Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Bill Pragnell wrote:
> > Ok, I see what you mean. (I don't like warp drive personally, it's a retrofitted
> > contortion that, as you say, requires quite fine gravity control.
>
> Well, it's the one that actual scientists are actually talking about. :-)

Not the only one! Wormholes have been discussed in the journals for a couple of
decades now.

> Generally speaking, "hyperdrive" and "warp drive" tend to mean the same
> thing - going somewhere that the speed of light is faster. (Assuming it's
> explained at all.)

Perhaps we're thinking of a different warp drive - I think star trek's warp
drive ended up as a bubble of compressed spacetime, not a different realm...

> > whereas I've not heard of any engineering applications of the Higgs Boson yet!
> Well, it depends what you can do with it! Higgs provides inertial mass, as I
> understand it, so it's really likely the basis of any "generated" gravity.

That's what I mean - it looks hopeful, but we don't know enough to have any
specific ideas yet. :)

> > Hmm, the 'manipulation of gravity' that I was thinking about wasn't any cleverer
> > than piling big fat masses up in interesting ways - ever read any Stephen
> > Baxter?
>
> The few I've read have been awful. :-)

Ah well. I agree his Ideas take front seat to everything else, so it depends on
what you look for in SF. However, the Mammoth series is definitely worth reading
- no cosmology in those - and I quite enjoyed the imagery in Flux (even if it is
a rehash of Niven's The Smoke Ring).

> And piling up big fat masses isn't gravity manipulation to achieve FTL
> travel? :-)

Well, we could do that now!

> As an aside, I just got back from the bookstore and it seems they have no
> actual science fiction in their science fiction section. There was some
> heinlein and asimov and other dead authors, a whole shelf of star wars and
> star trek, another shelf of manga, and everything else was vampires and
> dragons.  Oh, except for the John Ringo type stories. (Many of which I'm not
> even sure why they're listed under Science Fiction, except the author also
> writes some science fiction.)  WTF guys? Haven't you written any actual
> science fiction in ten years? Is America so hopelessly stupid and luddite
> that nobody reads something with actual science in it?

A shame. I was looking at the SF section in a bookshop over here recently, and
it's pretty decent at the mo. There's the regular slew of dead/getting on
classics (asimov, clarke, niven etc), a couple of shelves each of star wars,
star trek, doctor who and whatnot. But I'd say at least 20-30 shelves of proper
recent (last 30 years) SF. Much of it is british authors though, we don't get so
many of the recent US stuff unless it's popular. I had a really hard time
finding Vernor Vinge over here, for example. Buying online's the best bet - but
then browsing is impossible.

(I read A Fire Upon the Deep for the first time last year - probably the best SF
I'd read for a long time!)

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Warp schrieb:

>   Wait a moment. You base your opinion about movies solely on whether they
> meet the *expectations* you had about the movies before seeing them (rather
> than judging them in their own right, without any prejudices)?

No; if I did that, I wouldn't have enjoyed "Contact".

If you interpret that into my posting, you haven't read it carefully 
enough, or with a bias.


>   I'm sorry to say this, but that sounds just crazy.

Why? If I feel like watching a Sci-Fi action movie, and the thing I pay 
money for turns out to be some splatterpunk or whatever - which I 
wouldn't normally like anyway, and which I absolutely positively /not/ 
feel like right now - then what's crazy about me considering the movie bad?

My judgement of a movie is simple: If I enjoyed it, then I consider it 
good - if I didn't, then I consider it bad. Obviously, expectation /is/ 
a factor affecting whether I like it or not.

I don't give a damn about excellent vs. not-so-good acting so long as 
the movie manages to keep me focused on the story it tells; nor do I 
give a damn about excellent vs. not-so-good plot as long as the movie 
manages to keep me focused on the acting. And the expectations I have 
when entering the theater affect how good a movie can accomplish this. 
If I came particularly for the special effects, I really don't give a 
damn about anything else as long as the special effects are good and 
plenty and the other stuff is good enough to not distract me for longer 
than a few moments.

Anyone claiming to judge movies otherwise, and considering my way to 
judge movies superficial, I'd consider them dishonest, puffed-up 
intellectual farts.

