Re:Uninspired on several points (some spoilers)
on
Review: 'Titan A.E.'
·
· Score: 2
Another thing about the movie was that it seemed pretty pessimistic about our future. 1000+ years to get there? Bah.
Common sci fi shorthand. Time and setting is often a quick indicator of the type of story you are in for.
Space opera is usually in the distant future or a remote location. It makes the suspension of disbelief easier. Star Wars and Flash Gordon take place in locations we will never visit, and Star Trek happens in a time we will not live to see.
Cyberpunk is typically done on Earth, tomorrow morning (or shortly thereafter). We are supposed to accept that we are on the very edge of this stuff happening. In that regard, it follows the trend of "dire warning" novels like Brave New World, 1984, and F-451, all of which were set within a generation or two of the time they were written.
For instance, why can a common droid easily hack a super space stations computers?
Because the "common droid" was used on counterintelligence missions on board the first ship we see in the movie. He was surely programmed for that kind of stuff by the same people who died stealing the Death Star plans.
How can a crop dusting farm boy become an ace fighter pilot with no training?
1) The force. 2) He was described himself as "not such a bad pilot" in the Cantina scene, so he must have flown something at one time or another. 3) He was not an "ace" pilot... he was not even the leader of the "Red" team, which was not the lead team. He only got a shot at the Death Star when just about everybody else who tried was killed.
Where are the escape pods on the millenium falcon?
Dude, the ship was huge. Take your pick of locations.
Etc, etc, etc.
The biggest problem in Star Wars, by far, is that Light Speed is a big deal that only a few ships can muster, but people zing from star to star in a matter of days, hours or minutes.
I can explain this, and the presence of "noise in space" in one shot:
The "galaxy far, far away" is a much smaller galaxy than ours. The stars are very close together, and have some gas between them. There, done.
(If only Star Wars was a Marvel comic; Stan Lee would surely owe me a "no-prize" for that.)
If your lungs are full in the vacuum of space, the capilaries will burst shortly. Exhale and you buy a little time. It is extremely cold, but not enough to kill you instantly. The few seconds they were exposed would not have been lethal.
Other than the fact that a fire extinguisher would not propel them very fast (sit on a well-oiled office chair and fire one off... didn't get you very far, did it?), it was a fairly well-played scene, and one of the stronger moments in the movie.
Actually, a lot of the pop references probably came from that other note-worthy writer on the project, Joss Whedon (creater and writer of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, both on film and on TV).
The good news on the Ben Edlund front is that the guy that played "Puddy" on Seinfeld is going to be starring in an Edlund-scripted, live-action, prime-time, "The Tick" on Fox! A clip from the pilot is floating around the web, if you are interested.
The one point I disagree on is Barrymore. When I went in, I had forgotten that she was doing the lead voice, and didn't actually recognize her until late in the movie. She did a great job... the only thing that "didn't match" was the fact that her real life image is so different from the Akima character that you gotta get past your knowledge of who is behind the curtain. Ditto for Garafalo, who played a roll which she could never pull off in live action, but if you let yourself forget who is squealing with delight while shooting enemy ships, it is actually a pretty good job.
Re:Uninspired on several points (some spoilers)
on
Review: 'Titan A.E.'
·
· Score: 2
The hero and misc humans successfully rebuild a spaceship and get it flying before either of the bad guys get to the Titan, even though the Drej have this "amazing technology" and even though the other bad guys have this head start and just as accurate a map.
I think they established that the map used waypoints and got more acurate as you got closer, so while the bad guys had an idea of where to start looking, Cale had a pointer that took them strait to the Titan.
They never explain why Titan is such a threat
Never specifically explained, but not hard to imagine.
they never explain why they couldn't use Titan when the Earth was attacked but could now.
They sure didn't. By the end of the first reel, anybody watching this should be able to realize that the alien threat is not a very logical one, and enjoy the chase scenes for what they are.
As for Cale seeming a little too smart, I got the impression that he was not "just" a laborer, but was a pretty good mechanic (which in the future date would include knowledge of propulsion systems). They show him working on a robotic gizmo as a child, and hot-rodding an old rocket midway through the movie, so by the time he fires up the Titan, we are meant to understand that he has a knack for this kind of stuff.
The thing that puzzled me is: if you have the tech to build something like the Titan, and know that some aliens are not crazy about the idea and might come to wipe out humanity to stop you, why build only one? Wouldn't it make sense to invest in a fleet of them?
