Hacker Cinema
Battlestar Galactica
2004 · TV series · 44 min episodes · 4 seasons
Created by Glen A. Larson, Ronald D. Moore
Science FictionFantasyActionAdventureDrama
When an old enemy, the Cylons, resurface and obliterate the 12 colonies, the crew of the aged Galactica protect a small civilian fleet - the last of humanity - as they journey toward the fabled 13th colony, Earth.
54 positive16 negative10 mixed57 neutralfrom 137 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
150 comments on Hacker News
> It is fascinating that there are so many movies revolving around the US president, as if he has some ability that no one has and you can’t simply elect a new one if the enemy gets him.
One of the few exceptions was the Battlestar Galactica reboot, in which the entire chain of command was killed and the Agriculture Secretary ends up as the leader of the refugee humans.
Also Battlestar Galactica -multiple shots of homes in Vancouver- I remember watching the series and wondering what city was being used for Baltar's house and surroundings because it was so beautiful, futuristic and clean..then I went vistied Vancouver.. its truly a gorgeous city and area
http://www.battlestarlocations.com/locations-guide/the-miniseries-baltars-house
> When I saw the series adaptation of The Expanse, it was really obvious they played a lot of artistic license to make it exciting. A real space battle would be dots firing invisible dots at each other. "Close quarter battle" would be within something like 2000 kilometers, maybe more. That is close.
This is noteworthy because The Expanse tried to get this better than other scifi, say Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, or Star Wars (ok, space opera), where engagements take place at absurdly short ranges. In The Expanse you see the spaceships are really far apart, mostly dots to each other, and the engagements are (mostly) at really long torpedo ranges, with the exception of those cool scenes using PDCs. You get all those awesome shots where one spaceship sees the other as a tiny dot, then the camera zooms in dramatically to the other point of view. Cool!
And still, engagements are far too close range. But they "feel" long range in The Expanse, I think they got that visually right. I cannot blame them because I haven't seen anything any space combat in shows or movies that is even half as exciting and well done.
Amazing series, which somehow survived a forced change of lead actor, and got even better. The story was only marred by rushed ending to the story arc for Season 4, and then a nothingburger of a Season 5. Still, up there with BattleStar Galactica and The Expanse as the greatest TV sci-fi series of all time.
There's a complete discussion of the evolution of ideas and the fact that the distinction between "androids" or "synthetic life" versus "robots" or "humanoids machines" arose after R.U.R.
But what makes us think R.U.R. is still about robots is that the play is explicit that the robots are assembled, not grown:
> His robots resemble more modern conceptions of man-made life forms, such as the Replicants in Blade Runner, the "hosts" in the Westworld TV series and the humanoid Cylons in the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, but in Čapek's time there was no conception of modern genetic engineering (DNA's role in heredity was not confirmed until 1952). There are descriptions of kneading-troughs for robot skin, great vats for liver and brains, and a factory for producing bones. Nerve fibers, arteries, and intestines are spun on factory bobbins, while the robots themselves are assembled like automobiles. Čapek's robots are living biological beings, but they are still assembled, as opposed to grown or born.
Battlestar Galactica (2004) has an aesthetic like that. While they do use mainframe computers, they avoid all networking due to the risk of being hacked. Galactica is the only Battlestar to survive the first episode specifically because it’s the only one that still uses this outdated technology.
Plus, it’s just one of the best TV shows ever made in any genre.
Competitive markets provide natural death of weak content, without premature euthanasia of strong content. With on-demand streaming, viewers can stop watching if/when a show deteriorates in quality. Some shows have maintained relatively high quality over multiple seasons.
The Americans (6 seasons, 75 episodes) Battlestar Galactica (4 seasons, 88 episodes) Borgen (3 seasons, 30 episodes) Burn Notice (7 seasons, 111 episodes) The Shield (7 seasons, 88 episodes) Slow Horses (5 seasons, 30 episodes) WestWorld (4 seasons, 36 episodes) The Wire (5 seasons, 60 episodes)
"Biocomputing could help address the skyrocketing energy demands of AI, which threatens climate emissions targets and led some tech giants to resort to nuclear power"
I'm reminded of the Battlestar Galactica episode "You Can't Go Home Again" where Starbuck repairs a crashed Cylon ship to get home. The main element she had to figure out is how the biological brain of the Cylon controlled the hardware.
Thanks: that's interesting to know.
However, I don't know that it erodes the value of the quote which, taken in isolation, rings true. Even, of all things, a Batman movie[0], and Battlestar Galactica[1] (!) have managed to drop some remarkably profound truths on occasion which has made me relatively unfussy about where one can find truth.
At the same time I do like to give due credit so I'll be sure to reference the correct source in future. Thank you, once again.
[0] "You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain." - seen this one play out first hand multiple times in corporate life, specifically in leadership.
[1] "You cannot play God then wash your hands of the things that you've created. Sooner or later, the day comes when you can't hide from the things that you've done anymore." - take heed, Mark Zuckerberg.
I have a theory that it is a lack of artifacts/detail. Take most living or working environments from the present or past, and you'll see a lot of "things" adorning walls or placed on furniture, some accumulated over years of occupation and use. Sets of non-sci-fi shows or movies can use the real world as a reference and replicate these environments. When you do it for sci-fi shows, set designers probably stop when it starts looking "good enough", or they overdo it with details such as flashing lights or textures. I recall the Battlestar Galactica CIC being an exception.
https://www.realtimerendering.com/blog/thought-for-the-day/
It's crazy that post is 15 years old. Like the OP and this post get at, HDR isn't really a good description of what's happening. HDR often means one or more of at least 3 different things (capture, storage, and presentation). It's just the sticker slapped on advertising.
Things like lens flares, motion blur, film grain, and shallow depth of field are mimicking cameras and not what being there is like--but from a narrative perspective we experience a lot of these things through tv and film. Its visual shorthand. Like Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica copying WWII dogfight footage even though it's less like what it would be like if you were there. High FPS television can feel cheap while 24fps can feel premium and "filmic."
Often those limitations are in place so the experience is consistent for everyone. Games will have you set brightness and contrast--I had friends that would crank everything up to avoid jump scares and to clearly see objects intended to be hidden in shadows. Another reason for consistent presentation is for unfair advantages in multiplayer.
While the transformer movie might be a little bit Hollywood, Steve Jablonski did a great job - especially Arrival to earth.
Also, not a movie but a TV series, Battlestar Galactica (the new one). Bear McCreary created a space opera (the shape of things to come, Prelude to war…)
One thing i find interesting is how rarely labour struggles are depicted in mainstream tv/movies.
We have every type of revolutionary tv shows, including some fairly rediculous ones (e.g. divergent) but almost never strikes. The only exception i can really think of is that one episode of battlestar galactica (maybe give star trek ds9 half a point because they treated it in such a silly fashion).
Ron D Moore also worked on the remake of Battlestar Galactica. I think one of the first real binge-watched shows that I can think of. He was the guy who pushed for story arcs in DS9, while they were trying so hard to keep the show episodic. Those story arcs were some of the best Trek ever, and I think the success of that, and with the follow up success of BSG really changed TV a lot.
Oh, so that's where this came from.
From your link:
> In the reimagined Battlestar Galactica television series, the Cylon Hybrids often use this phrase when reciting system information about the Base-Ships.
I learned it as a specific phrase from that show, and its use there is chills-inducing too.
Not a movie, but Battlestar Galactica was a great remake.
Reuse of starship models certainly happened in SF shows and movies. There’s a big fleet battle in Serenity with IIRC some Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek models in the background, and I think the Serenity and one or two Star Trek ships found their way into fleet shots in Battlestar Galactica.
I remember being 'mocked' (ok not really) by friends for NOT having watched ANY of the Battlestar Galactica. So in one summer I binged the whole thing (I found the correct watch-order online, collected everything, and started watching maniacally).
It was definitely worth watching, I was pleasantly surprised about the cast - so many faces I've seen before. Good sci-fi stuff!
For reference, I'm a Trekkie, and I've watched the 'whole' things (all movies, all series - even the boring ones such as "Enterprise") x5 in my life (in the correct order ofc). Last time it was in 2016, so it's been a while and now there are even more to watch.
And they're going from binge-watching ad-free episode of an entire series, to releasing one episode a week... with adverts.
Yeah, no thanks. I'll just VPN+torrent the ad-free version and watch that, thanks. On any device of my choosing as well.
And why should I pay £8.99 or whatever to one streaming service, for one programme, that was previously "free to air" for the other series? Paramount taking back Star Trek from Netflix for example.
I'm not sure how many multi-million dollar, unseen cancelled-after-one-season dramas with 50,000 viewers these studios need to create before they realise 'we need viewers to 'build a franchise' and make a profit'.
Just imagine if these series or dramas were only seen by a few thousand people at most: Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Band of Brothers, Shogun, Dallas, Cheers and so on. Even How I Met Your Mother and Big Bang Theory were pretty much pre-streaming when they started, but syndicated to world-wide terrestrial channels.
I see we’re kindred spirits. Everyone talks about Vince Gilligan or David Simon. But no hats raised for Graham Yost.
As far as LOST goes, I enjoyed the ride up until that very last episode, much like Battlestar Galactica. It’s a pity but I bet I could watch it all again and just skip the last ep and fill it with my head canon.
I like the feature, too. I remember watching the Battlestar Galactica remake with the interpolation setting active and getting an even deeper sense of realism out of the scenes. They were already aiming for a documentary style with the camera work and special effects, so the higher prosumer framerate fit with the style very well. On other films and TV shows I like the interpolation for panning shots which jidder a lot on the standard framerate.
Any advice on how to appreciate the Expanse tv show?
I love backstory and worldbuilding sci-fi the Foundation Trilogy, The Man in the High Castle, For All Mankind, The Silo, The Tick, and Battlestar Galactica, but I can't seem to get immersed with The Expanse despite how much I try.
Is it a work that is better appreciated in the literary form instead of on television? Or did Syfy just jumble the first season?
Edit: Movies, unsorted, from the top of my mind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_of_Control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_East_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter%27s_Bone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contagion_(2011_film) , seen before Covid, deemed to be realistic, and therefore better than stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Andromeda_Strain with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warning_Sign_(film) somewhere in between. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_IV_(1974_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizards_(film) The remakes of the Planet of the Apes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Days_Later , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Weeks_Later a little less so, though it had some great scenes of flying into London City Airport and the modern parts around that. Bladerunner in the original versions, the remake not so much. 2001: A Space Odyssey, the intro and first parts, spaceflight to the moon and such, the rest not. Too boring. I liked the sequel 2010: Odyssey Two better, actually. Avatar. Part one only. All of this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(franchise) with the exception of the crossover stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film) for the almost cyberpunkish fuckedupness of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula_Untold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beach_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_(2005_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THX_1138 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropia_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollerball_(1975_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Dealer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southland_Tales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Live https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendence_(2014_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_for_Vendetta_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puppet_Masters_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Survivalist_(2015_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova_(2000_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_(2007_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_(1987_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Zero_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capricorn_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangar_18_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_(2001_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timecop Ron Silverman Badass! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_(2014_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Blonde https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_the_Night_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(1997_American_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowing_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Zone_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_(1998_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adjustment_Bureau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrival_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeforce_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_Protocol_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_(2009_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Countdown_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paycheck_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypher_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigger_Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echelon_Conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anderson_Tapes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Parallax_View https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Seduction
TV-Series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivors_(1975_TV_series) and the remake linked from there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Train_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho_(2006_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Strain_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayward_Pines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silo_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_All_Mankind_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_(American_TV_series) and its prequel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1883_(TV_series)
WESTWORLD!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_100_(TV_series) Praimfaya! Yeehaa! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpart_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon_(TV_series) All of Black Mirror! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Experiments_Lain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelers_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_Skies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devs_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peripheral_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helix_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporated_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raised_by_Wolves_(American_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_from_the_Loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschland_83 and sequels. ÄXZÄLLÄNNT! JAWOLLJA! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humans_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Night_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Worlds_(2019_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Nova_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Gods_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_High_Castle_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_(miniseries) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection_(American_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvation_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Dome_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_(2009_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caprica
This all began about 2006 with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica_(2004_TV_series) after having abstained from possessing a TV, or watching that by other means (with some exceptions for news and documentaries) since 1996, and mostly no cinema either.
That stuff rehooked me in a binge-watching session. Shit happens :-)
Do yoo vanna häff fries wiff thät?
/nerdsnipe off
It's a reasonable divide.
I'm wrapping up the Expanse series and I would consider it soft science fiction, veering into sci-fi.
(mild spoiler? Maybe?)
On one hand, they have "epstein" drives which aren't FTL but constantly accelerate. Caring about gravity and physics is huge in the books, as are components of biology.
On the other hand, the protomolecule and its associated story elements are all completely made up. There is no plausible explanation for its existence in our universe.
The series is very much about humanity, the characters, and how the characters have developed in the incredible lifetime that occurs through the series. In that way, it is very much "Space Opera" and not sci-fi.
But when I'm telling my friends what I'm reading, I don't want to explain "space opera" so I just say sci-fi. I guess I'm not helping.
Likewise, Battlestar Galactica is definitely space fantasy (thanks season 4).
Yes. I think TNG is overall a better, comfortable show, but DS9 is more of a "space-opera" (akin to Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica), with a few one-offs episodes. Ronald Moore wrote both BS:G and DS9, so you see very similar styles between the two.
Perhaps a quick dictionary lookup might help you?
