3 years that are also on HN (and of course generally on the internet).

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.

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