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[Network Pesci]

Read any good books lately?  Seen any good TV shows lately?  Seen any good movies lately?  Had any good dreams lately?  Had any good hallucinations lately?  I'm really reaching here.

Now I'm not the "Phones" kind of guy.  My social media, you're lookin at it.  I don't have a Facebook or a Twitter or a TikTok, and I will swear to that under oath in a court of law.  What I have is wiseassed comments and occasionally worthwhile discussions on video game forums and in the YouTube comments.  I don't stay current on TikTok trends, I only know what's happening by cultural osmosis and through the grace of the powerful but malignant cybernetic entity we call the Algorithm.  All of my dudes that I used to discuss movies and books and stuff with in real life, well, this fellow Michael broke a bunch of people's houses and they all moved away, and the Death Plague got the rest of them.

Now the remaining fellows I have to discuss movies with, well, they have taste, but not in movies.  They mostly taste like pork or beef or chicken, and they don't have much to say beyond the usual barnyard noises whether we're talking about great literature, politics, or the weather.  Why not this board?  You people must have more to say than OINK or EPIC FAIL, and the lot of you will be as familiar with Blindsight as you are 2001 A Space Odyssey, which is not something I can count on when helping elderly rednecks paint barns or clear fallen trees off barb wire fences.

I'm easily entertained.  I will watch any old crap with grown adults dressed like comic book characters and I'll probably get my money's worth.  I might well make some profound connection that nobody else in the world made because they prejudged the movie based on the TikTok consensus whereas I was thinking about that one scene that was totally a reference to that one comic I read back when phones came with a rotary dial and a curly wire.

I get a lot more out of sci-fi/horror than most.  I will watch a flick about cyborg zombies vs killer aliens on a space station and have as much fun considering the moral ramifications of whether they should have even made that AI do surgery in the first place as I would have arguing with the other turbonerds how long we would survive in that situation.  I might even write hymns to the AI in the comment section of its highlight videos if its movie or video game is awesome enough.  I've seen a couple of good films in the past year that made quite an impression on me, but I'm not quite egomaniac enough to start off with tens of thousands of words on all MY favorite movies.

What do YOU think?  You, reading this.  "About what?", I imagine you asking.  About anything.  I want to hear what people think, people who know the difference between a flux capacitor and a phased plasma rifle, and this is one of the only forum where we all use those on the regular.  Every one of you has held a SHODAN or a HAL or an AM or an EDITH or a SkyNet or an Ultron in your virtual hand, whether you stuck it at the helm of a drone cruiser, gave it a position in your government, left it in your planetary vaults, or sold it to TriTach for cash.  You have considered certain moral and practical issues in a way that 99.9999% of my fellow humans have not.  Even those of you who aren't meatbags, if you're an advertising bot sophisticated enough to pretend to care what I think about movies with robots in them so you can gather data on me, tell me what movies I should watch, and why I should care. 

Only let's try to keep it positive, or at least keep our hatefulness good-natured, so as to not make more work for the poor mods.  They're already like the sentries in the Resistance bunkers in the future war trying to keep out the infiltrators (and they don't have dogs to help them on the forums) so let's dislike movies other people like without busting out the personal insults and all.  You can still insult the spambots though, I don't think they're covered by the forum's TOS any more than the space pirates.

[xenoargh]

I finally got around to watching The Thing from 1982. Kurt Russel rules.

[Network Pesci]

I saw The Thing growing up about 100 times, but it was a VHS recorded off network TV so it had commercials included, some iconic lines mangled (and not a single one of them in a hilarious way like they do with Lebowski or Goodfellas), and all of the scenes with tentacles, slime, or blood edited out.  Imagine the iconic blood test scene but the blood just kinda appears in the dishes somehow and you only see the giant monster rip out of the chair and not what happens next.  The defibrillator scene just wasn't in the movie at all.  There was dogs in the kennel, and then there was a weird noise, and then there was no dogs in the kennel with no explanation of how.

