I don’t think this is a marketing thing. You need a ton of context to understand this well enough to be impressed by it; with only a tiny bit more context, you can instead be horrified. A risky play like this speaks to a short time-horizon, but the actual plan is absurdly long on time-horizon - planting logs on a 25-year-old inactive wiki and never ever mentioning or “discovering” it, leaving it solely for outside researchers to maybe find and maybe get people to care about it? That is just not the kind of plan an “even bad news is good PR” type of guy comes up with.
> Authors are desperate because books aren’t selling, traditional marketing isn’t working, and publishers are offering less support per title. We’re feeling pretty helpless about our career trajectories, watching sales numbers decline while wondering what we’re doing wrong.
What's wrong? There's nothing wrong. Just people addicted to FaceBook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Netflix, YouTube, etc.
Book publishers have spent the last few decades making a profit off of managing the decline of their entire field of endeavor. Every opportunity to expand the medium was thrown out, and every big fad wound up hurting rather than helping. For example, you know that "generation of readers" a certain YA book supposedly made? What it actually did was destroy graded readers because publishers thought YA books had to go upmarket. The publishing industry is just chock full of short-sighted moves like this.
If you look outside the Anglosphere you see far healthier[0] book publishing, to the point where translations of those books into English are filling the holes domestic publishers are leaving in the market. It started with comic books[1] and expanded into basically all fantasy fiction.
Social media has little to do with this, except that they're also filling a hole publishers aren't interested in filling.
[0] Healthy in terms of sales and audience. The authors of these books are being treated like shit, which perhaps is its own shortsightedness.
[1] It is hard to understate how weirdly pigeonholed western comics are, even after the death of the comics code and the indie comics boom gave authors way more creative freedom.
I think you clearly exposed one of the things that I couldn't never describe why I wasn't dragged into Racket/scheme. It's not only annoying is hard to remember all these differences.
Obviously the more you use the language these go away but still at least to me it doesn't seem to be a coherent syntax.
Well, to be fair, many/most programs aren't using complex numbers, or concerned with inexact vs. exact numbers, significant digits, or really even scientific notation.
Of the sci-fi genre for me it will always be #1. The whole thing is just perfect, there's no other movie that comes close to the world that is envisioned in Blade Runner.
People usually do not remember what happened turn by turn but they do remember what it made them feel.
Funnily enough, in the movie, the humans have little no feelings but the androids do -- and that is the central question that the movie made me consider -- what makes us human.
I am ofcourse biased because Blade Runner (original) is not only on my top 5 scifi movie list but also on my top 5 movie list. So much so that I am reluctant to watch 2049.
To me, the whole point of Batty's final scene is his empathy. PKD made a big point of empathy being the defining quality of humans and even the Voight-Kampff test relies on it.
I think that's a less interesting story if Batty doesn't develop and has only his self-interest.
I interpret the ending as Batty coming to the end of his life and realising that all life is precious, not just his own. That's why he saves Deckard after toying with him and then goes into his final monologue that taunts Deckard with how much more of a human life that Batty has experienced.
Of course, there's all the Christ symbolism with Batty's "crucified" hand and how he saves Deckard despite him killing all his friends and intending to kill him as well.
I think Blade Runner and Alien helped destroy mainstream science fiction.
Before Blade Runner almost anything could be science fiction. After Blade Runner science fiction meant detective noir with #tech_upgrade - clones, memory implants, dystopia. Or it was US truckers and/or the military fighting nasty aliens in spaaaaaaace. (Star Wars and its magic space knights was always more fantasy with a science fiction stage set.)
Blade Runner did it far better than the others, but then we had decades of mostly mediocre book knock-offs, especially in the UK. (Gibson gets a pass for taking the new trope even further by being a brilliant stylist, mixing in some tech orientalism, and inventing cyberspace.)
It's a stunning, iconic masterpiece of a movie with an unfortunate chilling cultural effect.
And ironically the Philip K Dick original was... very different.