Ignoring the religious definition, here's how it is typically interpreted:
"one who practices or preaches a more rigorous or professedly purer moral code than that which prevails"
My comment isn't at all about a purer moral code. It's about Hollywood's obsession with pushing more and more explicit sexual content on everyone and the objectification of women.
If you think speaking-up against objectifying women is against our prevailing moral code, well, not sure what society you have around you.
How about that scene in on of the Transformer's movies where they follow the actress (who used to be a Victoria's Secret model) up the stairs while wearing underwear with the camera firmly planted on her ass? Seriously? Why was that necessary?
It isn't about some pure moral code. It's about using women and pushing shit on people just to do it. Like I said in my comment, if the movie is about sexual matters, absolutely no problem. A blow-job scene in Battlestar Galactica? Really?
While I agree with Spielberg's realization that modifying his prior work was a mistake, there's something I would like to be able to do with movies as a consumer that I wish streaming services offered.
Hollywood seems obsessed with three things: Guns, sex and objectifying women.
While not every movie has guns, the sex and objectification is pretty much everywhere. Perfectly good movies have utterly unnecessary sex scenes that make them impossible to watch with kids. In some cases this is also uncomfortable in family gathering settings.
Two examples that come to mind (there are thousands):
Die Hard. He opens an office door, only to expose a couple having sex. Of course, the woman is fully exposed, while the guy is not.
Lucky Number Slevin. The main character walks into his apartment only to find his girlfriends on all fours on the bed having sex with a guy. Again, full sexual exploitation of the woman, of course.
The Last Kingdom (series): Once again, sex everywhere. No value whatsoever to the story. It's a great series. Unwatchable with kids and in other settings.
Battlestar Galactica (the one with James Olmos): Excellent series. Sex everywhere. No nudity that I can remember, yet scenes of oral sex and other forms of sex without showing full body nudes. Fucking unbelievably unnecessary.
Outlander (series): Might as well be labelled porn. It's a sex-fest. Humping in any way possible at any possible time and even male-to-male rape. Nothing whatsoever to add to the story, which would have been amazing without all that shit in there.
The Queens Gambit (series). Fantastic series about chess. My kids are really into chess. Fuck if we are going to watch it with them. No nudity, yet drugs and sex are featured. The character is fictitious, which means there was no need for any of it. The producers just wanted to include sex and drugs. This one can't be fixed. I am not going to watch a show with my kids that implies taking drugs can make you smarter in any way.
There are tons of movies and shows with similar problems. Movies that are excellent and yet the producers feel it is necessary to insert a stupid sex scene that adds absolutely nothing to the story and is of no value whatsoever other than to show boobs bouncing and feature women as sexual objects.
Notice I did not say anything about movies like Fifty Shades or Gray, Wall Street or Eyes Wide Shut. Those are movies where the story justifies some of what they feature. There could be an argument related to female objectification, that's about it.
I am not a puritan, by any means. I just think this is stupid, wrong, unnecessary, detrimental and destructive to women. Having a daughter changes your perspective on what's out there in popular culture. Great movies and series are being ruined all the time by inserting sex where it is unnecessary, and it is usually at the expense of women.
Getting back to the first paragraph. I wish there was a setting on streaming services to be able to watch these movies with those scenes cut out or replaced by alternative scenes shot and chosen by the creators.
In the case of Die Hard, the couple could be kissing, taking a nap, playing chess...anything. The point is they were distracted and did not react to the emergency. In the case of Slevin, the sex scene could either be completely cut out or replaced with something different.
That, to me, would be a feature very much worth having. Hollywood's obsession with sex and the objectification of women is a problem that does not seem to receive the attention it should.
The engineers learned from Scotty. There was a great scene in TNG where Scotty reveals to Geordi the estimates were rigged all along.
But then again, it’s a TV show designed to produce tension. Star Trek: Drydock wouldn’t be as exciting. But anyone who’s ever worked with ship’s equipment knows, it’s a lot of fun to test missile launches. Cleaning those tubes, however, not so much.
A few shows have spoken to the likely realities of maintenance. The Expanse and Battlestar Galactica didn’t hand wave the logistics and maintenance such vessels would certainly require.
A few things clicked for me here:
The algorithms that show me “things to watch” are so utterly useless (and yes I’ve thumbs downed a whole lot of things but it keeps showing me crap). Especially bad is Netflix, I think once Stranger Things is done with the final season (5) I’m out. Which leads to:
It’s f’ing impossible to find things (especially on Netflix). The whole UI of a wall of rectangular cover art with a show name below with no additional information until you click it is seriously the worst UI ever designed, it didn’t work well for music and it definitely doesn’t work for video ESPECIALLY on the limited and slow interactions of a TV remote.
These points above partly explain low viewing figures for new shows: they are so utterly hidden from view, the first season barely has a chance to get started before it’s pulled because cost/viewer ratio is too low.
Moving on from that - I’ve stopped watching anything that’s not a wrapped up series or a limited series (Maniac or New Cherry Coke Flavor on Netflix come to mind).
Often before I even start watching something I’ll quickly Google for “<show name> cancelled” before I waste time watching it.
I completely agree with other commenters here about companies committing to a guaranteed number of seasons / episodes which wrap up the story neatly…
If you look at a great example: BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (reboot) - the writers knew exactly how long it would last, everyone committed to it and the story was told and it got critical acclaim. Once it showed its worth there was still room for “sequels”. “The plan” was a great example of how the exact same story could be told from another point of view.
Another thing that comes to mind is “the matrix” which as a trilogy came to a satisfying conclusion. The amount of money spent on Matrix 4 verses how utterly terrible it was (does anyone even talk about it any more?) show a good reason why things need a definite end.
That being said I’d probably watch a tv series that showed the matrix world from the machine world…
Day the Earth Stood Still and Forbidden Planet are ‘required’. Haha. Robinson Crusoe on Mars is great.
The Black Hole is a Disney movie.
How about some TV?
Classic: Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, need I mention, Star Trek?
Current: Lost in Space, …
(Yikes. If 2001 is slow and boring, Solaris (1972) is watching paint dry. Sheesh)
… age appropriate is difficult, ahaha. You could also try your local library, the might have DVDs of TV shows and staff usually have kids section, and classics separate.
> Also lots of sci-fi movies underestimate how much will not change
My favorite detail of the Battlestar Galactica reboot was how normal it all felt. For the most part your only clue that it’s The Future was that every rectangle had chopped off corners to become an octagon.
They even found a clever plot-driven reason for why that’s the case. Loved it.
This jives with my theory of what makes bad TV: bad writing. It's exactly why I've never revisited Lost, even though I loved the first few seasons. The suspense and mystery never paid off, and it was too important a piece of the entire show to bother trying again.
Oddly, Battlestar Galactica has provided a pleasant rewatch every year or two for me for the past decade. It has good writing within each episode, and even though it doesn't hold up in the final season, the writing is overall satisfying enough that I don't avoid it entirely.
I could probably write something really mean about Westworld here but I'll just instead say that it's really, really, really sad that they canceled it after season 1. I'm sure the writers would have built satisfyingly on the world established in season 1 instead of jumping off the rails and expanding into unnecessary niches of convoluted storytelling.
Most searched for answer:
>The Battlestar is a fictional starship featured in the reimagined science fiction television series Battlestar Galactica. The starship was designed by Richard Hatch and the producers of the series. It was first shown in the pilot episode, "33", and has since appeared in all of the subsequent episodes of the series.
I saw that episode of Battlestar Galactica. It was generally unpopular with the people.
Fans who care aren't surprised.
I must have watched Season 1 3 or 4 times. Really incredible.
Second season started out interesting and then became just branding by the end.
It's pretty clear seasons 3 and 4 are influenced by real-world events around devleoping AI tech but it didn't lend anything to the story.
I think Aaron Paul is great but he just didn't fit in season 3. His character is more believable in season 4.
Still season 4 just sucked.
Aaron Paul ending up as a host was a predictable Starbuck moment. Westworld went sideways the same way Ron Moore's Battlestar Galactica did - the creators got high on their own supply while the stories stagnated.
>“series bible” for battlestar galactica
You mean the Book of Mormon?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolob#Kolob_as_the_inspiration_for_Kobol_in_Battlestar_Galactica
https://www.beliefnet.com/entertainment/movies/2005/05/born-again-battlestar.aspx
https://www.deseret.com/2014/11/22/20553208/mormon-creator-of-battlestar-galactica-dared-to-produce-something-profound
https://www.millennialstar.org/battlestar-galactica-and-mormonism/
http://www.mormonthink.com/glossary/battlestargalactica.htm
https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-Mormon-themes-in-Battlestar-Galactica
Looks like you can stream the whole series on Peacock.
Warning! Peacock bizarrely separates the 3 hour long pilot episode (referred to as a 'mini series') from the rest of the series.
Start here: https://www.peacocktv.com/watch-online/tv/battlestar-galactica-the-mini-series/8598767729774797112
Then go here: https://www.peacocktv.com/watch-online/tv/battlestar-galactica/8522076936060621112
If you like anything in the spacefaring sci-fi genre and haven't yet watched the 2000's iteration of Battlestar Galactica, you're in for one hell of a treat.
Be forewarned. It is very difficult to avoid binge-watching the show.
Season 5 might have sucked watching one episode a week but as a binge watcher, I thought it worked out pretty well.
The whole series ended up with a narrative arc like a novel. First season was setup. Things started to pick up in season 2, then 3 and 4 built to a huge peak, and season 5 wound it down, like Lord of the Rings after the ring is destroyed.
I can't think of any other show that has a single narrative arc like this across the whole series. At most you get an arc per season. Often not even that; e.g. the new Battlestar Galactica was a continuing story but the narrative tension was pretty even throughout, with a series of small arcs, each just a few episodes long.
One of the things that has been bothering me for a while is Hollywood’s obsession with throwing sex scenes into every movie. It bothers me because this makes them unwatchable with my children.
Two examples: Queen’s Gambit an Battlestar Galactica (the one with James Olmos). Both wonderful stories. The sex scenes are utterly unnecessary. There’s even an oral sex scene in one of Galactica’s episodes.
What the fuck is wrong with these people?
Also, for all their purported values they sure have no problem at all exploiting women in such ways.
This isn’t about being a prude at all. I am not. The sex and objectification of women in movies adds nothing valuable to the story and is a net negative for society. If you don’t agree, just wait until you have a daughter to view the world they are exposed to with a different perspective.
What a surprise: TV shows are made to reflect the current public perception of the world so they appeal more watchers. News at 11.
Star Trek isn't alone in this shift. Budget and special effects aside, could anyone imagine the remake of Battlestar Galactica (a show I didn't like at all, btw), Breaking Bad, Lost etc. in the 80s along the cheesy shows of that time? Of course not as they could only be conceived after a certain set of events, which very likely are 9/11 and the following absurd Iraq invasion; those events changed everything in what we think of the world and the people around us, including our own governments. Actually, TV shows were already transitioning to a less optimistic view of our society, which, speaking of SciFi, is clearly noticeable in B5 and DS9, but I think those events marked a milestone.
Also, from the 80s to the early 2000s, the biggest change affecting our society has been the ability to be online and engage in public discussion with others, which brought even more stimuli and opportunities -whether for the good or bad it's completely subjective- further accelerating our normal social evolution; the world has changed virtually centuries in 20 years. I couldn't imagine anyone seriously thinking of shooting today a remake of The A-Team series in which they maintain its original thousands bullets shot every episode but nobody dies format.
One thing I really want to see in my lifetime is an "AI" I can feed episodes of a TV show and have it generate more episodes. Like a second season of Firefly or Gravity. Or re-create the finale of Battlestar Galactica and give that show the ending it deserved.
I'm a fan of shows or movies being as long as they need to be. To Old To Die Young is a great example of a show that is bold and does this. Episodes range anywhere from 30 to 90+ minutes.
That said, for shows that have a continuous, overreaching storyline I'm highly suspect of the writers having no idea how the thing is gonna end. Sure, in some lucky cases it works out super well, but in other cases it gets us unsatisfying stuff that undermines the show like with Lost or Battlestar Galactica. Come up with the story arch and tell the story. Please don't keep stretching the thing out endlessly and end it when it's bad or the crew wants to move on. That's fine with shows that have disconnected episodes, but for modern shows or can ruin the whole thing and leaves me feel like I wasted a ton of time.
I have certainly pirated things, but I never made a real habit or practice of it. Mostly it was because I found there was no way to get what I wanted legally or conveniently, usually because of bullshit "windowing" practices.
As an example: at my house, my wife and I mostly only watch things together. We don't spend a lot of time in front of the TV, and so the time we DO spend that way is intentional, and pulls from a list of stuff we BOTH like.
Our tastes are not in perfect accord, though, so there are a few things she watches when I'm working late, and there are some movies I save for when she's out of town or otherwise occupied. One of those was the critically acclaimed Sicario.
Well, when I sat down to watch it when she was camping with a pal, I discovered that it was no longer available to rent online. Or buy. It had been "windowed" out for some reason.
Fuck. That.
20 minutes later, I had it. I wanted to pay for it, but there was no option to do so.
Come to think of it, the same thing happened 20 years ago or so with Battlestar Galactica. For some reason, the rightsholder wasn't releasing the prior season on DVD or digitally until substantially AFTER the new season started airing. This meant that for latecomers like us, it was more or less impossible to "catch up" before the last season started, which is crazy. Again, we WOULD have paid, but they weren't taking money, so we got the content anyway so we could watch the current season in sync with everyone else.