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clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
> Anyone claiming to judge movies otherwise, and considering my way to
> judge movies superficial, I'd consider them dishonest, puffed-up
> intellectual farts.

Oi! :)

I try to have no expectations of a movie that I don't know anything (or much)
about; I often enjoy such movies more than any other precisely for that reason.
In such cases, I'll try to classify it by genre only afterwards.

For your second point, naturally you're entitled to enjoy any movie any way you
see fit :)

In many cases, however, I can see what's coming from the publicity. Where
overly-hyped cinema is concerned, I am rarely wrong about what is coming. I knew
exactly what I was getting with, say, Transformers (and was not disappointed!).
I knew exactly what was coming with, say, Ghost Rider (and was accordingly
disappointed).

We don't all watch movies in the same way. If we did, there would be no
controversy over what constitutes a 'good' movie or a 'bad' movie.

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Bill Pragnell schrieb:

> I try to have no expectations of a movie that I don't know anything (or much)
> about; I often enjoy such movies more than any other precisely for that reason.
> In such cases, I'll try to classify it by genre only afterwards.

Trying to avoid having expectations is a much different thing than 
claiming to succeed in that attempt, or claiming to judge a movie 
unbiased by one's expectations (let alone insisting that you /must/ 
abide by these standards to judge a movie). /Those/ are the people I'd 
consider dishonest, puffed-up intellectual farts.

As I said: A good movie is one I enjoy - be it entertaining, touching, 
thrilling, relaxing, inspiring, or whatever - and a bad movie is one I 
don't enjoy (which obviously depends on the mood I'm in); everything 
else is a lie.

It's fair to reason why I /do/ enjoy some movie, or whether I /might/ 
enjoy some other movie I haven't seen yet - but there's no reason 
whatsoever why I /should/ enjoy some movie I don't (or vice versa).

Good acting, good plot, good cut... those are all just expectations 
individual people have. Exalting these expectations above others - like 
good special effects, a good laugh, or even good match of a certain 
genre stereotype - is hypocrisy.

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clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
> Trying to avoid having expectations is a much different thing than
> claiming to succeed in that attempt,

I do claim to succeed, not all of the time, but frequently.

> or claiming to judge a movie
> unbiased by one's expectations

Of course, I can make no such claim! :)

> (let alone insisting that you /must/
> abide by these standards to judge a movie). /Those/ are the people I'd
> consider dishonest, puffed-up intellectual farts.

Well, fair enough.

> As I said: A good movie is one I enjoy - be it entertaining, touching,
> thrilling, relaxing, inspiring, or whatever - and a bad movie is one I
> don't enjoy (which obviously depends on the mood I'm in); everything
> else is a lie.

I can recognise a movie as well-made in most ways, yet still not enjoy it as
much as a movie that I recognise as derivative, shallow and poorly executed.
This is something most reviewers fail to do, and in doing so give me no helpful
guidance on what to see or avoid. Of course, I don't *expect* anyone to agree
with me on what is well or poorly executed, or indeed enjoyable. :)

> It's fair to reason why I /do/ enjoy some movie, or whether I /might/
> enjoy some other movie I haven't seen yet - but there's no reason
> whatsoever why I /should/ enjoy some movie I don't (or vice versa).

Of course. I'm actually mostly in agreement with you on this, but I do
understand Warp's position.

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"Warp" <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote in message
news:4adc205c@news.povray.org...
> somebody <x### [at] ycom> wrote:

> > And *if* the second unmanned ship failed, *then* they'd send a manned
rescue
> > and repair mission, which would make for a more beliavable premise.

>   You don't "rescue and repair" a ship which eg. plummets into the Sun
> without exploding because something critical failed a bit before.

Huh? Is the payload supposed to be *manually* detonated "inside" the sun?
It's then sillier than I thought. If you drop a bomb into the sun and if it
doesn't detonate, I'm sorry, but there's *absolutely* nothing on board
astronauts can do except turn into plasma long before they notice the
malfunction, much less diagnose or fix it. What you are suggesting is like
strapping a technician to an atom bomb before dropping it off the plane, for
him to fix it in case something goes wrong on the way down.