>(Gibson gets a pass for taking the new trope even further by being a brilliant stylist, mixing in some tech orientalism, and inventing cyberspace.)
Gibson was also writing in that vein long before the release of Neuromancer, which repurposes some themes, plotlines, and even characters from his earlier short stories. And my understanding is he was working on Neuromancer before Blade Runner was released and without knowledge of it during its production.
I will say I'm reading through his short story compilation Burning Chrome and it is amazing. I don't think he ever matched Neuromancer with his other novels and over time they've just exposed his weaknesses more and more, which is a bummer. But he's absolutely at the top of his game in short stories.
No, Dick did not collaborate with Scott at all. He was not formally involved in the development of the film. He didn't write anything and wasn't given any say.
Dick actually hated the first drafts of the script, which deviated even more from the novel. He was also upset that he was asked to write a new novelization of the script that would essentially replace DADoES in print. He made comments in the press about how Hollywood was ruining his book.
He really only changed his tune after his agent persuaded the producers to invite Dick to the set in 1981. He was basically coddled by Scott and his team (who was told Dick was creating bad publicity and needed to be assuaged) for a whole day, shown around the set and given a rough cut preview that included several major sequences and unfinished VFX by Douglas Trumbull.
After that, he not only spoke highly of the screenplay (which had evolved with the help of David Peoples, though it didn't exactly get more faithful to the novel), he wrote enthusiastically about how the film was going to change the science fiction genre for ever. Unfortunately, he never got to see the finished film.
(Gibson gets a pass for taking the new trope even further by being a brilliant stylist, mixing in some tech orientalism, and inventing cyberspace.)
Gibson was horrified after walking out of a theater after seeing Blade Runner; in that Scott had visualized and shown onscreen the aesthetic of (at that point unpublished) Neuromancer.
>Before Blade Runner almost anything could be science fiction. After Blade Runner science fiction meant detective noir with #tech_upgrade - clones, memory implants, dystopia.
It didn't destroy anything; it just set a mold for the next few decades that was used to cookie-cut copies from. It cut a rut, and movie execs LOOOOVE a profitable rut to wallow in.
Same. The atmosphere it creates is still unmatched.
I wish I hadn’t watched BR2049. Felt like a cheap parody, from the torrents of water falling on the windows, to the fake light effects, to the cartoonish villain who of course had to butcher a human-looking replicant while monologuing in order to get a proper introduction.
Felt like Villeneuve agonized & sweated blood trying to make a homage to the original film (whose own appeal was not immediately grasped at release); which ended up not letting his own movie be as good as it could've been.
I felt the same way about BR2049. I know some people love it, but to me it was an unnecessary movie that did nothing better than the original, and it only cheapened some of the characters. Also, Jared Leto: I simply cannot stand his scenery chewing, even if he was in the movie only for a few minutes.
There are some acting missteps that unfortunately flaw the film for me.
Harrison Ford is not very good in it—perhaps not a great actor generally. His pretending to be a nerd/fan in Zhora's dressing room is too cringey to watch it's so bad… I feel like I'm watching Mickey Rooney playing Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany's.
And the actor that played Leon (Brion James) is also difficult to watch (he was a distraction in The Fifth Element as well).
Harrison Ford is not very good in it—perhaps not a great actor generally. His pretending to be a nerd/fan in Zhora's dressing room is too cringey to watch it's so bad…
Harrison Ford is playing Rock Deckard, a detective (not an actor) who hunts down artificial humans. At least to begin with, he and his fellow detectives don't have much respect for the replicants, so he thinks it will be easy to manipulate Zhora and get some information out of her before he kills her.
No, he's not. He's sushi, cold fish. He doesn't even know for sure if he's human. He can't be a good actor.
Actually, if he's a replicant made to believe he's human, he might even believe he was doing a good job, because he'd be clueless about what good acting is supposed to look like.
No, he's a replicant who believes he's a seasoned detective. Nothing Deckard believes about himself is true.
