It was so weird when I finally heard his real voice.

I don’t think people like to think about how effective and irresistible slave societies have historically been. Slave resistance has generally been at most a minor additional factor in their collapses after external disturbances.

Yeah, it’s definitely better that we got Cameron’s Aliens (probably the best scifi action movie ever) than Scott trying to rebottle the lightning.

Blade Runner with just Ridley Scott is Black Rain. Alien with just Ridley Scott is, well, Prometheus.

2049 has Joi, who embodies the question “what if the artificial person isn’t actually a real person.” That’s different from the original movie (though not the book), somewhat prescient to the real-life AI stuff and a take you don’t often see in popular scifi.

I get that, but the Adam West Batman is itself basically a parody. The Watchmen characters can’t themselves be in on the joke, and that show was pretty much the definition of being in on the joke.

Did they say that was their intention? Because if not, I don’t know if I’d buy that. People knew the Adam West Batman show was silly when it was on. I would say the costumes should reflect the character personalities and backstories.

Nearly 20% of children older than six in the U.S. are thought to have obesity, defined as having a BMI in the 95th percentile of their age and sex.

Matter of personal taste perhaps, but while they’re nice illustrations, I’m not sure they give Dune much of an aesthetic; I’d have trouble pointing to design aspects that are distinctly Schoenherr and not just minimal interpretations of the descriptions in the books. I don’t have that trouble with Howe’s Tolkien art. 

The three-lobed sandworms are great, and I can see how those specific illustrations could have become the Wookiees (there’s also a Schoenherr God-Emperor illustration that looks pretty Jabba-esque) but as a recognizable aesthetic for a Dune brand that seems to me like almost nothing to go on. His Dune art that I’ve…

He turned down a threesome because he “didn’t want to be an orgy guy.”

I mean, an AGI can create new stuff, by definition. It’s a person (or a perfect simulation of a person, depending on how you consider the consciousness question) so the stuff you might reasonably expect a person to be able to do, it should be able to do. I know there’s the scifi trope where the robot talks in a robot…

British actors tend to be both 1.) experienced in Shakespeare and historical roles that producers think will add verisimilitude, and 2.) cheaper for their skill level than Americans.

Call it one of my shamefully chud opinions, but I got the Rey as a Mary Sue argument as well. It’s not just that she’s unrealistically good at stuff, it’s that she’s unrealistically good at stuff that took Luke lots of practice. Not just piloting (which she’s immediately good at, just like Luke), but lightsaber…

The Mandalorian actually tried to address the drone thing by saying that the droids know they’re immortal and are literally just patient enough to wait for freedom (possibly via the eventual extinction of humanity).

He tends to have one trick for his scifi production design, which is “massive disproportionate scale.” Like in the original Blade Runner, there were bustling street level scenes, Tyrell’s massive temple-palace, futuristic skyscrapers and grand old buildings fallen to ruin as the city emptied out, and it was all…

Now I’m picturing a Steven Seagal version of Dracula rising from the coffin but continuing through a full 180 degrees of arc

It’s interesting, I was thinking about how Tolkien would react to the Jackson LotR movies. The more purist book fans dislike them, as did Christopher Tolkien who clearly took safeguarding his father’s legacy very seriously. But as far as I know, the only thing Tolkien ever asked about movie adaptations of his books…

Yeah, I’m not sure if it’s just that the 60s loosened everyone up and gave a generation of young adults the experience of engaging, as adults, with media like Dune and LotR, and then it was a couple decades until that experience could fully percolate through the culture? Or maybe people loosened up due to just the…

The thing with AI is that it’s a non-material technology that progresses as punctuated equilibrium with jumps for every discovery or paradigm shift, towards an unknown destination. So it’s always an exhausting flip-flop between millenarian hype during the jumps and self-conscious cynicism during the “AI winter”…