I do wish we still had the "long tail" that Netflix initially offered, but digital delivery leaves rightsholders with, well, too many rights. Right of first sale meant Netflix could rent a given DVD or BluRay in perpetuity, and the copyright owner couldn't do anything about it. With digital delivery, that's no longer true, and it creates crazy situations like the above.
I'm the opposite of you. From age 20 to about age 45, I did not watch TV at all. Part of that was because I grew up in the UK, and the experience I had with the BBC (and a bit of Channel 4 and very occasionally ITV) made US TV just look stupid to me. Endless stupid ads, laugh tracks, completely unrealistic characters, dumb plots, and more endless stupid ads.
Then ... Netflix arrived. I started watching a few of the shows that people raved about from their days on network TV, and I realized that the biggest problem was ... endless stupid ads. Which Netflix did not have. I became willing to try out HBO from time to time, got in Battlestar Galactica, and of course in 2014, True Detective showed up on HBO. In 2019, I discovered Deadwood (at that point nearly a decade old), a more or less Shakespearian epic of 19th century US history. Over the past decade, I've discovered so many truly worth shows - and I haven't event started on The Wire yet!
On top of that, Netflix has given me access to several UK shows (Luther, for example, but also Grand Designs (now, thankfully, on Youtube)) that have rounded out the menu.
I understand that aesthetic choices with TV shows are very personal, but I can honestly say that I now absolutely believe that "TV" (ala the new streaming services and/or their presentation of material without ads) can be a medium for stellar story telling. I would like it if we had a few more defined "limited series" where there's a story already known, with a beginning, middle and end (True Detective and Mare of Eastttown are great examples of this (as long as they do not ruin Mare by making a sequel). And sure, there are some TV series that really would have been better as a film. Nevertheless, the ability to spend 8-16 hours with compelling characters is big positive to me.
This habit of cancellation is, for me, the biggest failure of the lot. Some of their shows were very high quality and quite unique: One Day At A Time, The OA, The Baby-Sitter’s Club. You know what else all of these shows have in common? They were cancelled at the top of their game.
People forget that many huge shows, e.g. Breaking Bad, Battlestar Galactica, only became hugely popular several years into their run. The Wire is even more extreme: it only really became huge after the last episode was broadcast. But in each of those cases, someone made the call that a high-quality show was worth running, either because they hoped it would find a wider audience or because they believed it enhanced their brand.
I actually made it through the first 4 or maybe 5 seasons, and was pretty bored and underwhelmed the whole time. I found all of the characters except Amos and Bobbie flat and (unintentionally) off-putting. Unless I'm missing something, the plot and premises are nothing special. I consider myself a big fan of many TV drama series, as well as sci-fi, I just put this one near the bottom of my list. I just don't get what's so interesting about it. For reference, I consider (2000s) Battlestar Galactica to be an astounding masterpiece and among the greatest TV series of any genre, along every dimension you could measure a show by. I guess there really is no accounting for taste.
I've changed my mind before. I initially found Breaking Bad unwatchable, but eventually came around to thinking it's very good.
>overarching mystery story
Its like Lost or Battlestar Galactica, a lot of nonsense they make up on the spot one episode ahead of filming.
An interesting thing I've noticed recently is that CGI both opens up possibilities and closes them down, and it's in the closing that it becomes painful. As the author points out, in older practical effects movies, you knew that you wouldn't get many big macro shots of a lot of things happening at once. In Alien, you weren't going to see the alien walking around in natural light with camera angles all around it, because it would quickly become obvious that it's someone in a suit or an animatronic. In CGI you get the opposite scenario: you'll see big believable macro shots of fleets of spaceships, but when a human actor is interacting with a CGI actor, you know that they aren't going to believably inhabit the same small space: e.g. hugs, kisses, punches, etc., are probably not going to happen, or, if they do, will involve some predictable trickery. For example if a menacing CGI robot strides threateningly towards a human actor, you know they won't believably grab the actor and go face to face, not without some cunning cuts. This is especially apparent in television shows with lower budgets. The space scenes in Battlestar Galactica were consistently incredible, but I was never once convinced by the non-human Cylons when they were in the same room as humans. I watch newer CGI movies with an eye towards how artists are addressing these issues.
I rewatch SG-1 in its entirety every few years. Season 1 is by far the weakest thing until the last episode when we're told the Earth has a couple of... shuttles to defend itself against the aliens. From there, it's just pure fun for another 9 seasons.
Is it "the best sci-fi" out there? I can't say because Battlestar Galactica had its moments, Voyager had seasons 4-7, and the current (but last) Expanse season is absolutely incredible in every respect.
But SG-1 will always be an immutable top 3 entry for me. It's so much even my wife watched a few seasons with me back in the day. I love to see her laugh
Peacock has Battlestar Galactica but the Caprica prequel is on NBC only for cable customers. Disney+ can’t put the Spider-Man movies next to the other Marvel movies. When Doctor Who first came to HBO Max, you couldn’t watch it on a Roku TV because it wasn’t HBO Now or HBO Go. The industry is littered with exclusive regional contracts that continually expire and don’t make sense to the customers.
My other Four:
o Firefly - no brainer. Brilliant. o Battlestar Galactica - Has some issues mid-late course, but still pretty end-end enthralling. o Dark (I keep re-watching this over and over every few months. I have many notebook pages full of analysis. Seriously good SciFi for the most part.) o Altered Carbon (mostly Season 1 - but Season 2 was okay)
Big Recommendation:
Not really science fiction (even bigger themes explored) but far superior in terms of overall quality of work/screen writing, and has a similar "concept" that a lot of supposed science fiction shows have - "The Leftovers" - Which I put on my list of the 5 most brilliant things on Television (Sopranos/The Wire/Deadwood/Breaking Bad being the other 4).
I'll give a honorable mention to stuff I loved but I can't totally recommends:
o Travelers - I'm a sucker for a good Time Travel Show. o Foundation - Pretty - I watch it, but I totally would never recommend it. o Fringe - Wow - was totally into this. Definitely an acquired taste though. o Raised By Wolves - Interested in where it's going. Could entirely suck eventually I guess. o Black Mirror - Hit and miss, though hits often enough that I keep coming back to it. o WestWorld - I mean, we all watched it. Season 1 was *awesome* if you watched it in realtime and didn't read all the internet commentary when the aha moment hit you. Season 2 was pretty good as well IMHO. Season 3 was just dreck where the screen writing tanked *but* it paid an *awesome* homage to the very last of the Foundation Novels to bring it all home.
While lots of people are disappointed (to say the least) in the rendering of the books into a TV show, citing unfaithfulness to the source material and the spirit of the books, there are also a number of people who praise the representation of gender, approach to things like smoking, race relations, and other modern ideals.
I see it differently. The Fallout video games put an interesting spin on the "future" by showing that what was once considered fashionable can become distasteful due to catastrophic events. With Foundation, it would have been more interesting to show how different events lead to the current state of society. The Battlestar Galactica TV series made a point to showing how society turned decidedly against digital communications because of how vulnerable it was to AI.
Much like with A Handmaid's Tale, I wish they would have tried a little harder to bridge the gap between how we see things today, and how we could see them under different circumstances. 12,000+ years from now could be quite different from now in a lot of ways.
> I also don't get why the stories are intertwined and so stretched out.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RotatingArcs
It's a pretty standard technique to have multiple arcs going on in an episode. The most ready example that comes to mind is Battlestar Galactica.
It depends on what aspect of it you're looking for.
If you're looking for Scifi that maybe resembles it I'd say possibly Battlestar Galactica. It's a bit higher production level, although does have slow stretches during some seasons (I think middle third of S2 was one of them), and falls apart a bit when trying to put together it's ending. Writing is about the same, maybe a bit better - and has a similarish feel although not grounded on earth. Covers some interesting topics of society.
If you're looking more of the in depth discussion of the state of society (specifically American). The Wire is really spectacular. But it's not "junkfood" watching, it takes paying attention and a lot of points are subtle. It also takes about 6-7 episodes of very slow ramp up to get good, but one of the best shows of the past two decades - and plenty have said one of the most complete TV shows ever made.
If you're looking for just the easy to consume action and political intrigue, the first half of Game of Thrones fits that bill, but is now notorious for how poorly it ended. High production, lots of characters / back story.
Maybe 24 or Homeland would match if you're looking for more of a straightforward "stop the terrorists" themed show.
It all depends on what aspect of Colony you're looking for / enjoyed.
Do you suppose ascended beings and advanced alien technology are scientific as opposed to plot devices? It's all fictional. Star Trek, Star Gate, Dune, Battlestar Galactica, even plenty of things in the Expanse (Epstein drive, protomolecule tech). Interesting answers means expanding on the rules and story in the fictional universe to provide explanations for mysteries the author(s) set up.
It doesn't mean providing a hard scientific explanation for something that supposed to be beyond our scientific knowledge. Who took out the protomolecule builders and why? Leviathan Falls will likely provide some answers. Same with Death's End giving more details about the Dark Forest. It's an exploration of an idea, not a documentary.
Imagine criticizing Dune because the spice and sand worms aren't based on actual biology.
Thanks!
I tried PoI, but it didn't catch me (first ep only). Maybe I try again. I would love a good, techy private detective series. Would love to find something like Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, as a series.
For me, in Germany, Breaking Bad was the series which changed the game. After breaking bad, TV became the superior story vessel. There were some good series before, but after BB "everyone" around saw the appeal. It's a different narrative style than traditional TV series. Even gems like Battlestar Galactica, feel more episodically contained and are not bincheable like modern shows. BB wasn't pioneering but rather the turning stone(?), I think.
And yes, I do recommend giving BB another try. It starts so slowly, but it will get insanely intense! However, it's becoming uncomfortably stressful story-wise. If you don't like that sort of drama, you may not enjoy it. Then Better Call Saul is even better, but also even more slow progression. Tho, if you got into the BB style, the wrinting, acting and cinematography are unmatched IMO.
I think this has become a modern trend especially in long-form art (television, book series), where it's been noticed that mystery plots are a good way of attracting and maintaining an audience with much less effort than crafting a satisfying narrative takes. That's how we get things like Lost, Battlestar Galactica, or the Game of Thrones TV show (perhaps the ASOIAF books as well, but time will tell), as two prime examples of captivating the audience without a clear plan.
Atlantis couldn't decide what it was, I think. They got to some great characters, but with difficulty. Ronon replaced Ford in Season 2, with Ford being a very poorly written character, he didn't get a single interesting scene for a season. Weir was remarkably poorly written IMO, every time she made a decision it was wrong. Teyla had great moments but in too many episodes she was a "mystic Amazonian alien" cliche. Early on Atlantis tried to again do the "small band of humans versus powerful alien enemy" thing, abandoned that, transitioned to a cornier version of SG-1, then also abandoned that and went more for character stories, it was a mess. I'm also simply not a fan of its too lighthearted style, it intentionally avoided the more serious bits of SG-1.
Universe was great in my book. Detractors say it's like Stargate trying to be Battlestar Galactica, but BSG is easily my favorite sci-fi show so I actually liked that. Universe did make some mistakes early on, but the second season was great, I enjoyed Dr Rush as a very non-Stargate style main character, and I enjoyed how Universe had a completely different take on aliens, keeping them mysterious.
I had only seen TNG until two years ago. I knew almost every episode past season 2, and really loved it. Still do.
But then I watched Deep Space Nine, and wow. I got hooked. I "only" watched about 80 episodes that are the plot arc + a few outstanding solos, but still. The quality of the acting, the more "on the nose" social messaging, the darker side of the Federation, the racial struggles between the crew - if I hear anyone make fun of DS9, I send them on their way (which doesn't happen much like it did in the 00's).
I have some friends who liked SG-1 as kids, maybe I should take the time to watch it. But it can't be better than Battlestar Galactica :)
If you have not seen The Expanse yet, start now! This is the best sci-fi show since Battlestar Galactica.
The first three episodes are slow but later the show is so fast you wish back to it.
They're talking about a TV show[1], where one early episode revolved around the fact that they had avoided connecting the computers to keep the bad guys out. (Sorry if I'm telling you something you already knew; the question you started with made it unclear.)
The show created an aesthetic like an old submarine, even using set pieces salvaged from other submarine movies. That was an aesthetic choice, making everything look cluttered and cramped and slow, increasing tension in exactly the way old submarine movies used to. In those movies, the computers weren't connected because they didn't exist. Actions were coordinated by phone.
It's a bit contrived that they had computers but not networks. It was just a conceit of the show, and actually it was really mostly just in that one episode. But the aesthetic carried through and made for great atmosphere.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica_(2004_TV_series)
I'd go so far as to say the Expanse beats Battlestar Galactica. It's a classic for sure but too bogged down by the single self contained episode format that made it less enjoyable for me to watch.
Trekkie here (more or less). I like The Orville better than Discovery. Discovery is down-right disappointing and stupid. Picard is better than Discovery, but still didn't live up to my expectations.
You're probably right about Battlestar Galactica and The Expanse being the best hard sci-fi.
It's hard to beat the episodes/stories in the earlier Star Trek shows. The Twilight Zone was able to pull off a faithful modern reboot, why can't Star Trek?
(Someone else mentioned Planetes further down in the comments. That is also good hard sci-fi.)
I watched 2 episodes of it and thought the acting was terrible. It reminded me a lot of Battlestar Galactica. That being said, I have several friends that rant and rave about it and keep telling me to try it again.
Hm. Late to the party, nevertheless I can't resist to give my two cents to the phenomenon which is btw. not even new, or limited to Netflix.
First I didn't grow up with much TV, because there were many more interesting things to do as a child, like playing in the forest. Later on I haven't been a fan either, and finally discarded my TV in 1996 and went into cinema instead. But again, not that much.
