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Started this show last week and I've just caught up to episode 7. Everything to do with the clone emperors is goddamn fantastic. There's depth, there's layers, there's symbolism. It's visually stunning and of course the actors are all killing it. It's a really interesting exploration a sci-fi idea, and every time this storyline is on screen, I'm enthralled. Everything to do with Terminus and Anacreaon is goddamn garbage. It's a generic-looking sci-fi shootemup and the plot makes no sense. The actors are probably just fine but it's hard to tell, because the writers have given them nothing but poorly-thought-out crap to say and do. Everything to do with Hari and Gaal and Raych has been taking FOREVER to get wherever it's going. I like both characters, and it may yet turn out interesting, but good goddamn, get to the point already.
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Nov 1, 2021 02:52
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CainFortea posted:In I, Robot Susan Calvin explains how the math of the positronic brain means that by it's very nature, any attempt at making a brain without the 3 laws means that it simply doesn't work at all. I mean, there's no hard science to explain why, but she very clearly explains that it is so. If I remember right, the explanation in The Caves of Steel went something like this. It doesn't spoil much of anything even in the book universe, but just to be safe I'll mark it as BOOK SPOILERS: The Three Laws were baked into the theory of positronic brains right from the start, and so every single advancement that was made since that time has relied upon their presence. In theory, you could make a positronic brain without the Laws, but you'd have to start totally over again, essentially with a positronic abacus, and then re-do three thousand years of improvement and development. And you'd have to do every bit of it completely from scratch; nothing at all of theory or practice would transfer over from one type of robot to the other since they were based on fundamentally different axioms. Undertaking such a project was seen as infeasible even for the combined might of all fifty Spacer worlds.
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Nov 1, 2021 04:12
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Various thoughts of symbolism, all from the GOOD plot, the one about about the Emperors: The funeral of The three Brothers are of course facing down their distaff counterparts in the triple goddess. Meanwhile, Brother Dawn, while obviously heterosexual, is still in some respects coded as gay in the narrative. He must hide his true self, from the smallest gesture on up, lest he be discovered. Only with his secret lover can he truly
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Nov 1, 2021 06:03
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Jerusalem posted:He actually did have something akin to a "revelation" in that he felt changed and even demonstrated some empathy - he did move the guy to the side of the road, taking up a lot of his own energy and strength to do so, perhaps in hope the guy might end up surviving or even just as a final mark of respect to a guy he liked/valued. The other way to look at that is that (continuing with episode 8 spoilers) he imposed his own values and morals, whether they were wanted or not, just as he's done his whole life. The old guy seemed perfectly content to die on that path, and moving him off of it and (possibly) saving his life was a major violation of the rules. He cheated the old dude out of the death that he wanted, that he had spent his life savings to come and get, and that he had been heading toward for his entire life. All ruined because Brother Day didn't want his new friend to die. I'm not sure that's the way I would see it myself, but it's a valid perspective... and the one several in-universe characters would be likely to have if they knew all the facts. Continuing with overall episode impressions: The scene with Demerzel and Zephyr Halima was fantastic. The scenes on the ghost ship were more of the same mindless action, except now I guess they're making up new rules for hyperspace (with brain plugs and poo poo)? The scenes with Hari and Gaal still feel like they haven't gotten to the drat point yet.
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Nov 6, 2021 04:33
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DaveKap posted:I had to look up some examples and came to realize that my definition of hard sci-fi is way looser than it should be. I've always seen science fiction and fantasy as two sides of the same coin anyway. This opinion hasn't made me many friends among the more purist fans of either genre, but I stand by it -- they're basically just two very broad categories of setting where you can tell stories of unreal things. It's a matter of taste whether mixing the two genres is a good thing in any given work. They coexist happily in Star Wars or Buffy the Vampire Slayer or The Venture Brothers, but Lord of the Rings would not be improved by having a squadron of starfighters drop out of hyperspace. So it's perfectly valid to not like that Foundation is seemingly veering in a more fantasy-oriented direction.
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Nov 6, 2021 17:32
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Metropolis posted:The jump-ship's jumping patterns aren't random, they're predictable. Based on the most reliable rumours of its sightings throughout the galaxy, Hari Seldon or some kinda psychohistory AI figured out the pattern. He designed the Foundation to be most likely exiled to Terminus so that they would have a chance at acquiring it. In the early episodes, not having a jump drive was a big deal to Hari. Acquiring an old (and therefore good) imperial Flagship vessel would mean the Foundation could protect itself instead of being at the mercy of every small band of space jerks. This would also let them acquire more power to maintain influence during the fall of the Empire. While they were probably hoping for more reliable protection from the Empire early on, the whole point of their operation is that the Empire would weaken to the point where they couldn't protect something in the outer rim in short order, so facing their first hostile military conflict and coming out on top with unassailable weaponry would be a top priority. (Book spoilers) Remember, in the books, Anacreon DID find a derelict Imperial battleship, with which they directly threatened the Foundation. Hardin even had the Foundation's technicians fix the ship up for them first, which seemed inexplicable at the time. But the whole point of psychohistory was that the addition of that randomly-found ship (which more or less doubled Anacreon's naval strength) didn't matter in the slightest. Without the ship, Anacreon still would have tried to attack the Foundation at about that same time, and they still would have had overwhelming force on their side, and they still would have lost the war before it began for exactly the same reason. The ebb and flow of history is much bigger than single events like stumbling across one derelict. I'm still trying to give the show the benefit of the doubt here, and I don't consider "it's different from the book" to be a valid criticism all on its own. It's a different time and a different medium, of COURSE they're going to make changes. But with this one... I just don't see what the writers are going for or why they thought it was a good change. At the risk of repeating myself, the Trantor/Emperor storyline bears almost no resemblance to anything from the books, but it's very compelling on its own. But with the Anacreon/Ghost-ship storyline, I'm barely even interested at this point.