So I actually only saw The Thing for real once it came out on DVD.  You realize that your nerd card was invalid for like your whole life up until the closing credits rolled.  I guess mine has been valid for almost exactly half my life now.  Not like I'm a license inspector, I'm more in the field applications department.  Next you're going to tell me you haven't seen Terminator 2 or you don't have a favorite Star Trek captain or something.

I'm not going to say that dog is the best canine actor in all of movies ever, but it's certainly the most convincing I've ever seen.  I can generally get a dog to "sit", "stay", "shake hands", "fetch", that kind of thing.  Imagine teaching a dog to act like it's nervous about being seen and also have body language like something that's not a dog.

I used to practice chess on that computer program that Mac claimed cheated him.  The version my dad had on his Apple IIc never cheated me, but I was never good enough that it needed to cheat.  Swashbuckler, Wolfenstein, Wavy Navy, or ESPECIALLY Sun Dog: Frozen Legacy was more my speed.

Major League Spoilers for a movie older than the majority of humans on the planet

Okay, if you've only seen it once, what's your take on the ending?  I formed my opinion on that before there was social media, I'm aware of the various theories about there was gasoline in the bottle because MacReady didn't actually drink any or whatever, I heard something about lights reflecting off their eyes or mist on their breath, but I always figured that both MacReady and Childs were human but neither of them could trust each other and probably were going to sit there until they both froze.  I've seen something about if either was a Thing then they could catch it from drinking from the same bottle, but I'm unclear on how well a biological infestation can be transmitted through subzero liquor, I was under the impression anything over 100 proof was a disinfectant.

[close]

Everybody I see watch that movie says "why do they have a flamethrower?"  I always give them my best Archer, "... ... do you not?"  A flamethrower is thirty bucks at any Lowes or Home Depot gardening department, and most Wal-Marts, plus another thirty or so for the propane tank.  I have a flamethrower and I don't even have blizzards freeze my helicopter to the permafrost, I just sometimes have kudzu and giant fire ant mounds on the same section of fence I'm supposed to clean.  They don't even ID you to buy those in most states. 

Kurt Russell does in fact rule.  He also rocks, owns, regulates, and kicks ass, depending on which movies you're watching.

[xenoargh]

I have definitely watched Terminator 2. I liked Picard from the days before he needed a wheel-chair, but Sisko had his memorable moments. Never warmed up to Janeway and, uh, the rest of them are kind of a blur. Never could forgive Kirk for the nightmares I had after Wrath of Khan, which I first watched on one of those crazy gold-plated pre-DVD Laserdisc things at a friend's house.

As for the ending, none of us watching it had seen it before, and I thought it was really fun considering what was going on there. It's kind of dumb, though, if you really think about it. There's a raging fire nearby, and sharp stuff everywhere; they can walk over to the fire, cut their thumbs, and do the blood trick again. So I'm going to vote that the real ending is that after the credits roll, Kurt Russel figures out how to turn a tractor, leftover helicopter parts and flamethrower fuel into a badass rocket sled, because why not, he's already figured out everything else, and they escape to the nearest inhabited base, but SUPRISE, THE ALIEN HITCHED A RIDE, THE END.

Also, the flamethrower didn't make me blink, because you'd really need one in Antarctica to burn trash. I mean, maybe by now they ship all the trash out because otherwise environmental lobbies descend on them like harpies on meth, but in 1982? Surely they just dragged it out and burned it... and you'd want a flamethrower with actual jellied gas to get the job done right. I was kind of shocked by how real that looked in some of the shots; I was also really impressed by the guy doing the fire stunt. That's about all I'm going to say about this movie, though, because I think between your answer and mine, we've kind of spoiled it, and the youngsters here should just watch the darn thing, which is good even though the first act is glacially-paced by modern standards.

My next quest is to keep trying to get my posse to watch the new Dune, but only after watching the old Dune, and maybe finishing that film about the Dune that didn't get made at all (watched about 45 minutes of it, and wow, those guys were on a lot of drugs, lol). I've insisted on this order because none of them can be bothered to read Dune, even though it's surely better than the movies, and although the old Dune gets slammed by critics who probably actually read Dune, and the body-shields are atrocious-looking by today's FX standards, I like all the Giger and weird stuff in it and can usually ignore that Paul Atreides is, like, 15 years too old for the role.

