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Hilario Baldness posted:He's in charge of the day-to-day liaisons. Yes he's made himself very perfectly clear.
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Mar 25, 2024 12:50
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Jakabite posted:Just to answer all the people asking why the siphon can’t stay unfolded and block out the sun: it’s because when it’s unfolded it’s easy to destroy by just blowing holes in it I'm only up to episode six, but I assumed it was an illusion, since everyone saw the one eye looking straight at them, instead of dozens or hundreds of the things looking in a bunch of different directions.
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Mar 25, 2024 13:27
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What a wise, sophisticated proton.
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Mar 25, 2024 14:05
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no idea what a 3 body problem but going into this with no clue what it's about made the first few episodes very enjoyable, once the details of the setting are bared it seems like there's not much left to do. I probably wouldn't watch another season with the same characters, I'd prefer they hit the fast forward button on time.
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Mar 25, 2024 14:18
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Avasculous posted:In the book, they are omniscient spies, but can't do very much to the physical world besides loving with particle colliders and making people see things. The sophons were constantly hacking and making direct pressure on the world in the second book, in order to kill Luo Ji. People just thought it was an old assassin program because they were convinced the sophons had given up after seeing man's technological progress.
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Mar 25, 2024 14:42
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Steve Yun posted:More gems from my friend that made me laugh Serious answer? Because in Western culture explicit sexual identity is coded as a strong character trait. It establishes that a character is attractive enough that a person wants to have sex with them, and independent enough to openly defy authority figures by doing so. You can also see it at play elsewhere in this adaptation. The scene at the bar where the the karaoke guy hits on the lady scientists. Saul being a man whore in general. Ironically this was probably put in to push back on the idea that Liu Cixin's work is sexist, although it's never been super clear to me why people think that.
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Mar 25, 2024 15:10
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Episodes 1-5 were a solid 8/10, 6-8 were a 6/10. This show felt like a network TV sci-fi show that airs at 9pm on a Tuesday, with a little bit of gore, nudity, and language that could easily be stripped if this wasn't on Netflix. It gives you a bit to chat about as long as you are not willing to dig into anything, because as soon as you do, things start to fall apart. You just have to shut your brain off and go with it - which is fine, and I enjoyed the show. If I hadn't heard about the show before hand and seen all the hype around it, and just stumbled upon it randomly on Thursday night, I'd have been pleasantly surprised. The hype definitely oversold it.
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Mar 25, 2024 15:28
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swamp thong posted:no idea what a 3 body problem but going into this with no clue what it's about made the first few episodes very enjoyable, once the details of the setting are bared it seems like there's not much left to do. I won’t say too much but, well, we have such things to show you
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Mar 25, 2024 15:28
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The most unrealistic part is that there’s no faction denying the aliens exist and no faction trying to gently caress the Eye in the Sky.
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Mar 25, 2024 15:59
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Wii Spawn Camper posted:The most unrealistic part is that there’s no faction denying the aliens exist and no faction trying to gently caress the Eye in the Sky. There are plenty alien thruthers in the books. Like the opposite kind of the ones we have.
