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Snowman_McK posted:Because that's specifically what he said, yes. Do you have any evidence that the character is speaking the beliefs of the author directly?
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Feb 14, 2017 04:57
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Kingtheninja posted:Did you have to stop reading after that part?  On the topic of Crichton-chat, I like the book 'Sphere' but I think the movie is better. The casting is perfect, and the movie handles several of the "twists" and suspense moments better than the book does. The biggest one is Harry's theory that if the (human) spacecraft actually traveled through time, that means none of the characters make it back to the surface alive otherwise it would cause a paradox. In the movie, Harry introduces it fairly early after they realize what they've discovered, and it becomes a huge point of suspense because logically he's right, so it makes the audience question if/how the characters are going to survive. In the book, Harry brings it up literally 3 pages from the end of the book, after the characters have already made it back to the surface. That leaves two scenarios: either the characters all die right before the book ends, or they solve the problem immediately. And since it's a Crichton novel, you know exactly which scenario it's going to be right away, and there's no suspense.
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Feb 14, 2017 05:38
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DeimosRising posted:Do you have any evidence that the character is speaking the beliefs of the author directly? It's a bit suspicious when you have a character who, to that point, has not been portrayed as thoroughly insane suddenly start saying thoroughly insane things. Like, I cannot emphasize enough how crazy conflating phlogiston and photons is. It's not even that photons have a lot of experimental evidence behind them and phlogiston doesn't, it's a more basic error than that. It's like not believing in France because people used to believe in Zeus. Something's up even if it's not Crichton's manifesto. Xenomrph posted:Don't worry, I got your reference. The way the power of the Sphere is handled in the book was quite strange from what I remember. Does it ever explain why they can't just teleport themselves to the surface or manifest an escape submarine? I feel like the movie also handled this better but I can't recall how. porfiria fucked around with this message at 06:11 on Feb 14, 2017 |
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Feb 14, 2017 06:09
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I remember thinking the movie sucked. From what I remember, at least in the book, the sphere gives you the power to manifest things, not some unlimited wish granted type of thing. It also kind of gives the characters amnesia after entering it so they don't know they have the power. So stuff from their subconscious fears start to appear. They eventually figure out it makes what you imagine appear but it has to have some grounding in reality. They can wish for an escape sub but another character could wish for it to be covered in explosives. They can't wish to be magically transported to the surface and even if they could they'd die from decompression. It's been s long time since I read t though.
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Feb 14, 2017 06:28
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can't we come together in love for the film Congo
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Feb 14, 2017 06:35
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DeimosRising posted:Do you have any evidence that the character is speaking the beliefs of the author directly? Crichton used the name of an environmental activist he didn't like as the name of a small dicked baby rapist. Seriously. Since there's no little to no narrative or thematic reason to include a bizarre, insane and demonstrably wrong critique of the concept of scientific theory, I think it'd be more warranted to ask why else you think it's there. porfiria posted:It's like not believing in France because people used to believe in Zeus. Something's up even if it's not Crichton's manifesto. It's actually pretty much the basis of objection to global warming research. I actually had someone tell me that, since science used to think the world was flat, logically, how can we trust scientists now? It's such a fantastically wrong thing, and you can kind of see the chain of false logic that leads there. Snowman_McK fucked around with this message at 06:49 on Feb 14, 2017 |
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Feb 14, 2017 06:41
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alf_pogs posted:can't we come together in love for the film Congo I like Congo.
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Feb 14, 2017 06:50
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Snowman_McK posted:Because that's specifically what he said, yes. No; that's what the character said - making an unanbiguous reference to Thomas Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions, immediately before ironically asking someone to use a compass. The character is making a fairly clear statement about the impossibility of symbolizing something as abstract as quantum mechanics - something that can only be understood as an abstract meaningless mathematical formula. Matter is currently understood as only the collapse of wave oscillations, or whatever, but it's impossible to perceive the world that way. In 'Alien' terms, Thorne is talking about the black goo in Prometheus. What is the black goo??!! The glib answer, released after the film, is that the black goo is Chemical Agent A0-3959X.91 – 15.
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Feb 14, 2017 07:52
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It's a shame Scott went all in with the black goo definitely being a weapon and LV-223 definitely being a weapons facility. It made sense for Janek to think it was a weapons facility given his background but given the broader themes of the movie it made more sense for him to be wrong. It was fun to imagine it was a futuristic kind of fertiliser or some other industrial chemical that is only dangerous because the humans were ignorant of its purpose and stupid enough to go blundering in anyway.
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Feb 14, 2017 11:53
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oldpainless posted:I like Congo. me too. that is a tim curry and delroy lindo movie from top to bottom
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Feb 14, 2017 12:54
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ReV VAdAUL posted:It's a shame Scott went all in with the black goo definitely being a weapon and LV-223 definitely being a weapons facility. It made sense for Janek to think it was a weapons facility given his background but given the broader themes of the movie it made more sense for him to be wrong. Has he? I'm pretty sure that the black goo just being a tool for modifying or accelerating genetic development is still a valid interpretation. Aside from Janek's hypothesis, what contradicts it?