In fact, I challenge you to name 3 recently released SciFi flicks that are better.
1. Pi
2. Dark City
3. The Matrix
Okay, maybe that's only two and a half, because The Matrix was a re-tread of the story in Dark City, but all three of these were at least slightly better than Titan AE, each in its own way.
Now if you had said 3 recent animated films that were better, you would have won the argument. Toy Story 2 is the only one I can name off the top of my head. (Mononoke was not recent, it was a new dub of an old movie. The Iron Giant was not very good.)
Craig, I pretty much agree with every single point you make, and have a few of my own to add to it. It was a fun movie, although not without a few flaws.
***SPOILER ALERT*** (I don't want to be like the dweeb that ruined Fight Club for me... don't read on if you have not seen the movie yet.) This film must be seen in a theater with a good sound system. The audio team did a fantastic job. For example, when the ice was cracking, it sounded exactly like the cracking of a large frozen lake or colliding icebergs. Very cool.
The scene with Cale in the scrapyard working with his cutting torch (and leaving it adrift in space during his lunchbreak) was very cool and imaginative, much more so that the scene required.
The scene when the ship's cockpit glass was cracking was so good, I didn't even mind when they used a fire extinguisher to propel themselves to safety a few seconds later.
Drew Barrimore exceeded my expectations, and the fact that Garafolo was so "out of character" from her usual smart-alecky roles just proves that she is an actress and not a one-trick-pony.
Now for the weaknesses:
The pace of the movie did not feel right. I've never been a Bluth fan, because he often seems to dwell on moments that are not very interesting, while speeding through stuff that should probably be given more time. For example, during the scene when Cale was talking about how much he missed his father, I got bored and started noticing how well the steps of the flight deck were rendered... not the detail a good director wants the audience looking at during a first viewing.
Did the Drej remind anybody else of the Protoss from Spacecraft?
Other than the humans and the Drej, all aliens looked a little like some kind of animal or another (mostly lizards), were played for laughs, and their origins were never explained. They were all just geniric Disney-ish creatures that reminded me a little too much of the coke-snorting aliens from Heavy Metal.
The combination of free hand drawnings with advanced CGI took me out of the movie a little too often. If they had digitally rendered the characters, or had used traditional animation throughout, it probably would have been a slightly more emersive experience.
In the end, it was an hour and a half of purdy pictures, and the plot holes were no worse than those in The Matrix, which everybody seems to think is the coolest movie ever for some reason.
Actually, the producers of AE already expressed their intention to pull a "Lucas" and periodically update the soundtrack on any future releases.
Personally, I think that is a mistake. Yea, the music to the Transformers movie sucked, but the music sucked when it was brand new. When you watch old sci fi, the dated music is often part of the movie's charm. Could you imagine if they took the Queen music out of Flash Gordon? Or the Wendy Carlos synth-crap out of Tron?
That aside, the music to AE was almost as bad as the endless drone of radio rejects that populated most of Heavy Metal. Almost, but not quite... It was good enough that I was able to ignore it.
Of course Woz himself can put it much better than I can, so here it is from the man himself (cut&pasted from his web page):
"The Apple I was the first low cost computer to come with an alphanumeric keyboard standard. I just couldn't see the waste and effort to build some general techie product that needed a lot more junk to start typing. And until you type, nothing is worth much. I'd been through the other computer paradigm my whole life before. Also, our calculators at HP had meaningful (to humans) keyboards when turned on. I also made the Apple I display on the cheapest device possible, your own home TV. I also wrote the BASIC for it. I only left out floating point after thinking hard in order to have the first BASIC for a 6502 and maybe get a little fame in my club. The Apple ][ was the first to have BASIC in ROM, the first to have DRAMs, expandable hugely on the motherboard, the first to have so few chips, the first to be completely built, the first with a plastic case, the first with color graphics, the first with hi-res, the first with sound, the first with paddles for games, the first to include built-in casette interface, the first to have color and game commands in the BASIC, etc. It was the third ever to look like a typewriter (the Apple I was the first)."
Are you trying to insinuate that what makes the Apple II an invention, but the Altair not an invention...
I'm terribly sorry, but I don't remember saying that the Altair was not an invention.
Oh, wait... now that I read my comment again, I see that I never said any such thing.
Try reading more carefully next time.
Woz was the first, or nearly the first, to design and sell a computer system that included a video controller and a keyboard.