I don't expect I'll complete this quest, and will be forced to watch new Dune solo, lol.

Also, John Wick 4 is what happens when the most awesome action flicks since the 1990's, starring a guy who can be safely referred to as "old man" unironically, finally runs out of ideas. I didn't hate it, but I was glad it was over, and it felt like 3 hours, which is not how it should've gone. If they actually get Keanu to do a fifth one, they need to go full-Sharknado with it and set it on a space station full of Space Thugs Who Secretly Rule Earth, or something, with a surprise turn where it's revealed that they're really lizard people and the final 15 minutes is the prelude to V.

[Mortrag]

Good books:
Except a german one about autism I've read none in the past months. Other good reads are two ongoing web-comics. But they are both NSFW and because the forum rules state "No sexual content", I'm not sure if it's ok to name them.

Good movies/tv-shows:
The closest ones to that are a documentation about the 1483 defenestration of Prague (but because it was made by Arte, I'm not sure if it's available in other languages than german or french) and Perun's weekly presentation about the war in Ukraine.

Good dreams:
I checked the forum rules, but don't found anything against it, so: Just last night my dreams contained a successful counter-offensive by the Ukraines.

[Network Pesci]

Dude, what is your deal, you don't have to write ALL the words!

Well I don't have to NOT write all the words either.  Okay, I got this new job, it's not forever, but for the moment.  You know how in the movies there's that one guy, some country type dude in a rural area by himself, and he hears a noise like he never heard before.  So what does he do, he goes out to the barn with a flashlight.  Not a shotgun or a hunting rifle, not a tactical kevlar suit with an assault rifle, not an armored exoskeleton with integrated rotary multibarreled plasma cannons and smart targeting, a flashlight.  He walks out to that barn and he hears a weird noise so he shines the flashlight around and says something like, "hey, whut the hell is makin that sound?  You better show yerself."

All the people in the audience are like, oh man I would be GONE, like hell you would catch me going out there alone, dude get OUT of there nobody else even knows where you are, call somebody, bring a gun, something!  Why would you DO THAT?!?  Ugh I can't stand when people act so unrealistically, it breaks my suspension of disbelief, this movie sucks!

That's me.  That's my job.  I do that stuff like Aquaman talks to fish.  I got this old grandmotherly lady that I did some maintenance work for, and she has to go in for a bunch of medical treatments but she wants to still have all the cows and chickens she had when she started the treatment.  Or maybe, hopefully, more.  But there's all these coyotes and rattlesnakes, well, they feel the exact opposite.  So my job is housesit the farmhouse and stand guard on the barn and the shed and the coop.  I'm working hard, all the hours I can manage, sitting on my butt and looking out the window.  When I'm on active duty, I have to be vigilant, so I can't get really involved in a videogame that demands intense concentration, but I can sure sit in front of the computer and type my thoughts on the forums and hopefully some of them may be of amusement or interest to other bored schmucks.  And if I type a bunch of long meaningless bullcrap of no interest to anyone it is still a tribute to the Algorithm.

Near about every night, I hear some noise that ain't like no noise I ever heard before.  If I'm feeling nervous (maybe I'm literally watching a horror flick where this exact thing is happening on screen), I may go armed with a flashlight (I'm not talking about standard Astra Militarum Imperial Guardman issue neither, I'm talking a keychain Maglite), if I'm feeling brave I will probably just go.

I'm self-conscious about being that character in that horror movie every time.  I can imagine the audience, or even my favorite audience viewpoint characters from my favorite movies, heckling my decision-making skills to not pick up a gun or at least like a hammer or a shovel or something.

As a small child, I saw a movie, I didn't know how formative it was to my cultural and moral development until I rewatched it as an adult.  This movie taught me two important things.  The first thing, is, there are RULES.  Anything you don't know, you CAN know, you just have to learn how it works.  There are rules, and a small child can understand them, let alone a grown adult.  The second thing is the second one of those rules.  It was specific to the movie it was in, but it's also general to the Real Life Cinematic Universe.  That rule is, the horrors of the unknown, the abominations of the imagination, can be vanquished simply by turning on the light.  I am referring of course to the Gremlins.  I don't care how small or helpless you were when you first saw that movie, you were Rambo compared to that little dude Gizmo, and when it counted even that cute little furry critter would man up and get down to business if he had to carjack a Barbie Corvette to do it.