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Mar 25, 2024 17:41
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I finished watching this a couple of days ago and I wanted to let my thoughts settle a bit before posting. This is going to seem like I'm doing nothing but making GBS threads on the show, but if you read this please assume that I generally liked the parts that I don't criticise. I enjoyed watching it and I hope they finish the series. First off, I don't know what the story gains from being transplanted to England. I liked that the books were set somewhere that is new and interesting to me. I couldn't care less about London or Oxford as a setting. I couldn't stand most of the Oxford Five. Jin was the only one I was happy to see on screen and the only character shuffle/recombination that I think was successful. I think I just disliked the time wasted in trying to make them into more fleshed out characters. I don't think it was particularly successful, the performances were kind of flat and one note, and material I enjoyed in the books was removed to make room for it. Just as an example, when the countdown appears in the book, the character affected is freaked out but treats it like a scientist would; they conduct experiments, test hypotheses, apply the scientific method as much as they're able to. Auggie looks teary-eyed into the middle distance a lot and is sad about it. Nothing about the way she deals with it makes me think “this person is a world class scientist who is a threat to invading aliens” We've discussed pacing already in this thread and I think it's the worst thing about this adaptation. The books give you time to really think about what might be happening, the implications and possibilities. They're full of little bits of foreshadowing and repeated imagery and the occasional red herring. Like a good mystery they make you feel like an active participant. The series rushes to the end of episode 5 (great episode, worth watching the series just for this) and then almost grinds to a halt for three episodes. For a sci-fi series, it treats science with an incredible amount of disdain. The book presents science as a magnificent and terrifying puzzle to be unlocked and draws the reader into the problems characters are working on. In the show, science is either magic or a series of big words you say to someone to make them look stupid. I could tell this was made by the people who made Game of Thrones because, just like that show, this adaptation changes or introduces a bunch of stuff in a kind of thoughtless way and a lot of the changes undermine not just the themes but the basic plot. We've seen quite a few posts itt where people have asked “if they can do x, why not just do y” and the answer is almost always that X is something the show added or changed without thinking through the consequences. The VR units being alien tech, sophons hacking planes, the Judgment Day sequence being shot in a way that undermines the plan they chose. This also introduces another problem which has come up a few times in this thread: in the books there are characters who make bad decisions or come up with bad plans that still produce results that end up being useful later. When the adaptation introduces a bunch of weird inconsistencies, it becomes hard to distinguish between characters messing up and the writers messing up. Here are some positives: I thought the way the world of the game was presented was great. It looked almost exactly how I imagined it which is always a nice feeling. I thought it was a nice touch to use it as a way to introduce (book 2 spoiler) the character Sophon because when she shows up in the book as a fully formed weeb OC it's a little jarring. Jin was a genuinely good character and way more interesting than the 1.5 book characters she replaced. Episode 5, while kind of goofy in some ways, was pretty thrilling TV. The show sold the emotional core of Will's story better than the book, although I didn't think much of the actor and his one facial expression. Liam Cunningham was good as Wade. As I said, it probably seems like I'm being pretty harsh on it but overall I'm glad I watched it and am frankly amazed that it turned out even watchable considering the clusterfuck of the last 40-ish episodes of Game of Thrones. I hope we get the full adaptation, there's a lot more I'd like to see. Especially (book 3 megaspoilers, absolutely do not click) the chapter where a bottom rung space flunky on a ship half a galaxy away flicks a piece of paper at us that flattens the whole solar system
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Mar 25, 2024 18:25
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Why Oxford was something that bugged me too, not because I had a bee in my bonnet about the setting not being China, but because I couldn't really think of any obvious reason why London specifically was supposed to be this big hub of cutting edge technology. Do they do a lot more sciency stuff there than I realized, or is this more a matter of the showrunners just thought the characters would sound smarter if they had British accents?
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Mar 25, 2024 18:35
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Did all of Naoko Mori's lines get cut? She's in the background of a bunch of shots, basically doing a completely silent rendition of her Absolutely Fabulous character, and then she just vanishes from the story without saying anything. She's even credited on IMDB. Maybe I missed her lines, or maybe it's 
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Mar 25, 2024 18:46
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Some Guy TT posted:Why Oxford was something that bugged me too, not because I had a bee in my bonnet about the setting not being China, but because I couldn't really think of any obvious reason why London specifically was supposed to be this big hub of cutting edge technology. Do they do a lot more sciency stuff there than I realized, or is this more a matter of the showrunners just thought the characters would sound smarter if they had British accents? Oxford and Cambridge universities these days are mostly notable for routinely turning out some of the most obnoxious people in Britain but Oxford professors have won Nobel prizes. The most recent thing I could find was pioneering work on how antibodies function in the late sixties. Also there is a large particle accelerator in Oxford so that obviously helps for story purposes. The oldest universities in England are sort of equivalent to the US ivy league schools in that they will automatically be considered more prestigious by people in fields like law and politics. Oxford and Cambridge are kind of like our Harvard and Stanford, with all that implies and the addition of hundreds of years of weird traditions
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Mar 25, 2024 18:53
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Some Guy TT posted:Why Oxford was something that bugged me too, not because I had a bee in my bonnet about the setting not being China, but because I couldn't really think of any obvious reason why London specifically was supposed to be this big hub of cutting edge technology. Do they do a lot more sciency stuff there than I realized, or is this more a matter of the showrunners just thought the characters would sound smarter if they had British accents? The three creators of the show all seem to be Americans, so I think maybe it does come down to the fact that an average person thinks British people sound smart.