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Nov 7, 2021 01:18
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stephenthinkpad posted:Since I only care about the Empire plot, the one bug that annoys me the most is the robot girl who is 10,000 years old yet somehow she is a slave to this 500 year old galactic dynasty. There is no amount of Nth dimensional robotic law that will convince me that this was hardcoded in her. Hell she probably oversaw the rise and fall of 5 previous dynasties and had slept with all their founding emperors. If I had to make a guess on this one, I'd say that the first Cleon (somehow) found a way to trigger some kind of loyalty subroutine in the programming of the ancient and immensely capable robot that he encountered. Having the robot on his side may well have been a major factor in how he acquired the throne in the first place. But we have so little information that this guess comes pretty much out of thin air. And since we've seen zero evidence so far that the Laws of Robotics are even a thing in the TV universe, I'm not even trying to work those in.
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Nov 8, 2021 00:31
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Nitrousoxide posted:Probably not, since it has significant rings. That's just the trillions of satellites for Starlink version 47, launched by Lord Elon CXXVII.
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Nov 10, 2021 21:41
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Just-In-Timeberlake posted:Leon is an anagram of Elon His Imperial Majesty doesn't like to discuss Puzzle Bobble 4. (It was just a weird phase he was going through.)  https://bubblebobble.fandom.com/wiki/Cleon
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Nov 10, 2021 23:41
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Holy moly, this episode was terrible. For the Terminus storyline, I have only one small bit of ridiculousness to add that hasn't already been called out: So Salvor had never flown a ship before, and so she was only barely able to make a rather clumsy takeoff with Captain Boyfriend sitting right next to her telling her exactly what to do... but now she somehow managed to land it again all by herself. As for the Cleon storyline, it's been excellent in the past, but this time around it just wasn't very good. (Still better than the Terminus one, but that's a pretty low bar.) A couple of screenshots of something that could have been quite a bit cooler: Dawn's-eye view of the mural:  Full-color view a few moments later:  And that same view, run through a red-green colorblindness filter:  Yeah, not even close. I wonder why they didn't let the art department cook up an image where the color gimmick actually worked. Perhaps they were worried about leaving behind viewers who were colorblind?
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Nov 13, 2021 04:13
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its HIM posted:At that point Darkness had been through this exact ceremony 3 times (as Dawn > Day, then Day > Dusk, and now finally Dusk > Darkness). There's nobody (besides Demerzel) in a better position to notice that the clone baby is acting unusually fussy. That doesn't tell him the baby is colorblind (come on, you loving idiot) but it signifies that something is off compared to previous clones.  Four times, but the first was when he was a baby.
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Nov 18, 2021 00:12
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Red Fructidor posted:Yer a wizard, Hari
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Nov 20, 2021 06:56
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its HIM posted:That’s exactly how mentalics worked in the books, it was genetic. The first one Hari found was his own granddaughter (Raych’s daughter). (Minor book spoilers) But Raych was adopted. It wasn't genetics, it was coincidence. And Hari couldn't do the mentalic stuff himself anyway, he just figured out what he was looking at, and that he could use it in the Plan.
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Nov 20, 2021 17:07
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Nitrousoxide posted:Also Vault Hari has got the much worse existence, only getting to be turned on for 10 minutes every few hundred years, while ship Hari gets to live a more fulsome unlife. That Hari really got the rear end end of that deal. Nah, Ship Hari has to spend a thousand years doing the grunt work of running the whole Plan. Vault Hari just has to give a few ten-minute pep talks. He'll reach the nice pleasant Second Empire in, like, an hour.
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Nov 20, 2021 18:22
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"Okay guys, remember, we don't tell Empire that we couldn't find the flower girl's second cousin once removed's ex-husband's stepdaughter! Got it? He'd be so pissed if he learned we missed one. And we have to keep this secret forever, or else our great great grandkids will pay the price, six Cleons from now."
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Nov 21, 2021 04:13
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Zazz Razzamatazz posted:Turns out Hari AI is just a sophisticated Tinder chatbot... Next, the Hari AI goes on Space Twitter, and within 24 hours, assholes have got him spouting Nazi bullshit.