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Feb 14, 2017 15:51
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The actual purpose of the Black goo is to transform everything into bad CGI.
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Feb 14, 2017 15:54
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ReV VAdAUL posted:It's a shame Scott went all in with the black goo definitely being a weapon and LV-223 definitely being a weapons facility. It made sense for Janek to think it was a weapons facility given his background but given the broader themes of the movie it made more sense for him to be wrong. Do you mean he's said this in interviews or something? There's nothing in the movie itself that definitively proves what the facility is or isn't, or that the goo is a weapon. If the goo is a weapon, what is the Engineer doing in the opening scene?
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Feb 14, 2017 15:58
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The black goo is fire.
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Feb 14, 2017 16:01
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Party Boat posted:The black goo is fire. Basically, yea.
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Feb 14, 2017 16:04
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I just hope they find the MSDS for the black goo posted on the wall somewhere and realize they were just not following protocols and it's a very safe material when handled and disposed of properly and when you wear appropriate PPE.
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Feb 14, 2017 16:47
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David translates writing on ship wall as "0 days without an accident"
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Feb 14, 2017 21:21
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alf_pogs posted:can't we come together in love for the film Congo
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Feb 14, 2017 22:45
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hey guys michael crichton DEF didn't believe the stupid thing that character said *writes an entire book about global warming being a hoax*
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Feb 14, 2017 23:25
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porfiria posted:This would make sense if he were only talking about theory in the colloquial sense though--you have to be tremendously stupid to conflate the theory of photons with the theory of self-esteem (or teleological stuff like "humans will kill everything"). Like, Malcolm's point about thintelligence is meant to be somewhat lucid even if he's an arrogant jerk. There's absolutely no way to read what Thorne's saying as anything but total insanity. I mean, there's a good chance Crichton's just not a great writer and he was trying to give Thorne a somewhat controversial and not meant to be taken entirely at face value but nevertheless thought-provoking statement. But at the end of the day not believing in global warming is pretty frikin' close to not believing in photons so... Thorne isn't literally saying that things you can't see don't exist. His point is that consensus changes. The ending is an ironic inversion of the first novel, in which Malcolm uses mathematical models to predict that the park is inherently unstable, and Arnold responds that he's dealing with "life, not computer models." Thorne is a practicalist who believes engineers should study psychology because human beings undermine their perfect mathematical formulas.
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Feb 15, 2017 00:37
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Michael Crichton almost gets a pass for life just for writing and directing Westworld.
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Feb 15, 2017 00:43
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Neo Rasa posted:Michael Crichton almost gets a pass for life just for writing and directing Westworld. I'm revoking that pass for inspiring the TV show Westworld.
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Feb 15, 2017 00:44
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Yeah, you don't have to argue if Crichton believed what his anti-climate change characters said... there's plenty records of him saying that poo poo outside of his novels.
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Feb 15, 2017 01:04
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Thorne was written like the "cool college professor" archetype. He wasn't saying "protons aren't real" he was just trying to be cool and say that it doesn't matter what we think a proton is, because in 100 years we'll know so much more that whatever we think now will have only scratched the surface. But yeah, he was definitely Crichton's stand-in character in a lot of ways, and Crichton obviously was a weird dude before that velociraptor finally caught him and killed him.
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Feb 15, 2017 01:45
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Toady posted:Thorne isn't literally saying that things you can't see don't exist. His point is that consensus changes. The ending is an ironic inversion of the first novel, in which Malcolm uses mathematical models to predict that the park is inherently unstable, and Arnold responds that he's dealing with "life, not computer models." Thorne is a practicalist who believes engineers should study psychology because human beings undermine their perfect mathematical formulas. Yes, I'm sure the consensus about the Earth's age will change radically some time this century.
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Feb 15, 2017 02:12
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Well they don't call it the K-T boundary anymore so some of our concepts about the earth are subject to change...
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Feb 15, 2017 02:23
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porfiria posted:Yes, I'm sure the consensus about the Earth's age will change radically some time this century. He doesn't imply that it will, only that there are currently things that are believed to be true that will no longer be believed to be true in the future. Which is a very safe bet.
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Feb 15, 2017 02:35
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Payndz posted:A movie with Bruce Campbell, Joe Don Baker and Ernie Hudson, featuring a killer hippo and evil mutant gorillas being blasted by lasers inside King Solomon's Mines? How could anyone not? Don't forget the sentry guns. Edit: Also spoofing Surface to Air missiles with flare guns... ...man that movie really was balls out.