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Mar 25, 2024 18:57
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Three of the Oxford 5 don't have British accents.
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Mar 25, 2024 18:59
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Maybe they had a lot of production hookups in the UK after working on GOT
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Mar 25, 2024 19:00
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Nice Tuckpointing! posted:Three of the Oxford 5 don't have British accents. The more prestigious English universities attract a lot of students from overseas, so I didn't find that unusual
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Mar 25, 2024 19:02
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Steve Yun posted:Maybe they had a lot of production hookups in the UK after working on GOT I think it's either this or because they were concerned about the potential for strikes to impact filming. D&D might just straight up live in the UK now, who knows, I'm not gonna bother learning that random fact.
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Mar 25, 2024 19:02
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Knowing these show runners, they probably set it in the UK so they could cast the same actors from GoT, who already had the accents.
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Mar 25, 2024 19:03
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Tarnop posted:The more prestigious English universities attract a lot of students from overseas, so I didn't find that unusual Yes, but kinda puts the kibosh on whole British accents sounding smart reasoning. Edit; unless we're including all the other characters in their orbit around jolly ol' England. But, I think the theory that the creators leaned on their GoT filming connections makes sense. Nice Tuckpointing! fucked around with this message at 19:09 on Mar 25, 2024 |
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Mar 25, 2024 19:05
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Nice Tuckpointing! posted:Yes, but kinda puts the kibosh on whole British accents sounding smart reasoning. Oh right yeah, I forgot the possibility that you were responding to someone other than me lol
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Mar 25, 2024 19:07
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Some more things that I thought was super lazy: Whisking people away into hiding in a safe house, but letting them bring their phones with all of their location tracking apps. Setting up a secret base of operations, with the location being guarded (one of the characters quips about how one of the other characters told another one of the characters the location) but also letting everyone bring their phones in, and also it's not really a secret because a random company was able to deliver the plaque to the secret base.
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Mar 25, 2024 19:48
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Open Source Idiom posted:I think it's either this or because they were concerned about the potential for strikes to impact filming. This is the most plausible, cause the UK has different unions so filming wasn’t affected by the strikes last year. Same reason why House of the Dragon could film season 2.
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Mar 25, 2024 19:55
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Boris Galerkin posted:Some more things that I thought was super lazy: The enemy being capable of taking over total control over the driving system of an arbitrary vehicle The target immediately getting into a jet and it flies perfectly safely
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Mar 25, 2024 20:10
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Macdeo Lurjtux posted:The sophons were constantly hacking and making direct pressure on the world in the second book, in order to kill Luo Ji. People just thought it was an old assassin program because they were convinced the sophons had given up after seeing man's technological progress. Oh, my bad. It has been a long time since I read them and I forgot about that. Tarnop posted:I don't think it was particularly successful, the performances were kind of flat and one note, and material I enjoyed in the books was removed to make room for it. Just as an example, when the countdown appears in the book, the character affected is freaked out but treats it like a scientist would; they conduct experiments, test hypotheses, apply the scientific method as much as they're able to. Auggie looks teary-eyed into the middle distance a lot and is sad about it. Nothing about the way she deals with it makes me think “this person is a world class scientist who is a threat to invading aliens” Yeah, I pretty much agree on all points. I was really surprised by the show's pattern of blurting out an answer during or even before any mystery is introduced, when that's easily the strongest hook in the book. I think it would have been way easier to empathize with the Oxford 5 if they spent an episode or two trying to wrap their heads around their experiments failing and colleagues quitting or committing suicide without Wade and Shi announcing it was a global information warfare and assassination campaign against scientists in the first few scenes of the show. Likewise, there is no mystery to the VR game, because Shi theorizes (I think even before we see it?) that it's a recruitment tool, and characters take 1 look at the headset and declare it's far beyond human technology. This stretches even to the promotional campaign. The trailers use "THEY are coming!" as a tagline, the animated intro shows a planet surrounded by 3 suns, and I just saw an IG ad that was the Sophon threatening Wade on the plane.