For a time I substituted that with a Hauppauge WinTV in one of my PCI-slots, and had the surreal experience to watch the second plane crash into the Twin Towers in NYC live on CNN after IRC exploded with: "TURN ON CNN NOW!1!!". Removed the card maybe a few weeks after that, because TV became toxic then, as in News are bad for you, and wasn't worth the energy anymore.
Did a strict media diet for a few years then, until I couldn't resist because of Battlestar Galactica, and got lost into Lost :)
From then on I partially catched up, but still very selective.
Anyways, what follows is an incomplete list of things which either never made it further than the pilot, or got canceled mid-season, or could have been longer IMO.
Earliest thing which comes to mind are several attempts from Gene Roddenberry with
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_II_(film) in 1973
followed by
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Earth_(film) in 74
and [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_New_World_(film) in 75
Similar for [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run_(TV_series) around the same time.
Then the reimagined
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivors_(2008_TV_series)
where I can recommend the original https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivors_(1975_TV_series) if you are into realistic Non-Zombie Post-Apocalypse stuff and can get it in good quality.
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Train_(TV_series) from 1999 What are they going to do after? How? Where? WTF?
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho_(2006_TV_series) This was one of the most annoying cancelings mid-season!
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcasts_(TV_series) from 2011 could have been more.
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Nova_(TV_series) also from 2011 could have been much more.
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_(TV_series) 2011
[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_Skies 2011
[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defiance_(TV_series) 2013
[13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rewind_(2013_film) Never made it into a series. WHY?
[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_(miniseries) 2015
[15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayward_Pines 2015
[16] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupied 2015-2017 This one is special and maybe didn't get much attention because politically incorrect with the ongoing Crimean ... how to put it, occupation, crisis? Anyways, very watchable! (I'm delighted to discover there is a third season out there now. Yay!)
[17] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_(TV_series) 2016-2018 How do the aliens look? I mean WTF? What a let-down :(
[18] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Strain_(TV_series) 2014-2017 Not really canceled, but could have been more.
[19] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Sun 2018 Could have been so much more...
Maybe it's because budgets of production companies have been tighter since the
[20] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_crisis_of_2007%E2%80%932008 ?
Also more and more competition with more and more immersive games, sometimes rendered so photorealistic that players just dive in to explore the gameworld by sightseeing, and have fun interacting with things like in an old point-and-click adventure, just seriously upgraded and optionally in groups, networked :)
On the other hand, I feel like modern TV shows aren’t long enough. By that I mean they cover ground too quickly and lack depth. I miss Battlestar Galactica which would hint and lead you on and develop things slowly over years.
I've played New Angeles which is the replacement for Battlestar Galactica using the Android setting instead of a licensed setting.
I hate traitor mechanics, and I'm not a big fan of the Android setting (Android itself I find not much fun) - but I found the mechanism in New Angeles acceptable. One player did indeed screw everybody else over, and it wasn't the most fun I've had in that amount of time, but I'd do it again some weekend I think.
The popular game I refuse to play is "Firefly: The Game". The friend who owns it says "Well it's flawed but it really captures the TV show". I hadn't enjoyed our first game of Firefly and hadn't seen the TV show, though I had seen the movie, so I watched the TV show. The next time I explained to him that he'd been correct. It exactly captures the TV show, in that the TV show's writer clearly doesn't understand that he's writing a story about the bad guys. Stories about bad guys can be fun. There don't even need to be good guys, there arguably aren't any good guys in "The Wire" for example - but the writer does need to be aware they're telling a story about bad guys. Firefly thinks these people are heroes. And so does the terrible board game.
One of the most poignant comments on police militarization I've heard seems to have come from a television show.
"There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state. The other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people." - Commander Adams (Battlestar Galactica)
Obviously, this doesn't directly address the militarization of the police, but it should be easy to see how it can go both ways. Outfit the police as a military unit, and they'll start acting like one. How much surplus military equipment was sold to police since the Iraq war?
Thanks for the explanation. I'm still not sure about what a "railgun" is, if not an energy weapon.
The Expanse's ship combat is very cool. A worthy successor to the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica (minus the mumbo jumbo that marred the end of that series!).
I like the characters too. I haven't read the books, and I understand this character was changed a lot, but I really like what they did with Klaes Ashford in the series. Way to subvert expectations! The TV show more than once appears to set up a cliché (this is the bad guy, he has delusions of power and is going to undermine this other character) only to subvert it. More of that, please!
Starz has been around since the mid-90s. It has some pretty good programming but it just doesn't get the attention that maybe HBO or Showtime does.
They had a really good short lived comedy series called "Party Down" that I loved. Had a great cast! https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1073507/
I think Outlander might be one of its more popular series now. Based on a book series and brought to TV by Ronald D Moore who did Battlestar Galactica (which personally I am cautious about because the last season or 2 of BSG was not my favorite)
There have still been recent popular TV series that release weekly, rather than all-at-once binges. Pretty much everything on HBO and FX, for starters. I don't think watching TV on a schedule has passed out of living memory. I personally remember very fondly the collective experience of watching things like The X-Files and Battlestar Galactica at the same moment as the rest of the country.
> If you heard about Game of Thrones or Westworld or Stranger Things, or most recently, Tiger King, you'd realize this is very much still a thing for a large population.
This isn't the same thing.
In the 1990s, everybody watched The Simpsons. Even the people who hated it still watched it so they could complain about it. It was on broadcast TV so everybody had access to it. And Friends, and Cheers, and so on.
Game of Thrones is on HBO. If you have Netflix and not HBO, it's not there. Stranger Things is on Netflix. If you have HBO and not Netflix, it's not there. A lot more people watched Friends than Game of Thrones, because Game of Thrones was less available and had much more competition.
You can find a website full of fandom about Game of Thrones, but you can find a website full of fandom about Battlestar Galactica. Passion and popularity are not the same.
Popularity is what matters to the zeitgeist. It's not a matter of being able to find a place where all the Game of Thrones fans hang out and whinge about the last season, it's about being able to go into a room full of normies and make a reference to last night's episode and expect nearly everybody to get it. Which isn't really a thing anymore.
+1. It's kind of jarring at first--I kept wanting to see some sort of cut or break from the action. Quite an accomplishment, though.
Also, and perhaps inspired by this movie, the pilot for Battlestar Galactica begins with a five- (?) minute-long single shot that introduces most of the lead characters.
> I'll catch hell for this, but Battlestar Galactica was the same way.
I just rewatched the mini-series and first few episodes of Season 1 of BSG. While, I remember thinking the same thing at the time, it was very obvious the second time around that for large arcs, the writers didn't have much of a plan. If I remember correctly though, there was always a lot of uncertainty about how many seasons they show would have, so it was difficult to plan more than a season at a time. It was also SciFi's most expensive show at the time, IIRC. They had a similar problem with Farscape... it was a big (and expensive) show, which stressed the network financially.
BSG is a great premise, but hard to come up with an overarching story arc that makes sense or offers closure. But sometimes you just have to let the writers go with things to see where they end up. There were some really good episodes later in the series, even with the filler.
This show felt like so many other shows on American TV in the last decade: somebody had the core of a good idea, but the writers had no idea how to turn that into a show.
The first couple episodes of Jericho were tantalizing. The interesting part was the world and the geopolitical situation, but then so little about that actually changed over the course of the following episodes, it was just a bunch of small town politics and side stories among a few uncompelling characters.
I'll catch hell for this, but Battlestar Galactica was the same way. The mini-series and the first episode of season one are a completely different animal from the rest of the show. The rest of the show was just the writers releasing dribs and drabs of what the Cylons actually were and actually were planning, among a bunch of side stories between characters (okay these were more compelling characters for the most part, though largely unsympathetic).
Reminds me of Battlestar Galactica first episode, except with terrestrial jets instead of battlestars and vipers.
> You should throw out all the games.
This resonates a lot. I used to be a huge gamer, but as I moved along my career I had less time and less mental bandwidth to game.
In a pique of nostalgia I tried one last hurrah recently and built a gaming PC (documented here https://www.leonroy.com/blog/2018/10/teeny-tiny-workstation/ ) but even with a machine which 20 something me would’ve drooled over I find I no longer have the patience to play something like the new Assassin’s Creed, Breath of the Wild or Witcher 3. It leaves me a little sad because gaming brought past me a lot of joy but after sinking 80+ hours into a game you question whether that time would have been better spent doing an online course or heck spending an extra hour each evening exercising instead of twiddling thumbs on my controller.
Same goes for TV IMHO - I ask myself what was the last TV show which affected my outlook or moved me in some way and heck The Wire maybe, Battlestar Galactica perhaps? I’ve watched all of Dexter, Chuck, Game of Thrones, Greys Anatomy, Castle, the list goes on and not one of them feels like they had a measurable improvement on my life. I do wonder when we go too far the other way though.
"All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again." - Peter Pan movie, Battlestar Galactica, and should be every security incident report ever.
Not saying they shouldn't have issued their analysis, of course they should have, it mostly looks on target. But...it will all happen again.
This argument was made in the Battlestar Galactica tv series as well. Nicely put.
I have the, perhaps somewhat unpopular, opinion that this the concept has ruined most TV.
It wasn't Babylon 5 that sparked the trend, but in 2004 Lost, Battlestar Galactica and then later on a few following shows like Prison Break came along and were very successful with the long story arc.
The concept of the seasons-long story arc is now basically endemic in modern TV. I think it's a situation where the highs are higher, but the average is much worse across all TV.
The issue I think is that the writers can't experiment like they could in the past with the more monster-of-the-week type formula.
A bad idea in a modern show is baggage you have to deal with for the rest of the show. In old school TV, the end of the episode came around and erased all sins. It also forces the writers tell a complete story each episode.
Consider Star Trek: TNG. There are a whole pile of really terrible episodes of that show, but there are also amazing ones. I don't think it's possible for a show like Star Trek: Discovery to ever reach the heights of TNG given the baggage it has signed itself up to deal with.
I just did some very fast research about that, and apparently both Lost and Battlestar Galactica attributed their coherent story arcs to Babylon 5.
I never watched Lost though.
If I may ask, assuming you watched the show: did they ever film scenes from years in the future, seamlessly connecting them in the present and then later on?
Thanks for your reference.
So, the pilot episode of the Battlestar Galactica reboot?
Given the random hodge-podge of software and firmware that modern military tech runs on, you're not going to see much success in building a magic one-size-fits-all virus that will spread across the entire system.
Fortunately this is not true. Actually destroying retaliatory capability requires a sustained barrage of hundreds of nuclear weapons, the first rocket will definitely not do it. And while a single rocket will trigger a return strike with a nuclear weapon it will not trigger an all-out response.
If you ever get the chance to read old declassified nuclear attack plans against a city, you will see the same. A single nuclear weapon ... just doesn't do it. Those plans involve starting out with something like 10 nuclear explosions (not even directly against the city itself, rather on supporting infrastructure), and then one more every hour or so for 48 hours or even weeks (these plans are/were made for most large cities, and even for US cities where the likely plans for Russian nuclear attacks are created by US to allow for better preparations).
In some ways what you see in the first episode of Battlestar Galactica is somewhat accurate. First, dozens of nuclear explosions make an effective response impossible (e.g. military installations, runways, important bridges, train lines, communication, ...), then a methodical "sweep" with nuclear explosions of the entire city. This cannot be done with one, or even 10, nuclear bombs.
And even pretty bad radar systems can tell the difference between one and tens/hundreds of rockets.
So whilst this is a concern, it can and is eliminated with proper infrastructure and planning.
There will not be information asymmetry once a nuclear attack actually starts happening.
I've been long amazed at how bad Amazon's web ads are, as if the department was authorized to get rid of money as fast as possible. Besides the times -- because of one click through to a joke product like $10K ultrapremium audio cables -- that I would get followed by weeks with absurd ads, my favorite example is getting barraged by Battlestar Galactica season 3 ads right after I bought the damn thing. OTOH, perhaps Amazon's ad/recommendation system was too smart, trying to warn me from purchasing season 4.
I understand that big data learning systems are harder to tweak than what we'd suspect from ground-level day-to-day experience. But it just seems like Amazon still has plenty of room to apply some conventional heuristics to get far more efficiency than they do now.
Babylon 5 was a whole new ballpark when it came out in the early 90's. Good television is now everywhere, but when B5 came out, it was completely unconventional to have a continuous plot over five seasons. At the time "one plot per episode" was the accepted standard, and while the dramatic arcs of for example Star Trek, the Next Generation (ST:TNG) eventually became longer as the script writers got more confident, the arcs of B5 were supposed to last through the seasons from the beginning.
The writing is occassionally weak, and thus it pales in comparison to more younger fantasy productions like Battlestar Galactica reboot, or Game of Thrones. But at it's time it was groundbreaking.
The moments of epic were really good since they were preplanned and they could be foreshadowed much in advance. Hence moments like (spoiler alert...)
... Earth falling into totalitarian state, bombing of one of the alien homeworld, the Shadows overwhelming Centauri prime, etc, were nearly unheard of narrative high points due to the buildup to them over the series.
There were lot of not-so-high quality filler episodes and so on, which make the series more of a cult classic rather than ... an obvious classic.
And yes, I categorized space opera as fantasy :)
You are not wrong. But when I first watched the original Star Wars movies, I was a kid and had lower standards. When I watch these movies today, it is less about the movies themselves, but about revisiting those pleasant childhood memories.
The newer movies do not have those memories attached, so I am more critical. It's the same with Indiana Jones - the fourth movie was not really bad, but without the warm glow of childhood memories it does not have that same magic.