Altair users had to hack their own drivers, because the Altair was just a motherboard in a box (and that was only after you assembled it). Standard input was a row of on/off toggles, and standard output was a row of LED's. It was a ground-breaking invention, and if Ed Roberts is not also in the "Hall of Fame", then something is very wrong... but that does not take away from the fact that the Apple II allowed math geeks and software geeks and an endless army of other technophiles to get their hands on their very own computers, something that only hard-core hardware tweakers could do before.
In hindsight, selling a complete computer system instead of a motherboard kit may seem obvious to us, and it may only have been a matter of time before somebody figured it out, but Woz and Jobs actually did it.
What is more, Woz designed a great motherboard, possibly the best ever to be designed by a single person (instead of a team of engineers). He also came up with a great video architecture, which made his computer affordable.
If you really think all he did was stick a keyboard and monitor on an Altair and sell it under a new brand, you clearly have no clue about the history of the Altair, Apple, or personal computers in general. Get thee to the library!
Another option would be a menu program that lets newbies run all the default apps easilly, along with a menu-based tool for installing new apps that ads them to the user menu options, and a means for hackers to get a root shell without much fuss. Best of both worlds, if you ask me.
To exec a menu app is no great sin. Folks that used to log into a lot of BBS's "back in the day" would feel right at home.
Handheld GUI's all look like crap so far anyway, so why not let all the "point and poke" features be done with ASCII text instead of low-res pictures? It might not look as cool, but would probably run faster.
The "Jobs is just a suit" myth is getting a little tiresome.
Sure, these days he is a multi-millionaire CEO-of-two-companies-at-once, but he started out as a software hacker.
People forget that he was once pressured into bringing in a "real" CEO to take over the company, because of his lack of executive experience. He was later booted off the Apple board by the same CEO he appointed and ran off to form NeXT (a geek haven if ever there was one).
While the Woz rightly gets credit for doing most of the design work on all the early Appples, Jobs wrote quite a bit of the software, and the Macintosh was entirely his baby.
The two Steves got the money to start Apple Computer by selling stolen long-distance time.
Not quite. They did sell blue boxes to their college buddies, mostly to show off thier phreaking skills for fun, but they got the money to start Apple Computer from a venture capitalist.
(BTW: If you missed Cringly's "Triumph of the Nerds" special on PBS, go rent it. The interview with Woz contains a very funny story about using a blue box to call the Pope.)
The Apple I was a cheap alternative to other hobby computers like the Altair, but the Apple II was a big deal. Woz & Jobs brought the first "personal computer" to the market by assembling a complete system that anybody could buy and use.
Prior to the days of the Apple II, you had to build the damn things yourself, so computers were really only a hobbyist toy until the Apple II.
Pop the hood on one of those things, and you will see plenty of innovations. It was a beautifully simple and efficient motherboard design.
There was a reason why the Apple II sold as fast as they could make them; it was a good product that people wanted.
Yea, that's totally different than skinning, because if you are 5 pounds overweight, your avitar will be about 2 pixels wider! Astounding!
Skins or objects, we are still just talking about replacing the default purdy pictures with a picture of yourself, which is very fun for LAN deathmatches and can make chat rooms a little more spiffy, but is not exactly going to create a mad rush to have ourselves pixelated.
Why the hell would I want my beer gut to be carefully rendered in 3d anyway? If I was creating a skin of myself for a game, I would probably use photoshop or gimp to slim myself down first.
I used to have a job administrating CA-Unicenter TNG, an "Enterprise Management" suite that is meant to lord over all of your servers, mainframes, network, etc. - everything from job scheduling to desktop software delivery.
I thought it was really funny to call it the "MCP", but I guess I was the only one. The PHB had no idea what I was talking about.:)
What is far more likely to happen is somebody will someday commit a crime on camera and get away with it, because their lawyer will discredit the footage as being too easy to fake.
This is why audio tape is not really evidence unless a witness testifies under oath that it is correct.
Okay, I know it seems to be fashionable to flame sig11 around here, but I gotta say I kind of liked Tron.
From the film-junkie perspective, it was an interesting update of Metropolis, changing it from an industrial age horror story to an information age one.
From the geek perspective, it was one of Hollywood's better attempts at capturing the hacker ethos. (Jeff Bridges even uses the term "hacking" in a manner that ESR would approve of.)
