Testing Chat IV: A New Hope

[weemadando]

Reviews of Pacific Rim are coming in and holy shit does it sound like Guillermo had straight up sprayed diarrhoea on the screen.

When even the giant robot action is being written off, you know there's issues.

[Jung]

well I hate to blow my own trumpet*, but you know we have a fair number of people here who are interested in speculative fiction
so Jung you could post stuff here and maybe get a decent review/conversation of it

I've been avoiding that thread since it's huge, but I'm interested so definitely continue to post little updates like this here :L

I have a story thread if anyone's interested and doesn't want to slog through the 126 page monster thread in the Index.

[Oxymoron]

Reviews of Pacific Rim are coming in and holy shit does it sound like Guillermo had straight up sprayed diarrhoea on the screen.

When even the giant robot action is being written off, you know there's issues.

I'll reserve my judgment until I'll have seen it.

[Gands]

I'm now the Star Trek CCG first edition and Tribbles champion.

I got everyone there to sign a poster for the event, it's on my wall.

[weemadando]

Reviews of Pacific Rim are coming in and holy shit does it sound like Guillermo had straight up sprayed diarrhoea on the screen.

When even the giant robot action is being written off, you know there's issues.

I'll reserve my judgment until I'll have seen it.

I hope they're wrong but the stuff they're saying is not good at all. The dual pilot thing - there's no reason for it, no purpose on screen. It's just a thing that is there.

If anything it sounds like they had some good ideas, but they just didn't get them onto the screen.

[Veef]

The impression I got from the really weird backpedaling they were doing with the advertising is most viewers were getting confused by the tons of jargon and technobabble and weren't getting what the movie was really about.

Like they were seriously selling it all on kaiju flick nostalgia that died a long time ago.

[timmy]

I will enjoy it regardless of what critics say.

[Veef]

at least in this robot show Australia didn't get used as target practice for giant colonies

[Bakustra]

I leave you people alone for one extended holiday, and look what happens. In any case, Neil Gaiman totally is one of the most overrated nerd authors of all time. Probably in the top five if we discount the Golden Age effect and restrict ourselves to prose authors. Funnily enough, I actually am starting to sour on his works for reasons I was unable to articulate until I read Catherynne Valente's Deathless, though I won't really go into details unless people really want to hear me take many words to say that most genre fiction is shallow and hollow and this really pisses me off.

pls articulate buck

Funnily enough, I actually am starting to sour on his works for reasons I was unable to articulate until I read Catherynne Valente's Deathless, though I won't really go into details unless people really want to hear me take many words to say that most genre fiction is shallow and hollow and this really pisses me off.

that seems like a pretty blanket statement, but yeah most genre fiction is disappointingly shit (oh look how self-consciously 'weird' and 'zany' I'm being, blrghlarg, China Meiville I'm looking at you )

I do rather like Sandman, though I think that might be because it was my gateway comic into Vertigo, and from there the works of my spiritual liege Alan Moore and the religious experience that was Promethea.

but yeah +1 please articulate, I'm always looking for good stuff to read

basically, my issue with deathless, and with a lot of gaiman's output, is the sense of destiny as a force extrinsic to the characters and their motivations and desires. things happen because "the story" wills it, but the story is at once ethereal and physical enough to exist externally but never be countered. it's relying on being meta without ever actually engaging with the underlying story (this is especially frustrating because deathless does do this at points) or going the other way and letting the story speak for itself. e.g., you can retell oedipus with, say, the moirae flinging gigantic fucking rocks at him whenever he almost impedes destiny or whatever, or as a straight retelling, but wink-wink nudge-nudge and cutting out any link between oedipus' and jocasta's characters and their fates is bullshit. sandman works because enough is going on to obscure this at any given moment and sandman doesn't really rely on this for the main story, but it gets really bad in american gods and some of his short stories, and holy fuck did it make whatever happened to the caped crusader godawful. in addition, i like that tim powers' declare, a book where the soviet union is literally backed by dark powers written by a devout catholic, is still far more sympathetic towards the ussr than deathless is.

now, deathless is arguably worth reading if you get it from the library or something, but i, personally, wouldn't pay full price for it. i would definitely recommend anything powers wrote and could talk at length about his works

edit:

that seems like a pretty blanket statement, but yeah most genre fiction is disappointingly shit (oh look how self-consciously 'weird' and 'zany' I'm being, blrghlarg, China Meiville I'm looking at you )

[RogueIce]

Is that intentional?