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Nov 21, 2021 23:28
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Optimus_Rhyme posted:God this show is so Apple TV it hurts. Too much money but boring plot. The only other Apple TV show I've watched is For All Mankind, which has its own faults, but is leaps and bounds better than Foundation.
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Nov 22, 2021 02:58
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Perhaps next season will be set entirely within the flower girl's mind -- she's imagining what might happen next (it's not like she has any other pressing items on her schedule at the moment), and hopefully she'll prove to be a better writer than the ones we've gotten so far. 
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Nov 23, 2021 03:07
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Zazz Razzamatazz posted:Here's another another question: Why would a civilization that has mastered controlling gravity even have a space elevator in the first place? Even Waterworld and Terminus had ships just landing and taking off from the planet like it's no big deal. Maybe it's just traffic management, precisely so they don't have a kazillion ships landing everywhere. Like those cities that limit car traffic downtown -- you park at one of the gigantic facilities on the circumference and ride the metro the rest of the way in.
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Nov 24, 2021 18:05
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Jerusalem posted:I love it, though I am wary of the teased (season 2 ending spoiler) "Margo's gonna get forced to be a spy for the Russians" storyline, especially because I was absolutely invested in the two of them being a wholesome Space Nerd couple. A quick google indicates that Moore hasn't completely left For All Mankind, he'll still be involved. But he'll be a bit less day-to-day now that a new project is taking up more of his time. https://www.cbr.com/for-all-mankind-season-3-ronald-d-moore/
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Nov 29, 2021 03:04
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Dr. Fishopolis posted:so, i'm sorry, you're saying I can download my own cleon? how good are 3d printers on trantor exactly A Trantorian printer works perfectly but is half a mile long and requires the combined output of six uranium mining worlds to operate.
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Nov 29, 2021 04:55
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MarcusSA posted:The main issue is that it’s kinda out of nowhere and just kinda gross. Really? I thought it was extremely obvious all season what was building between those two, in practically every scene that they were in. And yes, it was a creepy-rear end thing to do, but importantly, it was treated that way in-universe. It's not a case of the writers not realizing how hosed up their character beat was. They knew. But maybe this discussion should go to the actual For All Mankind thread. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3958680
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Dec 3, 2021 20:29
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Can I get a Prime Radiant made with a flared base?
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Dec 4, 2021 01:23
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I'll keep watching it for the Cleons, even though the entire half of the show about Seldon and Terminus landed with a wet thud.
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Oct 13, 2022 17:05
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Rutibex posted:To be fair Asimov himself abandoned Psychohistoy as a concept when he found out about Chaos Theory. Its not a very well developed concept. It's a concept that Asimov came up with for a short story when he was like 20. It's admittedly a pretty cool concept, which is why he kept coming back to it for so long (and why we're still talking about it 80 years later), but it was never intended to be a real-world scientific theory. And besides, in one of the prequel books, there's mention of the "achaotic equations" that handwave the entire chaos issue away, just like the Heisenberg compensators do for the transporter in Star Trek.
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Dec 5, 2022 18:33
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Chairman Capone posted:I’m not positive, but that sounds like one of the Foundation prequels written by other authors in the late 90s after Asimov died. I remember some really weird stuff in those, like a Matrix-like computer system and a planet of clockwork robots. I'm okay with all of Asimov's Foundation books, though I admit the later ones aren't anywhere near as good as the original three. But when I tried to read one of those "authorized by the estate of Asimov" books by other authors, I think I got two chapters in before I gave up. Absolutely nothing felt right.
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Jan 9, 2023 00:42
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Rutibex posted:the true sequel to Foundation is Warhammer 40k In the glass cubicle, the image of the gray-haired, wizened man in a wheelchair sighed heavily. "I am Hari Seldon," he began simply. "With the successful conclusion of this most recent Crisis, you of the Foundation are now one quarter of the way to forming the inevitable Second Empire. But I regret to inform you that that Empire, once founded, will only last about six months. Call it a year, tops. After that comes total chaos and never-ending warfare. In the grim darkness of the far future," Seldon intoned, "there is only war."
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Jan 9, 2023 02:40
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WithoutTheFezOn posted:They put a dragon into Foundation. Sure, why not. The only monsters I can think of from the books are the Nyak birds, which the Anacreonian kings would traditionally hunt for sport in aerial dogfights. They're never described in detail, though, and might be anything from huge alien flying beasts all the way down to a local name for perfectly ordinary geese. More likely the latter, given the backstory Asimov established in the later books.
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May 12, 2023 13:34
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Chairman Capone posted:about reading the Foundation novels (mainly the original trilogy) through a solarpunk lens. I'm not entirely sure what exactly a solarpunk is, but playing with lenses around one sounds like a great way to accidentally start a fire. (That was a cool read, thank you!)
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Jan 23, 2024 02:20
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