Compared to eye-gougingly bad movies like Hackers and Virtuosity, it was a triumph.
I think something like the avitars from the chat room conference in the early chapters of Gibson's "Idoru" is more likely.
One girl went with a "slightly enhanced" version of herself, while a k3wl d00d she was talking to used a floating "wizzard of oz" style Death Head, complete with a text slogan meant to show how 1337 she was (but was lost in the translation).
Where both authors go wrong (IMHO) is when they assume that this stuff will be a big deal, and costly to come by. Later in the book, that same girl has to obtain some virtual formal wear for another meeting, and IIRC she could barely afford it.
What Gibson and Stephenson seem to miss is that we are already expressing emotions and editing our "presentation" for our avitars, even in text environments like MUD's. Avitar clothes and facial expressions will continue to evolve along with the rest of the technology, and on-line chat users will continue to take them for granted.
Slashdot Mirror
Common sci fi shorthand. Time and setting is often a quick indicator of the type of story you are in for.
Space opera is usually in the distant future or a remote location. It makes the suspension of disbelief easier. Star Wars and Flash Gordon take place in locations we will never visit, and Star Trek happens in a time we will not live to see.
Cyberpunk is typically done on Earth, tomorrow morning (or shortly thereafter). We are supposed to accept that we are on the very edge of this stuff happening. In that regard, it follows the trend of "dire warning" novels like Brave New World, 1984, and F-451, all of which were set within a generation or two of the time they were written.
He he he... good one.
Because the "common droid" was used on counterintelligence missions on board the first ship we see in the movie. He was surely programmed for that kind of stuff by the same people who died stealing the Death Star plans.
How can a crop dusting farm boy become an ace fighter pilot with no training?
1) The force. 2) He was described himself as "not such a bad pilot" in the Cantina scene, so he must have flown something at one time or another. 3) He was not an "ace" pilot... he was not even the leader of the "Red" team, which was not the lead team. He only got a shot at the Death Star when just about everybody else who tried was killed.
Where are the escape pods on the millenium falcon?
Dude, the ship was huge. Take your pick of locations.
Etc, etc, etc.
The biggest problem in Star Wars, by far, is that Light Speed is a big deal that only a few ships can muster, but people zing from star to star in a matter of days, hours or minutes.
I can explain this, and the presence of "noise in space" in one shot:
The "galaxy far, far away" is a much smaller galaxy than ours. The stars are very close together, and have some gas between them. There, done.
(If only Star Wars was a Marvel comic; Stan Lee would surely owe me a "no-prize" for that.)
If your lungs are full in the vacuum of space, the capilaries will burst shortly. Exhale and you buy a little time. It is extremely cold, but not enough to kill you instantly. The few seconds they were exposed would not have been lethal.
Other than the fact that a fire extinguisher would not propel them very fast (sit on a well-oiled office chair and fire one off... didn't get you very far, did it?), it was a fairly well-played scene, and one of the stronger moments in the movie.
The good news on the Ben Edlund front is that the guy that played "Puddy" on Seinfeld is going to be starring in an Edlund-scripted, live-action, prime-time, "The Tick" on Fox! A clip from the pilot is floating around the web, if you are interested.
The one point I disagree on is Barrymore. When I went in, I had forgotten that she was doing the lead voice, and didn't actually recognize her until late in the movie. She did a great job... the only thing that "didn't match" was the fact that her real life image is so different from the Akima character that you gotta get past your knowledge of who is behind the curtain. Ditto for Garafalo, who played a roll which she could never pull off in live action, but if you let yourself forget who is squealing with delight while shooting enemy ships, it is actually a pretty good job.
I think they established that the map used waypoints and got more acurate as you got closer, so while the bad guys had an idea of where to start looking, Cale had a pointer that took them strait to the Titan.
They never explain why Titan is such a threat
Never specifically explained, but not hard to imagine.
they never explain why they couldn't use Titan when the Earth was attacked but could now.
They sure didn't. By the end of the first reel, anybody watching this should be able to realize that the alien threat is not a very logical one, and enjoy the chase scenes for what they are.
As for Cale seeming a little too smart, I got the impression that he was not "just" a laborer, but was a pretty good mechanic (which in the future date would include knowledge of propulsion systems). They show him working on a robotic gizmo as a child, and hot-rodding an old rocket midway through the movie, so by the time he fires up the Titan, we are meant to understand that he has a knack for this kind of stuff.
