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basic hitler posted:Maybe Crichton was a hack, but I had a good time reading Jurassic Park and Andromeda Strain. His other stuff may be samey to the point of comedy but those are a good read and considerably better than a lot of science fiction I could've read instead. I'll never be able to look at JP without rose colored glasses after how much I enjoyed reading it in 6th grade. I've never been so glued to a book. I was also so proud of myself for reading such a big book 
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Feb 26, 2017 19:31
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Enos Cabell posted:The 13th Warrior was really underrated I thought. Never have read the book though. Whenever I hear people talk about this movie, everyone gets extremely hung up on "that's not how you make a scimitar" and "that's not how you learn another language" criticisms but as far as historical revisionist cannibal viking horror movies go, this was a good one.
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Feb 26, 2017 19:50
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Enos Cabell posted:The 13th Warrior was really underrated I thought. Never have read the book though. The book is way better than the movie and my favorite Chricton book overall.
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Feb 26, 2017 19:52
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achillesforever6 posted:I heard Pirate Latitudes was pretty decent and Spielberg wanted to adapt it, which I would allow since he's one of the few who could make Crichton's works great movies; Crichton was pretty much a hack in retrospect, though The Andromeda Strain is still a decent book. Don't forget, he also went back to "The Andromeda Strain" poorly as well with "Sphere" and "Prey".
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Feb 26, 2017 19:55
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achillesforever6 posted:Crichton was pretty much a hack in retrospect, though The Andromeda Strain is still a decent book. His best novel is A Case of Need and it isn't even close. Holy God, he fell off a cliff after Jurassic Park, though. The Japan-bashing in Rising Sun is disgusting, Disclosure, The Lost World, Timeline and Airframe are all trash and I gave up on him after that, never bothered with Prey or State of Fear or Next.
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Feb 26, 2017 20:09
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Rising Sun is hilarious in how immediately it dates itself.
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Feb 26, 2017 20:13
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Young Freud posted:Don't forget, he also went back to "The Andromeda Strain" poorly as well with "Sphere" and "Prey". Andromeda Strain and Sphere are pretty different. They both feature a team of scientists, but Sphere is about them confronting their own repressed fears and desires, while Andromeda Strain is about them confronting an implacable and chaotic universe.
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Feb 26, 2017 20:18
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Timby posted:His best novel is A Case of Need and it isn't even close. Holy God, he fell off a cliff after Jurassic Park, though. The Japan-bashing in Rising Sun is disgusting, Disclosure, The Lost World, Timeline and Airframe are all trash and I gave up on him after that, never bothered with Prey or State of Fear or Next. prey is actually half decent as it's mostly a thriller but state of fear is global warming denialism bullshit and i think next contains a character named after a journalist who wrote negatively about him because of the global warming denialism and the character is a peodphile with a tiny penis. michael crichton was the king of "idea guys". i would've loved to have seen his premises handled by someone who could actually write.
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Feb 26, 2017 20:23
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Groovelord Neato posted:prey is actually half decent as it's mostly a thriller but state of fear is global warming denialism bullshit and i think next contains a character named after a journalist who wrote negatively about him because of the global warming denialism and the character is a peodphile with a tiny penis. Don't forget that his original film treatments that he wrote and directed have some interesting bits. Runaway is pretty laughable these days and it's answer came in the form of The Terminator, released the same month as Runaway, but Looker has some interesting ideas that could have been explored separately, like cosmetic surgery addiction to attain the perfect look, image rights in the computer-generated area, and tailored advertising becoming frighteningly effective, but putting them together in the same film with dazzler guns and conspiracy plot just results in a jumbled mishmash.
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Feb 26, 2017 20:30
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Peanut President posted:Technically no dinosaurs break out in any Jurassic Park movies because they're not true dinosaurs due to the frog dna inserted into their code. Also the lack of feathers.
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Feb 26, 2017 20:42
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Bill Paxton passed away at 61.
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Feb 26, 2017 21:01
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Game over man. Game over. 
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Feb 26, 2017 21:07
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MonsieurChoc posted:feathers. the worst scientific discovery in human history, bar none.
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Feb 26, 2017 21:19
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Groovelord Neato posted:the worst scientific discovery in human history, bar none. Feathered dinos are way cool you loving scrub
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Feb 26, 2017 21:25
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nope. scales are way cooler and scarier. nerds always try to defend the drag queens of the jurassic but it'll never work on me, my mind is too strong.
