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8:48 am
March 30, 2011
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Hljothlegur
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Post edited 9:53 am – March 30, 2011 by Hljothlegur
Hljothlegur said:
Bought and am reading Crysis Legion. [snip]OMG, this is like walking barefoot over hot coals – I am walking faster and faster to get it over with. Maybe it will get better.
Andrea_A said:
I agree with you, it's not as complex as Blindsight or The Island. But much better than usual movie adaptations. (I read some over the years … but went more picky since this time, especially after discovering Watts).
Maybe for some gamers Crysis Legion would be starter drug to Rifters …
You could be right, that might be my problem, that this is an adaptation. I didn't like The Things when he excerpted it on The Crawl, but it makes sense and worked pretty well as it appeared finished, even tho' it is an adaptation. (Actually, it's kind of beautiful in its final form, especially when narrated by a woman.) I'm starting to think that descriptions of battle just do not flip my wig, especially written ones.
Visual ones, as in movies, really get the idea across better, in a non-boring way, but the more verity they have, the more unbearable they are to watch. E.g.,Saving Private Ryan – the opening where we see the D Day onslaught was pornographic in its detail, and pornographic in that it was gratuitous. Gee, fellas, war is hell? You mean beautiful useful young men are trained and dressed just to be slaughtered? That battle is a sickening and repulsive example of the old, rich and powerful sending the young and poor to murder and be murdered as part of a political chess game? And it's atrocious and morally indefensible? Really, gee, we never would have figured that out if you hadn't spent millions of recreate it in fetishistic detail for us on film.
So I am really biased, I guess. I'm not sure there is a way to describe battlefields, even full of aliens and cybernetic men, that won't repulse me a little if described closely enough, or bore me if left vague enough. I may just not be the target audience for this kind of sci fi.
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3:56 pm
March 30, 2011
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Andrea_A
| | Germany | |
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Hljothlegur said:
You could be right, that might be my problem, that this is an adaptation. I didn't like The Things when he excerpted it on The Crawl, but it makes sense and worked pretty well as it appeared finished, even tho' it is an adaptation. (Actually, it's kind of beautiful in its final form, especially when narrated by a woman.) I'm starting to think that descriptions of battle just do not flip my wig, especially written ones.
Sometimes they find their way into my mind too well. I read Baxters "Time Tapestry", with several battles from Roman Empire to World War 2. The battles are my most prominent memory about the books.
Visual ones, as in movies, really get the idea across better, in a non-boring way, but the more verity they have, the more unbearable they are to watch. E.g.,Saving Private Ryan – the opening where we see the D Day onslaught was pornographic in its detail, and pornographic in that it was gratuitous. Gee, fellas, war is hell? You mean beautiful useful young men are trained and dressed just to be slaughtered? That battle is a sickening and repulsive example of the old, rich and powerful sending the young and poor to murder and be murdered as part of a political chess game? And it's atrocious and morally indefensible? Really, gee, we never would have figured that out if you hadn't spent millions of recreate it in fetishistic detail for us on film.
Don't know this film, but "Windtalkers" had been enough for me showing war as dirty business. "Die Brücke" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D…..%28film%29 even more. This movie had been required at school, causing more than one nightmare in the class.
So I am really biased, I guess. I'm not sure there is a way to describe battlefields, even full of aliens and cybernetic men, that won't repulse me a little if described closely enough, or bore me if left vague enough. I may just not be the target audience for this kind of sci fi.
Normally avoiding MilSF. But sometimes liking "action". Scalzi's "Old Man's War" had been spiced with irony, making it a more than acceptable choice.
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3:12 pm
April 24, 2011
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Andrea_A
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Now I've finished "Legion", and it simply had been fun. Watts' black humor … hehe. I guess "The Things" qualified him for this adaptation, showing him to be able to "walk in another man's shoes".
One idea is going around in my head … the "gardener's tools"—or (maybe as alternative analogy) the lawn-mowing sheep? What comes next? The sheperd dog? Gardener's "Mongo"/"Igor"? The Gardener itself? Much stuff for "Crysis 3".
Some other books/movies about salvaging alien artifacts and/or getting into the way of some Powers: Strugatzky Brother's "Roadside Picnic", and the animated film "Phantastic Planet". Maybe A. Bertram Chandler's story "Giant Killer", too (with reversed roles, the humans are the Powers). The situation in New York got compared with humans "treating" ants; so taking a look at Bernard Werber's allegoric "Les Fourmis" ("Empire of the Ants") might be interesting.
I had some issues with the book's "hardware". At least the U.K. paperback edition looks like been layouted by the gardener … I found more than 30 widows*, a typographic no-go. A magazine (ammo) for each would be more than enough for running amok in the botch office  … Sometimes I'm asking myself why I learned that job; in the era of Desktop Publishing nobody cares about such details.
_____
* last line of a paragraph at the top of a page/column. "Hurenkind" (sonofabitch) in German, not a curse word in this context, only technical jargon.
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3:00 pm
April 25, 2011
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Flanders
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Copyediting (especially in genre fiction) is getting worse and worse. The worst I ever saw was the paperback edition of John Barnes' Candle. Between the widows n' orphans, miscellaneous typos, the inability to figure out whether the novel was talking about "memes" or "memos" (hint: it was the latter), and the bit where there was an italicized word and then they forgot to turn the italics off for the rest of the chapter, I was left wondering if they'd just run it through MS Word's spellchecker and called it a day.
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1:26 am
May 7, 2011
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sheila
| | mindsided by Blindsight | |
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I have been on vacation for 3 weeks now (yay, coming home today) and been meaning to think with more depth on the suit using the human as a hardware platform but have not so I will post half-assed stuff.
I have always been a fan of cyberpunk with a desire to "jack in", have neural interfaces, even more improved smart phones.
so with this story there is this but the injuries the guy suffers (or maybe the lack of morals or testing of the suit designer) remove his agency, maybe even his sense of agency.
a few weeks ago I reread The Long Run by Daniel Keyes Moran because it was available in ebook form and I had not read it in a long long time. spoilers. In it, Trent obtains an experimental neural interface illegally so that he can load his intelligent agent on it. It is an apotheosis almost, like he merges with his agent and they become something more. he desires it.
(same thing happens in movie version of Ghost in the Shell, at the end. puppetmaster joins with the woman)
okay, well, I gotta log out and get to the train now but quickly…
go over to latest blog entry in the crawl in the comments section where there is a sentence or two of Watts covering (maybe dismissing?) the idea of *something* with agency even if we retcon it to think it is ours.
Alcatraz maybe has his something of agency raised or lowered in awareness. or maybe that is meaningless.
and I was at a user group meeting where we had a researcher discussing prosthetics and neural interfaces and bayesian analysis for detecting intent of where the device would move…
and also consider how people who need to use these have to train…
so I wanted to pull those ideas together in relation to Alcatraz.
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