I'll get there one day.
And when in Gruyères then one should taste meringues double crème, or fondue in colder months.
And last but not least - its a region of Swiss pre-alps, mountains up to cca 2000m high, lovely hikes all around in picture-perfect nature and fields (government pays farmers to keep it looking nice) and even nearby very nice via ferrata on Moléson peak which I did 2 weeks ago, this time with some snow. It overlooks the castle and whole area from avove. That was interesting and intense experience while being alone on whole mountain.
There's several lifesize necronomicons/xenomorphs, some earlier and later variants, Sil and the skull train, a lot of art that was never used in Alien and sequels but some made it later into Prometheus.
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQwxhqR...
I kicked myself on the second read for missing why the title mentions trucking: it’s in the article, buried a little, but Ridley Scott called this the “truck driver” version of sci-fi.
“Bachelor pad” sci-fi is another great description, and this subreddit uses the equally fantastic term “cassette futurism”:
https://www.reddit.com/r/cassettefuturism/
I think it’s why I love the Technology Connections YouTube channel too. A lot of the devices are like 1980s science fiction! (The article in this discussion mentions the set designers using rotary mechanical switches to automate blinking light patterns so, in a way, they were living in their own futurism.)
Fantastic decision, the claustrophobia really adds to the creep factor IMO.
Although the ship in Dark Star wins the space-grunge contest hands-down.
The justification for the light situation in the movie is simple: corporate greed and human laziness (which fits nicely in the narrative as well).
Last place I worked at (10M investment) the men's pisser didn't flush and the toilet paper was brown sandpaper that smelt like shit even before you used it. Horrible TL lights though, so not quite a horror scene.
It's definitely a different world though because you’re not supposed to go under budget. If investors give you $100mil to make a movie, they want to maximize the return on that $100mil, so if you’re $5mil under budget, they want you to go and spend that money to make it even better (usually in post production now, but back then it was less of an option).
Of course, this isn't how it's usually presented in science fiction, but that's because a sci-fi story about a non-sentient fully automated mining machine wouldn't be very interesting. Gotta get humans out there.
I'd rather go with "for any delta in mining convenience between solar systems, there exists a level of FTL magic where shipping would become economically feasible"
Perhaps space slow steaming might be an option if your goal was to make a Dyson sphere exist before the star inside burns out?
This feels about as realistic as most of the spacetech proposals I hear.
The fact that interstellar mining is happening is evidence that it's cheaper than mining locally. Otherwise it wouldn't happen.
What a bizarre take. It's not a mcguffin. Both Alien and Avatar were based on economic/historical realities of their times and throughout history. Why do you think companies mine or drill for oil all over the world. Why not just stay within their national borders? You exhaust resources locally and you look for resources elsewhere. It's just common sense.
The costs (in money and energy) of the infrastructure to mine another solar system would pay for a lot of R&D to synthesize whatever it is here in our solar system.
Unlike the other poster, I don't think interstellar mining needs finding, I'm perfectly happy to lean back and enjoy the show. But whatever they mine would have to be very magical indeed to not be cheaper from any other process.
Is this a serious response? What is your point?
> The costs (in money and energy) of the infrastructure to mine another solar system would pay for a lot of R&D to synthesize whatever it is here in our solar system.
Sure. Just like infrastructure to mine another continent would pay for a lot of R&D to synthesize whatever. And yet, we mine other continents. Not only that, in the not too distant future, we are going to mine the moon, asteroids, etc. I wonder why we don't just synthesize gold rather than mining for gold in south africa or some far distant place?
> But whatever they mine would have to be very magical indeed to not be cheaper from any other process.
And yet, history, science, economics and reality says you are wrong.
You do realize that costs come down right? Just because intercontinental travel was expensive in the past doesn't mean it is expensive today. In a world of engineers and xenomorphs, it's the least crazy aspect of the film that simpletons are hung up about.
Or the local conditions are such that they produce different chemical compounds.