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Feb 15, 2017 02:50
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Schwarzwald posted:He doesn't imply that it will, only that there are currently things that are believed to be true that will no longer be believed to be true in the future. I hate to keep going around on this because it's so far off the topic, but this statement is both totally true and totally meaningless, so it's the way it's stated that opens the window into Crichton's beliefs. The character could have said, "We used to think killing Indians was cool. Who knows what we'll decide is wrong to kill tomorrow?" Or, "They used to sacrifice people to appease their Gods, heh." Instead he goes for a wacky pop culture angle on scientific inquiry (not to say the scientific method, peer review et al are infallible but we didn't believe in the four humors because they published a bunch of double blind studies in Nature) from a character who should ostensibly know better. That's why I made the France/Zeus analogy earlier--what the character is saying is genuinely incoherent. He might as well be saying, "We used to think black people weren't people. Now, we believe in photons." This is the heart of ideology etc.
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Feb 15, 2017 02:51
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porfiria posted:Yes, I'm sure the consensus about the Earth's age will change radically some time this century. This is foregoing the act of reading in order to fixate on whether dead celebrity Michael Crichton was a bad person, which of course he was. If you've actually read State Of Fear, the bulk of it is a ridiculous pulp adventure novel where they literally travel to Cannibal Island to blow up the supervillains' doomsday earthquake machine. I'm pretty sure someone fights a crocodile at some point. There is no point in the book where a character says "science isn't real" or anything of the sort. The failing of the book is the opposite: that it frequently pauses for the exposition character to give a PowerPoint presentation about temperature data, complete with charts and graphs. But this is secondary to the book's overall goal of trolling liberals.
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Feb 15, 2017 02:52
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:This is foregoing the act of reading in order to fixate on whether dead celebrity Michael Crichton was a bad person, which of course he was. No, you were the one who ignored the age of the earth angle in the original text because it didn't line up with your ineffable nature of nature interpretation. Wave-particle duality might be incomprehensible but that's not what the character is talking about. I'm taking the text seriously and pointing out how it's taking words that sound like they're talking about the same thing (photons/phlogiston) and relating them in ways that are either incoherent or meaningless. You're interested in making the same boring points about how liberals are stupid over and over again. Read carefully!
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Feb 15, 2017 03:07
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Michael Crichton was looking for the secret of the 8th Phonon.
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Feb 15, 2017 07:33
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porfiria posted:No, you were the one who ignored the age of the earth angle in the original text because it didn't line up with your ineffable nature of nature interpretation. Wave-particle duality might be incomprehensible but that's not what the character is talking about. I'm taking the text seriously and pointing out how it's taking words that sound like they're talking about the same thing (photons/phlogiston) and relating them in ways that are either incoherent or meaningless. You're interested in making the same boring points about how liberals are stupid over and over again. Read carefully! I wrote that Crichton's goal was to troll liberals. I do not believe in 'trolling'. (The aforementioned cannibals are in the book solely to eat a dude who believes in noble savagery.) You are ignoring such context as the entire rest of the book where they explore various scientific theories. The ending is simply the character saying "poo poo was really hosed up on Fantasy Island, let's get out of here." Like, literally, the point is that they journeyed into a sci-fi fantasy World, and now they are leaving that World.
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Feb 15, 2017 07:59
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AlternateAccount posted:I just hope they find the MSDS for the black goo posted on the wall somewhere and realize they were just not following protocols and it's a very safe material when handled and disposed of properly and when you wear appropriate PPE. The punchline being that wandering into a mundane industrial chemical plant without understanding what it is would likely be even more rapidly and gruesomely fatal.
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Feb 15, 2017 12:06
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:I wrote that Crichton's goal was to troll liberals. I do not believe in 'trolling'. What the hell is this poo poo? Trolling is a fake idea.
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Feb 15, 2017 13:10
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UmOk posted:What the hell is this poo poo? Trolling is a fake idea. sounds like somethin people who get trolled would say
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Feb 15, 2017 13:12
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Hunterhr posted:Don't forget the sentry guns. All of those elements somehow made an absolute snoozer of a movie with STOP EATING MY SESAME CAKE as the most memorable bit, because someone actually emoted other than Bruce Campbell's amazing death scream at the opening.
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Feb 15, 2017 16:52
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The Andromeda Strain is a great book. At least from my memories of being 14 years old.
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Feb 15, 2017 20:52
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:This is foregoing the act of reading in order to fixate on whether dead celebrity Michael Crichton was a bad person, which of course he was. the powerpoint presentations in the book are inaccurate and crichton believed they were accurate. i'll eat my hat the day you make an accurate post.
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Feb 15, 2017 21:27
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Groovelord Neato posted:the powerpoint presentations in the book are inaccurate and crichton believed they were accurate. i'll eat my hat the day you make an accurate post. I know that they are inaccurate, and that Crichton is a bad person. People are getting badly confused. A character making a statement about the blurry line between sci-fi and fantasy genres is not the same as a different character who is a climate change denialist.
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Feb 15, 2017 21:33
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