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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somebody wrote:

> I can suspend disbelief easier regarding matters like presence of FTL or
> artificial gravity. But decision of manned vs unmanned is not even a high
> tech / advanced sci issue, it's about common sense. I find it very hard to
> suspend my disbelief about the brightest minds of the world making such a
> blunder and sending a survivor/big-brother crew (from the reviews, it looks
> like we have the stereotypical young, maverick, ethnically diverse and
> politically correct, emotionally pre-teen, and sequentially eliminated
> bunch) on a mission that undeniably calls for an unmanned spacecraft. And
> yes, of course there wouldn't be a story or a movie without astronauts on
> that mission, but then again, did all the other sci-fi avenues run dry that
> this movie about an implausible scenario has to be absolutely produced?
> 
> 

Was it made by Hollywood?

Nuff said ;)

-- 

Best Regards,
	Stephen

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clipka wrote:
> Stephen schrieb:
> 

>> attack craft behave as if they were aeroplanes. Accelerating forward 
>> to go faster when they are in orbit and banking when they turn.
> 
> Yeah, they obviously didn't play those "attractor" leves of "Osmos" :-)
> 

LOL

> As for banking however, there /is/ some sense to it (though probably 
> unknown to most movie makers) for manned craft: While "upward" 
> acceleration of 9g can be survived with proper equipment and training, 
> "downward" acceleration of that order of magnitude probably kills 
> instantly though brain hemorrhaging, and I could imagine that "sideways" 
> acceleration of 9g could break a pilot's neck.
> 
> (I couldn't find any definite infos on this on the 'net, but it seems 
> that for instance roller coasters in Germany may have an "upward" 
> acceleration of up to 6g, but a "sideways" acceleration of no more than 
> 2g.)
> 
> So while it is most likely true that attack craft in movies typically 
> bank because the director didn't think /at all/, non-banking (manned) 
> attack craft would only prove that the director didn't think /enough/.

Fair point.

-- 

Best Regards,
	Stephen

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somebody <x### [at] ycom> wrote:
> "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,

  Would it really be so hard to actually *cooperate* with the person you are
having a discussion with, rather than trying to constantly and meticulously
find flaws, just for the sake of argument and to try to prove other wrong?

  Imagine the following situation: One day before the final detonation
sequence is started, an electrical failure happens (something which could
be fixable by a crew of people), which makes the ship inoperable and the
computer unable to start the countdown sequence. Communication with Earth
might also get compromised.

  A crew on board could fix the problem in a few hours, and the operation
is again good to go. An unmanned ship would just continue its journey,
plummet into the Sun and fail to detonate at the critical point. There's
no way you could set up and send a repair crew in time before that happens.

> >   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.

  At least it's based on actual theoretical physics.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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