I'm not going to strike gold in my backyard, but people in Colorado might. There's not a lot of diamond production happening within reach underneath my location, but there's plenty in parts of Africa.
If we want to take it to space, there's not a lot of Helium-3 to be easily extracted on Earth, but apparently there's quite a bit more on the Moon.
How Deckerd can afford to live in one post economic meltdown is a bit unclear. And those whisky glasses are worth a mint now too.
"Enhance" indeed.
He's part of a precarious minority of semi-technical functionaries, armed bureaucrats afforded generous promotions and great inner leeway amidst the post-meltdown order of things, in return for their unquestioning allegiance to the same
Personally I prefer the PKD book. It was more nuanced. But the aesthetic of the first film was just wondeful. If somebody had sold cold cathode flouro umbrellas when the movie came out they would have cleaned up.
After Deckard did an exemplary job, everyone liked it so much that they they replaced his entire cadre with simulacra.
>Personally I prefer the PKD book. It was more nuanced.
Oh absolutely! Just recently bought a fake animal and pondered it. Love PKD for selling various angles on the same trip for decades; wonder if his OG exegesis can be read anywhere...
But Alien being barely more than a higher budget Dark Star remake that somehow got stuck in the elevator scene (and lost all of the original's lightheartedness in the process), that absolutely is my favorite piece of scifi movie trivia.
granted, but this wasn't a Point Break remake either. Dark Star is pretty much a student film turned into a blockbuster. Even El Mariachi->Desperado wasn't as different as Dark Star->Alien was.
I didn't though, I'm not taking my brush & toothpaste to a public restroom at the office.
I didn't keep anything at my office, there were no lockers, no drawers, and the desk itself was messed with by the night cleaning crew.
> and miles cheaper than paying for dental treatments
You don't need to brush your teeth after every meal, that's a cultural thing. As long as you brush when you wake up and before you go to bed, that's ok.
Wow... calm down, armchair therapist. Just do your thing and let others live their lives.
Most people do NOT brush their teeth after lunch. It's just a cultural habit. See the comment that sparked this.
which really comes across as you work in a disgusting place, or you might have a bit of an overreaction
The overreaction thing is just your own baggage. Seems like a lot to extrapolate from so few words.
There are a few more out there if you want to thumb-through the deal thing
Heh, I can't get enough of them; it's a great visual design template to work from. And visual consistency of properties within a diegetic timeframe has to be taken into account, even if the newer entries' writers' rooms could profit from better talent...
That said, Alien: Isolation is still the best modern infusion into that universe, and one of the best games in my lifetime.
A perfect replika of Alien the original movie and its retrofuturism.
If you haven't seen these two films, you need to fix that this week. It'll change your life.
Scott tried to expand the aesthetics with Prometheus and Covenant. I felt the films did a great job of refreshing the look and feel while remaining faithful to the 80's. Unfortunately, the writing was trite and Scott's directing is averaging .200 at bat these days.
Romulus was not bad, though certainly not a masterpiece. At least it was better written and had better character arcs than Scott's recent films.
I'd rather have the performance of this series than whatever Jurassic Park or Star Wars have become.
Predator, oddly enough, has strangely been improving if you don't count Shane Black's entry.
I'm happy they keep making these, and I hope the writers and directors at the reigns keep experimenting rather than conforming to "safe" or "understandable by a general audience".
Let's agree to ignore the awful VS Predator crossovers for a second. I'm not sure they are canon anyway, and they are obviously cash grabs and not made with the same care of even the worst Alien movies.
Alien 3, while it has a cool idea (prison planet), is a mess as a result of executive meddling (the story can be read online). And they killed Hicks and Newt... bastards!
Resurrection was awful and awfully badly acted. I like Jeunet, but this was a hard miss. It has some cool visuals at times, typical of Jeunet, but the movie itself was embarrassing.