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Feb 26, 2017 21:30
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Groovelord Neato posted:nope. scales are way cooler and scarier. nerds always try to defend the drag queens of the jurassic but it'll never work on me, my mind is too strong. The scaly ones were never real and also look dumb. You ever meet a lizard? They're stupid as hell and not intimidating in the least.
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Feb 26, 2017 21:34
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If it didn't inevitably cost a ton of money to do, I'd love to see versions of the JP series as giant birds, just to see how goofy it'd be.
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Feb 26, 2017 21:37
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Enos Cabell posted:The 13th Warrior was really underrated I thought. Never have read the book though. The Great Train Robbery was a fun movie too. As people've been saying t's his later stuff that was just downright insufferable.
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Feb 26, 2017 22:08
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Rough Lobster posted:Was this the one where THEY FAX THEMSELVES TO THE PAST! because that's all I remember about that movie. What a dumb idea. Wait, if they faxed themselves to the past, they would just be creating a copy of themselves in the past, and the original ones would stay in the present. because faxing doesn't destroy the original document, only copies it in a remote location. *has clearly watched/read too much sci-fi*
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Feb 26, 2017 22:12
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Spatula City posted:Wait, if they faxed themselves to the past, they would just be creating a copy of themselves in the past, and the original ones would stay in the present. because faxing doesn't destroy the original document, only copies it in a remote location. I don't know about the movie but in the book they literally go "don't think about it too much" and also he cheats because the people are conscious the entire time so you know that it's actually "them." A weird thing about the book is that even though they are all perfectly clear that it isn't actually the past the corporate guys have a stupid rule about not bringing advanced technology with them. Even though the very first thing that happens when they travel is some dudes show up and murder all their guards.
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Feb 26, 2017 22:35
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:The book is way better than the movie and my favorite Chricton book overall. I thought it was the great train robbery? Your Crichton opinions are slippery as heck Groovelord Neato posted:prey is actually half decent as it's mostly a thriller but state of fear is global warming denialism bullshit and i think next contains a character named after a journalist who wrote negatively about him because of the global warming denialism and the character is a peodphile with a tiny penis. He was a great writer. Not a great prose stylist, and I know sentence level writing is the only thing MFAs care about these days, but homeboy could structure a page turner like no other. A Crichton novel is insomnia with page numbers.
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Feb 26, 2017 22:46
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Groovelord Neato posted:nope. scales are way cooler and scarier. nerds always try to defend the drag queens of the jurassic but it'll never work on me, my mind is too strong.   
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Feb 26, 2017 22:51
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I think I made this thing my pet in WoW once.
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Feb 26, 2017 22:53
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DeimosRising posted:I thought it was the great train robbery? Your Crichton opinions are slippery as heck It goes back and forth. When I was a kid, for sure it was Jurassic Park or Congo.
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Feb 26, 2017 22:55
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Spatula City posted:Wait, if they faxed themselves to the past, they would just be creating a copy of themselves in the past, and the original ones would stay in the present. because faxing doesn't destroy the original document, only copies it in a remote location. There's a french canadian sci-fi comedy show where they used Telefaxing instead of Teleporting. I find it funny.
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Feb 26, 2017 23:04
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it looks fabulous. DeimosRising posted:He was a great writer. Not a great prose stylist, and I know sentence level writing is the only thing MFAs care about these days, but homeboy could structure a page turner like no other. A Crichton novel is insomnia with page numbers. he was not a great writer and his books often got bogged down in exposition.
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Feb 26, 2017 23:22
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Groovelord Neato posted:he was not a great writer and his books often got bogged down in exposition. My go-to example of this is when he spends like forty pages in The Lost World babbling incessantly about prions.
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Feb 26, 2017 23:26
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I was reading a book called The Fold which was about teleportation and the entire time I was thinking "This is just Timeline only with teleportation instead of time travel" and then it turned out that the tech was based on crazy Cthulhu math and was actually swapping people with alternate universe people and then of course Lovecraftian horrors from beyond came through
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Feb 27, 2017 00:00
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:It goes back and forth. When I was a kid, for sure it was Jurassic Park or Congo. And much like Jurassic Park, the movie adaptation of Congo perfected the source material.
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Feb 27, 2017 00:04
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Hell yeah the Congo movie is great.HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Rising Sun is hilarious in how immediately it dates itself. Clive Cussler had a japan-bashing book too that I somehow slogged through last year and it is so terrible. The lead character is continually the most awesome smart guy everywhere, I think he even killed a japanese guy with a samurai sword at the end when he invades Japan. But most of the book is boring as well as super anti-Japan. Improbable Lobster posted:The scaly ones were never real and also look dumb. You ever meet a lizard? They're stupid as hell and not intimidating in the least. Crocodiles are pretty intimidating. And speaking of novel chat, The Great Zoo of China has dragons that are sort of flying crocodiles and it's cool as hell. It's like Jurassic Park with a lot more explosions. got any sevens fucked around with this message at 00:20 on Feb 27, 2017 |
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Feb 27, 2017 00:13
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got any sevens posted:Hell yeah the Congo movie is great. Dirk Pitt?!? Didn't Cussler write more than one book where Pitt and Cussler meet and hang out and talk about how cool each other are?
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Feb 27, 2017 00:25
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FishBulb posted:Dirk Pitt?!? Didn't Cussler write more than one book where Pitt and Cussler meet and hang out and talk about how cool each other are? Clive Cussler always has a self-insert version of himself who shows up to either shoot the poo poo or give some minor assistance.
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Feb 27, 2017 00:31
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got any sevens posted:Crocodiles are pretty intimidating. And speaking of novel chat, The Great Zoo of China has dragons that are sort of flying crocodiles and it's cool as hell. It's like Jurassic Park with a lot more explosions.   
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Feb 27, 2017 00:37
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Len posted:"This is just Timeline only with teleportation instead of time travel" To be fair, Timeline is Timeline with teleportation instead of time travel.
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Feb 27, 2017 01:08
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Re: Timeline (the book, anyway. Haven't seen the movie in ages)-- It wasn't a "fax", they used fax as a way to explain some nasty errors that cropped up later. The time machine tapped into a wormhole that led only to that specific time and place in the past, so I don't know where this whole time travel theme park thing is coming from because they can only send people to medieval France and nowhere else (and not a parallell France, either. It's our France). So the Marek that left a message was their Marek. I agree that a lot of it was pretty bad, though, but they weren't faxing people bad.
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Feb 27, 2017 01:09
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I like when the history nerd hero guy stays in the past and becomes a medieval badass.
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Feb 27, 2017 01:14
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LucyWanabe posted:Re: Timeline (the book, anyway. Haven't seen the movie in ages)-- I think it was something about how some of the earlier travellers racked up enough trips that they started to get photocopy of a photocopy errors. Like imagine slicing a picture of someone in two and then trying to line up the two slices perfectly again but being just slightly off. People had their bones and cellular walls and blood vessels not quite lining up or connecting properly.
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Feb 27, 2017 01:17
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Yeah, transcription errors were why that one guy became a psychotic rear end in a top hat and stayed behind earlier. His brain got hosed up by the system being imperfect.
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Feb 27, 2017 01:21
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Also cool was the start of the book where the stereotype nerd kid who knows all about quantam physics so he can explain it to the dumb-rear end adults.
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Feb 27, 2017 01:32
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Dinosaurs = feathered isn't as clear cut as headlines make it. Most dinosaurs were scaled. There's some evidence that ceratopsians had a bit of feathering here and there, but for the most part they are how you pictured them, give or take a little plumage along the back. There is little evidence that large therapods had large, colourful, shafted feathers like modern birds. There is strong evidence they had fluffy downy feathers, but again it's not clear if they all had them (because there are certainly examples of certain species with scaled skin) or if they only appeared on juveniles which were lost as the animal matured. Eitherway, a T-Rex probably looked less like a flamingo and more like a wolf. Dromeosaurs are a different story, there is pretty strong fossil evidence that at least some of them had large feathered coverings so it stands to reason that most of them were probably like that. So Velociraptor, which was actually a teeny little dinosaur with a crocodile like snout, was probably Absolutely Fabulous. Big fluffy feathers like the ones we associated with modern birds have evolved to allow the animal to fly and conserve heat. They may have been evolutionary advantageous to a small therapod, but If you are a 16 meter, 8 tonne monster, you aren't flying nor losing heaps of heat. How does it benefit the animal to evolve them? It probably doesn't.
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Feb 27, 2017 04:09
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