The FRIGHT part? Because it most likely was, as it's the sort of dumb thing some papers/tabloids will do.

[weemadando]

To be fair, I'd love for China Mieville to write a "straight" story for once. Like if Kraken hadn't taken a crazy twist.

[thejester]

Isn't that basically what The City and the City is?

[Bob the Gunslinger]

Is that intentional?

The FRIGHT part? Because it most likely was, as it's the sort of dumb thing some papers/tabloids will do.

Usually they don't make r/l-swapping puns when discussing tragedies that affected a lot of Asians.

[RogueIce]

Oh. Y'know I didn't even think of that, TBH. I'd be surprised if they did as well, in all fairness.

It's still dumb to make a pun in general when you're reporting on tragedies, though.

[Flagg]

It's either intentional or the editors are drooling morons.

[Civil War Man]

My first instinct is the editors being morons. The thought process for whoever wrote the headline was probably "Fright rhymes with flight, and being in a plane crash is really scary! I'M SO CLEVER!"

[Flagg]

At least the headline wasn't "Flied Rice".

[RogueIce]

TBH it's been so long since I have heard, seen or had anyone reference that whole "Rs for Ls accent" stereotype that I didn't even think about it until it was pointed out to me. It wouldn't surprise me if they missed it either.

[Jung]

Ah, SBers...

So, I'm trying to write a story about what I actually think is a fairly interesting speculative fiction premise (humans as apparently fundamentally chemical nonmagical lifeforms in a universe where most life has magic and empirically verifiable immortal souls), and I'm touching on issues of philosophy, free will, relation of humans to the natural world, nature of good and evil, whether an objective morality makes sense etc..

And what is the present topic of conversation?

A discussion centered around a guy bitching about a scene way early on where an extinguish fire spell kills a human (cause, you know, he's just an ongoing chemical reaction that dies when it stops instead of TRUE LIFE animated by A SOUL), because some guy doesn't think that would work because PHYSICS NITPICKING.

Edit: and of course his argument includes dubious assumptions he's treating as DEAL WITH IT objective facts.

Ah, nerds, they truly have their priorities straight when it comes to fiction.

[Jung]

I'm also going to point out that I think a LET'S ANALYZE THE PHYSICS approach to that scene is kinda missing the point. It's not really about the physics, it's about the symbolism:

A magical lifeform wouldn't be bothered by that because it is true life animated by an immortal soul; it is more than its body, its body is simply a shell, a thing of no real importance, and bends to the will of the soul.

A human gets hit with it and dies because he's fundamentally nothing but a long chemical reaction that dies when it stops. Sucks to be us that way.

It isn't some "hard sci fi" scene intended to "rigorously explore" the "realistic consequences" of magic interacting with the human biology. It's supposed to illustrate the clash between two different conceptions of life. You could sub an extinguish fire spell with something else in your mind, like a "remove armor" spell that flays a human because it recognizes his flesh as dead matter instead of a living substance qualitatively different from the dead matter surrounding it. The details of the mechanism aren't the point.

[adr]

typical literacy nerd response to being PROVEN WRONG by OBJECTIVE FACTS

blame the reader

[Veef]

Reviews of Pacific Rim are coming in and holy shit does it sound like Guillermo had straight up sprayed diarrhoea on the screen.

When even the giant robot action is being written off, you know there's issues.

I'll reserve my judgment until I'll have seen it.

I hope they're wrong but the stuff they're saying is not good at all. The dual pilot thing - there's no reason for it, no purpose on screen. It's just a thing that is there.

If anything it sounds like they had some good ideas, but they just didn't get them onto the screen.

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/pacific_rim_2013/#

p-rimmy is the best movie ever

except with that one review that didn't like it

[Glass Fort MacLeod]

A discussion centered around a guy bitching about a scene way early on where an extinguish fire spell kills a human (cause, you know, he's just an ongoing chemical reaction that dies when it stops instead of TRUE LIFE animated by A SOUL), because some guy doesn't think that would work because PHYSICS NITPICKING.

Edit: and of course his argument includes dubious assumptions he's treating as DEAL WITH IT objective facts.