As an adult, I read a book, and I knew instantly as I read it that it put in words something I had known emotionally since I could call myself an adult.  Everybody remembers the Red Dragon saying DO YOU SEE, but to me that's only like the tenth most memorable bit of the Red Dragon.  To me, the best bit of the Red Dragon is the moment the personality of the Dragon is born, before poor abused terrified little Francis ever sees that painting, the moment a frightened little child realizes, "I am not afraid of the thing in the dark.  I am the thing to fear in the dark."

Why do I need a gun to go out to that barn?  Do they got a pirate armada out there?  There any Remnant Ordos out in that barn?  I would need guns for those guys.  I don't need a gun, I'm armed everywhere I go, this thing between my ears is registered as a deadly weapon.  Whatever is out in that barn better HOPE it vanishes when I turn on the light, because I am higher on the food chain than anything in that barn, and that food chain was forged before ever a smith pounded rocks into metal.  I am Beowulf, I am Gotrek The Slayer, I am The Crocodile Hunter with a 10% less goofy-sounding accent and the sense to stay the Hell away from stingrays.

It's unthinkable to me to actually do like the horror audience is calling at me.  "Man them ain't your chickens, you must be some kind of stupid to go out there and die for another man's chickens, he could get more chickens!"  Naw, man.  Even if they're not mine on paper, if I'm being paid to take care of them, those chickens are MINE.  Just like the crew in my videogame fleet, they're MINE and so I care about them.  MINE is not about possession, it's about responsibility, and whatever that strange noise is, I'm responsible for protecting what's mine since it can't protect itself.

99% of the time, that strange noise is a rattlesnake trying to get in the chicken coop or a squirrel in the feed bins or at worst a coyote trying to mess with calves.  Once in a great while I will see something truly unearthly that makes me think for a second I have got over my head and I'm really in a horror flick.  Then when I turn on the light it is a barn owl or a strangely-colored possum.  If I ever run into something that doesn't consider a round-pointed shovel to be optional overpowered mod content that breaks vanilla balance, well, you will be spared ever reading another of my long-winded posts.  If I run into a werewolf with a chainsaw or a clown demon in a hockey mask or one of them tornado-assed cloudsnakes, I'll see if I can get some photos and post them on here for you jokers.  Really, I give myself better than 50/50 odds against any of them, because I've seen all their movies.

Anyway, my point is, I'm getting nearly full-time employment to sit in front of my computer and specifically NOT play video games or watch movies but do anything else that I don't mind being interrupted.  If I can't rack up credits in a double bounty system maybe I can rack up some words to amuse you or knock Alex a couple of points up on the Algorithm.

[close]

I will mash the overlong stuff up in spoilers by subject though.

@Xeno

As far as Star Trek goes, I'm a Picard man from way back.  As a small child, I liked anything remotely sci-fi with no discrimination, but as I got older, I found that I liked the Next Generation stuff better and the Classic stuff less.  There's a couple of entries in the Next Gen that I feel hold up as good today (dated special effects and all) as they did then.  And without getting hateful, let's just say that I find the non-Trek related things Picard's actor does to be far more noteworthy than anything I can think of by the other guy.  Which makes me proud and which makes me embarrassed, Professor X or the Solo Album?

I do have a Trek-related confession that would get my journeyman license revoked if the Bureau found out about it.  I recently, in the year 2020, watched Galaxy Quest for the first time.

Regarding The Thing, I'm not sure what you mean by the flamethrower stunts looked impressive, they were all real.  It wasn't like they added stuff in post back in those days.  They might have used a propane flamer and let you think it was a jellied flamer, but all the flames were entirely physical.  That one dynamite explosion was real, where Mac throws a stick of dynamite into a fire, just Kurt Russell surviving an explosion at medium-close range and being glad they got the shot the first time so they didn't have to do it again.