The thing that puzzled me is: if you have the tech to build something like the Titan, and know that some aliens are not crazy about the idea and might come to wipe out humanity to stop you, why build only one? Wouldn't it make sense to invest in a fleet of them?
1. Pi
2. Dark City
3. The Matrix
Okay, maybe that's only two and a half, because The Matrix was a re-tread of the story in Dark City, but all three of these were at least slightly better than Titan AE, each in its own way.
Now if you had said 3 recent animated films that were better, you would have won the argument. Toy Story 2 is the only one I can name off the top of my head. (Mononoke was not recent, it was a new dub of an old movie. The Iron Giant was not very good.)
***SPOILER ALERT*** (I don't want to be like the dweeb that ruined Fight Club for me... don't read on if you have not seen the movie yet.) This film must be seen in a theater with a good sound system. The audio team did a fantastic job. For example, when the ice was cracking, it sounded exactly like the cracking of a large frozen lake or colliding icebergs. Very cool.
The scene with Cale in the scrapyard working with his cutting torch (and leaving it adrift in space during his lunchbreak) was very cool and imaginative, much more so that the scene required.
The scene when the ship's cockpit glass was cracking was so good, I didn't even mind when they used a fire extinguisher to propel themselves to safety a few seconds later.
Drew Barrimore exceeded my expectations, and the fact that Garafolo was so "out of character" from her usual smart-alecky roles just proves that she is an actress and not a one-trick-pony.
Now for the weaknesses:
The pace of the movie did not feel right. I've never been a Bluth fan, because he often seems to dwell on moments that are not very interesting, while speeding through stuff that should probably be given more time. For example, during the scene when Cale was talking about how much he missed his father, I got bored and started noticing how well the steps of the flight deck were rendered... not the detail a good director wants the audience looking at during a first viewing.
Did the Drej remind anybody else of the Protoss from Spacecraft?
Other than the humans and the Drej, all aliens looked a little like some kind of animal or another (mostly lizards), were played for laughs, and their origins were never explained. They were all just geniric Disney-ish creatures that reminded me a little too much of the coke-snorting aliens from Heavy Metal.
The combination of free hand drawnings with advanced CGI took me out of the movie a little too often. If they had digitally rendered the characters, or had used traditional animation throughout, it probably would have been a slightly more emersive experience.
In the end, it was an hour and a half of purdy pictures, and the plot holes were no worse than those in The Matrix, which everybody seems to think is the coolest movie ever for some reason.
Personally, I think that is a mistake. Yea, the music to the Transformers movie sucked, but the music sucked when it was brand new. When you watch old sci fi, the dated music is often part of the movie's charm. Could you imagine if they took the Queen music out of Flash Gordon? Or the Wendy Carlos synth-crap out of Tron?
That aside, the music to AE was almost as bad as the endless drone of radio rejects that populated most of Heavy Metal. Almost, but not quite... It was good enough that I was able to ignore it.
You said that Katz articles are predictable, and somebody modded you down as "redundant".
Heh heh.
"The Apple I was the first low cost computer to come with an alphanumeric keyboard standard. I just couldn't see the waste and effort to build some general techie product that needed a lot more junk to start typing. And until you type, nothing is worth much. I'd been through the other computer paradigm my whole life before. Also, our calculators at HP had meaningful (to humans) keyboards when turned on. I also made the Apple I display on the cheapest device possible, your own home TV. I also wrote the BASIC for it. I only left out floating point after thinking hard in order to have the first BASIC for a 6502 and maybe get a little fame in my club. The Apple ][ was the first to have BASIC in ROM, the first to have DRAMs, expandable hugely on the motherboard, the first to have so few chips, the first to be completely built, the first with a plastic case, the first with color graphics, the first with hi-res, the first with sound, the first with paddles for games, the first to include built-in casette interface, the first to have color and game commands in the BASIC, etc. It was the third ever to look like a typewriter (the Apple I was the first)."
'nuff said, I dare say.
I'm terribly sorry, but I don't remember saying that the Altair was not an invention.
Oh, wait... now that I read my comment again, I see that I never said any such thing.
Try reading more carefully next time.
Woz was the first, or nearly the first, to design and sell a computer system that included a video controller and a keyboard.