Battlestar Galactica worked out very well, but that was mostly because they turned the original show completely inside out and turned it into something that could stand on its own.
If memory serves there was a fight between the showrunners / writers and the network between season 2 and 3 of Battlestar Galactica, on top of the writers strike that happened around that time. Imo, it really dragged the quality of the show down.
I hit this issue with a lot of video game/movie soundtracks (Battlestar Galactica and Starbound OSTs are some of my favorite programming music), and it's extremely frustrating. Even worse, Spotify's app doesn't work on my work VPN, forcing me to use the web app... which doesn't support listening to user tracks since Spotify won't store them in its own cloud.
I pay them $10/month for service, so why can't they reserve a couple gigs of space to store my files that they don't have in their library?
I saw that a few times in New Zealand, too. I think I've seen TV shows lose scenes and lines for more ads, as well.
What really got me was back when the Battlestar Galactica pilot screened on TV. I was very keen to see it, and heard the pilot was three hours three minutes long.
It was split up, on TV3 I think, into two 180 minute slots, which means there were almost as many minutes of ads as there were of the show. I had to turn it off after one scene was interrupted in the middle for an ad-break that was longer than the scene, then we came back for a single line (now out-of-context) and one camera change, then cut to another break. (For reference, it was a scene with the nuke hitting the Galactica, then six minutes of ads interrupted by about 25 seconds of show.)
I turned off my TV, found an email address, and explained to them just why I was going to buy the DVD and not watch another second of their broadcast.
TV advertising is so intrusive these days that I haven't watched broadcast TV in years.
You mean, the opening credits/music? Well yeah, those are the same in every episode, but I assume almost everyone skips those after they've seen it the first few times. Even the Battlestar Galactica reboot had an opening credits sequence which I usually skipped.
I've never been particularly nostalgic for websites.
I'm slightly nostalgic for shared Windows folders on LANs at college dorms. I remember seeing the first South Park short from such a folder as it was going viral.
I'm extremely nostalgic for the original Napster. I don't ever remember searching for a piece of music and coming up short. And I remember it being a very sudden shift-- one month you're making a mental note to search for a CD you misplaced somewhere back home, the next month you're getting on Napster to check if the theme to Ghostbuster's 2 has lyrics that recount the plot of the movie. It does.
A few weeks ago I typed "Battlestar Galactica" into Netflix, and guess what? It showed me lots and lots of results, none of which were Battlestar Galactica. And this isn't your run of the mill entitlement of a fool addicted to his Iphone apps. That is entitlement of a person yearning for modern functionality to match a shitty piece of software that saw its last stable release 15 years ago.
I'm having a hard time finding any numbers for the actual amount of music that was available on the original Napster at the time. Can anyone put some hard data to my rose colored glasses?
BET is a horror agglomeration of MTV, E! news, and crude commentary so prevalent on the internet today. Show after show features a display infantile and disgraceful behavior, which I am sure that most rational, educated people would not enjoy. I'm black and I'm not even going to pretend that I enjoy the portrayals on TV as a stunted, emotionally-challenged stooge that is ever pervading on cable TV today.
Why marginalize us to an ethnocentric echo chamber free from exchange of values, aspirations, and customs? Content creators can just keep hitting repeat on the same political, depressive drama from the 20th century (which we have not progressed from). What I dream is for popular TV shows to have a black lead, where not every character has to be black, nor words spoken in a "black" vernacular, nor a need for the show to be transmuted into a platform for social justice or black values. We need shows with black leads that rival enterprises like Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Game of Thrones, Simpsons, etc. I want something that everyone can get behind and imagine themselves as being.
As an individual of African descent, I stand against the attitude of viewing the world through a bitter lens of color, where issues are "white" or "black". Their issues are our issues and vice versa. That is that. We all live in the same society, we are all entangled, exposed to the negatives and pressures of prevalent problems. There's no need for anymore juvenile "us vs them" dialogue in this society.
Ships get around the solar system using a propulsion system called an Epstein Drive. I just watched the following video yesterday. The narrator talks about travel times to different planets using a flip and burn technique (accelerating at a constant rate to half way point flipping direction, and decelerating at the same rate to the destination).
https://youtu.be/hz7jETrejCQ
P.S. I love the Expanse :) I'm glad it was renewed for Season 3. Best sci-fi I've seen on TV since Battlestar Galactica.
The Buffy vs. Angel vs. Firefly discussion is a good one. Babylon 5, Veronica Mars, and the recent Battlestar Galactica also fit in. Ditto Dollhouse, Heroes, Alias and Lost.
I'd say:
-- It's just a detail, but recall that the first season of Buffy was actually just a half-season in length.
-- The first three seasons of Buffy had a very clear meta-metaphor. :) It posited monsters as being a good representation for what happens in actual high school life.
-- That aspect of the show hit its stride in the Buffy/Angel romance: Girl sleeps with guy and he turns into a monster.
-- Firefly was good, but nothing in it was as brilliant as, say, the best of Buffy.
-- A lot of shows started with a lot of monster-of-the-week/crisis-of-the-week and emphasized the ongoing story more later into the run. But most of the shows cited did at least some standalone stories all the way to the end. (Babylon 5 is one exception).
-- Firefly never got past that part of the show's evolution. This may be one reason it never matched Buffy's brilliance.
-- Not knowing whether or not a show will be renewed is a huge problem. If you're a fan of Buffy or Angel or Babylon 5, you're familiar with the consequences.
-- The writers' strike messed up multiple shows, or at least their audiences. I never went back to watching Battlestar Galactica post-strike.
-- Joss Whedon tried to oversee three shows at once. That didn't go well. Each of Buffy, Angel and Firefly deserved more of his attention.
-- Dollhouse didn't have real characters, the people running the place excepted. It was never going to work.
-- Some shows have a brilliant idea for an overarching story, in which the big story and the individual characters' experiences and arcs mesh beautifully. Then that story comes to a natural end, and the show is never quite as good again. Veronica Mars Season 1 is a great example. Ditto the first 1 1/2 or 2 seasons of Alias. Ditto Babylon 5 after things were wrapped up in Season 4.
-- I'd put Battlestar Galactica into the same group. The best part was the first season, as everybody builds a society on the fly )as it were) that can survive against terrible odds. The plots with the election and the defeat and the aftermath weren't as good. And the pseudo-mystical stuff toward the end was just weird.
That is amazing:
> ALIS does not have redundant infrastructure: ALIS’s current design results in all F-35 data produced across the U.S. fleet to be routed to a Central Point of Entry and then to ALIS’s main operating unit with no backup system or redundancy. If either of these fail, it could take the entire F -35 fleet offline.
That sounds like a movie plot [Independence Day] (or Battlestar Galactica)!
So, the enemy jams comms or shoots down satellites, and a F-35 squadron deployed to a base on the other side of the world can't do maintenance? An aircraft carrier is attacked and its antennas are destroyed, and they can't do maintenance? The enemy breaks into or takes offline the Central Point of Entry over the Internet (oh, but it's airgapped, of course...), and the entire F-35 fleet around the world can't do maintenance? (Or can't do it at the level required to maintain combat readiness.)
Am I misunderstanding something here?
This is a humorous complaint. I was using a VPN into England and had checked out Netflix and I thought the selection was great (finally, I can stream Battlestar Galactica. Archer's season 6 is finally out, etc.)...but I'm sure if I were using VPN regularly, and then checking Netflix...I'd have the same feeling of "it's the same ol shit on the front page"
It was never a series it was a backdoor pilot produced as a mini-series. Battlestar Galactica was made in the same manner it was just intended to be a mini-series / made for tv movie and it was't picked up for a show until the overseas ratings came in and Sky pretty much offered Syfy to help produce it.
I was a big Trekkie when I was younger...but I'm surprised at how poorly the show has held up when rewatching on Netflix. I think what spoiled me was the revamped Battlestar Galactica. It's not the dated special effects that bother me, it's the way the utopia of Star Trek's future and technology began to provide way too many plot crutches. By the end of TNG, it seemed like every crisis resolution involved reversing the polarity of some piece of equipment or weapon at the last minute. DS9 was my favorite series up until the latter seasons, where again, fancy technobabble would save the day over well-written plots. I never watched much of Voyager or Enterprise...but it seemed the technobabble only increased, with time travel being thrown in for variety. With Voyager, the absurdity of tech continued from the beginning...IIRC, even though Voyager was banished in the middle of nowhere with purportedly limited resources, some technicality about how the holodeck worked allowed them to basically use the holodeck all the time, as if it ran on magic and dreams (which is basically what the holodeck stood for in all the new series). Even the utopian future of no-currency was rendered a bit absurd with DS9 and the introduction of Ferengi as main characters, and constant mentions of "gold-press latinum"
BSG spoiled me because it showed, credibly that a space-faring future is unlikely to be clean and sanitized. I think one of my favorite aspects of BSG were the mundane ones, such as how having everyone spread out on different ships hampered logistics and communications. In Star Trek, of course, this was solved with instant communication devices, though the impact of instant communication in TNG-and-on seems rather limited compared to what we experience in the Internet-age.
Since the OP states that the new series shares the same writers as the rebooted movies, I'm assuming that the altered timeline will be adopted by the new TV series? The reboot Star Trek films were flashy and entertaining in the way that modern action films are entertaining...but they took up the technology-as-deus-ex-machina to the next level...Scotty created a teleportation device that rendered starship travel moot and, of course, life-giving Tribbles.
It would be a horrible reality TV show. Primitive construction techniques are very slow, especially if you also need to worry about acquiring food through primitive means, and each technique takes a lifetime to master. We and our children would all be dead by the time they rebuild the steam engine. But the series would not run that long because it would be boring.
The finale of Battlestar Galactica was totally the Golgafrincham “B” Ark from Douglas Adams. It turns out that “And they have a plan” was a lie, and the series just went downhill after season 2.
It could make for a good reality/docu tv show; drop 50 engineers and scientists on a large desert island with many resources, and task them to rebuild civilization. It would be interesting to see how long it will take to get the required work just for food acquisition low enough so that one could engage in the civilization building. It would also be interesting to see whether there are big shortcuts, things that don't have to be redone.
Oh another thought: In our modern civilization, we require a lot of materials that cannot be found in the wild. In order to get them, we need to do complex mining - but to do that, we need simpler mining -- to do that, we first need some tools -- do make those, we need more basic tools. I kind of wonder what the shortest chain/tree of prerequisite tools and materials is from the stone age, to, say, a modern cpu (to make it easier, let's assume availability of resources is not an issue).
(I feel these thought experiements were kinda spurred by the finale of Battlestar Galactica, at least in my circle of friends.)
Lol. I read the headline as 'diets cause cancer', that 'cures' for diets were causing cancer in young people. I expected something about diet pills.
There is a great Perry Cox speech out there about a patient eating red peppers to cure cancer.
Found it...
"Dr. Cox: And now I have to take your laptop from you, as I've deemed you just too darn stupid to use it. You see, those bell peppers that you're munching, they aren't gonna do a truckload of jack against the cancer raging inside of your body. Of course, I've only been a doctor for some twenty years, and the person who wrote that Wikipedia entry also authored the Battlestar Galactica episode guide, so what the heck do I know? But if you feel like living, page me."
Firefly is great, albeit short.
I was forced to watch Buffy, but while the first season makes you cringe, it is pretty good. Not as stellar as people claim, but really good. I think Joss Whedans masterpiece wasn't Buffy, it was Toy Story. But do watch the musical episode "Once More, With Feeling"!
Babylon 5, of course, if you can tolerate the (even for the time) bad CGI.
I've just watched DS9 from beginning to end, something I had wanted to do for 15 years now. Hasn't aged well, and I hadn't seen it in English before. Avery Brooks' overpronunciation is painful, but it is the best Star Trek series by far.
Friends was something I've enjoyed as a teen, and later as an adult. It was a totally different experience as an adult. I think that's worth a lot, to have a depth that appeals differently to you in different stages of your life.
Modern Family was way better than expected.
ALF is a bit painful to watch nowadays, it also hasn't aged well.
Golden Girls are probably still great, The Cosby Show definitely is!
Boston Legal is fun, fun, fun! Hey, why shouldn't Nantucket be allowed to habe its own nuclear weapons? But do watch all the newer Star Trek series before BL, so you can appreciate the ST heavy cast.
Dallas! Oh my. Incredible how old Victoria Principal is today.
ER was great, but I haven't seen much of the last seasons. I also liked Chicago Hope, but it clearly lost.
The 2004 Battlestar Galactica. Probably the most modern TV series of its time, great themes and issues, pretty current, fantastic buildup to the big finale and then... disappointment.
Game of Thrones, if only for the shock value ;-)
And at last, the Tv series I've probably enjoyed most in the last few years: the first two seasons of Veronica Mars. But make sure you can stomach it, the season finales are sickeningly evil (especially season 2).
There's some interesting ideas in here (first Shadow war in particular, but others too).
I really like B5 since it had a beginning, middle, and end which was rare at the time (and still somewhat rare now, but improving slowly). Plus it didn't feel as "dumbed down" as Star Trek was, which isn't to say it is a hard show to watch, just that a lot of episodes were pure politics (e.g. Game of Thrones style). The action/space battles were frankly excellent, and only shows like the new Battlestar Galactica have come close to that kind of dynamic space combat (still, for me, nothing will top the Whitestar jumping into Mar's atmosphere to out-flank the earth fleet).