Regarding the environmental concerns, they drag trash out and burn it right now in rural areas.  Where I'm at, it's not illegal to burn trash outdoors outside city limits unless there's an orange or red fire warning from a drought.  In the summer, a lot of the farmers around here set their pine woods on fire on purpose to burn off the underbrush, so then there's not uncontrolled wildfires during the dry fall season.  I'm out here looking at woods blazing aflame all proud like, "I did that."  Not literally right this minute, but like two years ago at a different job.  Why am I riding around on a four-wheeler with a flamethrower?  I'm not auditioning for the Mad Max sequel, I'm practicing responsible environmental stewardship and wildlife conservation.  With a flamethrower.  The Fish and Game people and the agricultural inspectors know about this and they don't disapprove.  If I'm not spraying DDT or dispensing sheep dip as a cure for respiratory ailments they could care less.

Gas Town Racetrack Five Miles Long

https://imgur.com/AdQeXMZ
This is not actually me, it is some random guy I saw on the Internet, but it's close enough that you get the idea.  My 4x4 is green and I had a fuel tank strung on the front instead of the toolbox and I had the flame wand in my left hand instead of mounted on the vehicle.  Also I was wearing a blue baseball cap instead of a hard hat.  In 2021, there were a few weeks in the summer that I made more hours doing this than any other job.  They PAID ME to do this like you get paid at your job.  They coulda tricked me into paying them if they told me it was a Fury Road LARPing event.

[close]

Dune

I've read, what, the first four books in the series?  I saw the oldest Dune, the one with Bowie, and I could have sworn there was a TV series in the late 90s or early 2000s that I saw when it was new.  Sometimes I have these insufferable nerdlord nitpicks about something that keeps me from fully enjoying a franchise and I voluntarily confess to being an insufferable nerdlord about the Dune shields.  Everyone that cares about Dune has had the argument already, and I'm not trying to harp on endlessly, I seriously don't want to troll Dune fans, but it's like Star Wars and 40K have better narrative justifications for swordfights on a battlefield where accurate firearms and autonomous drones exist.  It's not even that I can lead an army of neanderthals or Roman irregulars to beat a Dune-shielded army, it's the suicide nuke thing.  The idea of an invention that destabilizes society to that extent is more horrifying than all their AIs and personality recordings.  On one hand, it's useful protection during squad-level combat actions from nearly all projectile weapons, the 25th-century version of Kevlar, on the other hand it gives every Pather or lunatic with a grudge an RNG suitcase nuke.

It's a shame, and I know it's my problem, not the franchise's problem, because the books that I read did have a lot of interesting things to say about the moral and social implications of AIs and personality recordings and artificial life extensions and transhumanism and whatnot.

[close]

John Wick

Now I am all about any movie where some kung-fu badass has a ninja fight with fifteen goons with once and kicks all their asses even though the goons have body armor and machine guns.  I am all about some amazing stunts and some stunning sets and mastercraft camerawork.  My own personal theory is that the estimable Mr Reeves saw that one Saturday Night Live skit that was a meme for years where Tobey Maguire was like "I know Kung Fu" and he was so mad about it that he went up in the mountains and trained with ninjas and took special ops courses with Jason Bourne type dudes and came back a legit kung fu badass.  The major flaw in my theory is that Mr Reeves doesn't seem like the sort to get that mad about anything unless you kicked a puppy in front of him but he definitely put in some serious work between the original Matrix Movies and the modern day.

But once again, there's this insufferable nerdlord hangup on my part that ruins the entire franchise for me.  I would notice this even if I had only read one book of ancient mythology or read one comic book with wizards in it.  But like John said to the Terminator, "all of them, I think."  I know what the [REDACTEDING] Baba Yaga is and I know the Baba Yaga ain't no [REDACTEDING] boogeyman.  This ruins the entire greater John Wick mythology for me, I could watch a ballet of violence all day and preorder the DVD of the sequel, but I don't care the slightest bit about Al Swearingen's Assassin Hotel or the guild of assassins or the secret world or any of that.  If they would keep making John Wick movies that were just about this dude doing a kickflip McTwist double 360 reload melee kill on five guys at once, I would love them, but they want to have this whole John Wick franchise when I only care about John Wick.  I have only seen the first two.