Altair users had to hack their own drivers, because the Altair was just a motherboard in a box (and that was only after you assembled it). Standard input was a row of on/off toggles, and standard output was a row of LED's. It was a ground-breaking invention, and if Ed Roberts is not also in the "Hall of Fame", then something is very wrong... but that does not take away from the fact that the Apple II allowed math geeks and software geeks and an endless army of other technophiles to get their hands on their very own computers, something that only hard-core hardware tweakers could do before.
In hindsight, selling a complete computer system instead of a motherboard kit may seem obvious to us, and it may only have been a matter of time before somebody figured it out, but Woz and Jobs actually did it.
What is more, Woz designed a great motherboard, possibly the best ever to be designed by a single person (instead of a team of engineers). He also came up with a great video architecture, which made his computer affordable.
If you really think all he did was stick a keyboard and monitor on an Altair and sell it under a new brand, you clearly have no clue about the history of the Altair, Apple, or personal computers in general. Get thee to the library!
To exec a menu app is no great sin. Folks that used to log into a lot of BBS's "back in the day" would feel right at home.
Handheld GUI's all look like crap so far anyway, so why not let all the "point and poke" features be done with ASCII text instead of low-res pictures? It might not look as cool, but would probably run faster.
Among his comments, he actually said, "look, I'm no computer expert..."
Considering his boasts about bringing about the Internet, something tells be that his campaign won't be putting that on any bumper stickers.
(For the record, Bush is no guru either. We are a long way off from ever seeing a geek President.)
Sure, these days he is a multi-millionaire CEO-of-two-companies-at-once, but he started out as a software hacker.
People forget that he was once pressured into bringing in a "real" CEO to take over the company, because of his lack of executive experience. He was later booted off the Apple board by the same CEO he appointed and ran off to form NeXT (a geek haven if ever there was one).
While the Woz rightly gets credit for doing most of the design work on all the early Appples, Jobs wrote quite a bit of the software, and the Macintosh was entirely his baby.
But enough about Jobs... Way to go Woz!!!!!!!!
And I suppose the computer you wrote that post on uses toggle switches for input, and stdout is a row of LED's for displaying binary numbers...
Not quite. They did sell blue boxes to their college buddies, mostly to show off thier phreaking skills for fun, but they got the money to start Apple Computer from a venture capitalist.
(BTW: If you missed Cringly's "Triumph of the Nerds" special on PBS, go rent it. The interview with Woz contains a very funny story about using a blue box to call the Pope.)
Prior to the days of the Apple II, you had to build the damn things yourself, so computers were really only a hobbyist toy until the Apple II.
Pop the hood on one of those things, and you will see plenty of innovations. It was a beautifully simple and efficient motherboard design.
There was a reason why the Apple II sold as fast as they could make them; it was a good product that people wanted.
Skins or objects, we are still just talking about replacing the default purdy pictures with a picture of yourself, which is very fun for LAN deathmatches and can make chat rooms a little more spiffy, but is not exactly going to create a mad rush to have ourselves pixelated.
Why the hell would I want my beer gut to be carefully rendered in 3d anyway? If I was creating a skin of myself for a game, I would probably use photoshop or gimp to slim myself down first.
I thought it was really funny to call it the "MCP", but I guess I was the only one. The PHB had no idea what I was talking about. :)
On-line names are just the grandchildren of CB handles, anyway. Nothing to get worked up over.
This is why audio tape is not really evidence unless a witness testifies under oath that it is correct.
(Yea yea... IANAL.)
From the film-junkie perspective, it was an interesting update of Metropolis, changing it from an industrial age horror story to an information age one.
From the geek perspective, it was one of Hollywood's better attempts at capturing the hacker ethos. (Jeff Bridges even uses the term "hacking" in a manner that ESR would approve of.)
Compared to eye-gougingly bad movies like Hackers and Virtuosity, it was a triumph.
One girl went with a "slightly enhanced" version of herself, while a k3wl d00d she was talking to used a floating "wizzard of oz" style Death Head, complete with a text slogan meant to show how 1337 she was (but was lost in the translation).
Where both authors go wrong (IMHO) is when they assume that this stuff will be a big deal, and costly to come by. Later in the book, that same girl has to obtain some virtual formal wear for another meeting, and IIRC she could barely afford it.
What Gibson and Stephenson seem to miss is that we are already expressing emotions and editing our "presentation" for our avitars, even in text environments like MUD's. Avitar clothes and facial expressions will continue to evolve along with the rest of the technology, and on-line chat users will continue to take them for granted.