Or, if you believe he's human, his the typical hard-boiled detective, he did behave in the way Ford portrays in the movie. Not subtle, not particularly clever.
I thought Brion James was fantastic in The Fifth Element because he's one of the few slapstick outlets. He comes off as sorta military-scary, and ends up frozen like a Looney-Tunes popsicle in the freezer a few minutes later , and dead-pan military is a kind-of-funny partner to Corbin being an outlaw bachelor. He then remains the dead-pan receiver of abuse from the president, etc.
I agree about Harrison Ford, though I don't know who would've done it better at that moment in history.
aside : The Fifth Element is considered to be one of the noisiest distracting sci-fi movies ever, so to hear your main distraction was Brion James made me grin.
Huh? Between Kassovitz trying to rob Corbin, the priest's sidekick, the head scientist, the archeologist with "Aziz, light!", the Chris Rock character, Corbins "fake wife" suggestion, the space port ticket counter gags, the president, and several others, the movie hardly has "few" slapstick outlets.
Right, they're all over the place. That's just the kind of movie that it is, And to the extent that he serves as one of the distractions, it's complementing the tone and vibe of the movie. Like I wholeheartedly agree that he was a perfect fit for that movie, but not because he was one of a small handful of slapstick elements.
> And the actor that played Leon (Brion James) is also difficult to watch (he was a distraction in The Fifth Element as well).
Wow, couldn't disagree more. I mean, Brion James wasn't a good actor, but he aced his role of Leon. Leon is weird, awkward and insecure, while also capable of great violence... which fit Brion perfectly.
Yeah, I would go so far as to say highlight of his career. Extremely, extremely good, like can't look away good. I suppose it's all just opinion at some level, but this is sticking out like a sore thumb is perhaps the hardest one to defend that I'm seeing in the whole thread.
I remember so many details of his brief appearances in that movie, but what really stands out are his eyes -- intense, fearful, paranoid, menacing. (Suitable, given that scene where Deckard and Leon extract J. F. Sebastian's name.)
He almost always played a thug or heavy, and so I'm not sure what other film of his could have ranked higher than this. His scene sitting across the table from Holden is classic.
I don't remember him playing a heavy in The King is Alive, which is not a classic but a rather dark Dogme 95 film, of all things.
One of the reasons big companies still get away on things like these is because fines are pocket change to them and top level executives ever face a real prison sentence at all.
They have already done the legal work and the math in advance, and because the numbers are on their side they get away with it.
HE wants to get rid of forms, and make the rest of the world enjoy the burden of requesting access to open source code through a beloved form. Hope that's clear now.
The last technology that truly excited me was the ebook. I truly believe is one of the greatest gadgets ever invented. It's just fantastic the disconnection you get with it, the quality of the screen, how long battery lasts and obviously how many books you can carry in a small package.
Offtopic: Amazon has removed the option to not store your credit card details when checking out items. There used to be a checkbox that allowed you to choose not to save your credit card details for future purchases.
It's gone and confirmed and acknowledged by their support which made me take a screenshot of the popup where the card details are entered to confirm it. They in turned wanted to give me a 15€ gift card for the inconvenience and told them that I wasn't there asking for a gift card or discount and refused it.
So every single time you purchase with your credit card if you do not want your details to be saved, you have to MANUALLY go to your personal settings and remove the added card from your last purchase. Fucking amazing.
On top of that listings are overflowed with chinese brands and/or items that have no correlation to what I'm looking for.
Can someone suggest better alternatives here in Europe?
There is no single product Microsoft hasn't touched and ruined. People should leave all Microsoft products en masse. I'm glad I'm no longer on Github.
What I find a bit weird is why so many people rely on it. Today we have tons of VPS providers where anyone can host their on git repo and CI/CD pipeline.
What is preventing so many people to effectively have a custom setup?
My company is still on GitHub... for now. But incidents like this are becoming more common and I'm becoming less tolerant of it. I suspect many feel the same, but it takes time to persuade the masses.
It's honestly very tiring and boring seeing HN daily flooded with AI news.