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Mar 25, 2024 20:39
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Yeah maybe as a subset of pacing problems, moving (ep2 spoiler)DO NOT ANSWER to the second episode kills the delicious mystery and investigation of not knowing wtf is going on for half the story. I get why they did it, it’s an amazing hook and they wanted it in the second episode so that influencers and reviewers who got sneak peeks of the first two episodes would rave about it before launch. Oh well.
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Mar 25, 2024 20:53
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Mantle posted:The enemy being capable of taking over total control over the driving system of an arbitrary vehicle Those are all examples of this: Tarnop posted:I could tell this was made by the people who made Game of Thrones because, just like that show, this adaptation changes or introduces a bunch of stuff in a kind of thoughtless way and a lot of the changes undermine not just the themes but the basic plot. We've seen quite a few posts itt where people have asked "if they can do x, why not just do y" and the answer is almost always that X is something the show added or changed without thinking through the consequences. basically D&D strike again
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Mar 25, 2024 20:56
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Avasculous posted:Oh, my bad. It has been a long time since I read them and I forgot about that. I read the books within the last month and I don't remember any hacking like they demonstrated with the cars and the plane. They can read digital information, they can affect what people see, and they can communicate which allows them to use human proxies. Their ability to actually physically affect their environment is limited to subatomic manipulation, hence the whole particle accelerator thing. I don't know enough about electronics to know if that would let them change the behaviour of circuits, but they don't do that in the books as I recall. Even the "you're all bugs" message is done in the same way as the countdown, people see it directly in their field of vision
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Mar 25, 2024 20:59
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Mantle posted:The enemy being capable of taking over total control over the driving system of an arbitrary vehicle The cars were explicitly said to be autonomous self-driving cars. Presumably, they can't hack vehicles with human drivers / pilots.
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Mar 25, 2024 20:59
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Alien truther: protons can’t meddle with steering columns
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Mar 25, 2024 21:04
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I don't think the book's mysteries could sustain through a whole season. Basically everything is kept until the end, Ye Wenjie's actions and current status, what the video game is, what's driving the scientists mad and the incomprehensible power behind it. It would be a horrible "mystery box" show like Lost or something if they held onto those cards as long as the book does. You'd be bitching about "nothing happening for 7 episodes".
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Mar 25, 2024 21:09
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SimonChris posted:The cars were explicitly said to be autonomous self-driving cars. Presumably, they can't hack vehicles with human drivers / pilots. Cars have used engine management computers for decades now. Fly by wire has been a thing since the moon landings
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Mar 25, 2024 21:10
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Tarnop posted:Their ability to actually physically affect their environment is limited to subatomic manipulation, hence the whole particle accelerator thing. If they can manipulate "subatomic particles" then why can't they manipulate macroscopic things like electronics (the show shows that they can) or biology (the show shows that they can't)? It literally makes no sense. We are all made up of the same "subatomic particles" (fields, rather).
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Mar 25, 2024 21:26
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Boris Galerkin posted:If they can manipulate "subatomic particles" then why can't they manipulate macroscopic things like electronics (the show shows that they can) or biology (the show shows that they can't)? It literally makes no sense. We are all made up of the same "subatomic particles" (fields, rather). "The show says they can" is the whole problem. The books are pretty consistent about their limitations, the show just says gently caress it, do what looks cool and expect people to not think about it. I'm not claiming that the books are some unimpeachable fortress of science and logic, but they do treat all of this with more care than the show
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Mar 25, 2024 21:36
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I’ll be watching this show for Benedict Wong, Liam Cunningham, and visualisations of some of the best sequences from one of my favourite works of fiction and that’s about it. The Oxford Five are irritating, especially Auggie. Her character is written and acted terribly. Overall I’m looking forward to cool sequences in the hopefully coming series but D&D have already shown they’ve learnt nothing from GoT.