Prometheus was atrocious. Badly acted, badly scripted (characters making the dumbest of choices at every turn, professionals who don't know their profession -- xenobiologists who pet alien snakes, geologists who get lots at the first turn -- this has been discussed countless times). And the loss of mystery... nobody needed to know more about the Engineers/Pilot aliens, that's not how good storytelling works. Aided by technology, Scott "pulled a George Lucas" and forgot the cardinal rule of scifi horror/mystery: less is more.
After this, I exercised the good sense of avoiding Covenant (the plot summary seems bad), and Romulus, and now the new TV show.
I think overall the gravest sin is that the Alien universe was meant to be sketched in the broadest strokes, and details and mystery kept, not overexplained.
I wish they had let the first two awesome movies rest in peace.
Extended universes suck.
P.S. same applies to Blade Runner. Then again, I didn't even like the sequel, so I'm sure I'll dislike the upcoming show :(
For instance, I like the bleakness of Alien 3 opening with Newt and Hicks both dead. That doesn't spoil my enjoyment of Aliens, which ends on a triumphant note. These are different stories, and they can be treated on completely different planes. If you want, you can imagine the movies as representing alternate branching universes, where one branch led to Newt and Hicks dying in hibernation, and in some other branch that's too uninteresting to be put to film, they live happily ever after.
I also liked Blade Runner 2049, but I don't need to retroactively reevaluate the original Blade Runner in light of any of the questions that are settled in the sequel. In Ridley Scott's original film, Deckard's humanity is still open to question, regardless of what's presented in Villeneuve's version.
Of course when the sequel is complete trash, it's easy to ignore entirely. Terminator 3 being the obvious example.
I think there's a similar issue with Marvel after Thanos. Not as much that Endgame was a bad movie, just that the continuity was derailed and never grounded itself. Did Vision come back? Did Loki? Is the Fox Quicksilver canon now? Eh, who knows, the "real" state of the world has moved so much that it doesn't matter anyway.
In a way, I feel like this makes it the comic-book movie that's spiritually closest to the comics.
Yeah, remember when the network forced Lynch and Frost to reveal the killer of Laura Palmer. Broadcast executives typically don't get it, scenarists often get too infatuated with their own worldbuilding.
Does anyone know why Americans do this regularly, swapping i and e especially in words of German origin?
To be fair, German "ie" and "ei" is one of the few special rules which make no sense (or lost their sense in time). The 'e' in 'ie' is Dehnungs-e for elongation, just a notation that the i is longer pronounced (like Wiese, Biene). (Special rule: if ie is at the end of a word like familie (latin familia) often it is a diphtong and both vocals are pronounced).
"ei" is a bit stupid, because it is not pronounced "ei" but like "ai" or "ay" (eg Mayer).
That said, it should be a pretty hard rule when writing about a person to, at the very least, check to make sure you spelled their name correctly.
Has anyone actually counted whether that rule is more often true than wrong?
Which is basically saying the rule is worthless?
And yes, I realize by putting that in an HN comment to live on the Internet forever, the ghost of every English teacher I had growing up in the US is going to haunt me, one by one, until I am mad and rendered unable to communicate because the anarchic amalgamation that is the English language has lost any shadow of sensibility.
In fairness, I find it a perfectly wonderful language to get creative with, but I really do believe its evolution as a sort of Frankenstein's Monster, composed of parts borrowed from German, Latin, French, etc, has allowed it to transcend into something that broke free of any rules we tried to impose upon it. We're taught different ways to write an essay "correctly" for the sake of appeasing specific branches of academia, grammatical structures that are often awkward and completely at odds with how we actually speak, inducting more and more colloquialisms and slang into the accepted dictionary authorities each year as the stodgy old guard, once considered rebellious and fresh, passes on to the next generation.
English is dynamic and alive, in that way, leaving our educational curriculum running to catch up. Believing that, I cannot blame even the most eloquent native speaker for getting things "wrong" from the perspective of a non-native speaker. It's likely that they learned different and flimsy rules at different times from different sources.
You should see what they do to place names like Edinburgh.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWDsSDNpS8c&lc=UgyEogAS5P_Hm...
Double coincidence: it was I who posted this ten years ago: