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stephenthinkpad posted:I love Lee Pace, he is such a dick Not really a spoiler to say but... "magic" is also very important in the books and her abilities are pretty much just laying the foundation (heh) for that part. I also don't think we are supposed to think that she can see the future and this is purerly based on the show (Salvor as character is completetly different to the book version) but her visions are clearly tied to the vault and I'd speculate that the boy she saw on Trantor in her vision is simply Raych as kid. Another possible book spoiler (in a very tangential way) and pure speculation but honestly something that should be obvious from the TV show: I actually don't think this is about a typical "chosen one" or better said that it is somewhat of a misdirection. Imo Seldon uses the vault to influence what is happening and he picked Salvor due to her abilities so the only "magic" are her psychic abilities, everything else that is happening is connected to that fact. The bigger question is going to be how much the vault/Seldon know/control/manipulate events or if there is even a certain other "faction" involved. Phenotype posted:I really didn't expect it, I thought Asimov's stuff was all hard science and logic and didn't have any froo froo magic abilities running around. That being said, I'm here for it and willing to see what they do with it. I don't know that it's all "different magical abilities", though, I'm willing to accept a generalized "psychicness" or whatever that makes her immune to the force field and gives her vague precognitive abilities. Foundation isn't really "hard scifi" by modern SciFi standards and these psychic abilities are not just in the books but a central part of the story. I think a lot of book readers often chose to ignore it because Asimov treated them a lot like just another "tool" and they were mostly offscreen and/or sparingly used (and there are plot reasons for that) and might run under the "any technology advanced enough is indistinguishable from magic" approach ("psychic" abilities in the 40s and 50s were still something that many scientists didn't dismiss out of hand and let's just say that the later books also had a very spritiual element in them, certainly not just "logic"). LinkesAuge fucked around with this message at 22:37 on Oct 8, 2021 |
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Oct 8, 2021 22:27
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LinkesAuge posted:Foundation isn't really "hard scifi" by modern SciFi standards and these psychic abilities are not just in the books but a central part of the story. I think a lot of book readers often chose to ignore it because Asimov treated them a lot like just another "tool" and they were mostly offscreen and/or sparingly used (and there are plot reasons for that) and might run under the "any technology advanced enough is indistinguishable from magic" approach ("psychic" abilities in the 40s and 50s were still something that many scientists didn't dismiss out of hand and let's just say that the later books also had a very spritiual element in them, certainly not just "logic"). I compare it to the magic in Lord of the Rings. It's there, it's doing stuff, but it's way less in your face than something that's now.
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Oct 8, 2021 22:41
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In terms of that 40s/50s weirdness, I think it's kind of like how Star Trek TOS justified Gary Mitchell by referencing ESP
galenanorth fucked around with this message at 23:17 on Oct 8, 2021 |
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Oct 8, 2021 22:59
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One thing I do find wild is the total mishmash of accents. Lee Pace becoming way more American (I know he's an american, but it feels like he's trying to do that fantasy faux-british to a degree) when he's old is loving stupid and I get that American viewers don't seem to care about accents but it just takes me out of it. That irish lady on Terminus and etc, just...weird.
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Oct 8, 2021 23:10
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galenanorth posted:In terms of that 40s/50s weirdness think it's kind of like how Star Trek TOS justified Gary Mitchell by referencing ESP John Campbell, who published Foundation (and Dune) as editor of Astounding Science Fiction, was fuckin *obsessed* with ESP.
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Oct 8, 2021 23:15
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Speaking of Asimov and sci-fi publishing, “Mythic Quest” S2-episode 6 “Backstory” has both and fairly standalone.
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Oct 8, 2021 23:26
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Phenotype posted:I really didn't expect it, I thought Asimov's stuff was all hard science and logic and didn't have any froo froo magic abilities running around. That being said, I'm here for it and willing to see what they do with it. I don't know that it's all "different magical abilities", though, I'm willing to accept a generalized "psychicness" or whatever that makes her immune to the force field and gives her vague precognitive abilities. He had plenty of the Galactic Empire (and even some of the Robots I think) books that had psychics in them. In one of them (Pebble in the Sky) the main character is shot forward in time 50,000 years. Earth is a backwater in the Empire and he's seen as mentally deficient and undergoes an experimental "boosting" treatment. He ends up developing very powerful telepathic powers to point he has actual mind-bullets and can rupture people's brains. It's been decades since I read it, but I still remember how much I loved it as a kid. Next to Caves of Steel it's probably my favorite Asimov novel.
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Oct 9, 2021 01:18
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Regardless of plot I will continue to watch for set design and costumes. Dang they putting in some work.
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Oct 9, 2021 03:48
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My favorite parts continue to be the adventures of the Cleons.
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Oct 9, 2021 05:30
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Lee Pace owns. Also digging that Salvor’s boyfriend is both competent and supportive, it’s a refreshing dynamic.
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Oct 9, 2021 06:01
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Ur Getting Fatter posted:Lee Pace owns. 
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Oct 9, 2021 06:24
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THIS_IS_FINE posted:My favorite parts continue to be the adventures of the Cleons. I love the concept and so far it's developed in really interesting ways. Day becoming Dusk and having to eat poo poo from the version of him he raised from Dawn to Day rules, even if he's as guilty of the same kind of utter self-assurance that HE is the only one who truly understands the right thing to do. I'll be interested if the current Dawn's issues are just the same kind of uncertainty and confusion that ALL Dawns feel as they grow, or if there is something to Darkness' noting that something was wrong as he was marching to his death (or if that, too, is just how all Dusks react when their turn to become Darkness arrives). The Foundation stuff itself so far I'm finding less interesting than the Cleon stuff, though I like Salvor and the idea that Hari's plan has developed followers who have come to treat their mission with a kind of blind religious fervor.
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Oct 9, 2021 06:30
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Ur Getting Fatter posted:
Well what about his blue eyes that he briefly showed to the Anacreon captain. To me that implied he was secretly letting her know he was on her side? Did I read that wrong?
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Oct 9, 2021 06:34
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Phenotype posted:I really didn't expect it, I thought Asimov's stuff was all hard science and logic and didn't have any froo froo magic abilities running around. That being said, I'm here for it and willing to see what they do with it. I don't know that it's all "different magical abilities", though, I'm willing to accept a generalized "psychicness" or whatever that makes her immune to the force field and gives her vague precognitive abilities. Keep in mind that at the time Asimov wrote this, there where still scientists actively researching "psychic" poo poo thinking there might be something to it, and that something being "radio waves". As a result quite a few Sci-Fi writers decided that was excuse enough to include psychics. Hell, even as recently as star trek , which included psychics (ie Diana Troi), although Sta Trek is far from "Hard" sci-fi. I'm not sure you'll find that much in modern sci-fi since we've more or less proven that psychic powers are pseudoscientific horseshit, but the older stuff, there are valid excuses for it, and anyway, they can be nifty plot devices. I doubt you'd find Greg Bear or Greg Egan incorporating battle mages in their stories anytime soon however. duck monster fucked around with this message at 06:47 on Oct 9, 2021 |
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Oct 9, 2021 06:41
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D-Pad posted:Well what about his blue eyes that he briefly showed to the Anacreon captain. To me that implied he was secretly letting her know he was on her side? Did I read that wrong? I think that was just a throw-back to the weird blue space pilots from the first episode. He's a space traveler, after all.
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Oct 9, 2021 06:43
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D-Pad posted:Well what about his blue eyes that he briefly showed to the Anacreon captain. To me that implied he was secretly letting her know he was on her side? Did I read that wrong? No, l don't think that was it. Being a double-agent around Salvor in general seems like a singularly bad idea, let alone being her boyfriend when doing so. Besides I think he was establishing that he was from Thespia (she calls him "Thespian" like a curse after he flashes the eyes) who are generational enemies of Anacreon. Remember the bomber from Thespia in the space station eyes had flashed blue before he exploded. I think it was bluff during the interrogation implying Thespia supported the settlement and would respond unless she gave up the reason they were there and/or left the planet immediately. Proteus Jones fucked around with this message at 06:52 on Oct 9, 2021 |
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Oct 9, 2021 06:50
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Was Dawn fumbling to not be left-handed in the dinner scene? Possibly not a good sign in your perfect genetic dynasty.
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Oct 9, 2021 06:51
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twistedmentat posted:Based on its marketing, yes. Unlike some people, I don't have that much free time to devout to watching anything and everything. If you have time to post on here, that just comes off as condescending bullshit. We’re In the middle of a pandemic. You have time. Latest episode feels like they’re finally hitting their stride. Happy about that.
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Oct 9, 2021 08:32
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THIS_IS_FINE posted:My favorite parts continue to be the adventures of the Cleons. It's like the Clone version series ofreality TV shows like Big Brother. Which clone will be forced to "leave" the house next.
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Oct 9, 2021 14:02
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Have we discussed the part where Dusk says that something is wrong before being powderized?
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Oct 9, 2021 16:49
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I like this show but it has some really weird vibe to it that I just can't put my finger on. Psychohistory appears to be just a run of the mill computational sociology model, but it's treated as some kind of revolutionary discovery that hundreds of the best mathematicians can't figure out after studying it for decades and that has only been created after ten thousand years by a single person for some reason. And the scale of everything just seems off. Like, there are trillions of people in the empire but everything feels so small and revolves around a handful of characters. Seldon is supposed to be this extremely influential person, but the Foundation is just a couple hundred people. Shouldn't he have at least a couple billion followers to be even considered influential? They should have spend some time on establishing the scale of the empire more and what is at stake once it comes crumbling down. It's is supposed to be the Roman mega space empire. Show us the enormous administrative apparatus, the billions of soldiers, thousands of ships, extensive trade routes, life of ordinary citizens under imperial rule, etc. I don't really feel any attachments to the whole thing or why it would be bad if it's gone.
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Oct 9, 2021 17:16
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Yeah that's what I've been saying!
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Oct 9, 2021 17:26
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withak posted:Was Dawn fumbling to not be left-handed in the dinner scene? Possibly not a good sign in your perfect genetic dynasty. It does seem that way, maybe the "something wrong" Cleon was feeling was specifically about Cleon? The other Cleon I mean, not Cleon.
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Oct 9, 2021 17:53
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GABA ghoul posted:I like this show but it has some really weird vibe to it that I just can't put my finger on. Psychohistory appears to be just a run of the mill computational sociology model, but it's treated as some kind of revolutionary discovery that hundreds of the best mathematicians can't figure out after studying it for decades and that has only been created after ten thousand years by a single person for some reason. And the scale of everything just seems off. Like, there are trillions of people in the empire but everything feels so small and revolves around a handful of characters. Seldon is supposed to be this extremely influential person, but the Foundation is just a couple hundred people. Shouldn't he have at least a couple billion followers to be even considered influential? That may be more on the source material than anything. You never get a real sense of vastness from the books either to be honest. I do agree the show feels cramped and I'd love for episodes to maybe start with tiny vignettes illustrating the scale of the decay and fall of Empire. I feel like they were kind of caught in a bad place. They (mostly) hew as close to the source material as they can (although actually showing events rather than just talking about them) and get fairly predictable critique similar to yours. Or they create their own background details and dressing to demonstrate this vast, impersonal monolithic government that looms over the lives of trillions. And end up fielding book nerds rising up and bitching even more about "not my Asimov".
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Oct 9, 2021 18:02
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GABA ghoul posted:I like this show but it has some really weird vibe to it that I just can't put my finger on. Psychohistory appears to be just a run of the mill computational sociology model, but it's treated as some kind of revolutionary discovery that hundreds of the best mathematicians can't figure out after studying it for decades and that has only been created after ten thousand years by a single person for some reason. And the scale of everything just seems off. Like, there are trillions of people in the empire but everything feels so small and revolves around a handful of characters. Seldon is supposed to be this extremely influential person, but the Foundation is just a couple hundred people. Shouldn't he have at least a couple billion followers to be even considered influential? I get the complaints about scale, I would have liked it if they hadn't timeskipped all the way to Terminus and maybe the ship stopped at a few planets along the way to refuel and showed off a little more of the Empire, or maybe ran into an Imperial fleet and gave us some spaceporn shots of these giant cruisers. I think the two delegations from the first couple episodes were a good start, but we didn't learn enough about them for much in the way of worldbuilding. I don't think the Foundation is an issue, though -- it's one thing to have heard of Hari Seldon and think he's telling the truth, it's another to pick yourself up and travel across the galaxy to a planet in the rear end-end of nowhere to take part in what is essentially an encyclopedia publishing company best run by librarians. You're right that psychohistory is a bit of a black box, though -- I didn't realize that Gaal Dornick was literally the only other person in the galaxy who can even understand it. It's a different story than I thought they were going to tell, where Seldon ends up being almost a prophet figure as the only person who can commune with the almighty.
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Oct 9, 2021 18:27
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Phenotype posted:I don't think the Foundation is an issue, though -- it's one thing to have heard of Hari Seldon and think he's telling the truth, it's another to pick yourself up and travel across the galaxy to a planet in the rear end-end of nowhere to take part in what is essentially an encyclopedia publishing company best run by librarians. I agree. Running off to join Hari is effectively relegating yourself to exile on an unihabted rock in the middle of a DMZ at the edge of empire. Even assuming everything else is above board, it's still effectively a death sentence.
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Oct 9, 2021 18:33
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Well considering they are all acting like choice paralyzed cultists, it doesn't surprise me
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Oct 9, 2021 18:42
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Proteus Jones posted:That may be more on the source material than anything. You never get a real sense of vastness from the books either to be honest. I do agree the show feels cramped and I'd love for episodes to maybe start with tiny vignettes illustrating the scale of the decay and fall of Empire. I figure there will be more opportunities to visualize the scale and decline of the Empire as the show reaches the Foundation and Empire stories. It sounds like the show is still focused on the first Foundation book, and all of those stories are much more focused on how the Foundation survives its early days of isolation. Bobbin Threadbare fucked around with this message at 18:57 on Oct 9, 2021 |
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Oct 9, 2021 18:48
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Phenotype posted:I don't think the Foundation is an issue, though -- it's one thing to have heard of Hari Seldon and think he's telling the truth, it's another to pick yourself up and travel across the galaxy to a planet in the rear end-end of nowhere to take part in what is essentially an encyclopedia publishing company best run by librarians. I guess, but a couple hundred people still seems too few. The Foundation doesn't even have enough people so send an agent/representative to every world in the Empire. With trillions of people and their cultures and technologies to preserve and spread, it feels like it's just too small. I mean, a random rear end seed bank today already has something like 10 employees. I feel like the show would have benefited from portraying it as a much larger operation. It's not like Hari would have had any trouble convincing at least a couple million librarians to go with him (or whatever the librarian equivalent is in a society that has no need for librarians because libraries have been all digital for ten thousand years).
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Oct 9, 2021 18:49
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The Emperor's decision is to shuffle Hari off to a branch office in Alaska and then forget about him. The Foundation was never supposed to be properly resourced!
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Oct 9, 2021 18:51
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This show reminds me a lot of Niven's CoDominium universe. It's set after the dark ages that followed the collapse of the first galactic empire. The burgeoning second empire is much thinner populated, many technologies and archives have been lost in the hundreds of years of civil war. Most world have regressed into barbarism. "The Mote in God's Eyes" is even explicitly about the subject of perpetual cycles of collapse and rebuilding and societies setting up massive bunker "museums" that are supposed to make rebuilding after each collapse much faster, kinda like the Foundation. I guess I know now where he cribbed all his ideas from.
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Oct 9, 2021 19:02
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GABA ghoul posted:I guess, but a couple hundred people still seems too few. The Foundation doesn't even have enough people so send an agent/representative to every world in the Empire. With trillions of people and their cultures and technologies to preserve and spread, it feels like it's just too small. They definitely don't, but at this point I don't know if they're even allowed to visit imperial worlds. They're supposed to be exiled, and they were this close to all being killed like the painting cleaner, so only the most hardcore true believers are going to sign up for a life sentence at the rear end end of nowhere that could turn into a death sentence at any time if the fickle emperor catches a bad mood. You want to think more like a remote medieval monastery preserving the writings of the Roman Empire after it fell, except like a heretical sect in this case, because that's exactly what Asimov was thinking.
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Oct 9, 2021 19:22
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Did episode 3 and 4 mention the Encyclopedia at all? book 1 Isn't this a big decoy before the first Seldon Crisis? I am afraid the show watchers have forgotten about it already.
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Oct 9, 2021 19:23
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withak posted:Was Dawn fumbling to not be left-handed in the dinner scene? Possibly not a good sign in your perfect genetic dynasty. No. That's showing the clones diverging in personality. The young Cleon is meant to ape the motions, actions, and words of the older generations in order to condition him to be as similar as possible to them. This Brother Dawn is proving to be deviant in that regard. It's showing that despite all efforts, each of these men is not the same, no matter how hard they try. Much like the argument between Day and Dusk, it's highlighting the fracturing of the emperor's singularity of rule, not a physical flaw in the cloning. This is reinforced with him being slow on the uptake several times in the episode, learning to act like the others .
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Oct 9, 2021 19:32
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feedmyleg posted:No. That's showing the clones diverging in personality. The young Cleon is meant to ape the motions, actions, and words of the older generations in order to condition him to be as similar as possible to them. This Brother Dawn is proving to be deviant in that regard. It's showing that despite all efforts, each of these men is not the same, no matter how hard they try. Much like the argument between Day and Dusk, it's highlighting the fracturing of the emperor's singularity of rule, not a physical flaw in the cloning. This is reinforced with him being slow on the uptake several times in the episode, learning to act like the others . Yeah plus the previous episodes established that the whole point of the "lazy Susan" rotation was due to the original Cleon seeing the clone system as a way to add in consistency and predictably to the whole autocratic government. After all piles of real world autocratic government fell apart due to lack of heirs or the follow-up heirs to the kingdom being huge gently caress-ups.
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Oct 9, 2021 20:02
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Its a solution to "what happens after the benevolent dictator that did great things for the people, dies?"
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Oct 9, 2021 20:12
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The previous Brother Dusk got his gross old man cooties all over the new Brother Dawn and messed up his gestation.
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Oct 9, 2021 20:14
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I'm really not digging any of these super powers for a character who is supposed to be basically an influential town burgher.
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Oct 9, 2021 20:19
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LionArcher posted:If you have time to post on here, that just comes off as condescending bullshit. We’re In the middle of a pandemic. You have time. Sorry,but I felt being told I thought a show looked bad without watching it was a bit silly, because you don't have to watch something to know it's bad because that's the whole point of the marketing. The poster with Mack looming over the cast with a sword or riding the griffin I saw all over the subway did not endear or interest me in the show what so ever. Honestly it looked kind of cheap. But it told me it wasn't a show I'd enjoy because I don't like shows about nerds doing need things, I like shows for needs with space ships and robots and pew pews. I may have been letting a personal taste act as an over all judge of character, I was just surprised how out of nowhere the defense of mythic quest was, as I've literally never heard anyone talk about the show in at all. Also I work at a grocery store so the pandemic has made my life a living hell. I do like how you know right away who the invaders are, because the have the same kind of ruddy plated armor as one if the envoys from the earlier episodes. twistedmentat fucked around with this message at 20:32 on Oct 9, 2021 |
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Oct 9, 2021 20:28
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I don't have a clue what you're arguing about.
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Oct 9, 2021 20:47
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