There's this other Keanu flick that is right up my alley, and nobody has ever heard of it.  Off the top of my head, the best movie I want to put on not only for spectacle but for style, is The Man of Tai Chi.  This guy Tiger Chen trained Keanu for The Matrix so to pay him back once he became a big time star and could direct his own pictures, he made his own flick where Tiger is the main character of a Mortal Kombat tournament where Shang Tsung is using reality TV instead of evil magic to try to force Tiger to use his Tai Chi Peace Fatality.  As a director, Keanu's command of the language of color and motion and light and violence is impressive, and I have to wonder how much of his own stunt work he did.  The Man of Tai Chi is not trying to get me to care about their franchise, they already have that and it's called all the classic kung-fu flicks since forever all the way up to Kung Fu Hustle and plus all the classic kung-fu videogames since forever as well, or at least a fair few of them.

[close]

@Mortrag:

About the books, well, you didn't give me any titles to work with so I'll just come up with my own.  You're reading my novel on autism right now.  The only physical paper book I've read lately was a collection of Michael Shea short stories.  I heard they turned one of my favorites by him, The Autopsy, into a show, but I haven't seen it.  I thought having read that story that Shea was attempting to depict nonhuman intelligent life, but then I read the rest of his stories and I realized that is just how that dude thinks.  That little sucker is the most terrifying and evil plate of spaghetti in literature as far as I know.

About the politics, I don't know of any discussion on here but it's not banned.  Surely you can't get in trouble for mentioning without even saying how you feel about it.  I'll go a little further.  Without making any partisan statements for or against any real-life side or explicitly mentioning any real-life events from the past half-century, I will say that my father came to America as a small child, an immigrant from Latvia.  So I do have some relatives in that region and I do have some strongly partisan feelings on that real-life issue which I shall not bring onto the forums, there are literally millions of places on the Net more appropriate for that.  However, I can talk around corners and in fact explicitly relate it to StarSector.

Real Live Politics And Imaginary Moral Horror

In my life, I have spent a lot of time playing videogames.  At this point, I have probably spent more hours playing StarSector than any other video game.  StarSector is the greatest video game ever and it's not even done yet.  There's media that attempts to make you feel complicit in evil acts it depicts.  Cabin In The Woods, Funny Games, Spec Ops The Line are three examples I assume anybody is familiar with.  But what those entries play at, StarSector does for real.  Something with a linear story, I can watch Cabin In The Woods or I can not watch it, I can finish Spec Ops or turn it off, but whatever I'm supposedly "complicit" in has been chosen for me.

My latest campaign included the Xhan mod and Alfonzo's modset.  Both of these mods have unfair overpowered optional bossfights in remote reaches, Lovecraftian abominations that violate not only the laws of physics but question moral precepts as well.  Now these bossfights naturally have some sweet loot, plus I'm always wanting a challenge in a video game and I've beat the vanilla bossfights a dozen times each, more for some of them, so naturally I fly out to the corner of the galaxy and fight Cyborg Cthulhu.

Man, that guy's hard, I got my face kicked down my throat by that guy.  Oh well, I'll come back once I get a flawless nanoforge and about six battleships.  Okay let's try it again a few hours later.  Man, that guy's still hard.  Reload.  Man that guy seems impossible.  Reload.  Good Lord how do you even damage this guy?  Reload.  Okay here we go I got this, what if I lead with my flagship and th-  Oh never mind.  Reload.  This time we got 'im for sure.  All right, got you.  Sweet, I got both of the Gravity Blasters to drop this time.  (But with more cursing.)

That's how it is to me in real life.  I know that thing can be beat, it's got hull points the same as anything else, everything has rules and once you figure out the rules, it's not scary, it's just beautiful and you may feel sorry for it or not while you kill it and then you get sweet loot.  (I feel sorry for rattlesnakes and not sorry for Thousand Eyes.)