>   I honestly think you are now really stretching to try to find something
> to complain (about a movie you haven't even seen). I'm failing to see your
> ultimate motive. Is it to disagree just for the sake of disagreeing? What
> is your ultimate goal?

The whole premise struck me as supremely farfetched, that's all.

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On 10/19/09 01:16, clipka wrote:
> Another movie set in the future and happening to feature Will Smith, "I
> am Legend", definitely falls into the same category as "Event Horizon".
> A pseudo-science-backed classic vampire movie - WTF?!

	I didn't see I Am Legend, but I've seen both of the "originals". They 
were OK, actually.

-- 
Did you know the word gullible isn't in the dictionary?

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On 10/19/09 02:01, clipka wrote:
> Given that you think it worth mentioning, I reckon it /is/ a movie about
> zombies, backed with a pseudo-scientific background story explaining
> that this type of zombies happens to be people infected by rabies on crack.
>
> Just like "I am Legend", I guess.
>
> I actually detest such movies. If I'd want a zombie movie, I'd watch a
> /real/ zombie movie.

	I really don't get why. You don't like it just because they're not dead.

-- 
Did you know the word gullible isn't in the dictionary?

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Bill Pragnell wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> Bill Pragnell wrote:
>>> Ok, I see what you mean. (I don't like warp drive personally, it's a retrofitted
>>> contortion that, as you say, requires quite fine gravity control.
>> Well, it's the one that actual scientists are actually talking about. :-)
> 
> Not the only one! Wormholes have been discussed in the journals for a couple of
> decades now.

I meant in terms of "warp drive", the one scientists are talking about is 
making a bubble of space and moving that using gravity techniques.

I wasn't speaking of Wormholes is "warp drive" but another kind of FTL. 
Wormholes are also gravity phenonomena.

> Perhaps we're thinking of a different warp drive - I think star trek's warp
> drive ended up as a bubble of compressed spacetime, not a different realm...

OK. Sometimes it's a different realm, sometimes (more realistically) it's a 
"bubble of compressed spacetime."  I'll grant you "hyperspace" to mean the 
former. :-)   I haven't heard of any serious scientific progress in 
hyperspace travel.

> That's what I mean - it looks hopeful, but we don't know enough to have any
> specific ideas yet. :)

I'm not into it enough to know that.

> a rehash of Niven's The Smoke Ring).

There was one I read, I don't remember what it was called, something with 
giant cat aliens in it.... Anyway, they could go FTL, and coming out, they 
had to use the FTL engines to slow down, as they came out close to 
lightspeed. What impressed me about one small part of the story was they 
were going to sneak-attack this space station, and there were all kinds of 
speed-of-light calculations they were doing. As in, "We come out 70 light 
minutes from the space station, with the first of three slow-downs 65 light 
minutes out, and the second 55 light minutes out, but we won't do the second 
one, so after 55 minutes they'll see we haven't slowed, tell the guardian 
warship that's 12 light minutes on the other side about it, and by the time 
we see the guardian ship react, we'll be 32 light-minutes out, etc etc.

>> And piling up big fat masses isn't gravity manipulation to achieve FTL
>> travel? :-)
> 
> Well, we could do that now!

With enough work, yes. :-)

I'll grant you that wormholes look more feasible than warp drive, which in 
turn looks more feasible than hyperspace.

> Buying online's the best bet - but then browsing is impossible.

Yeah. I have a hard time finding new authors on Amazon. Especially someone 
(like Jim Butcher) doing stuff that's good but that I wouldn't normally 
expect to be good.

> (I read A Fire Upon the Deep for the first time last year - probably the best SF
> I'd read for a long time!)

It was way funny back when it was written, given that all the aliens 
complaining about slow netnews bandwidth was right on the money.

Everything Vinge does is great, yes. Wonderful ideas.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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Neeum Zawan wrote:
>     Well, perhaps you're right. It's been a while. I suppose Mars 
> doesn't have a significant enough atmosphere to worry about burning up 
> the way they entered?

I don't know. Some of them did indeed burn up, IIRC.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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