But B5 did have problems. The show was "cancelled" at the end of Season 4, so they combined S4 and S5's content into one season (which was both awesome in some sense, but disappointing in others). Then when the show got renewed for Season 5, they had no content since S4 "ended" many of the major plots. You also had the loss of Michael O'Hare at the end of Season 1 which made the show's overall story make a lot less sense. Bruce Boxleitner was wonderful, don't misunderstand, it just hurt the story's end when Michael O'Hare had to return to conclude things.
Nah, man, I first came to Japan (from the Bay Area) in 1989 and it totally was like a science fiction movie. I then moved to Tokyo in 1994.
• weird giant TV screens all over the city, bleating ads at you while you ate in a grubby hand-built noodle shop next to a skyscraper (Blade Runner)
• super-advanced mobile phones COLOR SCREENS that you could PLUG INTO YOUR PDA AND DIAL INTO BBSes WITH! (Star Trek)
• toilets that sensed your motions and flushed for you (never saw this in a movie but I always imagined after seeing them that the toilets on the Death Star had to be like this)
• elevated trains and highways that passed through buildings and let you peep into tiny apartments so small they might as well have been Battlestar Galactica living quarters
• the badass cassette walkman i bought with an extra D battery attachment
• robotic vacuum cleaners doing the airports and stations while playing a creepy melody so they didn't scare you
... plus tons more like that. I had never seen any of that stuff in the USA in those days. It just doesn't really sound high-tech and futuristic anymore.
Sure but the AI wouldn't necessarily have to respond. I think the main flaw in the Turing test is it's cultural dependence. I would argue that Eliza has passed plenty of Turing tests, mostly with people who had a chance encounter with it.
But why would an AGI individual have to be able to lie about it's childhood ? It could simply have a childhood. But I understand your argument : "Human" AI is constantly trained for the function "be a human". Machine intelligence is being trained with "is human X cheating", "is this spam", "what is the french for apple", "which way will stock X go" (and other "what will <large number of humans> do in situation X" questions) ... functions.
Keep in mind that your own brain is also simply running an algorithm, with "hidden state". Here's the first thing it hides pretty well : there's no single "you", there's about 300 regions in your brain, that are physically different, in different locations, and not directly linked. And if the rest of your brain gets disabled, each of those 300 regions can use your body to convince your own mother it's really you she's talking to. And the function your brain is executing is not to "have a soul" or something like that, but is mostly a behaviour-copy algorithm. It searches out other humans, observes their actions, learns to predict them and then uses what it's learned to "be you". Most people will not believe this is how it works, not even when they know quite a bit about neurons, and know pretty well that this is what our neurons do.
But when it comes right down to it, you, me, everyone is an "AI algorithm" just like Google search. Aside from the shear scale, number of connections mostly, there is nothing all that remarkable about the hardware it's running on.
I love how an AGI algorithm is presented in the follow up to the Battlestar Galactica series, "Caprica". Zoe Graystone explains it at one point in the series. It's fiction of course, but still. Her algorithm searches the internet, your computer, and everything and anything it can find for pictures and videos of it's "target" and then builds the function "given situation X, what would <human> do ?" and then puts the algorithm in a virtual body that looks like the human, and uploads it to V-world. She runs it on herself, a friend and accidentally on a third person she doesn't know and then proceeds to get herself blown up by a friend/terrorist (they can be both at the same time, you know) in the first episode, and their avatars wake up in V-world, sort of a facebook virtual reality edition, unaware of what has happened (and as V-world is mostly used for sex, dancing and debauchery it's not that easy to find out unless you're looking for it). Currently we don't have nearly enough data on any person to make this work ... but I am pretty convinced it is possible to make this work.
This would work, since it's doing the same thing your brain does when it hears the question "do you remember feeling happy when your mother held you when you were a baby ?". First, your brain doesn't actually remember that either way. It simply works it's way through to a good answer to that question. The thing it'll do is predict how you should answer that question, given (mostly) how other humans answer that question.
This is a very different problem from "lying about its childhood", specifically it's much more solvable. Can I predict how humans would answer questions about their childhood ? Certainly. Easy. Make the algorithm take enough contextual information into account (so that it both realizes what realistic answers are and either answers realistically or responds in a way that humans respond when they don't have a "good prediction" for an answer, for instance by saying they don't remember, or by changing the subject, or ...)
If you have young kids you will see this process in action. You have to "teach" kids memory. When they talk only a little, if you ask them something about earlier that day, they will respond. And the response makes sense, but it's not actually what happened. You will at some point realise this and correct them. Correcting them teaches them to match up what happened with their response, because they learn to predict that that's what's expected of people. Over time this correcting them will work, and they will have learned memory (and then they learn to lie, especially on questions like "did you hit your sister ?", and when that ends badly they learn to "not lie", like adults do. "Did you hit your sister ?" "She stole my lego").
Note that the underlying memory is also a prediction. If I ask you what happened this morning, and you want to try to answer correctly, you will start with an obvious fact (which isn't necessarily the truth), like "I woke up". Your brain will take that thought, and predict (not remember) what happened next. So I woke up, ok next, brushing teeth, ok next, read cell phone messages, ok next, ... ah ! the answer to the question.
That's not even the issue: justifying TV piracy is easy - "I'll buy the Blu-Ray when it comes out".
Which certainly seems fair enough - these things aren't just entertainment, they're culture. If you're a couple weeks behind GoT, chances are you're going to spoiled on it when some newspaper runs a damn headline about an episode.
For people in Australia, there is no other option: many shows simply never make it here. I remember trying to watch Battlestar Galactica on Channel 10 - by the end they really didn't care about that show, and by the time we got it season 2 was already starting in the US. They didn't pick it up.
Well, we definitely have different ways of watching stuff.
Which such good stuff such as ST, there are not enough episodes. I wish there were more. "It's the journey that matters!"
Re BSG, you DO NOT want to skip episodes, there's even a "right" order: http://thunderpeel2001.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/battlestar-galactica-viewing-order.html
This reminds me of a similar exercise to find the optimal viewing order of Battlestar Galactica episodes, movies, web-series, deleted scenes, extended episodes, etc.
http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/3641/what-is-the-viewing-order-of-the-re-imagined-battlestar-galactica
The remade Battlestar Galactica series had one horrible episode: "Black Market". I think everyone agrees that it's not good. However, if I was a first time watcher and someone told me to skip it, I would not have done so. I guess I like to watch the entire show and form my own opinions.
There are benefits and drawbacks to multi-writer teams. I say this as someone who spent the first half of his career in TV development and production. (In fact, I briefly interned on a Trek series back in college.)
One of the benefits is, for lack of a better word, scalability. A single writer would take forever to write 100+ cogent, consistently great, full-length episodes of a TV show. Since TV series' fates are always in flux, you can't afford a primetime series with only one writer, who becomes a crushing bottleneck if any changes in volume need to be made. Writing a great TV episode is hard, hard work and takes time. Now imagine writing 12, or even 22 of them on an insane production deadline!
On the other hand, some shows and formats work really well with a single writer/auteur. True Detective is famous for having been entirely written and entirely directed by just one writer and one director. Now, True Detective was a miniseries of only 8 episodes, and at that scale, a single writer is more realistic. I doubt you could have produced a primetime Star Trek series with only one writer and one director.
An interesting hybrid approach is what I'd call a staff structure with a clear "visionary" at the helm. This is sort of like what we saw on Battlestar Galactica: a show with a full writing staff, but one or two writers who basically dominated the process and authored the bulk of the series. MASH is another good example; Larry Gelbart clearly exercised strong, authorial control over the show, even though he didn't write every episode.
This latter approach tends to work the best, in my experience as a fan and as a former TV person. But it can have its difficulties and drawbacks, all the same. Sometimes there are limits to the imagination of even the most creative individuals. If you're relying too much on a strong auteur type, and he or she gets writer's block, or gets sick, or becomes extremely difficult, you're SOL.
Only to a limited degree. Yes, there were soaps and other serials that had long-running narrative arcs, but not with the kind of sophistication contemporary writers are using.
Let's call it the 'Post-Buffy' school of thought, where character nuance, motivation, back-story, plot and sub-plot are all delivered with a kind of attention to detail formerly only used by novelists. There may be a few examples from the 60's -- The Prisoner comes to mind -- but even that can't really touch the narrative layers we've seen in the last decade: The Wire, Lost, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Battlestar Galactica, Game of Thrones (TV as novel if there ever was one), Six Feet Under, Dexter, Band of Brothers, and so forth. These aren't just books, they're novels.
This I think is partially the result of the ability of viewers to sit down and spend concentrated time with a series when they come out on DVD. The first time my wife and I did this was maybe 10 years ago with Buffy and Angel, and it was the most fun I'd ever had with television. This was a new experience. We'd lose 4 or 5 hours late on a Friday just chaining one after another, like the Battlestar Galactica skit on Portlandia.
What I think Netflix is doing, and probably what it has massive amounts of data to back up (I watched Buffy through Netflix, come to think of it), is that this new type of viewer engagement -- long sessions of series "gorging" -- has completely transformed the way we experience television. I think this is why they released the House of Cards episodes all at once. This is also probably why they're not releasing viewing numbers -- the new experience context of contemporary viewers has very little to do with the old Nielsen ratings arc, and would be a poor measure of the show's success, from Netflix' own point of view.
There's another bias, where things are overrated because they're unusually good for their time. For instance, "Battleship Potemkin" is often considered one of the greatest films ever made because it was so innovative for its time, despite the fact that when you watch it now, it's easily a shitty propaganda film. It may have been a greater achievement, but as a film, it's somewhat lacking by modern standards. Likewise, MASH and Seinfeld were groundbreaking, but largely because of MASH and Seinfeld, we can and do make better television series today. I think the two biases largely cancel out.
This has some interesting consequences. For instance, in the restricted realm of science fiction TV, it's clear that Star Trek: The Next Generation is strictly better than the original Star Trek, just as the recent Battlestar Galactica is strictly better than TNG, because these series responded to and innovated on each other.
On balance, I still wouldn't say it's necessarily true that newer series are better than older series. It's still rare that a TV series tops The Prisoner, for instance.
"Look at the popular SciFi shows of the last few years. Namely Firefly and Battlestar Galactica. Both presented a future that was lived in, almost dirty."
Good point. One reason the first three Star Wars movies were so popular is that the places they showed looked "real". They looked reasonably lived in, solid places with actual inhabitants. The Falcon looked like my parents used station wagon.
It can go wrong, the Aliens movies always end up in a future that's positively filthy. Blade Runner, I think, sits just on the fithy side of the line. But future LA feels like a real "place".
My personal favorite vision of the future is the one presented in the Fifth Element loosely based on Valérian and Laureline. It's lived in, bustling, stylish (at various levels of fashion), shiny and bright where it counts, unfashionable where it should be and just dirty enough in the places that should be dirty. Small details, like the dirt Leeloo picks up when escaping the lab, add to this feeling of solidity. Popular culture is magnified to stand out amongst the crushing masses, and it seems like a place with endless nooks and crannies to explore. It's not utopian, but it's not dystopian. It feels like what the future would be like if it were the present...and somebody made a modern day adventure movie. It has an amazing tone.
It's amazing to me that more works haven't been created in that universe.
I might suggest that either you have already watched a lot of movies or your definition of interesting is rather narrow. I have hundreds of films in my instant queue. The number of critically acclaimed TV shows is pretty large, too. Have you seen all of Mad Men? Battlestar Galactica? Breaking Bad? Arrested Development or Louie? It would take a while just to get through those. There are, of course, many more. Lots of documentaries and smaller films you might not yet have heard of, but that you might like a lot.
It's hard for me to understand why anybody would think there's nothing interesting to see there.
From the business perspective, we all understand the rumored incremental hardware updates here from Microsoft and Sony; Nintendo ate everyone's lunch for 5 years with last-gen, 3-year old tech[1] that cost little to make while Microsoft and Sony hemorrhaged money until what seems like last year... not to mention the huge technical hurdle for devs and middleware companies trying to reach parity on each platform.
WIN: If Microsoft goes the incremental route with the same Xbox OS a-la Apple's iOS evolution, they keep middleware compatibility with larger graphical budgets for teams to play with... EVERYONE likes this and every dev team that has shipped an Xbox 360 game hits the ground running immediately -- possibly opening up the doors to dual Xbox 360 and Xbox 720 releases of their games (one with lower quality textures and rougher geometric assets and the other with higher-end business) -- I am sweeping my hands across a fairly complex problem here, but you get the point. With compatibility intact, there are interesting things that can happen here that we've seen work on the iOS ecosystem. (maybe not for Triple-A devs, but for budget minded games, this could work wonderfully especially as digital-downloads and indie devs grow).
LOSS: Sony has to make a clean cut and scuttle the last 8 years moving onto an x86 design, new OS, new middleware all new QA cycles and retraining all the PS3 devs.
WIN: Sony now matches the same arch as the Xbox-next (same CPU optimizations apply and same GPU family) and we can stop getting these damn port-style games that never take advantage of the extra Blu-ray room or cell processing power.
LOSS: No revolutionary boost in performance if the hardware rumors are true. I have no doubt the bump in specialized/tuned hardware will give us real-time versions of the Unreal Engine 4 demos (of that smoking guy that beats up mechs) BUT, at 4k resolution and 120hz for 3D? Not for every game. I imagine we will see something akin to what we have now with most games running at 720p with the few rare tuned ones actually running at 1080p resolutions. I would guess next-gen will offer 4k resolution on some titles and 3D on others while running at 1080p or some such combination. Obviously if it is a simpler game like a Wave Racer, we'll get both, but for Gears of War 15 and Mass Effect 32, I doubt it.