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Mar 25, 2024 22:41
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I enjoyed the series; first thing I think I've binged watched since the first Good Omens. Something about the premise bugs me though. Is it explained how the alien homeworld's system got like that? It couldn't have formed that way. As explained the planet would have been tidally disrupted, ingested or ejected long before even prokaryotes got a chance to form, let alone sentient life. Hell it probably could not have coalesced in the first place unless it formed far away and migrated in or was itself captured. Did the system capture a third star recently?
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Mar 25, 2024 23:04
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Tayter Swift posted:I enjoyed the series; first thing I think I've binged watched since the first Good Omens. Something about the premise bugs me though. Is it explained how the alien homeworld's system got like that? It couldn't have formed that way. As explained the planet would have been tidally disrupted, ingested or ejected long before even prokaryotes got a chance to form, let alone sentient life. Hell it probably could not have coalesced in the first place unless it formed far away and migrated in or was itself captured. Did the system capture a third star recently? Book stuff Their system was always trinary. It supposedly had several planets but the other ones got swallowed up, they knew theirs eventually would too Someone on the internet wrote an accountwalled essay about how Trisolaris never could have evolved life. I’m not qualified to say one way or the other but I’ll just accept it as a sci-fi premise for a good story Edit: a redditor who says they research trinary star systems says they can be stable if two stars are close and one far away
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Mar 25, 2024 23:18
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Boris Galerkin posted:And who the gently caress is Saul even? I literally can't think of a single thing he did in the show other than smoke weed. My bf is a real scientist dealing with the various controversies arising from DEI in the academic world (the Supreme Court Affirmative Action decision was a big shakeup with a lot of lawyers doing mandatory powerpoint training sessions, the Harvard plagiarism thing, etc). When he saw Saul in Ep.8 he was like "what has this guy accomplished?" and the show is like "We are making Saul a wallfacer, he has studied with some of the greatest minds..." and he lost his poo poo like "Studied with them?! What the gently caress has he published!!" and I was lolling. Even Saul himself is like "hmm I think I know why they picked me... nahhhhh" like he knows he's World Savior Diversity Hire. What else could they possibly expect anyone to infer from that part? Jakabite posted:I’ll be watching this show for Benedict Wong, Liam Cunningham, and visualisations of some of the best sequences from one of my favourite works of fiction and that’s about it. The Oxford Five are irritating, especially Auggie. Her character is written and acted terribly. Overall I’m looking forward to cool sequences in the hopefully coming series but D&D have already shown they’ve learnt nothing from GoT. This is 100% the right take, you correctly named the best and worst actors in the show, and yeah there's a couple cool scenes that are clearly despite D&D not because of them. SimonChris posted:The cars were explicitly said to be autonomous self-driving cars. Presumably, they can't hack vehicles with human drivers / pilots. Airplanes are like 99% autonomous already though. Airlines beg us to put our phones into Airplane Mode, yet loving Sophons can't disrupt them?
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Mar 25, 2024 23:25
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Here's an easy to digest video on the physics of the actual "three body problem:" what it is and why it's hard to solve. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=et7XvBenEo8 The TLDW is that the initial conditions are really important and even a tiny difference between two simulations/calculations will result in very different results over long periods of time. This was what that character hinted at on level 3 or 4 of the VR game. Here is a video on quantum entanglement for FTL communication: why it's not possible. It's a bit more in depth, but the guy's voice is very soothing and I could listen to him all day. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLqk7uaENAY I don't know the 1st guy's background, but he makes a lot of easy to digest physics videos for PBS. The 2nd guy is an actual professor/astronomer/scientist, not some random YouTube crank. He also hasn't succumbed to physicist's disease, yet. Boris Galerkin fucked around with this message at 23:30 on Mar 25, 2024 |
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Mar 25, 2024 23:26
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