I just straight up have a moral exemption for fictional acts performed in video games.  Good thing, too, or I couldn't look myself in the eyes when I brush my teeth.  What does going to fight a Hypershunt let alone the worse things in mods make me if StarSector was real?  Hey there's this thing, and it might just be a powerful product of high technology, but then again it might be a fundamental refutation of all known scientific and moral laws, and I know when I signed you up you thought you were going to keep terrorists and pirates out of the skies of your family's planet, but I'm going to go fight that thing.  It's not like I even know I can win this time, but I know I can win eventually, and I know it will cost a whole lot of casualties and the industrial output of this faction I'm ruling for years, and even though all those lives and money matter to me more because they're MINE, hey, sweet loot in the videogame.  I can get more imaginary crewmen and more imaginary money, it's just a video game.  My faction will replace my losses without me even lifting a finger, I can go make a sandwich and the game will keep going without me if I want.

This isn't even necessarily mod content, it's vanilla StarSector.  You know, this faction is really getting on my nerves with these guys attacking my trade fleets.  I think I'm going to go satbomb their planet, it's not like they can do anything about it and it will stop the attacks, probably.  I know those imaginary pirates have imaginary families on that station, that's why I'm blowing it up, to wipe out all of them, not just the ones attacking my fleet at this moment.  These terrorists over here, I can't ever wipe them entirely out, but I can certainly retaliate for this irritating -2 stability on my main industrial planet by with a few choice precision attacks against their infrastructure and food production.  Serves them right, now they're wracked with famine and the value of my faction's trade exports are up for the next couple of months.  Those millions of imaginary civilians that might be slightly inconvenienced (or die horribly) from my actions, what do I care about them?  They're numbers in a computer, they're imaginary people in a videogame and they're not even MINE.

That guy you see on the news in real-life current events, that guy you hate whose name I'm not going to say, some people think, what kind of person could do that?  I know.  I know this guy Hugo Kaboom in this videogame, he's killed more people and committed more war crimes than that guy on the news.  No, there's nothing evil about this game, you should play it, it's my favorite video game of all time.

[close]

[Mortrag]

About the books, well, you didn't give me any titles to work with ... 

Sorry, the title of the book is "Wer ist hier eigentlich autistisch?" (loosely translated too "Who is actually the autistic one?") by Brit Wilczek. Not sure if a translated version exists, but if you get a chance to read it, I can definitely recommend it.

[xenoargh]

Best book I've given away recently was another copy of Stanislaw Lem's Eden, which I still think is the best novel about meeting Real Aliens I've ever read. Ofc, that means I'll have to order another copy, because it's one of the ones I keep around to recommend.

Best book I've read recently was Samurai! by Saburo Sakai and a couple of journalists about being a Japanese ace in World War 2. It's one of those autobiographies that's hard to put down; Sakai was, just maybe, the luckiest man in the entire war, and experienced some absolutely insane things.

[Schwartz]

Stanislav Lem is a trip. My first and favorite of his are the Star Diaries. They're good fun if you like nuts-and-bolts Sci-Fi.

These days I'm watching the Zatoichi series again, which is 26 (!) movies about a blind swordsman and gambler in feudal era Japan. They're amazing in that they are all similar, yet they're all quite good as well.

[Network Pesci]

I'm not entirely familiar with Lem's works.  I've naturally read and seen Solaris, and I have a few of his novels.  Somewhere around here I have the two collections of short stories about the robot universe and a collection of short stories called "The Eighth Voyage and others" which only has the title Lem story.  He's got some amazing quotes.  Most of them I shouldn't post here, though, because they could be seen as offensive to either my fellow posters or real-world religious beliefs.  How about that one about being a visionary instead of a mirror?  I may not write great literature, but I flatter myself that I've managed to think thoughts no other person has ever thought before.  Now whether they're strictly speaking WORTH thinking, we'll work on that next decade.

Playing back through Rule The Waves and resolving to actually get good at it this time, somebody told me that they had written a strategy guide to that game as real world milhist.  It was a joke, but it was also true.  I read Castles of Steel and Dreadnought by Robert Massie, and those made me understand the actual real-world military theory that StarSector's gameplay is based on.  They were also informative that the feeling I get seeing some amazing ships in a mod faction's fleet and thinking, I WANT THAT AND MY LOYAL CITIZENS WILL PAY ANY PRICE FOR ME TO HAVE ONE, that's not new, irresponsible player character faction leaders have been feeling that for centuries.  More importantly, I know what, and why, is a battle line.