WIN: Faster game dev cycles means we get some more impressive titles on the improved hardware/experience sooner. Don't have to wait 2 years post-launch for the first real good game.
LOSS: Next-generation consoles are going to be engineered to be all-in-one entertainment hubs... TV cable tuning, DVR, streaming, apps, social, games, mobile-tie-in, etc. etc... this will make jumping between consoles harder as you stake your claim in the Microsoft or Sony (or possibly Nintendo -- yet to be seen if they can pull off a Network) camp and build up your life/existence within their walled garden. This generation it was nothing more than rep points, next-generation (especially Microsoft) will be throwing every Facebook-esque psychologically engineered trick in the book to keep you ON their platform, consuming content through their channel with your credit card en-tow, sharing your pictures with friends and building your character's rep from game to game to game, movie to movie and app to app.
I sincerely doubt we (the harder-core folks) will all have all 3 next-gen systems this next time around and will most likely have 1 (probably Xbox-next) as the cost of flipping between them will be bigger than just powering on Console X to play game Y for a few hours.
LOSS x2: Double the resolution on the Kinect-next, rumored eye-tracking, multi-person tracking and more accurate voice controls? I can't even imagine what is in store (e.g. "You don't seem to be enjoying this episode of Lost, would you like to skip to the next episode or can we recommend Battlestar Galactica?" -- say "Start Mass Effect, invite Scotty32, Soldier load-out" -- experience {episode of Law and Order, McDonald's Billboard in background... notification popup...} "Just emailed you a buy-1-get-1-free BigMac coupon for McDonalds! The nearest one is 2 blocks from you... yummy! Say 'Pause' to pause what you are watching and go grab lunch!")
You get the idea...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii#Technical_specifications
It's the product of the best parts of Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica and more
The best, most inventive, written SF never made it to the movies/TV, or was beaten to an unrecognizable pulp in the process.
No particular snobbery on this, just think you should be aware of it. If "important" is equivalent to popular or well-known, that's another kettle of fish. I'd say no.
You are so very wrong. Hardly any marketing is done for US shows abroad. You could easily miss the premiere of a new season if you weren't paying close attention.
US shows are thrown on the air mostly as filler, with some rare exceptions they are not the big moneymakers for non-US stations. Although not as carelessly as in the days before DVD box sets and mass piracy, when a episodes could be shown in the wrong order, series just disappear from the schedule unannounced for months, or stay on the shelve for years.
But they will still happily announce a series as "the new hit series from the US", knowing full well that the show has already been cancelled and they only have the 13 episodes to air... This is also largely because US shows are sold as package deals. If you want to buy House for your local market, you also have to buy the rights to crappy series you know nobody will watch, at least not on your station. So even if there is a potential audience for those series, they will barely get a chance to watch the series, since it will be programmed at some ungodly hour.
The Dutch broadcasters managed to ruin many shows like for instance Six Feet Under or Battlestar Galactica that way. Yeah, lots of people still saw them, but either pirated or on DVD. Following them on television was near impossible.
It's a business-model that prefers to destroy a popular product in order to maintain an artificial scarcity rather than to sell it directly to the consumers at reasonable price.
Maintaining this model ensures Hulu is never going to be available outside the US, unless the whole local broadcast market completely collapses.
Because there is more money to be made in ensuring that a show does not reach its audience. That's how fucked up the system is.
I'll second this.
From my personal experience, I occasionally try to see some stuff from the Youtube channels, but for one really good video there’s lots of stuff that really doesn’t appeal to me.
And I can’t really say nothing about Netflix, since it is not available in Portugal.
There is already lots of good independent production out there, amateur or professional. I just don’t know how and where to find it.
The solution, thus, is simple:
* Develop a boxee like setup box for around 50$/50€ with an internet connection;
* Distribute it around the world, no region locking whatsoever;
* Have a really good recommendation engine, based on social or whatever. It should allow you to input ‘titles’ that may not be available on the platform, but work as a ‘preference indicator’ (for example, ‘I like House and Battlestar Galactica’)
* It should allow for social subtitling, perhaps even with a reward system - for free;
* Charge 1€/1$ or less per paid TV episode, 2€ or less for film. Better yet, 10€/$ flatrate per device. But make the device still useful for anyone not willing to pay for that, with lots of properly selected free content;
* Commercials are acceptable: one brake per half an hour, not more than one minute : for non-paying customers.
This is not something terribly innovative (except for the recommendation system), but properly implemented it could be quite disruptive.
That's the problem. We can't aim to make $200 M movies from the start.
But I think it is pretty much possible to build a platform where we can finance a TV series like The Big Bang Theory, by charging only $1 per episode to the subscriber. Just cutting the middle man and setting a deal with a dumb pipe channel like Google (YouTube), where they can make money from ads, and paying the creators some more money... That would be only $4 a month for a series you REALLY love. [1]
And of course, the public wins A LOT, by avoiding unexpected cancellations, time slot changes, etc!
I'd definitely pay for series like Battlestar Galactica, TBBT, MacGyver (lol! how would it be today)...
And of course, if you make it GLOBAL, erasing regional restrictions, you can increase your audience at an enormous level!
I see this model as something ABSOLUTELY plausible today. Why are we still paying to the middle men?!?! Let's make this happen.
[1] http://www.tvguide.com/News/Top-TV-Earners-1021717.aspx
I always seem to find some television series that's available via streaming that my wife and I want to see. Each time I say, "We should cancel streaming when we're done with this" and each time we find something else that fits the bill. Firefly. Battlestar Galactica. Sports Night. Better of Ted...
We cut the cable cord over a year ago, relying on Netflix Streaming for older content and iTunes for newer stuff. Even paying for the iTunes stuff, we're WAY, WAY, WAY ahead. I should do that math someday...
I've been listening to the soundtracks of shows and movies remotely related to coding. e.g Tron and Battlestar Galactica.
Gasp, this is turning into a joke!
I had Netflix for a few months, I used it to watch the entire Battlestar Galactica. After that, I went through and searched for 30 different movies to watch, and they weren't available, and I'm not talking about new movies. None of the Indiana Jones', Star Wars', Rockies, Bladerunner, etc. Now with the Starz debacle, and with content providers getting ready to pound them with price increases, Netflix is in real trouble.
Yes, streaming is the way to do it. I love streaming. But I don't think it will be through Netflix. This sounds like a company in its death throws.
I simply don't understand why they would split themselves up into 2 companies. The only reason why I can think of why they would cut themselves into 2 companies, is so that the content providers can't use the DVD business' cash flow to pay for the content. So content providers can't charge an arm and a leg because the cash flow of the streaming side would be much smaller.
However, the miscalculation here is that content providers can simply make their own content available themselves through streaming. Which is already happening in other continents, and even in the US through Google, Facebook etc. I think Netflix has severely miscalculated itself, and this may be the end.
Pillaging? There's absolutely nothing wrong with giving a new voice to stories that have become part of our cultural consciousness. That's precisely how cultures evolve. We build upon the creations of those who went before us, adding our own unique touches and flourishes.
The only pillaging here is being done by politicians and lobbyists who are preventing new developments from being adapted and evolved. The creative contribution of Hendrix's recording of "All Along the Watchtower" is something many of us appreciate, but we've also seen glimpses into what sort of creations can be made with it (e.g., Battlestar Galactica's adaptation at the end of Season 3) and we're now being denied that by decisions like these.
These articles always remind me of how prescient Star Trek was when it came to technology, and how we really don't have anything like that these days. The last big SciFi show, Battlestar Galactica, seemed to go out of its way to avoid making any bold tech predictions, and the Star Trek franchise seems to have fizzled out (that movie doesn't count). ST:TOS predicted cloaks just six years after the first laser was ever fired, and 3 years before development began on UNIX. Holograms took until TNG, but they were still a good 20 years early.
I feel like we're getting ripped off. I want radical predictions that I can watch daytime specials on Discovery about in 50 years.
European who loves watching USA TV shows: it can literally take YEARS before very successful US shows make it to (non-pay) TV over here and quite often they are not being shown at all.
I was honestly surprised "Dexter" was on regular German TV here rather soon - I was on season three when they started season one here. I cannot say "Breaking Bad" is being aired yet nor "The Shield", "The Wire" or any other of my favorite shows. Not even "Battlestar Galactica" or "South Park" made it to non-pay TV.
Well, at least "Two and a Half Men" is on if you are so inclined.
Where I live in the States, I pay $65 USD for 7MBit DSL with a 250GB softcap. I've only gone over the cap about 3 times in the 4 years I've been with my ISP, and it is never more than 300GB total that month, with the exception of this winter. I've also never had to pay for additional usage beyond my standard monthly bill. My average per month is about 80GB for last year, which is mostly consumed by a full level 0 dump once per month and weekly level 1 dumps of 3 remote BSD VPSes to a home server once a month, yet I still only consume about 1/3rd of my allotted bandwidth.
My fiancé was between semesters at school this winter, and decided to finish watching Battlestar Galactica, among a couple dozen other movies to occupy her time through Netflix. My router's bandwidth logs show that she consumed about 35GB a day for 12 of her 15 days off. We hit somewhere under 500GB of data that month. Using TekSavvy's upcoming rates listed in this thread at $32.00 per month for 25GB with $2.00 per additional GB, we would have had a bill approaching $1,000.00. How the fuck is that justifiable?
Our current model takes in account that occasionally, users will blow through their caps with no regard for the sky, but most other months are way below the cap. My current plan, of which was negotiated over 4 years ago and has not changed since, still serves my needs perfectly. I could cut out Netflix and my VPS backups and use 4GB a month, but why should I move to a service plan that is lesser than my 4 year old contract? Did I mention my current ISP service plan was negotiated 4 years ago? ISPs have had 4 years, in my case, to upgrade their equipment to accommodate an increase in users, of which they have been pushing, because as a company, they like having an increase in subscribers. Realizing now that they are at the peak and want more money for the increased traffic is entirely out of line since they have had years of growth in their subscriber base and years of blind profit, but none of that was spent ensuring that they would have additional room to grow.
I would gladly pay a flat fee per GB of data, since theoretically it is more fair. I will not pay a flat fee that is approaching a 15 times increase profit for my ISP from what they paid for that GB. They gave me and every single other subscriber 250GB to use per month, and for the past 4 years, my habits have evolved to be aware and use 250GB of data per month. Cutting it back to 25GB and additional at $2/GB is entirely ridiculous. Moving backwards is not a solution.
Voyager and Enterprise got (and deserve) a lot of criticism, but DS9, at least while it was airing, was very widely respected as possibly the best Star Trek series ever produced. And that's because the writers realized that, at the time, the premise of space travel to strange alien worlds was not fantastic enough to hold viewer attention. Where TNG and especially TOS featured some new, strange thing each week (be it a fantastically powerful noncorporeal entity or a planet killer or a Dyson sphere), DS9 mostly took its world as a given and built a compelling, continuous drama out of those elements. It's quite similar to how the new Battlestar Galactica was constructed, and BSG developed a small, passionate fanbase during its run. (Not coincidentally, BSG had a number of DS9 writers on its staff.)
I also disagree that it's too late for a reboot. The reboot was the single most successful Star Trek movie ever produced.
This would need to include the voice of the drill instructor from Full Metal Jacket. Or allow users to pick a voice that best suits them. I can only imagine a call like this: "What, you incompetent maggot? You couldn't finish that code because an episode of Battlestar Galactica came on.... Turn off that boob tube and start writing some code, you filthy useless piece of shit"
I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves.
This reminded me of something from one of Joel Spolsky's last regular blog posts (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/03/14.html):
Although I appreciate that many people find Twitter to be valuable, I find it a truly awful way to exchange thoughts and ideas. It creates a mentally stunted world in which the most complicated thought you can think is one sentence long. It’s a cacophony of people shouting their thoughts into the abyss without listening to what anyone else is saying. Logging on gives you a page full of little hand grenades: impossible-to-understand, context-free sentences that take five minutes of research to unravel and which then turn out to be stupid, irrelevant, or pertaining to the television series Battlestar Galactica. I would write an essay describing why Twitter gives me a headache and makes me fear for the future of humanity, but it doesn’t deserve more than 140 characters of explanation, and I’ve already spent 820.
I suspect there's more of the early HP spirit at Agilent than at HP. Somehow when Compaq got the HP computer division, they got the name too, and the very cool test equipment part of HP got the new name Agilent. (This is my recollection, I'm sure the wikipedia has a much more detailed history)
I chuckle when I see the old tube-type HP gear as movie props. The HP 330 series distortion analyzer has had many appearances including on the wall in the presidents office in Battlestar Galactica. HP and Tektronix certainly have had many years as favorites for much of their test gear. Much older equipment is still in use. It's an eye opener to see the circuit boards with all the traces covered in gold. Not just an edge connector... the entire boards. Time to dust off my favorite early piece, the HP 300 Harmonic Wave Analyzer...
http://www.kennethkuhn.com/hpmuseum/
I was motivated by just how god-awful the ending to the Battlestar Galactica TV series was.
I found it impossible to relate to or care about any of the characters.
If you haven't seen it, find the incredible review of the Phantom Menace on YouTube by Red Letter Media. The most insightful part is where he asks people to describe the nature of the characters in both trilogies. For the original movies, people instantly recall, for example the "dashing...arrogant..scoundrel" Han Solo. For the newer films, nothing. What was princess Amidala like? Nobody cares.
Avatar suffered from this, and no amount of shiny graphics could ever bring me to care. With great characters you can forgive all kinds of things (eg Battlestar Galactica.)