Ah, nerds, they truly have their priorities straight when it comes to fiction.

Link to the post? I'm not sure what would be the problem. A fire is a chemical reaction, so at the worst I imagine that you could say is that the spell is somehow designed only to work on specific chemical reactions, which means that you would only need to create a variant that would work on humans. Hardly improbable, unless this is just more of that silly 'My interpretation is the valid one and you're all WRROONNNNG' shit.

[Jung]

Link to the post? I'm not sure what would be the problem. A fire is a chemical reaction, so at the worst I imagine that you could say is that the spell is somehow designed only to work on specific chemical reactions, which means that you would only need to create a variant that would work on humans. Hardly improbable, unless this is just more of that silly 'My interpretation is the valid one and you're all WRROONNNNG' shit.

Well, what it's referring to is here:

I nodded. It shot at us with some kind of gun. Tallman had caught it with a fireball, setting that grey clothing they all wore on fire, and then Joker tried to put it out with a standard extinguish spell ... and the creature had dropped dead. We hadn't been able to resurrect it, and we'd tried quite a few different techniques.

"Tinder, the chemical reaction that produces energy for our bodies-" Tinker pointed at the prisoner with her chin "-for their bodies too, is the same as the one that happens in fire. People don't die when you hit them with an extinguish spell, but imagine a flesh automaton, one that breathes air, and then imagine what would happen if you hit it with one..."

I thought about it. Thought about a creature that had no soul, that was just a self-sustaining chemical process, powered by oxygenation reactions. Thought about it getting hit with an extinguish spell, the oxygenation reaction stopping, no soul to get in the way, no life to restart the reaction because the reaction was its life...

I nodded. "It would die. Or ... stop moving, anyway."

Nerd nitpicking starts here:

... Ya know, by the logic Extinguish Fire is going on, the only way it works is by completely annihilating all chemical energy, meaning electromagnetic force stops working, which means whatever it is pointed at spontaneously explodes into free electron plasma.

Nice job putting out the fire. You just vaporised my house.

The electromagnetic force is the fundamental force that allows chemical bonds to happen and chemical reaction to take place. It controls virtually every single interaction that you see and experience every day aside from gravity.

To just "turn off" fire you need to stop electromagnetism. By turning off electromagnetism, chemical bonds fall apart as electrons no longer attract protons anymore.

If we're going to say that Extinguish Fire is somehow hax enough to stop fire without making matter fly apart at the seams, we need to then also say it is hax enough that it only ever turns off actual fire, not the oxygenation reactions of biological processes, which magic races are clearly aware of existing.

It's kind of just a matter of common sense. The conversation between the gods that brought Extinguish Fire into existence must have at some point had the following discussion.

"Hey, ya know, there's a lot of power-poor species out there that rely very heavily on material chemistry to support most of their non-power biology. How about we not design a spell that would spontaneously kill them because they don't have sufficient power to jumpstart their material bodies like elves do?"

"Oh yeah, sure, cool, no problem. Oh by the way, nice job drop-kicking that dark god across the horizon of that black rift last millenium!"

"Thanks!"

Oh, note the bolded parts are completely asspulled assumptions.

And I'm calling that scene out on grounds of no longer making any sense.

Either it should blow apart chemical matter by turning off electromagnetism, or it is psychic hax enough that it can only ever turn off something that counts as fire, ergo an oxygenation reaction of sufficient vigor and concentration to produce a flame. Otherwise it would indiscriminately kill every power-poor species caught in its path.

Which would not be "Good" by the way.

Unless Extinguish Fire is a Neutral spell. That just opens up a whole other can of worms.

For instance, why does a Neutral spell care if it blows apart everything in front of it?

Note, bolded part is after an extensive discussion in the planning thread about how a "good = killing bad" morality makes no fucking sense in a universe where A) the natural world looks like ours B) "good" isn't an autotrophes and scavengers only club C) everything isn't running on human-supremacism (because fuck human supremacism). This guy seems to be taking a bunch of his personal preconceptions and treating them as objective facts I should be bound by, which I've noticed is something nerds seem to do a lot.

[adr]

but you can put out fires by putting water on them too

perhaps the 'extinguish fire' spell works by just getting in the way of oxygen, and the cause of death on the person is actually some kind of supernatural suffocation

this isn't even hard