[xenoargh]

The two Lem novels I come back to every once in awhile for aren't the conventional ones (although I prefer his take on AIs much more than Asimov), they're Memoirs Found In A Bathtub (best depiction of Cold War paranoia ever) and Eden (which remains my favorite, "how meeting intelligent life will actually go"). The Robot Stories are fun discussions of alternate intelligences and their perspectives, but haven't aged as well, imo.

Both are mordant, sarcastic works from an author and era where it wasn't very safe to be openly critical of the USSR or cast doubt on the inevitable triumph of Rational Man over all difficulties.

They're like a delightful cold bath vs. reading more conventional work from the same period, yet aren't quite as out-there as some of the other stuff from the early 1970's, where apparently all you needed to become a sci-fi writer was to take enough drugs to have a loony-tunes concept and then spit it out onto paper. I think it's kind of sad that there's so little going on right now that I think's interesting in that genre; it's like everybody but Gibson gave up, because the Futures they imagined have already played out.

[Sorbo]

and maybe finishing that film about the Dune that didn't get made at all

What about Dune miniseries from 2000s? It has two parts, 3 series each, for total of six hours of runtime that adapt first 3 novels. It is a lot more faithful to the original books thanks to plenty of time for plot to develop and intent by showrunners to be so as close to source material as possible.

[Schwartz]

I'm not surprised all attempts at Dune have failed. The novels are kinda schizophrenic. The first one lulls you into a sense that it's a grand coming-of-age hero adventure, and people love those. The books that follow just subvert that and would leave many readers disappointed.

The miniseries wasn't bad, but it was as painfully '90s as the old movie was painfully '80s (gorgeous art neau-noir set pieces aside) and the new movie is painfully Villeneuve-y. I'd say read the first book and leave it at that.

[xenoargh]

@Schwartz: I agree that it might feel that way, if you haven't ever read The Dosadi Experiment, which was clearly Herbert's first try at Dune's complex themes regarding human potential. The later Dune books had a central problem: after making the core character into something like a god, now what?

I watched a little of that Dune series, and you're right, it's more faithful to the books. But visually, it just wasn't my cup of tea. I think that's just inherent to the budget / era involved; they couldn't afford high-end production value.

So, we tried Dune again. None of us could get through the 1980's version. I still "got it", but it was quickly apparent to me what a complex mess it was- it relies almost entirely on audiences who are either really good at inference... or have already read the book.

The modern version? I started cursing about 15 minutes in. I get that it's an interpretation, and the movie's only taking the story roughly halfway, etc., because another movie's going to get released this year... but I honestly just couldn't fathom most of the artistic choices made. Some scenes were more-or-less beat-for-beat from the book... others were wholly made up, and largely to the detriment of Herbert's novel and its complex themes.

But the youngest member of the audience said, "but it's a much better movie" and I have to admit that they were right. Unlike the 1980's version, which I think can't really be appreciated properly if you haven't read the novel... this version worked as a movie. But it felt like a disservice to the novel all the same.

Visually it had it's moments, but it wasn't nearly as inspired as Villenueve's take on Blade Runner was. And while I did appreciate a few things (for example, the Bene Gesserit fighting nous was properly shown for the first time on film) it still felt like a work that got cut too much in the edit.

[Schwartz]

The fanedit of Lynch's Dune has a lot of deleted scenes which add cool stuff from the book back into the movie. They are kinda grainy and as it's a fanedit, the guy overused the same pieces from the soundtrack to fill most of these with music - silence would have been better. But as far as extra scenes go, I'm surprised they did not make it into the movie. This really could have been "the one" if not for the cursed production difficulties and need to cut away so much. That, and Toto.

I agree that Villeneuve's is very watchable and slick. If he could just have eased off his style-over-substance approach a little bit and made the movie less detached. The book is a little bit like this, too, but I'm missing the character.