I've never had cable. Well, honestly, I've never paid for it. I've had roomies who just had to have it, but I never wanted it or had a TV until a few years ago. In the past couple years I've been watching TV series like Battlestar Galactica on DVD, but otherwise my TV is for watching movies.
Oh, come on. Are people really taking this article seriously? Look, it would be interesting to read an academic analysis of possible differences in how the sexes both produce and perceive entertainment. That is not what this article is. It is about pushing a gender war, where men are battling against a female gay alliance for control of the media.
From the article: Men, young and old, find gays and bisexuality (among men at least) about as attractive as a “fabulous” Broadway show followed by a viewing of all three of the “High School the Musical” movies. In fact, the more “gay” Broadway has become, (and the more technically excellent), the more repellent it has become to men and boys. Indeed, metal and rap’s popularity stem from the hostility both have to gays, making male sexuality not “questionable” the way the love for Broadway showtunes would be.Women generally like gays, and find gay sex fascinating the way men do lesbian sex. However, men know well that most young women, if presented a magic button that would make most men (average joes) “gay” they’d break their fingers pushing it. The chief objective of attractive young women being turning off male desire of all but the most Alpha of men.
This is so wrong I don't know where to start. The author misrepresents men who like musicals, gay men, rap music, and women all in one paragraph. The article he is responding to, "The War on Science Fiction and Marvin Minsky" is just as bad.
As a final note, some of the recent television shows the author uses to support his conclusion that women are ruining science fiction are "Battlestar Galactica", the new "Dr. Who", "Buffy", and "Firefly". It has not been my experience that any of these shows have succeeded in repulsing a male audience, although perhaps that's just my group of friends.
No, I understood. And I really appreciate your intentions. I just addressed the things that were most relevant to me in more detail. I do have congressman fight insurance companies on my behalf. But, I'm very lucky because of my wife and finances at this point in my life (finally), so I think I can have a bigger impact by thinking outside of my own problems a bit.
One of the people that was very helpful to me in finding treatment (and her sister) are in the documentary I mention, for example, and she died from Lyme complications after filming because she was denied adequate treatment for so long. I know others that have died due to Lyme and associated vector-borne diseases. (A celebrity reference for the HN crowd: Mary McDonnell of Donnie Darko and Battlestar Galactica is an activist in fighting Lyme and associated tick diseases that I occasionally see because she had a family member die of Lyme.) In sum, people are dying - and wishing they could die - because of these diseases, so I also wanted to address other actions I have taken and that others can also take.
I'm with you on video games, anime, and sci-fi/fantasy; for some reason, things targeted at geeks always rub me the wrong way. For instance, I can for the life of me not figure out why people enjoy Battlestar Galactica.
I'm not with you on TV. The best films I've seen in the past 5 years are nowhere nearly as good as The Wire or the first 4 seasons of The West Wing.
very true about the post-rock (I listen to Mogwai while coding as well). I'd add movie soundtracks / scores to the list for the same reason. Still a huge fan of the Battlestar Galactica soundtracks, esp season 2, and pretty much anything done by John Murphy (28 Days Later, Miami Vice).
Movies are as much (or more) a visual medium than an intellectual medium. Visuals are every bit as important as ideas. But visuals are the easiest part to convey in a trailer, and the lightcycles are the coolest visual element of Tron.
It's kind of like how in the reimagined Battlestar Galactica, they kept the Viper launch tubes because it was an awesome visual, and they had the scanny-red-eye Cylons. It didn't keep them from cutting to the heart of the ideas of BSG (survival and escape from a mechanical, inhuman enemy) but the visuals were just as much at the heart.
Let me put it this way--if there was a Tron movie that was perfectly true to the ideas of the original, but without any lightcycles at all, that would be just as wrong as making a Tron sequel that's all about lightcycles.
Nice write-up, it gives me some things to look for next time I watch the movies, like Amidala's costume color.
Trek is a series of standalone 42-minute episodes written by different authors with different agendas. Wars is one man's vision and after the first movie Lucas had all the time and money required for the rest. So it's natural to think of Wars as a better "whole" than Trek.
But in both cases I find myself wishing the vision and writing had been better. Does anybody over the age of 5 think Jar-Jar Binks was a good idea well-executed? No, he was just a plot device. Trek's Wesley Crusher is equally grating in most of his episodes. ("Wesley" is not to be confused with the talented Wil Wheaton, who deserved a better character.)
But when I watch Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica, well, I don't think the writing is bad or the characters contrived. Better vision, better writing, better stories.
That simply isn't true tho'. The biggest and most famous franchise of all, Star Wars, is heavily religious, the very first film states it openly. So is the best recent sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica. A main character of Firefly is a preacher.
Even in Star Trek the Vulcans spend an awful lot of time contemplating candles and wearing robes. They may not talk about it on-screen but the producers must have consciously chosen to use monastic/Catholic imagery.
In Australia, BitTorrent is especially popular among those who want to catch up with US television shows that appear months or years later on TV down under. Money is not so much of an issue for them, they simply want to see the latest Lost or Heroes episodes.
I'd just like to reiterate this point.
As a pay TV subscriber (foxtel), it always astounds me to have seen episodes like Battlestar Galactica and Heroes advertised as "aired in the US only hours before" (those were the exact words)- for the same episodes I had downloaded and watched about 12 weeks prior.
It's not that I don't want to pay for the content, I mean, I'm a pay TV subscriber, I'm paying for eventual access to it - it's frustrating to be living in a global community and friends can be discussing an episode of one of the few shows I do watch that has already aired but due to odd licensing/distribution deals, that content is just not available legally in any timely manner, even if you WANT to pay for it.
I've already ranted on this topic many times before (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=569114 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=498159 plus others), I know lots of people who are Australians and who feel exactly the same way - its not that we don't want to pay for that content, but their bad deals are kind of forcing our hands given the communication between people moves at a much faster pace than the licensing deals.
I kind of saw the same sort of data the other day when I had looked at the Alexa top 100 by country and was interested to see mininova specifically come in at #37 (depending on how accurate you argue Alexa to be http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries;1/AU) so seeing data like this only confirmed my initial suspicions and argument based off anecdotal evidence.
Basically, get a clue tv industry...
"The copyright holders seem to think that we still travel the Atlantic in a ocean liners run on coal. So they operate with licences that ignore the fact that people don’t care about countries and borders anymore."
I like to watch TV shows. I also like to discuss episodes with other people. Unfortunately most TV shows I watch are either months behind or don't air at all where I live. So I read about these shows, but by the time I can participate in the conversation the discussion has moved on. That's why I torrent shows. Not because I'm not willing to pay for them (I own most of the DVD sets) but because otherwise I wouldn't get the chance to participate in one of the most gratifying aspects of following these series.
More extreme examples are series like Firefly and Battlestar Galactica. Both never aired here and likely never will. I'm not willing to spend 45 euros on DVDs based on Internet word of mouth alone, but in both cases I got hooked after torrenting a few episodes and payed afterwards.
The key is in switching to an actionable ad model. Let's say I'm watching TV, and I know I'm going to have to buy toothpaste anyways. Then an ad comes up that says: Try this new toothpaste, it tastes like pork mixed with vanilla, and it just so happens I like pork mixed with vanilla, I click a button and my order of toothpaste is in. Or I'm watching a TV show, and then a 10 second Ad about the new Lexus comes up. I'm interested, so I hit the interest button and when the show is over, a browsable website is available with more information.
But this will not work on the current broadcast system. It only works on the web, and that's why TV is going to have to merge with the Web. The infrastructure is almost all in place, it's just a matter of switching. This is the real shake-up that is about to come, not gradient borders on todo lists.
Some TV shows are good, but they are expensive. But people pay for entertainment. There will always be an audience for Battlestar Galactica, and if the networks cannot offer it, someone else will offer it by making it cheaper and make the profits.
I was referring to the passage in the article which reads (emphasis mine): 'Distributes, shares, or facilitates the distribution of unauthorized data, malware, viruses, Trojan horses, spyware, worms, or other malicious or harmful code (collectively, “Harmful Components”).'
I took that to include copyrighted data, including Battlestar Galactica episodes.
On your last point; now we have another study, from a somewhat biased organization that believes strongly in, relies on, and supports, the "long tail" version of the music industry to support the long tail theory.
You're absolutely right. I don't think the facts have quite come out yet. I do think it has a lot to do with the models of the businesses doing the research. I bet you'd find that Hulu has a pretty interesting long tail (and plenty of blockbusters, as well), because I go there a couple of times a week, and I'm sometimes surprised by what has bubbled to the top 50 results--quite a lot of back catalog stuff. Even stuff that has been out of regular syndication for years, like the original Battlestar Galactica, and other old, somewhat forgotten shows, and shows that didn't make it very long on TV, like Firefly and John Doe.
I don't know, as I haven't studied things very closely--I saw Anderson give his long tail talk a few years ago, and I've read the article when it was published, but I haven't paid it too much mind. I do know that my tastes are squarely in the long tail. I don't watch blockbuster movies, I don't buy blockbuster records, and I don't read blockbuster books, in general. But, I also know that I'm not "normal" or "average" in my tastes, so I am and outlier and not a reliable predictor of anything the average consumer is going to do. I will point out, though, that there are more independent records being made, more independent films being produced, and more independent literature being produced than at any time in history. That has to be explainable somehow, though I don't know if the long tail is the right way to explain it. Maybe it's just bigger populations plus the Internet equals "everybody gets to makes records/movies/literature" now.
I really can't agree with the hypothesis that this guy is putting forward. Why would anyone work directly with the filesystem for storing large amounts of data in this day? Examples from MacOSX include email, photos, or music. I have two ways of getting at this: 1) Use the program that manages the library - Mail, iPhoto or iTunes - these have very friendly interfaces for most of the common tasks that you may want to do with these document types. Of important note, they have special use cases - I want mail from this week, or from this person, or that mention a certain subject. I want photos taken on a certain date, or during a certain event, or I want to create an album which shows photos of my niece from any event. I want to organise a playlist for tonight's party, or for listening to on my iPhone, or I want to find all of my Pink Floyd albums. Application-centric access is great for this.
2) Spotlight. But what if I want to do something else. Say I want to put a copy of all my Battlestar Galactica episodes on my Media Centre. Not a problem, Spotlight will grab all of those files for me in less than a second in the Finder. Or if I don't want to make copies, I could do something a bit more geeky, and create a smart folder containing everything Battlestar Galactica, and then iterate through that folder using a script to create alias to each item. I could then share the aliases, without having to make copies of those large files.
The days of handling the filesystem details of how one stores data are over. The computer can add so much more semantic information for us these days, allowing complex queries to retrieve the data that it would be silly to do the job manually. I don't try to read raw files out of an SQL database, I use queries - a userspace filesystem these days is much the same - don't worrying about ordering the data, just worry about being able to craft the right query to retrieve it...
Seeing the same Toyota ad seven times isn't helpful to the consumer.
But it's helpful to the marketer. It takes at least that many impressions to even register.
This is actually why I'm surprised by how little money online advertising makes. It would be possible for an advertiser to buy several impressions with the same user--or a series of ads being shown to the same user. Everything I've ever read about marketing tells me this would be more effective than an ad shown to five different people only once.
They need to 1) includes ads into small clips (3-5 min)
I recently built an HTPC with Media Center. When I first fired it up, I browsed to the "watch TV online" thing...clicked on the first popular clip. 30 second ad. 45 second clip. Never again will I browse to that option on my HTPC. Ever.
Anything less than 5 minutes with an ad is gonna piss me off.
But, I do love Hulu. The quality isn't as good as I'd like for most of the shows and movies (that HTPC is hooked up to a 46" 1080p TV), and I had to hit bittorrent to catch up on Battlestar Galactica this season when I missed the first couple--they only have the last three or four episodes on Hulu and scifi.com--but I still like being able to catch up on shows at my convenience.
I thought all the belly-aching about Vista was just people hating changes. Until I actually had to deal with a Vista PC. When my girlfriend bought a new HDTV, I built an HTPC to go with it, running Vista. Every driver just stops working (in interesting and confusing ways) every now and then, and has to be reinstalled. Yesterday I spent an hour poking at the network driver because it wouldn't connect and I couldn't watch the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica (and not being able to watch Battlestar Galactica makes me angry). Every once in a while the HDMI audio driver just stops working and has to be reinstalled. When switching between inputs on the TV, sometimes the video signal goes black, and the machine has to be hard rebooted. I'm sure these are all the fault of the hardware people writing crappy drivers, but it sure is a pain in the ass.
Amazon's Unbox software does something even worse on Vista. For some reason I can't figure out, it will only run once--on the next boot, it fails to start. That would be fine, except it tries to start again, and Vista pops up one of its "application has encountered an error and will be closed" or whatever...and Unbox tries to start again. Infinite loop. Since the Vista popup steals focus and cannot be ignored, the system has to be rebooted, and the app has to be uninstalled before the infinite loop kicks in.
I'd been led to believe that constant rebooting was a thing of the past in Vista...I think I reboot this box more than the XP install on my gaming system.
Vista is the worst computing experience I believe I've ever had. (And I've been using Linux as my primary OS since 96, when there were like five well-supported pieces of hardware, and I've also used every Windows since 95 in my life as an IT support contractor. I think many would say that Windows ME was the worst, but now I'd have to disagree. At least all of the drivers from 95/98 worked on ME.)
Out of things currently airing -- Battlestar Galactica, Weeds, Heroes, in that order.
The greatest TV show of all time is Six Feet Under. If you've never watched it, you're in for the best 64 hours of visual media of your life.
http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3420704/Six_Feet_Under_season_1