Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

I didn't ask if she was tall, I asked if she was single, hetero, and attractive. At 6'2", I'm used to looking like an ogre in group / family photos.

Girz0r

iTrader: (1)

Definitely misread that URL in the photo

stratosteve

iTrader: (1)

Ogre. I can relate. Lol. She is single, hetero and not attractive. Personality is even worse than her looks. Her hormone levels are largely not under control and it shows.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Ah, well scratch that. I've had enough of bipolar women to last two lifetimes.

Girz0r

iTrader: (1)

Must be a new york thing

I keeed.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

From what I've gathered, it's an "I live in Catskill (hicktown), but want a guy from the city, but don't actually want to live anywhere near the city because, despite the fact that when I'm in a manic period I come up with all sorts of aspirational, high-minded ideas, in reality the entirety of my lifelong dreams and ambitions is contained within the perimeter of a white picket fence in the suburbs sticks where I feel safe" thing.

Anyway, finally watched Into Darkness last night. That film validated the new franchise for me.

Girz0r

iTrader: (1)

Bi-polar gold digger?

y8s

iTrader: (8)

Who doesn't love a little Cumberbatch-brand dry wit and superiority up in their ****?

I am OK with the new JJ-style Trek. As long as I compartmentalize it separately from the real stuff. But he should really put some anti-glare optics on his cameras (and virtual cameras) if you know what I'm sayin'.

Monk

iTrader: (3)

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

I'll tell you what finally sealed it for me; it looks real.

What I mean is this: In the scenes on earth, most of the buildings were made of, you know, building material. Bricks, concrete, roofing tiles, etc. And the civilians on earth were mostly wearing clothes that look like, well, clothes.

Aboard the ship, the engine room looked like an engine room. And the warp core (exterior) looked like something CERN would build, not a cute little prop with flashing neon lights.

Yeah, there's obviously a lot of **** about it that's still fantastic and unbelievable. I mean, it's Star Trek. But they've latched onto a visual style that makes it seem a little more... connected.

codrus

With all the lens flare, you mean?

--Ian

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

I didn't even notice a lot of over-done lens flare in Darkness.

But no, wiseass, you know what I meme.






Also, I was joking when I said that the warp core looked like something CERN would build, meaning that it wasn't a simplistic, smooth, futuristic-looking piece of monolithic technology, but rather a very complex device with lots of dangly bits which actually looks like the sort of thing we'd use to create a fusion reaction here in the 21st century.







Turns out I was close. It's not CERN, it's the National Ignition Facility (how cool of a name is that?) at Lawrence Livermore lab, where they do, in fact, create fusion reactions.

codrus

It was toned down a lot from the first one, but still somewhat gratuitous.

But yes, the visual style is quite different. I suspect part of it is that TOS and TNG were TV shows first, movies second, and the budget for a TV show is a lot lower. It's a lot cheaper to make the TNG-style props than the Into Darkness-style ones.

I question the use of the word "realistic" though. Yes, it looks more like current high-tech, but why is that more "realistic"? Into Darkness/etc are set in around 2260, roughly 250 years from now. Does the engineering deck on a modern ship look anything like this?



--Ian

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Ship propulsion is kind of an unfair comparison, since the concept didn't exist 250 years ago. On the other hand, if you back up to only 200 years ago, then the engine room of a then-modern steamship looked rather more like the engine room of a present-day nuclear vessel than do engine rooms of earlier Star Trek vintage. They both have valves and dials and ***** and boilers and tubing and screws and bolts and removable hatch covers and doors that swing on a hinge, and there are no neon light tubes flashing in a chaser-pattern.




But let's talk about architecture for a moment.

Here is what the headquarters of the government of England looked like 250 years ago:





And here is what the headquarters of the government of England looks like today:





Now, which one of the following two photographs do you suspect is more representative of what the headquarters of the government of England will look like 250 years from now?

y8s

iTrader: (8)

if Dr. Who is any indication of the future...

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Or is it... an indication of the past?

codrus

Sure, but that's not a fusion reactor on the Enterprise in Abrams' movie, it's a WARP drive. A faster than light, forbidden by the rules of physics, we're making this **** up because we have no clue how you'd actually do it kind of warp drive. The difference between a sailing ship like the USS Constitution and the USS Gerald R. Ford is smaller than the one between the Ford and NCC-1701 USS Enterprise.

--Ian

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Just because something IS fiction doesn't mean that it can't be made to LOOK realistic.

For instance, the popular television show "Breaking Bad" was a work of fiction, however the producers decided to depict the main character as a realistic-appearing schoolteacher who drove a realistic-looking minivan, as opposed to a seven-headed alien who could fly.

This would be in contrast to, say, "The Powerpuff Girls", which makes absolutely no effort whatsoever to appear to be realistic.






Or, take The Hunt for Red October. Magnetohydrodynamic propulsion, as portrayed in the movie (silent & undetectable), is a fictitious technology. But the submarine, including its engine room, was portrayed in a way that made it appear to be a realistic object. Unlike, say, the Beatles' Yellow Submarine.






That's the test. Not "does this thing specifically resemble its 21st century counterpart," but rather "does this thing appear to be designed in a realistic manner, such that it could plausibly represent a real, functional object?"

codrus

Except it doesn't, because as far as we know there is no such thing as a real, functional warp drive. The best proposal for one right now is the Alcubierre drive, which theorizes that if you place various types of negative mass exotic matter in appropriate locations you can trigger localized inflation of space-time, which can happen FTL.

The USS Constitution looks fundamentally different from a steamship or a modern ship because it relies on wind and sails, rather than using some kind of heat source to boil water and turn a shaft. The steamship looks like the modern ship because they use the same basic principles -- even a nuclear-powered ship is just a nuclear heat source for a steam turbine.

I have no idea how you'd build an Alcubierre drive, but I'm pretty confident that boiling water into steam isn't going to get you there.

The Abrams movie appeals to your sense of aesthetics because it looks like real modern "high tech", instead of the 1980s flashy-light look. That's fine (and I agree that it's a nice change), but it's no more "realistic" than a Victorian-era painting of a Jules Verne moon rocket was at the time that it was painted.

--Ian

sixshooter

iTrader: (12)